Yann Boutang: a pseudo Marxist jester

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karl marx bday“Cognitive Capitalism” is an avalanche of words leading to murky marshes of not understanding.

In “Cognitive Capitalism” Yann Boutang tries to show he is a good Marxist fellow, knowing what valorization, surplus value and exploitation means. To understand “cognitive capitalism” he introduces “living labor” that “continues to exist”:

The solution is to split living labor into two, and to assume that — alongside living labor as an expenditure of energy that will be partially consumed and crystallized into new machinery in the following cycle — there is a living labor that continues to exist as a means of production throughout the cycle. In other words, this living labor is not destroyed as an intermediate consumption. It is consumed as bodily energy, certainly, but it also develops as a means of production of living as living labor. It builds itself as a skill, as a know-how resistant to its reduction to pure human capital that can be objectified.

How very strange. I understood that next to labor that went into machines (“dead labor” represented by fixed capital) there always was living labor consumed in the manufacture of goods or services for the consumer, represented by variable capital. So Boutang really proposes a third category: living labor that is not “destroyed” (=consumed) in the goods or services but which continues to be there as a kind of perpetuum mobile “a know-how resistant to its reduction to pure human capital that can be objectified” How very nice! A workforce with built-in resistance! Lees verder →

Why are there no borders on the internet?

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noordzuidkorea

 (J’accuse)

Almost every week now there are reports of major hacks and other cybercrimes, mostly committed from or by the usual suspicious countries. The hack of the personnel database of the US government, the German parliament, the kaspersky hack to name the most recent. Reports of the inherent unsafety and possible instability of the internet are also quite frequent. On the other hand it turns out that China is quite capable of censoring. So one begins to wonder why the common opinion among experts is that nothing structural can be done about it. Lees verder →

A scary view on the roots of anti-Semitism

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From the excellent exposé on Hannah Arendt by Corey Robin I extract this long citation about a theory on the roots of anti-Semitism (p10):

There’s an old theory about anti-Semitism that goes something like this: The reason so much of the world hates the Jew is that the Jew asks so much of the world. From Sinai to the soviets, from Moses to Marx, the Jew has sat in judgment, insisting that the world be other, better, than it is, and always for the sake of an ideal so remote—a God who cannot be represented, a utopia that cannot be sketched out—that it requires a hallucinatory zeal to sustain it. The “blackmail of transcendence” is what the literary critic George Steiner calls it: the insistence that the world take a leap into the void in the name of a God who cannot be named.

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Capital should be in solid hands

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It doesn’t matter if capital is concentrated in a few hands, as long as these are the right hands. solide handen

This is my answer to the outcry of Mr Piketty in his monumental study about the growing inequality in the possession of capital. As others have signaled Pikettys’ study misses the central idea of Marx: that capital is a social relation. As long as the character of this relation is not altered, the redistribution of capital over more people or even acquisition of it by the state will not help us one bit. If possible at all.

This fundamental relation is, as is well known, the exploitation of labor to extract profit, and using this profit for accumulating capital. Hence growth and concentration are inevitable in this system. Lees verder →

Unsettling the soul

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Visitors-hand

Yesterday, I experienced the new pictorial poem by Godfrey Reggio and Philip Glass titled “Visitors” (2013). To call it “viewing a movie” would be a vast understatement. As was the case with Koyaanisqatsi (1982) it left me more or less stunned and at some moments moved me to tears. Afterwards Glass and Reggio were present in a very sober setting to answer questions from the public. Of course there were some questions about the intention of “Visitors”. The answer was a bit too postmodern: there were no intentions, every observer could make up his own mind… I would be surprised if interpretations do not point in one direction: the loosening or relativization of the “self”. Though not a word is spoken, “Visitors” shows the machinery at work producing the self, the personality accurately. It does so by contrasting changes in human facial and bodily expression with that of an animal (I won’t spoil which), the emotional content of decaying human artifacts (building, attraction park, rubbish) and the flow of nature, dead and alive, triggering all kinds of “meaning” and so effectively setting the spectators meaning-producing machinery at work while at the same time unsettling it. This deconstruction -to use a postmodern term- of the soul, leaving it speechless, cannot be praised enough these days, where all egos are pumped up to the max. Maybe it wasn’t the intention of the makers. It certainly was the result. Reggio answered on a question about what words or phrases had inspired him when making “Visitors” that he had the intention to name the work “The holy see”. He refrained from it fearing it would produce too much misunderstanding. Well, not for me. “Visitors”, although expressing fleetingness, does not directly reference personality or the soul. Lees verder →

The Bloody Honor

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Banaz sisterBanaz’ sister (still from movie).

Yesterday (Februari 16) I saw Banaz: a love story and attended the discussion of the documentary in “de Balie” (Amsterdam) with creator Deeyah, host Eddy Terstall and the public.

It’s a remarkable and moving documentary about the vicious murder in 2006 by her own family of 20 year old Banaz, daughter of a strictly traditional Kurdish Muslim family escaping Saddam Hussein’s regime and granted asylum in the UK. This murder was arranged by the father and uncle because of the loss of (male) family honor inflicted by her running away from the arranged marriage with a cruel husband and a subsequent love affair with a man of her own choice. Lees verder →

Reading Dennett

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I am reading Daniel Dennett’s new book “Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking“. I think the main question in all of his writing, is: what is the “I” that is reading and how is it doing that and other things I’s usually do?

Reading is one of the most complex and problematic processes the I can be involved in. An excellent possibility to see what his answer is. Of course that’s only my interpretation of it.

The fundamentals of Dennett’s philosophical universe are:

  1. Materialism. In this book also formulated as “there is no wondertissue”: Everything finally has to be explained as material processes. There is no place for god, souls, ghosts, funny “quantumleaps” or intelligence from outer space.
  2. Determinism. This follows directly from (1). Nevertheless it should be noted as a separate and important point.
  3. Evolution. Especially in the development of culture and memes and the development of thought and the subject.
  4. The “I” is not a material part of the brain that can be isolated. It cannot be a theater somewhere in the center where a homunculus watches the inputs and sends out its responses. It is the systemic result or effect of deterministic processes running all over in the brain.
  5. For each and every “I” there is some faculty called “free will” that produces decisions about what to do. For this “I” (and its social environment) the outcome could have been otherwise. The “I” is accountable for its decisions. The fact that all the known and unknown (as seen from the standpoint of “I”) factors that lead up to a choice are determined processes (as in (2)) and thus the decision itself is too, is called compatibilism. For an omniscient world there can be no free will. For an individual with restricted knowledge there can be. An omniscient world (or individual) is impossible by definition. Lees verder →