"Sorry if I get a bit over the top in my passion for truth. Not just over a boy's alleged 'invention'..."
~
What seems to be most beautiful in Paris is the boulevard..at the hour when the gas lamps shine in the mirrors, when the knives ring against the marble tables, I'm going to walk there, peacefully, enveloped in the smoke of my cigar while looking at the women who pass. This is where prostitution is on display, this is where eyes shine!"
---Flaubert.
If that fake lyricism doesn't make you sick I don't know what will.
Who isn't a prostitute nowadays..journalists, academics, soldiers, mullahs...
"There are codes that give us clues...But during the day, it was slippery trying to identify who was or who wasn't."
"The social history was horrible, but the paintings were fantastic."
Well, I see, that's okay then!
What is fetishism but the masking of the true, underlying social relationships?The history of capitalism could be told as the history of commodification or commercialization. Commodification is inextricably bound to modern (liberal) notions of property, contract, agency-but to liberalism in many other ways as well: Rationality, quantification and utility.
It is also worth thinking about what actually happens in this process: reification, abstraction, alienation, the setting up of false notions of 'separateness' and the erosion of distinctions in a system of equivalences.
What cannot, today, be thought of as being a commodity? Nancy Fraser's intriguing question: just how far down does it go? (Of course, the process also needs the re-establishment of limits since transgression becomes meaningless without boundaries. See Gopnik: the Caging of America). Nature and human nature, body parts, genetic codes, knowledge, reproductive services, care..the list is endless. So, in this light the 'objectification' of women is just one aspect of a much larger and wider process.
Would commercialization have been possible-to this extent, that is-without a certain Protestant and scientific way of looking at the world taking root? A philosophy of suspicion and radical doubt. The pure, inner self is inalienable-this is posited as an abstract reason or will, devoid of any specific substantive characteristics. Opposed to this 'subjective' side, independent of the world and any relations to it or to other people, is the 'object' side (personal (accidental?) characteristics or one's labour) that can be alienated, at least temporarily so. In fact, to mark off that 'object' side as distinct in in some respects the only way of realizing one's inner freedom.
Nothing must be allowed to touch this pure, contemplative inner self (neither politics nor the body's fragility). Our dependence on other people is, in this regard, too 'feminine', childish, even. The philosopher, the scientist, stands aloof from the world, the great existentialist hero or the observer-the flaneur wrapped up in his smoke so that no-one can see him!- is invariably a man.
He who sees ratio sees only himself.
---Blake.
'Modern economics judges the performance of an economy according to its achievements of three general goals. Does the economy produce efficiently and expand the available quantity and quality of goods and services? Are the resources equitably distributed among different people...'
--Nordhaus, NYRB.
Hang on a mo. Modern economic theory? Where does it distinguish between the quantity and quality? Since it is based on subjectivist accounts of value (preference satisfaction) it says nothing about the nature (or quality) of those preferences, which are taken as 'given'. That's just standard economics.
Secondly, since when has economic theory been concerned about distribution?! Yes, post-Piketty there has been some concern about inequality by professional economists-mainly because they feel it might threaten the system (read: growth), but it' is pushing it a bit to say that mainstream economics has been or is genuinely worried about inequality.
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