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by ontheotherhand Tue Nov 29, 2016 12:08 amIma slične argumente Bodrijar, na koga je Niče dosta uticao. U Potrošačkom društvu kaže kako kapitalistička i komunistička društva vide jednakost kao jednakost pred Objektima, dok prava jednakost ljudskih mogućnosti ostaje zanemarena. Živimo u simulakrumu, pod znakovima obilja i bogatstva, dok pravo obilje i bogatstvo nestaju.
I na kraju knjige gde referiše na antropologa Maršala Salinsa:
Kasnije je razvio kocept simboličke razmene gde se oslanja na Batajev koncept generalne ekonomije. Marksizam kritikuje kapital sa pozicija robovske dijalektike, buržoaskog morala, instrumentalne racionalnosti i utilatirnih vrednosti.
A u Ogledalu proizvodnje piše da je jedina prava revolucionarns perspektiva sa one strane ekonomske vrednosti. Da bismo doveli u pitanje proces koji nas podređuje sudbini ekonomije i teroru vrednosti, i da bismo iznova sagledali pražnjenje energije i simboličku razmenu, koncepti proizvodnje i rada koje je razvio Marks kao i sama politička ekonomija moraju se analizirati kao ideološki koncepti utkani u opšti sistem vrednosti.
- Spoiler:
- The Egalitarian Ideology of Well-Being
The whole of the discourse on needs is based on a naïve anthropology: that of the natural propensity to happiness. Happiness, written in letters of fire behind the least little advert for bathsalts or the Canary Islands, is the absolute reference of the consumer society: it is the strict equivalent of salvation. But what is this happiness which haunts modern civilization with such ideological force?
Here again one has to revise all spontaneous conceptions. The ideological force of the notion of happiness does not originate in a natural propensity on the part of each individual to realize that happiness for himself. It derives, socio-historically, from the fact that the myth of happiness is the one which, in modern societies, takes up and comes to embody the myth of Equality. All the political and sociological virulence with which that myth has been charged since the industrial revolution and the revolutions of the nineteenth century has been transferred to Happiness. The fact that Happiness initially has that signification and that ideological function has important consequences for its content: to be the vehicle of the egalitarian myth. Happiness has to be measurable. It has to be a well-being measurable in terms of objects and signs; it has to be `comfort', as Tocqueville put it, already noting this trend of democratic societies towards ever more well-being as a reduction of the impact of social misfortune and an equalization of all destinies. Happiness as total or inner enjoyment -- that happiness independent of the signs which could manifest it to others and to those around us, the happiness which has no need of evidence -- is therefore excluded from the outset from the consumer ideal in which happiness is, first and foremost, the demand for equality (or distinction, of course) and must, accordingly, always signify with `regard' to visible criteria. In this sense, Happiness is even further removed from any collective `feast' or exaltation since, fuelled by an egalitarian exigency, it is based on individualistic principles, fortified by the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen which explicitly recognize the right to Happiness of everyone (of each individual).
The `Revolution of Well-Being' is heir to, or executor of, the Bourgeois Revolution, or simply of any revolution which proclaims human equality as its principle without being able (or without wishing) fundamentally to bring it about. The democratic principle is then transferred from a real equality of capacities, of responsibilities, of social chances and of happiness (in the full sense of the term) to an equality before the Object and other manifest signs of social success and happiness. This is the democracy of social standing, the democracy of the TV, the car and the stereo, an apparently concrete but, in fact, equally formal democracy which, beyond contradictions and social inequalities, corresponds to the formal democracy enshrined in the Constitution. Both of these, the one serving as an alibi for the other, combine in a general democratic ideology which conceals the absence of democracy and the non-existence of equality.
In the mystique of equality, the notion of `needs' is indissociable from that of well-being. Needs point to a reassuring universe of ends, and this naturalistic anthropology lays the ground for the promise of a universal equality. The implicit argument is as follows: all men are equal before need and before the principle of satisfaction, since all men are equal before the use-value of objects and goods (whereas they are unequal and divided before exchange-value). Need being indexed to use-value, we have here a relationship of objective utility or natural finality, in the face of which there is no longer any social or historical inequality. At the meat-and-drink level (use-value), there are no proletarians, no privileged individuals.
Thus the complementary myths of well-being and needs have a powerful ideological function of reducing, of eliminating the objective, social and historical, determinations of inequality. The whole political game of the welfare state and consumer society consists in surmounting their contradictions by increasing the volume of goods, with the prospect of an automatic equalization by quantity and a level of final equilibrium, which would be that of total well-being for all. Communist societies themselves speak in terms of equilibrium, of `natural' individual or social needs, needs `harmonized' and free of all social differentiation or class connotation. In this, they too drift from a political solution to a definitive solution by abundance, substituting the formal equality of goods for the social transparency of exchanges. Thus we also see the `Revolution of Well-Being' taking over from the social and political revolution in the socialist countries.
If this perspective on the ideology of well-being is correct (namely, that that ideology is a vehicle for the myth of formal equality `secularized' in goods and signs), then it is clear that the eternal problem of whether consumer society promotes or hinders equality, whether it is a fully achieved democracy (or on the way to being so) or the opposite -- merely restoring earlier inequalities and social structures -- is a false problem. Whether or not one is able to prove that consumption possibilities are being equalized (income differentials being flattened out, social redistribution, the same fashion for everyone, along with the same TV programmes and holiday destinations), this means nothing, since posing the problem in terms of the equalization of consumption is already to substitute the pursuit of objects and signs (level of substitution) for the real problems and their logical and sociological analysis. All in all, analysing Affluence does not mean seeking its verification in the statistics, which can only be as mythic as the myth, but radically changing focus and approaching the myth of Affluence with a logic other than its own. Analysis does, of course, require that we assess affluence in terms of figures, that we draw up the balance sheet of well-being. But the figures do not speak for themselves, and they never provide any counter-argument. Only interpretations speak, sometimes to one side of, sometimes against, the figures. Let us listen to what they have to say.
The most stubborn and unyielding of these is the idealist version:
- growth means affluence;
- affluence means democracy.
It being impossible to conclude that this state of total felicity is imminent (even at the statistical level), the myth becomes more `realistic' and we have the ideal-reformist variant: the large-scale inequalities of the first phase of growth are diminishing, there is no `iron law' any longer, incomes are becoming harmonized. The hypothesis of a smooth, continuous progress towards ever more equality is, of course, refuted by certain facts (the `Other America': 20 per cent living in poverty, etc.). But these point to a temporary dysfunction, to teething troubles. Growth, while producing certain inegalitarian effects, implies an overall, longterm democratization. Thus, in Galbraith's view, the problem of equality/inequality is no longer relevant. It was linked to the problem of wealth and poverty and the structures of the `affluent' society have resolved the problem, despite an unequal redistribution. The `poor' (the 20 per cent) are those who remain, for one reason or another, outside the industrial system, outside growth. The principle of growth itself remains inviolate; it is homogeneous and is tending to homogenize the entire social body
The basic question which arises at this level is the question of this "poverty". For the idealists of affluence, it is "residual"; it will be cleared up by additional growth. Yet it seems to carry on down the post-industrial generations and all efforts to eliminate it (particularly in the USA, with the "great society") seem to run up against some mechanism of the system which seems to reproduce it functionally at each stage of development, like a kind of drag on growth, a kind of mechanism indispensable to the general wealth. Should we believe Galbraith when he imputes this inexplicable residual poverty to the dysfunctions of the system (the priority accorded to military and other wasteful expenditure, a lagging of public services behind private consumption, etc.) or should we turn his argument around and conclude that growth, in its very dynamic, is based on this disequilibrium? Galbraith is very contradictory on this: all his analyses tend to demonstrate in a sense how its defects are functionally implicated in the system of growth, yet he recoils before the logical conclusions which would challenge the system itself and recasts everything in a liberal perspective.
Generally, the idealists do not go beyond this paradoxical affirmation: in spite of everything, and by a devilish inversion of its aims (which, as everyone knows, cannot but be beneficent), growth produces, reproduces and restores social inequality, privileges, disequilibria, etc. They will admit, for example, as Galbraith does in The Affluent Society, that, ultimately, it is an increase in production which takes over the redistributive role ("As there comes to be more and more... so there will in the end be enough for everyone" -- these principles, based on the physics of fluids, are never true in a social relations context, where, as we shall see below, things work in precisely the opposite way.) Moreover, from these principles, Galbraith derives an argument for the underprivileged, to the effect that even those on the bottom rung of the ladder have more to gain from an accelerated growth of production than from any other form of redistribution. But this is all specious: for, if growth grants everyone access to an income and a volume of goods which are higher in absolute terms, what is sociologically characteristic is the process of distortion which sets in at the very heart of growth. It is the rate of distortion which subtly structures growth and gives it its true meaning. It is so much easier to content oneself with the spectacular disappearance of a particular extreme form of penury or certain secondary inequalities, to assess affluence by statistics and general quantities, by absolute increases and gross national products, than to analyse it in terms of structures! Structurally, it is the rate of distortion which is significant. It is that rate which, at an international level, marks the growing distance between the underdeveloped countries and the overdeveloped nations, and also, within those nations, the lower incomes falling further behind the higher, failing industries losing ground to the high-technology sectors, rural areas losing out to urban, industrial areas, etc. Chronic inflation allows this relative pauperization to be masked, by revising all nominal values upwards, whereas the calculation of the relative functions and averages would show up instances of partial decline at the bottom of the scale, and, at any event, a structural distortion throughout. There is no point constantly arguing that this is temporary or conjunctural when one sees the whole logic of the system sustaining it and the system indeed depending upon it for the fulfilment of its aims. At best, we can say the system stabilizes around a certain rate of distortion or, in other words, stabilizes, whatever the absolute volume of wealth, at a point which includes a systematicinequality.
The only way, in fact, to escape the idealist dead-end of this gloomy listing of dysfunctions is to admit that there is a systematic logic at work here. It is also the only way of getting beyond the false problematic of abundance and scarcity which, like votes of confidence in parliamentary circles, functions to stifle all discussion.
There is not in fact -- and never has been -- any "affluent society", any more than there is an "indigent society", since ever society of whatever kind and whatever the volume of goods or available wealth is geared both to be a structural excess and a structural penury. The excess may be the portion set aside for the gods or for sacrifice; it may be sumptuary expenditure, surplus value, economic profit or prestige budgets. It is, at any rate, that luxury levy which defines both the wealth of a society and its social structure, since it is always the prerogative of a privileged minority and its function is precisely to reproduce caste and class privilege. At the sociological level there is no equilibrium. Equilibrium is the ideal fantasy of economists which is contradicted, if not by the very logic of society as a condition, then at least by all known forms of social organization. Every society produces differentiation, social discrimination, and that structural organization is based on the use and distribution of wealth (among other things). The fact that a society enters upon a phase of growth, as our industrial society has done, changes nothing in this process. Quite the contrary, indeed, in a certain way the capitalist system (and the productivist system in general) has been the culmination of that functional unravelling, that disequilibrium, by rationalizing it and generalizing it in all respects. The spirals of growth are arrayed around the same structural axis. As soon as the fiction of GDP is abandoned as the criterion of affluence, we have to admit that growth neither takes us further from, nor brings us closer to, affluence. It is logically separated from it by the whole social structure which is, here, the determining instance. A certain type of social relations and social contradictions, a certain type of "inequality", which used to perpetuate itself in the absence of economic progress, is today reproduced in and through growth.
This means that we must take another view on growth. We shall no longer say with the enthusiasts: "Growth produces affluence and therefore equality." Nor shall we take the extreme opposite view: "Growth produces inequality." Overturning the false problem of whether growth is egalitarian or inegalitarian, we shall say that it is growth itself which is a function of inequality. It is the need of the inegalitarian social order -- the social structure of privilege -- to maintain itself that produces and reproduces growth as its strategic element. To put it yet another way, the internal autonomy of (technological, economic) growth is weak and secondary by comparison with that determination by the social structure.
Growth society is, overall, the product of a compromise between egalitarian democratic principles, which for support within that society can draw on the myths of Affluence and Well-Being, and the fundamental imperative of maintaining an order of privilege and domination. That society is not founded on technological progress. It is that mechanistic view which fuels the naive illusion of future affluence. It is, rather, this contradictory dual determination which underpins the possibility of technological progress.
I na kraju knjige gde referiše na antropologa Maršala Salinsa:
- Spoiler:
- For Sahlins, it was the hunter-gatherers (the primitive nomadic tribes of Australia, the Kalahari, etc.) who, in spite of their absolute "poverty", knew true affluence. The primitive people of those societies have no personal possessions; they are not obsessed by their objects, which they throw away as and when they need to in order to be able to move about more easily. They have no apparatus of production, or "work": they hunt and gather "at their leisure", as we might say, and share everything within the group. They are entirely prodigal: they consume everything immediately, make no economic calculations and amass no stores. The hunter-gatherer has nothing of that bourgeois invention: economic man, about him. He is ignorant of the basic principles of Political Economy. And, indeed, he never exploits human energies, natural resources, or the effective economic possibilities to the full. He sleeps a lot. he has a trust -- and this is what characterizes his economic system -- in the wealth of natural resources, whereas our system is characterized (ever more so, which technical advance) by despair at the insufficiency of human means, by a radical, catastrophic anxiety which is the deep effect of the market economy and generalized competition.
The collective "improvidence" and "prodigality" characteristic of primitive societies are the sign or real affluence. We have only the signs of affluence. Beneath a gigantic apparatus of production, we anxiously eye the signs of poverty and scarcity. But poverty consists, says Sahlins, neither in a small quantity of goods, nor simply in a relation between ends and means: it is, above all, a relation between human beings.
But here we are once again speaking in morose, prophetic terms, caught in the trap of the Object and its apparent plenitute. Now, we know that the Object is nothing and that behind it stands the tangled void of human relations, the negative imprint of the immense mobilization of productive and social forces which have become reified in it. We shall await the violent irruptions and sudden disintegrations which will come, just as unforeseeably and as certainly as May 1968, to wreck this white Mass.
Kasnije je razvio kocept simboličke razmene gde se oslanja na Batajev koncept generalne ekonomije. Marksizam kritikuje kapital sa pozicija robovske dijalektike, buržoaskog morala, instrumentalne racionalnosti i utilatirnih vrednosti.
- Spoiler:
- The term “symbolic exchange” was derived from Georges Bataille's notion of a “general economy” where expenditure, waste, sacrifice, and destruction were claimed to be more fundamental to human life than economies of production and utility (1988 [1967]). Bataille's model was the sun that freely expended its energy without asking anything in return. He argued that if individuals wanted to be truly sovereign (e.g., free from the imperatives of capitalism) they should pursue a “general economy” of expenditure, giving, sacrifice, and destruction to escape determination by existing imperatives of utility.
For Bataille, human beings were beings of excess with exorbitant energy, fantasies, drives, needs, and heterogeneous desire. At this point, Baudrillard presupposes the truth of Bataille's anthropology and general economy. In a 1976 review of a volume of Bataille's Complete Works, Baudrillard writes: “The central idea is that the economy which governs our societies results from a misappropriation of the fundamental human principle, which is a solar principle of expenditure” (1987: 57). In the early 1970s, Baudrillard took over Bataille's anthropological position and what he calls Bataille's “aristocratic critique” of capitalism that he now claims is grounded in the crass notions of utility and savings rather than the more sublime “aristocratic” notion of excess and expenditure. Bataille and Baudrillard presuppose here a contradiction between human nature and capitalism. They maintain that humans “by nature” gain pleasure from such things as expenditure, waste, festivities, sacrifices, and so on, in which they are sovereign and free to expend the excesses of their energy (and thus to follow their “real nature”). The capitalist imperatives of labor, utility, and savings by implication are “unnatural,” and go against human nature.
Baudrillard argues that the Marxian critique of capitalism, by contrast, merely attacks exchange value while exalting use value and thus utility and instrumental rationality, thereby “seeking a good use of the economy.” For Baudrillard:
This passage is highly revealing and marks Baudrillard's switch to an “aristocratic critique” of political economy deeply influenced by Bataille and Nietzsche. For Bataille and Baudrillard are presenting a version of Nietzsche's aristocratic “master morality” where “superior” individuals create their own values and their life articulates an excess, overflow, and intensification of creative and erotic energies. For some time, Baudrillard would continue to attack the bourgeoisie, capital, and political economy, but from a perspective which champions “aristocratic” expenditure and sumptuary, aesthetic and symbolic values. The dark side of his switch in theoretical and political allegiances is a valorization of (i.e., a giving or assigning of value to) sacrifice and death that informs Symbolic Exchange and Death (in which sacrifice provides a giving that subverts bourgeois values of utility and self-preservation, an idea that has sinister implications in an era of suicide bombings and terrorism).Marxism is therefore only a limited petit bourgeois critique, one more step in the banalization of life toward the ‘good use’ of the social! Bataille, to the contrary, sweeps away all this slave dialectic from an aristocratic point of view, that of the master struggling with his death. One can accuse this perspective of being pre- or post-Marxist. At any rate, Marxism is only the disenchanted horizon of capital — all that precedes or follows it is more radical than it is (1987: 60).
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/baudrillard/#2
A u Ogledalu proizvodnje piše da je jedina prava revolucionarns perspektiva sa one strane ekonomske vrednosti. Da bismo doveli u pitanje proces koji nas podređuje sudbini ekonomije i teroru vrednosti, i da bismo iznova sagledali pražnjenje energije i simboličku razmenu, koncepti proizvodnje i rada koje je razvio Marks kao i sama politička ekonomija moraju se analizirati kao ideološki koncepti utkani u opšti sistem vrednosti.
