Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
> Angela wrote to Charles:
> >and in any case, the inflection of the first question, 'what does chaz
> >want', is still there in an important sense, though writ larger. the
> >inflection being a psychoanalytic one, implying that desires are not
> >always (some would go further and say 'not ever') transparently known.
> >if at the level of the psyche, which is always a social and historical
> >term and not an individual one, there is a certain opacity, then the
> >presumptions of planning fall down at this point, since planning assumes
> >a transparency. ie., how do you really know what you desire and why?
> >and, if you can't be always on top of this, why do you expect an
> >institution to be capable of such knowledge? (we're back perhaps to the
> >theory of the party-as-the-state-in-waiting as beyond ideology.)
>
> Why should "planning" assume "a transparency"?
>
> That "desires are not always transparently known" doesn't entail the conclusion you seem to be reaching for: "there is no social and individual need and desire that can be reasonably predicted and planned for."
Angela arranged the necessary (for her) shift from tautology to nonsense in a parenthesis "(some would go further and say 'not ever'), and she places herself among that "some" without feeling the need to defend the proposition. As a matter of fact almost all of human life can be (and always has been) easily predicted. At this moment I'm feeling pressure on my fingertips and little pressure on the soles of my feet. I can predict with absolute (sorry Ian) certainty that if I stop typing and stand up there will be more pressure on the soles of my feet than on my fingertips. And that kind of prediction bulks far larger in human life -- always has, always will -- than anything that concerns Angela.
Actually one can have such certainty in rather large concerns. In a tributary society (say western feudalism) the peasant family can predict with certainty that (given a series of ifs) they will eat and (given another series of ifs) and they won't. This is true of any social order in which there is a reasonably direct relationship of motive and act. (The motive of eating is visibly present in the act of growing, harvesting, threshing, and milling the rye.) If those acts succeed and are not visibly interrupted (by weather, by pillaging, etc -- all visible causes of interruption), their motive will be realized.
But from the very first appearance of commodity production (in Europe roughly 6th c. b.c.e.) this visible connection between act and motive is broken -- a break which we can see wonderfully manifested in the difference between the *Odyssey* and the *Oresteia* (for example). The former has for over 2000 years been seen (wrongly) as exhibiting the creation of order from chaos. (The sea usually mimes chaos -- as in the tale of Jonah) and escape from it order.) But Odysseus knows exactly what he must do to achieve his goals: get home and clean up things. He fears failing to carry out this act or complex of acts but he has no doubt that successful the motive will be realized in the act itself. This is of course grounded in the perfect planning of production in the *oikos* -- and it to his *oikos* of which Penelope is only one aspect, that Odysseus struggles to return. (*Oikos*, "household" a very inadequate translation, since what *oikos*, the root of *economy*, names no longer exists.)
Not so in Aeschylus' world. One act after another is presented by the agent as embodying the motive of bringing back order from chaos -- and in each case a *new* chaos immediately appears, even though the act in each case is successful. And life moved fast in 5th c. Athens. A few years later in *Antigone* the Creon's act serves to create the opposite (anarchy) from the order he aimed at. Just because he *was* successful in his act (the death of Antigone) his aim (the future) is destroyed (by the suicide of his son and wife). (Of course classical tragedy sees an invisible order looming over and generating the visible chaos -- in that it is sort of a forerunner of neoclassical economics.)
Order (predictability, planning) is the necessary precondition for human life, and to the extent that this predictability is lost life becomes impossible. (Consider the ultimate in disorder -- the "laws" of nature (e.g., gravity) fail to operate. Or the speed limit changes minute by minute according to secret whims of the traffic cop. Spike Jones grasped the essence of Nazi Germany nicely:
Every man of foreign race will love the Fuehrer's face
When we bring to the world dis - order.
In a world of deliberate chaos of course one must love the only (seeming) predictability: The Leader.
> I don't know exactly what is really at stake in this thread (which I haven't been following), but I do know, for instance, that I should like to have ready at hand something to wipe my bottom with after each satisfying experience of bowel movement, and that without going to too many meetings to wrangle with others. And I don't think I'm too eccentric in this regard. Further, there is no need to psychoanalyze why we might want toilet paper, is it?
Of course such planning would be impossible if now paper was absorbent but the laws of chemistry changed, with iron becoming absorbent and paper ceasing to be. Under Doug recently quoted Fitch on the 90% adequacy of vulgar marxism to explain reality. Actually vulgar anything explains 80% of reality. Angela presumably is focused on human freedom -- but of course freedom (at least in her sense) depends on most of life being predictable -- and it is the unpredictability of life under capitalism that constitutes what some marxists refer to as the "anarchy of production" -- the inability in a market economy to match production to need. In tributary societies as well as in hunter-gatherer cultures there may be -- usually is -- a problem of not enough, but never of too much, and it is the destruciveness of that too much which bewilders humans under capitalism. I remember when I was 9 my uncle carrying 300 crates of strawberries to market and bringing them home hours later to dump to the hogs: the highest price offered did not cover the cost of the packaging. My grandfather had that year raised the best strawberry crop of his life. Success = failure. *That* is chaos.
> >but, whether you accept the psychoanalytic claim of a certain
> >non-transparency, the question of _what_ is constituted as the planner
> >of wants remains. and, if it is the state, then we are truly in the
> >realm of (at least as an aspiration toward) a state authoritarianism as
> >an apparent alternative to the 'invisible hand' authoritarianism of
> >capital.
>
> That someone wants trains run on time (i.e. well planned) shouldn't make him an aspiring "authoritarian," I must add.
Apparently t his summer many airline passengers are having to sit in planes for 30 minutes or more before take-off, with the air conditioning not running. Many decades ago my wife, I and two small kids were in a pullman car put on a siding in Eau Claire, Wis. (temp -30) for well over an hour. Had we been able to predict that, we would not have had to take our coats off to wrap the kids. That is freedom for you. There are good communists out there who doubt Lenin. This said, anti-Leninism is *usually* hip anti-communism. I think it is in this case.
In any case, I've become tired of those two or three posters on one list or another who, while unable to lay a glove on capital, can sure run their own private revolutions against the tyranny of capital letters at sentence boundaries. It's too hard on my eyes.
Carrol