skandalon

The man who works recognizes his own product in the World that has actually been transformed by his work: he recognizes himself in it, he sees in it his own human reality, in it he discovers and reveals to others the objective reality of his humanity, of the originally abstract and purely subjective idea he has of himself. By this act of finding itself by itself, then, the [working] consciousness becomes its own meaning-or-will; and this happens precisely in work, in which it seemed to be alien meaning-or-will.

✖ Via Introduction to the Reading of Hegel by Alexandre Kojève, Cornell University Press, [1947]1980, p. 27

Here’s the original French version:

L’homme qui travaille reconnaît dans le Monde effectivement transformé par son travail sa propre œuvre: il s’y reconnaît soi-même; il y voit sa propre réalité humaine; il y découvre et il révèle aux autres la réalité objective de son humanité, de l’idée d’abord abstraite et purement subjective qu’il se fait de lui-même.] Par cet acte-de-se-retrouver soi-même par soi-même, la Conscience [travaillante] devient donc sens-ou-volonté propre; et elle le devient précisément dans le travail, où elle ne semblait être que sens-ou-volonté étranger. (Introduction à la lecture de Hegel, éd. Gallimard, Paris, 1947, p. 31)

A complete PDF copy of this book is available online. A French version of the ‘Introduction’ of this book is available here.

• Oct 02, 2010 link notes tagged: technology work world production subjectivity other self alienation slave master Hegel Kojève philosophy consumption consumer capitalism creation art

An especially disturbing section of the book delves into a lawsuit brought against Eli Lilly by survivors of a rampage by Joseph Wesbecker, who was the company’s worst nightmare: a Prozac user who went on the rampage in 1989 with an AK-47. Fortunately for Eli Lilly, the 1994 trial was concurrent with the O. J. Simpson trial, the facts were carefully manipulated, a secret settlement was made between plaintiffs and the drug company even as the trial continued, and Prozac avoided a warning label about possibly violent or suicidal behavior. All the particulars of this remarkable legal travesty are laid out here.

✖ Via The New York Times: “Exploring a Dark Side of Depression Remedies” by Janet Maslin, June 29, 2000.

The quote above is an excerpt from the review of the book Overcoming the Dangers of Prozac, Zoloft, Paxil and Other Antidepressants With Safe, Effective Alternatives by Joseph Glenmullen, M.D. (383 pages. Simon & Schuster). On the same subject, read also “Papers indicate firm knew possible Prozac suicide risk” by Tom Watkins, January 3, 2005:

An internal document purportedly from Eli Lilly and Co. made public Monday appears to show that the drug maker had data more than 15 years ago showing that patients on its antidepressant Prozac were far more likely to attempt suicide and show hostility than were patients on other antidepressants and that the company attempted to minimize public awareness of the side effects. (more)

Previously on Skandalon: Eli Lilly and Co.

• Sep 03, 2010 link notes tagged: technology rampage lawsuit antidepressant drug Prozac depression suicidal suicide homicide violence psychiatry pharmaceutical science industry capitalism individuation

art photograph magazine celebrity star famous america counter_culture critic revolution politic representation capitalism irony simulacrum product consumption girl woman pin_up

✖ Via The Thought Experiment: Sharon Tate in Esquire, December 1967. Photo by William Helburn

Excerpt from the magazine:

The little red book which contains hightlights from The thought of Mao Tse-tung is the most influential volume in the world today. It is also extremely dull and entirely unmemorable. To resolve this paradox, we, a handful of editors in authority who follow the capitalist road, thought useful to illustrate certain key passages in such a way that they are more likely to stick in the mind. The visual aid is Sharon Tate and, to give credit where credit, God knows, is due, she will soon be seen in the Twentieth Century-Fox motion picture, Valley of the Dolls.

The Thought Experiment is a blog run by Elizabeth Lamanna:

This animal is a thought experiment. I will try to keep it upbeat and interesting, but it may occasionally swing through bat country, go off broadway, or veer into vapidity as I attempt to disentangle what feels like the crushing simultaneity of where my choices have lead my life.

I realized about a month from turning thirty that I had spent the past year acting like I was going to be audited, as if, casting my memory back through the past ten years, I panicked. Maybe not without reason. Throughout this last decade, I’ve jumped a few ships, burned a few bridges, worded up, partied down, hung loose, and obeyed my thirst, and been just about rolled under by the waves almost as many times as I deserved. The final countdown of my twenties suddenly woke me up to the fact that somewhere along the way, I’d lost track of myself. (more)

• Aug 14, 2010 link notes tagged: art photograph magazine celebrity star famous America counter-culture critic revolution politic representation capitalism irony simulacrum product consumption girl woman pin-up

art design poster machine computer retro vintage apple store consumption capitalism economy electronic information shopping disaffection psychiatry

✖ Via Retrofuturs: “iTunes store / Sociology of objects”

Previously on Skandalon : Stéphane Massa-Bidal. Follow him on Tumblr.

The quote he’s using in this illustration is attributed to Tammy Faye Bakker. She’s also purportedly said “I wake up every morning and I wish I were dead, and so does Jim”. Cheaper and maybe less effective, I would say. I’ll come back to it.

• Jul 30, 2010 link notes tagged: art design poster machine computer retro vintage Apple store consumption capitalism economy electronic information shopping disaffection psychiatry

Mais l’accusation a buté sur le pourquoi des actes de celui qui, comme l’avait indiqué à l’audience le témoin Jean-Pierre Mustier, « vivra et mourra comme étant le trader au monde ayant fait perdre le plus d’argent à sa banque ». « Fou ou incompétent?” a demandé Jean-Michel Aldebert. Philippe Bourion avait évoqué une autre hypothèse: celle d’une « variante financière du bovarysme, qui consiste à se voir autrement que l’on est, à se donner des sensations fortes”. “Il y aura un avant et un après Kerviel dans les banques”, a affirmé le procureur, tout en s’interrogeant sur la capacité du système à lutter contre un nouveau « génie dévastateur ».

✖ Via Le Monde: “Me Metzner: “Qui a fabriqué Jérôme Kerviel”?”, Chroniques Judiciaires, by Pascale Robert Diard, June 25th, 2010

• Jul 21, 2010 link notes tagged: art novel author pathology fantasy knowledge reality economy lost loser representation anxiety critic desire Kerviel destruction money bank capitalism

― The more visionary the idea, the more people it leaves behind. This is what the protest is all about. Visions of technology and wealth. The force of cyber-capital that will send people into the gutter to retch and die. What is the flaw of human rationality?
He said, “What?”
― It pretends not to see the horror and death at the end of the schemes it builds. This is a protest against the future. They want to hold off the future. They want to normalize it, keep it from overwhelming the present.

✖ Via Cosmopolis by Don DeLillo, New York: Scribner, 2003, p. 90-91

Previously on Skandalon: Cosmopolis, Don DeLillo

• May 24, 2010 link notes tagged: DeLillo art author book capitalism critic future market novel protest revolution system representation order chaos community organization anguish anxiety

The market culture is total. It breeds these men and women. They are necessary to the system they despise. They give it energy and definition. They are market-driven. They are traded on the markets of the world. This is why they exist, to invigorate and perpetuate the system.

✖ Via Cosmopolis by Don DeLillo, New York: Sribner, 2003, p. 90

Previously on Skandalon: Don DeLillo

• May 14, 2010 link notes tagged: DeLillo art author book capitalism critic integration market novel revolution system Cosmopolis

Ethical issues aside, the banks also did poorly at their core job, which is managing risk. And, while there are plenty of honest, capable people in finance, the ease with which investors looked past Wall Street’s failings seems like a classic case of what the social psychologist Leon Festinger called “cognitive dissonance.” Festinger argued that when beliefs come into conflict with reality we think up explanations that shape reality to our beliefs, rather than vice versa. He used the example of the Millerites, a millenarian religious sect that came to believe that Jesus Christ would return to earth on October 22, 1844. He didn’t. But not all the Millerites abandoned their faith. Many set about constructing elaborate rationalizations to justify their belief, arguing that Christ had returned spiritually, or that the event had occurred in Heaven, if not on earth. Similarly, when people’s faith in Wall Street as an honest broker, a smart allocator of capital, and a path to personal wealth was disappointed, they managed to explain things away.

✖ Via The New Yorker: “Déjà Vu” by James Surowiecki, May 3rd, 2010, p. 25

About James Surowiecki:

“James Surowiecki has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 2000. He writes The Financial Page. Surowiecki came to The New Yorker from Slate, where he wrote the Moneybox column. He has also been a contributing editor at Fortune and a staff writer at Talk. Previously, he was the business columnist for New York magazine. He has contributed to The Wall Street Journal, Wired, the New York Times Magazine, the Washington Post, and Lingua Franca, and has written on subjects ranging from Silicon Valley to college basketball.” (more)

More importantly, James Surowiecki is the author of The Wisdom of Crowds (2004)

• May 03, 2010 link notes tagged: communication bank finance greed cognition faith reality economy theory crowd capitalism fraud lost loser

Anyway, not feeling too guilty about this, the real purpose of my job is to make capital markets more efficient and ultimately provide the U.S. consumer with more efficient ways to leverage and finance himself, so there is a humble, noble and ethical reason for my job ;) amazing how good I am in convincing myself !!!

✖ Via Reuters: “Goldman’s “Fabulous” Fab’s conflicted love letters” by Steve Eder and Karey Wutkowski, Apr 25, 2010

Here are some more excerpts from Fabrice Tourre’s email:

“The SEC’s complaint only included Tourre referring to himself as “fabulous Fab” and talking about “standing in the middle of all these complex, highly leveraged, exotic trades he created without necessarily understanding all of the implications of those monstrosities!!!”

“When I think that I had some input into the creation of this product (which by the way is a product of pure intellectual masturbation, the type of thing which you invent telling yourself: “Well, what if we created a “thing”, which has no purpose, which is absolutely conceptual and highly theoretical and which nobody knows how to price?”) it sickens the heart to see it shot down in mid-flight… It’s a little like Frankenstein turning against his own investor ;)”

Fabrice Tourre

” is a London-based Executive Director at Goldman Sachs who was charged by the SEC on 16 April 2010 in a $1 billion landmark fraud case.” (wikipedia)

You may remember Jerome Kerviel’s case.

• Apr 27, 2010 link notes tagged: technology economy capital capitalism bank money news America fraud destruction lost loser

You know what capitalism produces. According to Marx and Engels.”
“Its own grave-diggers,” he said.
“But these are not grave-diggers. This is the free market itself. These people are the fantasy generated by the market. They don’t exist outside the market. There is nowhere they can go to be on the outside. There is no outside.

✖ Via Cosmopolis by Don DeLillo, New York: Sribner, 2003, p. 90

Previously on Skandalon: Don DeLillo

• Apr 25, 2010 link notes tagged: DeLillo Marx art author book capitalism critic integration market novel resistance revolution Cosmopolis

✖ Via

9 0 0 0: The Brand

• Sep 15, 2009 link notes [via] tagged: art brand capitalism economy politic power religion slave humor critic

art poster propaganda capitalism communism revolution critic humor

✖ Via the Behance Network / “Coca-Cola communism poster” by Diego Lauton

“It represents graphically, and so sarcastical, the classical conflict between communism and capitalist in the world history. Visually, I took elements from the original russian propaganda.” Visit the artist’s official website.

This so called conflict is part of the past. Ask Gorbachev about it.

• Sep 02, 2009 link notes [via] tagged: art poster propaganda capitalism communism revolution critic humor

This movement of analytic abstraction in the circulation of arbitrary signs is quite parallel to that within which money is constituted. Money replaces things by their signs, not only within a society but from one culture to another, or from one economic organization to another. That is why the alphabet is commercial, a trader. It must be understood within the monetary moment of economic rationality. The critical description of money is the faithful reflection of the discourse on writing. In both cases an anonymous supplement is substituted for the thing. Just as the concept retains only the comparable element of diverse things, just as money gives the “common measure” to incommensurable objetcs in order to constitute them into merchandise, so alphabetic writing transcribes heterogeneous signifieds within a system of arbitrary and common signifiers: the living languages. It thus opens an aggression against the life that it makes circulate. If “the sign has led to the neglect of the thing signified,” as Emile says speaking of money, then the forgetfulness of things is greatest in the usage of those perfectly abstract and arbitrary signs that are money and phonetic writing.

✖ Via Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, tr. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, JHU Press, [1967]1998, p. 300 (French : éd. Minuit, Paris, 1967, p. 424-425).

• Jun 03, 2009 link notes tagged: philosophy language book author money capitalism sign

Money then serves as a measure which makes things commensurable and so reduces them to equality. If there were no exchange there would be no association, and there can be no exchange without equality, and no equality without commensurability. Though therefore it is impossible for things so different to become commensurable in the strict sense,our demand furnishes a sufficiently accurate common measure for practical purposes. [15] There must therefore be some one standard, and this accepted by agreement (which is why it is called nomisma, customary currency); for such a standard makes all things commensurable, since all things can be measured by money.

✖ Via Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, book V, chap. V, §14-15 (1133b1). Aristotle in 23 Volumes, Vol. 19, translated by H. Rackham. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann Ltd. 1934.

• Jun 03, 2009 link notes tagged: book philosophy money capitalism sign language