Re: nettime Political-Economy and Desire
Mark, There are two types of error: telling someone something they know already and not telling them something they don't know. I would rather commit the first type of error, but most of the people I know commit the second. So here goes. Louis Dumont is best known for his work on India. He wrote a book, Homo Aequalis, on western notions of the economy. This was translated into English as From Mandeveille to Marx. He wrote the foreword to the French edition of Polanyi's The Great Transformation in 1983. Vincent Descombes recently published an article on Dumont as a political thinker: http://www.laviedesidees.fr/Louis-Dumont-comment-penser-le.html?lang=fr. I was struck reading your two posts by the possible relevance of H.C. Binswanger's Money and Magic (A Critique of the Modern Economy in Light of Goethe's Faust). There's a review by Herman Daly here: http://www.jayhanson.us/page71.htm. Obviously there are many ways of approaching the idea that we are at a turning point in human history. For some time now, I have been pursuing a line that is closer to Felix's in the Facebook thread (posted today). This is that the old and the new spend some time together and are never completely separated. In particular, the decay of modernity since the 70s (I prefer to call it national capitalism) involves to some extent a reversion to what it originally claimed to supplant. Thus neoliberalism reverts to the Old Regime with its addiction to rentseeking behaviour while hiding behind the smokescreen of the free market (an issue raised by Lorenzo Tripodi in the other thread). This raises the question of whether a history of ideas is enough, given the confused social reality. I respond to this situation by supposing that Rousseau, Kant and Goethe have something to tell us because of their understanding of that previous transition which we repeat even as something unheard of also emerges. I like Hegel a lot and don;t think he deserves the bum rap Marx tried to pin on him. Moreover, he is the godfather of national capitalism (most explicitly in The Philosophy of Right). But he put the boot into Kant and this move has been repeated by all his epigones. Yet, for all the luminous moral/political philosophy and anthropology of Kant's last years, his crowning achievement was his third critique, the Critique of Judgment, which has a claim to having been the most influential book in the 19th century. So even if we stick to the history of ideas, there is the problem of radical shifts in fashion concerning what is important. In any case, for the question you raise about a revival of moral politics, I would feel obliged to start with Hegel's revolution against Kant when the categorical imperative was dismissed as bourgeois individualism. In my book The Memory Bank, I started out with a hypothesis not a million miles from yours conerning the rebirth of humanity in the digital revolution. I imagined that the impersonal society of the twentieth century was being replaced by the new scope for personalization offered by cheap information. But long before I finished the book, I realised that I was not describing a radical switch from impersonal to personal, but rather exploring how the relationship constituted by the personal/impersonal pair was changing under contemporary conditions. I think this is still important, but it grabs the attention less readily than my initial formulation. Maybe more pople will read your book than did mine. that's a consideration too. Best, Keith On Sun, Mar 4, 2012 at 4:42 PM, newme...@aol.com wrote: Brian: Mark, this one is truly fascinating. Send updates as you go. Thanks. Here's some more . . . The key question, I believe, is what happened to VIRTUE in these socio-economic transitions. # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
Re: nettime Political-Economy and Desire
Keith: Thanks for your thoughtful and generous reply. My fascination with the Germans is certainly driven in part by my inability to read the language (plus some potential ancestral linkage) and, alas, my French isn't proficient enough to read Dumont in the original but I'll gladly look to him in translation. Mandeville and Marx sound like fascinating bookends for an understanding of classical political-economy. The history of ideas is certainly inadequate, for the simple reason that much of the history of industrialism(capitalism) was never expressed publicly but rather persisted in secret protocols. Georg Simmel's 1906 The Sociology of Secrecy and Secret Societies is a welcome (albeit quite incomplete) companion to Weber's Protestant Ethic, describing aspects of these developments that Weber likely didn't have the courage to discuss. _http://www.brocku.ca/MeadProject/Simmel/Simmel_1906.html_ (http://www.brocku.ca/MeadProject/Simmel/Simmel_1906.html) As best I can tell, the robber barons got their *occultism* from the Germans (rather than the English/Scots) and given the apotheosis of German masonry in the intertwined 20th-century expansion of the SS and the invention of LSD (by the rival Anthroposophists), I find myself asking what exactly Hegel and his roommate Schelling were taking in those heady late 18th-century days of idealism. By the time we get to Nietzsche, there can be no doubt that powerful psychotropics were involved -- likely starting in his early student days in Leipzig and culminating on the streets of Turin. Given what we now know about the hallucinogenic origins of the Athenian DEMOS, you do have to wonder if the Illuminati (yes, a critical, if fleeting, group of German Freemasons) were also interested in replicating the Mysteries, as their code-naming of their headquarters in Ingolstadt as Eleusis might indicate. I was hoping that my mention of MAGIC would have stimulated some recollections and Binswanger is certainly a fruitful place to start. Yes, money is magic. And, the secular is often a disguise for the gnostic truth. At least two books appeared in the effort to better understand the origins of Nazi ideology which focus on 18th-century German masonry -- Ronald Gray's fascinating 1952 Goethe The Alchemist: A Study of Alchemical Symbolism in Goethe's Literary and Scientific Works (Cambridge) and Heinrich Schneider's 1947 Quest for Mysteries: The Masonic Background For Literature in the 18th Century (Cornell). As a fan of Hegel (and Marx) you might also benefit from John Milbank's 1990/2006 Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason (particularly Chapters 6 and 7, respectively for-and-against each of these two Germans), which is, alas, one of the few recent treatments I could find that tries to critically examine the assumptions of political-economy, as well as sociology. Yes, by initiating this thread, I was trying to find a few more. And, hopefully, this acquits me of some measure of error for not telling people something they don't already know. g Mark Stahlman Brooklyn NY # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
Re: nettime Political-Economy and Desire
Brian: Mark, this one is truly fascinating. Send updates as you go. Thanks. Here's some more . . . The key question, I believe, is what happened to VIRTUE in these socio-economic transitions. As you know, the *four* cardinal virtues and, thus, the foundation of Western culture -- from Plato to Aquinas (i.e. 2000 years) -- are fortitude, temperance, justice and prudence. Industrialism(Capitalism) gets rid of THREE of these, since humans are not expected to be just, prudent or temperate -- if their economic lives are ruled by desire. The *only* virtue that remains consistent with political-economy is FORTITUDE (i.e. power) -- so, very early, we wind up with the necessity for LEVIATHAN. Thus, social violence becomes mandatory for industrial economics. Accordingly, this becomes the basis of sociology and, if you will, the invention of society as the *regulator* by Comte/Durkheim and Weber/Simmel et al, building on Kant et al. Btw, this narrowing of the moral options is paralleled in philosophy with the discarding of formal, material and final causality -- also foundational from Aristotle to Aquinas -- to the exclusive benefit of *efficient* causality, which is the moral equivalent to FORCE. And, rarely discussed, this is also the reason for the strong attraction to MAGIC among key economic personalities (i.e. why those like John D. Rockefeller J. Pierpont Morgan were *occultists*, as was Nietzsche!) -- since summoning the devil is the ultimate expression of POWER. Maybe the cybernetics guys, with their interest in rationality, were also interested in power over entire populations: predictive power, the power to control. Yes, that's correct. I'm particularly familiar with the cybernetics people, since my father was in the room when that term was coined (as a protege of Norbert Wiener.) What systems science is all about (including today's complexity approach, as at Santa Fe Institute, Kevin Kelly et al) is power over people -- even when it is titled Out of Control. Btw, ironically, that is also why we know about Noam Chomsky. He was selected, funded and made famous by the systems/cybernetics guys at MIT because they hoped that his ur-grammar could be used to program people. It isn't -- as Chomsky himself revealed in some very important debates (after he got tenure). Yes, I believe that *digital* technology is stimulating a *moral* RENAISSANCE globally -- which is the reason for my re-reading the early political-economists. What the US is going through today is a re-discovery of the multiplicity of *virtue* as expressed in BOTH the Tea Party and OWS (i.e. where the virtue being emphasized for each is consistent with the ideologies of each of their wings -- justice for OWS and prudence/temperance for the Tea Party). However, as the ancients understood, there is no VIRTUE in separating these qualities and excessive emphasis on any of them leads in the direction of VICE. Furthermore, none of this makes any sense without grace, which, in turn, informs natural law. This DIGITAL *renaissance* of virtue also implies a revival of concerns about *vice* -- which is what is happening with the flesh hunt for corruption on the Chinese Internet, for instance. As it turns out, this is also why the Chinese Premier cited both Marcus Aurelius and Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments to Fared Zarcaria on his TV show last year -- as these are key documents in the capitalist assertion/rationalization of the solitary virtue of *fortitude*! The reason for my post was to take advantage of the wide-scope of reading by those on the nettime list to see if there are contemporary political-economists who are questioning the calculus of desire under *digital* economic conditions. Has anyone started to question the assumptions behind politcal-economy? Guess not, based on your own research? Mark Stahlman Brooklyn NY # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
Re: nettime Political-Economy and Desire
Mark, this one is truly fascinating. Send updates as you go. What you say about desire largely holds, I don't disagree. But over that three hundred years since Adam Smith, a major corrective to the moral theory of desire, which is visible already in Marx and explicit in Nietzsche, is that the real aim of accumulation is not acquisition or satisfaction of any kind, but power over other people. For a contemporary view of that, check out Bichler Nitzan, Capital as Power: Order and Creorder. Maybe the cybernetics guys, with their interest in rationality, were also interested in power over entire populations: predictive power, the power to control. best, BH # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
nettime political-economy and desire
Greetings On this question it might be worth it for those interested to take a look at The Passions and the Interests by Albert O. Hirschman at Princeton Univ Press. He illustrates the historical roots of what we can call the 'avaricious' side of capitalism; an issue that has been debated for many, many years and which ties into current conflicts. in matters of state let us not be guided by disorderly appetites... nor by violent passions, which agitate us in various ways as soon as they possess us... the Duke of Rordan (two or three centuries ago?) allan # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
Re: nettime Political-Economy and Desire
Morlock writes: There is pretty much a consensus that in the first world only about 10-15% need to work to provide *all* goods and services. Then, depending on the system, there are 15-20% of the armed guards (police, military, etc), and the rest are sort of ... redundant. Hence unemployment and poverty. Whence the 'hence'? I dare say i'm not the only person old enough to remember the days when these kinds of figures about production (not sure where they come from, but lets pretend) were used to promise us all (by whom?) that automation, and the information society, would lead to a paradisical world, in which we all exchanged whatever we wanted to produce in our spare time, and lived freely off perhaps working one day a week, or a couple of hours a week. The 'hence povery' here seems to me to arise from ignoring the 'structures' of work, 'structures' of ownership, 'structures' of power, and the 'structures' of distribution, amongst a few other things jon UTS CRICOS Provider Code: 00099F DISCLAIMER: This email message and any accompanying attachments may contain confidential information. If you are not the intended recipient, do not read, use, disseminate, distribute or copy this message or attachments. If you have received this message in error, please notify the sender immediately and delete this message. Any views expressed in this message are those of the individual sender, except where the sender expressly, and with authority, states them to be the views of the University of Technology Sydney. Before opening any attachments, please check them for viruses and defects. Think. Green. Do. Please consider the environment before printing this email. # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
Re: nettime Political-Economy and Desire
Mr. Ghost-of-Wells: As your email address indicates, you are apparently a fan of H.G. Wells. Of course, the Morlocks and Eloi (plural, one l) are the dramatis persona in Well's 1895 Time Machine. By the year 802,701 AD, _humanity_ (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_race) has evolved into two separate species: the Eloi and the _Morlocks_ (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morlock) . The Eloi are the child-like, frail group, living a _banal_ (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Banal) life of ease on the surface of the earth, while the Morlocks live underground, tending machinery and providing food, clothing and infrastructure for the Eloi. Each class evolved and degenerated from _humans_ (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human) . The novel suggests that the separation of species may have been the result of a widening split between different social classes, a theme that reflects Wells' sociopolitical opinions. (Wikipedia entry for ELOI.) Wells was a Fabian socialist and, as some nettimers know, someone who is far too little appreciated today -- especially in the Anglophonic world. In particular, Wells was featured in discussions of his 1928 The Open Conspiracy at the nettime Beauty-and-the-East confab in Ljubljana and who I also memorialized in my English Ideology and WIRED Magazine. _http://www.imaginaryfutures.net/2007/04/21/the-english-ideology-and-wired-m agazine/_ (http://www.imaginaryfutures.net/2007/04/21/the-english-ideology-and-wired-magazine/) Some of this helped to stimulate the infamous goofy-leftists-against-Wired thread on the WELL, hosted by sci-fi satirist Bruce Sterling, who claims he was deeply influenced by Wells. Fortunately, he's much funnier. The implications of Wells' construction of human nature is perhaps best summarized in Michael Vlahos' 1995 essay Byte City published by the think-tank that brought us Newt Gingrich (and some interesting early debates about the impact of the Internet), the now-defunct Progress and Freedom Foundation. In this essay, Vlahos (who now supports radical Islam and works at the US Naval War College), proposes a segmentation between the 5% Brain Lords (i.e. your crew with the laser pointers and Wells' New Samurai), the 20% Upper Servers who work as their support staff, the 50% of service workers and then the 25% who are permanently Lost. Radical? Honest? Hardly -- this is just what you would expect if you play out the implications of Hobbes, Bentham et al . . . just as H.G. Wells did (with an added dose of Santa Fe complex systems thrown in). What I'm looking for are those contemporary political-economists who have figured out that the 1950s shift to service economics, followed by the 1990s shift to information economics, has *fundamentally* changed this very old story. It has gotten very TIRED. Btw, sociologist Daniel Bell, who is often given credit for coining post-industrial, spends most of his 1973 The Coming Post-Industrial Society discussing why he (and his friends) are actually the Brain Lords and should therefore be put in charge -- as usual, sociology comes down to power. We flipped into something quite different when we went post-industrial (which Bell appears to not understand) -- so how do today's best thinkers describe this *new* situation? Mark Stahlman Brooklyn NY In a message dated 3/2/2012 10:03:22 A.M. Eastern Standard Time, morlockel...@yahoo.com writes: Desire is but hard-coded goals, that got hard-coded for reasons that were prevalent in the past. Now that the technology can cheat and s(t)imulate, the firmware is trashing in useless loops. Desires are amplified and have practically squeezed out ideas and ideologies. The cat has encountered the eternal laser pointer. ... # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
nettime Political-Economy and Desire
Folks: In preparation for some work on the impact of digital technology on political-economy, I have been re-reading Mandeville, Smith, Maltham, RIccardo and others (including various commentators like Marx) to try to sort out what *assumptions* were made about humans in the beginning of this inquiry. As many know, the overwhelming issue they were dealing back then with was passion and, in various ways, how to relate an economy which was driven by passion with earlier notions of morality. (Btw, the notion that human economic activity is somehow rational was not prominent among their assumptions and, from what I can tell, didn't actually take hold in economics until it was proposed by those like Herb Simon in the 1960s, who, arguably, were really promoting artificial intelligence and had to somehow fit computers without desires into their schema.) Perhaps most famously, Bernard de Mandeville's 1705 The Grumbling Hive: or Knaves turn'd Honest and his 1714 The Fable of the Bees: or, Private Vices, Publick Benefit lays out an early version for what today we might call the commodification of desire. The 300 year-long result of the changes chronicled by the early political-economists was global Industrialism (aka Capitalism?) and an apparently endless parade of large-scale production/consumption -- which, while certainly relying on a stream of technologies, was also fundamentally based on a revolution in moral sentiments. Yes, it is important that this result has greatly increased the world's population, life-expectancy and overall living standards -- including in places that industrialized but would not typically be called capitalist. What I'm wondering is if any contemporary political-economists have re-appraised the topic of desire and asked the question if one ever gets to the situation where enough is enough? Is there a limit to desire? If so, then what are the political-economic implications of changing that assumption about economic behavior? And, have any come to the conclusion that *yes* some have already passed that point in a meaningful way -- so that they are now living in a post-desire economy? The assumption most in the public sphere seem to make is that endless economic growth should be expected since the economy is endlessly driven by insatiable desires. Or, alternately, if economic growth isn't possible (even taking into account population growth), then we still need to satisfy those expanding desires some other way -- typically by redistributing what we already have. But is that a reasonable starting assumption -- specifically regarding endless growth in *desire* driving economic growth? Clearly, pre-capitalist society didn't work that way. Are the usual explanations (lack of technology, scarcity, etc.) -- particularly when presented by those who *assume* endless growth in desire -- credible? Indeed, why should post-capitalist society work that way? A related question: what happens to consumption (and growth) when an economy shifts from material goods to services (as some economies did when the term post-industrial was coined in the 1950s)? Moreover, what happens when an economy shifts to information (as some economies did when it became commonplace to refer to living in the information age)? Do people ever have enough stuff? And, is that the same question as can people ever have enough love? Enough sex? Enough excitement? Enough attention? Enough information? Most importantly -- do assumptions about human nature originally made in the 17th/18th century still apply today? Mark Stahlman Brooklyn NY # distributed via nettime: no commercial use without permission # nettime is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nett...@kein.org
