https://hbr.org/2011/03/capitalism-for-the-long-term
There is some interesting stuff coming out from Andy Haldane (chief Economist at the Bank of England). If even someone as mainstream as the Bank and as H. Clinton can point to this you know there's something to it, some dim intuition that at the very least there's a fault line in capitalism.
For others this is suggests something quite profound: a symptom of an imminent crisis.
What the mainstream doesn't want to countenance, however, is that this short-termism and myopia is now a structural feature of capitalism-the economy and the culture closely associated with it.No-one wants to join the dots and so we talk of the decline of reading, the destruction of the environment, the fragmentation of consciousness by trivia and virtual reality, the disorientation that comes about with the loss of a sense of place and stability, the de-skilling of so many people, the substitution of tradition by fundamentalism as so many isolated and separate developments.
This is not just about speed, planned obsolescence, waste and redundancies; it is also about the fragmentation of time and the emptying of time, the hollowing out of the very notion of durability, preservation, conservation (which makes one immediately think of the environmental crisis and the destruction of habits and habitats).
And here we're forced to go back, a long way back, to see these attitudes as being coeval with the beginning of modernity itself and the rejection of the teleological view (telos = boundary and goal). From now on life is life ("bare life") and a life lived well is determined by the individual himself (not by any norm or standard). Also, the good life is not a life as whole but a series of subjective states, which is why the expansion of choices, the constant referring to infinite desires ("non-satiation"), sounds both modern and old.
Tastes are simply given. There is no question of 'ordering' pleasure in terms of 'the good' or the reasonable, subjecting them to reflection, to a determinate view of either human nature or the good. Go with the flow. Sovereign becoming.
Life is short. The affairs of the heart.
Life is short, nasty, and brutish. We are only animals, after all. What drives us is self-preservation or greater and more intense pleasures (in the former view pleasure serves the instrumental purpose of furthering preservation).
For Aristotle 'preservation' is "participation" in the divine being (for the Muslims: a memory of the Garden,a memory of the future).
We move from desire to desire. Life is short, a flash in the pan. We look back. What was out life? a few good meals? Live for the moment because that's all there is.
In Crary's 24/7 we can trace the end of the future, of the very existence of temporality. Time doesn't pass (boredom) because there is no future or past any more.
Will capitalism end up devouring the very foundations and framework on which it rests? Not just the solid public world but the commons (of the mind and the land) as well?
There is some interesting stuff coming out from Andy Haldane (chief Economist at the Bank of England). If even someone as mainstream as the Bank and as H. Clinton can point to this you know there's something to it, some dim intuition that at the very least there's a fault line in capitalism.
For others this is suggests something quite profound: a symptom of an imminent crisis.
What the mainstream doesn't want to countenance, however, is that this short-termism and myopia is now a structural feature of capitalism-the economy and the culture closely associated with it.No-one wants to join the dots and so we talk of the decline of reading, the destruction of the environment, the fragmentation of consciousness by trivia and virtual reality, the disorientation that comes about with the loss of a sense of place and stability, the de-skilling of so many people, the substitution of tradition by fundamentalism as so many isolated and separate developments.
This is not just about speed, planned obsolescence, waste and redundancies; it is also about the fragmentation of time and the emptying of time, the hollowing out of the very notion of durability, preservation, conservation (which makes one immediately think of the environmental crisis and the destruction of habits and habitats).
And here we're forced to go back, a long way back, to see these attitudes as being coeval with the beginning of modernity itself and the rejection of the teleological view (telos = boundary and goal). From now on life is life ("bare life") and a life lived well is determined by the individual himself (not by any norm or standard). Also, the good life is not a life as whole but a series of subjective states, which is why the expansion of choices, the constant referring to infinite desires ("non-satiation"), sounds both modern and old.
Tastes are simply given. There is no question of 'ordering' pleasure in terms of 'the good' or the reasonable, subjecting them to reflection, to a determinate view of either human nature or the good. Go with the flow. Sovereign becoming.
Life is short. The affairs of the heart.
Life is short, nasty, and brutish. We are only animals, after all. What drives us is self-preservation or greater and more intense pleasures (in the former view pleasure serves the instrumental purpose of furthering preservation).
For Aristotle 'preservation' is "participation" in the divine being (for the Muslims: a memory of the Garden,a memory of the future).
We move from desire to desire. Life is short, a flash in the pan. We look back. What was out life? a few good meals? Live for the moment because that's all there is.
In Crary's 24/7 we can trace the end of the future, of the very existence of temporality. Time doesn't pass (boredom) because there is no future or past any more.
Will capitalism end up devouring the very foundations and framework on which it rests? Not just the solid public world but the commons (of the mind and the land) as well?
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