Dakryn's Batshit Theory of the Week
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zabu of nΩd
Free Insultation
- Feb 9, 2007
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Sure plenty of government jobs can be automated, but I expect jobs in law enforcement, courts, military, diplomacy, and humanitarian work to continue employing a lot of people.
Education jobs will benefit from the need for an increasingly educated workforce (as "lower-IQ" jobs get automated), as well as the inevitable (and currently underserved) need for students to have individual attention and face time from teachers.
Beauty and spa services don't pay much now, but there's potential for increased demand. I mainly expect this to come from an increase in the population's average age.
I also suspect that the number of hours/day and days/year people work will decrease, giving people an incentive to allocate more time to all kinds of time- and service-intensive activities, whether it's spa treatment, fitness training, live entertainment, tourism, higher education, or whatever. I know there's a question here of whether a lighter workload will decrease the economy's productivity to the point that it can't support as much service consumption - it just depends on how much we can use automation-based productivity gains to reduce the share of productivity we demand from humans.
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Dak
mentat
Law enforcement and the military are areas ripe for automation. Furthermore, again, jobs that remain available will be increasingly high tech. You cannot simply re-educate a bunch of average intelligence people to run complex equipment/systems.
And this is where the greatest uncertainty lies, not only in how to deal with it but if we even will actually "deal" with it.
zabu of nΩd
Free Insultation
- Feb 9, 2007
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It's an interesting problem for sure, with a lot of variables at play.
I'm curious what this looks like in list form now...
I'm curious what this looks like in list form now...
- the maximum value-creation possible through automation
- the amount of value-creating human labor that remains
- how many jobs the human labor can be divided into
- implied change in work/life balance from the new labor scheme
- how much the pay for those jobs can be subsidized
- how much service consumption the pay can support
- the work/life balance that results in optimal service consumption
- political will to implement all of the above
- pace of disruption in the job market vs. pace of policy changes and workforce retraining
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Internally Deformed
Farseer of the Paranormal Abysm
Good job on bringing William Gibson into play, every debate needs more WG. As to the idea of informational transparency being a two way street, this only really holds true if we accept the notion of privacy and freedom typically appealed to by conservatives in the pocket of big business, i.e. privacy = one's ability to trade without scrutiny, and freedom = one's ability to trade without regulatory interference. A clear notion of the divide between the public and private spheres pretty much solves this problem. Scrutiny of business dealings is only an invasion of one's privacy if one considers business to belong to the private sphere in the first place, which I would argue it doesn't and shouldn't.
Okay, I can see where you're coming from there. All I would add is that anyone holding that world view would probably also support the position that all kinds of sub-optimal conditions that exacerbate human misery ought to be accepted in the interest of stimulating a development which might later more effectively overcome them. It also discounts, of course, the possibility that someone espousing Sanders' views could well be that development.
And here you basically are acknowledging what I said above, which is the human element of systems. These are invaluable, seeing as we are humans (I assume) and have to look out for our interests. I have an almost automatic tendency to pull back from such commitments, however, to check my own emotions and empathic associations, and to try and look at things from a structural angle. Of course, this is ultimately impossible to do logically; but it isn't impossible to do speculatively...
Also, just a final point. If corruption (i.e. paradox) is a constitutive component of systems, there will always be local manifestations. If internal paradoxes exist, they will always out.
Agreed - but I think you'll also agree that the purpose of structural analysis must ultimately be to benefit the human element. If it is better equipped to do so than acting emotively, then go for it.
And yup, corruption will always out - but we do control the extent to which it does.
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Einherjar86
Active Member
In many ways this covers well-trodden territory, but it also clearly addresses the distinctions between different kinds of facts that arise in various disciplines. In short, the word "fact" itself doesn't designate a clear-cut and homogeneous category, but epistemological units that differ in form when you shift between systems of knowledge.
Also, I always enjoy articles that address the divide between the sciences and humanities, and this one does so rather fairly, I think. So I figured I'd share:
https://aeon.co/essays/why-should-science-have-the-last-word-on-culture
Also, I always enjoy articles that address the divide between the sciences and humanities, and this one does so rather fairly, I think. So I figured I'd share:
https://aeon.co/essays/why-should-science-have-the-last-word-on-culture
Dak
mentat
Einherjar86
Active Member
If the dismissal had been something more along the lines of a complete rejection of deconstruction, then I may have made a comment. As it stands, I'm fine admitting that many poststructuralists probably didn't know much about what actual scientists were doing. Although I'm not sure about Deleuze; I find it difficult to believe that he was out of touch with scientific practice, but then I don't really count him among poststructuralists. And Foucault definitely read up on science, but that doesn't mean he was well-acquainted with it. Baudrillard, Butler, Derrida... I don't think their writings exhibit an extensive knowledge of actual scientific practice. Of course, it's also totally possible that their obliviousness stems from their bloated writing style.
I do think that lots of conceptual models found within poststructuralism (and other postwar critical methodologies) are isomorphic with models we find in post-Einsteinian science, especially the work of Kurt Gödel. To a degree, I see Gödel's takedown of Russell and Whitehead as analogous to Derrida's takedown of Husserl and Heidegger. But this doesn't amount to saying that Derrida was well-versed in scientific literature.
Since the 1990s there's been a new generation of literary critics who have developed a reading of the complementarity between postwar critical theory and early-20thC science. N. Katherine Hayles (possibly my favorite literary critic) published a book back in the early '90s called Chaos Bound: Orderly Disorder in Contemporary Literature and Science. She wasn't claiming that poststructuralists really knew their science, or what scientists were doing, but that complementary patterns emerge between science and critical theory in the decades before and following World War Two (work she also pursues in her first book, The Cosmic Web, and her 1999 book, How We Became Posthuman).
Long story short, I think Pigliucci is mostly correct to say that most poststructuralists didn't know what they were talking about when it came to science; but I don't think that necessarily means they weren't saying things that were conceptually compatible with certain scientific models. Part of this possibly comes down to Pigliucci's discussion of the distinctions between facts - facts for critical theorists are definitely not the same thing as facts for physicists.
I do think that lots of conceptual models found within poststructuralism (and other postwar critical methodologies) are isomorphic with models we find in post-Einsteinian science, especially the work of Kurt Gödel. To a degree, I see Gödel's takedown of Russell and Whitehead as analogous to Derrida's takedown of Husserl and Heidegger. But this doesn't amount to saying that Derrida was well-versed in scientific literature.
Since the 1990s there's been a new generation of literary critics who have developed a reading of the complementarity between postwar critical theory and early-20thC science. N. Katherine Hayles (possibly my favorite literary critic) published a book back in the early '90s called Chaos Bound: Orderly Disorder in Contemporary Literature and Science. She wasn't claiming that poststructuralists really knew their science, or what scientists were doing, but that complementary patterns emerge between science and critical theory in the decades before and following World War Two (work she also pursues in her first book, The Cosmic Web, and her 1999 book, How We Became Posthuman).
Long story short, I think Pigliucci is mostly correct to say that most poststructuralists didn't know what they were talking about when it came to science; but I don't think that necessarily means they weren't saying things that were conceptually compatible with certain scientific models. Part of this possibly comes down to Pigliucci's discussion of the distinctions between facts - facts for critical theorists are definitely not the same thing as facts for physicists.
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Einherjar86
Active Member
Two ideas (i.e. I think too much); the first is long, the second is very short:
1. (I preface this with a disclaimer that I'm not a Marxist, despite all the evidence to the contrary.)
I don't buy the labor theory of value, meaning that I don't think value can be reduced to some metaphysical amount of labor-force instilled somehow within an object. But I have often found this to be a fascinating aspect of Marxian theory because of how strange it seems; after all, Marx criticized Hegel for being an idealist, saying that Hegel scored right on the dialectic but that he had it turned upside-down. Marx's project aimed to "turn Hegel on his head," so to speak, giving a materialist flair to Hegelian philosophy. Given this ardent materialism, how could it be that Marx proposed a "labor theory of value," i.e. a theory of value that posited value as some kind of congealed substance of labor inherent in a produced object - that is, a commodity? Could it be that Marx just threw in the towel and accepted a massive cognitive dissonance in order to devise a theoretical model that catered to the laboring subjects whose time and efforts went to manufacture these commodities? This has been a subject of some conflict for me, and something that I've reluctantly admitted after moving away from Marx and into more postwar theoretical territory.
But this doesn't mean I've abandoned Marx's critical commentary on industrial capitalism (i.e. the basic and very general organization of market economics following the Industrial Revolution). I recently read something by Michael Taussig (a Marxist anthropologist, I admit - let's get all our cards on the table) that gave me pause, and brought me back to this question. I'll give the quote in full below - it's from a book titled Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses:
Now, here's the really interesting part, Taussig's explication:
Now, what the fuck does all that bullshit mean?
Long story short, I don't think that Marx's labor theory of value can be construed as a means of calculating actual value in a market setting, and I think that Marx knew this. I think that Marx's labor theory of value only makes sense in an idealistic vision of socialist utopia, the success of which is beside the point I'm currently trying to make (although it wasn't beside the point for Marx). In Taussig's articulation, Marx's LToV operates less as a metaphysical treatise on value and more as a critical analysis of what complex market relations do to the perceptions of human subjects. And according to Taussig, perception is immensely important in shaping the dynamics of intersubjectivity and social relations (a claim with which I happen to agree). Basically, he's suggesting that perception doesn't constitute a clean line of communication and distinction between subject and object, but proceeds to entangle them, to confuse the perceiver with the perceived, and to displace the distinction through which we identify ourselves as subjects and our commodities as objects - we get sucked into the object world.
So Marx's LToV isn't that value inheres in a commodity as a metaphysically congealed substance derived from workers' labor, but that the post-industrial commodity elides the distinction between producer and produced, that it's a medium of social relations - this is how the actual relations between human subjects reappears in the commodity as a relation between things. To put this in more concrete terms, when you enter a convenience store you see shelves of bad snack food, refrigerated shelves stacked with sugar drinks, etc. etc. Labor value does not inhere in these products, but these products act as a medium between human subjects. The occupants of the store will never meet (in all likelihood) the laborers whose work went into making these products, meaning that the products themselves become the only means by which most people are able to have any identification with those laborers. We thereby fetishize the commodity, elevating it as a social form (or hieroglyphic, in Marx's own words) that represents the relation between human subjects. The commodity begins to dance, as Marx writes. In this way, these commodities appear to reflect the labor of those individuals whom most of us will never come in actual contact with. This is the "labor theory of value" - not an argument that value inheres in commodities as a substance of labor, but that commodities function in a market society as a representational form of the relations between laboring parties.
In short - when you look at a bag of Doritos, you don't see/touch/eat the people that went into producing it. You relate to those people via your own experience of that commodity as a product of labor.
Now, I'm going to stop short of saying this in any way justifies a move to full-blown communism. None of the above is intended as a justification of political revolution toward socialist organization. I'm interested in how the labor theory of value can be reimagined as a materialist philosophy, and I think this is how. When we replace the notion of a sense of value inherent within objects with a notion of value as a representation of relations between laboring parties, then we arrive at a materialist theory of value. Value derives from how subjects perceive their relations with others through the lens of commodities.
and 2. The left has an ideology problem.
That is, critique emerges in the form of ideological constructs. We need to take a lesson from Deleuze and Guattari and realize that ideology only makes sense within the parameters of ideological thought - in other words, the left can be said to suffer from "the ideology of ideology."
I don't exempt myself from this diagnosis.
1. (I preface this with a disclaimer that I'm not a Marxist, despite all the evidence to the contrary.)
I don't buy the labor theory of value, meaning that I don't think value can be reduced to some metaphysical amount of labor-force instilled somehow within an object. But I have often found this to be a fascinating aspect of Marxian theory because of how strange it seems; after all, Marx criticized Hegel for being an idealist, saying that Hegel scored right on the dialectic but that he had it turned upside-down. Marx's project aimed to "turn Hegel on his head," so to speak, giving a materialist flair to Hegelian philosophy. Given this ardent materialism, how could it be that Marx proposed a "labor theory of value," i.e. a theory of value that posited value as some kind of congealed substance of labor inherent in a produced object - that is, a commodity? Could it be that Marx just threw in the towel and accepted a massive cognitive dissonance in order to devise a theoretical model that catered to the laboring subjects whose time and efforts went to manufacture these commodities? This has been a subject of some conflict for me, and something that I've reluctantly admitted after moving away from Marx and into more postwar theoretical territory.
But this doesn't mean I've abandoned Marx's critical commentary on industrial capitalism (i.e. the basic and very general organization of market economics following the Industrial Revolution). I recently read something by Michael Taussig (a Marxist anthropologist, I admit - let's get all our cards on the table) that gave me pause, and brought me back to this question. I'll give the quote in full below - it's from a book titled Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses:
Taussig said:
Now, here's the really interesting part, Taussig's explication:
Now, what the fuck does all that bullshit mean?
Long story short, I don't think that Marx's labor theory of value can be construed as a means of calculating actual value in a market setting, and I think that Marx knew this. I think that Marx's labor theory of value only makes sense in an idealistic vision of socialist utopia, the success of which is beside the point I'm currently trying to make (although it wasn't beside the point for Marx). In Taussig's articulation, Marx's LToV operates less as a metaphysical treatise on value and more as a critical analysis of what complex market relations do to the perceptions of human subjects. And according to Taussig, perception is immensely important in shaping the dynamics of intersubjectivity and social relations (a claim with which I happen to agree). Basically, he's suggesting that perception doesn't constitute a clean line of communication and distinction between subject and object, but proceeds to entangle them, to confuse the perceiver with the perceived, and to displace the distinction through which we identify ourselves as subjects and our commodities as objects - we get sucked into the object world.
So Marx's LToV isn't that value inheres in a commodity as a metaphysically congealed substance derived from workers' labor, but that the post-industrial commodity elides the distinction between producer and produced, that it's a medium of social relations - this is how the actual relations between human subjects reappears in the commodity as a relation between things. To put this in more concrete terms, when you enter a convenience store you see shelves of bad snack food, refrigerated shelves stacked with sugar drinks, etc. etc. Labor value does not inhere in these products, but these products act as a medium between human subjects. The occupants of the store will never meet (in all likelihood) the laborers whose work went into making these products, meaning that the products themselves become the only means by which most people are able to have any identification with those laborers. We thereby fetishize the commodity, elevating it as a social form (or hieroglyphic, in Marx's own words) that represents the relation between human subjects. The commodity begins to dance, as Marx writes. In this way, these commodities appear to reflect the labor of those individuals whom most of us will never come in actual contact with. This is the "labor theory of value" - not an argument that value inheres in commodities as a substance of labor, but that commodities function in a market society as a representational form of the relations between laboring parties.
In short - when you look at a bag of Doritos, you don't see/touch/eat the people that went into producing it. You relate to those people via your own experience of that commodity as a product of labor.
Now, I'm going to stop short of saying this in any way justifies a move to full-blown communism. None of the above is intended as a justification of political revolution toward socialist organization. I'm interested in how the labor theory of value can be reimagined as a materialist philosophy, and I think this is how. When we replace the notion of a sense of value inherent within objects with a notion of value as a representation of relations between laboring parties, then we arrive at a materialist theory of value. Value derives from how subjects perceive their relations with others through the lens of commodities.
and 2. The left has an ideology problem.
That is, critique emerges in the form of ideological constructs. We need to take a lesson from Deleuze and Guattari and realize that ideology only makes sense within the parameters of ideological thought - in other words, the left can be said to suffer from "the ideology of ideology."
I don't exempt myself from this diagnosis.
Dak
mentat
This is more or less an aside to the general point of your post, but I don't think that Mr Taussig et al can purport to speak for Marx. I think Marx took the LToV qua LToV and accurately traced out the implications. It's just that it (the LToV) was replaced, and Marx never did formulate - at least publicly - a way to get from S(subjective)ToV to class warfare ideology. I have no problem respecting Mr Taussig's attempt to square the apparent circle as it were. But I find some irony in his conclusion, at least in the way you explained it.
I never did get around to finishing Das Kapital, I stopped about halfway through because I felt that the chapters were getting redundant. But I saw nothing to suggest that Marx had his own brand of the LToV. It was *the* LToV, which had been the officially accepted value theory of economists since at least Adam Smith. What is being suggested here though (and what I find kind of ironic) is that Marxian analysis of the LToV is essentially an inexhaustive form of the subjective theory of value! I say inexhaustive because there are others ways in which we assign value (via perceptions, of course) besides social relations.
I'm not familiar enough with the works of Smith or Ricardo to say definitively that they didn't see value as "inhering" in the commodity, but I don't believe any economists made such claims. Classical and modern economists use(d) value theories to try to explain price phenomena and any apparent paradoxes (like water vs diamonds). Products, or commodities, are certainly a medium between subjects, and money functions as a sort of "supermedium", or "medium of mediums".
Well gladly granting the point that value at least partially, or contingently, derives from social relations, doesn't in my mind in anyway lead a jump to or justification of communism. In fact I believe it hamstrings it significantly. But (again) value cannot only derive through perceived social relations. How you or anyone else perceives me or vice versa has little to no impact on my demand for water or the supply thereof at various locales (conjuring the water vs diamond paradox of the LToV). Like I said, it is an incomplete subjective theory of value.
If I understand you correctly, this would explain what I see as a disconnect between these actual theories in economics, and how they are played with in political philosophy (whether marxism or otherwise).
Einherjar86
Active Member
Well, I have to disagree with the claim that modern critics can't speak propose readings of Capital. The problem is that there is no universally accepted reading of his work, and Capital proves one of the most cumbersome texts to read in the past century and a half. All we really have are re-readings, not any originally intended purpose or meaning; and any original meaning would be mostly irrelevant in today's economic climate. So modern critics adopt some of the models and/or figures that Marx proposed and see how they fit in today's culture. This is perfectly acceptable practice in my book.
I realize that there's a brand of philosophical practice that understands philosophies as ceasing at the borders of the work in which they're contained. By that measure, we can effectively judge a philosophy as technically right or wrong. Alternatively, we can continue to interpret philosophical texts, meaning that they're never truly right or wrong, but rather shed light on modern culture in continually shifting ways. I prefer the latter method, as it refuses to consign philosophical work to the historical dustbin but to reconsider how meaning is a constantly shifting enterprise.
I'm pretty sure you prefer the former, but I don't want to presume.
You've put in the effort, and as I suggested above I don't think there's only one way to read the text. Personally, I find Marx's theory of commodity fetishism to be a determining factor of his entire philosophy, and I think it has significant consequences on how we can read the labor theory of value. I think you're right that he's adopting it from prior economists, but I think Marx had a more critical eye toward how it functions. It contributes to his theory of false consciousness, i.e. people assume it works one way, but it actually works in another.
Could be a poor choice of words on my part. If value derives from the labor put into producing it, then in a sense it inheres in the object, since the object wouldn't exist without said labor. In a retroactive swoop, value gets reified into a substance that the commodity carries along with it. That's what I meant by "inhere."
And yes to your comment on money being the "supermedium."
I think it does have an impact, but only in an indirect and highly complex way. If commodities function as a kind of fabric mediating the relations between subjects, then we unconsciously attribute value to, or associate value with, the subjects "behind" those commodities (for lack of a better word). Obviously, this is a different kind of value than economic value; i.e. it isn't the same thing as the price that gets attached to diamonds or water. But it has an impact at some point during the circulation of values that feeds back into commodity exchange.
For example, my primary relation to you is through media devices. There's a value associated with this kind of interaction, and it feeds back into the value I place on my computer. This value also relates to (dictates?) how I perceive the producers whose labor went into making my computer. Marx was interested in paradox too, but his paradox lies in how exchange value feeds back into labor value. So instead of value deriving from how much labor went into making an object, the commodity dictates how much value we ascribe to labor. The commodity is a medium-image of congealed labor, but only in a perceptual (i.e. subjective) sense.
Probably. This was a kind of off-the-cuff remark that I came up with yesterday while watching the news, and found myself thinking "it's an ideology of..." And then going on to think "why do I always do that?" I haven't really thought about it much beyond that.
Dak
mentat
Dak
mentat
https://www.propublica.org/article/white-trash-the-original-underclass
This article hits on a lot of some of that stuff I touched on earlier regarding, 50s "mythologizing", ACC skepticism, etc.
This article hits on a lot of some of that stuff I touched on earlier regarding, 50s "mythologizing", ACC skepticism, etc.
Einherjar86
Active Member
I've been reading about Isenberg's book for weeks now, and I really want to get a copy - although I have no time to devote to such a weighty study right now.
I'm unfamiliar with exactly what her evidence is (obviously, considering I haven't read the book), but the general argument is spot on, in my opinion:
The origins of the American Dream, set aflame. Seems like a fascinating read.
I'm unfamiliar with exactly what her evidence is (obviously, considering I haven't read the book), but the general argument is spot on, in my opinion:
The origins of the American Dream, set aflame. Seems like a fascinating read.
Dak
mentat
A little bit further down it touches on where I grew up and currently live:
Of course, it just so happens this area also has a huge population of "poor black trash" as well.
Of course, it just so happens this area also has a huge population of "poor black trash" as well.
rms
Active Member
Dak
mentat
Einherjar86
Active Member
Dak
mentat
Einherjar86
Active Member
Ha, absolutely. I mean, there's no reason that intelligence has to be "alive," right? Although, in this context, I suppose it would be neither living nor non-living. Which is a mindfuck in its own right.
