Old man's ramble

So I'll try again writing a blog, slightly political, slightly sociological, slightly entertaining. I'll try. I'm making the commitment to my small small readership, once a year.

The whole question is what to start with. And I came up with an idea. I don't know if you've other articles, but I came upon a realization. As we all know, we have an unfair economical system that does not promote wealth redistribution even if it is in the interest of society as a whole, so all its actors, even the one benefiting of the economical system. Some smart business man are aware of that, and we ought to give them credit more often than we do, they are saving it for the others, blinded by their inheritance. 

We have an economical system that does not in general promote its perpetuity, or societies, or most of enterprises. Indeed, a company that sells well its product, that is reasonably in the products it provides, would have sold at some point to everybody a product that last and at some point, that company will have serve its purpose, and will have to dismantle. Now, that ought to be normal. It is normal. Except that we do not easily accept it, and it is mainly because of vested interests. We are blinds to the normal need for change and evolution. Companies ought probably to think about their end, and I think it was the idea behind having a mandatory amount of money in a bank, to prepare for the end. The workers are not happy when this happen,and it is because the average expectancy of humans has outgrown the life-expectancy of most economical enterprises. We are not told that.

Indeed, between the reality of capitalism and the theory of capitalism, we can find a universe. Anyway, capitalism as it is is about keeping an advantage on everybody else, by mean of control of the land, of the media and of the political landscape. It's about an oligarchy that provides nothing fair,and keeping that advantage constantly. That's where Marx was probably the most right, alienation is a necessary by-product of a mode of wealth distribution based on private property. We are, entrepreneurs as well as workers, alienated from everything. The only times labor laws were put in place, in most countries, it was because either the populations were too educated for their own good, and sacrifices were made by the owners of means of productions to prevent a good revolution, or because the big companies wanted to make investments, but to keep their advantages, they would require all their competitors to do the same. This is what happened with most welfare or mandatory insurances schemes: keeping the advantage by uniforming the procedures.

A fair competition is non-existent. It is in theory possible, if we adopt a total
transparent society, but we are very far away from that. As much as we can still consider, and we will have to or fall in a dark age, that we can reshape our economical system ( limiting the use of limited first-hand goods ( and redistributing first to the region holding these goods) – eliminating everybody's debt – having a different economy for life ( as it is – so the enjoyment of culture) – an ownership of material products by societies ), we are far away from considering total transparency as another need for keeping human society going on. Total transparency seems to be an invasion of our private life, but more than the fascistic idea that people who have nothing to hide do not hide anything, I think that there is something wrong with society when we feel like hiding.

For example, someone prosecuted for a crime will try to hide it, for shame and knowing that most of us will judge him. How can people who are condemned are supposed to reintegrate society when they hold a stigma. I think that there is indeed something stigmatic in secrets. We also know that secrets only exist for the powerful. There is a very clear example in the news this week: the PRISM scandal is only relevant when put next to the Bradley Manning prosecution. The U.S.A. Are allowed to uncover everybody's secret conversations around the world, but the world is not allowed to know what the U.S.A. did wrong ( shooting journalists, torturing people in private prisons, supporting dictators and telling their diplomats to keep rubbing on their good side, fueling military-coup against socialist leaders...). Even for rich people, the fiscal audits from most European countries are actually limited in their research when auditing the fiscal revenues. Other than it is still legal, to some extent, to have off-shore accounts ( rich people have the right to pay taxes anywhere they want, as they pay handsomely lawyers who research what are the loopholes in every tax code)

Of course, total transparency is impossible at the moment. The wealth injustice, the conservative spirit touched by everyone, the frustrating mediascape, leads us to be incomplete being capable of all freudian pathologies. We are not sincere with ourselves, me least of all. Total transparency would require that we get rid of some constants in our constitution ( all around the world, everybody think they are slightly better than the average...), like our need for consistency, which prevents us from accepting change, especially in ourselves, or our need for a positive self-image, which explains why there is no Joker around the world ( no one I've ever met would consider themselves a bad person).

Anyway, I'm back, I'll try to be there as often as possible, with rambles and constructed thoughts. We'll see how it goes. By the way, calling on readers, if you have a theme you'd like me to express my opinion on, I'll gladly do !

  The next article will probably be on badly paid jobs we can't relocate,  language and what it shows about societies, and any thing that passes through my head at the time 

Top 5 Graphic Novels

Back to culture and personal reviews. At this point in my life, I would like to make a desert island, all time favourite top 5 graphic novels ( comic series). I do not know if I should start by explaining first the value of graphic novels and their history. I think I will just remind that they used to be the stuff of the children and the working class for a very very longtime, after they were the invention of the print ( before that they were the stuff to educate as well but a fringe of the population). It is the twentieth century I think that they became the stuff of adults, when people who grew up with them got accustomed with them, as well as the ones with the development of pornographic graphic novels. They will never completely be lost, but they were quickly overcome by the internet and animated films, so I might be in the perfect generation to judge the perfect graphic novels for adults.

Well, now the I have quickly establish their history, that I have legitimised also my taste through my age ( which I'll agree is a shaky excuse, but not much of you will have better ones). I will present my top 5:

1 - Hellblazer.

2 - Sandman.

3 - Preacher.

4 – Transmetropolitan.

5 – Planetary.

Some have more than one writer and graphic artist, so the title of the series will be enough for now.

Hellblazer tells the story of John Constantine. He is an Englishman from Liverpool originally, but has been adopted by London. He comes from the working class, which gives him a leftist fibre I really appreciate. It is an ongoing comics, that will probably follow the fate of all the famous super-heroes, it will last and last and your children might read it as well, and then it will restart again and so on. The particularity though is that Constantine is not a super-hero. He does not have the stuff of heroes. He is a coward who feels oblige sometimes to save the world, but would rather let other people die, and only when cornered does he do something, or at least that what he was when I discovered him. Before that, he was an arrogant bastard who thought he could do good, but then ended up killing his friends. He is bitter because of his life and because of the world. He might have some powers, as a self-proclaimed magician. We do know though what are magicians, yet we keep going to their shows. It's now been almost 30 years that Hellblazer comes monthly out, and it goes in depth in defining the psyche of a man who has lost his twin at birth, like Philip K. Dick, and like the author has developed a lucid way to explain and distort reality.

Sandman is the acclaimed work of Neil Gaiman. Sandman tells the story of Dream, one of the 7 eternals ( Destiny, Destruction, Delight ( who became Delirium), Despair, Desire and Death are his siblings). Eternals have realm, which interact with reality, and actually give reality its movements. Neil Gaiman plays in these novels with the mythologies we had through our history and still the one we have nowadays. It is full of reference and it imagines the personal histories behind the myths and what are the emotions that gods have, towards humans and themselves. Sandman is a great creation on the subject of imagination, as it is what dreams are for.

Preacher was the comic book that got me to serious adult comic books. Before encountering preacher, I was a marvel super-hero follower and a Mad magazine reader. Preacher got me to believe that graphic novels can really be smart adult entertainment. Why ? Well Preacher is about a preacher with an alcohol problem, a hit-man girlfriend and has a drug addicted irish vampire as a best friend. It is a very smart graphic novels as I said... Preacher is a very american graphic novel, as our Preacher goes through the U.S.A. To find God and get this last one – very interesting minor caracter – to explain why he has quit on his creation. Preacher illustrates Bill Hicks perspective on the USA: it is a country filled with the worst of humanity, and yet keeps a good aspiration to be the best it can – even if it fails.

Transmetropolitan's protagonist has the best name in the history of fiction: “ Spider Jerusalem”. I don't know where the name came from. It is set in a not-too-distant future, in a big city. The city represents the world, or is the centre of the world. Well it only represents it, it is actually New-York as it was, so the lighthouse of the world. In this city, everybody is hyper-connected and Spider Jerusalem used to be a famous journalist. And after some years in the wild, he is back and the world is not better. Spider Jerusalem is moved by only one thing: the Truth. It is a hero who knows what he wants, and he will do anything – armed with a bowel setting movement gun – to get it. And people read him, so he gets enemies. He represents the fourth branch of power as it should be. He is the hero that societies could have.

Planetary, finally, is the comic book on comic books. Every parts of this story is an adaptation of another comics of the 20th century. I have not read enough comic books to know where does everything comes from, but it is impossible not to see that it is all about comic books. All the old ones appear, like Tarzan and the masked cowboy, the enemies are the Fantastic Four and every body appears, even the ones I've just mentioned ( and maybe that's why I've put it up in my top 5 – John Constantine is transformed into Spider Jerusalem). I'm still trying to get my head around it, as I do not yet have resolved everything, but if one day you think you have accumulated enough knowledge about this art, this is the last graphic novels to read.

For any adults ( over 16) ready to discover interesting graphic novels, other than these, try V for Vendetta, Watchmen, Promethea and Swanpthing ( all by Alan Moore if I remember correctly), Sin City, Goddess, Lucifer, The Sandman theatre, Hit-man, Y the last man, or go ask your local comic book store.  

Eunuchs of the World

Back for a quick self-reflective study of my knowledge. It is not epistemology as I do not concentrate on the value of my knowledge, though I do doubt it sometimes, so I take back what I said, there is a bit of epistemology. Doubt is the foundation of knowledge. Anyway, it has been a long time I have written to be read, and not written to make sense of what I think I think, so it might take time to get into the careful balance of humour and seriousness. Seriousness and humour are just opposite sides of the same coin: a paradox born from the contradiction of our perception of the world, our expectation of the world, and the reality of the world as we perceive it.

I will not go for too much psychology, no matter how interesting that knowledge can be, pathologies of the psyche are too rare compared to the pathologies of our societies. Of course, both were born quite early into our civilisation (whether the personal development through language and the recognition of the Other or the societal development of information sharing and the confrontation with other perspectives). I will go into the realm of what I think is political philosophy, but as you, smart audience, know, no intellectual realm has borders like North Korea.

Let's just start with the birth of societies, as I have finished reading “ Guns, Germs and Steel” by Jared Diamond, who points out the chance of we, Eurasian, born on a continent with an East-West axis, where the weather is relatively equivalent, compared to all the other continents. This indeed means that transport and exchange are easier, as in order to go from one part of the continent to the other we did not need to go through much deserts or oceans, compared to the populations living on other continents. At that, we had the luck of having easily domesticable animals, and crops that provide enough nutrients and are easy to farm, so agriculture became the biggest advantage.

Agriculture was and still is the greatest thing that happened to man-kind, as it has provided us with a surplus in energy, and saved us time, meaning that we got to work on other things. I do not yet have the correct education in physics to understand the full consequences and relationship between energy and time, or space for that matter. Knowing though what I don't know makes me even more curious. Anyway, agriculture brought more people with more free time capable of working on much more, giving us technology and complex societies. It was though because of the spatial advantage that some cultures got to develop faster than others, and when confronted with these others, determined who would be the master and who would be the slave.

Here, we will have a little bit of time for a philosophical stage whisper. I am telling you quickly how master/slave relations were understood by Hegel and then by Marx, because it is always something interesting to keep in mind. A man meets an other man and it is a traumatising experience, because both of them thought that they were the centre of the world. So they had to fight, to affirm their uniqueness. Two possible outcomes. Outcome A, one wins, the other dies, end of the story. Outcome B, one wins, the other accepts that the winner gets to give the orders. So we have a winner Master and a loser Slave. Master needs Slave constantly, because S determines who M is. Without S, M is nothing now, while S is like he was before, except that there is now a meaning in his life: receiving orders. Of course, receiving orders means that there are imperatives, things that he can't have and as Groucho remarks, that's how desire was born because “ I'd never WANT to belong to a club that would accept me as a member”.

The birth of desire is the result of an order given, by the father or the social authority. That's how History started. Indeed, the M would never want any change, does not have any desire, he is the content father who just needs to perpetuate how society is. On the other hand, the S is the worker, the one who has to accept the situation with frustration – this latter feeling being transformed, sublime into production surplus of the cultural or intellectual order, when it is not of the political order.

Hegel and Marx thought that it were the total Slaves who made history, Hegel thought it happened in the realm of ideologies, Marx in the realm of economies and I go for the poor compromise of not knowing the causality and doubting there is a one way causality. I say “total”Slaves, because there are a hierarchy of Slaves: the priest, the politicians, the lawyers, the soldiers and so on until the lowest of the law. It is not economic relations that always change the ideologies, it is not always the ideologies that change the economic relations. Change is just what you get when the slaves have learnt much and the Masters forgot how they won.

Domination as the little story has undergone here happens only under universalisation of a field, a realm, or an order. What I mean is that you cannot have an asymmetric relationship if it does not occur in the same frame of understanding. For example, and here we are using an example from Bourdieu, let's say I want to compare the size of my reproductive organ with the one of my neighbour. I tell him mine is 31 centimetres long, and he tells me his is 12 inches long. We do not use the same measures so we can't compare, he and I will never know who is the master and who is the slave. Now, let's say that I am a legitimised authority, I tell my neighbour that we can only use centimetres. It gets to be a different relationship. It is accepted by him and I who the winner will be, because we have agreed on a frame.

I mention in passing the process of universalisation, because it is an ambiguous process of domination, and pacifications of conflict. Why do conflicts get less violent when everybody agrees on what are the terms of the fight ? Well because it accepts a common ground. Of course, usually, the common ground works mostly in favour of the one who ascertain his domination in an other field. For example, I am the master of the armies, I will put everybody under the influence of a religion we shall all believe in. The master of the armies therefore established the universalisation of the cultural context. It is then in these fields that domination will be recognised and that rebellious production, the sublimation of the frustration and the creation of the desires, will be born.

The ambiguity of the universalisation process is that one of the dominant forces of universalisation, of setting legitimate fields of hierarchy, is the State. The State will state rules, nominate, and act in an accepted way. Whether we like it or not, we abide by the State rules, and this because the State is our legitimate authority. Now, we are getting in the thick of it. There is of course an idealised power called the State, which will establish a lot of fields and the rules of games of these fields, under which people play the different games of social life. The State in itself is though a field where we find rules of games and people playing to get on top.

From there on, different fields will bring on different elements with different interests, mainly keeping the status of Master. Hence, when we see positive change within society, looking back retrospectively, two sorts of groups are the elements of these changes. The first one is the group of particular slaves, which have taken the oppression to an unsustainable point, where antagonistic forces meet. Of course, this type of group will create a problem, as Badiou notifies, since they might only demand change for their own private interests, and not a change in depth of the order of things within a given society.

Normally, a slave-group that asks for change which might not consider the others does so because their field of oppression is not shared by others oppressed in a different way. The petite bourgeoisie in Russia which saw its political capital stample on asked for a revolution, but the political field capital was not shared with the peasants, hence the economical oppression ( USSR was about economical oppression more than it was about political oppression, as is the case in China now – the instruments of productions were not shared but concentrated among the few bureaucrats coming from the small revolutionary bourgeoisie- Yougoslavia was about political oppression) of most of the population.

The second type of revolution, or actual societal change with a deep impact within history comes from the people living outside the realm of the Master/Slave relationship, in the societal level and not the psychological one. They are not oppressed and they are not oppressing, there interests are only out of empathy, a quality easily suppressed by enslavement into a relation. Of course, these people ask for change on a global level, and are heard with a very long delay.

The religious figures are among these types and usually people with no powers commemorate by history but yet that we can't follow because we still feel trapped. I call them the Eunuchs, as their motives are solely the interests of humanity at large. They are the ones who consider everybody. Ghandi for example did not only defend against the oppression of the external forces, but also the internal oppression of Indian societies. Of course, what I say here as been proven by history, wether in Egypt or in China, sometimes they had Eunuchs to direct the administration and nobles have overthrown them when their private interests where at risks.

The Eunuchs are the ones to save our world, as they are outside any Master/Slave relationship of any kind, but can see them all. They would, I guess, defend the sanctions upon Greece for not adhering to an individualist capitalistic ethos, but would also remind the Greeks that if they would want really a fair Earth, their standards would have to go down anyway so that the Wallensteinian periphery ( “The South”) get to be defended as well against the oppressors that Europeans are.

The Eunuchs are the real Marxist proletarians, because Marx has ignored ideology, he could foresee that the proletarians would fight between themselves and between nations before fighting against their oppressors, that is my point I think. .

Thanks for reading  

Ethics is the realm of the immaterial

So here is an article based on an interesting conversation with my bro-in-law, which turned into an attack from my sister to me. The theme of the conversation was the illegal download of music unto my computer, which I was calmly enjoying in my room. My bro-in-law being an intellectual property lawyer, he saw it as an infringement of the rule of law, which I am not denying, but that it was a behavior closer to Greek anarchism as imagined by the English than a behavior ought to be normal. As for my sister, as an economist, it was just another example of the fact that I am a bourgeois who has no respect for a hard-working class, which I am only partly denying.

Can I go anywhere with this? I think it is largely possible to show that though I am in the wrong, it is only relative to how we accept the world we live in today, and how we would like it to be. And again, if we can't dream of a better world, I still wonder if we can take any moral high-ground, as there is nothing morally constructive otherwise. I don't know now if I should start by taking a position of the particular to then go to the universal, or start with the universal and go unto the particular of the arguments.

To start on my position, I was stating that the music industry nowadays, does not represent any opportunity for music players, when it has all the potential to. Indeed, music players get only 3 cents per song on a CD or 6 cents per song on Iplayer, so they do make a lot of their living in concerts. Now production companies do make a lot of money, and the reason to make this money to hire lawyers and lobbyist so they can keep on there business. Or to spend money on videoclips and advertising to promote one or the other untalented crappy son-of-producer to teenagers. This is the industry we are financing when we buy a CD and all of it to satisfy a property fetishism ( which I suffer from sometimes myself, but I didn't dare to tell my opponents that, because it does ruin a little bit my argument against that industry).

Now, we have to understand that most music players until the rise of the reproduction industry, where rarely professional musicians, but where part-time musician. It is therefore a funny thing to think of an artist as something that has to be done full-time. A composer of classical music could pretend to that, but they are a dying breed, and it is still something that is enjoy almost only in big concert halls or operas ( I went to “Yvonne, la princesse de Bourgogne”, by Philippe Buysmans, among other operas and concert this year). And that's where it has to be understood that Walter Benjamin was right, reproduction does kill the art. Reproduction transforms a performance into an information. And information should be free, otherwise there won't be anything shared by humanity.

A small paragraph on information. Information is any stimuli that is shared, and therefore can be used as a sign – a shared tool of communication. Education for example is information – we teach each other signs, ways to interpret the world – so we can better understand how each other thinks. Now music reproduced is solely information, as it is the reproduction of information we can all understand and correlate to, but further more, it is the name of the artist and the song which are important. If we wouldn't share that, then only people with money could exchange these informations, therefore excluding people who have not access to it. Let's take another example, if Leonardo da Vinci was still alive, and did not want the Mona Lisa to be digitalized or even printed, only people who can afford holydays in Paris and time to go to the Louvre would know what it is. Is that fair? But now, is seeing a print of the painting the same as the real stuff? No, just like listening music from my computer not the same as going to a concert.

Now, back to the artist. Artist are people allowed to do what they like, because they have found owner of means of production ready to invest in them and what they produce to make a profit out of it. The investment is first cultural, in the sense that they manipulate information to make it somehow worthy, so there is an economical return afterward. Of course, the manipulation of the cultural is never too easy for there are people who have an education of the history of art, so can compare it with more data. Hence it is easy to create worth for teenagers as they do not have any standard to value cultural worthiness. So is it fair that some are lucky to find a patron when others are not recognized as doing anything worthy of recognition, as money generates worthiness and not personal appreciation. As a Houellebecq wrote in his latest book, we can see Damien Hirst and Jeff Koon discussing how they will share the art market ( well how russian oligopolist, arab princes and Saatchi brothers are getting along if we want a wider picture), create unequality. But hey, it is alright, it is the rule of law as it is and as it should be accepted.

So my point, that I didn't get to pass, was that as hours of work should be reduced as the amount of work to produce a sustainable market has diminished ( it has, that is why we have systemic unemployment), it leaves more time for everybody to be an artist. No, everybody should not be an artist, and yes artist are essential for the world to make it a beautiful place. But everybody should contribute also a little bit towards working ( in french, the word 'travailler (working)' comes from trepalium, meaning an instrument of torture) for the whole society. If you go to a pub in Ireland, chances are that you will hear a band there, who does that for there own pleasure, and not for money. Isn't how art should be provided? Otherwise, as my sister pointed out, artist have more chances to come from people like me, who have parents who can provide for them. And a lot of musicians comes from such backgrounds ( no generalization here though).

Now, I would like to downside my argument here a little bit. It is true that there is a lot of justification here for an illegal action. There is nothing wrong with justifying actions actually, it is part of a brain process for everything that we do. Even irrational arguments will be justified in our brain, and sometimes for the wrong reasons ( split brain research have proven that) and maybe I act that way because my environment pushed me to act that way, on the other hand, because I have always pushed my reasoning to the furthest I could, my justification have changed as it would fit a wider understanding of the world and the conception of an ideal world, instead of just justifying through social convention.

Justification through social convention, such as saying that the Greeks deserve where they are now because they didn't play by the rules of our game, is actually the way that a big part of humanity has been controlled for centuries. The example of the stupidity of social convention lies in a few philosophers, since antiquity, but is in our modern days best exemplified by Bourdieu when he says that the best jokes on christianity and beliefs do come from cardinals. Indeed, when you are up in the game, it is easier to cheat. It is actually worst than that, if you are higher up in any social game, it is actually good to show in private that you support the opposition and in public you still manipulate everybody, because you see the whole game and yet know that nothing can touch you.

Hence, for example, though greek cheats, it is at all level of society and easy to identify as it is a universal behavior, on the other hand, while Greece has a shadow economy estimated at 25%, Belgium shadow economy is estimated at 20%. Not that far behind, the difference is that Belgium shadow economy is also mostly done by rich people engaging “smart-accountant” who know how to dodge all taxes. The social convention pushes us to believe that the problem comes from the everyday greek who does not make you pay for the added value on the desert he just sold you. http://www.gregpalast.com/lazy-ouzo-swilling-olive-pit-spitting-greeksor-how-goldman-sacked-greece/

Of course, the explanation on this website is not the one we need to point out, because though we ( the youth and the educated-engaged academics) do repeat it all the time, conventions tell us to go through the political process, though it is accepted that it is lobbying works only if you have money, to get it to change. So what are we left with? Well not working constantly the game of social conventions, and knowing why intelligently, and informing oneself oneself on why and how, is actually a good way for emancipation and change within a system.

Now, back to our world, which is a horrible world where lazy-ass bourgeois like my-self can spare not to have a student job and instead roam the internet to accumulate information. What we have here is an unstable and unfair environment, but like any environment it can change, through feedbacks and pressure on parts of its components. The pressure will always result on some change, for example, representative democracy has lead the youth to be partly disillusioned by our capacity for our society to be better. The pressure for growth has created a vicious-circle based on debt, and debt is only the lending of future-time, therefore neither the baby-boomers are capable of considering a better future. To change the environment, we have to therefore pressure it to change, through actions which are disruptive to its systemic working, ergo I'm doing good downloading louis armstrong's CD's and strangely, I don't feel like I'm stealing him of anything.

I can't get no ( satisfaction - from exchange-value)

I have not written for my blog for quite a while. I do not know if I should really do my own psychoanalytical observations here. I have received demands for and against. I will favour at the moment the voices in favor, as I have not yet taken any rendez-vous with a professional and I could make you, my invisible audience, my symbolic master. So now I do know if I should dwell a bit into personal explanations.

It has all to do with the self, the perception of the self, and the expectations of the self. I have recently moved back to Brussels, my hometown and it takes some time to adapt. I am indeed confront with the self-perceived self of my past, the self I have constructed for me in U.K. And this new breed of self that has not entirely found itself yet. I have though high demands and expectations, I know that I had the luck to grow up in an environment that brought me informations and a way to value informations and I have also the brain capacities to process with ease these informations, though I do have to work still on my memory.

The fact that I find myself very intelligent, and that people find it hard to disagree on that statement but agree that it is not a mark of humility to state it, I find I have to learn a lot and do a lot with this intelligence and when I do not, I beat myself to the point that I sulk into doubt. It takes me time to get back unto my feet and tell myself that I need to start again. This is though how real strength is defined though: the ability to go back to a fight. So here I am back, to my world of reflection, with a self perceived as being worthy to lay down thoughts, no expectation to be incredibly smart and innovative ( not to put to much pressure at the beginning) but with the goal of someday looking back and the roads I took with slight pride.

So now that my time with my lacanian master that you are is up, I will start to write about a very simple class on a Marxist analysis of commodities. It is mostly for myself that I will write about it and I have not yet come to a conclusion, as usual with my personal work. The first exercise will be to outline the difference between two useful concepts: the use-value and the exchange-value. The use-value is the value of a commodity as it is. It is a very hard thing to actually conceive as it is linked to the concept of necessities. Indeed, something can be truly useful only if it is necessary. And a necessity is linked to either a mean to survive, either a mean to develop oneself as its own.

It is easy to value the use of food, and then again, exotic food has more exchange-value than use-value. It is more difficult to value a pen or a computer, as someone might find himself working to accomplish himself when others might buy these tools just to show they can exchange a possession for social recognition – social recognition is something I will later on define when I will define the different forms of capital ( and not stop at Marx definition of capital : Any commodity which helps the accumulation of exchange-valued commodities). So two forms of use-value: the material form, as something that we need so our body survives and the spiritual form - nothing essentially religious- but just specie-centered idea that the human only has a spirit – as something that we need so we can do something of our life as we have decided to independently do.

Now exchange-value is the thing of everyday now. It is the discussions around the price of things, as we exchange money for different objects. Money has become the universal standard to establish exchange-value. We exchange anything ( almost) for money and the price actually does not reflect on anything in particular. What we pay at a restaurant for example, is only defined as what the boss of the restaurant think is the normal price for what he serves. It has nothing to do with the pay of the cook, of the waiters and waitresses, of the food or the price of the designer he chose for his menu. It is something he thinks is the price that people will pay. This price will be accepted only by a social standard established by different networks of people. Let's say the boss of our restaurant is a friend of two newspapers editors, then his price will be high, as the media can easily make a price ( an exchange-value) socially acceptable or not, no matter the fact that the value of a dinner is relative to the taste of the person going to the restaurant plus the added use-value commodities used ( mainly the food and the labour).

Now we are constantly reminded that the exchange-value is the everyday lie that we accept. No matter that televisions cost far more in a store that the added cost of their productions ( and that the value added is done through off-shore front companies so less redistribution for profit is done), we are aware of it and yet ready to buy new ones before the old ones are really broken – Brave New World accepted ideology as well – reparation is something of the past, replacement is the standard of living now. What Marx has noted though is that the exchange-value of a commodity will always rises faster than the exchange-value of labour, meaning that no matter that a company makes profits, the wage of the common worker will never rise, except to the need of necessities ( the risk of a lower production due to excessive frustration). Satisfaction of the exchange-value of labour will be also discussed later on, I want to first talk about the standard of exchange-value.

Currencies are the universal standards of exchange-value and it seems a fair one. Of course, since the 20th century, the value of currencies are themselves only exchange-values, as the price of foreign goods depends on the exchange-value of a currency to another. Meaning that somehow, a currency will have a better value or a worst value depending on a socially acceptable consensus of the people buying these currencies. The value of a currency is therefore not defined by the general population, there is nothing democratic about it – except maybe in China -, but by the people who own a high social capital.

So here I have to explain the notion of social capital. Social capital I will define as the trust accepted in a source for its information. The trust in itself is the capital. Meaning that someone with high social capital will be able to decide more or less the exchange-value of any commodity, as it is the information generated. Somehow, no surprise here, but people with high economic (material) capital have had a high social capital for a long time. That's why two of the big three rating agencies belong to the “ public”, meaning stocks can be bought on the stock exchange so you can have a more-or-less important say depending on how much money you put in, and that the last one “Finch”, belongs to one of the most connected man of France. These three make the weather in finance, even when they are proven wrong.

Now, about satisfaction, it is something personal to the extent that there is an emancipation for the power of structure around. The structures of the system are a necessary tool, in the sense that no one can promote anarchy as it does not bring forward a liberation from the necessities of life. Then again, we are not satisfied by the necessities only in life. We do need to do something out of our life to bring on an existential satisfaction. We can accept on one hand the animalistic satisfaction of procreation, in the sense that we live and do what we do so we can live on through our offspring and so one until the end of the earth, or we can do something for which we are proud to have bring something forward to humanity and all the other species that will recognize the contribution. What is not a necessity is do something we do not like for a defined amount of time just because we cannot choose something else ( or for a lesser time).

Satisfaction is relative to emancipation as I said, because it is a standard of living we accept for ourselves, and this standard is accepted because we are told is acceptable, until a certain point. This is why information is a useful tool for the emancipation for humanity, though still a difficult one to use, in the sense that the medium of information is still important to make an effect. We are satisfied by how things goes because we do not want to know more, and generally we decide to ignore what we know because how we came to learn was not enough to chose to accept it. What we have learned can possibly rise our level of dissatisfaction and because we do not do anything about, it is favorable to ignore the information.

I think I have now lost my self a bit in the meanders of political economy. Anyway, the prices do not reflect offer and demand, but by the complex relationship ordered around by exchange-values.
I will write more next week, as I have decided to take back on the goal to write an article a week as a way to prove and improve myself. That's all folks !  

Chess of life

I have the luck of having been introduced to chess quite early in my childhood and taken a liking to it. Of course, in the digital age, it is a game that tends to disappear and it is not one of the games that spurs creativity as a recent academical article as noted. On the other hand, chess has many advantages for self-development, and it is also a tool to a certain understanding of the world, in an ideal-type of way.

The concept of ideal-type is actually a good one to start up with the subject of chess, as no ideal-type exists in reality. The problem is that every words represent an ideal-type. For example, “ chair” represents something in our mind, but we never see it in the world exactly as we see it in our mind, so we create a group of things we observed that can belong to that group. The problem now is that such groups make sense only in relations to others as the limit of a group can exist only if they are other things that have borders as well.

So if concepts that make sense of the world is stuck in borders of this world, we find our thoughts on a checkerboard. BOOM ! Here I start with my chess concept ( it is not mine, it is actually more Wittgenstein's one, I have just adapted it). So we are stuck with generalisations in our mind of everything that surrounds us. Each generalizations have its limits, and our mind can only collect a limited amount of rules-concepts-generalizations-heuristics-devices. 8 by 8 cases, separated by black and white so we know every time what are the limits more or less. So we have a structure of understand that is a checkerboard. What you can see though is that a checkerboard will never move. It is 8 by 8, it is black and white. Point. It won't transform. It is a tabula rasa of understanding that is slightly useless as though we have understood more or less the limits of our understanding, no one can say that they have not changed there minds and that the relations between concepts have not changed.

So we need pieces. The pieces are the words we are going to define, the cases we are going to give depth to so we have a dynamical understanding of the world. Pieces are shit complicated to understand as they represent something for their modus operandi but their m.o. are useless if they would have been alone on a checkerboard. Indeed, a rook can move everywhere, and then would represent everything, if he had nothing to stop him. Something that represents everything, represents nothing. So again, a piece functions is only defined in relation to others. A bishop can move far and well, compared to a King, but it is kinda stuck, compared to a rook.

So we have dynamical concepts moving around in relations to others, but also in relations to where they start from. And here, we observe a hierarchy of concepts, where we have loads of little understandings, which can be sacrifice because they can be replaced easily by others. Who cares for the word chair, as I have the verb seating, I have stools, I have sofas and armchairs. On the other hand, I do care for future, past or present, because they are important for me to know where ( when actually) I am. And what about Me. Could Me be a king, that I might lose on a checkerboard? Anyway, we have a hierarchy of pieces, that is assigned rather by their uniqueness than by their function.

I would like to make a parenthesis here concerning pawns. A pawn can go a very long way and be transformed into a key piece for someones understanding of the world. Let's say use the color blue, which is not that important ( it didn't really exist in ancient greek, and there are a multiplicity of blues in Inuit ). It is a color. The thing though is that in relation with, let's say phenomenology or linguistic or history of art, we can start detail the color in all its specificities in a culture at a given time and how it might represent part of the view of the world this culture has. Bam ! The blue was a pawn of daily language that became a Queen to understanding the world. The pawn had to travel from its original position, to the furthest point it could go, and by always sustaining its relations to other points without falling out because its position was to be taken by a stronger piece.

What is weird though is that the responsibility of a concept and the power of its modus operandi are different as well. Indeed, let's look at the fundamental concept for a game of thoughts: the King. It's function is to go slowly where it will find a safe roof, which is not really impressive, and yet it is the most important piece. As such, it is only because we have a game that we have King, and it is the importance we put on this singular concept. If we take the Queen, we can make it as relevant we want to the other pieces as we wish. The Queen is the other singular piece of the game and it can do pretty much what we want her to do. Would we wish though to let her stay at home to care for the King, she wouldn't be that important anymore. She has a defined function, but her importance depends only in the relation she has been put with the others.

So what is left within a game are the rules of the games. Indeed, the modus operandi and the rules are slightly different. First of all, the rules are set in the times of the games. For example, first moves can be different from other moves, and the clear example is that a pawn can move two steps if it is its first move. It is afterwards restricted. Another example is the King and the move called castling, where he moves two steps to hide behind a rook. He can't do so if he moved previously, or the rook moved previously, or if he is moving through a mate. Such moves are therefore constricted by the rhythm of the game. Rules are also quite tricky as they are sometimes unknown by most of the players. For example, en passant is a rule that not everybody knows, where a pawn can take a side pawn that moved its initial two steps. So the more rules a player knows, the better off he is.

So now we have introduced the player. Rules apply to him. Would he touch a piece, he has to move that piece and would he stop touching that piece, he can't change his mind to move that piece until it is his turn again. The player is constricted by the rules but like a piece can move within the rules limited by him. The main rule being the goal: mating the king ( not as finding him a suitable queen, but attacking him and living him no escape). The player assign the importance he wants to each of the pieces to defeat his opponent. That's where the opponent enters our realm of understanding. The game is Manichean, it is one against the other. To play well, the importance is not only to put your piece in a favorable place in relation to the other pieces ( and even the pieces of his own colors which assure his defense but also his moves to come) but to anticipate the other players move.

That's where it becomes tricky. Concept fights one another, over an important idea. We are almost in a Hegelian fight between a thesis and an antithesis. We are actually exactly there. As personalities that compose the self are nothing more than define in opposition with other personalities. We anticipate the other players move and most of the time, you anticipate the other player's best possible move. This is where the game gets tricky, because the best move can be set three turns afterwards by a succession of apparently irrelevant moves. We have to put our shoes in the other player's mind and assuming that he is slightly more stupid than we are ( would we think he'd be smarter, he would anticipate our anticipation and counter the our own counter-move). Would he be more stupid though, we can find ourselves at lost, since we foresaw wrong and would change tactic in mid-way leaving maybe an unexpected opening. The argumentation never goes as expected.

That's why we can fight ourselves at chess ( and the here-presented symbolic chess). Indeed, you just need to turn the checkerboard to see from the opposite perspective what has been going one and even better, you know what is anticipated from the opposition and go on this eternal fight of counter-anticipation. Internal discussion over what is right or wrong, over we should follow passion or reason, are set within a checkerboard, where there is a king one side and the other, and there are different arguments for one and the other, which are set within the limit of our mind and sometimes, unexpectedly, a pawn through experience would become more important that when it started and would reverse maybe the game we thought was set for ourselves.

Of course, we can cheat. To cheat we just have to be sure the opposition hasn't seen what we did or ignore the rules we have set ourselves. A game of chest, professionally, is noted down, so there is always a repercussion to inconsistencies of a game.

There are so many things to say about the games of chess set in our lives. We can observe that it is a relation game, and it is not necessarily because you have a lot of concepts on your side that you will win. It can for example mean that you did stay on a good defensive the whole game, but you went nowhere to attack the other, and worse, you stuck yourself and an opponent horse came through to stalemate you where you haven't left place to escape. Too many words can block winning an argument because of confusion when the other can move its concept freely to counter or attack.

The infinite variations of games means it is impossible to know how a game will end. It does depend on the players level of the game, but even then, every body forget pieces or make mistakes. It is of course impossible to apply a chess game to reality, but somehow, all of reality is applicable to a chess game. Sometimes we win, sometimes we lose but we always lose a little, rarely it is a stalemate. And there is always another game coming.

Applied Spider-Man Theory

'With power comes responsibility' is Spiderman motto and a well observed rule that we can observe sometimes in our society throughout history. There are maybe though exceptions and to find these exceptions, I would like to explore to what extent is that motto true. If it was entirely true, would the Green Goblin really go on rampages like he does ? Well, that might not be the best of examples, since he is held responsible for his actions by Spiderman, and punish, maybe not accordingly in a fair way ( a lot of times Spider-man would be too nice to the different people who impersonated the Green Goblin, from my point of view).

Anyway, first we have to start with a definition of power, and I will use classic sociological theories to do so. First of all, any power is characterized by an inter-dependent relationship. You do need two people for one to exert power over another one and there must be a need for these two to be in such a relation. For example, it could be two lovers, in which case they are dependent on each other for their feelings to be kept alive.

First question that arises then is that most relations are asymmetrical at a given time, meaning that someone will always make a decision that the other(s) will have to follow. There is nowadays a view that power is unfair, but it is bound to exist in the sense that if two persons try to exert power on the other, they would nullify each others decision and nothing would move. That's why that in the example of two lovers, the decisions would have to be balanced, either in time or in the theme of what has to be decided.

Now that we know that every inter-dependent relations will have a power relation, we have to observe in which way the power goes. One has power over another one, if he controls some uncertainty to come. I hold a gun to your face, I'm dependent on you because I want your wallet, you are dependent of me because I'm holding some uncertainty about your future ( life or death). It does not have to be a threat but the uncertainty control can be a reward. I ask you to clean my shoes and you'll get a big fat check, I get to decide the quality of the cleaning.

The third element of power we need to find, if we want to see the verstehen, it is the will to make someone do something. It does not have to be conscious, but it has to be accepted. Back to lovers: I want new shoes and someone in love with me offers them to me. I can accept them and offer back gratitude or more or I can refuse them and reject the person courting me. Have I exerted power in both cases ? In the first one, I would say that I did, as I have accepted that I hold a way to make someone do something for me, in the other one, even though I made someone do something I have reacted in such a way that it will not ( hopefully) happen again. In the second case, I have not exerted power, but the image the other had of me did and as such, he forced himself.

Now, what are the different types of power we can observe in society?

The first one is the power of Coalition. Meaning that many can form peer pressure, or threats to make someone do something. Unions are a good example, though it has to be noticed that they are trying to counter another form of power. They do though exert a form of pressure to act in a certain way in an inter-dependent relationship by holding cards over the future.

The second one is Hierarchical Authority. I have a boss, I have to obey him. We both work for the same institution, but this institution has given this guy the power to tell me what I have to do otherwise he will ask that some sanctions will be applied to me. He represents the power of the institution into which I am a part of, and as such, it is not directly the person who has power.

The third one is the power of the person holding an Information. In social sciences, informations ( and it is slightly similar in physics) can represent anything. So someone holding money for example, holds information that will make anyone do something. A better example might be, in theory, the University professor ( in a perfect world) who can ask his audience to be quiet, otherwise he won't share what he knows.

The fourth one is the Mastery of a process. Imagine that a prisoner is given the right to serve whoever he wants in a prison, well, people will have, to some extent, obey him otherwise they won't be sure what they will be served. He is not an authority, as he was not given power, but is one in practice.

The fifth one is the power of the Expert. Everybody knows this power: the doctor who can prescribe you a good drug or tell you everything is alright and you should go to work. The lawyer who tells you you'd better settle or loose in court, even though in your mind you are totally right. The architect who tells you that another floor will really not fit the general symmetry of the building.

The sixth one is the power of the Network. It is a vicious power that everybody to some extent uses. You know a guy who knows a guy so you can do something that someone else, who knows no one, can't do. The person with the network, does not have a power of coalition, because it is not a fixed group, he does not have to be an expert or an authority, but he is just a pal with the person who has some power.

Finally, there is the Manipulation. It is all the form of power that are based on simple manipulation of the pathos of the other. The other one is in love with you, well you don't have to go and get your coffee anymore. The other one is stupid and get enraged easily, well you have heard that this guy you hate told something against him in his back and he better get his ass slapped. Someone you never met does not know you're bluffing when you say your his boss's son, he will also get your coffee.

Now, all these powers have limits and consequences. To have limits and consequences, the power relation has to be observed, felt and understood. If I went to see ' Eat, pray, love' 5 times with my girlfriend because I'm telling myself I love that film, the power my girlfriend has over me is probably limitless. If I suddenly become a pure existentialist in front of man holding a gun in front of my face and decide I might as well die here, he can shoot, but he won't have made me handed in my wallet.

The thing is that sometimes, we see the power and dislike it, but without observing what gives this power its limits. The limits of power are a lot of times set by the responsibility this power has in an inter-dependent relationship. For example, a King of France has an almost absolute power over his kingdom. He has so only though as long as he can hold his kingdom together. Now if he starts going crazy on spending and taxation and people do not recognize their country anymore, they will find a way to fight this power. The opposite is kind of true, someone who has a lot of power, but use it in such a way that everybody in the relationship is happy, will hold to this power very long. If women are portrayed as the weaker gender, men will have to be polite and courteous because they are the protectors. If now women want to be seen as equal, men do not want to hold the responsibility anymore.

With the loss of power therefore might also come the loss of responsibility, which might be the vicious side of this story. Imagine the owner of a company. He gets to decide who works where and what salary they'll have, and if he abuses of that power, like the king, he would be in trouble. But now, a CEO, who does not own his company, is not responsible for anything, as he would point at the shareholders and say that they hold control over future uncertainties. These shareholders though, will point at the market and consumers to say that they hold the control over the future uncertainties of the company. Everybody has some power, meaning that everybody is responsible, meaning that nobody is.

We can find this disappearance of power and responsibilities in a lot of strata of society I think. Certainly in politics, in economy, in class inequalities. The best way to avoid the costs of power is obviously the tendency for synopticon. The synopticon is the process of everybody looking at one person. This person will look as holding a lot of power, and yet it is only because everybody looks at him that he will look as being responsible. A National football trainer would look responsible for his team, but it is just because he is the one put up front by the team and the owners of the club. Mubarak is also good example of someone who looks like he is in power of a country and held responsible for the inequalities in this country, but he was just a front figure for a whole clique.

People are afraid to look powerful, because they do not like the cost of power, the responsibilities. They prefer to put up masks. If you want to make something positive for the world though, you do need to have power over what goes wrong. I don't know on this one if I really prefer Spider-man over Superman.