More or Less

The relation between human perception and the perceived world is part of a long-standing philosophical debate—but it is also a sociopolitical reality. People perceive different things according to their economic viewpoint and according to normalized opinions and beliefs (broadly speaking, culture). Part of the task of having a critical, social justice consciousness is to identify how and which ideas—including ideas of abundance and scarcity—may be informed and sustained by class ideology. Karl Marx wrote that humans will never have true freedom until we collectively have reasonable control over our society, partly because we will perceive the world from various class divisions rather than as a comprehensive class of people who are interested in the maximization of collective human flourishment.

Class-based divisions reinforce class-based perceptions of abundance and scarcity. (To be clear, when I use the term class-based division I mean the working class and the owning class most broadly, and then also the varying levels of economic stratification commonly known as lower class, middle class, and upper class.) This is the philosophical and practical conundrum that the economic system of capitalism leaves us all in. Individuals in the owning class are perceptually-conditioned over time to perceive the world according to their vested interests. Likewise, individuals in the working class are perceptually-conditioned over time to perceive the world in their ways—ideally leading to the recognition of their own exploitation and thereby organizing a revolution of the economic system. The tensions between the two broad groups are more than obvious, and some intellectuals have theorized that mass culture (mass television, media, and advertising) acts as a sort of ideological screen that often keeps the working class from boldly organizing upon the recognition of their alienation from their labor.

It goes without saying that the owning class perceives the world to be exquisitely abundant because they see rich things while the working class perceive the world to be scarce because they see few things over which they have material and political control. This often goes without saying precisely because the relation between class division and class knowledge is purposely obscured leading individuals to assume that the way they perceive the world is a universal human perception. But this cannot be so within a class-stratified society and globe.

I bring this up because I see it occurring regularly, usually after I have reflected on it, since assumptions like this are latent and widespread and tend to become imperceptible without the lens of reflective scrutiny. I would like to examine a recent adbuster, “Get Less Today,” that I think shows how latent class-divided perception and knowledge can be even when the occasion is a progressive cause.

“Get Less Today” is a public education outreach campaign spearheaded by the Solid Waste Management Coordination Board and Rethink Recycling that aims to encourage Twin Cities residents to reduce consumption and solid waste disposal in the region in order to improve the region’s solid waste management system[1]. I want to be clear that my intention is not to assail the campaign effort, which I view as a positive, well-meaning, and progressive contribution to the community, but rather to illustrate how economic assumptions are present in the campaign in latent ways, just like they are in newspapers, articles, and other campaigns. These assumptions frame knowledge from a certain perceptual viewpoint demonstrating just how pervasive economic assumptions are in the overall culture if they appear even in well-meaning, progressive, public education campaigns.

Here is the adbuster video from the “Get Less Today” outreach effort:

 

As you can see, the video begins with an image of a woman standing before a closet full of clothes, a box in her hands, sighing, “This is too much. What am I going to do with all this stuff?” The next image shows that same woman trying to get through a walk-in closet full of clothes. We then move to “Lester Moore” “selling” the value of less stuff. “Just like you,” he says in a passionate voice, “I worked hard to get cool things, follow fashion, and pick up the latest piece of technology. I could barely get through a week without picking up more stuff. In fact, at one point, I even had to rent a storage locker to fit all my stuff! That’s when I really realized that what I needed wasn’t more, it was Less.” Lester continues to come up with witty sayings that play off the idea that less is more.

I describe the video as an adbuster because it evidently does double duty as a satire on infomercials and advertising. It pokes fun at the ways in which advertisements deceptively sell us stuff that we don’t need and it also satirizes the over-cluttered household by depicting abundance in extreme and cluttered forms. All of these are useful points. The main charge I have is what I have spoken of earlier with regards to perception and class-divided knowledge. Capitalism can accommodate all of these ecological significations—buy less, spend less, reduce, reuse, recycle, and so on. But what any outreach effort that does not critique the economic system perpetually obscures from the start is that the very idea of reducing consumption presupposes that all individuals have too many things when that is absolutely not the case in actuality. There are vast numbers of people in our country—let alone in the world—who do not have enough food in their pantries, and some do not even have pantries. Having more in our present system means that others are doing without by necessity. In the “Get Less Today” adbuster, having more becomes a burden on privileged residents and homeowners as opposed to what could be a much more effective critique of the systemic distribution that allows some to have too much and others to have nothing. It thereby unconsciously reinforces the perceptions of people who have money to spend on things and money to save on less things and so reinforces the class-based divisions which are responsible for these differing perceptions in the first place. In failing to provide a systemic critique we may preserve and actuate the very harm that we seek to minimize.

Moreover, while the adbuster encourages less consumption and increases waste disposal efficiency it does not problematize the waste disposal system at large. Indigenous economist and author Winona LaDuke points out that the waste industry is one of the biggest industries in our society and is part of an inherently unsustainable linear economic model. She describes, in stark contrast to our present model, a cyclical economic model where resources are returned to the earth in sustainable ways to replenish themselves or create new resources. This model has no need for conceptions of reducing waste, since waste itself would no longer be an accurate term for what happens to items after they are used.

- A.H.

 

References: [1) “About Us,” Rethink Recycling

The Dialectics of Our Split State

Minnesota’s split state—a DFL Governor and a GOP Legislature—appears to be the cause for the fiscal confusion that has shut our state government down. Such a claim assumes that the two parties are diametrically opposed and binary. Yet differences across party lines are not that vast—and certainly not static. Rather than meeting in the middle and accepting the false binary construction, our split state presents us with the gripping opportunity to explode contradictions, logical inconsistencies, and false consciousness that are at the heart of the fiscal confusion.

Publicly engaged citizens and our state lawmakers need to approach state governance dialectically. A debate, distinct from a dialectic, divides Democrats and Republicans outright and requires each party to defend and prove a pre-committed position. Reporters have noted that a major point of fiscal disagreement between Governor Dayton and the Legislature has been the issue of income tax. In line with the historical difference between the two parties, Democratic Governor Dayton has wanted to increase income tax on the highest Minnesota income earners while the Republican-housed Legislature has wanted to cut taxes and decrease spending. A number of smaller disagreements concern the distribution of the budget to various state-funded and state-supported programs, like public transit and higher education. These disagreements nonetheless have significant effects on Minnesota residents; for instance, the University of Minnesota, MnSCU, Metro Transit, and mental health service agencies are all at risk of losing large portions of much-needed state support. Governor Dayton budges here and there towards the “center” and the Legislature likewise budges here and there towards the “center.” Gov. Dayton may modify his proposed tax increases and the Legislature may increase funding for higher education or public assistance programs.

Yet a position-defending debate limits creative resolutions and visionary change. How can our lawmakers pass laws that correspond with Minnesotan’s longing for true wealth (based on human health, happiness, and sustainable well-being) if they are locked into defense mode? The Recession and ecological devastation together have provoked a growing class consciousness and ecological awareness that must be engaged and worked through. A dialectic exchange needs to take place at public squares and at the State Capitol to reveal contradictions implicit in both parties’ reasoning. Logical inconsistencies can thereby be surmounted through such an emergent dialogue. The urgency and necessity for lawmakers to engage the budget dialectically should not be mistaken by readers as a merely theoretical proposal—while we engage and stir our consciousness for an equitable, sustainable, flourishing society, we must remember that individuals and communities are bearing the consequences now of inaction and wrong-headed action.

A dialectic consideration of the budget reveals that as debates surrounding income tax and budget allocation continue, such debate accepts de facto the condition of employment and the constitution of money under capitalism. Reviewing very briefly this system, we see that income-earners are economically coerced to work for the owners of the forces of production, whether these forces be factories that produce rubber vehicle tires, mills  that ground flour, plants that assemble cell phones and laptops, or organizations that employ individuals to administrate, manage, supervise, do financial accounting, and many more tasks. Importantly, the pyramid’s flag-bearing peak is capital itself. The accumulation of money for the sake of money is the penultimate value and purpose of the entire scheme.

Accepting the unsustainable and inequitable system of capital is the core dysfunction behind the fiscal confusion and the state government shutdown. This acceptance amounts to a policy decision de facto. Budget formation, which unjustly receives less media attention than outright policy decisions such as marriage laws, for example, is in effect state lawmakers’ highest level of policy-making that affects individuals across all identity politics’ given demarcations. State budget planning and implementation requires, evidently, the use of money. But where does money come from in our capitalist system? From the surplus value that owners of productive forces extract from discrepancies between the worker’s waged labor, new technology that increases productivity, and the private sale of the commodity produced, as Philosopher Karl Marx painstakingly first analyzed in his seminal work Capital. Common sense and experience confirms these findings.

It is this foundational inequality that our lawmakers fail to examine and to surmount, effectively composing a destructive budget year after year. A balanced budge serves society, not exploits society in order to provide, after the fact, handouts for the disadvantaged and the poor that it creates as part of its very mandate. The existence of large numbers of impoverished peoples demonstrates the failings of capitalism to provide for the needs of all human beings. This lethal understanding of “budgeting” must be done away with. It is not the tax on income that we and our state lawmakers need to redress. It is not the amount of money to be allocated that needs to be discussed. It is not even the income discrepancies between lower, middle, and upper classes that needs to be addressed, though exceptional discrepancies will naturally dissolve when the core issue is surmounted. Indeed, it is the rotting, ghostly figure of capital that must be cornered and condemned. Collective ownership of the forces of production will end the privately traded commodities market for capital profit and restore the needs, goals, and prosperity of human societies.

Erudite philosophers, such as Hegel and Marx, have shown that work is critical to self-consciousness, to the existence of the human. There are many ways to be human—to experience the well-being and joy inherent in our rich and generous species-life. Late capitalism destroys the work-self-consciousness symbiosis that is critical to the human and obligates humans to give up our very consciousness. Individuals cannot work for our humanity but rather must work for capitalists, and for the capitalist’s god, capital wealth (the accumulation of money). Our labor is not only traded for private profit but, being so traded, alienates us from what it means to be human.

Cooperatively owned spaces and public-access spaces, like libraries, universities, parks, gardens, and public transit, showcase the cooperative spirit of the human giving for shared human use. These are not intangible ideals but real practices and places that exist; it is these very places and spaces that the fiscal dysfunction and consequent state government shutdown has ruined, or threatened to ruin. The de facto policy that leeches on the people’s blood and hearts is the clandestine consideration of what money is and how money is created, funneled, withheld, and accumulated in modern society. Unjustly acquired money does not belong in any law-abiding budget.

Minnesota has the rich natural and human resources necessary to sustain our human population at high levels of well-being and happiness. We are a state of farmers who have been producing nutritious foods for distribution and exchange at food co-ops around the state. We need more Minnesota residents to purchase their food needs at co-ops, whose pricing and collective ownership reflects the real needs of farmers, sustainable farm practices, and nutritionally-rich bodies, as opposed to corporate, for-profit grocers that sell towards the whims and mercies of the sociopathic stock exchange. We need Minnesota to keep running cooperatively led places, like the Seward Café in Minneapolis, and to open more. The contention that co-op costs are unreasonably priced for middle-income people is built on a form of reasoning that ultimately binds people—including the impoverished who truly cannot afford it—to the slave-like chains of repetitive, mechanistic, unfulfilling, corrupt, competitive, and time-drenching employment at the hands of the owners of productive forces. Such employment is economic coercion. We need a truly balanced budget. We must organize to work for ourselves, for our communities, and for our humanities.

-A.H.

Borderline States of America

Individuals with borderline personality disorder suffer tremendously, and often secretly, from this neurotic condition characterized by a pattern of tumultuous relationships and unreasonably risky, impulsive behaviors. Psychoanalysts believe the disturbance emerges as a “protective” measure in an individual whose sense of self has been badly bruised and humiliated in childhood. This sense of self has not been restored since the original trauma.

Sigmund Freud’s instructive thesis that unequal societies engender neurosis is relevant to our present consideration. Freud studied and treated bourgeoisie women who came to him exhibiting symptoms of hysteria. He argued that bourgeoisie class norms, expectations, and experiences repress normal, balanced human feelings and expressions and these repressed feelings rupture out in uncontrollable physical behaviors. Freud observed a corresponding increase in hysterical cases as the society in which individuals lived became more and more unequal.

I borrow from Sigmund Freud’s instructive thesis that unequal societies engender neurosis in order to say that capitalism is itself an organized site of structural borderline. That is to say, unreasonably risky, impulsive behaviors are normalized through systems and structures that destroy humans, animals, and life-sustaining beings in apparent and latent self-destruction. Since capitalism is now globalized, this self-destruction would amount to a destruction of the entire world, which is the world where we presently meet.

I have written in previous posts that capitalism is the superstructure that penetrates all frames of knowing and mediates relations between all individuals. That is to say, capitalism’s logic, material base, and cultural force frames the entire world through its sole consideration: capital wealth. But now I would like to add that capitalism penetrates (and fractures) the very foundation of knowing—the human self.

Thus it is not only that an unequal society engenders neurosis in some individuals but that an unequal society in fact engenders neurosis in all individuals, although in varying degrees. The object of resisting capitalism is then to address not only its material base, its cultural force, and its logic, but is also, crucially, to address its destructive psychological imprint.

Like a true borderline case, capitalism projects all of its deficits onto individuals. Consequently, it is individuals who have failed to keep up with mortgage payments, it is individuals who are too lazy or incompetent to find gainful employment, it is individuals who are greedy and hostile, it is individuals who are fat and unhealthy. (How many times have we heard the same individualist failure rhetoric applied to what should be appropriately considered a systemic failure?) Projective identification happens when individualizes internalize capitalism’s false projections and begin to identify with and perform these projected attitudes, behaviors, or roles themselves. I often encounter people who believe that humans are naturally greedy or corrupt. This sort of thinking is not only false, but very harmful. Capitalism’s never-ending crises, such as the recent US Recession, can in this way serve to capitalize on humanity’s present despondency by falsely projecting and essentializing greed, fraud, exploitation or weakness as natural traits of the human being. The financial crisis can be used to represent the human self, and, moreover, to marshal fear. This is an example of not only projection and of false consciousness, but also of manipulation.

These are all examples of capitalism affecting neurosis in the individual. Now what I would like to demonstrate is that capitalism is in itself structurally neurotic, specifically in the borderline sense. Renowned psychiatrist and author Alexander Lowen, in his book “Narcissism: Denial of the True Self,” writes that the “very term ‘borderline’ was created to denote a personality structure that is somewhere in between, both sane and insane” (24). Lowen argues that narcissism—of which borderline is one specific sub-type—is the primary psychological disturbance of modern life and that our culture is narcissistic. He also says that to be narcissistic in a narcissistic society is technically (though not reasonably) sane, since sanity is a measure of the discrepancy between “fantasy and fact” (24), and a narcissist therefore is a match for our present narcissistic culture.

Capitalism also is “somewhere in between, both sane and insane.” It is not completely psychopathic, nor is it obviously harmless. Its outward appearance, one could say, is normal. One could even point to the high level of material abundance it provides to residents of core nations like the United States. But this appearance is a mask which conceals the intense insecurity and emptiness of lives generally lived under its decree and furthermore reveals an incongruous split between “fantasy and fact.” Examples of risky and impulsive behaviors abound, behaviors that are self-destructive and that can be appropriately considered self-loathing acts. Consider the following cases. We live in a country where the average resident has access to modern technology and a modest standard of living, and where seven million people abuse prescription drugs. We live in a country that has some of the most advanced medical centers, and that has some of the highest rates of cancer in the world, such as the astronomical breast cancer incidence among American women. We live in a country that produces new knowledge and new technology in a variety of important disciplines, and that has an increasingly unsatisfied workforce  who are working longer and longer hours, usually for less pay. The cases go on and on. The incongruities are unreasonable and suggest a serious lack of human consideration at the most basic level: health and happiness.

Let’s take as another example the present situation of colleges and universities in the United States in order to further illustrate capitalism’s structural borderline. Many of our country’s public colleges and universities are losing state funding, and this increases the burden on individual students and families to pay rising tuition costs. The University of Minnesota has lost significant state funding in my two years as a graduate student. I have observed the English Department repeatedly cut costs because of this decreased budget; several cost reductions have directly impacted graduate students. Meanwhile, for-profit colleges and universities, such as University of Phoenix, are burgeoning and making private profit. For-profit colleges are directly traded on the stock market. A recent USA Today article (“For-profit colleges get rules tied to federal aid”)” reports that a new federal regulation “triggered a strong rally in publicly traded shares of for-profits college operations” because the regulation, intended to protect students receiving federal financial aid from problematic for-profit practices, is more lenient than had been expected. As a result of this unexpected news, the article reports that “Corinthian Colleges jumped $1.07 (27%) to $5.06, Education Management shot up $4.46 (22%) to $24.76, Devry climbed $7.87 (15%) to $61.86, University of Phoenix parent Apollo gained $4.71 (11%) to $46.90 and Washington Post Co., which owns the Kaplan school chain, rose $20.46 (5%) to $426.42.” These numbers illustrate the parody of the situation. And yet this is no fiction, but verifiable fact. What is reasonable and sane about buying and selling education on the stock market? This is an example of structural borderline—risky behavior that takes a worthwhile democratic pursuit and privatizes and trades it on the stock market for capital profit. Advocates of for-profit colleges may argue that these institutions provide additional options for students and do not take away from public universities, but the Recession has proven that everything is economically interrelated. Provoked by capitalist, for-profit undertakings that failed, the Recession troubled the government’s finances, and the government “balanced” its budget by cutting funds to publicly supported colleges and universities across the country.

This is not to say that structural borderline does not appear also in public (not-for-profit) institutions. Since capitalism’s logic and psychological imprint affects all individuals living under its system, one often finds a willingness—even by progressive groups—to work within its mandate. But since the system is borderline, wouldn’t working within it to promote human and nonhuman well-being be problematic? Wouldn’t one need to challenge and resist capitalism’s force as a fundamental part of any vision of social justice and well-being? It is an impossibility to believe that we can reverse ecological devastation and sustain human and nonhuman beings only by raising environmental consciousness because capitalism can absorb recycling, reducing, and reusing initiatives (and then some) with only a hitch. Consider environmental initiatives, such as the Natural Capital Project, to quantify nature’s value economically. These numbers will be used by decision-makers to aid in calculating and making decisions as a genuine attempt to preserve natural resources. But working towards the capitalist system, by quantifying nature economically, is a borderline act: it is half sane and it is half insane.

The discrepancy between the world we live in and the world we ought to live in is falsely dumbfounding because structural borderline is capitalism’s synchronous condition. Unreasonably risky, impulsive, destructive behavior should be by now recognizably predictable and cliché. We must resist such borderline consciousness and boldly assert the restoration and recovery that is so needed of the bruised human self-consciousness.

-A.H.

Citations:

Lowen, Alexander. Narcissism: Denial of the True Self. New York: Touchstone, 1997.

Anti-Humanism Sustainable Human

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Philosopher Frédéric Neyrat describes humanism’s conception of the human: Humans are not born human but become human. We lack an essence that must be made. But what does “to become” or “to be made” mean? he asks. “The globalized world is based on a specific understanding of becoming. We believe that ‘to become’ is ‘to produce something.’ And we believe that man has to be produced. Not only produced, but endlessly produced” (IAS lecture link).

Neyrat explains that humanism is “always an overstatement, that is to say an interpretation of man, an interpretation of history and of a special kind of metaphysics” and he is looking at “our idea of humanism.” Our modern idea of humanism is transhistorical, he says, and has the goal of “producing a flexible human being.” Neyrat says that this humanization (the creation of the flexible human) creates humans who believe that we can destroy nature while still remaining safe.

The idea that human essence must be made fits perfectly well into the logic of capitalism, which aims to produce—and monetize—the entire world. Together humanism and capitalism instruct us that humans are deficient in-and-of ourselves. We are to be made good (enough). We “prove” that nature is nothing as we objectify our lack into a product, thereby negating this lack. The process must be repeated again and again since our lack is inherent. This endless production devastates the earth, leading us to our present ecological devastation and degenerate state. Because humanism defines humans by a lack of essence that must be made, and “to be made” under capitalism means to produce, humanism must be challenged if we are to sustain humanity itself, Neyrat argues. Anti-humanism is thus a resistance to humanism’s production of the human.

It is useful to note that it is humanism plus global capitalism plus modern technology, according to Neyrat, that negates the value of production. Work is critical to self-consciousness—to the human—as influential philosophers Hegel and Marx cogently articulate. But under capitalism, humans are alienated from our work and so from our humanity. Even if humanism’s claim that we become human were true, then we cannot become human under present-day conditions (since we are systematically separated from what we produce).

Neyrat also demonstrates that humanism is itself a “mode of production” since it “produces an integral difference” between nature, nothingness, and humans. That is, humanism is a concept that produces a pernicious divide between humans and nature as humans must be made from nature into culture. Humanism produces a particular frame of understanding human existence and possibility. It is false consciousness to accept the conditions of this frame as if it were self-constituted law. We must consider the limitations of humanism’s construct. We need to change at the conceptual level if we are to surmount our present global economic system and reverse human and ecological destruction.

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Problems of sustainability can be re-evaluated as emanating from humanism’s self-destructing contradiction under capital rule. To become human is to produce. But alienated from our work we must produce perpetually—ineffectually—and thereby destroy the very earth that makes the world habitable to humans.

Conventional sustainability theories suggest anthropocentrism—or human-centeredness—is a dominant cause of ecological devastation. Humans only care about other humans (and themselves) and this exclusive focus on humans destroys the nonhuman world. One popular response to anthropocentrism is the turn toward subverting or deconstructing the animal/human binary. Such a response often attempts to portray specific examples of the “animality” of the human as a way of representing the permeability of this binary. If we can successfully reposition the human focus as a less anthropocentric being, then perhaps we will stop destroying the planet.

But let us give consideration to Neyrat’s challenging claim that it is not anthropocentrism but “anthro-indemnification” that is responsible for ecological destruction. The term “indemnification” means to compensate for a loss or hurt; in our specific context, it would mean to compensate for the lack of human essence. So humans devastate the globalized world not because we are self-centered but rather because we are without self. (This is not the same thing as being selfless; one cannot be selfless unless one has a cohesive self to “give up.”) Lacking a stable, composed self, we “act out” against the material world in behaviors that could be described as self-loathing—this hate is spawned from and directed at the absence of a coherent self. The entire world can be seen as a hostile escape from this systemically-organized and individually-occupied self-vacancy.

Sustainability efforts and environmental philosophy must re-consider the systemic subjugation of the human in present times in order to restore the perceived lack of human essence and to bring to a halt the dehumanization of humanity. Our society has failed the human. The human self itself must be restored and sustained.

-A.H.