One might have expected that Keynes' General Theory, insofar as it examines how various shocks would impact on an economy in which the money supply does not expand and new plant can be bought but not put into use, could hardly serve as the basis for political initiatives. Nothing could be further from the truth. In order for something like Keynes' theory to serve as a guide to policymaking it is necessary for Keynes' short term model to be extended to a medium term model, in which more variables are subject to change. Keynes offers no clue as to how, for instance, the medium term rate of profit on marginal capital might show the same tendency to decline as the short term rate of profit. He certainly does offers policy makers encouragement to use his theory in precisely this way.
Keynes believes that output and employment can be increased if capitalists are prepared to produce at a lower rate of interest. The increased employment of available resources, including labour, ought can be thought of as a general improvement. Keynes thinks this reduction in the operative rate of interest can be effected in two ways:
1. Increasing the propensity to invest at every rate of interest - shifting schedule "N" down and to the right
2. Increasing the propensity to consume at every level of income - shifting schedule "S" down and to the left
These are surely long term or medium term goals for an administration, and incorporating these changes into Keynes' short term model is, at best, stretching a point. Keynes' model implicitly rules out the use of new industrial plant, and the effect of this increase in capacity on output and interest, as beyond its scope. This feature of capitalist production is excised for formal reasons, even though policy proposals are made, the efficacy of which certainly depend on the growth path of capitalist production.
The ideas mentioned above about psychological propensities to save or invest are the basis for Keynes' reverie about ancient Egypt, which:
"was doubly fortunate, and doubtless owed to this its fabled wealth, in that it possessed two activities, namely, pyramid-building as well as the search for precious metals, the fruits of which, since they could not serve the needs of man by being consumed, did not stale with abundance".
This is probably only half serious, because ancient Egypt evidently was not a fancy dress version of bourgeois England. Keynes' point is that the relatively low amount of saving in ancient Egypt, i.e. hoarding of gold, would have reduced "the interest rate", whatever that was, and increased output. This counterfactual story is not just picturesque, however, because it serves as a rhetorical support for the most celebrated keynesian policy: wholly wasteful loan expenditure.
Friday, October 23, 2009
Thursday, October 22, 2009
keynesianism 1
The specific situation analysed by Keynes, in which a market economy fails to achieve full employent, is based on the the validity of Keynes observations about the rigidity of money wages. An economy with a fixed supply of currency, perhaps based on a more or less fixed supply of gold, would certainly be exposed to deflationary forces if individuals decided to withdraw more and more currency from circulation. If money wages are fixed, monetary deflation will probably be reconfiguered as a contraction of the real economy. The simplest solution to this problem, put into practice by governments everywhere since the abandonment of the gold standard, is for government to progressively inflate the money supply, and so prevent workers from making real wage gains by defending a current money wage. Even Milton Friedman considered this the most realistic response to a deflationary crisis as severe as that of the great depression. Keynes claims to have developed a general theory of the capitalist economy, supplementing the restricted theory of the classical economists (for Keynes, principally Smith, Ricardo and Marshall), which tacitly assumed that the interest rate would be equal to Keynes' "neutal rate" of interest, or a rate of interest maintaining employment "at some specified constant level". In the context of the abandonment of the gold standard, the notion that the economy is subject to deflationary pressure on account of its restricted supply of money is no longer so credible. Keynes' theory itself can be taken as a description of the special case of an economy in which the government does not permit itself to expand the money supply.
The great difficulty with Keynes, and part of the reason why his books are still read, is that while he talking about one thing, he might be alluding to something else. So people think, perhaps he could have meant that real wages were fundamentally stable, or that the interest rate on productive capital might fall for a different reason, or that the medium term processes of the economy might behave like the short term processes, etc etc.
The great difficulty with Keynes, and part of the reason why his books are still read, is that while he talking about one thing, he might be alluding to something else. So people think, perhaps he could have meant that real wages were fundamentally stable, or that the interest rate on productive capital might fall for a different reason, or that the medium term processes of the economy might behave like the short term processes, etc etc.
Tuesday, October 20, 2009
the Keynes meme
Interest in Keynes' ideas has understandably increased since the last year's great banking bailout and recession. At least, the opinion pieces in the Guardian seem to mainly involve Keynesianism and the "liberal left". Because Keynes' system is fairly complicated, I thought it would be worth restating what it entails, as far as I understand it. This could then be a sort of resource for amateur criticism of the theoretical basis of the Keynesian proposals put forward by playwrights, journalists and celebrity cooks, in the pages of the Guardian.
"N" (investments) represents the value of capital investments to be made from the reserve fund of non-circulating money
"S" (savings) represents the value of money diverted from consumption into the reserve fund of non-circulating money
"MEC" marginal efficiency of capital, i.e. rate of profit on additional capital.
Money wages are fixed in the short run. It is hypothesised that workers will be able to effectively resist cuts in money wages. Because there is involuntary unemployment, it is further hypothesised that an increase in the workforce will not cause money wages to rise. In the terminology of economics, the labour supply is perfectly elastic, within the relevant range, at the prevailing money wage.
"MEC" represents the marginal efficiency of capital. It describes the expected return on capital added to existing capital. The Keynesian "problem" occurs when the graph of MEC is downward sloping. That is, each £100 added to the stock of capital is expected to return a lower percentage of its value each year as profit. Keynes explains this phenomenon as resulting from technical diseconomies of scale. Each additional worker set to work produces output of less value than the last.
Competition between capitalists is assumed to coerce them into setting production where their costs, including normal profits, coincide with their income. Put another way, capitalists increase or decrease production until the industry supply curve, representing their costs, including normal profits, coincides with the industry demand curve, representing their income.
The short run supply curve, representing industry costs, can be taken to be fairly similar to the supply curve for labour, because industry as a whole need only put to work extra labour to increase production. The industry supply curve will have a tendency to rise, however, as production increases, because labour is considered to work with decreasing efficiency. Industry will respond to an increase in demand by expanding production, with a less marked increase in prices. Similarly, industry will respond to a decrease in demand by reducing output, with a less marked decrease in prices.
The economy will only be stable if the sum of money output to the consumers, in the form of wages and profits, exactly equals the money input into industry, in the form of consumption spending and investment. This is the basis of the problem of oversaving. If money is saved from the incomes generated by industry , with no commensurate injection of money from elsewhere, then demand in the goods market will have effectively fallen. Capitalists cannot simply devalue their products, as they cannot devalue their costs, and will be forced into the expedient of reducing production.
"Saving", for Keynes, means the same thing as "hoarding", for Marx. That is, it is either the saving of banknotes, in a shoebox or whatever, or the banks' reserve on bank saving: the percentage of deposits the banks can't relend. Keynes' saving schedule represents net savings: while some people may be saving others may be dissaving. Money is considered to be saved for the usefulness of possessing a liquid asset, entitling the holder to unspecified future production. Keynes assumes that saving increases as national income increases, but that the percentage of income saved also increases as national income increases. At low levels of national income, Keynes expects net dissaving. The money saved might be thought of as accumulating, in a sort of fund of virtual wealth that isn't used as entitlements to current production. Obviously, the money remains in individual private ownership rather than collective ownership. The money saved neither circulates nor yields interest.
"Investment" represents the sum of money spent on additions to the capital stock from the fund of non-circulating money. The amount of money diverted into capital expenditure depends on the rate of interest. If the rate of interest is relatively high a relatively large amount of money will be spent on additional capital. If the interest rate is relatively low, a relatively small amount will be spent.
"Savings" represents money withdrawn from expenditure. "Investment" represents money added to expenditure. If savings exceeds investments, demand will be insufficient and capitalists will be obliged to reduce output. As production is reduced the interest rate increases. Investment, consequently increases, while savings falls. When parity is achieved between savings and investments the economy becomes stable at a lower level of output. Similarly, if investments exceeds savings, the demand is excessive and production expands. The expansion of production reduces the interest rate, until savings once again equals investments.
Hence, Keynes theorises an economic system in which production stalls below full employment, but which is self stabilising with regard to various sorts of shock. The stable level of output and the stable interest rate can be derived, theoretically, from the propensities of saving and investment and the marginal efficiency of capital.
"N" (investments) represents the value of capital investments to be made from the reserve fund of non-circulating money
"S" (savings) represents the value of money diverted from consumption into the reserve fund of non-circulating money
"MEC" marginal efficiency of capital, i.e. rate of profit on additional capital.
Money wages are fixed in the short run. It is hypothesised that workers will be able to effectively resist cuts in money wages. Because there is involuntary unemployment, it is further hypothesised that an increase in the workforce will not cause money wages to rise. In the terminology of economics, the labour supply is perfectly elastic, within the relevant range, at the prevailing money wage.
"MEC" represents the marginal efficiency of capital. It describes the expected return on capital added to existing capital. The Keynesian "problem" occurs when the graph of MEC is downward sloping. That is, each £100 added to the stock of capital is expected to return a lower percentage of its value each year as profit. Keynes explains this phenomenon as resulting from technical diseconomies of scale. Each additional worker set to work produces output of less value than the last.
Competition between capitalists is assumed to coerce them into setting production where their costs, including normal profits, coincide with their income. Put another way, capitalists increase or decrease production until the industry supply curve, representing their costs, including normal profits, coincides with the industry demand curve, representing their income.
The short run supply curve, representing industry costs, can be taken to be fairly similar to the supply curve for labour, because industry as a whole need only put to work extra labour to increase production. The industry supply curve will have a tendency to rise, however, as production increases, because labour is considered to work with decreasing efficiency. Industry will respond to an increase in demand by expanding production, with a less marked increase in prices. Similarly, industry will respond to a decrease in demand by reducing output, with a less marked decrease in prices.
The economy will only be stable if the sum of money output to the consumers, in the form of wages and profits, exactly equals the money input into industry, in the form of consumption spending and investment. This is the basis of the problem of oversaving. If money is saved from the incomes generated by industry , with no commensurate injection of money from elsewhere, then demand in the goods market will have effectively fallen. Capitalists cannot simply devalue their products, as they cannot devalue their costs, and will be forced into the expedient of reducing production.
"Saving", for Keynes, means the same thing as "hoarding", for Marx. That is, it is either the saving of banknotes, in a shoebox or whatever, or the banks' reserve on bank saving: the percentage of deposits the banks can't relend. Keynes' saving schedule represents net savings: while some people may be saving others may be dissaving. Money is considered to be saved for the usefulness of possessing a liquid asset, entitling the holder to unspecified future production. Keynes assumes that saving increases as national income increases, but that the percentage of income saved also increases as national income increases. At low levels of national income, Keynes expects net dissaving. The money saved might be thought of as accumulating, in a sort of fund of virtual wealth that isn't used as entitlements to current production. Obviously, the money remains in individual private ownership rather than collective ownership. The money saved neither circulates nor yields interest.
"Investment" represents the sum of money spent on additions to the capital stock from the fund of non-circulating money. The amount of money diverted into capital expenditure depends on the rate of interest. If the rate of interest is relatively high a relatively large amount of money will be spent on additional capital. If the interest rate is relatively low, a relatively small amount will be spent.
"Savings" represents money withdrawn from expenditure. "Investment" represents money added to expenditure. If savings exceeds investments, demand will be insufficient and capitalists will be obliged to reduce output. As production is reduced the interest rate increases. Investment, consequently increases, while savings falls. When parity is achieved between savings and investments the economy becomes stable at a lower level of output. Similarly, if investments exceeds savings, the demand is excessive and production expands. The expansion of production reduces the interest rate, until savings once again equals investments.
Hence, Keynes theorises an economic system in which production stalls below full employment, but which is self stabilising with regard to various sorts of shock. The stable level of output and the stable interest rate can be derived, theoretically, from the propensities of saving and investment and the marginal efficiency of capital.
Sunday, October 04, 2009
about Egon Schiele
This month's lecture is about Egon Schiele's expressionist pictures and their relation to ideas of the avant garde in early twentieth century central europe.
"Why must you write these appalling adumbrations?" someone might say. It's a complicated issue. Mainly I wanted not to think any more about Egon Schiele. What interested me in the subject is:
1. that it can be shown that a good deal of the apparently "inexpressible" content of expressionist works is only reasonably rather than absolutely inexpressible, i.e. it certainly can be expressed, if only in overly complicated, tangled prose.
2. the way pictorial modernism works, for example in Schiele, is illuminating with respect to how political or scientific modernism works, for example in Freud.
Maybe the person asking the first question would also want to say some things about Karl Popper's popular theory of science. I doubt Popper would sign any of these speculations off. We are already exercising taste more than science in identifying the dominant motifs in Schiele's work: abstraction, distorted lines and sex. Relating these motifs to theories put forward, not by Schiele, but by his contemporaries, is to indulge speculation more, and more imprudently.
Notes on Schiele:
1. Artists have always been interested in depicting relations of power. In Schiele's pictures social relations, even at the level of private life, are hardly shown. There are only the traces or imprints of social relations on atomised figures. The conformation of the bodies of Schiele's figures, their few scraps of underwear, and perhaps their hairstyles, seem to be charged with an obscure sociological, even physiological importance. I don't believe Schiele was any less interested in relations of power than his predecessors. In Schiele's pictures, I would suggest, power only attains its proper grandeur, is only really power, and is only of interest, when it operates abstractly. Consequently, Austria-Hungary's hundreds of cavalry officers must have seemed to be only a cheap imitation of power, and of no interest. Likewise the giant banks. In a particular theory of the avant garde, developed by Wassily Kandinsky, real political relations are subsumed by ideal relations. From this it follows that the operative ideal political relations are purely abstract. The world, according to this point of view, coheres as a "spiritual" whole. An image of a tart, paid to undress in a rented room, expresses the inner workings of this world no more or less well than a microscopic slide isolating tuberculosis bacteria.
2. The implicit theory of the avant garde already had an invented "upper" and "lower" section, corresponding to what individual consciousness had or had not yet "comprehended", before Freud's invention of similar agencies hemming consciousness in: the superego and id. Schiele's distorted, nervous lines develop the sort of ambiguities developed in Freud's analyses of dreams. Schiele is drawing at his desk, perhaps, and the lines are simultaneously, or alternately, "channeling" the "upper section" or social superego, and dissimulating against it, and perhaps also counterfeiting this imaginary "upper section", for the benefit of his putative bourgeois patrons, no doubt confined to the "lower section."
3. The purported reality of the "upper" and "lower" sections makes sex ambiguous. As an activity of individual interest, it should be, according to Vygotsky's arguments, productive of knowledge at the individual level. Hence it should be attached to the "upper section". But it is, nevertheless, the means by which the personnel occupying the "lower section" are really reproduced. Very mysterious.
"Why must you write these appalling adumbrations?" someone might say. It's a complicated issue. Mainly I wanted not to think any more about Egon Schiele. What interested me in the subject is:
1. that it can be shown that a good deal of the apparently "inexpressible" content of expressionist works is only reasonably rather than absolutely inexpressible, i.e. it certainly can be expressed, if only in overly complicated, tangled prose.
2. the way pictorial modernism works, for example in Schiele, is illuminating with respect to how political or scientific modernism works, for example in Freud.
Maybe the person asking the first question would also want to say some things about Karl Popper's popular theory of science. I doubt Popper would sign any of these speculations off. We are already exercising taste more than science in identifying the dominant motifs in Schiele's work: abstraction, distorted lines and sex. Relating these motifs to theories put forward, not by Schiele, but by his contemporaries, is to indulge speculation more, and more imprudently.
Notes on Schiele:
1. Artists have always been interested in depicting relations of power. In Schiele's pictures social relations, even at the level of private life, are hardly shown. There are only the traces or imprints of social relations on atomised figures. The conformation of the bodies of Schiele's figures, their few scraps of underwear, and perhaps their hairstyles, seem to be charged with an obscure sociological, even physiological importance. I don't believe Schiele was any less interested in relations of power than his predecessors. In Schiele's pictures, I would suggest, power only attains its proper grandeur, is only really power, and is only of interest, when it operates abstractly. Consequently, Austria-Hungary's hundreds of cavalry officers must have seemed to be only a cheap imitation of power, and of no interest. Likewise the giant banks. In a particular theory of the avant garde, developed by Wassily Kandinsky, real political relations are subsumed by ideal relations. From this it follows that the operative ideal political relations are purely abstract. The world, according to this point of view, coheres as a "spiritual" whole. An image of a tart, paid to undress in a rented room, expresses the inner workings of this world no more or less well than a microscopic slide isolating tuberculosis bacteria.
2. The implicit theory of the avant garde already had an invented "upper" and "lower" section, corresponding to what individual consciousness had or had not yet "comprehended", before Freud's invention of similar agencies hemming consciousness in: the superego and id. Schiele's distorted, nervous lines develop the sort of ambiguities developed in Freud's analyses of dreams. Schiele is drawing at his desk, perhaps, and the lines are simultaneously, or alternately, "channeling" the "upper section" or social superego, and dissimulating against it, and perhaps also counterfeiting this imaginary "upper section", for the benefit of his putative bourgeois patrons, no doubt confined to the "lower section."
3. The purported reality of the "upper" and "lower" sections makes sex ambiguous. As an activity of individual interest, it should be, according to Vygotsky's arguments, productive of knowledge at the individual level. Hence it should be attached to the "upper section". But it is, nevertheless, the means by which the personnel occupying the "lower section" are really reproduced. Very mysterious.
Wednesday, September 16, 2009
mammon, innit
It's often remarked how President Obama's delivery seems to add depth to whatever he's reading. His gestures really register the nuance that he is able to draw out of his text, which you feel might even have been written by the guy who wrote speeches for Bush. The president is really listening in to his speech. You can hear the same thing in certain Big Youth records, for example (as well as a more realistic political analysis), records which demonstrate more pronouncedly an affect common to inveterate cannabis smokers. I mention this because the text goes no further than blaming the crisis on the profligate tradeurs - officially sanctioned pantomime villains - when the crisis developed directly from the system of mortgaged property.
How different to Bush's speeches! George W seemed to me much more about dramatising how he, Bush, having slugged it out for the prerogative of getting up onto the anthill, could now say without challenge what was the truth, because it was what he was saying.
How different to Bush's speeches! George W seemed to me much more about dramatising how he, Bush, having slugged it out for the prerogative of getting up onto the anthill, could now say without challenge what was the truth, because it was what he was saying.
Saturday, August 29, 2009
In the new revolution, Guardian readers
The Guardian's sub editors came up with a brilliantly counterintuitive title for a think piece they featured this week, looking at "colour revolutions":
"In the new revolution, progressives fight against, not with, the poor"
a sort of echo of that record by the Fall: "hate's not your enemy, love's your enemy".
The writer, David Edgar, doesn't try to justify any such thing, but the article's quite interesting insofar as it reflects the disappearance from common knowledge of the concept of the "bourgeois revolution"; a disappearance the article both testifies to and masks.
I don't know anything about David Edgar, other than that he sometimes appears in The Guardian. He explains that in the last years of the Cold War he was involved with a "marxist" journal, without supporting Soviet-style communism himself:
"In 1989, I was one of two non-communist members of the editorial board of the magazine Marxism Today"
...which might seem as paradoxical as being one of two illiterate members of the editorial board of the London Review of Books, but is entirely reasonable in the context of the decomposition of "the left" from the late 70s onward, which is one of the subjects the article addresses. David Edgar tries to conceptualise:
"the colour/flower-coded revolutions of the 21st: from Georgia's 2003 rose revolution via Ukraine's 2004-05 orange revolution to Kyrgyzstan's initially pink or lemon but finally tulip revolution against another crooked post-communist government, later the same year."
I don't think many people would blame Edgar for regarding marxism like a carthorse regards the whip, and wanting to develop a liberal or liberal-friendly position, but in this case the classic liberal position coincides with the marxist postion. Marx's ideas about the causes of social change were based on a widely accepted liberal or radical analysis of the social and economic causes of the French Revolution; causes which were found to be retrospectively applicable, with due modification, to the American Revolution and the Glorious Revolution of 1688. The French Revolution as a whole could be looked at as a "movement" in which the bourgeoisie, having acceded to economic power, exploited popular discontent and thereby acceded to political dominance. Variations on this thesis of the "bourgeois revolution" have been profitably employed by serious analysts from Von Ranke to Poulantzas.
The "20th- century, third-world revolution" represented a quite distinct phenomenon, in which social change in undeveloped countries, already integrated into the world system as undeveloped countries, exerted a different sort of pressure on the existing state and resulted in a different political settlement. As Edgar states:
"Iran in 1979 was a recognisable, 20th- century, third-world revolution, in which the progressive middle class allied with the rural masses to overthrow a hated, foreign-backed autocracy. "
The upheavals Edgar describes in Eastern Europe and in Russia, on the other hand, were classic "bourgeois revolutions" against the bureaucratic "socialist" state, that in no way "presaged a new kind of political movement". They represented the dismantling of the bureaucratic command economy by sections of its ruling class and resulted in its replacement with something approximating the current western version of bourgeois capitalism.
Because Edgar doesn't want to analyse, in retro-marxist fashion, the social structures underpinning the rival groups in the conflicts he describes, he equates the properly bourgeois revolutions in Eastern Europe, and the stalled bourgeois revolution in Iran, with a faction fight in Ukraine and a reactionary coup d'etat in Thailand. The political structure of the state, and the socio-political structure out of which its opponants came, differs in each case. The dynamics of the bourgeois revolution, the genuine "colour revolution", are hardly likely to be replicated in Western Europe, as it already is subject to neo-bourgeois capitalism.
As I said, Edgar's concept of the "21st-century revolution" is as much about replacing the concept of the "bourgeois revolution" as failing to remember it. Extrapolating from the recent events in Iran, Edgar describes a conflict which:
"pits the educated, western-oriented, socially liberal, economically neoliberal urban middle class against the economically egalitarian, socially traditionalist rural poor."
In talking about the "middle class" rather than the "bourgeoisie" Edgar abstracts out the dominant interests on both sides. Hashemi Rafsanjani is no more middle class than his political rivals. The conflict in Iran involves a struggle between two factions of the ruling class, which has been expanded into a struggle for political rights, fought mainly by a section of the "urban middle class" against state power. The entire conflict cannot be reduced to this second struggle.
David Edgar's political aims are good:
"liberty, secularism, free speech, gay rights, civil liberties, enlightenment values and feminism, but also in social diversity, religious tolerance and economic equality"
...and he's right in understanding that the ideas of classic marxism have very little appeal for British newspaper readers. But there is something strange in writing for, as well as about, a middle class "intelligentsia", "progressives"; in effect a putative "class of consciousness", and having to process precise concepts into a sort of ideological babyfood, and so have to talk about a conflict between the "middle class" and "the poor" in the Revolutionary Islamic Republic of Iran.
"In the new revolution, progressives fight against, not with, the poor"
a sort of echo of that record by the Fall: "hate's not your enemy, love's your enemy".
The writer, David Edgar, doesn't try to justify any such thing, but the article's quite interesting insofar as it reflects the disappearance from common knowledge of the concept of the "bourgeois revolution"; a disappearance the article both testifies to and masks.
I don't know anything about David Edgar, other than that he sometimes appears in The Guardian. He explains that in the last years of the Cold War he was involved with a "marxist" journal, without supporting Soviet-style communism himself:
"In 1989, I was one of two non-communist members of the editorial board of the magazine Marxism Today"
...which might seem as paradoxical as being one of two illiterate members of the editorial board of the London Review of Books, but is entirely reasonable in the context of the decomposition of "the left" from the late 70s onward, which is one of the subjects the article addresses. David Edgar tries to conceptualise:
"the colour/flower-coded revolutions of the 21st: from Georgia's 2003 rose revolution via Ukraine's 2004-05 orange revolution to Kyrgyzstan's initially pink or lemon but finally tulip revolution against another crooked post-communist government, later the same year."
I don't think many people would blame Edgar for regarding marxism like a carthorse regards the whip, and wanting to develop a liberal or liberal-friendly position, but in this case the classic liberal position coincides with the marxist postion. Marx's ideas about the causes of social change were based on a widely accepted liberal or radical analysis of the social and economic causes of the French Revolution; causes which were found to be retrospectively applicable, with due modification, to the American Revolution and the Glorious Revolution of 1688. The French Revolution as a whole could be looked at as a "movement" in which the bourgeoisie, having acceded to economic power, exploited popular discontent and thereby acceded to political dominance. Variations on this thesis of the "bourgeois revolution" have been profitably employed by serious analysts from Von Ranke to Poulantzas.
The "20th- century, third-world revolution" represented a quite distinct phenomenon, in which social change in undeveloped countries, already integrated into the world system as undeveloped countries, exerted a different sort of pressure on the existing state and resulted in a different political settlement. As Edgar states:
"Iran in 1979 was a recognisable, 20th- century, third-world revolution, in which the progressive middle class allied with the rural masses to overthrow a hated, foreign-backed autocracy. "
The upheavals Edgar describes in Eastern Europe and in Russia, on the other hand, were classic "bourgeois revolutions" against the bureaucratic "socialist" state, that in no way "presaged a new kind of political movement". They represented the dismantling of the bureaucratic command economy by sections of its ruling class and resulted in its replacement with something approximating the current western version of bourgeois capitalism.
Because Edgar doesn't want to analyse, in retro-marxist fashion, the social structures underpinning the rival groups in the conflicts he describes, he equates the properly bourgeois revolutions in Eastern Europe, and the stalled bourgeois revolution in Iran, with a faction fight in Ukraine and a reactionary coup d'etat in Thailand. The political structure of the state, and the socio-political structure out of which its opponants came, differs in each case. The dynamics of the bourgeois revolution, the genuine "colour revolution", are hardly likely to be replicated in Western Europe, as it already is subject to neo-bourgeois capitalism.
As I said, Edgar's concept of the "21st-century revolution" is as much about replacing the concept of the "bourgeois revolution" as failing to remember it. Extrapolating from the recent events in Iran, Edgar describes a conflict which:
"pits the educated, western-oriented, socially liberal, economically neoliberal urban middle class against the economically egalitarian, socially traditionalist rural poor."
In talking about the "middle class" rather than the "bourgeoisie" Edgar abstracts out the dominant interests on both sides. Hashemi Rafsanjani is no more middle class than his political rivals. The conflict in Iran involves a struggle between two factions of the ruling class, which has been expanded into a struggle for political rights, fought mainly by a section of the "urban middle class" against state power. The entire conflict cannot be reduced to this second struggle.
David Edgar's political aims are good:
"liberty, secularism, free speech, gay rights, civil liberties, enlightenment values and feminism, but also in social diversity, religious tolerance and economic equality"
...and he's right in understanding that the ideas of classic marxism have very little appeal for British newspaper readers. But there is something strange in writing for, as well as about, a middle class "intelligentsia", "progressives"; in effect a putative "class of consciousness", and having to process precise concepts into a sort of ideological babyfood, and so have to talk about a conflict between the "middle class" and "the poor" in the Revolutionary Islamic Republic of Iran.
Tuesday, July 21, 2009
more notes on functionalism
Without going into the vexed question of functionalism in modern society, and how it is to be reconciled with the idea of "gradations of rank", which is no doubt much more complex than I described...
what I'm interested in is the notion of a functionalism that is imagined to work for a whole society, and a society which is ordered hierarchically, and whose real "gradations of rank" are imaginatively carried over as a necessary organisational principle underlying this functionalism...
since society is to be reproduced as a single intentional entity, a "spiritual" entity, and not a monist system where everything is as important as everything else, or a composite of rather prosaic functionalist parts that do not yet crowd out human subjectivity
We already have a model of "cultural functionalism" (where functionalism works through a hierarchical order etc) in Kandinsky's text. This text makes explicit claims, and its contemporary prestige can be more or less well reconstructed.
According to the logic of "cultural functionalism", truth is concentrated in a single point. This circumstance problematicises humanist culture, the social structure of which is predicated on the idea that people in general are capable of making distinctions between what can be considered "true" and false". If we take humanist culture to be necessarily polyvalent, it might be represented as a horizontal section cut through the "triangle", such that it formally comprehends a "lower section" that supports it and from which its subject matter is drawn, while this culture is itself formally comprehended by an "upper section" it in turn supports.
As I mentioned the question of how an interplay of functionalisms contributes to human culture in any particular society is too complex to adequately address. We can, however, draw some conclusions from the limit case of "cultural functionalism" for which we have Kandinsky's description. What might we expect of a humanist culture inflluenced by these ideas?
1. culturally consistant "upper" and "lower" sections
2. the sacralisation of a practically dormant "upper section" (in bourgeois society, bourgeois humanism would have to invent an imaginary "upper section")
3. the idea that there is a natural trade off between the security of humanism and the inactivity of the "lower section"
what I'm interested in is the notion of a functionalism that is imagined to work for a whole society, and a society which is ordered hierarchically, and whose real "gradations of rank" are imaginatively carried over as a necessary organisational principle underlying this functionalism...
since society is to be reproduced as a single intentional entity, a "spiritual" entity, and not a monist system where everything is as important as everything else, or a composite of rather prosaic functionalist parts that do not yet crowd out human subjectivity
We already have a model of "cultural functionalism" (where functionalism works through a hierarchical order etc) in Kandinsky's text. This text makes explicit claims, and its contemporary prestige can be more or less well reconstructed.
According to the logic of "cultural functionalism", truth is concentrated in a single point. This circumstance problematicises humanist culture, the social structure of which is predicated on the idea that people in general are capable of making distinctions between what can be considered "true" and false". If we take humanist culture to be necessarily polyvalent, it might be represented as a horizontal section cut through the "triangle", such that it formally comprehends a "lower section" that supports it and from which its subject matter is drawn, while this culture is itself formally comprehended by an "upper section" it in turn supports.
As I mentioned the question of how an interplay of functionalisms contributes to human culture in any particular society is too complex to adequately address. We can, however, draw some conclusions from the limit case of "cultural functionalism" for which we have Kandinsky's description. What might we expect of a humanist culture inflluenced by these ideas?
1. culturally consistant "upper" and "lower" sections
2. the sacralisation of a practically dormant "upper section" (in bourgeois society, bourgeois humanism would have to invent an imaginary "upper section")
3. the idea that there is a natural trade off between the security of humanism and the inactivity of the "lower section"
Friday, July 17, 2009
Vienna 1900
These quotations were chosen by more erudite writers, first Stefan Zweig, from his autobiography:
"Everyone knew just what he possessed and what he would inherit, what was allowed and what was forbidden. Everything had its norm, its specific mass and gravity. The man of means could calculate exactly ho much interest per annum his fortune would bring him, the civil servant or officer with equal exactitude the year in which he woud gain promotion and the year in which he would retire ... everything in this great realm had its fixed, immovable place; and in the highest place of all the aged Emperor; but should he die, one knew (or thought one knew) that another would take his place, and nothing would change in all this carefully planned order..."
and from a visitor to the Paris World Exhibition of 1900:
"The Austrian section possesses this great interest - that it represents not only the individual efforts of artists and craftsmen, but also the "official" decorative art movement of the State schools. Viewed from this last standpoint there is nothing in the entire Exhibition more admirable, more thoroughly commendable, than the display in question. Is it not wonderful indeed that a Government should have entrusted to those, and those alone, capable of acquitting themselves with credit, the task of decorating and arranging its Exhibition? And is it not still more astonishing that, instead of contenting itself, as most other nations have done, with the reconstruction of ancient styles, more or less national in character, a country should have displayed so much independence, so keen an appreciation of freshness and modernity?"
I intend to look at the problems of the Viennese Secession style as problems of functionalism.
Functionalism, where it is applied to social formations, can be a productive method for analysing societies that are complex and decentred, where rationalistic logic is difficult or impossible to apply. Hence its use develops alongside the development of capitalism, where capitalist development is attended by increased social compexity and the crumbling of central authority.
In American society, and in the Americanised popular culture predominant in Western society, functionalism tends to validate the actions of the popular classes. This could be called "democratic functionalism". It's expressed almost everywhere, but can be seen very clearly in things like The Economist's fetishisation of McDonalds. It has the advantage of fostering a democratic culture, but has the weakness of tending to discount the undemocratic aspects of modern society: centralisation of corporate power, corporate bureaucracy, waste.
A democratic culture develops alongside the development of capitalism in the US, France, China, even in Britain, a sort of monarchy, where a sort of "high" culture is willed into existance, but nevertheless remains stilted, amateurish, out of place in a resolutely modern society*. In France and the US the idea of excellence also becomes mixed up with the idea of democracy, complicating things further.
In Kandinsky's monograph a different kind of fuctionalism is outlined, in which precisely those aspects of the social system relegated to the subjective by "democratic functionalism", are conversely presented as the truly functional aspects of society.
Looking at it today, Kandinsky's monograph might be seen as indirectly describing the apparent logic of one section of contemporary society: that part of the culture industry that doesn't deal with kitsch. But it's surely intended as an explicit description of the society in which he lived: Imperial Germany at the turn of the Twentieth Century. The composite system of capitalism, government bureaucracy and monarchy that existed in Germany also pertained in Austria-Hungary and the principle cities in Russia, though not Russia as a whole.
I think it might be interesting to look at Viennese culture in the early Twentieth Century as if it was informed by the "cultural functionalism" exemplified by Kandinsky. This is to arbitrarily apply a rather incomplete hypothesis, it is not to establish a historical fact.
Things like last year's banking sector bailout point in the direction of the consolidation of an almost feudal degree of class power. Under these circumstances Americanised democratic culture can only be put under further strain. This raises the question as to whether in looking at Vienna at the turn of the Twentieth Century, we aren't looking at the future, with the possibility of understanding that future, and understanding how it is historical.
*I quite like the idea of just writing "notes" about things, and so displaying the fragments of a polemic outside of their functional order, like pictures of antique rifles in an encyclopedia of weaponry. I could have gone on:
"in this respect Coleridge's epic poem can be seen to metaphorise the threadbare hobby humanism of the useless classes, set adrift on a sea of democratic absolutism."
What a thing to say!
"Everyone knew just what he possessed and what he would inherit, what was allowed and what was forbidden. Everything had its norm, its specific mass and gravity. The man of means could calculate exactly ho much interest per annum his fortune would bring him, the civil servant or officer with equal exactitude the year in which he woud gain promotion and the year in which he would retire ... everything in this great realm had its fixed, immovable place; and in the highest place of all the aged Emperor; but should he die, one knew (or thought one knew) that another would take his place, and nothing would change in all this carefully planned order..."
and from a visitor to the Paris World Exhibition of 1900:
"The Austrian section possesses this great interest - that it represents not only the individual efforts of artists and craftsmen, but also the "official" decorative art movement of the State schools. Viewed from this last standpoint there is nothing in the entire Exhibition more admirable, more thoroughly commendable, than the display in question. Is it not wonderful indeed that a Government should have entrusted to those, and those alone, capable of acquitting themselves with credit, the task of decorating and arranging its Exhibition? And is it not still more astonishing that, instead of contenting itself, as most other nations have done, with the reconstruction of ancient styles, more or less national in character, a country should have displayed so much independence, so keen an appreciation of freshness and modernity?"
I intend to look at the problems of the Viennese Secession style as problems of functionalism.
Functionalism, where it is applied to social formations, can be a productive method for analysing societies that are complex and decentred, where rationalistic logic is difficult or impossible to apply. Hence its use develops alongside the development of capitalism, where capitalist development is attended by increased social compexity and the crumbling of central authority.
In American society, and in the Americanised popular culture predominant in Western society, functionalism tends to validate the actions of the popular classes. This could be called "democratic functionalism". It's expressed almost everywhere, but can be seen very clearly in things like The Economist's fetishisation of McDonalds. It has the advantage of fostering a democratic culture, but has the weakness of tending to discount the undemocratic aspects of modern society: centralisation of corporate power, corporate bureaucracy, waste.
A democratic culture develops alongside the development of capitalism in the US, France, China, even in Britain, a sort of monarchy, where a sort of "high" culture is willed into existance, but nevertheless remains stilted, amateurish, out of place in a resolutely modern society*. In France and the US the idea of excellence also becomes mixed up with the idea of democracy, complicating things further.
In Kandinsky's monograph a different kind of fuctionalism is outlined, in which precisely those aspects of the social system relegated to the subjective by "democratic functionalism", are conversely presented as the truly functional aspects of society.
Looking at it today, Kandinsky's monograph might be seen as indirectly describing the apparent logic of one section of contemporary society: that part of the culture industry that doesn't deal with kitsch. But it's surely intended as an explicit description of the society in which he lived: Imperial Germany at the turn of the Twentieth Century. The composite system of capitalism, government bureaucracy and monarchy that existed in Germany also pertained in Austria-Hungary and the principle cities in Russia, though not Russia as a whole.
I think it might be interesting to look at Viennese culture in the early Twentieth Century as if it was informed by the "cultural functionalism" exemplified by Kandinsky. This is to arbitrarily apply a rather incomplete hypothesis, it is not to establish a historical fact.
Things like last year's banking sector bailout point in the direction of the consolidation of an almost feudal degree of class power. Under these circumstances Americanised democratic culture can only be put under further strain. This raises the question as to whether in looking at Vienna at the turn of the Twentieth Century, we aren't looking at the future, with the possibility of understanding that future, and understanding how it is historical.
*I quite like the idea of just writing "notes" about things, and so displaying the fragments of a polemic outside of their functional order, like pictures of antique rifles in an encyclopedia of weaponry. I could have gone on:
"in this respect Coleridge's epic poem can be seen to metaphorise the threadbare hobby humanism of the useless classes, set adrift on a sea of democratic absolutism."
What a thing to say!
Klimt's portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer
Klimt seems to be quite innocently eulogising bourgeois princess Adele Bloch-Bauer. Klimt was just as innocently enthused by the possibilities of factory production, so it couldn't be said that for Klimt, polite society and the factory floor represented the contrasting faces of the bourgeoisie. And in 1907 the Austrian bourgeoisie could still be considered a progressive force.
(Does this seem right? To try to be more accurate, I feel like this picture praises unambiguously but messes with the oppositional pairs bourgeois-aristocratic and natural-artificial, if that makes sense.)
I don't think you would do something like this now because you would be tempted to cut the goldleaf out from B&H cartons. Or perhaps tastes have changed as much as technology. A contempory picture showing, say, Tony and Cherie Blair embracing on a haptic field of depleted uranium, might neither praise nor naturalise.
Saturday, July 04, 2009
about old man Freud
In The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud recounts a story about his father being picked on for being a Jew, in their former home village in Moravia:
"I might have been ten or twelve years old when my father began to take me with him on his walks, and in his conversation to reveal his views on the things of this world. Thus it was that he once told me the following incident, in order to show me that I had been born in happier times than he: "When I was a young man, I was walking one Saturday along the street in the village where you were born; I was well-dressed, with a new fur cap on my head. Up comes a Christian, who knocks my cap into the mud, and shouts. "Jew, get off the pavement!"" - "And what did you do?" - "I went into the street and picked up the cap," he calmly replied."
...which is meant to demonstrate what maturity can be, and how it can be distinctly counter-intuitive. Despite Freud's father having no real choice, and the subsequent history of European anti-semitism, it's hard not to see this story, cut out from history this way, as prefiguring, almost justifying, Mahatma Gandhi's idea of passive resistance,
but on the very next page we learn that:
"One of the first books which fell into my childish hands after I learned to read was Thiers' Consulate and Empire."
So you can imagine old man Freud, suffering being victimised this way, and making his way home, where he sits reading Thiers! I don't think this is an indictment of either Freud, it just illustrates how life is.
...
For various reasons, I was trying to get a copy of Gerard de Nerval's book Visionaries, or the Precursors of Socialism, in English. That it's not available may or may not be a good thing. In restoration France, socialism seems to have been imagined as an obscure menace potentially afflicting the resuscitated old society, somehow mixed up with conspiracy and occultism. Theophile Gautier, somewhere, says all his friends, with the exception of Sainte-Beuve, were medievalists, and this would be a properly medieval outlook. I think it's more disconcerting to encounter people who think we really do live in a total society, than people who think we ought to; like Agamben, who is madder than Cabet ever was. The younger Freud, later author of Civilisation and its Discontents, simply could not understand that societies could exist, had existed, and did exist, in which one faction was permanently pitted against another. Despite that fact that socialism, if it is ever built, can and ought to accomodate aberrant or eccentric behaviour, where possible, the idea of a total society, insofar as it prefigures a rational total society, is a prefiguration of socialism.
"I might have been ten or twelve years old when my father began to take me with him on his walks, and in his conversation to reveal his views on the things of this world. Thus it was that he once told me the following incident, in order to show me that I had been born in happier times than he: "When I was a young man, I was walking one Saturday along the street in the village where you were born; I was well-dressed, with a new fur cap on my head. Up comes a Christian, who knocks my cap into the mud, and shouts. "Jew, get off the pavement!"" - "And what did you do?" - "I went into the street and picked up the cap," he calmly replied."
...which is meant to demonstrate what maturity can be, and how it can be distinctly counter-intuitive. Despite Freud's father having no real choice, and the subsequent history of European anti-semitism, it's hard not to see this story, cut out from history this way, as prefiguring, almost justifying, Mahatma Gandhi's idea of passive resistance,
but on the very next page we learn that:
"One of the first books which fell into my childish hands after I learned to read was Thiers' Consulate and Empire."
So you can imagine old man Freud, suffering being victimised this way, and making his way home, where he sits reading Thiers! I don't think this is an indictment of either Freud, it just illustrates how life is.
...
For various reasons, I was trying to get a copy of Gerard de Nerval's book Visionaries, or the Precursors of Socialism, in English. That it's not available may or may not be a good thing. In restoration France, socialism seems to have been imagined as an obscure menace potentially afflicting the resuscitated old society, somehow mixed up with conspiracy and occultism. Theophile Gautier, somewhere, says all his friends, with the exception of Sainte-Beuve, were medievalists, and this would be a properly medieval outlook. I think it's more disconcerting to encounter people who think we really do live in a total society, than people who think we ought to; like Agamben, who is madder than Cabet ever was. The younger Freud, later author of Civilisation and its Discontents, simply could not understand that societies could exist, had existed, and did exist, in which one faction was permanently pitted against another. Despite that fact that socialism, if it is ever built, can and ought to accomodate aberrant or eccentric behaviour, where possible, the idea of a total society, insofar as it prefigures a rational total society, is a prefiguration of socialism.
Friday, June 26, 2009
notes on Iran
When people risk violence in order to confront their rulers this is driven by biological need more than strategy. It would be a tremendous achievment if the Iranian people succeeded in further democratising their country, and it's regrettable that democracy has to be fought for this way and at such cost. Ahmedinejad probably won the election, and the reform candidate, Mir Hossain Mousavi seems to be like an Iranian Henry Hunt, except more Thatcherite. This isn't really important. It is to be hoped that these recent events strengthen opinion in the West in favour of non intervention in Iranian politics.
1. Economy
Iran has a GDP of approx $165bn, of which oil and gas exports account for approx $35bn, so oil exports account for one fifth of output. Its greatest resource is labour not oil. Iran is a populous country, in comparison to other middle east oil states, with a population of 70m. The country is practically self sufficient in food production, producing $20bn of agricultural products domestically, with net imports of around $1.5bn.
Iran is therefore unlikely to be a victim in a situation of competitive Hobsonian imperialism, where rival countries try to insource skilled labour and outsource unskilled labour, since it is guaranteed foreign currency earnings, and so capital investment, as long as a competitive market for oil exists. Since these factors mitigate in favour of the country remaining politically independent, rather than passive, it is in the national interest, as long as the capitalist system exists, to maintain that independence by guaranteeing the security of food production as much as possible. Whichever political system the country has, it will always be prudent to maintain the current relatively labour intensive agrarian base, insofar as it maximises output.
The prominence of skilled labour, and to a lesser extent diffuse agriculture, mitigate against the development of a terror society. Hence, we can speculate that if the current regime fell apart to be replaced by a bourgeois "directory", the worst-case scenario of the Western pro-Ahmedinejad lobby, the situation might not degenerate hopelessly.
2. Political system
Iran's corporatist political system was established by Islamic revolutionaries in order to lessen the antipathy of rich and poor: of "oppressor and oppressed" as much as possible. As in every corporatist system, the principle of equanimity toward the various classes that constitute class society, each permitted to reproduce itself as itself and nothing more, works itself out in the fusion of the party bureaucracy with the surviving ruling class. Iran's corporatist bureaucracy is now threatened by its bourgeoisie because in reality it cannot bridge the antagonisms generated by capitalism; because it cannot prevent the accumulation of capital; because it redistributes more to the rich through inflation than to the poor through welfare.
In as much as the bureaucracy is threatened from the right it can be said to represent the interests of those groups also threatened from the right: the peasants and commercial middle class. But the regime represents their interests in a rather circuitous way, it is not simply a magnified image of the dominant ideas of these groups. It is a bureaucratic regime principally occupied with its own bureaucratic goals. Karl Marx wrote of the French peasants of 1851: "they cannot represent themselves; they need to be represented", an historically specific argument based on technology as much as ideology. In Iran the peasants are too dispersed to be mobilised, and their patriotism, in this instance, can be thought doubtful. Since it is the children of the commercial middle class, afforded the opportunity of higher education, who are now in confrontation with the regime, the patriotism of this group can be thought doubtful too.
Disclaimer - these are notes based on reports in the UK press and should be judged accordingly
1. Economy
Iran has a GDP of approx $165bn, of which oil and gas exports account for approx $35bn, so oil exports account for one fifth of output. Its greatest resource is labour not oil. Iran is a populous country, in comparison to other middle east oil states, with a population of 70m. The country is practically self sufficient in food production, producing $20bn of agricultural products domestically, with net imports of around $1.5bn.
Iran is therefore unlikely to be a victim in a situation of competitive Hobsonian imperialism, where rival countries try to insource skilled labour and outsource unskilled labour, since it is guaranteed foreign currency earnings, and so capital investment, as long as a competitive market for oil exists. Since these factors mitigate in favour of the country remaining politically independent, rather than passive, it is in the national interest, as long as the capitalist system exists, to maintain that independence by guaranteeing the security of food production as much as possible. Whichever political system the country has, it will always be prudent to maintain the current relatively labour intensive agrarian base, insofar as it maximises output.
The prominence of skilled labour, and to a lesser extent diffuse agriculture, mitigate against the development of a terror society. Hence, we can speculate that if the current regime fell apart to be replaced by a bourgeois "directory", the worst-case scenario of the Western pro-Ahmedinejad lobby, the situation might not degenerate hopelessly.
2. Political system
Iran's corporatist political system was established by Islamic revolutionaries in order to lessen the antipathy of rich and poor: of "oppressor and oppressed" as much as possible. As in every corporatist system, the principle of equanimity toward the various classes that constitute class society, each permitted to reproduce itself as itself and nothing more, works itself out in the fusion of the party bureaucracy with the surviving ruling class. Iran's corporatist bureaucracy is now threatened by its bourgeoisie because in reality it cannot bridge the antagonisms generated by capitalism; because it cannot prevent the accumulation of capital; because it redistributes more to the rich through inflation than to the poor through welfare.
In as much as the bureaucracy is threatened from the right it can be said to represent the interests of those groups also threatened from the right: the peasants and commercial middle class. But the regime represents their interests in a rather circuitous way, it is not simply a magnified image of the dominant ideas of these groups. It is a bureaucratic regime principally occupied with its own bureaucratic goals. Karl Marx wrote of the French peasants of 1851: "they cannot represent themselves; they need to be represented", an historically specific argument based on technology as much as ideology. In Iran the peasants are too dispersed to be mobilised, and their patriotism, in this instance, can be thought doubtful. Since it is the children of the commercial middle class, afforded the opportunity of higher education, who are now in confrontation with the regime, the patriotism of this group can be thought doubtful too.
Disclaimer - these are notes based on reports in the UK press and should be judged accordingly
Tuesday, June 23, 2009
corrections, links
I should have mentioned re the "British Jobs/British Workers" strike, after my rather ad hoc comments, that proper reporting ought to have established first of all:
1. whether Total had reneged on an earlier agreement
2. how much the workers earned, and how this might change
The struggle now does not involve patriotism at all, but whether Total can get away with sacking its workers for going on strike.
Comrade Lenjino on the Lindsay strike
I don't think I could piece together a better analysis of the situation in Iran from English language public domain sources than Louis Proyect has:
here
It's a minefield of disinformation!
Whenever I've checked the blog Vineyard of the Saker I've found it accurate - it quotes a source in Iran, and briefs against Mousavi and Rafsanjani.
This piece about the Baseji, I think, rather oversells this organisation. The goon is ultimately the enemy of the worker, structurally, even.
1. whether Total had reneged on an earlier agreement
2. how much the workers earned, and how this might change
The struggle now does not involve patriotism at all, but whether Total can get away with sacking its workers for going on strike.
Comrade Lenjino on the Lindsay strike
I don't think I could piece together a better analysis of the situation in Iran from English language public domain sources than Louis Proyect has:
here
It's a minefield of disinformation!
Whenever I've checked the blog Vineyard of the Saker I've found it accurate - it quotes a source in Iran, and briefs against Mousavi and Rafsanjani.
This piece about the Baseji, I think, rather oversells this organisation. The goon is ultimately the enemy of the worker, structurally, even.
could Ahmedinejad be new "Geordie Messiah"?
Perhaps as chairman of the beleaguered Tyneside club, the former hardliner could more comfortably display his grandiloquent rhetoric, comparing to an indestructible diamond, new signing Nigel Quashie.
Tuesday, June 09, 2009
"levers"
"The fight started here at Lindsey: the fight against discrimination, the fight against victimisation and the fight to put bread on your table for your children. Gordon Brown said it is indefensible. If the prime minister will not defend the working man, if parliament will not defend the working man, then the union will defend the working man."
"discrimination"? "bread"?
I wrote some notes about the "British Jobs/British Workers" protests back in January. I didn't see the point at the time of "virtually" and meaninglessly upbraiding the "British Workers" via the internet, but I think these events might be sociologically important. Firstly, as far as can be ascertained the local construction workers formerly received fairly good wages,
the basis of relatively decent wages in the construction industry depended on:
1. level of activity in the industry
2. number of industry workers unemployed: so called "reserve army"
3. state of competition in the industry
4. time/money trade offs for employers
hence the workers' wages was based on an underlying "mechanism" that was relatively stable for a while, during the growth phase, but changed markedly once the recession kicked in.
The conflict over Italian contractors brought in to work at the refinery was probably related to altered conditions insofar as:
1. the ongoing practice of cheaper foreign labour being brought in, coextensive as it is with the effects of market forces, could be targeted as an aspect of the working of market forces amenable to political intervention
2. or, maybe the local workers erroneously blamed the use of foreign workers for their problems
3. perhaps the altered circumstances in the market allowed the company to deliberately confront local workers
I think for the local workers to take action against their worsened circumstances they probably had to have a credible programme by which the former distributive "mechanism" could be restored, or where something like it could be created, which wasn't really possible. This is what I imagine underlay the "British Jobs/British Workers" aspect: a strange outburst of right radicalism, untidily recuperated by Unite the union, once it already had nowhere else to go.
If the workers had really been on the breadline in the first place, it would have made more sense to fight for council housing indexed to wages, rather than against immigration, once the fight had been extended to a general political struggle. I think the dream of "grabbing the immigration lever" somehow seemed more credible than the dream of "grabbing the social housing lever". Neither was immediately on the cards. Also, the local workers might have pressed the injustice of the deterioration in industry wages/conditions effected by housing workers of any nationality in special "hulks", presumably council approved, without having to "go nationalist" at all. Again, I think the reasons they didn't do this lay in the structure of the industry and the abruptness of recession.
the neoliberal Battleship Potemkin
"discrimination"? "bread"?
I wrote some notes about the "British Jobs/British Workers" protests back in January. I didn't see the point at the time of "virtually" and meaninglessly upbraiding the "British Workers" via the internet, but I think these events might be sociologically important. Firstly, as far as can be ascertained the local construction workers formerly received fairly good wages,
the basis of relatively decent wages in the construction industry depended on:
1. level of activity in the industry
2. number of industry workers unemployed: so called "reserve army"
3. state of competition in the industry
4. time/money trade offs for employers
hence the workers' wages was based on an underlying "mechanism" that was relatively stable for a while, during the growth phase, but changed markedly once the recession kicked in.
The conflict over Italian contractors brought in to work at the refinery was probably related to altered conditions insofar as:
1. the ongoing practice of cheaper foreign labour being brought in, coextensive as it is with the effects of market forces, could be targeted as an aspect of the working of market forces amenable to political intervention
2. or, maybe the local workers erroneously blamed the use of foreign workers for their problems
3. perhaps the altered circumstances in the market allowed the company to deliberately confront local workers
I think for the local workers to take action against their worsened circumstances they probably had to have a credible programme by which the former distributive "mechanism" could be restored, or where something like it could be created, which wasn't really possible. This is what I imagine underlay the "British Jobs/British Workers" aspect: a strange outburst of right radicalism, untidily recuperated by Unite the union, once it already had nowhere else to go.
If the workers had really been on the breadline in the first place, it would have made more sense to fight for council housing indexed to wages, rather than against immigration, once the fight had been extended to a general political struggle. I think the dream of "grabbing the immigration lever" somehow seemed more credible than the dream of "grabbing the social housing lever". Neither was immediately on the cards. Also, the local workers might have pressed the injustice of the deterioration in industry wages/conditions effected by housing workers of any nationality in special "hulks", presumably council approved, without having to "go nationalist" at all. Again, I think the reasons they didn't do this lay in the structure of the industry and the abruptness of recession.
the neoliberal Battleship Potemkin
Tuesday, June 02, 2009
after Kandinsky
(a provisional reconstruction of, and development of, Kandinsky's system, outlined in Kandinsky's 1911 monograph Concerning the Spiritual in Art, but considered to have possibly wider sociological relevence.)
1. Initial premises:
Suppose a special case of neo Burkean naturalistic philosophy: the absence of an immanent technical limit. Consider designated artistic masterpieces to represent the precipitate of humanity's self actualising struggle. These designated masterpieces can be called "dominant art". Humanity is considered to be purposive and its dominant art sublative of its purposive struggle.
2a. Since works of art concretely exist, a technical limit must exist for "humanity's self actualising struggle".
2b. hence abstract art: the dramatisation of an imagined technical limit.
2c. dominant art is abstract art (2a).
3a. from the systematisation of dominant art necessarily follows the innovation of new dominant art, since dominant art is necessarily formally unamenable to systematisation (2c), and dominant art represents the precipitate of humanity's ongoing purposive struggle.
3b. hence the stress on systematisation as a political strategy in 20th Century social criticism; or, the imagined political efficacy of art criticism in 20th Century literature.
3c. since dominant art sublates humanity's purposive struggle, humanity cannot purposively effect innovation in art without this new art negating existant dominant art and superceding it in turn.
3d. hence the Hegelian dynamics of late 19th and early 20th Century art and art criticism.
4a. since all instances of dominant art are equally sublative of humanity's purposive struggle, dominant art is not merely art, but only one kind of omnological work. The importance of art subsists in its sublative function rather than its optical merits. The particular form of an omnological work is relatively unimportant.
4b. paintings are equivalent to "the spiritual life".
4c. art is equivalent to philosophy.
4d. sex is equivalent to art; is equivalent to philosophy.
4e. "a chef can discourse on cooking techniques as if they were moments in universal history".
1. Initial premises:
Suppose a special case of neo Burkean naturalistic philosophy: the absence of an immanent technical limit. Consider designated artistic masterpieces to represent the precipitate of humanity's self actualising struggle. These designated masterpieces can be called "dominant art". Humanity is considered to be purposive and its dominant art sublative of its purposive struggle.
2a. Since works of art concretely exist, a technical limit must exist for "humanity's self actualising struggle".
2b. hence abstract art: the dramatisation of an imagined technical limit.
2c. dominant art is abstract art (2a).
3a. from the systematisation of dominant art necessarily follows the innovation of new dominant art, since dominant art is necessarily formally unamenable to systematisation (2c), and dominant art represents the precipitate of humanity's ongoing purposive struggle.
3b. hence the stress on systematisation as a political strategy in 20th Century social criticism; or, the imagined political efficacy of art criticism in 20th Century literature.
3c. since dominant art sublates humanity's purposive struggle, humanity cannot purposively effect innovation in art without this new art negating existant dominant art and superceding it in turn.
3d. hence the Hegelian dynamics of late 19th and early 20th Century art and art criticism.
4a. since all instances of dominant art are equally sublative of humanity's purposive struggle, dominant art is not merely art, but only one kind of omnological work. The importance of art subsists in its sublative function rather than its optical merits. The particular form of an omnological work is relatively unimportant.
4b. paintings are equivalent to "the spiritual life".
4c. art is equivalent to philosophy.
4d. sex is equivalent to art; is equivalent to philosophy.
4e. "a chef can discourse on cooking techniques as if they were moments in universal history".
Saturday, May 30, 2009
Zizek update
The world of Zizek studies was rocked this week with the publication of a five year old article by Ian Parker, which was basically sympathetic to Zizek, and which went some way toward explaining his writing, but which also contained an apocryphal anecdote about Zizek. The article is available as an MS Word file here:
www.discourseunit.com/publications_pages/parker_papers/2004%20PINS%20Zizek.doc
According to Parker, one of the themes addressed in Zizek's work is "how it [is] possible to engage in transformative personal change", which, if we really are "caught by ideology" and "caught by fantasy", literally coincides with the problem "how it is possible to be revolutionary". Zizek's greatest wheeze was probably his discovery of a new role model for "transformative personal change", previously unknown in the world of Mind Body Spirit publishing: Vladimir Lenin.
This is Zizek's "mischevious" side. What is strange is that Parker really has to spell it out, for those otherwise gifted souls involved in "artistic practice, personal change and political transformation", not to mention "quite difficult theory", who might otherwise "overidentify" with Zizek's drollery for no good reason whatsoever. In this Parker has done a great service to advanced education. In fact, one wonders whether Zizek himself wanted to signpost the article, in order to reign back some of the Ultra-Zizz graduate students.
The weaknesses of the rest of the article are the weaknesses of advanced education, which is dominated by people who are good at believing anything. One might have thought that pro "philosophers" would be able to decompose the Freudian system into the logical operations that constitute it (i.e. the "Freudian proof" underwrites each otherwise unrelated development of the Freudian system), but apparantly this isn't possible. Instead, all the "advanced studies" are layered on top of each other, as in a Hanna Barbera monster sandwich: "Hegelian phenomenology, Lacanian psychoanalysis", "Marxist politics".
Parker compares Zizek's "lessons" with "hysterical" explanations:
"Psychoanalytically speaking, and drawing on the work of Lacan, we could put it like this. The hysteric finds a way of speaking the truth through lies."
It is precisely the "Freudian proof" that guarantees for the "hysteric", that is, the client, their inevitable, though unconscious, omniscience over their own history. For Zizek to perform the same function for his readers, his particular clients, he would have to have the same omniscience over universal history. Zizek seems to have read maybe two books in the last five years (not counting the books he's written), and he's not really that clever anyway.
(see also Colonel Chabert's latest Zizek studies masterpiece, here.)
www.discourseunit.com/publications_pages/parker_papers/2004%20PINS%20Zizek.doc
According to Parker, one of the themes addressed in Zizek's work is "how it [is] possible to engage in transformative personal change", which, if we really are "caught by ideology" and "caught by fantasy", literally coincides with the problem "how it is possible to be revolutionary". Zizek's greatest wheeze was probably his discovery of a new role model for "transformative personal change", previously unknown in the world of Mind Body Spirit publishing: Vladimir Lenin.
This is Zizek's "mischevious" side. What is strange is that Parker really has to spell it out, for those otherwise gifted souls involved in "artistic practice, personal change and political transformation", not to mention "quite difficult theory", who might otherwise "overidentify" with Zizek's drollery for no good reason whatsoever. In this Parker has done a great service to advanced education. In fact, one wonders whether Zizek himself wanted to signpost the article, in order to reign back some of the Ultra-Zizz graduate students.
The weaknesses of the rest of the article are the weaknesses of advanced education, which is dominated by people who are good at believing anything. One might have thought that pro "philosophers" would be able to decompose the Freudian system into the logical operations that constitute it (i.e. the "Freudian proof" underwrites each otherwise unrelated development of the Freudian system), but apparantly this isn't possible. Instead, all the "advanced studies" are layered on top of each other, as in a Hanna Barbera monster sandwich: "Hegelian phenomenology, Lacanian psychoanalysis", "Marxist politics".
Parker compares Zizek's "lessons" with "hysterical" explanations:
"Psychoanalytically speaking, and drawing on the work of Lacan, we could put it like this. The hysteric finds a way of speaking the truth through lies."
It is precisely the "Freudian proof" that guarantees for the "hysteric", that is, the client, their inevitable, though unconscious, omniscience over their own history. For Zizek to perform the same function for his readers, his particular clients, he would have to have the same omniscience over universal history. Zizek seems to have read maybe two books in the last five years (not counting the books he's written), and he's not really that clever anyway.
(see also Colonel Chabert's latest Zizek studies masterpiece, here.)
Friday, May 29, 2009
Stress by Justice
What people saw in this video, although its makers intended something else, was a film propagandising against youths from the suburbs of Paris, responsible, apparently, for the troubles in France. But this was to insult the film makers, who only wanted to put their brand on these youths, or their imagined version of them. Because their own milieu in fact responded positively to the idea of youth gangs. Like Barthes said, as a collective project, instead of Gothic Cathedrals...
part of an ongoing collective project: a vast underclass fantasy
part of an ongoing collective project: a vast underclass fantasy
Wednesday, May 27, 2009
were postmods correct?
People mainly think arts criticism is the preserve of the effete upper classes, who cannot even make it in investment banking; hideous characters, like Batman villains who have not learned how to steal. This may or may not be accurate. We can argue against this negative picture that:
1. arts criticism is just a part of social criticism
2. Our Western Civilisation is heavily "artistic", judging by the resources devoted to the production and consumption of "art"
3. this mythology of social criticism still has to be accounted for - by social criticism
4. popular culture in the 90s wasn't so against it. (History is not just the present tacked onto an imaginary past, loosely based on 50s America)
(Social criticism was more acceptable in the 90s. This aspect of popular culture seems to have been deserted, to some extent, by other sections of popular culture, since popular culture is partly institutionally based, and the priorities of these institutions change, while some disappear. Antoine de Caunes is no longer on teevee. Probably people used to take more drugs in the 90s. Everyone wanted to be an "art terrorist", like Jean Baudrillard. It used to be that it was "kool" to know people who made electro concept albums, about corporal punishment in English Public Schools, for the Mo Wax record label. People still feared Japan, not China.)
A more serious indictment of arts criticism is: that identifying the "real" meaning of "works of art" is a false operation. For example, Lukacs identifies the nineteenth century naturalistic novel as being about reification. This wasn't the dominant impression for the producers or consumers of these novels, so isn't the theory a sort of imposture?
What Lukacs has done, or what I have tried to do, is to assume these "works of art" "reflect", more or less loosely, the concrete conditions in which they have been produced, not just economic events, of course, but memories, the weather, events lost to history. Criticism, then, ideally ought to run parallel to the "art" in "reflecting" these circumstances. That a great deal of guesswork is involved makes approximation and error inevitable. This method is, in principle, formaliseable, hence scientific. It has this advantage over "dominant response" criticism: if the dominant response to a "work of art" is that it's a scam, or just rubbish, or an aspect of our society's totalitarian tendency, this fails to account for its conditions of production.
1. arts criticism is just a part of social criticism
2. Our Western Civilisation is heavily "artistic", judging by the resources devoted to the production and consumption of "art"
3. this mythology of social criticism still has to be accounted for - by social criticism
4. popular culture in the 90s wasn't so against it. (History is not just the present tacked onto an imaginary past, loosely based on 50s America)
(Social criticism was more acceptable in the 90s. This aspect of popular culture seems to have been deserted, to some extent, by other sections of popular culture, since popular culture is partly institutionally based, and the priorities of these institutions change, while some disappear. Antoine de Caunes is no longer on teevee. Probably people used to take more drugs in the 90s. Everyone wanted to be an "art terrorist", like Jean Baudrillard. It used to be that it was "kool" to know people who made electro concept albums, about corporal punishment in English Public Schools, for the Mo Wax record label. People still feared Japan, not China.)
A more serious indictment of arts criticism is: that identifying the "real" meaning of "works of art" is a false operation. For example, Lukacs identifies the nineteenth century naturalistic novel as being about reification. This wasn't the dominant impression for the producers or consumers of these novels, so isn't the theory a sort of imposture?
What Lukacs has done, or what I have tried to do, is to assume these "works of art" "reflect", more or less loosely, the concrete conditions in which they have been produced, not just economic events, of course, but memories, the weather, events lost to history. Criticism, then, ideally ought to run parallel to the "art" in "reflecting" these circumstances. That a great deal of guesswork is involved makes approximation and error inevitable. This method is, in principle, formaliseable, hence scientific. It has this advantage over "dominant response" criticism: if the dominant response to a "work of art" is that it's a scam, or just rubbish, or an aspect of our society's totalitarian tendency, this fails to account for its conditions of production.
Wednesday, May 20, 2009
the social background of confusionism
I used to work for a company that marketed office supplies, in which capacity I learned that you can get specially laminated Kandinsky prints for the walls of your office or factory, for the purpose of motivating your staff. Even though I am sympathetic to a future in which call centre workers might take their easels and pots of paint into work, and work on their pictures during their lunch hour, or even while they're on the phone, I have some reservations about this enterprise. After all, motivational pictures generally serve to dramatise management turning a deaf ear toward their workers' legitimate concerns.
Jean Arp, whose pictures, duly laminated, might well be available from the same company said: “we had a dim premonition that power-mad gangsters would one day use art itself as a way of deadening men's minds”.
I suggested that the regulative idea of art that underlies Kandinsky's paintings follows from the attempt to apply functionalist logic to works that are supposed to have been produced in complete freedom. I don't just mean Kandinsky but his milieu, his class even, who took naturalistic conservatism for granted even as they became interested in the basically anti-bourgeois ideas of romantic anti-utilitarianism.
It is reasonable to explain a great many consumer products on functionalist grounds. A ballpoint pen, for example, can be understood as something that exists to solve a technical problem as efficiently as possible. It conforms to a technical limit, even if this limit involves criteria relating to its function as a commodity as well as as a writing implement. The same principle cannot be applied to so called cultured art, unless the ideas of art pour art are to be abandoned, and for all art to be treated as kitsch art, merely conforming to a need like any other product.
This culture, which could not accept inefficiency or kitsch, compelled its painters to imagine and to show a technical limit for art, at or around the point at which it becomes unintelligible. Such a limit was duly invented. Consequently we have a moral concept: "high art", and a descriptive concept: "abstract art", for the same sort of thing: the confusion and alterisation of culture.
Jean Arp, whose pictures, duly laminated, might well be available from the same company said: “we had a dim premonition that power-mad gangsters would one day use art itself as a way of deadening men's minds”.
I suggested that the regulative idea of art that underlies Kandinsky's paintings follows from the attempt to apply functionalist logic to works that are supposed to have been produced in complete freedom. I don't just mean Kandinsky but his milieu, his class even, who took naturalistic conservatism for granted even as they became interested in the basically anti-bourgeois ideas of romantic anti-utilitarianism.
It is reasonable to explain a great many consumer products on functionalist grounds. A ballpoint pen, for example, can be understood as something that exists to solve a technical problem as efficiently as possible. It conforms to a technical limit, even if this limit involves criteria relating to its function as a commodity as well as as a writing implement. The same principle cannot be applied to so called cultured art, unless the ideas of art pour art are to be abandoned, and for all art to be treated as kitsch art, merely conforming to a need like any other product.
This culture, which could not accept inefficiency or kitsch, compelled its painters to imagine and to show a technical limit for art, at or around the point at which it becomes unintelligible. Such a limit was duly invented. Consequently we have a moral concept: "high art", and a descriptive concept: "abstract art", for the same sort of thing: the confusion and alterisation of culture.
Wednesday, May 13, 2009
Kandinsky's triangle
In 1911 the greatest modern painter wrote:
"The spiritual life can be accurately represented by a diagram of a large acute triangle divided into unequal parts, with the most acute and smallest division at the top. The farther down one goes, the larger, broader, more extensive, and deeper become the divisions of the triangle. The whole triangle moves slowly, barely perceptibly, forward and upward, so that where the highest point is “today;” the next division is “tomorrow,” i.e., what is today comprehensible only to the topmost segment of the triangle and to the rest of the triangle is gibberish, becomes tomorrow the sensible and emotional content of the life of the second segment.
At the apex of the topmost division there stands sometimes only a single man. His joyful vision is like an inner, immeasurable sorrow. Those who are closest to him do not understand him and in their indignation, call him deranged: a phoney or a candidate for the madhouse."
Kandinsky's system is to apply the selectively naturalistic logic of Burke or Hayek to the masterpieces of art. The triangle is a metaphor for the sublation of the indefinite. Suppose a masterpiece of art is ordinarily defined along the lines of "an artwork considered to be especially excellent from a set of works of art". According to Kandinsky, masterpieces of art not only represent a kind of "conclusion" to the "syllogisms" of ordinary art. But also, ordinary art itself no longer needs to be submitted to critical judgement. It is formally subsumed by the masterpieces of art, and may remain undefined.
What Kandinsky has done is to apply the functionalist argument from Burke or Hayek to something which is meant to be, by the standards of art pour art, which he also wants to uphold, absolutely functionless. Some strange arguments follow from this...
"The spiritual life can be accurately represented by a diagram of a large acute triangle divided into unequal parts, with the most acute and smallest division at the top. The farther down one goes, the larger, broader, more extensive, and deeper become the divisions of the triangle. The whole triangle moves slowly, barely perceptibly, forward and upward, so that where the highest point is “today;” the next division is “tomorrow,” i.e., what is today comprehensible only to the topmost segment of the triangle and to the rest of the triangle is gibberish, becomes tomorrow the sensible and emotional content of the life of the second segment.
At the apex of the topmost division there stands sometimes only a single man. His joyful vision is like an inner, immeasurable sorrow. Those who are closest to him do not understand him and in their indignation, call him deranged: a phoney or a candidate for the madhouse."
Kandinsky's system is to apply the selectively naturalistic logic of Burke or Hayek to the masterpieces of art. The triangle is a metaphor for the sublation of the indefinite. Suppose a masterpiece of art is ordinarily defined along the lines of "an artwork considered to be especially excellent from a set of works of art". According to Kandinsky, masterpieces of art not only represent a kind of "conclusion" to the "syllogisms" of ordinary art. But also, ordinary art itself no longer needs to be submitted to critical judgement. It is formally subsumed by the masterpieces of art, and may remain undefined.
What Kandinsky has done is to apply the functionalist argument from Burke or Hayek to something which is meant to be, by the standards of art pour art, which he also wants to uphold, absolutely functionless. Some strange arguments follow from this...
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