Monday, May 19, 2008

lottery

I've had some respect for Dominic Fox since he cut Communication House, (rightly) protesting the British Government's contemptible policy of imprisoning asylum seekers. Anyway I'm arbitrarily singling him out as exemplifying a baleful trend; Dominic writes in the comments section at Limited Inc:

"Circulation and exchange can take other forms besides those they take within a regime of commodification; they can take, for example, the form they take in gift exchange. But circulation and exchange in whatever form shift the object between value-schemes, detaching it from its value-in-use, and assigning to it a value-in-circulation (the value of the gift for example is not just that of the use it will find in the hands of the receiver, but something additional: the social, symbolic value of its being given). Iterability means that the object has no natural home in any one value-scheme, that it finds a home by circulating into place (so to speak)."

As far as I am aware this business of the gift was either of purely anthropological interest (Mauss) or served as a heuristic device for analysing capitalist society (Bataille, after his own fashion). But what really insults my postmod sensibilities is the failure to "privilege" for example Huizinga's ideas about play (the debate at Limited Inc was somewhat along the lines of Huizinga's polemic against Burckhardt) which are certainly no more nonsensical than Derrida freebasing Mauss. Or, from another perspective the idea of basing a society on lotteries as per Borges' Lottery of Babylon. It's conceivable that for no good reason Huizinga's work could be consigned to the dustbin of history.

It seems plausible that in a society with only one good, which serves for essential and luxury consumption (as the only possible realisation of money wages and profits), in which market exchange and private ownership of the means of production predominate, that a pattern of the distribution of goods would pertain along the lines of that outlined in Marx's Capital; at least this outcome seems more plausible, given these preconditions, than a neoclassical type distribution. What's needed for this piece of educational theatre is a plausible single good. I haven't tried to work out the details but you could maybe use - lottery tickets.

Anyway, what a shame for the esteemed writer of Communication House to have never read Borges!

5 comments:

Dominic said...

Communications House is just around the corner from where I work. Grim place, an administrative centre crossed with a holding pen. The RCG (Revolutionary Communist Group) stand outside it once a month chanting. Good on them.

catmint said...

yeah, good on them!

Le Colonel Chabert said...

do you know the calvino story where everybody goes out and burgles every night, leaving their own doors open to be burgled, and then an "honest man" refuses to burgle, and engenders inequality...

catmint said...

No, I haven't read Calvino. I'll check it out.

catmint said...

...the other condition necessary to the marxist model is compulsion to sell labour power