The Life of Pure Consumption

As I continue with my research project on Marx and freedom, I'm finding Marx's conception of human nature to depend hugely upon productive activity. For him, it seems that this ability to produce and "objectify our essence" through production is what makes us uniquely human. While I am largely sympathetic to this view, I think one thought experiment might clarify things a bit. Is it possible to live the life of pure consumption, i.e. one which involves no productive activity? Of course we all want leisure time and to consume at minimal cost (or no cost), but is it actually possible to produce nothing? If it is possible, than perhaps Marx is wrong. Perhaps we can live as the morbidly obese humans aboard the Axiom as in WALL-E...

In case the question is still unclear, imagine the following. You live in a cushy Upper East Side apartment, with an unlimited credit card. You can buy whatever you want, and you are free to move about and do as you please. Your apartment has a kitchen, with beautiful granite counters but no stove or oven, for to cook would be to engage in productive, creative activity. You can buy clothes from the most expensive stores, but you must only wear them as entire outfits, for to assemble your own would be to produce, to create. As you move about your social life, you can shower your friends with lavish gifts, but only objects which you can purchase in their entirety. You may not bake them a cake, or write them a card, or even use poetic language in your speech, for to do so would be, again, to create. You may have sex with anyone (and anything), but only if you agree to be sterile. You are free to take and to consume anything you wish -- but you must never create.

Is this life possible? Could it be fulfilling, and livable? To me, it seems to be clearly a distopia, but must it be so? Must our lives include creation, or is this demand simply that of a misty-eyed dreamer divorced from reality?

For a Ruthless Criticism of Everything Existing

As I embark upon a whirlwind tour of lesser known Marxian texts through Tucker's Marx-Engels Reader (2nd ed.), I've found quite a few gems that seem to confirm many of my suspicions about various aspects of Marx's views. The following quote from a letter to Arnold Ruge in September 1843 (just a year before the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts) is one of particular clarity:

Our motto must therefore be: Reform of consciousness not through dogmas, but through analyzing the mystical consciousness, the consciousness which is unclear to itself, whether it appears in religious or political form. Then it will transpire that the world has long been dreaming of something that it can acquire if only it becomes conscious of it. It will transpire that it is not a matter of drawing a great dividing line between past and future, but of carrying out the thoughts of the past. And finally, it will transpire that mankind begins no new work, but consciously accomplishes its old work.

So, we can express the trend of our journal in one word: the word of our time to clarify to itself (critical philosophy) the meaning of its own struggle and its own desires. This is work for the world and for us. It can only be the work of joint forces. It is a matter of confession, no more. To have its sins forgiven mankind has only to declare them to be what they really are.

Though this passage is not terribly exciting as an expression of his stance against ideology (as it is just one statement amongst many of similar philosophical substance), it elucidates a view on the task of the social philosopher that I find myself being very sympathetic to. More on this later, but for now, I thought I'd just share this rather beautifully written passage. Onwards!

The Dfficulty of Writing Poetry

I recently had an interesting conversation with a young poet and good friend that has made me pause and think about some of the philosophical issues regarding poetry, specifically the difficulty of writing it, and the questions one is confronted with when attempting to do so. This entry is somewhat deviating from more formal philosophical inquiry, but I hope it will prove to be interesting intellectual fodder nonetheless. Given my lack of background in this area, I will dive into this topic essay-style with some reflections and questions. (If you have answers or theories, please give them!)

Allow me first to recount my (very recent) experience of writing a poem, one which I assume is rather generic, at least insofar as it seems to make clear to me some of the frustrations many poets have expressed towards language and words. As I began to write, I maintained a dual purpose: (1) to empty, in a therapeutic manner, parts of the whirlpool of emotion I found myself drowning in, and (2) to create a "poem," however one might choose to define that. General wisdom seems to dictate that the process of accomplishing (2) often leads to the successful overcoming of the problematic and/or unwanted emotional state in (1). In reality, I found it difficult to accomplish both (1) and (2) simultaneously. When I channeled my "true," "honest" emotions, my words emerged as trite overstatements that one might find in the lyrics of some tacky power ballad. Conversely, when I tried to create an original, coherent, perhaps even beautiful (if I am to admit of my ambition) work of art, the words seemed to gain a life of their own, crafting elaborate shapes and sounds and donning upon me a Yeatsian mask against my will.

So what, then, is the philosophical importance of this conflict? Well, first of all, what is honesty in the context of poetry? If you did not conduct extensive research into every word and every possible combination of words, how could you be sure that the given combination is reflective of your true feelings, or emotions? Are words themselves not just fundamentally inadequate as a form of expression? It seems like no medium could be adequate. Even a sophisticated event-recreation machine which mimicked all sensual and emotional information entering the brain within a particular moment is insufficient to capture any such truth. What's perhaps even trickier is the exact nature of emotional truth and how it is affected by the basic ways in which we view the world in addition to our (untrustworthy) memories. Can such things be defined?

To continue the story of my intellectual journey as a (highly amateur) poet, I found that there was indeed a way in which my two tasks supported each other, though in a somewhat unexpected fashion. As I was writing, I became bored with certain words and substituted them with more exciting ones. For example, the line "the moment was right" (a very true reflection of the feeling I was trying to convey) became "the dove's arson alight." The dove is a symbol of hope, and its arson is a darker version of fire, which--since it is alight--also represents hope, with connotations of passionate longing as well. The latter surely represents a more complex emotional story, but is it my story? Was the alliteration of "arson alight" just too aurally pleasing to pass up, or did a tinge of evil really lurk behind this potential-ridden but regret-filled moment? Is my work authentic, even relative to me? To what degree was I being honest, and not just with a potential reader -- but with myself? It seems that modern, mainstream society has tended to hail darker, more emotionally charged poetry as being inherently most honest, but was I truly being more honest in the revised line or was I perhaps just letting myself fall into the now-Romanticized notion of a dark, brooding poet?

This brings me to another point: mimesis. Though I generally believe art to imitate life (at least, historically, if not categorically), I think that the increasing pervasiveness of art in our modern world (likely due to technological advances and the rising of a middle class) has generated increasingly widespread exceptions. As Oscar Wilde writes famously in The Decay of Lying (1889), it is often the case that "Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life." It is interesting to think about how slightly different tastes in aesthetic qualities of either appearance or sound can produce almost chaotic results in the final form of the poem. Furthermore, if Life is imitating Art, then our own understanding and conception of our past memories, when committed to paper (or, computer screen), is shaped at least to some extent by our (oft-irrational, oft-unpredictable) aesthetic preferences. Though the anti-memetic concept is often frightening because of its connotations of the power of mass marketing and brainwashing, it's fascinating to see it work at an internal level. By writing and by choosing words with which to express ourselves, we make concrete a fleeting thought and we take a chisel to our memories and carve it into the most appealing shape that we can then fit into our precarious identities.

The Problem of Transparency

One of the major issues in the management of any democratic organization is transparency. Though the word itself takes on primarily positive connotations and is oftentimes presumed as absolutely necessary in any democratic organization. However, experience in political offices and organizational leadership positions tells us that the degree of transparency employed by the leadership or executive body is a difficult political as well as ethical question.

In a democratic organization or state, transparency is prima facie necessary. If political or organizational power is to be derived from the constituent members, then its members must be informed. However, there are two glaring problems.

THE NOBLE LIE

The first is the essentially the Platonic kallipolis-style noble (or "virtuous") lie. The masses do not always know what is best for themselves, and it is sometimes necessary to control their access to certain information in order to produce the most desirable consequences. In the Republic, the noble lie is the story where people are born constituted by three different metals, a "lie" used to maintain social harmony by giving legitimacy to the proposed social stratification. Though used in the kallipolis to relate a false myth, the noble lie can be thought to operate through omission as well. Thus, transparency is often undermined by the control of information access for good social consequences.

This is undoubtedly the more dubious of the opposing forces to transparency. From a Kantian perspective, withholding information in such a way is to treat the masses not as ends in themselves, but as means to a socially desirable ends. However, it is important to note that it is a non-ideal policy, operating under the (non-ideal) premise that people are not able to know what is best for themselves. Perhaps a more robust educational system founded on a rigorous study of the liberal arts from the very beginning would be enough to push society towards a more ideal state, but for now, the non-ideal situation must be assumed, and legitimacy given to the noble lie.

INFORMATION MANAGEMENT

The other caveat working against transparency is the management of large volumes of information. Given our new technological age, the access to information is becoming less and less of an issue. With the advent of the internet and constant streams of information coming from every individual (and organizations such as Wikileaks), the problem is less how we access information and more how we sift through all of it to discover what we want to know. We have more than enough information now; in fact, we have too much, and most of the things we publish and share are lost in the annals of cyberspace. An extra email from an executive body (be it the leadership of an organization or political power) becomes hidden amidst thousands of other messages. Even if a responsible, executive power is 100% transparent in their communications, it is not necessarily true that the correct information will reach the correct hands.

So we are left with a difficult problem about transparency. On the one hand, it is the ideal under which democracy is even possible. On the other hand, there are many instances where full disclosure is perhaps not the most wise, and--even if it were--the dissemination of the information is not always a simple task.

PUSH vs. PULL

One possible solution to the issue of transparency is to distinguish between various ways of distributing information. In this way, it will be possible to reject the binary of disseminating and withholding information by being aware of several intermediaries.

One fundamental distinction to make is the difference between push and pull information, terms traditionally used by software engineers to describe data flow. In communications technology, the data-push model consists of an individual pushing the data stream continuously to the clients whereas the data-pull model consists of an individual pushing the data stream to a server where it is held until the client decides to pull the data off the server.

This distinction can be applied to an organizational executive body's control of information access. There are many ways that an organization can choose to convey various information, a variety made much wider by social networking technology, and each of these ways represents a different information conveyance model. A letter, an email, or an announcement at a mandatory meeting would all be a examples of push information. A tweet or a posting to a bulletin board would be examples of push information.

BEYOND THE PUSH/PULL BINARY

It is important to realize that the push/pull information distinction is not a perfect binary. Given the present culture, a client is relatively free to ignore an email. Thus, email is not perfectly an example of push information, and contains elements of pull information as well -- the client would need to actively decide to open the email for the information conveyed to have proper uptake. The specific situation is also important to where the mode of communication falls on the spectrum between push and pull. For example, a direct email from Barack Obama is likely to be opened automatically, whereas an email from the Vice President of the Society for Socially Responsible Electrical Engineers of Manhattan would most likely merit some consideration before opening and reading.

Thus, the urgency of a particular piece of information is given by the relationship between the sender and the recipient, other particularities of the situation, and the mode of communication chosen. We take urgency to be a technical term, which can be defined as the objective degree to which a piece of information can be construed as push information (as opposed to pull). The the term is taken to be an objective quantity, its measurement is extremely difficult and impossible to fully precisify.

MOVING FORWARD

To conclude, the reason why the issue of transparency is so difficult to resolve is because the question is formulated based on an oversimplified binary. The question should not be about whether transparency is good or just. Rather, it should be about the level of urgency given a piece of particular information and whether that is good or just. Discussions about transparency should investigate the relationship between sender and recipient, and then decide on the appropriate means of communication by appeal to the proper level of urgency that should be attributed