"Do you believe your own theory?
-No, Stephen said promptly."
the seventh chapter of Ulysses, set in the newspaper office finds a section of Dublin's intelligentsia discussing the perfection of a rhetoric independent of lowly particulars. The adman Leopold Bloom appears briefly to beg a favour and is sent packing. Mr Bloom brings a quiet dignity to an undignified day of scrabbling around after various errands. These events could be said to illustrate the prehistory of modern advertising, before its accession to logical, ethical and aesthetic preeminence. A new messiah for Ireland indeed.
One of Joyce's devices is an advertising style. As is well known, Ulysses makes few concessions to its audience in terms of intelligibility. I'd suggest that the implied receiver of this work is no longer a supposed other person, with particular involvements in events, rather it's as if the work is submitted to a purely abstract agency, mirroring the abstract style of advertising, or more precisely an imagined abstract agency reconstructible from advertising. Later, (in chapter nine) Ireland's real intellectuals will be satirised. One ought to ask: for whom? Or, who exactly is supposed to really get this bravura display of erudition and pseudoerudition?
We could say, rather preliminarily, that modernism denotes such works as are produced not for people but for an abstract agency of receivership, and that are stylistically sprung round this abstraction. Advertising produces works that evoke the same effect, by other means, since it's proved valuable to be able to show commodities abstacted or reified fom quotidian misery, not least that of their conditions of production. The trick is to appear to have channeled Abbadon, or whoever might be said to represent the impersonal voice of the world of commodities. In fact advertising seems to have perfected the stylistic innovations of modernism formerly applied to art: photomontage, juxtaposition of text and image, absurdism etc.
The most modern relations are impersonal relations. Rebecca West considered the aerial bombing of civillians in the second world war to be, in terms of form and content, an expression of the impersonal relations characteristic of modern industrialised society, and an unfocused resentment this society inculcates, according to her, among those it does not benefit. From a historical point of view this is doubtful, since civillians were first bombed from the air in colonial wars, and this argument that fascism really affranchised the disenfranchised of modern society, who continued to channel an attitude rooted in disenfranchisement - all this seems fairly illogical. The value of this argument is that it expresses clearly and concisely a real impression of these abstract, impersonal relations.
Rousseau's sandwichman pleads his own case: "Though the rain wets the earth/ I wear on my back/ The unanswerable advertisement/ of the broadsheet Éclair"
Monday, June 09, 2008
Monday, May 26, 2008
Lenin's take on immigration
"Lenin" has a serious point to make about the governing party's current orientation:
"Given that New Labour were the ones who tried to stoke up anti-immigrant xenophobia in Crewe and Nantwhich, on the assumption that the 'white working class' is basically racist and authoritarian, we can almost bet that the government will place themselves to the right of the Tories on this question at the general election despite the evident failure of this strategy by yesterday morning"
The supposed "rational kernel" of a xenophobia that New Labour cannot quite will to materialise, is the idea that immigration results in lower wages. Lenin writes:
"When we are told by some who should know better that immigration pushes wages down, empirical refutation isn't difficult to find. For example, a recent study for the Low Pay Unit found that overall pay tends to increase a bit as a result of immigration, although the lowest paid might experience a slight fall."
giving short shrift to the idea that immigration might weaken the bargaining power* of labour. The writers of this study express their conclusions this way:
"although the arrival of economic migrants has benefited workers in the middle and upper part of the wage distribution, immigration has placed downward pressure on the wages of workers in receipt of lower levels of pay. Over the period considered, wages at all points of the wage distribution increased in real terms, but wages in the lowest quarter would have increased quicker and wages further up the distribution would have risen more slowly if it were not for the effect of immigration."
Historically economic immigration tends to be positively correlated with output. Evidently adding to the work force will boost output, but this isn't likely to have constituted the sole or principle reason for rising real wages in recent years, if we accept that such a thing has occured**. The distribution of output largely depends on political factors. The term "wages" in Lenin's formulation is amenable to some ambiguity. Average wages may have increased but workers aren't paid average wages. "Wages" can reasonably taken to mean working class wages, which can rightly be said to have stagnated on account of immigration.
Perhaps Lenin ought to put Marx aside at this stage. For better or worse the sisuation in the UK isn't really consistant with Marx's predictions of a vast proletarian class with the capitalists and their retainers living like plantation owners among their slaves. Instead there's something like a working class amounting to 35% of the population, with perhaps 55% of the population belonging to a middle class whose income is subsidised (tactically or accidentally rather than for reasons of social justice etc) by property income.
Considering the middle class and the working class together as a marxist type proletariat results in the following sort of formulation:
"Marx speaks of reproducing the means of subsistence, but here he clearly refers to a historically produced subsistence as opposed to the minimum amount of nutrition, clothing and so on that one could possibly live with. The means of one's subsistence can include sufficient wages to use the internet, purchase a car, mortgage a house or pay rent on a flat, have the normal range of consumer durables, including a washing machine and perhaps any other labour-saving device that allows you to get to work on time and have sufficient hours after the working day to unwind and recuperate for the next eight hours. It would also include support for a family, which is after all the unit through which the labour is replaced. If you look at the UK national minimum wage, or the US mimimum wage, the level is determined not by reference to some ahistorical level of bare subsistence, but by how much it costs to reproduce one's labour in the here and now"
This implies a kind of social reasoning on behalf of employers that isn't supported by reality. The inclusion in wages of funds that can cover items such as washing machines depends on a number of other factors:
1. the overproduction of these items at lower and lower cost
2. low inflation resulting from persistant real growth
3. the ability of workers to resist wage cuts
all of which depend more on capitalists failing to collude in their own interests than somehow colluding in the workers' interests.
In the absence of effective unions resistance to wage cuts comes down to passive resistance: going off sick, sudden defection from the workplace, working inadequately, refusing to work or being made incapable of work.
Having pointed out that employers are bound to follow this conventional minimum, Lenin introduces a class of employers who do not:
"If the rate [of the minimum wage] is far too low" then "this is a concession to the needs of poverty employers whose margin of profit is slight. In comparing the wages of migrant and 'indigenous' workers, one therefore has to look at the determinants of the cost of labour power."
The problem here comes out of construing middle class wages as working class wages. Hence we end up with the following formulation, bizarrely amenable to the kind of xenophobic nonsense Lenin rightly deplores:
"The combined costs of reproducing one's labour power as a Polish worker is lower than the cost of reproducing one's labour power as a British worker."
and which isn't correct.
Anyway, Lenin's right to advocate "free movement" as a civil liberties issue and to reject the idea of Gaza type walls defending our priviliges as tame retainers of capitalism as detestable and practically impossible.
*Lenin raises a different bargaining power argument here:
"At the moment, European capital supposedly requires 8% unemployment - the 'natural' or 'non-accelerating inflation' rate of unemployment. Anything lower and the bargaining power of labour pushes up the cost of labour power (that's the 'accelerating inflation'), which is disadvantageous to the employers. However, we don't necessarily fancy being appendages to the machinery of capital, and that is what we become when migration is restricted to suit its interests."
The NAIRU is basically nonsense because inflation historically tends to fall as output rises. What the gentlemen advocating its use as a tool for informing policy mean is that given significant inflation capitalist profit depends on aggressive action to reduce the bottom line.
**the calculation of real wages tends to systematically underestimate the costs of housing. The Low Pay Unit believe the cost of accomodation in the UK to amount to £30 per week. pdf
"Given that New Labour were the ones who tried to stoke up anti-immigrant xenophobia in Crewe and Nantwhich, on the assumption that the 'white working class' is basically racist and authoritarian, we can almost bet that the government will place themselves to the right of the Tories on this question at the general election despite the evident failure of this strategy by yesterday morning"
The supposed "rational kernel" of a xenophobia that New Labour cannot quite will to materialise, is the idea that immigration results in lower wages. Lenin writes:
"When we are told by some who should know better that immigration pushes wages down, empirical refutation isn't difficult to find. For example, a recent study for the Low Pay Unit found that overall pay tends to increase a bit as a result of immigration, although the lowest paid might experience a slight fall."
giving short shrift to the idea that immigration might weaken the bargaining power* of labour. The writers of this study express their conclusions this way:
"although the arrival of economic migrants has benefited workers in the middle and upper part of the wage distribution, immigration has placed downward pressure on the wages of workers in receipt of lower levels of pay. Over the period considered, wages at all points of the wage distribution increased in real terms, but wages in the lowest quarter would have increased quicker and wages further up the distribution would have risen more slowly if it were not for the effect of immigration."
Historically economic immigration tends to be positively correlated with output. Evidently adding to the work force will boost output, but this isn't likely to have constituted the sole or principle reason for rising real wages in recent years, if we accept that such a thing has occured**. The distribution of output largely depends on political factors. The term "wages" in Lenin's formulation is amenable to some ambiguity. Average wages may have increased but workers aren't paid average wages. "Wages" can reasonably taken to mean working class wages, which can rightly be said to have stagnated on account of immigration.
Perhaps Lenin ought to put Marx aside at this stage. For better or worse the sisuation in the UK isn't really consistant with Marx's predictions of a vast proletarian class with the capitalists and their retainers living like plantation owners among their slaves. Instead there's something like a working class amounting to 35% of the population, with perhaps 55% of the population belonging to a middle class whose income is subsidised (tactically or accidentally rather than for reasons of social justice etc) by property income.
Considering the middle class and the working class together as a marxist type proletariat results in the following sort of formulation:
"Marx speaks of reproducing the means of subsistence, but here he clearly refers to a historically produced subsistence as opposed to the minimum amount of nutrition, clothing and so on that one could possibly live with. The means of one's subsistence can include sufficient wages to use the internet, purchase a car, mortgage a house or pay rent on a flat, have the normal range of consumer durables, including a washing machine and perhaps any other labour-saving device that allows you to get to work on time and have sufficient hours after the working day to unwind and recuperate for the next eight hours. It would also include support for a family, which is after all the unit through which the labour is replaced. If you look at the UK national minimum wage, or the US mimimum wage, the level is determined not by reference to some ahistorical level of bare subsistence, but by how much it costs to reproduce one's labour in the here and now"
This implies a kind of social reasoning on behalf of employers that isn't supported by reality. The inclusion in wages of funds that can cover items such as washing machines depends on a number of other factors:
1. the overproduction of these items at lower and lower cost
2. low inflation resulting from persistant real growth
3. the ability of workers to resist wage cuts
all of which depend more on capitalists failing to collude in their own interests than somehow colluding in the workers' interests.
In the absence of effective unions resistance to wage cuts comes down to passive resistance: going off sick, sudden defection from the workplace, working inadequately, refusing to work or being made incapable of work.
Having pointed out that employers are bound to follow this conventional minimum, Lenin introduces a class of employers who do not:
"If the rate [of the minimum wage] is far too low" then "this is a concession to the needs of poverty employers whose margin of profit is slight. In comparing the wages of migrant and 'indigenous' workers, one therefore has to look at the determinants of the cost of labour power."
The problem here comes out of construing middle class wages as working class wages. Hence we end up with the following formulation, bizarrely amenable to the kind of xenophobic nonsense Lenin rightly deplores:
"The combined costs of reproducing one's labour power as a Polish worker is lower than the cost of reproducing one's labour power as a British worker."
and which isn't correct.
Anyway, Lenin's right to advocate "free movement" as a civil liberties issue and to reject the idea of Gaza type walls defending our priviliges as tame retainers of capitalism as detestable and practically impossible.
*Lenin raises a different bargaining power argument here:
"At the moment, European capital supposedly requires 8% unemployment - the 'natural' or 'non-accelerating inflation' rate of unemployment. Anything lower and the bargaining power of labour pushes up the cost of labour power (that's the 'accelerating inflation'), which is disadvantageous to the employers. However, we don't necessarily fancy being appendages to the machinery of capital, and that is what we become when migration is restricted to suit its interests."
The NAIRU is basically nonsense because inflation historically tends to fall as output rises. What the gentlemen advocating its use as a tool for informing policy mean is that given significant inflation capitalist profit depends on aggressive action to reduce the bottom line.
**the calculation of real wages tends to systematically underestimate the costs of housing. The Low Pay Unit believe the cost of accomodation in the UK to amount to £30 per week. pdf
Tuesday, May 20, 2008
pay attention!
Tom Friedman's pronouncements: if you pay attention to the content of what he says and at the same time his social position, the means at his disposal, there's a real and obvious discrepancy. He can come across like someone wearing a mink coat in a sauna. On the other hand insofar as Friedman isn't a retained spokesman of the US government*, and that his work is really reproduced through the market, one can suppose a normalising tendency prevails to some extent, such as colours the sale of commodities generally. I'm assuming Friedman's schtick becomes normalised the same way Pepsi Cola is. But of course as much as he lauds Our Western Civilisation he also exemplifies its public discourse.
It is not quite a matter of condescending to the public. There's a real affectation of a homely style but nothing to suggest that this is merely a matter of expediency. No sense of someone really calculating. This communication is fundamentally unilateral but also strives for a democratic effect, as if aiming for consensuality. And so this univocality is presented as an unfortunate result of a regrettable pervasive childishness.
It's a matter of historical record how the US government's foreign policy (which may have led to the death of one million Iraqi citizens, sanctions plus occupation, some reports suggest twice this amount) has been presented in this mawkish, childish manner. It remains to be established to what extent these apparent exercises in style actually influenced policy making.
*Friedman is independently wealthy but likes to play act a money grubbing style
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!
"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!
Sunday, May 04, 2008
panic
& panic was evident, effectuating or following from a rigid interpersonal distance, one imagined, gridded these floors and floors of offices. Maybe we could talk about it? We could wear sunglasses indoors, in the manner of Billy Idol, or maybe we could talk about it.
Wednesday, April 16, 2008
Ron Paul/Ben Bernanke exchange
(The army and police in Ron Paul's imagination have a status comparable to Tiepolo's angels)
Sunday, April 13, 2008
Do Republican voters believe in progress?
People sometimes think I have an unnecessarily dystopian view of the future. Brazilian development: favelas, palm trees, ten percent of the population owning seventy five percent of the wealth. To what alternative view could one realistically subscribe? It's possible to isolate, within the spectacle, a "vision" of exogenous "waves of progress": the specific basis of trickledown economics. I recall at university this being pushed as the dominant view: that which is actualised, the most modern, the most scientific. It's worth asking to what extent this view is accepted.
America's CEO
I don't pretend this is especially scientific, but I think the recent recent Republican contest in the U.S. approximately gauges assent to neoliberal ideas (against a limited pallette of alternatives) within a bloc of the population important for the manufacturing of consent: America's middle class. Support for Romney could be taken to more or less track approval of these ideas as explanation, narrative, packaging. Support for the other two main candidates would track dissent from this.
For no good scientific reason I'm persuaded that for most people Romney's very comportment radiates the "stable waves" of neoliberalism:
"your boss is a worker like you. He just works more productively. This work benefits everyone. You ought to vote for your boss"
(My paraphrasing. And I think it's right to stress this aspect of his campaign. It's surely a mistake to think Romney's neoliberalism is polluted in some way by a militarism in contradiction with it, or at another level, his mormon beliefs.)
I suspect the failure of these ideas to be adequately persuasive is testified to by thousands of now useless "America's CEO" mugs, caps and mousemats piled up in a warehouse somewhere in Michigan.
But what on earth can the platforms of McCain and Huckabee represent if they are obliged to depart from the dominant ideas of the dominant classes whose interests they aspire to serve?
Again, rather subjectively, McCain strikes me as a proponant of disaster movie rhetoric; the whole thing in The Towering Inferno, security guards improvising a useable system, the bourgeois system having melted into air. An odd relation with bourgeois civilisation and it's institutions, this imagination exceedingly pleased by the thought of setting up a control checkpoint in MOMA or the central library; making up a barricade from a Richard Serra installation or amid an Ice Age diorama: "The Museum's under control Maam". A reified pragmatism, basically.
America's CEO
I don't pretend this is especially scientific, but I think the recent recent Republican contest in the U.S. approximately gauges assent to neoliberal ideas (against a limited pallette of alternatives) within a bloc of the population important for the manufacturing of consent: America's middle class. Support for Romney could be taken to more or less track approval of these ideas as explanation, narrative, packaging. Support for the other two main candidates would track dissent from this.
For no good scientific reason I'm persuaded that for most people Romney's very comportment radiates the "stable waves" of neoliberalism:
"your boss is a worker like you. He just works more productively. This work benefits everyone. You ought to vote for your boss"
(My paraphrasing. And I think it's right to stress this aspect of his campaign. It's surely a mistake to think Romney's neoliberalism is polluted in some way by a militarism in contradiction with it, or at another level, his mormon beliefs.)
I suspect the failure of these ideas to be adequately persuasive is testified to by thousands of now useless "America's CEO" mugs, caps and mousemats piled up in a warehouse somewhere in Michigan.
But what on earth can the platforms of McCain and Huckabee represent if they are obliged to depart from the dominant ideas of the dominant classes whose interests they aspire to serve?
Again, rather subjectively, McCain strikes me as a proponant of disaster movie rhetoric; the whole thing in The Towering Inferno, security guards improvising a useable system, the bourgeois system having melted into air. An odd relation with bourgeois civilisation and it's institutions, this imagination exceedingly pleased by the thought of setting up a control checkpoint in MOMA or the central library; making up a barricade from a Richard Serra installation or amid an Ice Age diorama: "The Museum's under control Maam". A reified pragmatism, basically.
liberalism in contradiction (2): the Gaza blockade
Back in January Hamas managed to bring down the Gaza/Egypt border, only for a few days. This was driven by necessity of course, but also demonstrated a sophisticated sense of contradiction (which costs nothing and unfortunately isn't exchangeable); possibly a sharper sense of contradiction than various "leftists" might have employed.
What was demonstrated? Massive hypocrisy. The technocratic rationale of the various networks of power that happen to be ranged against the residents of Gaza: the administration of Israel, but also that of Egypt and the United States; this rationale is starkly contradicted by a practical policy of mass social imprisonment. We're used to being presented with an imaginary trade-off between vague humanitarian concerns, to be appraised in a manner unfortunately approximating aesthetic criticism, and the more positivistic, and so more apparently real concerns of the economy; here both are being curtailed.
Of course Israel's administration isn't known to be particularly liberal; and it isn't, but it's important to recognise what are really secondary phenomena; e.g. the strange religious parties are more or less peripheral to a power structure that ressembles that of other highly developed countries: business, journalism, academia, banking.
The point is that in the situation in Gaza one is presented with the apparently universal language of modern technocracy in contradiction.
Nitzan and Bichler wrote an excellent book about, among other things, Israel's power structure. This is their take on a tengentially related issue, the contradictions of the Likud party(and Kadima deserve no greater charity):
"When preaching economic liberalisation, Likud members usually meant exactly what they said. Most of them were socialised during the British Mandate era, and many of them, even today, remain locked into the petty bourgeois mentality of "free markets" and "small government". But that is precisely the point. In their imagination, they were removing the shackles of government from an otherwise competitive economy. What they did in practice, though, was deregulate an oligopolistic war economy, effectively inviting dominant capital to take the lead. Viewed from this perspective, their "political folly" no longer seems senseless. On the contrary, it looks as if their actions, unbeknown to them of course, were in fact serving a broader "latent function". For Israel's dominant capital, stagflation, rising military spending, growing dependency on the United States, and a ballooning debt, were the basic ingredients for successful differential accumulation. These very policies were also consistant with the interests of dominant capital groups in the United States, particularly those related to armaments and oil, which benefitted from the escalating regional conflict, and which played an important role in shaping U.S.-Israel relations. The most promising political platform for achieving these results was a combination of laissez-faire economics and racist militarism; and the party which believed in these principles, was ready to implement them, and, most importantly, was to never fully understand their consequences, was Likud."
from The Global Political Economy of Israel
There's actually a decent BBC report on the situation in Gaza here
What was demonstrated? Massive hypocrisy. The technocratic rationale of the various networks of power that happen to be ranged against the residents of Gaza: the administration of Israel, but also that of Egypt and the United States; this rationale is starkly contradicted by a practical policy of mass social imprisonment. We're used to being presented with an imaginary trade-off between vague humanitarian concerns, to be appraised in a manner unfortunately approximating aesthetic criticism, and the more positivistic, and so more apparently real concerns of the economy; here both are being curtailed.
Of course Israel's administration isn't known to be particularly liberal; and it isn't, but it's important to recognise what are really secondary phenomena; e.g. the strange religious parties are more or less peripheral to a power structure that ressembles that of other highly developed countries: business, journalism, academia, banking.
The point is that in the situation in Gaza one is presented with the apparently universal language of modern technocracy in contradiction.
Nitzan and Bichler wrote an excellent book about, among other things, Israel's power structure. This is their take on a tengentially related issue, the contradictions of the Likud party(and Kadima deserve no greater charity):
"When preaching economic liberalisation, Likud members usually meant exactly what they said. Most of them were socialised during the British Mandate era, and many of them, even today, remain locked into the petty bourgeois mentality of "free markets" and "small government". But that is precisely the point. In their imagination, they were removing the shackles of government from an otherwise competitive economy. What they did in practice, though, was deregulate an oligopolistic war economy, effectively inviting dominant capital to take the lead. Viewed from this perspective, their "political folly" no longer seems senseless. On the contrary, it looks as if their actions, unbeknown to them of course, were in fact serving a broader "latent function". For Israel's dominant capital, stagflation, rising military spending, growing dependency on the United States, and a ballooning debt, were the basic ingredients for successful differential accumulation. These very policies were also consistant with the interests of dominant capital groups in the United States, particularly those related to armaments and oil, which benefitted from the escalating regional conflict, and which played an important role in shaping U.S.-Israel relations. The most promising political platform for achieving these results was a combination of laissez-faire economics and racist militarism; and the party which believed in these principles, was ready to implement them, and, most importantly, was to never fully understand their consequences, was Likud."
from The Global Political Economy of Israel
There's actually a decent BBC report on the situation in Gaza here
Monday, April 07, 2008
what we need (1): a new logo for deconstruction
I didn't get so far with literature studies. It's sort of like, the premises in contradiction, and the materiality of that. Why not make this image up as a flag to display outside your place of study? wherever deconstruction is practiced.
Wednesday, April 02, 2008
liberalism in contradiction (1): Camp Bondsteel
Camp Bondsteel, Kosovo. Even the Serb nationalists who suspect it to be a facility for processing heroin concede it is productive
The success of neoliberalism is expressed in the contrived aura of rationality that surrounds these institutions. The development of Kosovo during the SFRY period is, not without good reasons, often considered to have been particularly inefficacious. For example, Misha Glenny writes of Priština:
"The Grand Hotel itself is an unmistakeable monument of late Titoism in Prishtina. It was constructed in the 1970s at a time when the federal government in Belgrade pumped endless funds into Kosovo in the hope of curbing unrest among poor Albanians in the region. These monies fell into the hands of the Kosovo League of Communists bureaucracy, largely Albanian, whose ideal of infrastructural renewal was to erect many grandiose buildings in the capital. Such white elephants, however, should have been built after investment in jobs and primary requirements, such as improved road and rail access to Kosovo. Of the many pompous buildings which litter this provincial backwater, the Grand Hotel takes pride of place as the most ridiculous of all."
Reliable official statistics concerning Kosovo are difficult to find. According to a "marxist resource" "unemployment grew from 18.6 to 27.5 percent in the ten years from 1971 to 1981". The rate among the majority Albanian population would have been considerably greater.
Nine Years after the Kosovo war unemployment in this country may exceed 50%. Some of these unemployed have "jobs" in an unofficial economy probably more than half the size of the official one.
Camp Bondsteel, whose efficacy is beyond challenge, cost an estimated $350 million dollars to build and around $50 million dollars to run per year. Kosovo's annual budget in recent years has been around $1 billion dollars.
(more about Camp Bondsteel here)
Thursday, March 20, 2008
note on liberalism
In the essay Why I am not a conservative Hayek mentions the changes in that which is denoted by the word "liberalism":
"Conservatism proper is a legitimate, probably necessary, and certainly widespread attitude of opposition to drastic change. It has, since the French Revolution, for a century and a half played an important role in European politics. Until the rise of socialism its opposite was liberalism. There is nothing corresponding to this conflict in the history of the United States, because what in Europe was called "liberalism" was here the common tradition on which the American polity had been built: thus the defender of the American tradition was a liberal in the European sense. This already existing confusion was made worse by the recent attempt to transplant to America the European type of conservatism, which, being alien to the American tradition, has acquired a somewhat odd character. And some time before this, American radicals and socialists began calling themselves "liberals." I will nevertheless continue for the moment to describe as liberal the position which I hold and which I believe differs as much from true conservatism as from socialism. Let me say at once, however, that I do so with increasing misgivings, and I shall later have to consider what would be the appropriate name for the party of liberty. The reason for this is not only that the term "liberal" in the United States is the cause of constant misunderstandings today, but also that in Europe the predominant type of rationalistic liberalism has long been one of the pacemakers of socialism."
The liberalism with which Professor Hayek aligns himself conceptualises an attitude toward a social order in transformation, consonant with the attitude of conservatism before the French Revolution toward a society imagined static. A conservatism restored is likely to exhibit as odd a character as one transplanted. Hayek's tradition covers a relatively brief period. It consists principally of such ideas as were useful to the ascendant capitalist class.
(This isn't meant as some kind of unconscious censorship, in a psychoanalytical vein, just a rather banal admission of ordinary social politics. For example Marshall writes concerning Ricardo and his Principles of Economics: "He was with difficulty induced to publish it; and if in writing it he had in view any readers at all, they were chiefly those statesmen and business men with whom he associated. So he purposely omitted many things which were necessary for the logical completeness of his argument, but which they would regard as obvious".)
Similarly the adoption of the tag "liberal" by "radicals and socialists" relates back to an older, more general liberalism as well as the Latin American tradition that has followed its own distinct course.
We will look at Hayek's logic in due course, but we could perhaps say, rather provisionally, that Hayek's method, which works backwards from institutions to human practice, has something in common with the experience common to people in modern cities, drawn into the decipherment of giant billboards.
"Conservatism proper is a legitimate, probably necessary, and certainly widespread attitude of opposition to drastic change. It has, since the French Revolution, for a century and a half played an important role in European politics. Until the rise of socialism its opposite was liberalism. There is nothing corresponding to this conflict in the history of the United States, because what in Europe was called "liberalism" was here the common tradition on which the American polity had been built: thus the defender of the American tradition was a liberal in the European sense. This already existing confusion was made worse by the recent attempt to transplant to America the European type of conservatism, which, being alien to the American tradition, has acquired a somewhat odd character. And some time before this, American radicals and socialists began calling themselves "liberals." I will nevertheless continue for the moment to describe as liberal the position which I hold and which I believe differs as much from true conservatism as from socialism. Let me say at once, however, that I do so with increasing misgivings, and I shall later have to consider what would be the appropriate name for the party of liberty. The reason for this is not only that the term "liberal" in the United States is the cause of constant misunderstandings today, but also that in Europe the predominant type of rationalistic liberalism has long been one of the pacemakers of socialism."
The liberalism with which Professor Hayek aligns himself conceptualises an attitude toward a social order in transformation, consonant with the attitude of conservatism before the French Revolution toward a society imagined static. A conservatism restored is likely to exhibit as odd a character as one transplanted. Hayek's tradition covers a relatively brief period. It consists principally of such ideas as were useful to the ascendant capitalist class.
(This isn't meant as some kind of unconscious censorship, in a psychoanalytical vein, just a rather banal admission of ordinary social politics. For example Marshall writes concerning Ricardo and his Principles of Economics: "He was with difficulty induced to publish it; and if in writing it he had in view any readers at all, they were chiefly those statesmen and business men with whom he associated. So he purposely omitted many things which were necessary for the logical completeness of his argument, but which they would regard as obvious".)
Similarly the adoption of the tag "liberal" by "radicals and socialists" relates back to an older, more general liberalism as well as the Latin American tradition that has followed its own distinct course.
We will look at Hayek's logic in due course, but we could perhaps say, rather provisionally, that Hayek's method, which works backwards from institutions to human practice, has something in common with the experience common to people in modern cities, drawn into the decipherment of giant billboards.
Sunday, March 16, 2008
Bill Turnbull Update
Apparently my review of the BBCs Bill Turnbull Programme from several months ago was written in an overly cryptic way and impossible to understand. At any rate this wretched programme has still not been cancelled. Basically the Bill Turnbull Programme is a news programme on BBC1 and BBC News 24 that's on for two hours or so each morning, at a time when people are getting ready to go to work and is devoted almost entirely to fatuous news stories. It also has a strong middle class feeling insofar as the stories are not only fatuous but boring rather than salacious, as per tabloid journalism.
I'm saying, imagine a fishmongers shop, for instance, that only stocks a few distressed undersized fish. You would probably infer from this that better quality fish were comparatively difficult to source.
The same with this programme, which evades reporting the excesses of, for instance, the British state that underwrites its existance, not through standard tactics of disinformation, but through a kind of militant irrelevantism.
I'm saying, imagine a fishmongers shop, for instance, that only stocks a few distressed undersized fish. You would probably infer from this that better quality fish were comparatively difficult to source.
The same with this programme, which evades reporting the excesses of, for instance, the British state that underwrites its existance, not through standard tactics of disinformation, but through a kind of militant irrelevantism.
Masterpieces of Conservative Intuition: Duchamp's Urinal
Alain Badiou talks somewhere, quite grandly, about art; a theory to art to which he does not subscribe, in which art appears as something like "the condescension of the infinite into the material abjection of the body."
There are many good reasons to talk about art. It's pleasant to discuss pleasant things. It can be a way of obliquely discussing political questions, since the distinctions between ethics and aesthetics are somewhat indefinite. Also there is a great deal of money sloshing around unrestrained by dreary market imperatives.
It is perhaps not Professor Badiou's intention here to be working through an explicit critique of political conservatism.
The infinite is certainly a category of the postmodern political aesthetic. In employing such figures such as "the statistical mysteries of GNP" one suggests the real abstraction of things; infinite displacement. But this way of looking at the world is prefigured by more ancient ideas, those of modern and precapitalist conservatism.
Conservatism has an afiliation with theology. It is nonetheless fundamentally pragmatic and emotional. Its basis is something like the idea that human institutions are justified by a series of validating operations tending to infinity. This perpective is, or ought to be, underwritten by the relatively static nature of the society in which it subsists. Several strands of distinctively modern ideology depend to an extent on the same feeling, notably evolutionary biology and political economy.
Having carefully studied Duchamp's urinal, not to mention the theoretical articles supporting it in The Blind Man, it is hard not to be convinced that the opinion of many art-school professionals, who assert that this work expresses Duchamp's personal lyricism, and that whatever such a remarkable individual designates as art is so, is not only wrong, but expresses prejudices comparable to those Duchamp attacks. The affective basis of Duchamp's work is, clearly, the conflation of the conservative paradigm, where an institution is validated retroactively irrespective of its practical usefulness (as a thing detached from its circumstances, such detachment being unacceptable), and an object of no practical usefulness as art (though with undeniable practical usefulness in itself, as Hegel was fond of saying). This is a deconstruction of conservatism, and it's odd to find it discussed in a way that conforms to the tenets of this same conservatism.
The conservative instinct is, however, very strong, meshing as it does with material interests, and can be expected to cling tenaciously to the bottle-rack and the bicycle-wheel.
There are many good reasons to talk about art. It's pleasant to discuss pleasant things. It can be a way of obliquely discussing political questions, since the distinctions between ethics and aesthetics are somewhat indefinite. Also there is a great deal of money sloshing around unrestrained by dreary market imperatives.
It is perhaps not Professor Badiou's intention here to be working through an explicit critique of political conservatism.
The infinite is certainly a category of the postmodern political aesthetic. In employing such figures such as "the statistical mysteries of GNP" one suggests the real abstraction of things; infinite displacement. But this way of looking at the world is prefigured by more ancient ideas, those of modern and precapitalist conservatism.
Conservatism has an afiliation with theology. It is nonetheless fundamentally pragmatic and emotional. Its basis is something like the idea that human institutions are justified by a series of validating operations tending to infinity. This perpective is, or ought to be, underwritten by the relatively static nature of the society in which it subsists. Several strands of distinctively modern ideology depend to an extent on the same feeling, notably evolutionary biology and political economy.
Having carefully studied Duchamp's urinal, not to mention the theoretical articles supporting it in The Blind Man, it is hard not to be convinced that the opinion of many art-school professionals, who assert that this work expresses Duchamp's personal lyricism, and that whatever such a remarkable individual designates as art is so, is not only wrong, but expresses prejudices comparable to those Duchamp attacks. The affective basis of Duchamp's work is, clearly, the conflation of the conservative paradigm, where an institution is validated retroactively irrespective of its practical usefulness (as a thing detached from its circumstances, such detachment being unacceptable), and an object of no practical usefulness as art (though with undeniable practical usefulness in itself, as Hegel was fond of saying). This is a deconstruction of conservatism, and it's odd to find it discussed in a way that conforms to the tenets of this same conservatism.
The conservative instinct is, however, very strong, meshing as it does with material interests, and can be expected to cling tenaciously to the bottle-rack and the bicycle-wheel.
Sunday, March 02, 2008
Introduction to Liberalism
At a meeting in 1975, Margaret Thatcher reached into her briefcase and pulled out a book. According to John Ranelagh in Thatcher's People, she held the book up for all of us to see - This, she said sternly, is what we believe, and she banged the book down on the table. The book was The Constitution of Liberty by F.A. Hayek.
How much credence to give this attachment to Hayek's letters. These are the parts of an ideology. They aren't purely a banal set of instructions, an instruction manual. And yet this couldn't be just anything.
We have interests and seek to defend them. It helps for there to be a coherent narrative threading together the various moments through which power is manifested. And yet it's likely that these ideas have a degree of autonomy beyond that of cynical post hoc justification. This ought to be demonstrable empirically.
Iain Boal and Michael Watts write in a review of David Harvey's book about neoliberalism that:
"neoliberalism" should be approached – could this possibly come as a surprise to a Marxist? – as an ideology. Any adequate account of its rise to hegemony should not assume a pure body of neoliberal theory "lurking in the wings" of history, as Harvey has it. Rather it has to begin from the premiss of a contested discursive field among whose keywords are "freedom", "market", "private property".
This point is confirmed, quite starkly in the Joseph Stiglitz exposé in last week's Guardian:
I ask what discoveries Stiglitz found the most disturbing. He laughs, somewhat mirthlessly. "There were actually so many things - some of it we suspected, but there were a few things I couldn't believe." The fact that a contractor working as a security guard gets about $400,000 a year, for example, as opposed to a soldier, who might get about $40,000. That there is a discrepancy we might have guessed - but not its sheer scale, or the fact that, because it is so hard to get insurance for working in Iraq, the government pays the premiums; or the fact that, if these contractors are injured or killed, the government pays both death and injury benefits on top. Understandably, this has forced a rise in sign-up bonuses (as has the fact that the army is so desperate for recruits that it is signing up convicted felons). "So we create a competition for ourselves. Nobody in their right mind would have done that. The Bush administration did that ... that I couldn't believe. And that's not included in the cost the government talks about."
Then there was the discovery that sign-up bonuses come with conditions: a soldier injured in the first month, for example, has to pay it back. Or the fact that "the troops, for understandable reasons, are made responsible for their equipment. You lose your helmet, you have to pay. If you get blown up and you lose your helmet, they still bill you." One soldier was sued for $12,000 even though he had suffered massive brain damage. Some families have had to buy their children body armour, saving the government costs in the short term; those too poor to afford it sustain injuries that the government then has to pay for. Then there's the fact that it was not until 2006, when Robert Gates replaced Donald Rumsfeld as secretary of defence, that the DOD agreed to replace Humvees with mine-resistant ambush-protected (MRAP) armoured vehicles, which are much more able to repel roadside bombs; until that time, IEDs killed 1,500 Americans. "This kind of penny-wise, pound-poor behaviour was just unbelievable."
Yet on another level, Stiglitz is unsurprised, because such decisions are of a piece with the thoroughgoing intellectual inconsistency of the Bush administration. The general approach, he says, has been a "pastiche of corporate bail-outs, corporate welfare, and free-market economics that is not based on any consistent set of ideas. And this particular kind of pastiche actually contributed to the failures in Iraq." There are the well-rehearsed reasons: ignoring international democratic processes while advocating democracy; pushing forward liberalisation before Iraq was ready. Stiglitz's twist on this was the emails he was receiving from the United States Agency for International Development, complaining about the Treasury being obstructive. "They were saying, 'Can you help us? Because we're trying to get businesses to work, but the US Treasury is trying to tighten credit, so there's no money in this country.' "
It's probably fair to judge the liberals in these circles, the “free market people”, as the progressive element, or at least as the less anti-progressive. But I don't think the course of human freedom is going to be set back by looking at these things.
How much credence to give this attachment to Hayek's letters. These are the parts of an ideology. They aren't purely a banal set of instructions, an instruction manual. And yet this couldn't be just anything.
We have interests and seek to defend them. It helps for there to be a coherent narrative threading together the various moments through which power is manifested. And yet it's likely that these ideas have a degree of autonomy beyond that of cynical post hoc justification. This ought to be demonstrable empirically.
Iain Boal and Michael Watts write in a review of David Harvey's book about neoliberalism that:
"neoliberalism" should be approached – could this possibly come as a surprise to a Marxist? – as an ideology. Any adequate account of its rise to hegemony should not assume a pure body of neoliberal theory "lurking in the wings" of history, as Harvey has it. Rather it has to begin from the premiss of a contested discursive field among whose keywords are "freedom", "market", "private property".
This point is confirmed, quite starkly in the Joseph Stiglitz exposé in last week's Guardian:
I ask what discoveries Stiglitz found the most disturbing. He laughs, somewhat mirthlessly. "There were actually so many things - some of it we suspected, but there were a few things I couldn't believe." The fact that a contractor working as a security guard gets about $400,000 a year, for example, as opposed to a soldier, who might get about $40,000. That there is a discrepancy we might have guessed - but not its sheer scale, or the fact that, because it is so hard to get insurance for working in Iraq, the government pays the premiums; or the fact that, if these contractors are injured or killed, the government pays both death and injury benefits on top. Understandably, this has forced a rise in sign-up bonuses (as has the fact that the army is so desperate for recruits that it is signing up convicted felons). "So we create a competition for ourselves. Nobody in their right mind would have done that. The Bush administration did that ... that I couldn't believe. And that's not included in the cost the government talks about."
Then there was the discovery that sign-up bonuses come with conditions: a soldier injured in the first month, for example, has to pay it back. Or the fact that "the troops, for understandable reasons, are made responsible for their equipment. You lose your helmet, you have to pay. If you get blown up and you lose your helmet, they still bill you." One soldier was sued for $12,000 even though he had suffered massive brain damage. Some families have had to buy their children body armour, saving the government costs in the short term; those too poor to afford it sustain injuries that the government then has to pay for. Then there's the fact that it was not until 2006, when Robert Gates replaced Donald Rumsfeld as secretary of defence, that the DOD agreed to replace Humvees with mine-resistant ambush-protected (MRAP) armoured vehicles, which are much more able to repel roadside bombs; until that time, IEDs killed 1,500 Americans. "This kind of penny-wise, pound-poor behaviour was just unbelievable."
Yet on another level, Stiglitz is unsurprised, because such decisions are of a piece with the thoroughgoing intellectual inconsistency of the Bush administration. The general approach, he says, has been a "pastiche of corporate bail-outs, corporate welfare, and free-market economics that is not based on any consistent set of ideas. And this particular kind of pastiche actually contributed to the failures in Iraq." There are the well-rehearsed reasons: ignoring international democratic processes while advocating democracy; pushing forward liberalisation before Iraq was ready. Stiglitz's twist on this was the emails he was receiving from the United States Agency for International Development, complaining about the Treasury being obstructive. "They were saying, 'Can you help us? Because we're trying to get businesses to work, but the US Treasury is trying to tighten credit, so there's no money in this country.' "
It's probably fair to judge the liberals in these circles, the “free market people”, as the progressive element, or at least as the less anti-progressive. But I don't think the course of human freedom is going to be set back by looking at these things.
Tuesday, January 08, 2008
Tuesday, December 11, 2007
Kosovo's alleged "population bomb"
| Population 000s | Albania | Kosovo | Morocco | Philippines |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1971 | 2189 | 1244 | 15711 | 37602 |
| 1991 | 3299 | 1956 | 25039 | 62538 |
| Increase% | 51 | 57 | 59 | 66 |
Statistics off the internet. Countries from faostat. Kosovo statistics from Yugoslav official statistics.
Friday, December 07, 2007
no future
Colonel Chabert certainly had some strong opinions about Mark K-Punk and his writing. Could part of it just be the Punk thing?
I remember growing up the kind of disdain working people had for the eight years out of date punk scene. Truly it was more loathing than disquietude. It was especially adressed to this one punk who wandered round the shopping centre with a child's swing chained to his jeans. Many drank. At this time cheap supermarket lager made it feasible to drink outdoors in the afternoon. There was also a glue panic. I was more into BMX. A playground marked up with sex pistols graffiti yet generated a sense of menace, both seductive and repellant, of the sort ruined by actually listening, years later, to the tedious sex pistols records.
Anyway, I think the line of argument borrowed from Dr Žižek in Mark's theory masterpiece Marxist Supernanny gets the "ideology of late capitalism" wrong. Mark writes:
"In Tarrying with the Negative, Žižek famously argues that a certain Spinozism is the ideology of late capitalism. Žižek believes that Spinoza’s rejection of deontology for an ethics based around the concept of health is allegedly flat with capitalism’s amoral affective engineering."*
There are really two things to consider that are intimitely related: liberalism as an ideology and the actual economic base, constructed on the principle of seperation, of which liberalism** represents an idealised version. Ideologically liberalism is basically private property conceived as not being underpinned by coercion. This is something like a philosophy where substances persist in themselves indefinitely without any kind of totalisation. And as such this diverges from Spinoza's metaphysical plan at the point where Spinoza introduces the idea of God as substance subsuming the various substances, and so effecting just this kind of totalisation. And we can maybe accept the Deleuzist argument, if only provisionally that politics and theology operate on the same "level" without making politics a determinant of theology or vice versa.
*my hacheks
** i.e. economic liberalism of which anglo-saxonic conservatism is a degenerate form
I remember growing up the kind of disdain working people had for the eight years out of date punk scene. Truly it was more loathing than disquietude. It was especially adressed to this one punk who wandered round the shopping centre with a child's swing chained to his jeans. Many drank. At this time cheap supermarket lager made it feasible to drink outdoors in the afternoon. There was also a glue panic. I was more into BMX. A playground marked up with sex pistols graffiti yet generated a sense of menace, both seductive and repellant, of the sort ruined by actually listening, years later, to the tedious sex pistols records.
Anyway, I think the line of argument borrowed from Dr Žižek in Mark's theory masterpiece Marxist Supernanny gets the "ideology of late capitalism" wrong. Mark writes:
"In Tarrying with the Negative, Žižek famously argues that a certain Spinozism is the ideology of late capitalism. Žižek believes that Spinoza’s rejection of deontology for an ethics based around the concept of health is allegedly flat with capitalism’s amoral affective engineering."*
There are really two things to consider that are intimitely related: liberalism as an ideology and the actual economic base, constructed on the principle of seperation, of which liberalism** represents an idealised version. Ideologically liberalism is basically private property conceived as not being underpinned by coercion. This is something like a philosophy where substances persist in themselves indefinitely without any kind of totalisation. And as such this diverges from Spinoza's metaphysical plan at the point where Spinoza introduces the idea of God as substance subsuming the various substances, and so effecting just this kind of totalisation. And we can maybe accept the Deleuzist argument, if only provisionally that politics and theology operate on the same "level" without making politics a determinant of theology or vice versa.
*my hacheks
** i.e. economic liberalism of which anglo-saxonic conservatism is a degenerate form
Tuesday, December 04, 2007
more inequality
Income distribution for various countries: percentage of national income or consumption for successive quintiles of population assigned by income, i.e. quintile A means bottom 20%, quintile B next 20% etc. The bureaucrats at Penn State Uni explain the whole thing, and with better html.
Source here, statistics from World Bank here
Source here, statistics from World Bank here
| Country | A | B | C | D | E | Gini |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| China | 4.3 | 8.5 | 13.7 | 21.7 | 51.9 | 0.47 |
| India | 8.1 | 11.3 | 14.9 | 20.4 | 45.3 | 0.37 |
| Indonesia | 8.4 | 11.9 | 15.4 | 21 | 43.3 | 0.34 |
| Brazil | 2.8 | 6.4 | 11 | 18.7 | 61.1 | 0.57 |
| Pakistan | 9.3 | 13 | 16.3 | 21.1 | 40.3 | 0.31 |
| Bangladesh | 8.6 | 12.1 | 15.6 | 21 | 42.7 | 0.33 |
| Nigeria | 5 | 9.6 | 14.5 | 21.7 | 49.2 | 0.44 |
| Mexico | 4.3 | 8.3 | 12.6 | 19.7 | 55.1 | 0.46 |
| Philippines | 5.4 | 9.1 | 13.6 | 21.3 | 50.6 | 0.45 |
| Vietnam | 9 | 11.4 | 14.7 | 20.5 | 44.3 | 0.34 |
| U.S. | 5.4 | 10.7 | 15.7 | 22.4 | 45.8 | 0.41 |
| Japan | 10.6 | 14.2 | 17.6 | 22 | 35.7 | 0.25 |
| Germany | 8.5 | 13.7 | 17.8 | 23.1 | 36.9 | 0.28 |
Saturday, December 01, 2007
medecine
Forty years ago Simon Kuznets' pioneering studies of national income disclosed a significant relationship between income and inequality, such that:
a rise in income in low income countries tended to be consistant with greater inequality; a rise in income in high income countries tended to be consistant with less inequality.
From this empirical fact the "Kuznets curve" was theorised, illustrating a supposedly universal pattern of development whereby as an economy develops inequality first rises then falls.
This procedure involves an extra presupposition. Economies are considered as effective parallels of each other. Their interrelation and the way they function as part of a unified world economy is abstracted from.
This was never the cutting edge of neoliberal development theory, but the assumptions made here have to be considered in the context of practical measures in this sphere: the decades of IMF austerity measures etc. It goes some way toward furnishing these policies with a theoretical basis, or at least a post hoc explanation.
The consequent story about development also, deliberately or accidentally, has certain features in common with victorian moralising. And it wouldn't be too surprising to see a trickle down version of this theory in the pages of The Economist militating for the underdeveloped world to "take its medecine".
Are we obliged to consider this universalisation of the European and American experience, which provides a rationale for the programmes of their proxy, as an example of the sort of phenomenon Edward Saïd discusses in Orientalism? One important differance is that the presuppositions of something like the Kuznets curve typify mere disinterest rather than an aggressive objectification. The pathology differs.
a rise in income in low income countries tended to be consistant with greater inequality; a rise in income in high income countries tended to be consistant with less inequality.
From this empirical fact the "Kuznets curve" was theorised, illustrating a supposedly universal pattern of development whereby as an economy develops inequality first rises then falls.
This procedure involves an extra presupposition. Economies are considered as effective parallels of each other. Their interrelation and the way they function as part of a unified world economy is abstracted from.
This was never the cutting edge of neoliberal development theory, but the assumptions made here have to be considered in the context of practical measures in this sphere: the decades of IMF austerity measures etc. It goes some way toward furnishing these policies with a theoretical basis, or at least a post hoc explanation.
The consequent story about development also, deliberately or accidentally, has certain features in common with victorian moralising. And it wouldn't be too surprising to see a trickle down version of this theory in the pages of The Economist militating for the underdeveloped world to "take its medecine".
Are we obliged to consider this universalisation of the European and American experience, which provides a rationale for the programmes of their proxy, as an example of the sort of phenomenon Edward Saïd discusses in Orientalism? One important differance is that the presuppositions of something like the Kuznets curve typify mere disinterest rather than an aggressive objectification. The pathology differs.
Monday, November 26, 2007
fetish
Spectrology comes out of social conditions, not ambiguities in old books. But I wonder if this passage in Ricardo inspired some of the gothic mise-en-scène in the first part of Capital:
“The real price of every thing,” says Adam Smith, “what every thing really costs to the man who wants to acquire it, is the toil and trouble of acquiring it. What every thing is really worth to the man who has acquired it, and who wants to dispose of it, or exchange it for something else, is the toil and trouble which it can save to himself, and which it can impose upon other people.”
...what Smith and Ricardo mean is that transacting commodity for commodity, or labour for commodity is effectively reducible to a transaction of labour for labour, where commodities are valued according to the labour that goes into their production...
... on the other hand Ricardo's cut and paste can't help but suggest, though accidentally, that the commodity itself somehow attains hex properties, mysteriously "imposing toil on other people".
“The real price of every thing,” says Adam Smith, “what every thing really costs to the man who wants to acquire it, is the toil and trouble of acquiring it. What every thing is really worth to the man who has acquired it, and who wants to dispose of it, or exchange it for something else, is the toil and trouble which it can save to himself, and which it can impose upon other people.”
...what Smith and Ricardo mean is that transacting commodity for commodity, or labour for commodity is effectively reducible to a transaction of labour for labour, where commodities are valued according to the labour that goes into their production...
... on the other hand Ricardo's cut and paste can't help but suggest, though accidentally, that the commodity itself somehow attains hex properties, mysteriously "imposing toil on other people".
"labour was the first price"
Ricardo on labour as the source of value:
"In speaking then of commodities, of their exchangeable value, and of the laws which regulate their relative prices, we mean always such commodities only as can be increased in quantity by the exertion of human industry, and on the production of which competition operates without restraint.
In the early stages of society, the exchangeable value of these commodities, or the rule which determines how much of one shall be given in exchange for another, depends almost exclusively on the comparative quantity of labour expended on each.
“The real price of every thing,” says Adam Smith, “what every thing really costs to the man who wants to acquire it, is the toil and trouble of acquiring it. What every thing is really worth to the man who has acquired it, and who wants to dispose of it, or exchange it for something else, is the toil and trouble which it can save to himself, and which it can impose upon other people.” “Labour was the first price—the original purchase-money that was paid for all things.” Again, “in that early and rude state of society, which precedes both the accumulation of stock and the appropriation of land, the proportion between the quantities of labour necessary for acquiring different objects seems to be the only circumstance which can afford any rule for exchanging them for one another. If among a nation of hunters, for example, it usually cost twice the labour to kill a beaver which it does to kill a deer, one beaver should naturally exchange for, or be worth two deer. It is natural that what is usually the produce of two days’, or two hours’ labour, should be worth double of what is usually the produce of one day’s, or one hour’s labour.”
That this is really the foundation of the exchangeable value of all things, excepting those which cannot be increased by human industry, is a doctrine of the utmost importance in political economy; for from no source do so many errors, and so much difference of opinion in that science proceed, as from the vague ideas which are attached to the word value.
If the quantity of labour realized in commodities, regulate their exchangeable value, every increase of the quantity of labour must augment the value of that commodity on which it is exercised, as every diminution must lower it.
Adam Smith, who so accurately defined the original source of exchangeable value, and who was bound in consistency to maintain, that all things became more or less valuable in proportion as more or less labour was bestowed on their production, has himself erected another standard measure of value, and speaks of things being more or less valuable, in proportion as they will exchange for more or less of this standard measure. Sometimes he speaks of corn, at other times of labour, as a standard measure; not the quantity of labour bestowed on the production of any object, but the quantity which it can command in the market: as if these were two equivalent expressions, and as if because a man’s labour had become doubly efficient, and he could therefore produce twice the quantity of a commodity, he would necessarily receive twice the former quantity in exchange for it.
If this indeed were true, if the reward of the labourer were always in proportion to what he produced, the quantity of labour bestowed on a commodity, and the quantity of labour which that commodity would purchase, would be equal, and either might accurately measure the variations of other things: but they are not equal; the first is under many circumstances an invariable standard, indicating correctly the variations of other things; the latter is subject to as many fluctuations as the commodities compared with it. Adam Smith, after most ably showing the insufficiency of a variable medium, such as gold and silver, for the purpose of determining the varying value of other things, has himself, by fixing on corn or labour, chosen a medium no less variable.
Gold and silver are no doubt subject to fluctuations, from the discovery of new and more abundant mines; but such discoveries are rare, and their effects, though powerful, are limited to periods of comparatively short duration. They are subject also to fluctuation, from improvements in the skill and machinery with which the mines may be worked; as in consequence of such improvements, a greater quantity may be obtained with the same labour. They are further subject to fluctuation from the decreasing produce of the mines, after they have yielded a supply to the world, for a succession of ages. But from which of these sources of fluctuation is corn exempted? Does not that also vary, on one hand, from improvements in agriculture, from improved machinery and implements used in husbandry, as well as from the discovery of new tracts of fertile land, which in other countries may be taken into cultivation, and which will affect the value of corn in every market where importation is free? Is it not on the other hand subject to be enhanced in value from prohibitions of importation, from increasing population and wealth, and the greater difficulty of obtaining the increased supplies, on account of the additional quantity of labour which the cultivation of inferior lands requires? Is not the value of labour equally variable; being not only affected, as all other things are, by the proportion between the supply and demand, which uniformly varies with every change in the condition of the community, but also by the varying price of food and other necessaries, on which the wages of labour are expended?
In the same country double the quantity of labour may be required to produce a given quantity of food and necessaries at one time, that may be necessary at another, and a distant time; yet the labourer’s reward may possibly be very little diminished. If the labourer’s wages at the former period, were a certain quantity of food and necessaries, he probably could not have subsisted if that quantity had been reduced. Food and necessaries in this case will have risen 100 per cent. if estimated by the quantity of labour necessary to their production, while they will scarcely have increased in value, if measured by the quantity of labour for which they will exchange.
The same remark may be made respecting two or more countries. In America and Poland, on the land last taken into cultivation, a year’s labour of any given number of men, will produce much more corn than on land similarly circumstanced in England. Now, supposing all other necessaries to be equally cheap in those three countries, would it not be a great mistake to conclude, that the quantity of corn awarded to the labourer, would in each country be in proportion to the facility of production?
If the shoes and clothing of the labourer, could, by improvements in machinery, be produced by one fourth of the labour now necessary to their production, they would probably fall 75 per cent.; but so far is it from being true, that the labourer would thereby be enabled permanently to consume four coats, or four pair of shoes, instead of one, that it is probable his wages would in no long time be adjusted by the effects of competition, and the stimulus to population, to the new value of the necessaries on which they were expended. If these improvements extended to all the objects of the labourer’s consumption, we should find him probably at the end of a very few years, in possession of only a small, if any, addition to his enjoyments, although the exchangeable value of those commodities, compared with any other commodity, in the manufacture of which no such improvement were made, had sustained a very considerable reduction; and though they were the produce of a very considerably diminished quantity of labour.
It cannot then be correct, to say with Adam Smith, “that as labour may sometimes purchase a greater, and sometimes a smaller quantity of goods, it is their value which varies, not that of the labour which purchases them;” and therefore, “that labour alone never varying in its own value, is alone the ultimate and real standard by which the value of all commodities can at all times and places be estimated and compared;” —but it is correct to say, as Adam Smith had previously said, “that the proportion between the quantities of labour necessary for acquiring different objects seems to be the only circumstance which can afford any rule for exchanging them for one another;” or in other words, that it is the comparative quantity of commodities which labour will produce, that determines their present or past relative value, and not the comparative quantities of commodities, which are given to the labourer in exchange for his labour."
from Principles of Political Economy
Friday, November 23, 2007
Government Buildings
What I noticed today at the Learning Disability Centre. These government buildings have a sort of ostentation, not at all in their decor, but in the extension of their space. It's plausable that rather than the cramped sensation that typifies the ordinary relay* being consistant with society's ultimate possibilities, they could instead be consistant with this "depth".
Piranesi's Imaginary Prisons are intelligible this way; that they are constructed in recognition of the principle that this indefinite extension of the social sphere is truly feasible. But secondarily this impression is made distasteful, conventionally blackened. Psychoanalysis seems to have half recognised that ideology quite often appears this way, with the superimposition of contradictory impulses. It's here again in this sort of invective.
*the relay of capital through consumption etc
Tuesday, November 13, 2007
... at least I am not a marxist
& I read this on Leninushka's blog, as an explanation of Karl Marx's notion of surplus value:
"Let us recall the gist of Marx's notion of exploitation: exploitation is not simply opposed to justice - Marx's point is not that workers are exploited because they are not paid the full value of their work. The central thesis of Marx's notion of 'surplus-value' is that a worker is exploited even when he is 'fully paid'; exploitation is thus not opposed to the 'just' equivalent exchange; it functions, rather, as its point of inherent exception - there is one commodity (the workforce) which is exploited precisely when it is 'paid its full value'. (The further point not to be missed is that the production of this excess is strictly equivalent to the universalization of the exchange-function: the moment the exchange-function is universalized - that is, the moment it becomes the structuring principle of the whole of economic life - the exception emerges, since at this point the workforce itself becomes a commodity exchanged on the market. Marx in effect announces here the Lacanian notion of the Universal which involves a constitutive exception.) The basic premise of symptomal reading is thus that every ideological universality necessarily gives rise to a particular 'extimate' element, to an element which - precisely as an inherent, necessary product of the process designated by the universality - simultaneously undermines it: the symptom is an example which subverts the Universal whose example it is."
(from Dr Žižek's Ticklish Subject)
According to Marx's theory, as laid out in Capital, the remuneration of the predominant form of labour, disqualified or undifferentiated labour, sold on the open market and so remunerated its "true" market value will tend to a conventional minimum, just enough to reproduce the worker as worker. The product of labour will likewise be remunerated its value as realised on the open market, which according to Marx, following the example of Ricardo, will be equivalent to the value of the labour of which it is comprised. Surplus value, which accrues to the capitalist, represents the difference of these amounts.
According to Baran and Sweezy's definition, surplus value is "the difference between total social output and the socially necessary costs of producing it", theoretically this could apply to situations other than that described by Marx.
This theory is eminently criticiseable, (though professional economists tend to prefer to ignore it altogether). Nitzan and Bichler describe the labour theory of value, where labour produces its value but is paid the value of its own production as "a dangerously circular notion". Certainly one wonders why the value of each commodity isn't bid down by "competitive markets" to the value of reproducing productive labour, so value added by labour equals the remuneration of labour and the neoclassical model holds*.
Karl Korsch supposed that the laws of motion of the capitalist system disclosed by Marx's model were evidently correct but that the presupposition underlying it should realistically be conditions of monopoly rather than pure competition (Sweezy concurred with this view). The tendency of capitalists to not compete on price would be a consequence of (a high degree of) monopoly, all other conditions would hold.
The crucial advance of Marx's theory over that of the economists of his time, and which their successors have conspicuously failed to make good, is to describe a dynamic economy in which both the remuneration of labour and capital are "real" outputs.
Žižek's reading of Marx, which to be fair to its context, is surely meant to be an "against the grain" piece of belle-lettrism, sets up an integral ambiguity on the phrase:
"the full value of their work"
which could mean either:
"the full value of the remuneration of their work"
or "the full value of the product of their work"
and "justice" could mean
"the most equitable"
or "according to the law"
...hence there's a number of meanings suggested here that seem more exciting than the only one that can be reconciled with what Marx writes in Capital: that workers are paid the going rate and that this is in accordance with the law of the land. This contrivance of ambiguity where none is necessary compliments and reinforces what one supposes to be the background impression of Marx and his work as evoked through the wider cultural and educational apparatus, as fundamentally ambivalent, both validated and discredited. This ambivalence seems to be often indicated, where our ideology "crystallises" into the form of the individual. And it is surely in this respect that Marx announces Lacan.
*The objection to neoclassical economics here seems to run something like this: while one business or one business sector could reduce its prices to merely cover inputs, this behaviour can't be aggregated to the level of the whole economy since price cuts are only relative price cuts (some players gain, some lose) and don't have the effect of lowering total output, while neoclassical economics considers the lowering of prices to be consistant with output being added to.
"Let us recall the gist of Marx's notion of exploitation: exploitation is not simply opposed to justice - Marx's point is not that workers are exploited because they are not paid the full value of their work. The central thesis of Marx's notion of 'surplus-value' is that a worker is exploited even when he is 'fully paid'; exploitation is thus not opposed to the 'just' equivalent exchange; it functions, rather, as its point of inherent exception - there is one commodity (the workforce) which is exploited precisely when it is 'paid its full value'. (The further point not to be missed is that the production of this excess is strictly equivalent to the universalization of the exchange-function: the moment the exchange-function is universalized - that is, the moment it becomes the structuring principle of the whole of economic life - the exception emerges, since at this point the workforce itself becomes a commodity exchanged on the market. Marx in effect announces here the Lacanian notion of the Universal which involves a constitutive exception.) The basic premise of symptomal reading is thus that every ideological universality necessarily gives rise to a particular 'extimate' element, to an element which - precisely as an inherent, necessary product of the process designated by the universality - simultaneously undermines it: the symptom is an example which subverts the Universal whose example it is."
(from Dr Žižek's Ticklish Subject)
According to Marx's theory, as laid out in Capital, the remuneration of the predominant form of labour, disqualified or undifferentiated labour, sold on the open market and so remunerated its "true" market value will tend to a conventional minimum, just enough to reproduce the worker as worker. The product of labour will likewise be remunerated its value as realised on the open market, which according to Marx, following the example of Ricardo, will be equivalent to the value of the labour of which it is comprised. Surplus value, which accrues to the capitalist, represents the difference of these amounts.
According to Baran and Sweezy's definition, surplus value is "the difference between total social output and the socially necessary costs of producing it", theoretically this could apply to situations other than that described by Marx.
This theory is eminently criticiseable, (though professional economists tend to prefer to ignore it altogether). Nitzan and Bichler describe the labour theory of value, where labour produces its value but is paid the value of its own production as "a dangerously circular notion". Certainly one wonders why the value of each commodity isn't bid down by "competitive markets" to the value of reproducing productive labour, so value added by labour equals the remuneration of labour and the neoclassical model holds*.
Karl Korsch supposed that the laws of motion of the capitalist system disclosed by Marx's model were evidently correct but that the presupposition underlying it should realistically be conditions of monopoly rather than pure competition (Sweezy concurred with this view). The tendency of capitalists to not compete on price would be a consequence of (a high degree of) monopoly, all other conditions would hold.
The crucial advance of Marx's theory over that of the economists of his time, and which their successors have conspicuously failed to make good, is to describe a dynamic economy in which both the remuneration of labour and capital are "real" outputs.
Žižek's reading of Marx, which to be fair to its context, is surely meant to be an "against the grain" piece of belle-lettrism, sets up an integral ambiguity on the phrase:
"the full value of their work"
which could mean either:
"the full value of the remuneration of their work"
or "the full value of the product of their work"
and "justice" could mean
"the most equitable"
or "according to the law"
...hence there's a number of meanings suggested here that seem more exciting than the only one that can be reconciled with what Marx writes in Capital: that workers are paid the going rate and that this is in accordance with the law of the land. This contrivance of ambiguity where none is necessary compliments and reinforces what one supposes to be the background impression of Marx and his work as evoked through the wider cultural and educational apparatus, as fundamentally ambivalent, both validated and discredited. This ambivalence seems to be often indicated, where our ideology "crystallises" into the form of the individual. And it is surely in this respect that Marx announces Lacan.
*The objection to neoclassical economics here seems to run something like this: while one business or one business sector could reduce its prices to merely cover inputs, this behaviour can't be aggregated to the level of the whole economy since price cuts are only relative price cuts (some players gain, some lose) and don't have the effect of lowering total output, while neoclassical economics considers the lowering of prices to be consistant with output being added to.
societies of control
This admittedly fatuous news story made me think Deleuze and Guattari could have been right after all:
Cat's daily routine baffles owner
"A cat is baffling his owner by wandering off at night before expecting to be collected by car every morning at exactly the same time and place.
Sgt Podge, a Norwegian Forest Cat, disappears from his owner's home in Talbot Woods, Bournemouth, every night.
The next morning, the 12-year-old cat can always be found in exactly the same place, on a pavement about one and a half miles (2.4km) away.
His owner, Liz Bullard, takes her son to school before collecting Sgt Podge.
She said the routine began earlier this year, when Sgt Podge disappeared one day.
Ms Bullard rang the RSPCA and began telephoning her neighbours to see if anyone had seen him.
An elderly woman who lived about one and a half miles away called back to say she had found a cat matching Sgt Podge's description.
Ms Bullard collected him but within days he vanished again. She rang the elderly woman to find Sgt Podge was back outside her home.
She said a routine has now become established, where each morning she takes her son to school before driving to collect Sgt Podge from the pavement between 0800 and 0815 GMT.
It is thought Sgt Podge walks across Meyrick Park Golf Course every night to reach his destination.
Ms Bullard said: "If it's raining he may be in the bush but he comes running if I clap my hands."
All she has to do is open the car passenger door from the inside for Sgt Podge to jump in.
Wandering the streets
Ms Bullard also makes the trip at weekends and during school holidays - when her son is having a lie in.
She does not know why, after 12 years, Sgt Podge has begun the routine but explained that another woman who lived nearby used to feed him sardines, and that he may be on the look-out for more treats.
"As long as you know where they are you don't mind as a cat owner," Ms Bullard said.
"I know where to collect him - as long as he's not wandering the streets."
Back at home, Sgt Podge has breakfast before going to sleep by a warm radiator. "
Saturday, November 03, 2007
acted version
(This is a review of the BBC's Bill Turnbull Programme. It's like an acted version of The Daily Mail.)
It's noticeable that the interrelation of the military industrial complex and the media apparatus in these societies is such that while one does not find oneself hypnotised to the extent of uncritically accepting their worst excesses, to some extent real disquiet is deadened, routinised. If the media hasn't been so succesful in legitimising the warfare state its illegitimacy has been allowed to persist.
(and they invite me, if indirectly, to write about this stuff, as undifferentiated sausage filler)
We are not permitted to know how serious the administration is with respect to potentially bombing Iran, or what would be at stake, or even if publicity of all this is or is not a deliberate tactic. Apparently it has something to do with Our Reluctant Pipelines.
The dissemination of fake news or news styled entertainment should therefore be considered as part of a wider politics.
In common with many other commodities one feels impelled to criticise the BBC's Bill Turnbull Programme on aesthetic grounds (in which respect it's evidently deficient), though it really deserves to be criticised politically.
It's stretching things to say that this programme is neo-liberal propaganda: its obvious complacentcy being precisely what is forced by "harsh realities";
but in another way a kind of mill logic is at work. One is shown the commodity as flux and invited to imagine its total situation. Here one is shown a series of great banalities, and invited to connect:
- the flatness of this "news" - the relative inelasticity of its supply schedule - the total labour crystallised in total news production - the veracity of this news, and by extension that news which is not shown.
(as one of those queries about things that switch with the changes in the mode of production, it would be interesting to know if in the past this sort of "flat news" would have been considered straightforwardly incompetent, and if this changed, when.)
Thursday, November 01, 2007
Britney Spears video
...anyway this is a better example than all that about renaissance drama:
They hired a bare arse double for this video*; it's meant to be something like:
this unexpected social convention, a red hot bared arse projected out of the usual neolib austerity, this estrangement invites one to "spiritualise" the social world as it appears**; to find society tiered, and so, in a way, artistic.
This seems to be what Pierre Bourdieu missed: that bourgeois art isn't made in the image of bourgeois man, but is rather constituted as a compliment of the major bourgeois idea: bourgeois individualism; and as such this art is quite often presented as a series of imaginary exoteric networks, such as can be observed.
*surely an original stage in the progress of division of labour
**what Lacan imprudently generalises in his "big other" theory
Wednesday, October 10, 2007
eco solipsism
Tom and Barbara: kept pig in kitchen
I was going to write this whole thing about ecology - I'm reminded of this with Warszawa's essay. This was an interesting essay. I disagree about Iraq though. The revealed powerlessness of the general population in this country is surely a very bad sign. These banal points relate more to other things:
1. Consumption is related to work - all other things equal the more people work the more is consumed and vice versa. A reduction in consumption is equivalent to an increase in leisure. That this leisure is expressed as unemployment rather than a shortened working week is really political not economic. How much people would work if the only factor to think about was consumption, so not including this constructed insecurity, is hard to gauge. Probably people would want to work less.
2. In the most industrialised countries only a small proportion of the population work in agriculture now (in the UK 1%, in the US 2%, Denmark 3%*). Even in a crisis this figure is not going to be greatly multiplied. the most realistic response to a food shortage would be more intensive agriculture not a return to peasant agriculture, especially for office workers etc. Reprocessed neoliberal "knowledge workers" are not going to be better at farming than experienced farmers. They might be better at writing CROP FAILURE on one of those jumbo pads in marker pen with arrows pointing out the reasons: FARM MANAGEMENT, CLIMATE CHANGE, SKILL BASE, WEEVILS etc, or setting up a projector slide of a cartoon character saying WHAT NEXT? in front of a withered field.
*proportion of those in work, Economist World in Figures 2007
Saturday, October 06, 2007
martian logic
"there are two faculties of intellection of which you possess one"
...a compliment and an insult together, perhaps.
1. diagrammatic method
Draw a hoop. Label its ends Plus/Minus, also: "there are two faculties of intellection"/"of which you possess one"
2. literary method
I suppose that while the meaning of the two parts of the formula are reconcileable, the intentionality you would ascribe to these parts is contradictory; but these parts are also mutually associated (rule of association).
You have a sense of yourself thinking, or an idea of your sensitivity; in any case you have a faculty and its intentionality.
Supposing the impression of correct reasoning follows from the contradiction in intention of actors; this is proscribed by Jung's formula which subsists as if intending two things at once (i.e. there's a necessary consonance of interests of actors given rule of association and its preconditions).
And the intentionality you ascribe your faculty, by itself or so prompted, is pitched against one side then the other, finding always something this faculty cannot digest.
This sense which I suppose Jung developed from something like the Book of Disquietude, of the mysterious nature of vocation (the potency of a personal faculty with respect to the potency of all faculties), illegitimately by my reckoning; this works itself out into something like the apprehension of a divine plan. This isn't a vague conservatism, but an important ideological form of conservatism, supplementing conscious self interest. Jung's affinity with the thought of the middle ages is well known.
Another example of split intentionality comes up with Percy Shelley's "unacknowledged legislator". All this is no doubt hard to understand; it's really like martian logic. But it's just outside the view of J M Keynes say, invoking "unacknowledged legislator" against ideologism, at the end of General Theory.
...a compliment and an insult together, perhaps.
1. diagrammatic method
Draw a hoop. Label its ends Plus/Minus, also: "there are two faculties of intellection"/"of which you possess one"
2. literary method
I suppose that while the meaning of the two parts of the formula are reconcileable, the intentionality you would ascribe to these parts is contradictory; but these parts are also mutually associated (rule of association).
You have a sense of yourself thinking, or an idea of your sensitivity; in any case you have a faculty and its intentionality.
Supposing the impression of correct reasoning follows from the contradiction in intention of actors; this is proscribed by Jung's formula which subsists as if intending two things at once (i.e. there's a necessary consonance of interests of actors given rule of association and its preconditions).
And the intentionality you ascribe your faculty, by itself or so prompted, is pitched against one side then the other, finding always something this faculty cannot digest.
This sense which I suppose Jung developed from something like the Book of Disquietude, of the mysterious nature of vocation (the potency of a personal faculty with respect to the potency of all faculties), illegitimately by my reckoning; this works itself out into something like the apprehension of a divine plan. This isn't a vague conservatism, but an important ideological form of conservatism, supplementing conscious self interest. Jung's affinity with the thought of the middle ages is well known.
Another example of split intentionality comes up with Percy Shelley's "unacknowledged legislator". All this is no doubt hard to understand; it's really like martian logic. But it's just outside the view of J M Keynes say, invoking "unacknowledged legislator" against ideologism, at the end of General Theory.
Monday, October 01, 2007
again, Jung
With the discusion about Jung and his types, I attempted to analyse the working of these types in a new way. And not entirely successfully. If I've just derived a model of sorts from intuition I could still list the various assumptions and preconditions that underwrite its validity, after Hotelling's look at the Coke/Pepsi problem.
supposing Jung's formula can be legitimately reduced to something like:
"there are two faculties of intellection of which you possess one"
(I'm violating an important legalistic convention here: that you shouldn't represent that which you criticise: the same person shouldn't be defence counsel and magistrate. This is for the sake of simplicity, but the argument also comes back to this convention)
I'm assuming firstly that the statement's abstracted out of definite context, and as a corollary of this, that the way the formula functions: it's development of meaning and affectivity, vary depending on the way you intend or desire these things: here "thinking" and "feeling"; and as a further consequence of this that the parts of the formula are associated; you want to reconcile the parts of the formula into a coherent whole; this has to do with the convention that you structure the implicit error of statements univocally etc. According to Empson "we think not in words but in directed phrases".
These rules or conventions that follow from an originary state of abstraction probably ought to be called:
1. Rule of intention
2. Rule of association
If I wanted to illustrate the rule of intention, there's this thing by Pessoa: He passed me, came after me, (which otherwise might be worth considering in its confluence with Fascism, but) as an example here it demonstrates this point quite elegantly: it finishes "I'm lucid./Bloody hell! I'm lucid". This exclamation "Bloody Hell!" does nothing except reverse the expected intentionality or directedness of this "I'm lucid". So Pessoa's juxtaposing the senses of "I'm lucid", intended contrarily; as if he's registering the momentary incandescence of "I'm lucid" and its degradation; it's, as it were, registered as credit and deficit. The punchlines to jokes degrade this way. Pessoa, I suppose, finds his sense of everything: society; language - all this appears to warp in sympathy with desire.
This apparent paradox develops in Book of Disquietude into "I reasoned that God, while improbable, might exist, in which case he should be worshipped", which diverges from Pascal in having an established dichotomy to invert: Pessoa is "reasoning" apparently, and not "feeling" the substructure of his belief. The literal meaning is implicitly an inversion, and so the opposite is, in a sense, also stressed. You're maybe reminded of the two faces of Gauguin's cow. Again, I think Pessoa's fascinated here, and not analytically, with the possibility of shifting the directedness or intention of the assertion "I reasoned", from credit to deficit, and so volatalising his otherwise rather conservative (or reactionary) consequence "he should be worshipped". Pessoa's formula is close to Jung's formula. Already there are "types" of intellection: reasoning and feeling ("since the human spirit tends towards judgements based on fealing instead of reason, most of these young people chose Humanity to replace God"); and a structurally generated "incompleteness" built around this quirk in conceptualisation.
In my next piece, if I write such a thing, I'll come back to how this develops with Jung.
I'm not sure how to value my new method. The brevity of the argument here seemed the least inappropriate thing to do. It all came out of the critique of political economy, but Nitzan and Bichler, for instance, seem to have done rather better with this with ordinary empiricism.
Monday, September 17, 2007
"The opaqueness surrounding the nature of what may have been hit in Operation Orchard"
here:
"Operation Orchard can be seen as a dry run, a raid using the same heavily modified long-range aircraft, procured specifically from the US with Iran's nuclear sites in mind. It reminds both Iran and Syria of the supremacy of its aircraft and appears to be designed to deter Syria from getting involved in the event of a raid on Iran - a reminder, if it were required, that if Israel's ground forces were humiliated in the second Lebanese war its airforce remains potent, powerful and unchallenged."
"Operation Orchard can be seen as a dry run, a raid using the same heavily modified long-range aircraft, procured specifically from the US with Iran's nuclear sites in mind. It reminds both Iran and Syria of the supremacy of its aircraft and appears to be designed to deter Syria from getting involved in the event of a raid on Iran - a reminder, if it were required, that if Israel's ground forces were humiliated in the second Lebanese war its airforce remains potent, powerful and unchallenged."
Thursday, September 13, 2007
ritual in the dark
My landlord was a large genial man with a neatly shaved head. He wore a surprised expression as if surprised having ate Tweetie. His collection of pornographic supplements from the tabloid press* was second to none; they took the place of encyclopaedias in his lounge; or, one could suppose, from a previous period of the development of the middle class: holiday brochures. This lounge had a stilted sort of perfection like the "installations" in the Littlewoods cataloge. And maybe this exaggerated a sense of provisionality that followed from its function as something like a concierge's office. You were reminded of that programme where Paris Hilton pretends to be an air hostess.
My landlord liked to imagine this pornography wasn't merely staged, apparently ex nihilo but in some way documented another social world, and simply recorded living friezes of taut flesh.
Supposing commercialised sex now stands in for something like a Deleuzian line of escape, I mean ideologically not really -
- because all this is reproduced through the commodity system the detritus of former ideological regimes isn't erased -
- it stands in for this as drug abuse did, as petty crime did, as working class life did.
Pornography is probably another version of pastoral, as Michaux' books used to be (however involuntarily). If the metaphysics of pornography are, as Baudrillard said, what's interesting about it, this is because they are peculiar to this era, and can be understood as such.
[*the Sport for instance offers a quite eclectic apprenticeship not limited to sex lines, videos, rubber, dildos, spanish fly, inflatable men and women, articles for use per rectum; and contact details for depressed prison wives, perhaps, or those of truckers, or other men.]
Sunday, August 26, 2007
first principles
I was telling these two transvestites about Hotelling's spatial duopoly model. About how the problem isn't so much the discontinuities in the reciprocal reaction functions, as their failure to be quasi-concave.
Hotelling's innovations certainly contributed toward the development of useful models for understanding capitalist competition (e.g. Paul Sweezy's theory of monopoly); but his ideas are also interesting as a very pure form of the logic of economism. So, in Stability in Competition Hotelling criticises the mathematician Bertrand's presupposition (from his monograph on Cournot's book) that:
"one merchant can take away his rival's entire business by undercutting his price ever so slightly. Thus discontinuities appear, though a discontinuity, like a vacuum, is abhored by nature. More typical of real situations is the case in which the quantity sold by each merchant is a continuous function of two variables, his own price and his competitor's. Quite commonly a tiny increase in price by one seller will send only a few customers to the other."
In so far as Hotelling's system proved not to be internally consistant it invites consideration as ideology, i.e. as a product of the imagination under the circumstances in which it was formulated. Of course it's the logic of neoliberalism, something like:
"given the abstraction of the situation, and given the antithetical interests of participants involved, we must deduce or further presuppose the contiguity of their positions, hence equilibrium, a practically useful conjecture that cancels abstraction practically without cancelling it really."
Without going into the ruinous absurdities derived from, or related to this system of thought just yet, it's not irrelevant that this does recall previously existing figures of ideology, as discussed by Bachelard:
"The Grand Bénitier's strength is on a par with the height and bulk of its walls. Indeed, according to one observer, it would take two horses hitched to each valve to force the Grand Bénitier "to yawn, in spite of itself."
I should love to see an engraving that represented this exploit. I can imagine it, however, by recalling an old picture, which I have looked at long and often, of horses hitched to the two hemispheres, between which nothing existed but space. Here this image depicting the "Magdeburg experiment," which is legendary in elementary scientific culture, would have a biological illustration. Four horses to overcome fourteen pounds of limp flesh!"
Saturday, August 25, 2007
a subject for popular anxiety
"Interest in "atmospheres" is a critical attitude designed for, and particularly suited to, the poets of the nineteenth century; this may tell us something about them, and in part explain why they are so little ambiguous in the sense with which I am concerned. For a variety of reasons, they found themselves living in an intellectual framework with which it was difficult to write poetry, in which poetry was rather improper, or was irrelevant to business, especially the business of becoming Fit to Survive, or was an indulgence of one's lower nature in beliefs the scientists knew were untrue. On the other hand, they had a large public which was as anxious to escape from this intellectual framework, on holiday, as they were themselves. Almost all of them, therefore, exploited a sort of tap-root into the world of their childhood, where they were able to conceive things poetically, and whatever they might be writing about they would suck up from this limited and perverted world an unvarying sap which was their poetical inspiration."
***
"In that age, too, began the doubt as to whether this man or that was "grown up," which has ever since occupied so deeply the minds of those interested in their friends. Macauley complains somewhere that in his day a man was sure to be accused of a child-mind if no doubt could be cast "either on the ability of his intellect or the innocence of his character"; now nobody seems to have said this in the eighteenth century. Before the Romantic Revival the possibilities of not growing up had never been exploited so far as to become a subject for popular anxiety."
- William Empson Seven Types of Ambiguity
***
"In that age, too, began the doubt as to whether this man or that was "grown up," which has ever since occupied so deeply the minds of those interested in their friends. Macauley complains somewhere that in his day a man was sure to be accused of a child-mind if no doubt could be cast "either on the ability of his intellect or the innocence of his character"; now nobody seems to have said this in the eighteenth century. Before the Romantic Revival the possibilities of not growing up had never been exploited so far as to become a subject for popular anxiety."
- William Empson Seven Types of Ambiguity
Wednesday, August 22, 2007
the gorgon's head
I saw this in Southampton City Art Gallery last week. It's really the distance these things have from us now that justifies considering them as fragments of a dead culture. It would surely be an exaggeration to declare capitalist culture in general fragmentary, but there's no doubt some validity in Benjamin's method in Arcades, say.
Anyway, we can be sure Burne-Jones's picture is very symbolical of something or other. It suggests perhaps that the reflected image is the real one and the "natural" image somehow counterfeit (or something else).
a modern prince
The Times interviewed General Musharraf. The propaganda element of this article, from the decision to commission an interview with this unelected leader and not others, is no doubt to show the General somewhat domesticated; if not justified at least putting his side of the story. The idea of dialogue can be connected with the General. An intimacy of sorts is established.
There's also the ludicrous sub-editing:
"Hard man in a rocky place"
"He’s the West’s night watchman — an Islamic leader holding the flanks in the front line of the war against terror. His country harbours Al-Qaeda and the Taliban. But is Pakistan’s President Musharraf doing enough — or is he fomenting civil war?"
(as if the perfect nightwatchman was a fantasist:)
"The exchange illustrated one of the problems Musharraf’s critics have consistently complained of: that when the truth is inconvenient, he simply tends to ignore it, crossing the frontier from fact into fiction as nonchalantly as he once ordered his troops to cross the border from Pakistan into India at Kargil. This is very evident in his memoir. As a reviewer in The Wall Street Journal noted, “believe little of what you read… Though there’s much the book doesn’t tell us, it does offer invaluable (and frequently hilarious) insights into the levels of delusion a man may reach when he is accountable to no one, elected by no one and trusted by no one”.
If Musharraf’s book was accused of having an inventive approach to the facts, it was also widely said to be, as The Economist put it, both “boringly boastful” and “bafflingly rude” about the leaders of other countries. The first time that the general showed either of these tendencies during our conversation was when I asked him what he felt when the world’s press published photographs of Dick Cheney lecturing him during a recent visit to Pakistan. At this, the general showed a brief flash of his famous amour-propre. “Dick Cheney never wagged his finger at me,” he said, in direct contradiction of pictures beamed across the world. “People may say that, but in fact… Dick is rather a quiet man. A great listener. I talked 90% of the time.” There was an irritable pause. Then the general added: “Everyone thinks we had a dressing-down. It’s not true.” Another pause, then: “At official levels there is total understanding between the US and Pakistan. We’re together in the same coalition. There can be differences, but…” He left the sentence unfinished."
There's also the ludicrous sub-editing:
"Hard man in a rocky place"
"He’s the West’s night watchman — an Islamic leader holding the flanks in the front line of the war against terror. His country harbours Al-Qaeda and the Taliban. But is Pakistan’s President Musharraf doing enough — or is he fomenting civil war?"
(as if the perfect nightwatchman was a fantasist:)
"The exchange illustrated one of the problems Musharraf’s critics have consistently complained of: that when the truth is inconvenient, he simply tends to ignore it, crossing the frontier from fact into fiction as nonchalantly as he once ordered his troops to cross the border from Pakistan into India at Kargil. This is very evident in his memoir. As a reviewer in The Wall Street Journal noted, “believe little of what you read… Though there’s much the book doesn’t tell us, it does offer invaluable (and frequently hilarious) insights into the levels of delusion a man may reach when he is accountable to no one, elected by no one and trusted by no one”.
If Musharraf’s book was accused of having an inventive approach to the facts, it was also widely said to be, as The Economist put it, both “boringly boastful” and “bafflingly rude” about the leaders of other countries. The first time that the general showed either of these tendencies during our conversation was when I asked him what he felt when the world’s press published photographs of Dick Cheney lecturing him during a recent visit to Pakistan. At this, the general showed a brief flash of his famous amour-propre. “Dick Cheney never wagged his finger at me,” he said, in direct contradiction of pictures beamed across the world. “People may say that, but in fact… Dick is rather a quiet man. A great listener. I talked 90% of the time.” There was an irritable pause. Then the general added: “Everyone thinks we had a dressing-down. It’s not true.” Another pause, then: “At official levels there is total understanding between the US and Pakistan. We’re together in the same coalition. There can be differences, but…” He left the sentence unfinished."
Saturday, August 18, 2007
Futurism
Suppose Futurism performs two contradictory operations, that we could call humanisation and dehumanisation, and suppose the combined effect of these operations was a kind of empty religious art.
Walter Benjamin's reduction of Marinetti's manifesto on the Ethiopian war demonstrates Futurism's effect quite purely:
"For twenty- seven years we Futurists have rebelled against the branding of war as antiaesthetic.... Accordingly we state: ... War is beautiful because it establishes man's dominion over the subjugated machinery by means of gas masks, terrifying megaphones, flame throwers, and small tanks. War is beautiful because it initiates the dreamt-of metalization of the human body. War is beautiful because it enriches a flowering meadow with the fiery orchids of machine guns. War is beautiful because it combines the gunfire, the cannonades, the cease-fire, the scents, and the stench of putrefaction into a symphony. War is beautiful because it creates new architecture, like that of the big tanks, the geometrical formation flights, the smoke spirals from burning villages, and many others.... Poets and artists of Futurism! ... remember these principles of an aesthetics of war so that your struggle for a new literature and a new graphic art . . . may be illumined by them!"
Its processes:
1. Humanisation
Marinetti's surrealist in this way: that he effectively takes for his unconscious things that really belong to the wider social world. This happens first of all with his Jarry pastiche Roi Bombance, written as if Jarry had the legal status of an imaginary friend. We can applaud this disregard for the copyright laws. It's here again in this piece on the Ethiopian war, Marinetti effectively usurps the position of creator, as sanctioned in bourgeois art, but here with respect to a vast apparatus of death.
2. Dehumanisation
What Badiou calls formalism:
"On one side is the absolute desire for new forms, always new forms, something like an infinite desire. Modernity is the infinite desire of new forms."
...a recognisable tendency, is I think really a tendency to dehumanisation in art. There's no intrinsic inventory of forms with an implied succession, rather "newness" is here more an effect of form: "new architecture, like that of the big tanks" etc. This would relate formalism to the baroque, which Benjamin tells us "knows no eschatology". The market evidently dictates that art ought to be inhuman.
In the first case the artist stands in front of this alienation effect, in the second he tries to disappear behind it. In the situation where both operations are effected simultaneously the result is something like the genderless reproduction of the inhuman. This is how I'd want to introduce the subject of modern architecture.
Saturday, August 11, 2007
Inequality
To what end is class, a category basic to capitalist society, treated under the heading "inequality" e.g. in the research of the left liberal Joseph Rowntree Foundation? This abstract "inequality" in a way suggests its opposite: quantitative inequality through qualitative equality; as if this society was an unfortunately inequitable version of socialism, and as if the only sociology thinkable was that of "economic man", (uncoerced and uncoercing, unaccumulating). Society is here found unfair not structurally, but in an inessential way; as if only "decoratively" unfair, on account of its practical efficiency (this is almost suggested). Thousands of homeless people affirm this society is not socialist.
Thursday, August 09, 2007
class composition in Britain: 2001 census information
"The National Statistics Socio-economic Classification (NS-SEC) is the replacement proposed for the Registrar General’s ‘social class’ classification. It places people into a socio-economic category based on their occupation and certain characteristics of the work that they do (whether they are an employer, self-employed or an employee; whether or not they are responsible for supervising others; and the number of employees at the place of work). Of the classifications for people in work, the highest group is NS-SEC 1,‘Higher managerial and professional occupations’, and the lowest is NS-SEC 7, ‘Routine occupations’.The NS-SEC classes are listed with the population in 2001."
1. Higher managerial and professional occupations (3,182,614) 8.46%
"Doctors, directors of large organisations, clergy "
2. Lower managerial and professional occupations (6,990,083) 18.59%
"Journalists, nurses, school teachers"
3. Intermediate occupations (3,532,894) 9.39%
"Travel agents, police officers (sergeant and below)"
4. Small employers and own account workers (2,626,067) 6.98%
"Farmers, taxi drivers, hotel managers"
5. Lower supervisory and technical occupations (2,687,927) 7.15%
"Train drivers, electricians, bakers"
6. Semi-routine occupations (4,393,965) 11.68%
"Scaffolders, traffic wardens, dental nurses"
7. Routine occupations (3,410,122) 9.07%
"Building labourers, waiters, cleaners"
8. Never worked and long-term unemployed (1,404,188)3.73%
Never worked (1,021,800)
Long-term unemployed (382,388)
Not classified (9,379,577) 24.94%
Full-time students (2,648,991) 7.04%
Not classified for other reasons (6,730,586) 17.90%
Total (aged 16-74) 37,607,437
1. Higher managerial and professional occupations (3,182,614) 8.46%
"Doctors, directors of large organisations, clergy "
2. Lower managerial and professional occupations (6,990,083) 18.59%
"Journalists, nurses, school teachers"
3. Intermediate occupations (3,532,894) 9.39%
"Travel agents, police officers (sergeant and below)"
4. Small employers and own account workers (2,626,067) 6.98%
"Farmers, taxi drivers, hotel managers"
5. Lower supervisory and technical occupations (2,687,927) 7.15%
"Train drivers, electricians, bakers"
6. Semi-routine occupations (4,393,965) 11.68%
"Scaffolders, traffic wardens, dental nurses"
7. Routine occupations (3,410,122) 9.07%
"Building labourers, waiters, cleaners"
8. Never worked and long-term unemployed (1,404,188)3.73%
Never worked (1,021,800)
Long-term unemployed (382,388)
Not classified (9,379,577) 24.94%
Full-time students (2,648,991) 7.04%
Not classified for other reasons (6,730,586) 17.90%
Total (aged 16-74) 37,607,437
Sunday, August 05, 2007
Saatchism
The dominant cultural paradigm in Britain now, and perhaps too in 1979, reflecting the coincident practices of the culture industry and the ideological bases of neoclassical economics, is the individualism of the atomised society. The credibility of this individualism as a realistic explanation of society depends on the absence of those features that were understood to characterise earlier versions of class society:
1. Coercion
2. Accumulation
Saatchi and Saatchi's indefinite dolequeue presents a horrific accumulation of the indigent, reminiscent of the legendary breadqueues of the eastern bloc. But it doesn't so much ask the spectator to choose the most realistic response to the phenomenon of unemployment, as to choose the metaphysical system that retroactively presents this unemployment in the most acceptable way. Thatcher's metaphysics won the day.
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