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Critique of Political Economy, Vol 1: The Process of Production of Capital

June 26, 2015 / posted in dialectics, images of being-human, rational choice theory and homo economicus, reviews, Theory / No Comments

Capital: Critique of Political Economy, Vol 1: The Process of Production of CapitalCapital: Critique of Political Economy, Vol 1: The Process of Production of Capital by Karl Marx
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

What hasn’t been said about Capital before? The least interesting parts were the areas where Marx goes on about exploitation. This makes it very obvious that we are supposed to identify with the working class. After all, we all work for a living at something, don’t we? We all have bosses. Yet this does beg the question a little, as this sets up a self-fulfilling situation. Who is it that gets rich off of us? We don’t see them.

One of the angles that is often missed about Capital is that it is a book derived from economic principles. Marx takes it for granted that land and are production and value. He also points out that excess population will keep us poor. Land is always a problem, of course, and too many people does make a job more precious. What is happening now though, is that technology is making labor less and less important. The labor Marx spoke of is just one stage of capital. In “first world” countries we have moved mostly beyond the factory (and some farming) jobs so often cited in this book, into a different kind of economy.

It strikes me that a supplement to Capital would be to recognize that it is not capitalism that is the supreme model for civilization (producing class struggle) but it is in fact valorization and management of production/resources that produces struggle. There is also, the additional factor that class struggle is just one way to slice social antagonisms. The multitude of class and identity conflicts express themselves economically in a variety of ways that aren’t simply class, but also gender, race, religion, disability and so on. In a way, we need a more general account of social production, of which Marx showed us but only presented in a limited way.

He does however, largely through David Ricardo’s work, show us the impossible signifying bond: between exchange-value and use-value. He also is able to demonstrate how credit creates another impossible signifying bond to guarantee further exchange-value, making it a transcendental (pathological) signification. I thought that Capital would be a boring book to read. In a way, the ideas are so extended today throughout so many philosophers that, while rather long, was a snap to read.

I am told that Engels really changed the character of the book, from philosophy to a call for class uprising. I am curious as to how much this is true.

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Logics of Worlds: Being and Event

February 22, 2015 / posted in dialectics, manifesto, reviews, rhizomatic architecture, Theory, Universal non-all / No Comments

Logics of Worlds: Being and Event, 2Logics of Worlds: Being and Event, 2 by Alain Badiou
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

On the onset, Badiou’s materialist dialectic seems fairly obscure. But while he doesn’t speak much about it throughout his book, it becomes clear that his materialist dialectic is predicated on the same kind of formalization that has swept up modernist thought: the creation of formalism in order to express relations in thought.

While you can tell that Badiou doesn’t want to dismiss his previous work, Being and Event in this one he seeks to engage with the non-philosophical more. On this end, while the previous was on ontology this book it seems far more about presentation, or existence. Having sublimated the formalisms of mathematics into philosophical though, Badiou would introduce to us a more specific (and thus generalized) logic on which to understand the various collections and connections we witness in our everyday lives.

This formalism can be understood as the result of the Cartesian method of synthesis. One breaks down a situation into constituent atoms and then patches those atoms back together to come up with a composite world. The various different situations provide little input as to the method of the formalization, although the success of the formalization requires a method of atomization — “chunking”. How we decide to decompose a situation into unchunks will in reverse allow us to assemble them back together.

Part of Badiou’s genius, especially with this previous book to this, the first Being and Event relied on his insight that mathematics at its root was conceptual, not formal (despite how we in post-industrial education are introduced to mathematics, as pure formalism). By grasping the concepts, we can then also understand that mathematics is philosophical in its nature, although it is of a different kind. Math follows the inductive “analytical” side of the method. The missing piece is the synthesis. Much of philosophy post-ancient Greece, had to do with the presentation of the synthesis side. As Irme Lakatos notes, Descates realized their methods, and speculates that their “secrets” had to do with the method of analysis. The synthesis portion was given publicly and that’s why the Euclidean method is nothing but synthesis. We get the conclusions of their philosophy, but not their analysis. The end result of their analysis however, are their axoims. And so that’s what is missing in their method. This is also, incidentally, why mathematics and physics meld together so well. Two dissolve a situation via a formalism and then to patch it back together allows one to continually create new models, new methods of dissolution and then synthesis. The main impetus that arises from this the cherishes “occult hypothesis” by which one is able to grasp the missing “influx” that arranges the atoms and then sets the stage for how these atoms are to be stitched back together. For Newtonians, this occult hypothesis is gravity. The various other “conclusions” that theorists and scientists can come up with are varying but they consist of the “excluded middle”. Slavoj Zizek for example, in Less than Nothing has the occult hypothesis of less than nothing, the theory of two vacuums.

What is perhaps wonderful about Badiou’s approach, as well, is that he sidesteps the traditional jargon that Zizek has to deal with. Badiou can talk about past philosophers, and but Zizek, in order to make his point, MUST. This injection of mathematics is perhaps Badiou’s greatest contribution. It is a great strength as well, for he is able to introduce new relations on their own, rather than having to continually modify language we are already familiar with.

What is weak about Badiou however, is that he adds little content to a situation. His formalism is a tool that can be used to recompose existing worlds and relate them to one another. While he dismisses Kant in this book, he misses Kant’s greater understanding. As stated in his Critique of Pure Reason: mathematics is another synthesis. While math can be used analytically, and often is, its incompleteness in its axoims results from the fact that as a methodological field, math is stitched together through a variety of methods connected by sheer formalism. There is no one conception that rules mathematics in the same way that there is a singular conception that may rule Lacan or Descartes. So while formalism can be method to note new connections, it cannot replace the intuition of thought itself. In fact this is not an explanation what so ever.

Two additional weaknesses to Badiou

1. He critiques Deleuze heavily in claiming that his fourfold thesis is a reversal of Deleuze’s. This misses the point as both he and Deleuze understand that negation is not a rebuke of a logic but rather the emphasis of a missing totality. Badiou’s own method of formalising a transcendental envelope is predicated on the minimum gesture of negation of a missing piece. In fact, Badiou ends his book by noting that the presence of a body (or a grouping of conceptions as a topological family) is wholly subsisted on the missing of a minimum. His other critique — that Deleuze reduces everything into a monotonous elan vital, similiar to Spinoza’s lack of a transcendental distinction of substances and subjectivity is well taken, however.

2. His main value in the conversation is his ability to provide surjection between the domains of math and philosophy. This theory of points (book IV) is a pretty good aesthetic, only missing Dedekind’s cut of real numbers. While his analysis of what points provides to the conversation could have been (and should have been) interjected into his first book for the purpose of clarification, he misses out on providing an internal definition of knowledge even in this following book. One creates knowledge only when one can mark it, that is, surjectively translate it into a point. In fact, Weierstrass’s genius at the end of the 19th century relied on solifying what Descartes started: the overlay of points onto numbers in the form of analytic geometry. This move by 19th century mathematicians following Weierstrass’s reluctant but compelling argument for what eventually comes modern day set theory thus taken as being unequivocally true by Badiou and absorbed into his approach. Now, having explained the value of this formalistic surjection, Badiou misses the fact that the immanence of his theory is useless in itself.

Of course, he realizes this implicitly, but he does not seem to understand, as Karl Marx and Immanuel Kant did, that navigating the interstice is what brings a formalism its value. Kant’s genius lay in realizing the synthetic nature of phenomenon. His transcendental dialectic surpassed the different singular (“logically independent worlds” qua) faculties to give us a method of relating phenomenon together, stitching together a world through the continuance of their parts. Likewise, Marx explains exchange value through the various different use values of products. That the connected use values of these products is what creates value for money, and that different kinds of money are in a way, different kinds of sublimated use values. In his approach here, Badiou continues to wrap different worlds as increasingly complex localizations that appear to one another, but in the process of doing so always presents it within an absolute envelope (m) that is routely defined as the mode by which these different atoms can interrelate and be associated with one another. And while he states early on that there is no Being that covers all being, like there is no Body that can cover all, I do not think he realizes that by sublimating presentation as a formalization within these sets, he at all is able to step outside of the pure multiples themselves and wrap all of being as only that which appears under immanent logic. At the end of this book, he laments the dismissal of concepts, quoting Descartes that mathematics is eternal. And yet, hasn’t he contradicted himself? He defines early on that there is no Being — that it there is no way one envelope can wrap all of the different worlds, and then he defines it through sheer nominalization (m) and then acts as though this nominalization surpasses the physical presentation of the logics of worlds, stating that there are worlds in which we cannot have access to because their presentation is too baroquely different from our own.

This is the same entrapment that thinkers that the great Roger Penrose, or even Richard Dawkins falls into. Their sublime ability to create complex and yet fantasically concise occult hypothesis allows them the decompose and recompose with such sheer mastery that they have forgotten the reality of their own methods. They are hypnotized by their own defined immanence, forgetting that even in this present world there are points that lie outside of the rigor of their own presentations. Badiou follows this routine, coming to the conclusion to speak of the totality of Idea as an absolute shield. Nevermind the fact that such methodology did not exist for all time, and that the formalism of our own knowledge is a fragmentary creation of the conditions of what we accept to be knowledge. If our knowledge is fragmentary it is because we reject the interstices which gives each world of knowledge value, value which exists wholly outside of each field but is understood as immanent to that fields own internal non-sense.

This tact understanding is also Deleuze’s greatest insight which I think exceeds Badiou. Deleuze’s own language: the conceptions of territoriality, plateaus and the like, consist of Deleuze and Guattari’s genius at producing traces (rhizomes) by which different machinic assemblages influence one another. (Un)fortunately, Deleuzean language either leads people to reject it outright as being non-knowledge, as there is no “point” by which one can make heads or tails of it, books which review Deleuze and only write about a few of his concepts as though this is the great aspect that is to be gleamed, or books which abandon Deleuze but are “about” Deleuze and seek to create their own immanence. Badiou’s method does allow for some greater control in adjusting and decomposing with greater control, but I think that Badiou himself misses the larger aesthetic of Deleuze by pursuing too recklessly the desire for validation. On the one hand, Badiou understands that his philosophy only has value if he is able to connect it to real life situations (thus his talking about life and death) but on the other hand, he wishes for the most obscure concepts in order to be recognized with his heros, as a philosopher).

Having gone this far in the review, I do wish to pull back a little and return to the material dialectic. This insight is profound on its own, but Badiou misses stating it explicitly in his text because he is too enamored of his mathematical rigor: this point is simply that all creation of knowledge (analysis and the synthesis) is predicated on procedure. The truth of mathematics as a rigorous activity and the formation of knowledge as points wholly subsists on the exteriority of various groups that are able to formulate their knowledge as a logical consistency of their profession/activity. That is to say, the pure immanence of a specific approach requires the route nullification of external connections in-itself. Worlds become whole when they eschew other worlds, and nullify the influence of exterior factors. This pure modeling becomes all the more valuable when it is connected to a process which then is able to modify one another. Professions like attorneys and architects are gatekeepers to officiated activity, activity which is inflated because of the formalism of capitalism… but that in itself, is to encroach on an entirely different subject.

I gave this book 5 stars because it’s a tight piece of world. It’s flawed for the reasons I point out, but it’s still wellworth the read.

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The Death and Life of Great American Cities

February 21, 2015 / posted in images of being-human, rational choice theory and homo economicus, reviews, Theory / No Comments

The Death and Life of Great American CitiesThe Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

What Jane Jacobs is really responding to, and criticizing is the spreading of the capital through what John K Galbraith calls the technostructure. Since capitalism’s main drive is technology, as technology reduces cost, affords greater material agency through large capital investments, this is no small subject, although it is a somewhat hidden angle. The megalopolises that exist today are really only possible because of major advances through technology, major investments in infrastructure and major innovations through technological advancement. For this reason, it makes sense that the planners of cities will also invest in the aesthetic of knowledge the technostructure affords us: expression of good design.

Design is really only the highlighting of a particular axis of an independent logical relationship. That is to say, if there are three mutually exclusive choices, their presentation in design as three separate but equatable types is good design. Good design allows us to equalize non-differentials by allowing their containment within logically more important groupings. If we are looking at a series of individuals, it makes sense to present information about these individuals in such a way that highlights through equitable features of however the information is being presented so that these individuals can be arranged to be easily sortable. So that we can make decisions about these individuals. It would make less sense to cram the information together in logically independent relations that have very little to do with our ability to make decisions.

In this sense, much urban design as criticized by Jacobs holds along the axis of decision making for individuals, or at least from the planning perspective, to equate logically independent relationships that have little to do with the ability for common urbanites to make decisions about their environment. For Jacobs, which may be dated these days, urban designers thus, have little understanding of the walkable experiences of urbanities for community building, community strengthening. In short, their knowledge is based more on aesthetically “cold” principles from a bigger view. There’s a good quote from this book: That a region “is an area safely larger than the last one to whose problems we found no solution” In other words, such bureaucracies are too abstract to understand small problems, thus their knowledge and their creation of models is based on these “cold” aesthetically split models that do not demonstrate interactions that stand outside of their modeling. They “average” out too much data, and end up with an impoverished but clear picture that is unsustainable as it is not supported by an exterior topology their model cannot account for.

Galbraith uses the term techostructure in order to denote the melding of planned economies with technologies. This means that administrators and managers need to be able to organize their information according to technologies and functional uses. While regional governments will lag behind the development of new technologies, their division along previous lines of technological influence, their division according to technological functionality will deny the collected effects of their management. Such administrative bodies deny confluence. Early on in the book, Jacob goes to argue that it is in the intermix of diversity, technologies, and mixed uses (where an area is used one way by a population for a time, and then later on, has a different use at a different time) that creates a strong community, enriches its citizens and promotes good economic and social growth.

One of the geniuses of Immanuel Kant and Karl Marx was their recognition that value and phenomenon are created synthetically. This is to say that all topographies are determined by their exterior. As Jacobs notes, communities are generally held around a few key socialites who are able to navigate the interstices of different circles of interest that are geographically aligned by otherwise do not mix. These key individuals carry with them an excess of value since they provide the nexus to which communities and built around and attain cohesion of vision, value and identity. These individuals, like key spaces, be it a park, a mall or otherwise, are not the product of a singular focus, but a mix of logically related cues that deploy individuals together, forcing them to interact, create friendships and build trust.

In a technostructure kind of language we can claim that the very thing any technologically influenced management structure — that relies on the creation and management of specific “expert knowledge” — must necessarily miss the very object they are attempting to manage as a whole. There is department of community, or department of individuals — there is no management of human interaction (socially or economically) as these are the very values that a techostructure wishes to maintain. Rather, this element is destroyed by a technostructure as it is split between departments that have conflicting authority to manage their immanent spheres. The result of this, is understood as chaos as each sphere of influence manages its immanence but in the process of doing so impacts (through the excess of its immanence) other spheres as this influence organizes parts of society that impact other spheres of influence. This excess of planning can only be understood as chaos in reference to the rigorous “planning” of each sphere… what is unplanned is the outside impact.

While Jacobs does not talk about society and cities too much at this abstract a level — her book is more examples of various principles along separate dimension (each chapter is a meditation on each logically independent feature, such as streets, parks, sidewalks, age of buildings, and so on) I think her book would have been more cohesive if it were able to address the issue from a large standpoint of aesthetic philosophical division, as a concept like technostructure would afford. Nonetheless, while dated in some examples, and in use of language, Jacob’s book remains a good marker for the consideration of the interstices that make up society, that any logically independent axis is in fact not truly independent in how that value is created even if we organize it along lines of presentation that appear to be wholly independent. Cities die and grow by chaos, even as this chaos is technologically created through capitalism, forming new social alignments all the while, it is poor understood by existing bodies that use dated models. One wonders how this would have played out should Jacobs had written this in the present age of the internet.

So the 4 stars is really only because she lacks a unifying feature of the book explicitly, even though it is beautifully thought out, and written with rigorous passion. This book is somewhat dated and will be even more so in the near present.

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Transcritique: On Kant and Marx

January 30, 2015 / posted in dialectics, images of being-human, rational choice theory and homo economicus, reviews, Theory, utility / No Comments

Transcritique: On Kant and MarxTranscritique: On Kant and Marx by Kojin Karatani
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Kojin Karatani argues for the formal equivalence of Kant and Marx as for Karatani, both thinkers critique their fields of study (Kant in philosophy and Marx in economics) by positioning themselves in the interstices. For both, all knowledge is a constructive difference, a synthesis of different transcendental fields. For Kant, we have empiricism and metaphysics suspending the transcendental apperception. For Marx, money weaves a field from which surplus value can perpetuate capitalism through the extension of merchant capital. This reading relies on the understanding that different spheres of money, different cultural, geological, economic and semiotic values allow merchant capital to attain surplus value through what is basically arbitration. Karatani then expands on Marx, applying him in various ways up to the current consumerist state. This reading by itself isn’t enough — Karatani emphasizes that such disparate spheres are created through the metaphoric union of the capitalist-nation-state. Much of Karatani’s chapters on Marx are devoted to arguing for this articulation while correcting much simpler readings of Marx as perpetuated by Engels. Of course, Marx and Kant are both difficult thinkers to read. Kant is notoriously erudite, and Marx is notoriously long winded. Yet Karatani manages them both, along with various supporting thinkers and their various positions, to illuminate Marx and Kant while maintaining a slender volume just over 300 pages in text.

I highly recommend this book. This is my second time reading it. The first time, I was a little lost, better read on Kant but not very well read on Marx. This time around, about ten years later, I ate this book up. Karatani proves to be a close reader while being a precise reader, a difficult task. He brings up details when details are needed and illustrates broad topics when overviews are to be given. If I were to characterize his approach of transcritique, it is less about utopia (both Kant and Marx are prone to be understood as utopic thinkers) and more about understanding the context by which the logic of their fields of study are arranged. Marx did so in his volume 3 of capital, understanding the state’s irrational role in supporting and promoting capital in relation to other states. This is much like how Kant, according to Karatani, in his 3rd critique moved forward to speak of a “plural subjectivity” often thought of as his thoughts on aesthetics.

It’s strange that Marx and Kant can be read against one another with such similar structures.

In a way, I wish for Karatani to have included at least a conclusion, to tie both of these guys together, as he did so in the beginning. What have we to gain from this methodology of transcritique? It’s true that his last chapter on Marx moves forward to provide alternatives and reasons as to why capitalism should not be allowed to persist, and why it will inevitably fail. Still, he leaves this methodological approach behind, and the first third of his book (on Kant) without mention in the conclusion. His big take on bracketing as being necessary for knowledge leaves me wondering — what does this method of transcritique bracket, and where are Karatani’s antinomies? What assumptions does he see himself making? Technology for Karatani is in pure service of capitalism’s ability to create organic unity in production and capital as well as the creation of new temporary values in the form of lifestyles. He brackets the possibility for technology to create relations outside of the 4 social relations as he espoused by Marx.

In a way though, this book could stand a third section, one on information, knowledge and money together. This section would combine these two points and statistic a new domain of examination, namely that of the internet… with bitcoin and the like. Coming out in 2003, it’s surprising that only 10 years later, transcritique could stand to be updated in this way. Technology has surly surpassed our ability to grasp what we are doing as it extends much more quickly how we can do it.

Still, a great book. It’s amazing how little Marxists, even staunch communists, have read of Marx. They get too caught up trying to solve the problems of capital that they don’t seem to appreciate or understand what capital is, and how it allows for much more than just problems. If you’re on the fence about this book I would recommend reading it. Nearly every page has something worth taking away from, and that means you probably have to reserve two hours to read 50 pages. The time is well spent.

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Pedagogy of the Oppressed

April 27, 2014 / posted in dialectics, images of being-human, reviews, Theory / No Comments

Pedagogy of the OppressedPedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Although a small book, Freire’s tight analysis of oppression as it dehumanizes or forecloses oppressed subjectivities from fully forming is astounding.

Freire’s thesis is fairly simple: Freedom can only be attained when people are clear on how they are not free. Thus, only though education can one attain the proper human freedom of realizing one’s place in the world.

This isn’t as simple as it sounds. One’s place in one’s world is tied to who one thinks they are, and how they are. People’s identities have a solid anchor in their subjectivity. They often do not seek liberation by way of questioning their own hidden assumptions… rather they often seek liberation by attempting to become in the form of their own oppressors.

Although he doesn’t fully go into the philosophies behind his writing, it’s clear that he’s read Hegel and Marx, dived deeply into dialectics and come back with the same credo so many philosophers before him have acknowledged: radical freedom is only attained through the re-coding of who one is, of understanding the implicit choices we do have instead of limiting one’s self by not being the proper subject. So often does not simply not allow oneself permission to be simply because of habit, or social standing… The implications of new agency aren’t simply in discourse, or social hierarchy, but also in resource and labor division. Freire seeks to bring about revolutionary action through real education… on the street education, where one lets the people speak, and gives them agency to speak.

Strangely enough, much of what he says does echo cognitive psychology’s development of ego in the spiral dynamics model. One can only realize who one is, after one has realized the conventionality of being, stumbled into the negation of post-conventionality and come back with a better understanding of how we are all in this together.

I won’t echo all of his book on here, I can’t. Although less than 200 pages, Freire has not wasted a single sentence. He has cut out so much of what is inessential to emphasize what is essential.

Rarely do you meet an author who has come across such forceful passion AND thought through his message with such clarity… it was such a pleasure to read this.

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on Art

September 17, 2011 / posted in art, images of being-human, life as we know it, manifesto, rhizomatic architecture / No Comments

Sculpture is the most ideal art. Music is the most pragmatic. Dance is the most expressive.

The dream of the artist is to inscribe in the space inside the body outside the body. It’s very much as what Deleuze said regarding the inscription of great books being written in flesh.

I don’t mean that art should be tattooed, but that it should connect what is internal with what is external.

Yet art is not limited to the permeation of membranes or the echo of a model in the head of an artist to the exterior, nor does art have to do with the fidelity of transmission between an external source with an internal experience.

The worst artist is one who carefully conceives of his creations as a matter of controlling the experience of his audience — about transmitting a message, of needing to supplement their art with a libretto or scoffing at those who do not understand their art. Art as a capitalist endeavor is owned, but art as art is experiential germination not teleological. Art is not an essay, it is not about message or medium, although essays can be art. Mediums themselves may be art, and messages can certainly have that artistic impulse.

Rather, to make art is to germinate a form with its ambivalence and its multi-valence and its integral congruity such that the experience of that form extends itself naturally within the substrate of a manifold.

So while each of us are manifolds, select reflections of the world around us, our manifold itself is permeated by forces beyond us from the outside. Those forces can reverberate within our manifold to manifest a chamber of interlaced experience. That vibration, be it pleasurable or stinging — be it without judgement is the result of art. Great art can lead us to intenser vibrations.

Although of course, we judge such vibrations on the face of pleasurable experiences, or singular expressions in allowed social spaces. The accidental death of a parent, or the purposeful interruption of employment can both be traumatic instances, but not permissible within the social realm of ‘art’.

This is how sculpture can be the most ideal form. In the rigidity or fluidity of material, we can experience the visual (and tensile) sensuousness of a form that interrupts a space we are in and informs us of an otherworldly experience. Traditional otherworldly statues of Gods and Demons, plants and other creatures can invoke in us the presence of a static creature such as Venus de Milo. More contemporaneous forms vary in their simplicity or texture to suggest the raw indeterminacy of a gesture — perhaps highlighting the specificity of a bird in space as with Brâncu?i.

In much the same way, music allows for the literal and synecdochiac reverberation of rhythms and beats that bounce within the antechambers of our manifold. We literally vibrate with sounds that resonate with us. As the rhythms align the internal weave of our core, as it is already pre-made with alliterations from familiar genres and languages, so does speech and poetry jolt us with the strength of its diastole and systolic pistons such that we get the hip shaking, head pounding one-step, a halfway intrusion into the expressive realm of Dance.

If you follow me so far, you will understand the how dance and other forms likewise fall under art.

Great art is not the germination of a thought, so much as it is the construction brand new memetics, not of the replication of cliches and icons — although there are room for these too, as art. Art can be any kind of verbal or non-verbal language, it is a modal set operating on other modal sets. And we human subjects are not the only manifolds, although that is our best experience of alien worlds that weave worldly produce in often inexpressible or even inexcusable forms.

Manifolds exist as reflections in the pond, registers in your motherboard — manifolds are topographical maps of the earth, presented as 2D fold-outs. Manifolds are imprints of a system, or a totality along a specific interface, such that the movements of a knight in chess is a particular manifold. A table is a manifold of a factory. A chair is the manifold of the man who made it, the woman who sat in it for fifty years and the weather outside her home.

When Charles Bukowski grew old, wrote poems and started to vomit his brains out, drink is heart and his relationships down the toilet, he is a manifold of a great deal things. His abusive father, his teenage acne, his misery and search for pussy, his subsequent selfishness and alcoholism, his many wives, his days traveling and giving talks. When Michel Hemmingson wrote about the human scum, like the step-father who fucks his step-daughter, or shall we imagine a novel Hemmingson might write… a Vietnam vet who ends up in Hawaii, drugged out, alcoholic, washed out, alienated from the his family, his life interrupted, working a worthless job, waking up drunk each morning, walking the beach dressed like a bum, watching the waves crash on virgin sands, dreaming of the pussy he had, of his children who hate him, barely riding his bike to work once in a while, and his friend who drives a crab truck. This too is a manifold, the manifold written out in words meant to be inscribed in flesh, a way of life. A way of living, a weave, a potential argument for humanity, for existence, for the interruption of alien consciousness on our planetary cosmos.

Philosophers desire to be artists, they desire to walk the thin line that intersects all manifolds, runs through them. But that too is a manifold, one which seeks to imprint its attending indexes onto other manifolds. Plato wrote his Republic as an exploration of what he thought is, justice and the best social roles to express that justice. Heidegger, Sartre, Nietzsche, Marx and even Hegel all wrote on what the best way to live was, the best life to be. The different indexicals that tie these manifolds together act as spaces within a statue, to help formulate the different modes of awareness along bands of consciousness. Shall we name the indexes in Freud? Father, Child, Mother. Lacan? Analyst and Patient, Symbolic and Real and Imaginary. Language works as Moebius Strips that both inform us of our specific meaning along an indeterminate range. Art that does not apply so directly to such vast and vague concepts such as Society and Justice still carry a language a rhythm like Frank Sinatra’s do-be-do-be-do or a do-wop that enfolds us and unfolds within us in a place and time of our being-here regulated by limbs, circadian rhythms of day and night, our social function (formal, wedding or in the bedroom with an intimate guest) and what we had for lunch earlier, our hopes and dreams, the deixis of our self image &c.

In this manner, art is more than just a medium or a message. It is the way in which we weave and are weaved by our surroundings, the ripples of our actions in other’s lives and their actions in ours. We are made and unmade by the minute, by the hour with the expressive forms that carry alien forces directly into our filters, such that the Simpsons expressed in South Park is more than just South Park or the Simpsons, but informs us of each. We watch Lost not as Lost is made or watched by its producers or written by its writers, but as we are made and it is made through us. So the truths and beauties that Moulin Rouge spoke so highly of in Art is less the periodic expression of “partial theories as though formalized through science” but the deployment of our own orientation to that stimulus, our own expression of our manifold as a slice of a context, through the deixical filters of self image and being and through the rubric of oneness, the way evolution isn’t about the development of a single species through time but the cohabitation of a series of forces as they co-evolve, the planet as one massive domino, biome on biome, niche on niche and weather system on planetary rotation.

Living life is art in the broadest sense and our awareness of it does not make it less rich but in fact is irrelevant to its continuation. If anything our awareness is an interruption of a process through the privatization of a deterritorialized space and the prizing of one deixical filter above all others. The projection of ego and selfhood is to mistake the manifold for everything else, when in fact manifolds are little more than dirty mirrors. Remove that dirty mirror from its manifestation and place it in a vacuum and it would be like putting a diamond in a room with no light. Or cutting a figure from a painting out. Taken out of context, the figure lacks all balance of perspective and is no longer adequate to its task. It functions as an empty vector. Unless one projects the original painting around the figure or introduces the figure as a piece in a new manifold, nothing will happen. A mirror in the dark like a soul without a body will falter and vanish completely without a trace like animals in iron cages.

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.

    Meaning at Work, or Why utility is a prori only to itself

    March 27, 2011 / posted in Business, images of being-human, life as we know it, utility / 8 Comments

    When I was growing up, my parents presented me with a life path.  It went something like this:

    1. Go to public school
    2. Go to College
    3. Get a job
    4. Get married and buy a house
    5. Have kids
    6. Work until your kids have left home
    7. Work until you retire
    8. ????

    I asked them, what’s the point of that?  They didn’t have much to say, I’m not sure why, but their basic argument was to say, well, look at us.  We are doing it and it’s fine. (Ironic perhaps, but they are at step 8 now, and the four question marks seem to loom over them everyday…. such that they still have no answer.)

    But at the time, being something like, 10 years old, I didn’t have much to say.   I’m not going to fight-club my way through this, but I will mention that this post will survey a growing trend that I have noticed across different areas of our online media, that of where meaning and work inter-relate.  After all, even if you don’t follow the schema above, if you wish to be “standing on your own two feet” you’re going to have to contribute to society in a meaningful way.

    Contribution doesn’t always mean being paid but it does mean earning a living somehow and not soaking up someone else’s resources.

    But that’s the catch isn’t, it?  I mean, how I defined the problem: in a meaningful way. That’s problematic.

    If you’re on the blogosphere reading this post written in American English, most likely you’re in the upper part of the Global Economy.  Not necessarily at a leadership position, but certainly in the upper stratas of the global-economy.  So you think of the world in terms of $$$$ in terms of capitalism.  How does meaning fit in?

    After all that’s what this blog is about: Meaning.  In particular:

     

    Meaning in the Workplace

    I’d like to cite an article first written by Tammy Erickson.  You can find the article in the Harvard Business Review Blogs.  The article is titled: Meaning is the New Money, although the url suggests an earlier title was about challenging deeply held something… (probably belief?)  To sum this article: Erickson challenges the common belief about what best holds us together as a work-force when we work at a job.  For instance, my parents suggested that I do something I like.  What I like, like many teenagers, had nothing to do with earning money because it was pretty much focused on pleasing myself.  And no one will pay me to do things that please me.

    So while many of us like money, working a job to make money isn’t something (I hope) most of us have to do.  What my parents meant is that we should do something for a living that we at least enjoy.  If you think about it, most of us spend more time with our coworkers in a week than with our loved ones, at least during our waking hours.  That’s kind of a sad thought.  All those turn-key children.  Left alone without guidance from parents who slave away….

    No, Erickson argues that we all need meaning in our jobs, we all need to be energized by what we do, to believe that it matters.  Here’s a compelling quote:

    My research has clearly shown that high levels of engagement, and the associated discretionary effort, occur when our work experiences reflect a clear set of values that we share. For many today, meaning is the new money. It’s what people are looking for at work. Clear company values, translated into the day-to-day work experience, are one of the strongest drivers of an engaged workforce, one primed for successful collaboration.

    Now if that doesn’t convince you read, or at least skim, the article I don’t know what will!

    Isn’t what all the corporate magazines talk about?  Team-building a corporate culture with a cohesive message so everyone is on the same page, working happily towards a shared goal?

    So now, if I get this right — companies not only need to produce more value for their customers than it costs (monetarily) to produce that good or service — they also need to produce meaning for their workforce so that their employees are on board the project too… not just as a wage earner, but with a clear vision and focus as to how their work at the company is meaningful and helps others in the long run.

    Sounds like managers also need to become teachers!  And CMOs and CEOs need to be philosophers!  So then, if I take this article literally, business organizations need not only a clear cash flow that makes fiscal sense for them to operate and survive business cycles, but also that businesses need a clear pedagogical skeleton so that the message is disseminated from the philosopher-CEOs and COOs and CFOs that drive a business towards its strategic goals.

    Certainly many of the more successful corporations that have exploded since their founding today have that clear mission and vision of the kind of company they want to be.  But besides the issue of meaning, what else is at stake?

    What happens when we lose meaning?

     

    The Great Depression of the early 21st Century

    Certainly in our current lifestyle, we find ourselves amid a “Great Depression” comparable to the many depressions in the earlier part of the 20th and latter part of the 19th century… For instance, Detroit basically has 50% unemployment (from World Socialist Website via Jodi Dean, here: The Depopulation of Detroit).  If we take Detroit as a sintome of our current employment life, what does that entail?

    The issue as I see it has less to do with what happens if we get meaning back in our life, but what happens if we lose it.  If we treat our jobs as vehicles for money, which is how we might traditionally look at our job, we end up in a completely different kind of “depression”.

    From the Socialist Worker via Jodi Dean, we get an interview of Alex Callinicos called Capitalism’s Crisis.  This Callinicos hails from a Marxist view of what has traditionally been seen as a deficit on the part of laborers.  I’m not a big Marx expert, or even fan, but I do find him useful.  The idea is that the surplus value of a laborers’ only real commodity (his time, energy and life-force) is where capitalists make their profit.  The crisis of capitalism that Callinicos refers to is the end of capitalist profit.  I don’t want to talk about capitalism too much here as a system, but the basic idea is that as long as capitalism is profitable that profit can be spread among everyone (albeit unevenly).  When that profit stream dries up, it needs to get its $$$ from somewhere, so Callinicos talks about how it is going to try and take more of it from its working class by deducing wages or benefits.

    So the lack of jobs that say, Detroit faces (along with the rest of us) also stems from the lack of profit that is to be had (eating up all our equity from our finance instruments circa 1980 to mid-2000s).  By the way, Alex Callinicos also wrote a book called Against Postmodernism which I read trying to figure out what Postmodernism was.  I was an undergrad at the time, and frankly, my first attempt to grasp what he was saying resulted in a huge fail.

    But in any case, if Callinicos is correct, then our current recession is actually a depression.  And as such, it is unlike the depression resulting from the speculative crashes in 1929 — this depression is actually a crisis in the logic of capitalism.  If the system of economic redistribution is no longer adequate to redistribute… meaning or money or whatever it distributes, then it has failed us.  To quote Callinicos,

    The great Russian revolutionary Lenin said there’s never a really hopeless situation for capitalism as long as workers allow it to survive.

    Sooner or later the system can recover from any crisis. It would be difficult for it to return to the pattern of the recent past, as the financial system has been seriously weakened.

    While the slump continues, it’s important to see that it’s uneven. One section of the system, the historical core in North America and most of Europe, is still quite depressed.

    But if we look at China and the economies associated with it, which include Germany and Brazil, they are growing quite quickly.

    This reflects the way in which the Chinese state threw everything into preventing a protracted economic slump.

    The fact that this bit of the system is growing is a further destabilising factor, however.

    It produces tensions between the US as the dominant capitalist power, and China—increasingly seen as the major challenger. That makes it harder to manage capitalism.

    But even if they do find a way of muddling through, what produced the crisis was the logic of capitalism and the system—a system that is driven by blind competition in pursuit of profit.

    That system will continue to produce crises and continue to try to solve them at the expense of working people and the poor.

    So the only real guarantee of escaping crises like this one is to get rid of capitalism altogether.  That may not be a bad idea, but it also may not be necessary.  Callinicos seems to adhere to Marx to understand what Capitalism is… but you should also understand that Marx himself did not really see capitalism as a horrible system.  Faulty, to be sure, but not without its merits.

    Nonetheless, we can take this Callinico’s call to action a step further.  Richard Seymour, author of the blog Lenin’s Tomb, in an article titled Towards a new Model Commune critiques the basic segmentation that happens in capitalist culture — the organization of the workforce, the regulation of our 9-5, the unthinking box each of us puts herself in when we think, oh I should get another job, often with a helpless conviction that there is in fact no other way for one to live…. that we cannot effect a change in the larger system because I’m just one poor little me!  What can I do? The question then comes as a parallax reversal of JFK’s statement, we should not live for our system — we should ask that our systems live for us, allowing us to live.

     

    Beyond Nihilism: Meaning without Utility

    Having followed me thus far, you’ll be impressed with how far “left” I have gone.  But this is not a matter of liberal or conservative however; the status quo has no substance in itself.  People will only adhere to a meaning if it continues to service them well.  So the question is more aligned with Immanuel Wallerstein‘s dichotomies from his World Systems Analysis.  We have rather, three parties, a defense of the status quo for no change, a desire for some carefully measured change, and then we have those few who want radical change.  Critical theory, or at least a philosophical eye on the relations that be want change, push for change, dooming it to be “left”.  So what does this mean? Our “left” and “right” positions is really more accurately, a measure of how things can be “better”.  The Americanizations of Liberal and Conservative are anything if not misleading.  Conservatives may want change, but it’s not so much change of what is fundamentally sound, but a tweaking of our current day back to the intentions of “the good ole days”.  Liberals more would more on the side that what is fundamentally sound has yet to be.

    Thus, the content of both sides is irrelevant, their positions are metered around what is seen as being fundamental “change” or not.

    So my point in bringing this up, if anything is that while you’ll see that while this entry has gone into the very “liberal” ideologies of Marxist critiques of capitalism, you can find similar thoughts echoed, if not in the right then at least in the status quo.

    My evidence for this?  Straight from the business blog of Tony Schwartz, We’re in a new energy crisis.  This one is personal.  While much of this blog’s purpose is to promote their “The Energy Project” which has to do with auditing tasks that businesses (and their front running exes) perform to save energy.  Not energy like green energy or electricity, but personal energy.  What does this blog post reveal about one of his key principles?  It’s worth quoting:

    Companies need to take up the cause of a new way of working.

    The companies that build competitive advantage in the years ahead aren’t going to do it by seeking to get more out of their people. They’ll do it instead better meeting people’s core needs — physical, emotional, mental and spiritual — so they’re freed, fueled and inspired to bring more of themselves to work every day.

    What assure people energy — what meets their needs — is to give them meaning, to energize them with a goal, exactly what Erickson writes about above.

    But then we knew this already.  Victor Frankl wrote Man’s Search for Meaning which is actually a memoir of his survival from a Nazi Concentration Camp.  His analysis and conclusion is that human beings need meaning to survive.  He observed that those who survived the camp did so because they had sufficient reason not to give up.

    I don’t think that we of the global economy are ready to give up.  And our daily lives DO have meaning, albeit personal meaning.  For many of us, our jobs mean a little bit, we find a way to incorporate what we do into the larger picture of how others live around us.  Even still though, to get supreme satisfaction is requires more than just knowing that we did our part in some small way.  Having a personal disjunction between our life with our family and friends and what we do in the office is perhaps one of the greatest conundrums of the modern era.

    Both Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari and Jean-Francois Lyotard (to mention a few) cite our postmodern, post-industrial society with its circularity of capital (C-M-C and M-C-M) with its built-in limits as endless producing — all without producing any meaning.  Instead, meaning is foreclosed between production on one side, and consumption on the other-side through the parallax multi-faceted kernel of $.  The only thinker I know of who seems able to transcend this analogous gap between money, commodity and capital is Kojin Karatani and he proposes a barter type system as a way of side-stepping the dialectic. (Slavoj Zizek has written extensively about parallax gaps, of which this is one… but he does not offer solutions, just further re-defining of the problems in the dialectical structure.)

    Anyway, such discussions between meaning and money are fit for another time.  And my reading of Lyotard’s Libidinal Economy is quite rusty.  I did try and tackle this subject before here: On Capitalism, a Tragedy although the approach was quite philosophical.

    And no, I don’t think capitalism is a tragedy, I was just playing off of Michael Moore’s Capitalism, a Love story.

    So the takeaway?  If anything it’s not that we can work more hours in a day.  Or that we could be more productive if we paid our employees more, or save our economy by shrinking the benefits to those who have jobs.  I suppose I can write a little bit on that some other time, maybe.  But what I want to end with here, is simply that if we are to find our way out of the current economy deadlock, and our collective dissatisfaction with how much we work then we need to take a risk and alter the way we approach work.  This can’t happen until businesses collectively see their mission to be more than just greed and profiteering.  The world today is remarkably different from when Adam Smith wrote The Wealth of Nations.  The main difference is that the world then was much bigger.  Today we live in a sandbox. We find our resources dwindling and our pollution with no where to go.  We used to shit in someone else’s backyard — but only now we see that someone else’s backyard is also our backyard.

    If anything we need to forcefully reinstill meaning into our existence.  Instead of embracing the null of capitalism and relying on transactions and cash flow to be the determining factor of meaning and rationality (decision making) we need to find some other means.  Which will be hard, because we wouldn’t be changing the tangible pieces on the table.  We would be changing the intangible relationship of those pieces, the logic of how they work together.  I think if anything, the experiment of a centralized bureaucracy like the Soviet Union’s most likely isn’t the answer…

    So to get back to the takeaway, we have to understand that Homo Economicus cannot be the basis for Rational Choice Theory.   This kind of maximization of utility can only be cohered when understood in conjunction with a meaningful metric.  Only one kind of meaningful metric exists:  MONEY.

    One could argue that the metrics don’t need tampering and the basis for rational choice is sound, it’s rather the instrumentation needs to be refined.  But then if you use the Energy Project as above, can we actually put a dollar sign for every effort spent on pedagogically infusing an employee with the company mission?  Or the time spent by a manager to explain to an employee how they fit into the company network?  Or the extra productivity an employee may show (or not lose) because such time and energy was spent?

    Well, business has a vested interest in these things, and big business has a ton of money and a need for quantifying studies so I am sure someone has been insane enough to create tools to describe what I’ve described directly above.

    But in all seriousness: I am not alone in voicing a concern that economic theory is insufficient in properly modeling and putting into practice what is healthy for human beings.  This article:  Goodbye, Homo Economicus from Economist’s View voices concerns about the insufficiency of linking rational choice theory (with its model of humans as homo economicus, interested mainly in external measurable values of maximizing utility and minimizing cost).

    What the “madmen in authority” heard this time was the distant echo of a debate among academic economists begun in the 1970s about “rational” investors and “efficient” markets. This debate began against the backdrop of the oil shock and stagflation and was, in its time, a step forward in our understanding of the control of inflation. But, ultimately, it was a debate won by the side that happened to be wrong. And on those two reassuring adjectives, rational and efficient, the victorious academic economists erected an enormous scaffolding of theoretical models, regulatory prescriptions and computer simulations which allowed the practical bankers and politicians to build the towers of bad debt and bad policy. …

    Which brings us to the causes of the present crisis. The reckless property lending that triggered this crisis only occurred because rational investors assumed that the probability of a fall in house prices was near zero. Efficient markets then turned these assumptions into price-signals, which told the bankers that lending 100 per cent mortgages or operating with 50-to-1 leverage was safe. Similarly, regulators, who allowed banks to determine their own capital requirements and private rating agencies to establish the value at risk in mortgages and bonds, took it as axiomatic that markets would automatically generate the best possible information and create the right incentives for managing risks. …

    The scandal of modern economics is that these two false theories—rational expectations and the efficient market hypothesis—which are not only misleading but highly ideological, have become so dominant in academia (especially business schools), government and markets themselves.

    I am not familiar with the author of this article.  Where this article stops, is in suggesting how economics could be reformed so that the internal models that build our current understanding of how resources and finances should be handled better on a different axis of value.  That’s okay though, this article is from a blog about economics, not about meaning in the face of rational nihilism via utility… an understanding of money that is nearly a priori due to its near-circularity.

    But if anything, the takeaway should be that our current system needs to change in some fundamental ways because of a lack of meaning in our workplace and the lack of integration between our system of resources and how people live.

    It’s not enough to BS a company work-place environment.  That environment needs to be genuine. People today are quite savvy at detecting bullshit.  Likewise any meaning a company creates, like the lessons in a public classroom, for it to be meaningful, need to be integral to our personal lives, in some way.  And that choice has to be allowed by each individual, we need a society that sets the proper conditions for such connections to thrive.  What such a society should be, or how it should be transitioned onto is of course, a difficult but collective choice each of us needs to make on a daily basis. In the case of public education, nearly impossible for students — perhaps near impossible for us capitalists — as we’ve defined our global system of economics to systematically exclude the intangibles, thereby excluding the very things that assures each of us the highest priority in meaningfulness!

    Still, the next time you go to work, decide for yourself, if this is what you ought to be doing.  Not in terms of today or tomorrow, but in terms of next year, or ten years from now.  Understand that maximizing a paycheck is like maximizing utility.  Getting a pleasant job that is close by is like minimizing cost.  Is that really the best way to live — according to such minimal and circumstantial constraints?

    After all, in the journey of being alive, we collect things, bank accounts and stuff.  It’s not been accepted that anyone who has died has come back to really talk of their post-life experience.  Even still, we all see that No, you can’t take it with you.

    So the worthwhile part needs to be the journey, not the destination.  Why else would we possibly be here and now, alive today?

    If this is so, then society should try and maximize its populations’ “journey” instead of maximizing utility in the form of numbers in a corporate bank account…

    Dialectical Nihilism

    January 19, 2011 / posted in life as we know it, manifesto, Theory / No Comments

    Many of the entries I have posted on here are an attempt to try and find a rational application of ideas, or the imprint of massive theories onto the chaotic transgressions of daily life. Theories themselves when applicable to meaning, society and culture, prove effective when they

    1. can justify or explain a particular situation — why things are
    2. grasp the relationships of various categories as they function by highlighting a fulcrum upon which meaning is generated.

    For this reason, it may be incoherent or disjointed to present a theory simply as a theory for its own sake. Such theorization is an artifice of academia and not at all pragmatic. Nonetheless, I present below a theory I batted around a bit a few years ago in order to try and make sense of what I was doing. I am not going to apply the theory here, but simply present it as a point of reference.

    Forgive me, if this seems too academic.

    Dialectical Nihilism

    we have heard of dialectical materialism — and dialectical idealism. the former is used to describe the adoptation of hegelian dialectics by marx… an explanation of production (the formation of history through class struggle). the latter i have heard as a reflective description of hegel, when in fact dialectics itself in general is associated with hegel, although at its root we can get socratic dialogue. fine whatever, classical blahblah. but can be mix traditions? nietzsche and hegel don’t go together. but let’s try:

    what about dialectical nihilism?

    step 1. simple nihilism in-itself. we have the reactionary nihilist who claims “i believe in nothing”. this is coupled with what you might call evangelical atheism in which this nonbeliever poo-poos everything that is “meaningful” — claiming such people are idiots. let’s take the example of God. such a nihilist would eagerly either make fun of or try and convince believers that there is nothing instead of God.

    incidentially this form of nihilism is what i associate with self proclaimed atheists and nihilists, which is why i do not take up such a title. it’s an obscene sort of behavior which is hypocritical.

    step 2. negative nihilism. most atheists do not reach this point, or atleast if they do they are quiet about it. this is where nihilism recognizes that while “i believe in nothing” this has a negative bearing in extension. such a nihilist would see believers of God and say, “well good for them. at least they are happy… i guess”.

    step 3. nihilism for-itself. such a nihilist can go to church because of the pleasure of other people’s feelings. of the beautiful architecture, of the pleasantness of the hymns and the freshness of goodwill — and enjoy the simulacra of religion and not see any contradiction because while there may be nothing, what does it matter what others believe in? let’s enjoy this nothing in its nothinghood. perhaps sartre…? most people will never reach this level ethics in their life, this adherence to a productive principle.

    step 4. this is where nihilism itself is a notion. what to call it? if this was truly hegelian it would be the reversal or what sartre might say as nihilism in-itself-for-itself; but such a mode is often found in either the 2nd or 3rd step, not the 4th. here a nihilist can claim that “there is nothing for me to grasp; why shouldn’t i believe in whatever? at least i am happy… i guess”. what makes this the 4th step is in the empty form of the notion — which of course in hegel’s 4th is like this 4th — a divorce of content from the empty pure form (reality). in this example it is expressed as a separation of belief from reality… a point at which some christians i have met have attained.

    at its core, we have a resemblance of nietzsche… in the form of hegel. not to say that nietzsche is synonymous with nihilism. certainly nihilism is a simplified form. what might make this nietzschiean is in how we divorce a position’s normal “expected” valiance from its expression… not just that we deal with nihilism and therefore must deal with the origins of values. we have a movement into the origins of the seed of belief in that 4th nihilist claim…

    so but basically this can be understood as a justification of christianity or whatever through nihilism.

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