Liszt concert info

Fri, November 13, 7 PM, Pass 6
Students' Culture HallSymphonic Orchestra of the „Transylvania" State Philharmonic
Conductor: György Selmeczi (Hungary)
Soloist: Diana Dava Barb - pian

Program:
P. Vermesy – Symphony no. 3
D. Şostakovici – Piano Concert no. 2
F. Liszt – Mephisto Valse
F. Liszt – Csárdás obstiné (arrangement by G. Selmeczi)
F. Liszt – Csárdás macabre (arrangement by G. Selmeczi)
F. Liszt – Les Preludes

In this interview Madoff confesses that technological deflation (lower operating costs for brokers, managers, and bankers) caused the tremendous inflation of the early naughties.  The automation of decision making and data processing caused trading commissions to drop, thereby forcing banks into greater risk taking in order to compete for profits.  Madoff is one of the few people I would trust on this topic, since he proudly asserts the wolfishness and desperation that under any circumstances govern economics.  

If he's right, the overproduction of financial services might well have surpassed the overproduction of, saying, housing.  If so, we can expect the deflation of the former to be much more severe.

Skeptonomics: Progress and the Deflation of Monumental History

More questions:

Was there really any such thing as capital?

Is it possible to have a capitalism with multiple caputi?  A cerberus, or a body with a soul or a mind in many places?

Observe:

"In the last years of the reign of the ever more melancholic King Ulászló, Hungary experienced the most bloody and ferocious rural revolt of her history.  The economic and social situation of the peasants had begun to deteriorate in the late fifteenth century, when Hungarian landlords, like their fellows in Poland and Bohemia, started to impose restrictions on their tenants.  One of the reasons was that the lords, wanting to profit from the rise of food prices on the European markets, wished to enter the marketplace with foodstuffs extracted from their serfs.  Seigneurial dues in kind, together with the tithe (mostly rented by the landlords from the church), and different traditional taxes gave the seigneurs control over a considerable amount of marketable produce.  Laws of the late fifteenth century confirmed their right to trade in these commodities free of taxes and customs duty." ---From "Rural revolt and the Laws of 1514" in A History of Hungary

A commodities bubble caused one of the great peasant revolts of the early modern period.  The bubble was caused by free market protectionism, and feudal exemption from taxation -- all instigated under the passive oppression of a melancholic and ineffectual sovereign.  Sound familiar?  

He continues:

"While one day of robot counted as a quite heavy obligation in the preceding century, three days weekly was not rare 1520."

Robot here performs precisley the same function as central banking interest rates under the monetarism of the contemporary banking class:  increase wealth by maximizing the percentage of worker production which will be paid directly to you.  Contemporary economics has never succeeded in being anything other than a technology for optimizing this strategy.  Indeed, all it has contributed is the ability to create inflationary bubbles at will, resulting in an intensification of robot, by using the printing press to expand the monetary base at just the right moment.  But in this, if in nothing else, Marx is even more dishonest and unhistorical than Keynes, for, even in 16th century Hungary, it is the bourgeoisie, Marx's own class, which is the revolutionary class.  The burden of performing an abject surrender to theological brutalities always falls on them, is always a function of their cosmopolitanism: 

"The growth of the market towns, with their limited but promising liberties, seemed also to have threatened seigneurial interests, and beginning in 1492 Diets revoked the right of peasants to transfer from one lord to another or from village to market town."

So, if, in this history of kings and classes, a caput can be found always elsewhere and again, what can be said of all the forces which seem to work against it?  And what can such an "against", such a contra, mean where these kinds of revolutions appear to be the turnings of gears within a single robot?

I think they almost get it...

Marketwatch is headlining this story as "Shoppers on Strike": exactly.  See the "general strike..." post below.

Surrogate Intercorporeality: Urbanization and the growth of the ?world-wide inter-web, as you call it?

It seems like the curmudgeony insistence on the alienating effects of the internet must be both right and wrong. In Dreyfus? ?On the Internet?, this notion seems to emerge out of a certain reading of Merleau Ponty, in which ?intercorporeality? is a taken as a concept of limits. We need our bodies to interact with the people we interact with. The limits implied by the emphasis on this type of intercorporeality signify that bodily interaction is not possible over the internet. And yet, if studies have found that internet usage decreases connectivity in families and communities, if people seem to be bodily compelled to hang out online day and night instead of using their bodies to communicate with their ?actual? location, then we must pose two skeptical marxist questions:

1) Can we be so certain about the non-intercorporeality of internet users with each other?
2) And may not the information-seeking public be actively deploying a tough therapy for a previously existing alienation?

The very concepts of surrogacy and the urban suggest that we need not touch, see or even hear each other in order to participate fully in intercorporeality. Surrogacy means that we can act as each other: my bodies can be you across space, and be for you. The urban means a closeness beyond the epistemic positing of presence: we live close together, in an infinity suggested only by the perceptual experience of finite multiplicity. The play of metaphore involved in surrogacy dominates experience, for even direct investigation is given over to the gestures of all our others. Taken together with the fact that even the particularity of our egos is still a we composed of all names, faces and unknown bodies, and it becomes clear that even cats have internet, and that it has probably been theorized since at least 6,000 BCE.
And the second question tomorrow...

The Sublation of the General Strike

The question whether the general strike is a partial reality, or only a product of popular imagination, is of little importance. All that it is necessary to know is, whether the general strike contains everything that the Socialist doctrine expects of the revolutionary proletariat.

- George Sorel, Reflections on Violence

Since violence is clearly illegible as violent, we may as well admit that the type of violence known as "resistance" and "anti-capitalist" struggle will work with as much insipid, invisible, globe-engulfing force as anything like "capitalism".  Keeping in mind that the "capital" of Das Kapital is more an arche-principle of any organon, than the designation of any specific economic system, it might seem as if violence itself were in any case anti-capitalist.  The specific illegibility of violence as violent (our inability to identify all possible consumption as violent, for instance) leads us to the same equipollence we find surrounding so many concepts, such as sovereignty, perpetrator, terrorism, and roguishness.  So, of course, capitalism is auto-immune, as Marx and so many others have pointed out.  But, further, if its violence has failed to live up to the stupidity of our concept of the "event" as irruptive, as violent, then so, by any argument, must its self-violence.  

It is for this reason that the violent destruction of aggregate demand in "advanced" economies must be judged along the same lines as the violence of the general strike once was: not does it "work" (as if we could know what this means), but is its futurity proletarian?  Does it expect an aneconomy of the other, not knowing what it will be? In this way, and only in this way, is the myth of the general strike growing out of its long, long infancy...

Early halloween post: Skeptical Ethics and the Deflation of the Uber-bubble (Crashes of 1873 & 1893)

Wikipedia (the moment of telos of human intelligence) tells us:

That in May of 1873, just as the global economy collapsed, barbed-wire was invented, and Jesse James carried out the first successful train robbery.

[Aneconomy: What is taken, is also taken.]

and that in 1893: "The huge spike in unemployment, combined with the loss of life savings by failed banks, meant that a once secure middle class could not meet their mortgage obligations. As a result, many walked away from recently built homes. From this, the sight of the vacant Victorian (haunted) house entered the American mindset."

[Many are still vacant (in Philly, say); many more vacancies are being added (in Stockton, say). As long as territories (dwellings) multiply faster than people, the periodic bubbles will only continue to deflate the larger bubble of monumental history.Nice to think the spectrality of the haunted house as the hope of abandonment, rather than the abandonment of hope. Lets add the McMansions to the ranks of the scary-beautiful!]