« Posts tagged kant

The Violence of Subjectivity complements our Lack of Negativity

May 5, 2011 / posted in dialectics, life as we know it, manifesto, Theory, Universal non-all / 2 Comments

There is an inherent violence in being a subject.

AS what Slavoj Zizek calls the universal exception, our subjectivity each, is an exception of the unbreakable rule of the universal.

This subjectivity must be “non-all” an untotalized whole which prevents the universal from foreclosing.

Part of why I think so much continental philosophy goes on and on about subjectivity and cannot bridge the gap between subjectivity and society remains in this gap between the “non-all” and the universal.

A great part of why modern philosophy starts with Kant is that Kant provides exegesis on subjectivity — but only does so at the expense of the noumenal.  Kant sacrifices the rest of the world, the external world in exchange for securing subjective phenomenal experience.

Hegel tries to fix Kant.  The genuis of Hegel is that he wrote on the extra subjectivity, the becoming-universal of particulars — he tried to bridge that gap with his dialectical absolutist system, to totalize the non-all and unproblematize the subjectivity by enfolding it back into the Notion.

Whether he succeeds or not is up to debate of course, but no other philosopher has come close to his achievement.  This is why Hegel remains for both Marx and Lacan (in fact even today), the godfather — Hegel provides the only comprehensive system of talking about the universal qua society with an eye on the particular.  He does so by nearly sacrificing the subjective, but saves it through a kind of transcendental rambling.

By comparison, Deleuze and Guattari don’t even talk about subjectivity; they make it irrelevant.  Graham Harman also side-steps this Cartesian mutualism by going via the Object with Merleau-Ponty and his notion of flesh.

But I’m not going to go in depth to examine others.

What’s so damning about Hegel is that through his particular becoming-universal he found the universal on the particular, through a kind of metaphysical “raising” of essence.  This is obviously what Deleuze and Guattari do with various meta-tools, like territorializations and refrains, the difference though is that Hegel does this raising through negation.

Negation eliminates what does not fit that form.  To emphaize my point, Kristeva attributes negation as a concept to Hegel — the specific making of a negative (something).  Contrast this with Kant and Kristeva points out that Kant only discovered negativity — the absence of what we are looking for.

The negation of Hegel allows us not only a radical de-subjectivising but also the clearing of room to make way for the *trumpet sounding* throne of one particular to rise up to the throne of universality. In contrast, Kant used negativity in order to make room.

Where violence comes into place is our rejection of the negation.  Our supposition as a subjectivity must come about through social effluence — we stand up to this symbolic universal by declaring our relevance against our own negation by this universal.

We tear out and subjectivise what would be an object.  We would do violence to universals and other would-be universal small-others through our radical Otherness qua subjectivity.  Think of the violence today perhaps in Libya and Egypt

Think of the French Revolution.

Think of all the expressions of free-self organization that the U.N. throughout the 20th century and up till today have stamped out, and how small-other Universals qua government seek to legitimize their claim on what would be a universal expression of their own brand of subjectivity… we return to State Democracy its own Jacobianian Excesses in the form of our own self-subjectivisation which then must always be violent.

This is also how Hegel is also the first modern philosopher-statesman inasmuch as the first and only true philosopher on modern Universality.

Unfortunately we seem stuck on this in Continental Philosophy and unable to articulate other forms of universality. We can’t articular a society let alone conceive of one. And no, ramblings of a disintegrated body of objectivity does not a society make.

So no: the radical pluralism of Deleuze and Guattari do not count simply because while they clear our the space for alternate forms they are too reactionary against Hegel to be useful in constructivism.  It’s also questionable as to whether or not we are at a point in which there is enough space for anything else to be constructed.

from Social to Universal, what comes after a Monetized Economy?

April 29, 2011 / posted in Business, images of being-human, life as we know it, rational choice theory and homo economicus, rules, Uncategorized, utility / No Comments

I’ve written about the failure of our economic models to account for our happiness and welfare in the work place. I want to go into a little more detail about what an alternative view for our society might look like post-money, but first, some more general news about the failure of our economic models to register real value outside of the work place in terms of the Global Economy.

 

Current Opinion from some Economists today…

…expresses a criticism of the FED. At the Roosevelt Institute there recently was a panel on the Future of the Federal Reserve, a large debate surrounding the current actions and criticisms of the Federal Reserve as well as panel talks about the FED’s current program, the so called QE2 which is scheduled to be halted by June of this year without a clear date (or even plans) for a better and more effective QE3.

It seems that the general consensus agreed upon by everyone except the Fed and the government is that QE2 was in fact too conservative to be a success and was in fact a failure. QE2 did not generate the jobs people hoped for nor did it spark the economy with low interest rates.

The FED becomes an easy target in current debates as to why the economy is at risk as to why haven’t job growth happened and who is to blame. I am not an economist, so I will spare you the details, but I am very interested in the subject. If anything, we are plagued by a systematic failure of the existing financial infrastructure. The problem comes from huge debt. In order to handle many of the national and international debts that are due this year entire nations will have to get debt financing. The question, of course, is who do they get it from?

If the government that prints money has no money to pay for its debt, then who does it?

The current bailout situations and the burst of that financial bubble earlier in 2008-9 resulted in monetizing private debt as public debt. A short term solution seems to be simply to do the same thing again. If that happens, loser in these transactions will be individuals who have saved up money. It will eat away at the savings of the American public — in fact of the rest of the world since the US dollar is known as “reserve currency” meaning that people in other countries will use the US dollar to transact business because their own government’s money is not considered stable enough. In fact, China has the largest amount of US currency in reserve, totalling an astounding 3 trillion dollars.

But of course, decisions the FED stem directly from situations here in the U.S. and not of the rest of the world.

This might stave off the problem for another time, but the debt problem persists. Interest rates will mount and at some future point an even larger debt will be incurred, things time with our public economy and our private savings exhausted… our credit exhausted…

So what is the solution?

If you are not sure if you can trust the reserve currency, the idea is to switch to a currency you CAN trust. In this case, GOLD and SILVER. SO you see that the price of gold is to break $1,600 for a troy ounce by the end of 2011. Additionally companies that mine metals are a desired commodity as well as indicated by China’s repeated bids to buy foreign mining and farming companies. In fact there are rumored talks among some of China’s officials to reinvest their U.S. Currency into Gold.

So why aren’t U.S. officials fazed? Everyone’s doing the same dance right now — everyone’s still using U.S. currency. At some point there needs to be an exit strategy. According to Max Keiser, Goldman-Sachs officials have started sipon money from the stock market into commodities and alternative currencies. One such online company, Zynga, wildly successful for its which had made a move last year in Oct 2010 to create its own currency. With the investment of Goldman-Sachs officials, the Fed is investigating the matter. According to Keiser though, Goldman-Sachs is siphoning money from Wall Street all the while keeping the bubble of pricing up through the use of computers that trade. One of his evidences despite the Dow’s recent record high even in this bad economy stems from the drop in VOLUME even while the PRICE is high. The idea being that the unwitting American shareholder will be left holding the worthless shares when this new bubble bursts.

 

Holding the bag means holding… what?

So my judgmental sentiments aside, it seems that when the economy “downsizes” in value because of inflation — because the monetization of our economy creates excess value, value based on speculation of the future value of money — the system will implode. Much of this is doom and gloom. One fair indicator of when this will happen in the near future is the fall of the United States as an economic power — passing its economic torch to its largest landowner, China as soon as 2016 according to Chris Martenson.

This of course may not happen, 2016 still is over one presidential term away, and who knows maybe Bernanke will wisen up and the Financial overlords that bombed a 65 trillion dollar world economy to personally make for themselves a few million will find themselves in jail…

But if that doesn’t happen, there’s a good chance that we homo sapiens will have to reorganize into a new resource distribution system. Doubtlessly, this will involve money, as people have always had money, but it may not involve capital as the primary exchange for labor.

This is a little beyond the scope of this post, but it’s perhaps important to note that democratization of private industries is not the key to establishing a more free society.  The logic of freedom, as Zizek put it eloquently:

the key to actual freedom resides in the “apolitical” network of social relations, from the market to the family. Here the change required is not political reform but a transformation of the social relations of production—which entails precisely revolutionary class struggle rather than democratic elections or any other “political” measure in the narrow sense of the term. We do not vote on who owns what, or about relations in the factory, and so on — such matters remain outside the sphere of the political, and it is illusory to expect that one will effectively change things by “extending” democracy into the economic sphere (by, say, reorganizing the banks to place them under popular control). Radical changes in this domain need to be made outside the sphere of legal “rights.” In “democratic” procedures (which, of course, can have a positive role to play), no matter how radical our anti-capitalism, solutions are sought solely through those democratic mechanisms which themselves form part of the apparatuses of the “bourgeois” state that guarantees the undisturbed reproduction of capital.

He continues on here, citing how violence is the inescapable and inevitable truth of the States’ impotence, and that extending the logic of the state into new regimes is a needless production of the same. So rather than dwell in violence and democracy, let us instead move back into the apolitical communities where most of us are heavily invested and are infact, as American sitcoms like to show us, largely apolitical.

There are perhaps an infinite number of possibilities but I will cover only one form, Peer to Peer Networks, which, instead of being an extension of state democracy, or state anything, rather is an extension of the communal commons “space” by which most of us interact anyway… (even if it’s not recognized by our current global the economy as such.)

 

Introducing Peer to Peer Networks

The rosey scenario of so called Peer to Peer Networks comes from a computer analogy but it carries with it a sociological ideology of individuals interacting as individuals and not through the manifests of corporations. Peer to Peer interaction gets a great deal of exploration through P2P Foundation, a utopian organization that seeks to explore the very real possibility of a new form of distribution closer to the maxim ‘think global, act local’ in which interested individuals interact with one another in mutually beneficial ways. If you think this is radically different from Homo Economius, you’re absolutely right. This organization tends towards the touchy-feely-poetics but one article likens the difference between spiritual self-suifficiency vs interdependent interbeiningness via “spiritual collectives” vs “gurus” with the emphasis on collectives as being more wholesome since we are socially interconnected.

There is much to be said and in my opinion (not said) about how P2P is beneficial but as presented here, the impetus is to take a larger view of who we are as human beings and offer a human solution rather than one concocted through the confines of “Rational Choice Theory“. The thinker I would like to cite for this line of thought is Hazel Henderson.

Henderson is a grown-up hippie. Her main attack on the economy today stems from what she sees as two critiques:

  • Seeing monetary exchange as the only meaningful measurement of production
  • understanding human beings as theoritical economic creatures that seek only to maximize utility and reduce cost

    • She points out of course, that people are not so perfectly greedy, although greed is a part of who we are… and that over half of all the meaningful production occurs through the work of women. The PTA meetings, the cooking, the cleaning, even helping your neighbor paint their house on the weekend — these are meaningful acts of production that are not measured in any form of monetary exchange. Likewise, for her, financial instruments whose only purpose is to change a tax status or promote speculation is not a meaningful act of production, although it carries with it a monetary cost. Many of the ‘goods’ we enjoy, like the environment, likewise cannot be monetized, valued or taken into the consideration as a cost inherent in any kind of business plan. As such, the environment is generally worthless and meaningless according to economic theory. Also, our hanging onto the notion of GDP as a meaningful measurement of economic health makes no sense, especially since new cars may be exchanged between two countries and then counted as GDP for both countries.  Structurally her critique means a few things:

    • Money fails as an indicator of meaning since it fails to objectively capture what we value
    • On the producer side, a variety of interactions exist without any consideration of money (they are valueless, even if those behaviors maintain the quality of life for all)

    Our attempt to organize our society around economic theories of value is a terrible thing, resulting in incredible amounts of waste and human misery. We work too long to support those we love who we never see because we have to work.  An extensive video of hers can be found here: The Alternative Economy of Hazel Henderson.

    If you are like me, then I apologize, because the only thing I find somewhat grating is that she calls it the “Love Economy”. All the same, her suggestion is not to remove money, but to de-center it.  Instead of money, we would find meaningful metrics in the healthiness of society through several different axises which are not tied to the market.  She cites thirteen separate axises of human need.  For instance, the quality of clean air will be measured by environmental engineers on a scale relevant to their industry, not to a dollar value which can then be compared to other monetized “goods” and found to be more or less valuable than other goods as an ‘objective’ dollar amount.

    The Love Economy however, is just one expression of P2P. In the larger picture, the Love Economy stems from a trying to arrange society in order to maximize it values, something which is largely impossible to maintain if you hold that the only value is the collection of money.

    This would mean the end of the cost-benefit analysis and ROI for decision making. (If you would like to glance a governmental body of text related to the work I do on a daily basis for businesses, take a peek: Cost Benefit Analysis for Americans with Disabilities Act 2010, in particular “side transfer for water closets 602.3”.) Even if this text puts you off, I am afraid most of us would not be able to function without these kinds of “objective” guidelines.  How would managers or committees decide any course of action without a financial basis to limit and define meaningful activity?

    It’s most likely too, that the destruction of money as the primary signifier/coupler/de-/re-territorialisating agent will signal the end of corporations. The injunction of corporations as legal entities that benefits key players in the corporate hierarchy must end.  Corporations as entities of ownership and resource control were seen by Marx as a form of communism and collective ownership, but modern corporations are concentrations of wealth and power in the hands of a relative few:  I forget where I heard this but something like the top 34 corporations in the world have more GDP than all but the top 8 countries, of which the corporations are “members of”, but you can imagine how long that would last, especially with a weakened US dollar.  As reported by Lenin’s Tomb this class struggle is comparable to what’s happening in other countries like the middle east because it’s a class struggle, even if the stakes are somewhat different.  If corporations throw their weight around, of course local governments that can’t follow them need to provide conditions for those corporations such that a corporation will understand that it makes monetary sense for them to stay.  This is perhaps ironic for those of us living in the United States, as our material wealth in the 50s – 90s had come from corporation’s exploitation and the oppression of other nations for the US’s material interests, as pointed out by Keith Hart.

    But now that the corporations have become increasingly powerful in a global economy, they have the option of forcing by design or accident local changes to their favor.  It’s not too far off then, that Corporations can be considered the dominant species on the planet.

     

    from Social to Universal in a Global Economy

    Given such a dramatic statement, for us individuals to understand our place in the world we cannot rely on simply being just a citizen of a nation or a worker inside another corporation.  We have to understand our role as producers and consumers, first and foremost (since that is how we meaningfully interact with a value-system of money).  This switch from citizen to consumer/producer fuels much of the current revolution in Search Engine Optimization.  Most of the industry is still mulling over how social networking influences online presence.

    Online presence includes all the online discussion in the 3rd dimension of consumer to consumer (the first being business to consumer and the second being consumer to business).  The freedom of information on the internet has eliminated the days when corporations had control over their timely product unveilings, or their press releases.  The internet has allowed companies to have a better feedback of what works for their customers and what doesn’t.  Since the speed of information is so much faster, companies need to release products that aren’t perfected in order to remain competitive or deal with informal press releases better.  Both Apple and Coke have proven adept at providing expression as their main marketing maneuver rather than the more traditional marketing which aims at offering consumers impressions.  The influx of twitters and facebook “likes” and “shares” have proven to have an increasingly huge but causally unclear influence on search engine ranking.  Already all the major SEO companies have begun to recognize that in good marketing relationships with customers online, your cusomters produce your best (and worse) content.  More often than not, relationship building online and instantaneous information flow has allowed each of us to become both consumer and producer.

    Which brings me to back to the original point, the producer-consumer dichotomy. One interesting point, among others, that came from an interview with Rachel Botsman came from her observation that we generally think of ourselves as citizens only, or first. That kind of view will need to change in the near future when we have to reorient ourselves as simply participants. In a peer to peer economy, we will be both consumer and producer, not just consumer. We will be directly responsible for our individual interaction and participation as to how resources are transacted. Her example is eBay, in which strangers can participate on equal footing for remote merchandise that is bought without examination.

    The philosophical implications of this are many.  The internet has provided a new objective, recordable voting mechanism for companies to be ranked even before consumers open their wallet to “vote” in economic transactions.  A blogger can collect a valuable audience which then becomes an asset to marketers.  Facebook is an extremely intelligent implementation of this kind of collection of information, perhaps one that rivals even Google, with it’s long term information hoarding.  This kind of objective interaction with the Other verges on an interaction with the Universal.

    Arguably this kind of dichotomy was marked by the first modern cosmopolitian philosopher, Hegel.  Hegel reverses the formalism of Kant by extending Kant beyond subjectivity and as Zizek says, Subjectivising substance devoid of content.  By the imposition of his dialectical process, Hegel reaches the notion of the Universal, garnishing a multitudinous rambling along the way.  Any contemporary philosopher who seeks to tackle the universal must address Hegel, even if it’s by avoiding the Hegelian Dialectic method.

    The most traditional conception of the universal is best expressed through Lacan’s (read Zizek’s) Real in which madness, phantasms and partial objects cannot cohere into a meaningful subject.  Is this rhetorically not the perfect analogy to describe the unlinked disorder of the internet where we reach 404 and partial hits on keywords — such as when I search for one word and get something completely different that I click on?  I don’t want to go into schizoanalysis or anything like that.  Rather I want to point out that our relationship with the universal, especially as monitored through the internet is mediated by a direct attempt by a corporatized other to impose universality on each of us small others through a medley of law (and other paranoiac applications).  Whether this be through the paranoid discourse of the state (legality) or through the internet’s opposing hysteria as expressed through Bing’s initial video campagin today we have the increased injunction from the Other Enjoy! and Obey! simultaneously.

    This is not a new injunction.  I won’t blame this on Hegel, but increasingly in an more ethnic world with global trade, everything becomes relevant for examination — starting with culture and human rights and ending with intellectual property and intangible costs.

    Overlawyered.com‘s author, Walter Olson has written extensively about how the legal system has developed into the political monstrosity it exists as today.   Apparently attorneys before law school were more pragmatic, trained on their job in apprenticeships.  After law school invoked a liberal agenda to use the legal system to argue for change, everything became a matter of litigation — what was perhaps previously a personal dispute between you and your boss now became a matter of employee and employer for all to bear witness to.  Increasingly individual concerns have become scrutinized, first through totalitarian states like Stalin and Maoist Communisms, but more recently in the overlawyered culture that exists today — anyone can sue anyone for anything, right or wrong.  The influx of attorneys qua politicians (up to 30% or 40% of politicians are attorneys, I believe) comes from the desire to use the court room as a place to change law, which it isn’t supposed to be.  Legislation is supposed to change laws.

    Anyway, in many ways, the injection of the internet into the intermix of what is accountable (accidential emails, even blogging about belly dancing can ruin a divorce settlement).  This kind of dissemination of all aspects of human life even a humorous but somewhat mostly true guide on how to live with your philosopher-relative or life-partner becomes fodder for the voracious paranoia (followed by aimless surfing/hysteria) leaving footprints of human desire and meaning objectified even if this wealth of information doesn’t lend itself directly to meaning.

    Don’t get me wrong, participation in the world is definitively more meaningful than retracting into rigid rationalism, i.e., Hegel is more relevant than Kant, who can’t even leave his house without a God as a universal-guideline.  After all, isn’t that what WW2 showed Sartre?  Young Sartre stopped writing so much and took his place as a public intellectual, held himself accountable for his actions and attempted to take his message of humanism and authenticity in the face of an ever-growing global economy of maginalization and monetization of human meaning.  After all, old Sartre knew that meaning was in social interaction not in transactions.

    Social interactions is something people complain about losing, in an environment with too many people, when we can be alone in a city of one or fifty million people.  Companies are finding out that we got choices — as with any sales person today has to answer to each of their clients: “Why should we buy from you?”

    Just like companies are discovering that collecting Facebook shares and re-tweets is the truest indicator of actual meaning.  And that meaningful relationship will lead to trust, reliance and transactions.  Given this article, that social networking produces the same chemicals falling in love, perhaps I should rescind my statement — that love economy isn’t so far off…. only perhaps “economy” is outdated.

    Perhaps we should call it the love network.

    What ever happened to Deleuze?

    January 20, 2011 / posted in note to self / No Comments

    The older I get, the more I find myself agreeing with Kant’s thoughts on things.

    This is a little disappointing to me…

    On Capitalism: A Tragedy1

    December 20, 2010 / posted in life as we know it / No Comments

    Amusing ourselves to Death

    I recently watched Capitalism: A Love Story a documentary made by Michael Moore at a some good friends’ home. Capitalism: A Love Story, argues that capitalism does not work nor does it work for people as a whole. Alternatively, Moore claims that socialism is better because people need to be protected from mechanisms beyond their control. Moore presents the common individual as someone who is happy to wake up, go to work and do what they do. All the complications of the financial work — the nitty gritty of the stock market — are beyond the scope and intelligence of the common individual. Moore’s utopian dream is to usher in a kind of 2nd Bill of Rights straight out of Franklin Deliano Roosevelt’s term — to guarantee the common American a decent job, a decent wage, a good house and food on the table.

    This kind of debate is as old as the end of Monarchy. Various utopian ideas from transcendentialism to utilitarianism, socialism have all been offered by thinkers, social critics and philosophers as the answer to the human question: How should we all live together? While most of these ideas have fallen to the wayside, Immanuel Wallerstein in World Systems Analysis offers us a single axis on which to locate people’s political alignment: openness to change. His arguement stems from a loose analysis of the French Revolution — an event which he likens to the social turmoil in the 60s. Wallerstein believes that there are three categories of openness to change: the conservatives, the liberals and the radicals. Only when two of the three groups work together can there be change or the lack of it. To repeat his analysis is more than what I want to get into right now, but it is the fear of change which prompts strict laws, and it is the fear of change which keeps the status quo. This fear, of course, is aligned with those who have the majority of the power.

    None the less, fear of change aside, who wouldn’t want everyone to have a home, a decent job and a good wage? What conservatives would claim is that the masses, if given this kind of “Right” would taking advantage of those who genuinely work hard to achieve what they have. They would cite that providing all this would invoke an imbalance of the economy… and that if the “basic necessities” were guaranteed as a right then people having no incentive to work at all.

    Personally, I believe think the 80/20 rule works here… 20% of our population basically run the rest of the society so that 80% of us to have our mundane jobs. in a way there’s already too many people around and not enough jobs. As technology becomes more effective, the job market will tighten. Americans work more hours than any other culture in the world because of intense market competition (and the echos of a Protestant work-ethic). Would it possible to spread some of this work around? Furthermore, while competition is often claimed to lead to efficiency, anyone who looks at the current market place will see a large amount of redundancy in our society. Markets may be able to sustain four or five fast food joints in a local area in a big city, but if they are all comporable, do we really need three burger joints each with four or five worker working minimum wage? Other cultures have been amazed at the vast selection of material goods that we have available to us. Is having rows and rows of different toilet paper made by different competitors in a free market really efficient? Do all the different kinds of toilet paper really sell?

    This kind of market choice has been touted as a equivalent to our personal freedom. But five or fifteen different kinds of cereal isn’t really the same as an authentic choice. (I could get into this too but that’s time for a different entry!). My point is that, in a way having this kind of market excess is really redundant. If we could take all the brain power that was sunk into making iPods and iPod rip-offs and other mp3 players… it’s conceivable that we could make a super mp3 player that won’t be such a waste. because all the products that don’t work… well, it’s junk. we make a lot of junk. Many of us have what was once the ‘latest gadget’ which is now junk in our desk drawer? What about planned obsolescence? How efficient is that? How good is that for the environment? When money becomes the metric for efficiency, as economists and cost-analysis by political departments are oft to do to justify their policy decisions — then what happens it that money becomes the only item that is ‘generated’ from implementing those decisions.

    But capitalism itself has other virtues, right? To create one central “Soviet-esque” department to make iPods would force a single directive, or a single origin for what would or would not be produced. This could destroy our ability to create and be innovate. Furthermore, having such a department that isn’t under any external pressure (such as market pressure) would eventually cause the department to become less efficient. Even still, look at newer information sharing models, such as the open source model that works so well for Firefox in competition with the monolithic Internet Explorer. This model could theoritically be applied to our market economy. So just because things have been done in a certain way so far, and that we have gotten so much ‘progress’ and ‘stuff’ and ‘development’ doesn’t necessarily mean that we should continue in this infrastructure.

    But I really don’t want to argue this stuff. I’ll probably end up sounding like Alvin Toffler in Power Shift. To get to issue directly, let’s just jump ahead a hundred years to where our hypothetical Socialist system works and then compare it to Capitalism as we have it..

    So let us assume that we we jump to where we work out all the bugs — all the major ones anyway, and people live lax lives because there’s too many people — and technology lets us work so efficiently, so people can work very little and have a minimum. To keep innovation and purpose, I suppose we could introduce a tier-system where people could work harder or more responsible jobs — climb a kind of ladder — and in the process become rewarded by getting more food selection or get more privileges, like being able to have babies… Not to mention that being higher in this rung would engender for them elevated status in the eyes of their peers.

    Even still though, we have the same problem don’t we, like the comic linked above by Stuart Mcmillen. In such a world like the one we live in, where we are divorced from daily survival, where we have free time and the technology to insolate and amuse us, in our free time we will always choose to have more of something enjoyable — to the point at which if no one stops us, we would become paralysed by it.

    It’s clear in Moore’s film that he takes the position that most people want to work and not care too much about the big picture. While Moore doesn’t suggest why but if you take McMillen seriously is that we are don’t care because we are blind sided by the things we love. Now, I don’t think it’s so much that we have become blindsided by materialism — we are in fact blindsided by materialism — but I think we always have been distracted from what’s going on in the social milieu. Since humans begun to band together and live in settlements and colonies to maximize our ability to distribute work we’ve collectively had the opportunity to have free time and create. While most of our history is undocumented (since we were so often struggling to make ends meet) — only recently in the past 5,000 years have we begun to really flourish as a species — our death rate is historically low — it’s kind of amazing just how uncreative individually we are. New creations in the market place are often offered as solutions to problems — problems in the market place, problems with products — but just as often the majority of us aren’t creative at all. As human beings we all face very similar problems and we respond to them in tired ways.

    While much of what we do is very different today than what our predecessors had, the massive still remain at the mercy of those in charge. And those in charge will do as people do — help those who are closest to them. Over time, those relations are bound to crystalize and become inbred… This is where what’s great about capitalism becomes apparent — through the market place. In the process of being innovative and bringing value, there stands a chance for the very poor and disenfranchised to become wealthy and successful too. We do have a system but it’s relatively loose. This is also where capitalism’s weakenesses as a system also become apparent: while plenty of people have made large amounts of money — most of them have not kept it. The value they give society may not disappear, but if money is a metric to social value — should they have not gotten a chance to prosper forever? In our hypothetical system, people would still benefit from the merits of their own achievements. But families would not be able to inheirt and competition for climbing the social ladder would have to be much more rigid. People who want to go off and do their own thing wouldn’t really be able to; there may not be a market for them. You might also add that this is a valid fear: if people have very little rights and very little in the way of being autonomous then they become vulnerable for those in charge to subvert the system against them… because they are uncoordinated and without the means to protest.

    Just like what happens in Moore’s film.

    Moore doesn’t seem to find fault directly with greedy individuals. And he doesn’t find fault with our government. He finds fault with the system itself, a system that rewards greed in as much as it rewards innovation and successful marketing. A system and a means of distributing wealth and resources that seems to just have popped out ahistorically. Moore’s gripe is not about a particular attempt at world domination, after all, people in charge have tried to get more and more and more all the time. (Moore begins his film with a voice over about the fall of Rome, drawing connections between the United States and a decadent Rome.) This is what more gets at: he named his movie about capitalism — he’s questioning the value of a money driven society. as a patroit, he finds human rights synonymous not with capitalism but with individual quality of life. Gandi’s quote could work here: “a nation’s greatness is measured by how it treats its weakest members”. Today we are to be insolated from weakness. We don’t see our weakest members. We don’t even die in our own beds. The sick and dying are wisked away and the public is segregated from everything horrific or uncomfortable… Even if this horror is in our own bodies. We are an anaesthesized culture. This is our pervasive attitude towards pain and discomfort — why wouldn’t there be?

    After all, if you could avoid pain and go with fun things, why wouldn’t you? If you could live your life in comfort, pleasure and feeling good everyday… why wouldn’t you? Huxley seems to think most of us would. I would agree. Most of us do. Television and entertainment is a huge industry. We decide everyday how we want to live, and most of us to some extent, spoil ourselves with distractions. Video games can be a rewarding experience, the thrill and excitement and relatively low risk involved. The low risk may be the deciding factor, after all, in video games, the work and effort we put into it amounts to very little that’s translatable to the world we actually live in.

    And about the world we live in?

    Of course, we are integrated into our surroundings. Much like our so advanced cell phones — if taken away from the system it’s invented for — it becomes useless junk. Likewise, we can’t really go back. We can learn to make fires, hunt under the sun and eat wild berries, but it’s questionable how long our soft bodies and our soft processed-food digestive systems can last. we wouldn’t really want to go back either — unless it was temporary ‘fun’.

    So to save ourselves, Moore’s film ends with a call to arms against the powers that be. This seems kind of obvious — that we need to do something for ourselves — although his film might have been better said for the masses to awaken and stop being so self involved.

    The biggest issue, I believe, with ceasing self indulgence has to do with our general sense of purpose. As a people, there doesn’t seem to be a very strong regard as to our sense of meaning or well being.

    Many different contemporary thinkers have wondered at how “in flux” meaning in our day and age is, aptly but ineffectively bringing up a multitude of explanations, none of which have any strong certainty about them. Contemporary thought has bred several giants in our day and age who attempt to give voice to our ennui. Lyotard is credited with coining “Postmodernism”. Derrida wrote tons of books about “Post-Structuralism” of which the most famous phrase is “The center is not the center”. While there are many different ways to ponder why this is, it’s best to approach this issue historically to address the “how”. Philosophy for a long time was a kind of secular theology basing its structure around the structure of theology. So, in a poetic way, it makes sense that the lack of religion today means the end of the master signifier. Without a single signification to anchor how we should approach meaning, our world becomes increasingly fragmented. This makes sense culturally as well, since in an international village where a variety of voices are given credit, there can’t help but be a multiplicity of views. In terms of ontology, we can turn to the last great Ontologist: Towards the end of his life, Heidegger wrote an Introduction to Metaphysics. The last part of the book discusses the “ought” of which Heidegger credits Kant with bringing up — the last kind of being is split into values and ontology. People’s values support an ontology that expresses how people think things should be. Historically this is fitting. Heiddeger wrote this in the fifties. Perhaps still reeling from the end of Facism, the world was split into two major camps: Capitalism and Communism — both of which had several different modes — and all of which vied for what they thought life should be. That Heidegger should see fit activity with ontology — and how ontology should be justified — seems a frightening thought. Perhaps this was his attempt to incorporate what he saw happening — but could not make understandable within an ontological system.

    Nonetheless, his prediction about the justification of values proven almost too true. Today, between political parties and pundits, revolutionaries, terrorists and foreign diplomats, our current media explosion of meaning and dialogue isn’t a response to a lack of meaning but exactly what Baudrilliard writes about — Hyperreality. Signification works on its own level to justify itself to an abstracted sense of the universal even if we do not know what a universality is between people: What rights should be, or what kind of humanism pervades culture, even if we have an offering of a variety of points of view. In a very real way, this fourth ontology is lost among the massive amounts of dialogue. Hyperreality affects ontology as a suspension of the ontological metaphysics of presence, making the question of ontology almost irrelevant.

    I don’t concur with Baudrillard’s brand of nihilism (even if I agree with his lack of universal content). More importantly though, we have lost the ability to decide for ourselves what should be as this network of significant obscures our ability to attain any kind of Metaphsics of presence. While Moore doesn’t have this level of dialogue in his film, Moore seems to think that we should have a Second bill of Rights to guarantee our middle class lifestyle be available for everyone — and it sounds good at first — but in terms of an ontology and the production of meaning, this doesn’t make sense. Now granted, his film’s purpose isn’t trying to decide for us the meaning of life, but it is trying to suggest how it is we should live. And how we should live directly connects with how we access universal notions of humanity, society and productivity.

    The last bit about productivity is off of Heidegger’s beaten track. To address productivity, we can turn to Marx and Wallerstein. Both write that the middle class is the key to engendering a stable society. The middle class act as ‘managers’ to production, ‘oppressing the poor’ and acting as the body for the ‘rich’. If both writers are are are correct about the role of middle classes — then making everyone middle class as Moore suggests would be the end of our civilization as well know. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t mean the end of civilization — just the end of what we know. After all, if there were truly only 2 classes, the workers and the rich then civilization should collapse because the workers would see that their leaders had everything. Of course, if we are imagining a hypothetical future, then why not have robots (ala the Matrix) do all the hard work? but that doesn’t really solve the issue of people becoming complacent or themselves robotic qua workers. Already we get the common complaint about our cubical brothers and sisters — who go in during the morning on a coffee high and then work themselves into another coffee stupor in the afternoon only to go home, celebrate the latest tv show and then pass out in bed. So while productivity can be suspended it does not directly addressly the issue at stake:

    Even if we were to recognize that our society was stolen from us, who would care? Without an originary access to the universal there isn’t any reason for us to do anything. If we don’t ‘get’ how things should be and we are not embodying that metaphysics of presence, then there can be no purpose to doing one particular thing over another. All our distractions — our toys, our drugs and our entertainment become so much more satisfying only because any direct connection to a satisfying life isn’t possible.

    This brings us back to the original thought… and Moore’s title the thought about money.

    Deleuze and Guattari in Anti-Oedipus wrote that money is the master signifier. Taking Marx one step further they demonstrate in a more direct way that the cycle of money, M-C-M and C-M-C can’t be broken. Money is the ultimate commodity and money is exchanged, ultimately for itself since the value of a thing is its monetary value. Theoritically nothing is changed but everything is different when Marx wants us to short circuit the cycle and take money out of the equasion by taking it directly out of the hands of the managers. But first, a quote from Deleuze and Guattari

    Let us return to the dualism of money, to the two boards, the two inscriptions, the one going into the account of the wage earner, the other into the balance sheet of the enterprise. Measuring the two orders of magnitude in terms of the same analytical unit is pure fiction, a cosmic swindle, as if one were to measure intergalactic or intra-atomic distances in meters and centimeters. There is no common measure between the value of enterprises and that of the labor capacity of wage earners. That is why the falling tendancy has no conclusion. A quotient of differentials is indeed calculable if it is a matter of the limit of variation of the production flows from the viewpoint of a full output but it is not calculable if it is a matter of the production flow and the flow on which surplus value depends. Thus the difference is not canceled in the relationship that constitutes it as a difference in nature; the “tendancy” has no end, it has no exterior limit that it could reach or even approximate. The tendancy’s only limit is internal and it is continually going beyond it, but by displacing this limit — that is, by reconstituting it, by rediscovering it as an internal limit to be surpassed again by means of a displacement; thus the continuity of capitalist progress engenders itself in this break of a break that is always displaced, in this unity of schiz and flow. In this respect already the field of social immanence as revealed under the withdrawal and the transformation of the Urstaat is continually expanding, and acquires a constitency entirely its own, which shows the manner in which capitalism for its part was able to interpret the general principle according ot which things work well only providing they break down, crises being “the means immanent to the capitalist mode of production.” If capitalism sis the exterior limit of all societies, this is because capitalism for its part has no exterior limit, but only an interior limit that is capital itself and that it does not encounter, but reproduces by always displacing it….”If the movement does not tend toward any limit, if the quotient of differentials is not calculable, the present no longer has any meaning….The quotient of differentials is not resolved, the differences no longer canel one another in their relationship. No limit opposes the break, or the breaking of this break. The tendency finds no end, the thing in motion never quite reaches what the immediate future has in store for it; it is endlessly delayed by accidents and deviations…. Such is the complex notion of a continuity within the absolute break.” In the expanded immanence of the system, the limit tends to reconstitute in its displacement the thing it tended to diminish in its primative emplacement. [Anti-Oedipus 230 – 231]

    In other words, the there is no end for the system to reach either for the nation-states (peripheral or center as Deleuze and Guattari go on to talk about in a very Wallerstien-esque way) or for the workers within capitalism first who find their life blood sucked away first into dollars per hour and salaries before then finding that same earned money sucked away from them in the form of commodities. On both ends, does m = m + surplus value or, in other words, our lives in exchange for pleasures, with no end in sight. We might be wearily working our minds to the bone typing away at work staring at a monitor (the labor of which is then subsumed by corporations) or we might be wearily working our minds to the bone staring at the vast internet or satelite television… in the big picture, we pay for our own creations (which is the impetus for revolution)! But alas, it makes no difference. If money continues to be the master metric which defines all our efforts like some Mastercard commercial that enforces to us that what’s priceless — i.e. without price (being worth so much it can’t be comodified, or worth so little it can’t be comodified) then that kind of master metric we give to our lives signifies that our lives have no absolute no value themselves being priceless. Each (hu)man according to her talents, perhaps, but also according to her discipline to get up in the morning, to the job opportunities available in her local area, to the assets she already owns (work clothes, a car, a place to live… shower and get dressed) we become useless to the job market without the things that surround us. a computer to find a job, a car to get to work, money for the bus, clothes to wear to work, an education, a common language

    Never before have we found our lives without intrinsic value. Perhaps that is the true horror of measuring everything by money. in Moore’s film he has a segment about workers who are insured by their companies — who continue to profit from their employees even when their employees die. This segment is tragic to their families because it shows them directly how much (or how little) their surplus value really is….

    Breaking this cycle is perhaps impossible, given our current ontological sophistication. It operates as a kind of stand alone complex. Marx was unable to explain where capitalism came from. He’s also unable to explain how it might end, except through some kind of miracle Proletariat uprising, which won’t happen as long as people remain hypnotized as vanishing mediators for the passage of money. we might have drank ourselves to death in past nations, but today we sit ourselves — bore ourselves — to death. Without a universal content there remains no impetus for us to do anything. Moore might appeal to the highest law in our nation. but that won’t work, you realize. the system would have to collapse to shock us out. A sudden disruption of the cycle of M-C-M and C-M-C cannot be stopped, by natural disaster as people will just build it back up. In a way, the system has to grind to a halt like surplus trash such as in Pixar’s Wall-e although even then, people continued to exist in some kind of suspended techno-world of hypnotized pleasure.

    Kojan Karatani in Transcritique examines how Marx and Kant are related — but he also offers this advice for us to step out of M-C-M into a zero sum system of barter and exchange. it’s not enough to awaken workers into Proletariats but also the same individuals need to waken as consumers and choose not to participate in the cycle: the parallax gap that splits production into the two modes of M-C-M and C-M-C needs to be consciously undone. In other words, let pork become pigs again…. and let employees stay human.

    I think what’s at stake here, if you don’t follow, is not just a question of how we should live. If anything Moore’s position actually doesn’t go far enough if only because he is still enamoured by STUFF, a house for everyone, a car. The utopia upbringing he talks about from growing up in — that he wants to bring to everyone — is a 50’s daydream — the epitome of being-consumer. Solutions offered to the problem in his film (but not in his film) do exist. But it’s not enough to complain about our loss of freedom or to strive for small government. While our civil liberties are definitely important just like the poorest of the poor’s standard of living — what’s at stake is far more important because our very meaning in living and being alive is what will initiate and maintain any kind of revolutionary change in society. This kind of revolution in consciousness is not something we can easily conceive of because it requires we jump axises. Our current state of legality — like philosophy — marks of our inability to coalesce our subjective differences. It’s not so much as Baudrilliard claims that the multiplicty of meaning destroys any meaningful referent itself — but that as a people, we can’t choose between the many meaningful referents. We are too distracted. Given any political event, like the advent of wikileaks or Russia’s refusal to disarm nuclear weapons — there arises any number of commentators who would have us believe contrary things. Our paralysis — our inability to select just one — becomes our inability to select anything — which then becomes our inability to care. After the news we change the channel and forget about what’s at stake. Conceptually we may reserve the universal ‘citizen’ as the person we are all slotted to be — legally or otherwise — the limit to what is an allowable subject. But when given so many choices in the free market, like so many comments, we can no longer find justification for our daily lives. Why this hamburger? Why this restaurant? Why/what Feminism? Why drive this car? Why choose this life partner? Why have children? Why this clothing store? Why are we alive? If we always choose to do things that make us feel good and look good, we lose sight of what is actually good. Now, I don’t mean that like wall-e we should forgo our technological slumber in favor of walking on our own two feet and cleaning up the planet ourselves (rather than letting robots do it).

    Ethical responsibility isn’t in particular actions — and this is especially where Karatani’s Transcritique becomes useful — Marx misses ethics and Kant misses the ability to talk about our every society in concrete terms– ethics is in EVERY action. Any (non)action IS an ethical action. We are not abstracted subjects or even consumers. We are human beings who embody our own resource production and distribution and our lives are statements not just for ourselves but for how we should all be. We can carry the weight of the world. Every action IS a universal action, not in the multicultural sense of (“imho” or “for me”…). This is the gap where Sartre entered after he stopped writing. He began to do rather than just write. Most of us often shrug and say what can we do? Think globally and act locally. Slogans do abound — the answers are right in front of us — if we can distinguish them — but postmodernism as a lifestyle or a philosophy is harmful. Living in a world where everything is equal and a Presidential Administration can claim they are victors and say they write history even before any material change has occurred is not the world we should embrace. We still do have a choice. I don’t mean a choice between paper and plastic, I mean a choice as to how we want to live. Unfortunately such a real choice may no longer easily exist as an option for many of us, as long as we continue to work, buy our food, and drive our cars.

    Choosing to uninstall a program isn’t the same as not using a computer… even though not using a computer means wasting more trees… The answers don’t lie within an axis of money or no money or between small or big government but within the values we choose to have and the responsibility and accountability we embody to our fellow human beings.

    1 Mostly edited by my good friend Mabbish. Thanks!

    Newer Posts »