by
James Wood
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In ordinary life, we don’t spend very long looking at things or at the natural world or at people, but writers do. It is what literature has in common with painting, drawing, photography. You could say, following John Berger, that civilians merely see, while artists look. In an essay on drawing, Berger writes that, “To draw is to look, examining the structure of experiences. A drawing of a tree shows, not a tree, but a tree being looked at. Whereas the sight of a tree is registered almost instantaneously, the examination of the sight of a tree (a tree being looked at) not only takes minutes of hours instead of a fraction of a second, it also involves, derives from, and refers back to, much previous experience of looking.” Berger is saying two things, at least. First, that just as the artist takes pains—and many hours—to examine that tree, so the person who looks hard at the drawing, or reads a description of a tree on the page, learns how to take pains, too; learns how to change seeing into looking. Second, Berger seems to argue that every great drawing of a tree has a relation to every previous great drawing of a tree, since artists learn by both looking at the world and by looking at what other artists have done with the world. Our looking is always mediated by other representations of looking.
Literature, like art, pushes against time's fancy - makes us insomniacs in the halls of habit, offers to rescue the life of things from the dead. A story is told about the artist Oskar Kokoschka, who was leading a live drawing class. The students were bored and doing dull work, so Kokoschka whispered to the model and told him to collapse to the ground. Kokoschka went over to the prone body, listened to his heart, pronounced him dead. The class was deeply shocked. Then the model stood up, and Kokoschka said: 'Now draw him as though you were aware he was alive and not dead!' What might that painting, in fiction, of a live body look like? It would paint a body that was truly alive, but in such a way that we might be able to see that a body is always really dying; it would understand that life is shadowed by mortality, and thus make a death-seeing metaphysics of Kokoschka's life-giving aesthetics. (Isn't this what makes serious noticing truly serious?) It might read like this passage from a late story by Saul Bellow, 'Something to Remember Me By'. It is a paragraph about a drunken Irishman, McKern, who has passed out on a couch: 'I looked in at McKern, who had thrown down the coat and taken off his drawers. The parboiled face, the short nose pointed sharply, the life signs in the throat, the broken look of his neck, the black hair of his belly, the short cylinder between his legs ending in a spiral of loose skin, the white shine of the shins, the tragic expression of his feet.' This is perhaps what Kokoschka had in mind: Bellow is painting, in words, a model, who might or might not be alive: a painting that threatens at any moment to become a still life. [...]
[...] the most far-reaching and significant of Marx's assumptions concerns the unchallenged power of private property rights in both production and exchange. It is in this context that he also assumes perfect competition in the market place. He accepts Adam Smith's theory of 'the hidden hand' although he insists that the hidden hand is that of labour not that of capital. Monopoly power is assumed away. Why he adopted these assumptions is an interesting question. My guess is that Marx's primary intent in Capital is to deconstruct the utopian vision of free market capitalism that the political economists of the time were promoting. He wishes to show how market freedoms do not produce a result that is beneficial for all, as Smith and others supposed, but that it would produce a dystopia of misery for the masses and immense wealth for the propertied capitalist class.
[...] we know from the analysis of the circulation of capital that a great deal of appropriation of value through predation occurs at the point of realisation. Increasing the minimum wage or creating a basic income will amount to naught if hedge funds buy up foreclosed houses and pharmaceutical patents and raised prices (in some cases astronomically) to line their own pockets out of the increased effective demand exercised by the population. Increasing college tuitions, usurious interest rates on credit cards, all sorts of hidden charges on telephone bills and medical insurance could steal away all the benefits. A population might be better served by strict regulatory intervention to control these living expenses, to limit the vast amount of wealth appropriation occurring at the point of realisation. [...]
he goes on to say that it's not a surprise that VCs support UBI, cus otherwise there'll be no demand for their products etc
which raises a deeper question: in such a world, where you have to jump through hoops to ensure that money circulates as a way of distributing goods, why stick to money? to think about more
[...] What originally appeared as a means to promote production becomes a relation alien to the producers. As the producers become more dependent on exchange, exchange appears to become more independent of them. Money is introduced as the servant of exchange but soon becomes its despotic master. Adam Smith's 'hidden hand' begins to take over. [...]
I like the analogy (aligns with mine for capitalism as a whole)
The irony is that the need to find a physical material representation for social values led to the adoption of an unimpeachable metallic base (gold and silver) for money that was so dysfunctional for daily use that it required symbolic representation of itself (paper and electronic moneys) to be effective. The symbolic moneys gradually became more dominant as trading expanded. Cutting out the metallic base in the early 1970s produced two symbolic systems--value and money--side by side in an awkward dialectical embrace.
can you think of value and money as being like the signified/signifier in a Saussurean view of language? or money as a Wittgensteinian language game
[...] debt is a claim on future value production that can be redeemed only through value production. If future value production is insufficient to redeem the debt then there is a crisis. Collisions between value and anti-value spark periodic monetary and financial crises. In the long run, capital has to confront ever-escalating claims on future values to redeem the anti-value building up within the debt economy and credit system. Instead of an accumulation of values and of wealth, capital produces an accumulation of debts that have to be redeemed. The future of value production is foreclosed.
Marx agreed that workers employed in circulation (e.g., in marketing) do not produce value (otherwise he would have to concede that value could be produced by market exchange). They can, however, be a source of surplus value. They are like machines which cannot produce value but whose use can increase relative surplus value by lowering the costs of wage goods and so diminishing the value of labour power thereby producing more surplus value for the capitalist. Costs entailed in circulation and state administration, Marx argued, should be viewed as deductions out of value and surplus value production. Costs of circulation in the market (other than those of transportation), no matter whether borne by the industrial or merchant capitalist, are considered as necessary deductions from potential value already produced. [...]
[...] If investors seek speculative gains in price-fixing markets for assets which have no value (such as art objects or currency and carbon futures) instead of investing in value and surplus value creation, then this indicates a pathway by which value can be leached out of the general circulation of capital to circulate as money in fictitious markets where no direct value production (as opposed to appropriation) occurs. When price signals betray the values they are supposed to represent then investors are bound to make erroneous decisions. If the money rate of profit is highest in property markets or other forms of asset speculation then a rational capitalist will place their money there rather than in the sphere of productive activity. The rational capitalist behaves irrationally from the standpoint of the reproduction process of capital as an evolving totality. The result could be a deepening tendency towards secular stagnation in the economy as a whole.
a corollary of this which he explains later on: in the presence of an asset bubble, cutting taxes on rich is a bad idea cus they will overwhelmingly invest in that over true production
[...] when technology becomes an independent business, it no longer responds primarily to needs, but it creates innovations that have to find and define new markets. It has to create new wants, needs and desires not only on the part of producers (through productive consumption) but also, as we see all around us on a daily basis, on the part of final consumers. This business thrives upon and actively promotes the fetish belief in technological fixes for all problems.