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The consumer is not, as in a previous era of liberalism, a purported equal trader on a market — leaving aside the problematic basis for thinking this ever came about — but a “capital” among others, an entrepreneur most often providing free labor that creates value for others. If the laborer in the factory was the paradigm of alienation in a previous era, today in the West s/he is the freelancer: signing up for one project at a time, often free of charge in order to gain experience or “clips” and without the social safety net of a pension or guaranteed healthcare coverage. We are each a company of one, committed to doing what used to take whole enterprises: we provide our own customer service, do our own investments and taxes, act as our own travel agencies, and, for those lucky enough to have 401(k)s and healthcare, pick and choose among competing options that we once left to the experts. “There’s an app for that!” also means “you’re on your own.”
It’s not just that corporations have speech, as Justice Kennedy argued in Citizens United, a case Brown cites as a prime example in her book. Those who do speak think of themselves more and more as corporations in a do-it-yourself culture. Make bad investments? Choose the wrong healthcare plan? Buy a home on which your bank is owed more than the house is now worth? This is just the risk that comes with newfound economic freedoms. But as we spiral in student loan, credit, and mortgage debts, we are decidedly unprofitable companies of one. The corporations take all the profits; we take all the risk.
i like this. relevant for book
[...] neoliberalism’s basis in financial capitalism, not manufacturing, means economics has no other end than itself. There are simply no values outside of this — no “interest” one would have other than maintaining one’s own market efficiency. The emblem for this is the internet economy, where companies that have never produced a profit (and never will) are famous for being famous, valued for being valued, and thus trade at stock prices well ahead of those dinosaur companies still producing widgets. Uber had its IPO in December valued at $40 billion, even if it plans to profit from entrepreneurs “liberating” the value of their cars by driving them as taxis. No matter — Uber’s early investors will largely have cashed out by the time institutional investors, such as pension plans, are left on the hook for its future negligible value.
i don't quite fully agree with this theory but it's an interesting perspective
[...] the only entry into the “job market” is through a university education that requires one to take on “freely” this debt. As Lazzarato notes, though, this debt takes out an advance on our future: who can afford to take a few years off to volunteer when one immediately graduates into dunning notices for student loans? Who can decide to be a doctor in poorer communities when only a more remunerative post will allow one to pay down one’s monthly student loan payments? And why don’t I deserve a high-paying job? After all, I, and no one else, has invested so much to get me to this point. After spending so much, don’t I deserve to make much more? Gone are the days where our best and brightest go on to serve in the Peace Corps or help NASA send human beings to the moon, since there are ever more apps to be made and financial products to be invented. In this way, our possibilities close before us. [...]
All the poor kids in South Pasadena lived in the Raymond Hill district. Immigrants and the POC who were not East Asian, because they also lived in the rich white areas. There were burglaries constantly, the sound of car alarms going off at all hours, police making their rounds at every odd hour. Everyone was wearing the wrong thing in this area — bad shorts and bad T-shirts, knockoff sneakers, budget gear. Everyone had bad haircuts, bad attitudes. All of us walked to and from school — this was an area for kids who had the keys to their house when they were still single digits, who barely knew their parents growing up because they worked so many jobs, who learned how to babysit when they were still babies as the siblings came in. This was the kind of area you wanted so badly to leave one day. It bred aspiration that way while the rest of South Pasadena was a wonderland everyone was a forever-citizen of; they all came back, but not the Raymond Hill kids, if we could help it. We were scared of the few white people who were our neighbors; anyone who was white who lived there had definitely done something extremely wrong in life. I made out with boys in their cars, made sure they parked uphill so my parents couldn’t somehow spy us from their bedroom window, worrying about why I was late. When it came time to leave, I went as far as possible, 3,000 miles away, and when I came back to visit, the greatest compliment I received was New York had really changed me.
[...] There were several male editors at RayGun who’d been fired from SPIN for sexual harassment, and they didn’t seem to have learned anything. But there was a power in being 19 and having so many eyes — especially their eyes — on me. I felt dangerous. I’d wear long, tight white club dresses and black platform sneakers with silver glitter face makeup — the kind of thing that would be a hit at a rave, but I felt fine wearing it to work. I made sure you could see through everything. What’s the worst that could happen? People thinking badly of me, people wanting me? It was 1997 and everything seemed mostly okay. One night my friend from high school and I went to a bar/club in L.A. called Louis XIV and an older French man took us to a private room where there were platters of coke. I had tried some at Sarah Lawrence, so it was with confidence that I took the rolled-up bill. Before the end of the night, we were with him and his friend in a dingy motel room — dingy but historic — the Saharan Motor Hotel on Sunset, which I’d always driven by and wondered about. He played music videos on a dying TV, rewinding Enrique Iglesias over and over, and eventually he began groping me. We managed to leave and laugh about it for days, zero trauma somehow, just another night where we’d skim danger but be fine. That summer, I thought I would have no future but I didn’t care because I was happy to be in that moment, the one time summer in L.A. felt good to me. Ever been so happy you wished you could die? I asked the VJ one day after he fucked me behind the Hollywood sign. He was almost my age now, and didn’t look at me when he said, Never.
I’ll start out Fanny Factoid then say it straight: L.A. is the most populous county in the nation; adjusted for the cost of housing we have the highest poverty rate; we’re the manufacturing capital of the US (used to be steel, now it’s tshirts and underpants and wut, u got a problem with that?); almost half the goods that arrive in this blighted and trinket-rich nation come through our two ports. If you want to know what the future looks like, and I mean its near-brutality, this is the place to live. Snow-capped mountains, citrus blossoms scenting the breeze, and scavenged train tracks with a bomb-blast of packaging materials for miles. Text me when you get to Union Station I’ll pick you up in front. — XOXO, Rachel Kushner, author of The Mars Room
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Honoré de Balzac, often said to be the greatest of French novel-ists, was born in Tours on May 20, 1799. His father was a civil servant who had survived the Revolution and risen under Napoleon; his mother came from a middle-class Parisian family. Raised by a wet nurse until the age of four, he was later sent to study at the Oratorian college in Vendôme. In 1814 the family moved to the Marais district of Paris, where Balzac attended the Lycée Charlemagne. Following three years as a legal clerk he earned a Bachelor of Law degree in 1819, but soon decided to pursue a literary career. His first effort, Cromwell, a verse tragedy, was a complete failure. During the 1820s Balzac supported himself as a hack journalist, turning out sensational novels and potboilers under various pseudonyms. He also tried to make money in several publishing ventures, all of which failed and left him saddled with debt. The appearance in 1829 of Les Chouans, the first work published under his own name, along with La Physiolo-gie du mariage, marked the beginning of Balzac's success as a nov-elist. Scènes de la vie privée (1830), a collection of short stories, quickly enhanced his reputation.
"Salute me for at this very moment I am in the throes of becoming a genius," Balzac announced to his sister in 1833, when he conceived the idea of pouring all his creativity into writing one great chronicle of the age, La Comédie Humaine. "[lt] was at first as a dream to me," he later explained. "French society would be the real author; I should only be the secretary. By drawing up an inventory of vices and virtues, by collecting the chief facts of the passions, by depicting characters, by choosing the principal incidents of social life, by composing types out of a combination of homogeneous characteristics, I might perhaps succeed in writing the history which so many historians have neglected: that of Manners. By patience and perseverance I might produce for France in the nineteenth century the book which we must all regret that Rome, Athens, Tyre, Memphis, Persia, and India have not bequeathed to us: a history of their social life."
Balzac devoted the rest of his life to this monumental task. Clothed in a white dressing gown that resembled a monk's robe and imbibing huge quantities of strong black coffee, he began writing at midnight and continued until midday. Famous for composing an entire work on successive galley proofs instead of submitting a finished manuscript to printers, Balzac published five or six books a year, with as many others in various stages of completion. Over a period of two decades he produced ninety-two novels filled with some two thousand characters. Among the most outstanding are Eugénie Grandet(1833), Le Père Goriot 1835), César Birotteau (1837), Ilusions perdues (1837-1843), Ursule Mirouët (1842), La Cousine Bette 1846), and Le Cousin Pons (1847).
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[...] "Balzac [was] the master unequalled in the art of painting humanity as it exists in modern society," judged George Sand. "He searched and dared everything.... Childlike and great; always envious of trifles and never jealous of true glory; sincere to the point of modesty, proud to the point of braggadocio; trusting himself and others; very generous, very kind, and very crazy, with an inner reserve of reason which controlled all aspects of his work; brazen yet celibate; drunk on water; intemperate regarding work, but sober in the other passions; materialistic and romantic to equal excess; credulous and skeptical; filled with inconsistencies and mysteries—that was Balzac."
In 1795 Jerome-Nicolas had not known how to read or write; in 1802 he had made no progress in either art; but by allowing a handsome margin for "wear and tear" in his estimates, he managed to pay a foreman's wages. The once easy-going journeyman was a terror to his "bears" and "monkeys." Where poverty ceases, avarice begins. From the day when Sechard first caught a glimpse of the possibility of making a fortune, a growing covetousness developed and sharpened in him a certain practical faculty for business--greedy, suspicious, and keen-eyed. He carried on his craft in disdain of theory. In course of time he had learned to estimate at a glance the cost of printing per page or per sheet in every kind of type. He proved to unlettered customers that large type costs more to move; or, if small type was under discussion, that it was more difficult to handle. The setting-up of the type was the one part of his craft of which he knew nothing; and so great was his terror lest he should not charge enough, that he always made a heavy profit. He never took his eyes off his compositors while they were paid by the hour. If he knew that a paper manufacturer was in difficulties, he would buy up his stock at a cheap rate and warehouse the paper. So from this time forward he was his own landlord, and owned the old house which had been a printing office from time immemorial.
He had every sort of luck. He was left a widower with but one son. The boy he sent to the grammar school; he must be educated, not so much for his own sake as to train a successor to the business; and Sechard treated the lad harshly so as to prolong the time of parental rule, making him work at case on holidays, telling him that he must learn to earn his own living, so as to recompense his poor old father, who was slaving his life out to give him an education.
annoyed cus the book is the kathleen raine translation but the epub that's supposed to be the same translation is actually a different one [from project gutenberg] so the text im saving is diff from what i read ... ugh
Then David endured the most painful of humiliations--the sense of shame for a parent; there was nothing for it but to be passive while his father poured out a flood of reasons--sordid, whining, contemptible, money-getting reasons--in which the niggardly old man wrapped his refusal. David crushed down his pain into the depths of his soul; he saw that he was alone; saw that he had no one to look to but himself; saw, too, that his father was trying to make money out of him; and in a spirit of philosophical curiosity, he tried to find out how far the old man would go. He called old Sechard's attention to the fact that he had never as yet made any inquiry as to his mother's fortune; if that fortune would not buy the printing-house, it might go some ways towards paying the working expenses.