Benjamin Geer on Sat, 10 Feb 2007 01:16:03 +0100 (CET) |
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Re: <nettime> money is always personal and impersonal |
On 08/02/07, Keith Hart <keith@thememorybank.co.uk> wrote: > Humanity's task > today is to assume responsibility for life as a whole on this planet > [...] > But critics sometimes > claim that the economists' impersonal approach is irrelevant or even > harmful to human interests. The economy exists at a number of levels > and not just those of the person, the family or local groups. The more > inclusive levels are made possible to a substantial degree by the > relative impersonality of money and markets. It will not do to replace > one pole of a dialectical pair with the other. We are today more than > ever aware of our economic interdependence in a world of markets and > money that has been unified by a digital revolution in communications. What you seem to be getting at here is that in order to "assume responsibility for life as a whole on this planet", we need something like a world market, rather than a world of small economies based on "the person, the family or local groups". I think it's worth questioning that idea. Can the relatively recent phenomenon of the world market, involving impersonal trade on the scale currently practised, be made sustainable in terms of energy consumption and environmental impact? Although the task of assuming responsibility for life as a whole on the planet arguably requires some kind of global political interaction, why should it require much global economic interaction? > The > sociologists, anthropologists and alternative economists will not get > far by harping on about how people already impose personal and social > controls over money and exchange. That is the everyday world as most > of us know it. We need ways of reaching the parts we don't know and of > averting the ruin they could bring down on us all. I think there's more to criticism of the impersonal economy than you acknowledge here. There is also the argument that the imposition of the impersonal economy has destroyed beneficial social relationships, while failing to provide adequate substitutes. Pierre Bourdieu gives examples of the violence of the impersonal economy in an article called "Making the Economic Habitus: Algerian Workers Revisited", written in 2000 about his early fieldwork in Algeria in the 1960s.[1] He, too, compares the modern economy to a religion: "Acquiring the spirit of calculation required by the modern economy entails a veritable conversion via the apostasy of the embodied beliefs that underpin exchange in traditional Kabyle society...." Echoing Polanyi, he emphasises "the *mismatch" between economic dispositions fashioned in a precapitalist economy and the economic cosmos imported and imposed, oftentimes in the most brutal way, by colonization. This mismatch forced one to discover that access to the most elementary economic behaviours (working for a wage, saving, credit, birth control, etc.) is in no way axiomatic and that the so-called 'rational' economic agent is the product of quite particular historical conditions...." Echoing Mauss, he writes: "In Kabyle society at the end of the colonial era, exchanges between relatives or neighbours obeyed the logic of the gift and counter-gift. People of honour do not sell milk ('Would you believe it? He sold some milk!'), or butter or cheese, or yet fruits and vegetables; instead, they 'let the neighbours benefit too'. A miller with surplus flour would not think of selling a foodstuff which is the very basis of the eating regimen. The same is true of services, which are governed by strict rules of reciprocity and non-payment, and also of loans.... Relations reduced to their purely 'economic' dimension are conceived as *relations of war*, which can only obtain between strangers. The site par excellence of economic warfare is the marketplace, not so much the small market of the village or tribe, a place where one is still among people one knows, as the bigger markets of small towns further afield...." Flour mills are an example of what was lost in the conversion to a market economy: "each mill was tied, through the interplay of the exchange of services and the back-and-forth of relationships and alliances, to a stable clientele, treated with special respect, rather like guests, and the miller levied a share (a tithe) of the grain he had handled in exchange for the service rendered. With the decline of agriculture... use of traditional watermills decreased... and motorized mills took their place, sweeping away as if by magic the whole system of conventions that governed the play of collective solidarity in the case of traditional milling. Thus, for instance, tradition dictated that any load of grain not brought to the mill on the back of a beast of burden be ground for nothing and before any others. For it could only be the small stock of a pauper, gathered by gleaning, or the gifts of the 'Aid, the tithe levied on the crops... in any case a quantity too small to be reduced by another tenth and too urgently needed for its milling to be delayed. With the motorized mill, generally acquired by saving (rather than being merely a customary object that one inherits), and perceived and treated as a mere means of production (in the strict economic sense), comes the logic of investment and the calculation of costs and profits.... The user of the motorized mill, however poor, becomes a customer and the miller behaves toward him like a businessman concerned to get a return on his investment." Returning to the metaphor of religion, he says: "To bring home to readers who, like our economists and sociologists of the economy, move like fish in water in the so-called rational economy, that the word 'conversion' is not too strong, and to provoke in them the conversion of the whole mindset that is necessary to break with the universe of deeply embodied presuppositions which make us perceive the economic conducts current in our own economic world as self-evident, natural and necessary, and therefore rational, I would need to be able to evoke here the long series of often infinitesimal experiences which made me *feel* in sensible and concrete fashion the contingent and arbitrary character of these ordinary behaviours that we perform every day in the ordinary course of our economic practices and that we experience as the most natural things in the world.... I remember vividly spending long hours questioning a Kabyle peasant who was trying to explain to me a traditional form of the loan of livestock, because it had not occurred to me that, contrary to all 'economic' reason, the lender could feel obligated to the borrower on the grounds that the latter was looking after an animal that in any case would have to be fed. I also remember the mass of anecdotal observations and statistical data that I had to accumulate before I understood the implicit philosophy of labour, based on the equivalency of labour and its remuneration in money, that I was engaging in my spontaneous interpretation of this world, and which was preventing me from fully understanding certain behaviours or the astonished reactions of my informants...: the utter outrage at the behaviour of the stonemason, back from a long sojourn in France, who asked that his wage be supplemented by the sum corresponding to the monetary value of the meal traditionally offered upon completing the building of a house, which, in an unprecedented breach of propriety, he had declined to attend...." He compares what was gained in this transformation with what was lost: "The principle of the overturning of the vision of the world in late colonial Algeria was nothing other than the acquisition of the *spirit of calculation*, which one should be careful not to confuse with the universal capacity to calculate. To subject all the behaviours of existence to calculating reason, as demanded by the economy, is to break with the logic of *philia*, of which Aristotle spoke, that is, the logic of good faith, trust and equity which is supposed to govern relations between kin and which is founded on the repression, or rather the denegation, of calculation. To refuse to calculate in exchanges with one's 'nearest and dearest' is to refuse to obey the principle of economy as propensity and capacity to economize or minimize expenditure (of effort, 'pains', then labour, time, money, etc.) in favour of giving without counting, a refusal which can in the long run foster the atrophy of calculating dispositions. It means refusing to leave a world in which the family, and the exchanges of which it must be the site, provided the model for all exchanges, including those that we regard as 'economic', for a world in which the economy, henceforth constituted as such, with its own principles, those of calculation, profit, etc., claims to become the principle of all practices and all exchanges, including those within the family, to the great scandal of this Kabyle father whose son had asked him for a wage. It is this overturning of the table of values which gave rise to the economy as we know it...." > For example, amazon.com keeps a record > of every book bought from them and they make recommendations for new > purchases on this basis. This is similar to the small bookseller who > reserves a book for a favorite customer, but now it all takes place > anonymously at distance. Some firms are already moving towards a > system known as Customer Relations Maintenance (CRM) based on data > banks that know no limit in scope. To me it seems very doubtful that such systems, which are based on the 'spirit of calculation', can ever compensate for the loss of real solidarity based on familiarity and trust, i.e. on the refusal of calculation. Ben [1] Ethnography, Vol. 1, No. 1, 17-41 (2000), http://eth.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/1/1/17 # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo@bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net