Foucault - Chomsky #5 (y finito)
Assuming that we keep the Marxist notion of the aristocratic few lording over the proletarian many, then Chomsky seems right in his assertion that the class "proletariate" needs be expanded to include the skilled mechanical and the intellectual laborers ... to include the middle and upper-middle class and perhaps the lower upper-class as well.
This segment of society is not, as Chomsky might say, aware of their place in the scehma ... they associate themselves with those above and demarcate below themselves ... demarcate the people below them ans different and less than themselves, via education, arts, and mundane material things. If you serve others ... and yet you have an image of the southern redneck, or that those from across the river in Council Bluffs are somehow less interesting and vital than you, then you, in contemporary Marxist terms, have been co-opted by the aristocratic class.
This segment of society allows provides the weight and power for the aristocratic power structure to rule ... the same structure that keeps this segment of society from being what it would really like to be, true owner-operators of society, so to speak.
And that's the rub ... everyone's demand and desire to be equal to those just above themselves (but never below themselves) is the propping up of the values "above" and the aristocrats' defeat of the proletarian desires by the means of divide and conquer.
In terms of capital, they give some up, or, rather, they give up some of the growth of the capital, to obtain this end. Those on the receiving end of this capital transfer keep their stash together to try to multiply it and vault up into the higher ranks.
Don't get me wrong here. Capital is beautiful. Capital is one of those most amazing object/forces in the world. If society does not understand what capital is, and how it works, then there can be no free society of the future. The freedoms that we identify (Foucault would here note that they are not "true" freedoms but only the freedoms defined by this culture, defined by the will to be an aristocrat) are obtainable only when the capital pool is allowed to multiply itself.
But that is another area altogether.
I leave the debate on this note ... this comparison. If one has to choose between making the middle third of the western democratic societies more free, or bringing the other 75% of the world up to that level ... what would you choose to do?
How about if we add uncertainty? If the freeing of that third of society would make it easier to pull the rest of the world up? ... then would you choose that? Or, conversely, knowing that we can't know what the free peoples of that future society would do, and given our current moral imperitives, culturally derived as they may be, do we take the safe lesser bet and work for the rest of the world? ... or do we work for the higher idea, hoping that will work for the rest of the world?
At heart i remain Nietzschean. Whatever the morals and desires of that future society, no matter how good they may be versus more desireable standards ... they are still unknown to me. I am a man in culture (Dasein, perhaps the good word) with my moral ways and i must pursue those moral ways, by the best means. The accumulated freedom and capital of the western democracies is not something i feel i can risk in the name of anyone. I must side with the slower safer option, the general grab of "the rest of us" of the capital pool (and freedom pool, as it is). This talk of better future freedoms ... that is spirit talk and back-worlds talk and just cannot, at the end of the day, work as justification for me.
At the time when Newton was writing The Principia, my ancestors had for generation after generation after generation been farming for others in the mud of southern Ireland, Clan McNamara in County Cork.
Me. Today. There are a thousand fulfilling and self-actualizing tasks with which i could task myself, and accomplish. Things my ancestors never dreamed of having the freedom to do. How could i not, as a moral agent, wish to export that in my community and in my world forst and formost. It would take a very specific vision of a better society and a very high probability of obtaining it to get me to give up my moral wishes here and now.
Foucault would tell me, "they've gotten you hook, line and sinker."
Then again, Chomsky would tell me that too, he would just mean something a little different thereby.
This segment of society is not, as Chomsky might say, aware of their place in the scehma ... they associate themselves with those above and demarcate below themselves ... demarcate the people below them ans different and less than themselves, via education, arts, and mundane material things. If you serve others ... and yet you have an image of the southern redneck, or that those from across the river in Council Bluffs are somehow less interesting and vital than you, then you, in contemporary Marxist terms, have been co-opted by the aristocratic class.
This segment of society allows provides the weight and power for the aristocratic power structure to rule ... the same structure that keeps this segment of society from being what it would really like to be, true owner-operators of society, so to speak.
And that's the rub ... everyone's demand and desire to be equal to those just above themselves (but never below themselves) is the propping up of the values "above" and the aristocrats' defeat of the proletarian desires by the means of divide and conquer.
In terms of capital, they give some up, or, rather, they give up some of the growth of the capital, to obtain this end. Those on the receiving end of this capital transfer keep their stash together to try to multiply it and vault up into the higher ranks.
Don't get me wrong here. Capital is beautiful. Capital is one of those most amazing object/forces in the world. If society does not understand what capital is, and how it works, then there can be no free society of the future. The freedoms that we identify (Foucault would here note that they are not "true" freedoms but only the freedoms defined by this culture, defined by the will to be an aristocrat) are obtainable only when the capital pool is allowed to multiply itself.
But that is another area altogether.
I leave the debate on this note ... this comparison. If one has to choose between making the middle third of the western democratic societies more free, or bringing the other 75% of the world up to that level ... what would you choose to do?
How about if we add uncertainty? If the freeing of that third of society would make it easier to pull the rest of the world up? ... then would you choose that? Or, conversely, knowing that we can't know what the free peoples of that future society would do, and given our current moral imperitives, culturally derived as they may be, do we take the safe lesser bet and work for the rest of the world? ... or do we work for the higher idea, hoping that will work for the rest of the world?
At heart i remain Nietzschean. Whatever the morals and desires of that future society, no matter how good they may be versus more desireable standards ... they are still unknown to me. I am a man in culture (Dasein, perhaps the good word) with my moral ways and i must pursue those moral ways, by the best means. The accumulated freedom and capital of the western democracies is not something i feel i can risk in the name of anyone. I must side with the slower safer option, the general grab of "the rest of us" of the capital pool (and freedom pool, as it is). This talk of better future freedoms ... that is spirit talk and back-worlds talk and just cannot, at the end of the day, work as justification for me.
At the time when Newton was writing The Principia, my ancestors had for generation after generation after generation been farming for others in the mud of southern Ireland, Clan McNamara in County Cork.
Me. Today. There are a thousand fulfilling and self-actualizing tasks with which i could task myself, and accomplish. Things my ancestors never dreamed of having the freedom to do. How could i not, as a moral agent, wish to export that in my community and in my world forst and formost. It would take a very specific vision of a better society and a very high probability of obtaining it to get me to give up my moral wishes here and now.
Foucault would tell me, "they've gotten you hook, line and sinker."
Then again, Chomsky would tell me that too, he would just mean something a little different thereby.
posted by Thomas F. Schminke at 9:16 PM
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