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Living death

Posted by moses @ 16:03 • • 0 comments


I think there are exists two broad ways of tackling life in the middle class consciousness. Both are geared towards consumption, but both go about achieving it differently. The first and more traditional way is associated with the 'Protestant ethic' and involves delaying consumption. It looks at the economic rewards of doing so, namely interest earned by money saved or invested and, more importantly, the accumulated material wealth that can be enjoyed without worry after retirement.

The second way seeks instant or near-instant gratification through consumption. This younger and more hedonistic approach stands in opposition towards the older way, seeking to rebuff the latter's firm demeanour and re-evaluating life as something that is lived moment-by-moment and not (entirely) towards some final end.

Those who subscribe to the first approach disapprove of the other's foolish and unrestrained ways, while those who subscribe to the second approach regard the former in return as boring and straitlaced people who do not know how to live.

As I am more familiar with the first approach, having been brought up in a household that subscribes to the Protestant ethic, it forms the locus of the following thoughts.

Those who prefer the hedonistic lifestyle are absolutely correct. Although the general pre-eminence of a 'Protestant ethic', as described by Weber, is questionable, it exists at least in a hyperreal sense as a kind of personal ideology to some. The Protestant character of the ethic stems from what Nietzsche derided as a preoccupation with the afterlife, whereby one spends one's life in preparation for an eternal life that is to come—a teleology of death, so to speak. In a similar sense, some would focus a large part of their earthly efforts on preparing for the future, namely for the time of retirement, when one is no longer as capable of hard work.

Little or nothing else matters beside this goal. Little else is of value. All their lives they look for that elusive final happiness. When their plans have finally come to fruition in this life, when they can show off their hard-earned wealth and berate other people, they may seem to be a picture of success. But a life of misery may well belie that exterior.

Perhaps they are just incredibly patient people who are always contented along the way. But it seems more likely that they are simply unhappy people. It's no surprise—a teleology of death tends not to bring life to its believers.

Authentically false

Posted by moses @ 11:48 • • 0 comments


I'm sure we have, as consumers, critics and individuals, expended effort, time and money to look for the authentic. As tourists, we sometimes look for the authentic experience of a place; as gastronomes, we look for authentic cuisine; as individuals, we look for authenticity in matters of identity. These are but a few of the myriad instances in which we search for authenticity.

Yet, what do we mean by 'authentic'? Does authenticity exist at all? Sometimes we may even be sure that we have found it; but have we, really?

I believe that the notion of authenticity can be deconstructed or demythologised in the manner of Barthes. But why stop at revealing the class influences behind it? Studies on diasporas and postcolonial theory have also shown that the notion of authenticity is fraught with difficulties. But is there nothing more to it than the workings of ideology or a kind of collective consciousness?

Here, I want to explore the meaning of authenticity as it is cognised by the individual, to find out more about what authenticity means to each of us, if it actually means anything at all.

To a significant extent, the search for the natural parallels the search for the authentic, providing a reference with which we can understand the latter—we simply have to substitute the goal of a natural state with the goal of the original state of a human activity or creation. Hence, when we look for the authentic, we are looking for the original condition of something man-made.

The search for an original condition indicates the existence of a history. If something that we use or adopt is in its original condition, we would not need to find its original condition. However, in addition, if the history of the type of object or the practice being considered is a short one, then it is likely that we would merely be conservative in choosing to stick to the original—in other words, the notion of authenticity is not likely to be involved at all. Hence, something has to have a relatively long history or, more precisely, has to have undergone many transformations before we would be interested in rediscovering its original form.

But how often can we find the original state of something that has undergone many transformations? Human beings modify and reappropriate the things they create to fit their environment and their own uses. After numerous transformations, the original condition of something may not be knowable or recognisable to us. In instances where we think that we have found something authentic, chances are we have not found something that is in its original condition. So does authenticity have anything to do with the original condition?

To answer this question, consider the fact that some people object to the conducting of major restoration work on ruins on grounds that the ruins would lose their authenticity. It does not seem to matter that restoration work might, ironically, bring a ruin closer to the condition of its original structure. In this light, what is so authentic about their 'authentic' unrestored forms? The quality of authenticity, therefore, has a curious tendency to be unrelated to the original condition of the object concerned.

If so, what can authenticity be reliably said to describe? I think it is precisely that authenticity is a vague and to some extent illusory concept that it is so conveniently used. While there might not be sufficient reason to be loyal to originals as simply originals, there are reasons to prefer the authentic when authenticity also connotes superiority. In fact, my contention is that the condition of being original only matters insofar as it provides a reason for claiming the superiority of an object—it is in claiming the superiority of an object that people are actually interested. Authenticity is thus another label that is frequently used as a means of distinction without necessarily denoting an innate characteristic of objects. In other words, the notion of authenticity is quite arbitrary.

In this light, I think we can certainly afford to be less concerned about authenticity. The next time you are tempted to go further for something authentic, think about saving your resources for something really good.

Death to the patriot!

Posted by moses @ 15:59 • • 0 comments


Often, I would read about things that make me embarrassed of even downright ashamed of my country. I'm aware of its rather dirty history, and I don't have such faith in it to be certain that it's not involved in some reprehensible business today. In this light, is there any place for patriotism?

I find it amazing how people get up in arms over criticism of their country. Some of them do not even care if the criticism holds some truth. That or they are simply convinced that it is false. Perhaps to them, their country can do no wrong. What is the source of such touchy pride?


I'd like to say that it's because these people are aware of the historical significance of their statehood, because they truly understand how it compares to the alternatives. But that is a distant knowledge, if it can be grasped at all. Rather, I suspect the source is found in 'education' and propaganda, in the meanings they imbue through symbolic power and in the paranoid alternative scenarios that they plant in people's minds.

It is patently ridiculous that the paraphernalia and icons of national identification are treated with such reverence, so much so that acts that indicate disrespect towards them may be subject to legal sanction. These symbols are said to have a unifying function, yet in affording them true iconic status, the real things that they might have stood for become overlooked, relegated into the obscurity reserved for complex ideas that seem difficult for the minds of the brash to hold.

Thus we have the flag, the lion and what-not, symbols that are regularly wheeled out to summon feelings of pride and attachment so the masses can cheer as they did for kings. These are closely associated with the conception of the nation, together with and sometimes more prominently than real things such as community and solidarity with your fellowmen. They are mere noise, the pop of party poppers and the drunken singing of anthems before the wars that kill citizens in the name of the fatherland.

Far from being its defender, the unthinking patriot who is swayed by these icons, by pithy calls to augment the glory of the nation, is a danger to the community. It is the patriot who gives strength to hegemony and oppression. In his blindness, he may allow all manner of evil and political deception to come to pass. What's more, he may play the role of a soldier and marshal for them, actively aiding them and coercing his countrymen. Hence, if there is one slogan that we must have for patriotism, let it be "Death to the patriot!” 

Patriotism in peacetime is as useful as anger is while one is resting.

The Last Man

Posted by moses @ 02:11 • • 0 comments


Life is beautiful—so much so that there's little need to change it in any significant way. Such is the sentiment that I feel is predominant in the middle class public sphere, to the extent that, apart from a handful of disparate issues on the agenda, there is little prospect for active participation in social transformation.
"We have discovered happiness"—say the last men, and blink thereby.
This Nietzschean imagery seems particularly apt if we conceive of modern consumer society as the endpoint of a grand enlightenment project, namely that of turning human beings into masters of their own fates—beginning with mastery over nature through scientific progress (which is still ongoing), and arguably taken to the fullest extent in the Marxist vision of the human mastery over its own labour power.

This endpoint does not mark the fulfilment of the project, however. It seems that while science is still moving irresistibly forward, there is no longer much impetus to expand this project into other domains of human life. We have stopped, it seems, because life is good enough. Material conditions for the large middle classes in wealthier societies are sufficient for the pursuit of individual happiness; so what else do we need?

With the notion of success measured primarily in terms of the accumulation of material goods and perhaps influence, and now that pleasure as a chief mode of happiness is easily attainable, 'structural adjustment' is only used in a macroeconomic and financial sense. The drive for revolution dissipates in the humdrum of daily work and entertainment, drowned out by television and music. It's an uneventful and perhaps even blissful death.

Thus, it is perhaps the case that human agency can only, at least in present times, play but a small part in historical change. Mass action is generally precipitated by external changes and not vice versa. I think this certainly has implications on participation in social organisation, implications that are, unfortunately, less than inspiring.

The Culture Industry revisited

Posted by moses @ 15:57 • , , , , , , • 0 comments



While cultural studies has today succeeded in appearing to undermine the Frankfurt School critique of the Culture Industry, the machinery of commodification steams ahead, more productive than ever. The intellectual world is powerless before this trend and continues to concede its influence. Numerous scholars of culture are striving to make their field at once more obscure and more accessible. They toil to create a happy vision of a world that is poised to reap the benefits of new communications technology, promising a cosmopolitan future of choice and enlightened consumption.

This vision is constructed through discourse that is sprinkled with an ever-growing list of newly-coined terms. Yet it is, at the same time, one that people can readily identify with—for who isn't ready to believe in the prospect of a brave new world, especially when the media has just informed them of the exciting new products available in the market?

Admittedly, Critical Theory does not often fare well in today's intellectual climate, a circumstance that I feel is attributable to its underpinnings in the labour theory of value, or at least in varying degrees of economic determinism. Popular conceptions of value no longer hold it as something objective or cardinal. Value is something that is purely relational and manifested in actual preferences. In other words, that people value something more than another cannot often be explained in terms of natural and tangible causes. Valuation is often a subjective affair.

In a powerful way, this undermines the Marxist critique of exchange value, not only by dispelling the labour theory of value on which the critique is based, but also by replacing the concept of use value with ordinal utility. Now we have another conception of value that is also Subject-determined and correlated with exchange value but is not equivalent to the latter. And the concept of use value seems cumbersome and obsolete beside one that is able to account for all Subject perceptions of value, including the intangible, instead of being mired in the materialist paradigm. Moreover, this conception of value is seductively democratic. After all, what can appear more empowering than a view of value that privileges people's preferences and decisions?

What this means for the Frankfurt School critique is its effective isolation as an elitist view of culture that presumes to tell people what they ought to value. If preferences are subjective, what right does anyone have to proscribe any as long as no actual harm can reasonably be alleged to result?

It is difficult to defend the Frankfurt School from such a charge. Yet I maintain that its critique of the Culture Industry still rings true, albeit in a way that may necessitate some distancing from Marxist discourse. My proposition is to look at the critique from a particularly modern perspective that revolves around expectations and hype.

If there is anything that we have learned from the last global financial crisis, it is that expectations may diverge from a more tangible reality of a situation, whatever the latter may be. Perhaps this can be seen in terms of the divergence between short-term and long-term confidence, the latter which is dependent on a stricter or more complete procedure of reasoning. But regardless of what exactly we should compare expectations to, the evidence seems to point to the existence of hype.

Hype can be understood, in that sense, as the inflating of expectations of returns relative to a more tangible measure of actual returns. Even under conventional ways of looking at the market, hype is rarely a good thing—it implies that buyers are ultimately losing out in terms of expected versus real returns to their spending. And since hype is paid for by marketing costs that are likely to figure in pricing decisions, hype also represents a potential deadweight loss.

What does this have to do with the Culture Industry? It is my contention that the Culture Industry is a major source of hype. It deals in feelings, manufacturing them in order to generate interest in things—a process that is typically subsumed under the goal of making profit. It thus becomes the primary source of trends that influence people's preferences in goods. To grasp the commercial importance of the Culture Industry under late capitalism, simply witness how advertising thrives on the products of the Culture Industry.

Moreover, this principle does not apply merely to the products of various industries, but also to more general things such as lifestyles and even happiness—the message is that spending our money on something or adopting a certain attitude or lifestyle can bring us happiness or a sense of fulfillment.

But can hype not become real if it proves to be permanent? After all, there are still many people who would be very happy to buy, for example, the latest Apple products simply on the basis of the expectations that have been generated through marketing. Thus, it would seem to be the case that these people continue to get what they expect.

Yet it remains true that no one really knows how long the ephemeral expectations that are associated with hype can last, especially on the level of the individual. All it takes is for the realisation to come, in one fine moment, that there is no basis for believing that something is as good as it has been made out to be. Much of the perceived returns would be lost in that moment, just as the perceived values of certain financial instruments evaporated a few years ago.

The lie that Culture Industry sells us does not, therefore, have to depend on a highly contentious philosophical analysis of value. Whatever the exact nature or typology of value may be, hype as the commodification of feelings can be observed in our everyday experience; and it stands clearly a means of extracting profit through the inflating of expectations.

The perpetual requiem

Posted by moses @ 19:32 • , • 0 comments


Those who wish to hold on to dreams should also be prepared to give them up. One cannot be uncompromising about dreams, for dreams have power over us. They have the power to reveal our mortal limitations, unclothed by the delusions of power that flights of fancy bring. For dreams are always a few steps ahead of us—the more we are able to realise, the fancier they become. Confidence often leads to our undoing, and the moment when we see the precariousness of our situation, the potential futility of our efforts, is the moment of despondency; a moment of lifelessness and regret for failures past.

To dare to dream is to dare to give them up. Yet, on the other hand, can we do without them? As dreams give meaning to our lives, they may also take them away. Thus, it is not having dreams or giving them up that is most crucial. Most importantly, accept the passing of dreams. Old dreams die to be replaced by newer, often less exalted ones. As we age, so do our dreams decay. But still you must hold on to them, to give them up later or perhaps to even realise them. That is what we really live for—the chance, however small, to see some of our dreams realised, or to fight again another day until we breathe no longer.
Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that's no matter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther… And one fine morning—

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

Big picture, small picture—who the hell knows anyway?

Posted by moses @ 20:18 • , , , , • 0 comments



More technocratic or elitist discourses on governance often bring up concepts like 'the big picture' or the 'the long view'. I won't dispute the fact that these terms have meanings (albeit relative ones). But they don't seem as clear as they are made out to be in those instances. It's always worth asking what the big picture or the long view is, and how anyone knows what it is. Otherwise, it would only serve as a cover that allows the powerful to explain things away with a wave of the hand.

The problem in thinking in terms of the big picture becomes clear when there are competing claims about the same reality, typically with some grounded in experienced reality and others in more abstract or socially-constructed terms. For example, it is possible to enjoy a period of posted economic growth and rising nominal (or even real) wages while having people report decreasing standards of living in their everyday experience. Of course, facts grounded in experienced reality are often fragmentary and contentious—they are typically anecdotal and it is easy to find examples that contradict each other. To the rationally-minded, such facts might therefore be unquestionably devalued.

However, this does not mean that they are necessarily untrue or unreal. Everyone sees reality through the veil of a particular (and partly self-imposed) perspective. However, this reality is also the reality that each of us knows. It's cold comfort to be told that some abstraction or another person's reality can free our perceptions from the constraints of the experienced. What we experience is necessarily treated as true because we experience it. That is a fundamental tautology in epistemology.

Of course, ontologically this is a problematic position. Yet in practical matters, the empirical is the most directly relevant to the individual. Small epistemologically-determined problems can culminate in an ontological crisis. After a certain point, we just don't know if a claim that has been 'proven' to be ontologically true is indeed true. It becomes increasingly difficult, for example, to hold on to a traditionally held view that something is good when we are finding so many little things that are wrong with it.

The epistemological/ontological divide translates into a small picture/big picture divide in the socio-economic realm. What I call the 'small picture' is obvious enough to each individual, as it concerns the present and immediate reality around him. But how do we derive the big picture? Are we able to see how all the small things, consisting as they are of an insurmountable mountain of conflicting data, form the big picture? The long view is even more complicated as time constantly introduces change.

What people wind up doing is simplifying the reality that they see. They abstract reality, deriving theories, numbers and indicators to allow them take stock of it in a convenient and concise way. When they need to think about the future, they make projections based on these abstractions. This is a powerful and useful method, but it's not without its risks. If experienced reality is affected by perspective, what exempts our visions of the big picture from the same influence? In fact, most if not all attempts at abstracting reality are acts of interpretation—we are interpreting reality according to a certain framework or paradigm.

In governance, the tendency to abstract and derive the big picture for policy purposes has led governments to pursue numbers. They rely on indicators to measure the effectiveness of their policy, the welfare of the people and virtually everything that pertains to their business. This is often a necessary measure in their position, yet the problem with these indicators is that they are interpretive. The real problem, however, comes when people are not aware of this. Numbers and abstractions become totalitarian teleologies, imposing an "iron cage", as Max Weber put it, of rationalism on the lives of individuals. And worst of all, they become held as 'truth'.

The elitism regarding the big picture is a manifestation of this rationalist arrogance and its obliteration of the hermeneutic. What individuals think and feel is completely unimportant beside the data. Unfortunately, the people who champion the big picture often neglect to ask how the data is derived. Emptily they claim to be bastions of reason and lovers of wisdom, and those who disagree they declare to be contrarian or oppositional. Hence, the position of the unthinking rationalist is readily assumed by the most dangerous ignorant people of all—the pseudo-educated, the body of the reactionary middle class.