Notes,

reports and

retorts.

 

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p. 4: "Thurman Arnold..." see [Arnold 1937, 347]. Arnold was assistant attorney general in the third Roosevelt administration and investigated the cooperation between General Motors, Standard Oil and I.G. Farben.

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p. 6: "Thorstein Veblen's bushy-bearded argument..." see [Veblen 1899]. See also Adorno's devastating critique of Veblen's obsession with the "practical" vs. the "unpractical." [Adorno 1967a]

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p. 7: "Harvard's president urges all Americans..." New York Times September 6, 2009.

p. 7: "As Ladyblatt White Manhattan explains..." New York Times Week in Review (Sunday, December 9, 2007), 1. See WOID XVIII-22.

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p. 16: "Money threads through Republic I..." See [Shell 1989a].

p. 16: "Those unresolved tensions between Justice and Mutual Exchange..." The concept of isonomia, or rules of equity, is also discussed in Plato's earlier dialogue, Gorgias.

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p. 20: "Can't they just sniff...." The fetishization of women's bodies - that is, dealing with women's bodies as commodities - would take another form (if it took a form at all) in a culture that did not ask of women that they perform at once as commodities and as producers of commodities. The asymmetry between the forms that fetishization takes on the part of women vs. men in the theories of Freud and his followers is discussed in Roudinesco 1997, p. 319.

p. 20: "Just as Karl's evil uncle Hegel..." Marx's definition of "fetishism" originates with the Enlightenment writer Charles de Brosses [de Brosses, 1760], who was among the first to offer a materialist view of religions and first to define the term "fetishism"in the sense intended by Marx: a belief system in which powers are given to inanimate objects in order to displace onto them an agency - in the case of Marx an agency that the believer is loathe to take upon him- or herself. (Marx found the concept discussed in Hegel's Philosophy of History.) Marx's theory parallels the Freudian theory of fetishism in interesting ways: with Freud, the concept splits into two distinct categories, Fetishism and Compulsion. [Roudinesco 1997, pp. 316-320, 913-916]. The practical problem for a Marxist is to explain why people keep acting like capitalists in a capitalist society: "The Commodity made me do it!" "There's this Invisible Hand!" This is done by fetishizing various concepts as historical or social agents: The Economy for a capitalist, The Iron Law of Wages for a certain type of Marxist, Dialectical Materialism for another, sensationalist psychology in the 17th. and 18th centuries. When Jacques Lacan famously said that for the young rebels of 1968 "cobblestones and teargas 'fulfilled the role of object a” [Werner 1998, p. 241], he suggested the possibility of a fetishization of historical processes, with the caveat that teargas, Economic Theory, or getting off on your sister's slippers may also have a heuristic value: that is, these would be processes that are not frozen as inalterable essences (philosophical and ethical neuroses, if you will), but as tools that may be used and discarded when their time comes, either in the individual's development or in historical development, pretty much as Hegel saw the heuristic value of religious fetishism in History, and as Marx intended the First Book of Capital to make sense once the principles of bourgeois economics had been truly understood and, being understood, transcended.

p. 20. "It is strange...." Marx to Engels, August 24, 1867, in Marx 1977, p. 525.

p. 20: "If the commodity has a double character..." Marx to Engels, January 8, 1968, ibid, 523-524. If the tensions between use-value and exchange value survive in the object produced it's not because of some magic property that makes the object "desirable," it's because of the relationship between those who produce the object and those for whom it's produced. In the case of Art, "those for whom it's produced" can mean any number of individuals or classes. [Sartre 1948]. Definitions of Art are usually more interesting when they begin by answering the question "who is it produced for?" than when they end with "who produces it?"

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p. 25: "The art that got appreciationated..." See Polisi 2008, p. 35.

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p. 29: "Tribal brotherhood..." See Nelson 1949.

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p. 30: "These pieces [coins] have nothing..."Derrida 1982a, p. 210: "Ces pièces n’ont rien d’anglais, ni d’allemand, ni de français ; nous les avons tirées hors du temps et de l’espace ; elles ne valent plus cinq francs : elles sont d’un prix inestimable, et leur cours est étendu indéfiniment." Anatole France, in Derrida 1972a, p. 250. Significantly, the word "cours" is translated as "exchange-value" when in fact it means the process of exchange.

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p. 31: "And the capitalists have been getting jus-ed on that..." The history of the monadic ego can be divided into two major periods, BK and AK: Before Kant and After Kant. In the former category the most common tendency is to begin with the premiss that primitive, "natural" societies were communistic, and argue from this whether or not 'evolved' societies should, should not, or could return to this primeval state; see Surtz 1957 p. 161 and n. 2, p. 226. In the nineteenth century the argument shifts from a historical to a biological one: is man "naturally," or "genetically," or "essentially" made to live as a greedy nomad, or the reverse? By the mid-nineteenth century, Schopenhauer's concept of Mitleid, "sympathy" is brought to bear in various forms against Darwinian theories of struggle; see McGrath 1974, p.43 sqq. There is an echo of these arguments in Freud 1921 and Freud 1930. Marx himself starts out by rejecting Kant's monadic ego, suggesting in the Philosophical Manuscripts that the ego does not exist outside of its social, interpersonal dimension; the reverse "is as great an absurdity as the idea of the development of language without individuals living together and talking to one another." Or again: "The human essence is no abstraction inherent in each single individual. In reality it is the ensemble of the social relations." However, he goes on to suggest that only under communism (in the future, that is) will the potential of human beings to live interpersonally be fully developed. For a full discussion see Ollman 1971, 106-110.

p. 31: "The economic historian Richard Goldthwaite..." See Goldthwaite 1980 and Goldthwaite 2009.

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p. 32: "Largely dependent on symbolic and aesthetic exchanges..." Ellen Meiksins Wood, 82-83, following Rodney Hilton, makes the far bolder assertion that international trade in Europe was not at all driven by capitalist-fantasy processes of Supply and Demand; in fact, she suggests, logically enough, that the trade in luxury goods was as likely to influence internal markets in basic necessities as the other way around.

p. 32: "The leadingest expert..." See Montias 1990a and Schwartz 1998a.

p. 32: "It is evident..." Lucki, 113.

This particular fantasy still runs strong. See this review.

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p. 33: "Ernst Gombrich, Karl Popper, Friedrich Hayek." The argument is developed further in this article.

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p. 35: "Like the declamation of the actor..." Smith 1776, Book II, Chapter III: Of the Accumulation of Capital, or of Productive and Unproductive Labour; see also Book I, Chapter X: Inequalities arising from the Nature of the Employments Themselves......The argument is developed further in this article.

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38: In one Medieval theory the Devil is unable to understand the present, only the past and the future: unable, that is, to see himself reflected except through History. See Mellinkoff 1988.

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p. 41: "There's something called Modernity." As Beller observes, (pp. 169-172) there is a fundamental distinction to be drawn between the vision of "aesthetic modernity" promulgated by Schorske and Berman (the vision that's become a standard academic staple in American universities), and the vision of "critical modernity" proposed by Janik and Toulmin. The latter aimed to "restore an ethical imperative" to Modernity; the former's just middle class whiny ass.

p. 41: "They reject the working world..." Harrington, p. 87.

p. 41: "Even if truth..." from Arendt's despicable attack on Benjamin in Arendt 1968a; the incoherent rehash of Kant is on p. 39. (Arendt choses to ignore the distinction between proof kath’ aletheian and kat’anthroopon in Kant 1790.)

p. 41: "'animal laborans' and 'homo faber.'" See Arendt 1958.

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p. 42: "The Nazi's doxy's moxie...." see Ricoeur 1961a for a subtle and devastating take-down. Ricoeur argues that Arendt's Origins of Totalitarianism and the Human Condition are riffs on Heideger's essentialism, marked by an obsession with the abolition of the concept of social class and a desperate attempt to resolve the contradictions of use- and exchange-value. Much the same argument is made in Goldmann 1970a, 262: "Heidegger, by putting forth a dualist philosophy of History, had thoroughly separated the ontological from Being (l'ontologie de l'ontique), Philosophy from positivist science, as well as the authentic from the inauthentic, the elite from the masses, etc."

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p. 46: "Ownership of the means of production." Should read: "Control over the means of production." I wasn't thinking at the time about those Marxist discuss-ants who are always happy to argue over who's a bourgeois or not as long as the concept of property itself remains untouched.

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p. 47: "Would these million men..."

Ce million d’hommes ou environ, qui parlent avec tant de complaisance de leurs vastes propriétés, les croiroient-ils bien assises, lorsque vingt-quatre millions d’autres hommes cesseroient de retirer de leurs mains le juste & continuel salaire de leur industrie? Présume-t-on que des fortunes immenses se seroient paisiblement élevées sans la ressource qu’offroit au reste du peuple la culture des arts, ou qu’elles resteraient en paix si cette culture venait à ne plus rien produire?” Lefébure 1785, p. 4.

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p. 51: "Combining the Soviet power..." Lenin 1918; see the discussion in Sochor 1988, p. 115, and in Braverman 1974, p.12.

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p. 52: "Economic oysters to be broken up to indebt them..." Auerback 2009a.

p. 52: "Trade unions are not at all interested..." quoted in Sochor 1988, p. 131. The context, however, is that trade unions in the first years of the Soviet Union resented being dragged into what they considered the frivolous activities of the Proletkult organization. Nadezhda Krupskaya, Lenin's partner, argued that these clubs should be "educational," rather than functioning like "tea rooms." Presumably all aesthetic practice is either educational, or mere entertainment...

p. 52: "For a start, we should be satisfied..." V. I. Lenin, "Better Fewer, but Better," 2 March 1923, in Lenin, Selected Works, 1-vol ed. (New York: International Publishers, 1971), p. 700; quoted in Sochor 1988, p. 172. See also Lenin, "On Proletarian Culture," in the same volume, described at the time as "the thunder of Vladimir Ilich" at being thwarted in his attempts to destroy Proletkult. Sochor 1988, p. 154.

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p. 54: "Then there's the AS, the Artskirts..." Élie Halévy wrote about the "Organization of Enthusiasm" as a hallmark of totalitarian regimes; this begs the question, whether this type of organizing in the field of culture constitutes another aspect of liberal totalitarianism - a theme also broached by Theodor Adorno.

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p. 56: "A protocol economy..." Brooks.

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p. 57: "If one were to tell those few..."

"Si l’on disoit à ce petit nombre d’hommes qui possèdent tout, occupez l’Artiste : & payez-le Bien; car avec la moindre parcelle de ce même génie don’t il anime le marbre ou la toile, il pourroit, s’il le vouloit, trouver des moyens sûrs de s’enrichir à vos dépens. ” Lefébure 1785, pp. 4-5.

p. 57: "The fussy Mammon..." D. H. Lawrence, letter to Lady Ottoline Morrell, in Moore, I, p. 315.

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p. 58: "work will never be merely..." Benjamin 1934a, p. 777: "Seine Arbeit wird niemals nur die Arbeit an Produktoren, sondern stets zugleich die and den Mitteln der Produktion sein." Gesammelte Schriften, II, p. 696.

p. 58: "Technique isn't doing what the machine wants, it's making the machine do what you want..." see Braverman 1974, passim, esp. 193-4: A mere "technical possibility" (the capacity of the machine to take over the functions of a human), is presented by capital as "inevitability." See also in Betz, p. 93, a discussion of Hanns Eisler's radio cantata, Tempo der Zeit, with words by Robert Gilbert:

Who is creating the tempo of this time to make others so comfortable? All of you! With the work of your hands it is created! Make sure that for the others, that is, for the ruling class, it becomes damned uncomfortable! Abolish exploitation! Only then will technical progress serve those who create it. Change the world: it needs it!

 

p. 58: "and do new things, and even better, that's why the artparatchiki fear technique as much as they love technology." see Braverman 1974, 230: "In reality, machinery embraces a host of possiblities, many of which are systematically thwarted, rather than developed, by capital... This tendency to socialize labor, and to make of it a an engineering enterprise on a high level of technical accomplishment, is considerd abstractly, a far mor striking characteristic of machinery in its fully developped state than any other. Yet this promise, which has been repeatedly held out with every technical advance since the Industrial Revolution, is frustrated by the capitalist effort to reconstitute and even deepen the division of labor in all its worst aspects."

p. 58-9: "All exchanges..." Piere Klossowski, who collaborated with Benjamin on the original, French version of "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," writes of Benjamin's wish for an "'esoterism' that would be both 'erotic and artisan'." Klossowski, p. 369.

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p. 59: "I listen to you and all the time..." V. Shelgunov, “Workers on the Road to Marxism,” Staryi Bol’shevik, 2 (5) (1933): 99-100; quoted Rosenberg and Young, p. 20.

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