As I remarked earlier, both Adam Smith and Nietzsche thus anticipate Levi-Strauss's famous argument that language is the "exchange of words." The remarkable thing here is that so many have managed to convince themselves that in all this, Nietzsche is providing a radical alternative to bourgeois ideology, even to the logic of exchange. Deleuze and Guattari, most embarrassingly, insist that "the great book of modern ethnology is not so much Mauss' The Gift as Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morals. At least it should be," since, they say, Nietzsche succeeds in interpreting "primitive society" in terms of debt, where Mauss still hesitates to break with the logic of exchange. On their inspiration, Sarthou-Lajus has written philosophy of debt as an alternative to bourgeois ideologies of exchange, that, she claims, assume the prior autonomy of the person. Of course what Nietzsche proposes is not an alternative at all. It's another aspect of the same thing. All this is a vivid reminder of how easy it is to mistake radicalized forms of our own bourgeois tradition as alternatives to it (Bataille [1993], who Deleuze and Guttari praise as another alternative to Mauss in the same passage, is another notorious example of this sort of thing).Perhaps not a passage that will cause you to run to the bookstore (maybe crab-walk) so here's another I just enjoyed:
Similar ideas have become the basis of that most basic, dominant institution of our present economic life: wage labor, which is, effectively, the renting of our freedom in the same way that slavery can be conceived as its sale. It's not only our freedoms that we own; the same logic has come to be applied even to our own bodies, which are treated, in such formulations, as really no different than houses, cars, or furniture. We own ourselves, therefore outsiders have no right to trespass on us. Again, this might seem an innocuous, even a positive notion, but it looks rather different when we take into consideration the Roman tradition of property on which it is based. To say that we own ourselves is, oddly enough, to cast ourselves as both master and slave simultaneously. "We" are both owners (exerting absolute power over our property) and yet somehow, at the same time, the things being owned (being the object of absolute power). The ancient Roman household, far from having been forgotten in the mists of history, is preserved in our most basic conception of ourselves—and, once again, just as in property law, the result is so strangely incoherent that it spins off into endless paradoxes the moment one tries to figure out what it would actually mean in practice. Just as lawyers have spent a thousand years trying to make sense of Roman property concepts, so have philosophers spent centuries trying to understand how it could be possible for us to have a relation of domination over ourselves. The most popular solution—to say that each of us has something called a "mind" and that this is completely separate from something else, which we can call "the body," and that the first thing holds natural dominion over the second—flies in the face of just about everything we know about cognitive science. It's obviously untrue, but we continue to hold onto it anyway, for the simple reason that none of our everyday assumptions about property, law, and freedom would make any sense without it.See, kinda funny, right? Not more than a few pages go by without him making light of us confused you-mans.
I want to share the terrifying response to a infrastructural breakdown in town yesterday, real quick: the local grocery store shut-down, resulting from this problem (which will most certainly be more regular and longer lasting in the near future). After being turned away, very politely by a store-worker, I hung out for a minute to see how my neighbors would respond. Rage. Angry fucks. Shock. I can't choose from almost-everything-I-can-imagine-eating!?!? Ahhhh!!! If this was enough to get folk all riled up, a chilling scene, for those of us who see various "disruptions" as the mode of the future times.
What are you talking about? I have no sense of humor of any kind! I especially lack irony.
ReplyDeleteAn interesting phenomenon here, over the "holiday" season. The state liquor store shares a parking lot with the closest grocery chain. There was some construction (well, a lot) at the intersection light leading into that parking lot. We sat in queue for maybe fifteen minutes - which is a long time to sit at a light, I guess.
ReplyDeleteStarted noticing people in front and around me throwing up their hands, making angry faces looking generally pissed.
I wondered if it was because they couldn't get to the grocery store or because the promised land of the liquor store was just over the horizon, but still out of reach.
After we all eventually pulled into the parking lot - no one got of their car to walk into the liquor store.
Not being able to get into the grocery store, and losing fifteen minutes of the day in the process, seems to make people very, very angry.
Which says a lot, as you imply above. What will people do (especially where I live) when oil spikes and food shortages mean something approaching hunger?
Whole lot of cold season around here. Not too many farms left.
Yes yes, Jack, the analogy that our "economy" runs like a racehorse (sort of impressive when not falling to catastrophic injury) is fitting.
ReplyDeleteOf course, the pissy people I observed were obviously not angry because they'd go hungry that night, rather — as your anecdote reveals — their expectations were fucked with... and this is a grave offense. For a few years now I've strained to reorient my eating patterns (generally meaning I eat the same stuff, from the garden and canning, lacking the variety I've grown accustomed to).
And to your question, what will people do? Hopefully figure ways to alleviate the mental and physical anguish that is coming down the soon-to-be-less-traveled roads. But it doesn't look good, does it.