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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…

On Capitalism: A Tragedy1

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

Amusing ourselves to Death

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Just like what happens in Moore’s film.

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

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

And about the world we live in?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1 Mostly edited by my good friend Mabbish. Thanks!