Limited, Inc.
“I’m so bored. I hate my life.” - Britney Spears
Das Langweilige ist interessant geworden, weil das Interessante angefangen hat langweilig zu werden. – Thomas Mann
"Never for money/always for love" - The Talking Heads
Sunday, April 20, 2025
Sorites and the mean - not for the fainthearted
Wednesday, April 16, 2025
Joseph Roth and the dialectic of nationalism
As Stephane Pensel has pointed out, Joseph Roth seems to be a writer absolutely opposite to W.G. Sebald. Sebald wound his writing around his reading – books came to life in his demi-fiction, much as lines came to life in Paul Klee’s painting. As Klee said, an active line”, a freely drawn line, goes out for a walk. Sebald’s fiction is about taking the author, with a universe in his head, out for a walk. Roth, by contrast, often spoke about the virtues of reading little: “Please understand”, he wrote in a letter to a friend, “I don’t read. I hold with the good words of a man I otherwise don’t value, Karl Kraus, who wrote: A poet who reads is like a bartender who drinks.”
Thursday, April 10, 2025
Lucky Charms
I wrote an account of opening a cereal box – what is known, in the industry, as a billboard box – in 2022. Three years later, as the racist band of malcontents, led by Trump, Mr. Measles, and Mr. Bucket Shop, have decided to break America’s spirit and the world order, this account seems hopelessly nostalgic, a point to which we will only return in some phantasmal next stage of our neoliberal breakdown, our global shakes.
Does a market economy generate a market culture?
Does a market economy necessarily generate a market culture?
Frank Cunningham wrote an interesting
article on this topic that appeared in the Journal of Social Philosophy in 2005.
Clearly, Cunningham was a student of Karl Polanyi He quotes a pertinent passage
from one of Polanyi’s essays:
“This institutional gadget, which became the dominant force in the
economy—now justly described as a market economy—then gave rise to yet another,
even more extreme development, namely as a whole society embedded in the
mechanism of its own economy—a market society.”
This may seem like an esoteric theme, but, in actuality, it is the central
problem of our time. If the one always leads to the other, not only is
liberalism sunk, but the ability to meet the enormous environmental challenges
that are even now building in the oceans and the heavens is doomed to failure.
That will then doom to failure whole swathes of the planet. For instance, the
melting of the glacial system in the Himalayas will essential drain the source
of water for around 400 to 500 million Indians and Chinese. Although the
libertarians, Randians, Trumpians and other fine purveyors of superstition
probably don’t know this, without water, people die. The Randians, et al.,
would probably answer that at least they would die in freedom, able to freely
exchange their whole life savings for a couple of cups of water before
expiring. And think of the enormous flexibility this would put into the labor
market!
But these people are crazy. Unfortunately, at the moment they govern the
planet, write the newspapers, and release the bombs. To use the word in the
proper sense, they are the terrorist class.
This is my hook to Cunningham’s thesis.
Terror, or fear, is, according to Cunningham, one of the
great connectors between a market economy and a market society. Cunningham
makes the case that what is commonly viewed as greed – that insatiable avarice
for more money driving the ideal type capitalist (he quotes John D.
Rockefeller’s response to the question, how much do you need, by saying – “just
a little more”) is actually driven by the fear that is promoted by one of the
mechanisms of the market – its efficiency. That efficiency depends, in good old
capitalist fashion, on removing ‘unnatural’ restraints to the pricing of
commodities.
“Still, market economies are characterized by expansion of the market into all
domains. Part of the explanation for this is greed for profits, but I suggest
that at a more primordial level expansion derives from insecurity or, more
precisely, fear.
Competition among producers and retailers promotes efficiency by prompting them
to make and distribute things that people want and by keeping the costs of
those things down—this is the key premise of free market economic theory. But
at the same time, competitors must fear each other. Employment of wage labor
with the omnipresent threat of dismissal keeps wages down, thus reducing this
cost of production or distribution. Privatization of publicly needed goods
provides captive markets. From the side of working people and consumers, market
economies are also fearful places. Wage laborers must fear dismissal. Market
transactions may signal consumer preferences, but they do not guarantee that
goods produced in response to those preferences will be affordable.”
Cunningham’s point is that fear is what turns the relation of the economic and
social around – in Polanyi’s terms, what makes it the case that, in capitalism,
the economy is no longer embedded in social relationships, but social
relationships are embedded in the economy.
And how we see how fear and panic are used to drive even the
craziest and most marginal capitalist ideas.
To dispel fear itself – that is the center of Rooseveltian
liberalism. We have to get back to that.
The 21st century "left"
A little thought experiment-y thing occured to me as I walked to Le Progres, my little neighborhood cafe. If Churches were abolished, I thought, if there were no churches, neither Catholic nor Protestant, would there be Christians?
Tuesday, April 08, 2025
Shots in the Forest
Western man, don't you come around... Ft
Friday, April 04, 2025
Business journalism sucks sucks sucks sucks sucks sucks. Oh, and it sucks some more after that
Sorites and the mean - not for the fainthearted
It is said that Chryssipus the Stoic held that there were, for all problems, true solutions. But he also held that at times, we can’t see th...
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You can skip this boring part ... LI has not been able to keep up with Chabert in her multi-entry assault on Derrida. As in a proper duel, t...
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LI feels like a little note on politics is called for. The comments thread following the dialectics of diddling post made me realize that, ...
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In messing around in the vaults – the vaults under the surface of history and literature, as per the posts of last week - LI recently came...