Tag: maximisation of profit

Scales falling from the eyes

da Peter Herrmann's Blog, posted in thoughts on life and its philosophy

Of course, change is undeniable, everywhere and at any time. And the same can be said in regard of things not changing at all, being the same everywhere and at any time. – It seems to be true for the big and also for the small matters. And sometimes we are not really aware of any of these; and/or we are not aware of the details, the question of the real meaning. Sure, there cannot be any clear answer, as there is always the perspective as decisively intervening variable. At stake here are at least issues as form, substance and perception: looking at the rainbow fish we see the sparkling scales,

https://www. worldwidefishandpets.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/boesemansRainbow2-1-1-1.jpg

though we have to ask what happened to the fish after he gave them away. Is it the same fish or not, and what – if anything – changed.

It is the question also if we look at language: so often we take words dispassionately, just as they are so well known – as it happened the other day, or I should say night, walking along the Leopoldstrasse, seeing the bakery’s light, the word Strassenverkauf – Street Trading: of course: the window where they would sell during the opening hours bread, roles and cake to the passerby – of course also the coffee to go: wiki-food for wiki-lives in a wiki-world where everything is possible:

I am expected to see the social and, to a large extent, even the real environment as a contingent. Everything could be different – and almost nothing I can change.[1]

wikiwiki – an invitation to play — wikiwiki – kiwi kiwi – Kipukapuka

Few meters on I hesitated, returned, reading it again, in a different way now – getting the impression of scales falling from my eyes: Isn’t there really some more truth in a reading that suggests that shops like this are trading in streets, shaping very much spaces, public spaces?

Here space is about living in permanent transition – space where pace matters …, as faster as better …, as further as worthier …

“Everything could be different – and almost nothing I can change“ is also about the paradox of a new world, suggesting

To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism, as Evgeny Morozov titles in his critical review.[2]

The paradox is that everything becomes transitory – and in the knowledge of this we make things to be replaced. The earlier Phoebus cartel meant to shadow light bulbs

The Phoebus cartel had an ambitious agenda. First, it stabilized prices at a fairly high level. The demand for lightbulbs was inelastic—that is, it changed little with the price of the object. Because as a rule consumers spent far more on electricity to power bulbs than on bulbs themselves, the price of electricity was the chief factor determining the demand for lamps. European producers reasoned that higher prices on bulbs would not depress sales while boosting profit margins per unit sold. General Electric particularly liked this policy, which allowed it to keep prices in the United States lower than European ones and so discourage challengers from the continent. In addition, the cartel provided for licensing technology among members, a system that earned GE substantial royalties. Finally, Phoebus pursued a far-reaching program of technical standardization. European firms had been producing electric lamps with a dizzying variety of voltage, longevity, brightness, and socket size. The cartel sought to regularize bulbs, setting up a central laboratory in Switzerland to which all members had to submit their goods. Few objected to the policy, as standardization lowered production costs as well as confusion among consumers. Another initiative, however, did not earn such universal praise. Phoebus (and in the United States, GE) systematically changed bulbs to allow them to produce more light per unit of electricity. This also cut the average life span of bulbs by about 20 percent, forcing consumers to purchase more of them. The cartel did not advertise the change, but when called to account, managers pointed out that the new bulbs provided more light per unit of power and so benefited customers. It was not clear, however, why consumers could not have chosen for them- selves between the new, brighter bulbs and the old, longer-lasting ones.[3]

The new cartel is about more. It is about making us to live lives in transition  – instead of furthering enlightenment, shadowing the being itself.

Occupied – being busy is the new and ultimate way … tired is the new stoned.

****

The other day I went with two friends after lunch around the corner – who could have resisted the question ‘We’ll go for an ice-cream?’ – ’Sure, best gelateria in town’ I smirked. There had been a more or less long queue, people well ordered entering the small place, ordering, being asked which ‘top-up’ they wanted to test – just a spoon full, moving on to the cash register and then we stood more or less in the way, enjoying ice-cream and company under the little awning – indeed, there is room in even the smallest cabin.

This is the pleasant of being caught in a machinery of shops, eateries, service centres …As it is a pleasant way to go for a cuppa in the shop next to the Institute – where they have coffee to Gogh.

****

…all trading in streets, highly social in their orientation on shaping spaces in which we move, or in which we are caught, not feeling in a position to move. Sure, supposedly we are acting purely as individuals, like the Smithian butcher, brewer, or baker of whom we know he following:

Whoever offers to another a bargain of any kind, proposes to do this. Give me that which I want, and you shall have this which you want, is the meaning of every such offer; and it is in this manner that we obtain from one another the far greater part of those good offices which we stand in need of. It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages. Nobody but a beggar chuses to depend chiefly upon the benevolence of his fellow-citizens. Even a beggar does not depend upon it entirely. The charity of well-disposed people, indeed, supplies him with the whole fund of his subsistence.[4]

Even if we really behave like individual butchers, brewers and bakers, nolens volens we create spaces and publicness – being occupied by our occupations — and confronted with the challenge of occupying them – on this level the choice of ice cream in the small place around the corner and grabbing a sandwich at the window, ops Strassenverkauf – Street Trading.

****

Perception matters – perception of things, beings and being. And perception is not least about perceiving historical truth, truth of history, of change and stability and how it is seen. Martin Walser, being interviewed as one of the Zeuge des Jahrhunderts, states pointedly

As long as something is, it is not what it will have been at some time. – Solange etwas ist, ist es nicht, was es einmal gewesen sein wird.

And the same, cm grano salis, can be said when it comes to language:

As soon as we use words, we may use them in a way that is different to what they meant when they had been used originally. Yes, there is movement as well of language and its use and understanding.

Moving – Heraclitian movement is also about moving oneself, not (primarily) as self-movement for the sake of oneself, instead as actively moving oneself in order to move society in order to build a society that allows to move …

… indeed it is about the butcher, the brewer, or the baker.

Sure, so far

[w]e address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages.

But is it entirely true? Aren’t we also at times go to a craftsperson who is clearly distinctive from the replaceable machine, tool or vending machine – who ‘is what s/he works and works what s/he is’? Isn’t s/he like most of us hoping to be able and encouraged (today one would say empowered) to live in a society

where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic.

A passage that is still appreciated, even if Marx wrote these words in the German Ideology already in1845.

***************************************************************************************************

[1]       (Mir wird zugemutet, die soziale und weithin sogar die dingliche Umwelt als kontingent zu begreifen. Alles könnte anders sein – und fast nichts kann ich ändern.)

(Luhmann_Politische Planung-Aufsätze zur Soziologie von Politik und Verwaltung_1971_VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften.pdf: 44)

[2]       (public affairs, 2013)

[3]       Wells, Wyatt, 2002: Antitrust and the Formation of the Postwar World; New York et alt.: Columbia University Press: 21

[4]       Smith, Adam, 1776: An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations [The Wealth of Nations]

 

norm and deviation

da Peter Herrmann's Blog, posted in academic life - living in academia, works, projects, publications

Or: is there really no such thing as society?

Just doing the final preparation on the presentation

Norms and Deviations of Modern Information-Environments for Young People

tomorrow in Moscow. It is a bit worrying, in particular as thinking about it I am getting so aware about the major flaw of most of the debates and research: naming the youth, shaming the technology and blaming the bad spirit of our times.

The other day I went to see “The Iron Lady” (surely too favourable for her) – and it became shockingly clear in which way part of the critic of her politics had been to some extent mislead, rejecting her favoured orientation on responsibility, taking the burden away from the state but not seeing that her actual point had been very much a different one: the refusal of taking the sociability of humans into account. With this she fell, of course, far behind even Aristotelean thinking. Aristotle, as well known, discussed  four core matters: chremastike, oikonomia, eudamonia and not least phronimoi – all relating to each other and all only in this interplay elements of what he considered as “good society”. With this he had to reject any fundamentally orientation on chremastike (as orientation on pure maximisation of profit) and also any “pure” private property.

What we surely could learn from Thatcher is just the opposite what she said: There is such thing as society – and we need to destroy it. This is what happened under rulership, this happens currently in Hungary, Greece, Germany and so many other countries – not only within the EU but also for instance with the revival of religious fundamentalism under the conservative Turkish AKP-government (closely going hand in hand with more severe breaches of human rights not least against the Kurds) …

Coming then back to tomorrows lecture, it is getting so clear to me that the core deviation is twofold:

  • the withholding of rights of (not only) young people to fundamentally and closely control the process of production (production in the economic sense and the production of the social) going hand in hand with
  • the withholding of knowledge.

Surely the latter is a matter where I may be in part guilty myself. Of course, teaching in academia is also about “making existing knowledge available”, i.e. providing information. But isn’t it much more about developing knowledge, allowing – and demanding – serious research?
Universities – but in general any kind of teaching, social development should accept the need of time as core ingredient of knowledge.
If I will actually say what I prepared, I will end with a reference to Schiller who stated in his Letters upon the Æsthetic Education of Man.

Moreover, as the sensuous impulsion controls us physically, and the formal impulsion morally, the former makes our formal constitution contingent, and the latter makes our material constitution contingent, that is to say, there is contingence in the agreement of our happiness with our perfection, and reciprocally. The instinct of play, in which both act in concert, will render both our formal and our material constitution contingent; accordingly, our perfection and our happiness in like manner.

So true, we have to return to this much shared reasoning,

  • the Marx/Hegelian view on freedom as insight into and understanding of necessity
  • Spinoza’s understanding of freedom as acting with reference to the necessity of the own nature
  • or to use then Schiller’s words of the famous conclusio:

Man only plays when in the full meaning of the word he is a man, and he is only completely a man when he plays.

If we teach and allow such real play, computer games will surely not be a problem at all. – And there we are surely at the point of blaming ourselves for not taking enough initiative and following the rules of individualists rather then allowing phronesis to develop. And this is surely not least strictly against Thatcher’s and others attempt to destroy society as much as it is against the call for big society – doesn’t this speak volumes that both slogans come from the same father of thought (obviously a motherless child).