tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-66352258847013946092024-03-14T03:16:02.264+01:00Memes on MemesBlog by Ivan BlečićUnknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger11125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6635225884701394609.post-56912186230495982072023-11-23T15:14:00.010+01:002023-11-23T15:14:38.235+01:00Mimesis and Imitation<p> by Paul Dumouchel</p><br /><br /><b>Mimesis<br /></b><br /> Girard in his works uses the word “mimesis”, “mimetic desire” and associated terms in two relatively different ways. On the one hand the terms are used in a causal way, as if mimesis and mimetic desire were some form of psychological force that brings people to copy each other, especially in their behaviour of appropriation. Mimesis in this case is understood as a kind of instinct or as a biologically determined propension to copy others. On the other hand, the terms are also used in a descriptive way. On such occasions, mimesis corresponds to or is present whenever we notice similarities in the behaviour of different individuals. This is particularly the case, but not exclusively, when Girard talks about violence. To take a recent, and uncontroversial example, Ismail Haniyeh, the senior political leader of Hamas declared after the atrocious attack on Israeli civilians: “We have only one thing to say to you: get out of our land. Get out of our sight … This land is ours, al-Quds [Jerusalem] is ours, everything [here] is ours … There is no place or safety for you.” <a href="file:///D:/voyage%20Italie%20France%20novembre%202023/Milan/Mimesis%20and%20Imitation.docx#_ftn1">[1]</a> Which essentially means no Israeli civilian is innocent, all are legitimate targets. Thus justifying what he had just ordered. A short time after that murderous attack Isaak Herzog, the president of Israel, responding to criticism of the massive bombardments of Gaza and the consequent lost of civilian lives said, “It is an entire nation that is responsible out there…It is not true this rhetoric about civilians not being aware, not being involved.”<a href="file:///D:/voyage%20Italie%20France%20novembre%202023/Milan/Mimesis%20and%20Imitation.docx#_ftn2">[2]</a> In other words, they should all be punished, and it is legitimate to do it. It is unlikely that the president of Israel, who would forcefully deny any resemblance with a known terrorist, is copying the leader of Hamas, in the way in which we can say that I am imitating my colleague’s goal of becoming chairperson of the department. In cases of mimesis like this one, we do not need to posit any real relation between the agents, all we do is notice a troubling similitude in their behaviour.<br /><br /> In the competition that opposes me to my colleague, mimetic desire is understood in a causal way. It is what explains our conflict. Its real cause. It is not the direction of the department as a valuable object that cannot be shared that explains our conflict, but the mimetic relation between us. Mimetic desire is also understood causally in this case because it is conceived as real relation between us, and counterfactually it is assumed that if this relation were absent there would be no such conflict between us. As far as the terrorist and the president are concerned the situation seems quite different. Mimesis in this case does not imply or require any real relation between them. By real relation I mean one in which they are personally involved rather than something that can only be described from the outside. Mimesis in this case is revealed by a symmetry or similitude that we observe in their statements and behaviour, a symmetry that is quite independent from any direct relation between the two persons. In this case, we recognize the mimetic dimension of violence from the fact that, under a certain description, the opponents tend to become doubles of each other. In this case, we do not treat mimesis as if it were a force acting causally, but more like a structural characteristic of systems of interactions.<br /><br /> Are these two ways of understanding mimesis compatible? They are different, but I do not think that they are contradictory. To the opposite, an analogy with classical physics suggests that causal explanations and structural explanations are strictly equivalent. This is a rather distant analogy, so it cannot be taken as a proof of anything. However, the analogy is enough for us not to refrain from jumping to the hasty conclusion that the two aspects of mimesis are incompatible or that the notion is incoherent. It remains nonetheless that the concept of mimesis is to some extent ambiguous, and it is not entirely clear how these different aspects of mimesis are related. How mimesis in its descriptive sense, the symmetry that we observe in agents that are not concretely related to each other, relates to mimesis in the causal sense? Are these two types of phenomena sufficiently alike to be both called mimesis?<br /><br /> <br /><b><br />Imitation<br /></b><br /> A different, but in some way related problem can be raised concerning imitation. C.L. Nehaniv in his chapter in the book Imitation and Social learning in Robots, Humans and Animals<a href="file:///D:/voyage%20Italie%20France%20novembre%202023/Milan/Mimesis%20and%20Imitation.docx#_ftn3">[3]</a> (2009) – a chapter which is entitled “Nine billion correspondence problems” – considers<a href="file:///D:/voyage%20Italie%20France%20novembre%202023/Milan/Mimesis%20and%20Imitation.docx#_ftn4">[4]</a> that imitation is a matching behaviour, and defines a matching behaviour in the following way: 1) A behaviour C (for copy) is produced by an organism or machine; 2) C is similar to another behaviour M (for model); 3) registration of M is necessary for the production of C; and 4) C is designed to be similar to M (Nehaniv, 2009:25). This definition corresponds pretty well to how we commonly view imitation and to how Girard conceives what he call the “mimesis of representation”. Imitation requires the “registration” – that is the perception or in some way having a “representation" – of the model behaviour that is reproduced, and this “reproduction” is “designed” (aims at) at being similar to the original behaviour. The requirement that M needs to be registered does not imply that imitation is always or necessarily conscient, its presence in the definition is essentially to rule out cases where C and M are similar by accident. Cases where we would not be dealing with imitation, but with contingent coincidences.<br /><br /> This conception of imitation – and Nehaniv thinks it is a good one – leads, he argues, to what he calls correspondence problems, which is the problem for an organism or machine of generating a ‘suitable’ matching behaviour. This problem is particularly difficult for a machine which does not have any intuition about the world and what is relevant or not. In robotics the difficulties of creating a robot able to imitate as defined by the correspondence problem constitute a particular version of what is classically known in cognitive science as the “Frame Problem”.<a href="file:///D:/voyage%20Italie%20France%20novembre%202023/Milan/Mimesis%20and%20Imitation.docx#_ftn5">[5]</a> <br /><br /> The correspondence problem can be illustrated with the following example. With my right hand I throw a rock and break a window. We can identify three different aspects of this event: a gesture – the bodily movement one makes in throwing something – an action – that of throwing a rock – and an effect – breaking a window. Now you can with your right hand make the gesture of throwing a rock, but not throw anything. At which point you imitate the gesture, but neither the action, nor the effect. You could also with your left hand throw a rock but not break anything, this time you imitate the action, but neither the gesture, nor the effect. You could also with your feet kick a rock in the window breaking it, and now you imitate the effect, but neither the action, nor the gesture. You can also imitate only two, say gesture and effect, action and gesture, effect and action, combining these different aspects of M differently. To this we can add a further requirement concerning granularity. That is to say how much does C, the copy, need to be like M, the model behaviour, in order to qualify as imitation. Clearly there are many different ways of throwing a rock, overhead, underhand, sideways, with force, barely, etc. This of course also applies to the gesture and the effect combining these in a myriad of different ways, we rapidly get to Nehaniv’s nine billion correspondence problems.<br /><br /> Nehaniv raises the correspondence problem as a technical issue in the context of robotics where we want robots to learn by themselves to imitate a model behaviour. Note that this problem is prior to the question of what we want the robot to imitate or of what it should imitate. However, the correspondence problem also constitutes a fundamental epistemological issue for us. What level of similarity between C and M allows us to consider that imitation has taken place. Requiring that C reproduce all three dimensions of M, the gesture, the action and the effect, at a sufficiently high level of granularity seems much too demanding. However, once we open the door to imperfect or incomplete imitation, it becomes extremely difficult to know where we should stop. How matching must the matching behaviour be? Except perhaps by insisting on the presence of some normally non observable elements, for example, that M is registered or that C is designed to be similar to M, this question seems difficult to answer. Unfortunately, once we leave the world of the machines that we make ourselves, both registration and design in the sense in which these terms are used here become unobservable. Viewed as a correspondence problem, what constitutes, or which behaviours correspond to imitation seems far from clear. <br /><br /> <br /><b><br />Phenomenology<br /></b><br /> This said, there are important differences between mimesis and imitation, two in particular need to be mentioned for they have far reaching consequences on the respective phenomenologies of these two types of interaction. A third important difference will appear later on. The first is that imitation is discrete while mimesis is continuous. The second is that imitation is a dyadic relation while mimesis, or at least mimetic desire, clearly is a triadic relation. The disciples desires the object that the model desires. It is not without reason that Girard called this “triangular desires”. <br /><br />That imitation is discrete is evident from its definition above as a matching behaviour. M the behaviour to be imitated is a discrete or independent behavioral element and imitation takes place when another organism produces a behaviour C that matches M sufficiently. Both elements are discrete and imitation as a process has a beginning, an end and goal that can all be determined. It is also clear from the above definition that imitation is a dyadic relation. It exclusively concerns C and M, and this remains the case whether C and M are considered to be two different behaviours or two different persons or organisms. Imitation essentially only involves what or who imitates and what or who is imitated. Nothing else is necessary to define the relation and presumably to understand it. <br /><br /> Mimesis and mimetic desire as they are defined by Girard are quite different. First mimetic or triangular desire, as Girard first named it, evidently is a triadic relation involving two subjects and an object. In consequence, it is a more complex relation than imitation because both the model and the disciple are assumed to simultaneously have, so to speak, an eye towards the other and an eye towards the object. Mimetic desire does not simply relate the model and disciple, but it relates them to each other and to the object simultaneously. To put it otherwise, the object mediates their relation to each other and each one mediate the relation of the other to the object. Each pole of the relation constitutes a factor in the relation of the two other poles. The relation is also continuous not having any clearly assignable beginning or end. Mimetic desire does not, unlike imitation, have a well-defined objective whose accomplishment signals the end of the relation. To the opposite, mimesis is an ongoing dynamic relation, that may be broken off by an external event, but there is no particular action or event involving any of the three parties, either the model, the disciple or the object that necessarily constitute the end of the relation. <br /><br />From these different characteristics of these two types of interactions follow important consequences for their phenomenology. Because of its character as a dyadic relation and its definition as a matching behaviour imitation is essentially repetitive, monotonous, and conservative. It naturally reduces differences and the complexity of the environment. Further because it is repetitive imitation inevitably tends to invades the environment where it takes place unless there is something to stop it. In consequence, in the absence of two conditions which are typically satisfied in evolution by natural selection, imitation reduces the complexity of a system. The first of these two conditions is that there needs to be an independent source of differences or of novelty, which in biology are provided by random mutation and by reproduction mistakes, or imperfect imitation. Note that imperfect imitation or reproduction mistakes are in a way equivalent to Nehaniv’s correspondence problems, but these are seen here from a different point of view. The more correspondence problems arise and less imitation is repetitive, monotonous and conservative. The second necessary condition is accidents of a changing environment, without this moving target populations would rapidly get and remain at fixation. Evolution would stop. However, in the absence of these two external factors, a source of novelty and a moving target imitation by itself is a repetition mechanism that leads to a reduction in complexity. Imitation can only give rise to novelties as part of a complex system of which it constitutes but one element, as is the case in natural selection, or to put it otherwise, imitation can only give rise to novelties if it becomes a triadic relation as in the case of natural selection.<br /><br /> The situation is different when it comes to mimesis. Imitating the desire of another, though it often takes the form of desiring the same object which the other desires, is not itself a definite object. It does not constitute a clear objective or target. To put it otherwise, imitating the desire of another is not a matching problem. There is no behaviour M that being copied satisfies the intended goal of mimesis. Girard often says that the real engine of mimetic desire, what brings us to seek to appropriate the objects that others have or to destroy these others in violence is a desire for being, which he calls metaphysical desire. It is the being of the model that the disciple tries to take over, more precisely the excess of being that he or she attributes to the model. The fact is however, that the being of another is not an object. It is not something that can be represented as a particular goal. Nonetheless, according to Girard, the rivalry does not lead to just anything, to any behaviour whatsoever because each one’s actions are to some extent guided by those of the other.<a href="file:///D:/voyage%20Italie%20France%20novembre%202023/Milan/Mimesis%20and%20Imitation.docx#_ftn6">[6]</a> Given the imprecision of this goal, satisfying this desire will take many different forms which will always be constrained by the actions of the other. Hence the phenomena of symmetry that Girard uncovers. Given that here, unlike what is the case for imitation, there is no definite action that determines the end of the relation, the agents are wont to invent different challenges and competitions. They are brought to imagine different means and objects that will become signs of victory or of defeat. Since this search for being is an illusion that nothing can finally or fully satisfy, the relation is incessantly pushed forward. Mimetic desire is continuous and gives rise to a rich phenomenology of behaviour. It inevitably produces novelty and complexity.<br /><br />These two types of relation – imitation and mimesis – are then radically different and give rise to completely distinct phenomenologies. Imitation is discrete. It is repetitive, monotonous and conservative. It leads to a reduction of complexity. Mimesis is continuous and dynamic. Dynamic in the sense that past results of the relation feedback unto the relation itself and move it forward. It has no recognizable goal or objective. Mimetic theory is a morphogenetic theory because mimetic relations give rise to a complex phenomenology of objects and interrelations. To summarize the argument until now: appearances notwithstanding, mimesis is not a form of imitation. Though imitation may be a way in which some agents try to address their mimetic rivalry. That is to say, mimesis may lead to imitation, but mimesis is not a species of imitation.<br /><br /> <br /><br /><b>An objection and a response<br /></b><br />An objection which some may have already silently formulated is the following. If, as argued above, in mimetic relations the actions of each agent are guided by those of the other, then why don’t their behaviour progressively converge towards the same actions and given that mimesis, according to Girard, is contagious, this process would progressively engulf the whole community. In which case rather than giving rise to a complex phenomenology of behaviour, mimesis would turn out to be just like imitation, repetitive, monotonous and conservative and it would lead to a reduction of complexity. The answer to this objection is that this is precisely what sometimes happens, but fortunately not always. The question therefore is that of what are the conditions for this to happen. Or to put it otherwise, under what conditions does mimesis give rise to a rich complex phenomenology and under which does it inevitably lead to a reduction of complexity? <br /><br />The convergence of the rivals unto the same behaviour corresponds to what Girard describes as mimetic doubles or doubles of violence. Rivals become doubles of violence when in a conflict each one’s action are commanded by those of the other, to such a point that the two opponents become mirror images of each other. This happens, argues Girard, when the rivals lose sight of the object around which their conflict first began. Each focusing on the other as the only cause of the quarrel, aims to destroy or annihilate him or her. Or, as Clausewitz said of war understood as a dual, a fight whose goal is to force the adversary to comply with our will. As more and more opponents become doubles of each other the intensity of the violence becomes greater and this leads to a reduction of complexity. <br /><br />As Girard says, violence destroys differences, it erases them making both the environment and the relations between the agents more simple. It destroys differences and reduces complexity in two ways. On the one hand directly, physically by destroying objects, bridges, libraries, houses, train stations, etc. Reducing a world that was structured in a way that supported and facilitated the fulfillment of numerous different objectives that is focused on only one: to survive and to win. One the other hand it erases differences as cognitive objects, as in the converging statement of the political leader of Hamas and the President of Israel, differences between children, woman, elderly people, party goers, journalists and combatant have disappeared. All and everyone from now on are only enemies. <br /><br />This violent lost of complexity corresponds to the transformation of what until then was a triadic relation mediated by an object external to the opponents, into a dyadic relation of pure sociality. Of pure sociality in the sense that the relation now involves as a meaningful component nothing other than the two agents who violently interact with each other. Without any object between them, as can literally be the case in a fists fight. Or, less literally, where all objects lost their reality as independent objects and only exist as means or obstacle to the conflict, as we commonly see in wars. Progressively as the conflict intensifies whatever exists only has meaning through its effect on the reciprocal opposition of the adversaries. So it comes to pass that hospitals, children, party goers, family dwellings become legitimate targets to the advantage of one or the other party. Objects, whose sole meaning now is in relation to pursuing a conflict, have now disappeared as independent objects, and when differences are only meaningful in relation to the conflict they have disappeared as differences, for as Quine once wrote, “a difference that does not make any difference is not a difference”. This metamorphosis of objects and difference into pure means of conflict, corresponds to weaponizing them and constitutes a good definition of what is a weapon.<br /><br />It is therefore, when mimesis becomes, or is simplified into a dyadic relation that it leads to a reduction of complexity, to an impoverished environment. To the opposite, as long as it remains mediated by an external object. External in the sense that it maintains an independence relative to the rivalry, whether this object is physical, cultural, legal, or intellectual, whether this object is a game, a competition, an enterprise, or a project that the mimetic relations between agents can give rise to a rich and complex world and phenomenology of behaviour. <br /><br />Why is this the case? Why does the object do that? Or to give to these questions a different more general formulation: why does the passage from a dyadic to a triadic relation, or vice versa have such dramatic consequences? Why is it that in one case the relation is repetitive, monotonous, reducing complexity while in the other it becomes the occasion of change, of novelty and leads to greater complexity? Why is going from two to three so important?<br /><br /> I do not know the answer to this last, more abstract question, but I can suggest a hypothesis concerning the role of the object based on the differences between imitation and mimesis as analysed above. The complexity reducing aspect of imitation seems to be a direct consequence of its definition as a matching problem and this is inseparable from the fact that there is nothing between C and M, between the copy cat and the model. A behaviour of M that is to be imitated by C is not an external object. On its own it has no reality that is independent of M. Nonetheless, for C it can constitute an object and the target of his or her imitation. However, as a matching behaviour the imitation of M by C does not add anything new to the world. It can only produce a novel behaviour to the extent that it fails as a matching behaviour.<br /><br />M’s desire for something can constitute a goal for C but that can only be in the form of M’s relation to the object. That relation however is unlike a discrete behaviour, there is no particular gesture, action or effect that defines it. At least that is the case as long as the object retains its reality. If I imitate your action of eating an apple, I can only match your behaviour by eating a different one. If, however, it is your desire of the apple that I imitate, what I want cannot be a different apple. It is this one which your desire has made valuable that I also desire. Our behaviours towards the apple will therefore be different, rather than literally the same, as in imitation. I will try to grab the apple; you will try to prevent me from doing that. Even in such a simple case, my mimetic behaviour will not directly match yours. The symmetry between our two behaviour will only arise in a dynamic sequence through repeated interaction. When I imitate your action of eating an apple, the apple only has meaning and existence as defining your action and not in itself. When I imitate your desire for the apple the apple has an existence and meaning in itself as the object that we both desire and its existence as an object independent of us is what prevents us from both having exactly the same relation to it. <br /><br />When the object disappears our several behaviours can become strictly the same as in imitation, but not immediately for in reciprocal violence, identical actions first appear alternatively as Girard argues in his analysis of Oedipus Rex. As in a fist fight, when I punch you block and when you punch I block. However, finally at the climax of the mimetic crisis the imitation becomes literal, perfect matching behaviour, when all turn against the same and only victim. <br /><br /> <br /><br /><i><br />Paul Dumouchel<br /><br /></i>Université du Québec à Montréal<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="FR-CA"> </span></p><p>
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<div id="ftn1">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><a href="file:///D:/voyage%20Italie%20France%20novembre%202023/Milan/Mimesis%20and%20Imitation.docx#_ftnref1" name="_ftn1" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span lang="EN-CA"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-CA; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">[1]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a><span lang="EN-CA"> See, S. Tindall, “Angry old men set the
middle east ablaze. The young will pay the price.” <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/oct/14/angry-old-men-set-the-middle-east-ablaze-the-young-will-pay-the-price-israel-gaza">https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/oct/14/angry-old-men-set-the-middle-east-ablaze-the-young-will-pay-the-price-israel-gaza</a>
<o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<div id="ftn2">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><a href="file:///D:/voyage%20Italie%20France%20novembre%202023/Milan/Mimesis%20and%20Imitation.docx#_ftnref2" name="_ftn2" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span lang="EN-CA"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-CA; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">[2]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a><span lang="EN-CA"> See Chis. McGreal, “The language used to
describe the Palestinian is Genocidal” <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/oct/16/the-language-being-used-to-describe-palestinians-is-genocidal">https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/oct/16/the-language-being-used-to-describe-palestinians-is-genocidal</a>
<o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<div id="ftn3">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><a href="file:///D:/voyage%20Italie%20France%20novembre%202023/Milan/Mimesis%20and%20Imitation.docx#_ftnref3" name="_ftn3" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span lang="EN-CA"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-CA; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">[3]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a><span lang="EN-CA">
C.L. Nehaniv, “Imitation and Social Learning in Robots, Humans and Animals” in <i>Imitation
and Social learning in Robots, Humans and Animals,</i> C.L. Nehaniv & K.
Dautehahn, Eds, Cambridge University Press, 2009, pp. 35-46.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn4">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><a href="file:///D:/voyage%20Italie%20France%20novembre%202023/Milan/Mimesis%20and%20Imitation.docx#_ftnref4" name="_ftn4" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span lang="EN-CA"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-CA; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">[4]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a><span lang="EN-CA"> He
tells us that this conception of imitation comes from W.R. Mitchell, “A
Comparative Developmental Approach to Understanding Imitation” in <i>Perspectives
in Ethology 7: Alternatives</i>, P.P.G. Bateson & P.H. Klopfer, Eds, New
York: Plenum Press, 1987, pp. 183-215.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
</div>
<div id="ftn5">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><a href="file:///D:/voyage%20Italie%20France%20novembre%202023/Milan/Mimesis%20and%20Imitation.docx#_ftnref5" name="_ftn5" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span lang="EN-CA"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-CA; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">[5]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a><span lang="EN-CA">
For an introduction to the frame problem, see “The Frame Problem” in the
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, available on line at <a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/frame-problem/">https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/frame-problem/</a>
<o:p></o:p></span></p>
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<div id="ftn6">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><a href="file:///D:/voyage%20Italie%20France%20novembre%202023/Milan/Mimesis%20and%20Imitation.docx#_ftnref6" name="_ftn6" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span lang="EN-CA"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span lang="EN-CA" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-CA; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-latin;">[6]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a><span lang="EN-CA"> I
assume here that, as Jean-Pierre Dupuy argued in “Le signe et l’envie”, double
mediation, that is where A imitates B desire while B imitates A’s desire is the
simplest form of mimetic desire. </span><span lang="FR-CA">See P. Dumouchel & J.-P. Dupuy, <i>L’Enfer des choses. René Girard
et la logique de l’économie</i>, Paris : Seuil, 1988.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
</div>
</div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6635225884701394609.post-15622549448490738462023-11-20T16:48:00.002+01:002023-11-20T16:49:34.183+01:00Images: from images of what is invisible to images that cannot be seen<p><i> Paul Dumouchel</i></p><br /><br />I am interested in how the production and dissemination of images using digital technologies (understood in a broad sense) and these technologies themselves transform our image of the world. The fact that the word “image” appears twice in the previous sentence and in two different meanings is no accident. The plurality of meanings of the word “image” is very ancient. It is already present in “idea” the Greek word for image derived from the ancient Greek verb idein that means to see. Idea for us no longer as the meaning of an image and only refers to an invisible immaterial concept. To see however, still also means to understand, in many languages, not only in some that are closely related, like French, English or Italian, but even for example, in Japanese. <br /><br />I want to see – to understand – how images relate to concepts and how this relation has changed with the introduction of new technologies of image making. What interests me is the relationship between the different types of material images that we make and thinking, or if you prefer, the relationship between the images we make and our understanding of the world. This is not the relation between material images and “mental images” as psychologists usually understand this last term, but rather between the images that are material objects and invisible immaterial thought. I will focus on only two aspects of this complex relationship. One is how we resort to images to make visible what is invisible and how this particular relation has changed with the rise of new technologies of image making. The other is how the new technologies that allow us to make images transform our relation to the world. In both cases, what is at stake is the ability of images to reveal the truth about the world. If you prefer, what is involved is their truth value. <br /><br /> In both cases – that of images that make visible what is invisible and that of images that cannot be seen – we need a starting point as reference to describe the relevant changes in the images we make. The 20th as the century of photography will provide that point of reference. <br /><br /> <br /><br /><b>The 20th century</b><br /><br />Its importance comes from that the 20th photography both constituted a sharp break with what had gone before in relation to images and second because what happened then to image making was in many ways the continuation and the culmination of a development that had been going on for centuries. The 20th century was, as far as images, are concerned the century of photography, of cinema and later of the television. It is true that photography started somewhat before in the second half of the 19th century, but all three technologies really came into their own in the 20th. Beginning towards the end of the 19th century, the world, our social life, was inundated by an extraordinary quantity of new images compared to what existed in the previous centuries. Photography became a common place activity, one that was more and more accessible to everyone. In books and textbooks photos began replacing illustrations, drawings and engravings, while in the cinema, alongside films of fiction and entertainment, new genres appeared: documentaries and news reels which progressively moved from the theatre house to everyone’s home taking the name of news cast and live reporting or live TV. These images, in part because of their sheer number and the ease with which they could be produced, transformed people’s relation to images and to the world. More precisely these new media and means of producing and reproducing images gave prominence to one particular dimension of images. These progressively more and more common images corresponded to one way in which images had been used until then, but which previously had only occupied a limited place in social life. <br /><br />That one way is of faithfully representing (some portion of) the world, and of representing it as it is. That is to say, became prominent images that claimed to represent truthfully and objectively what they are the image of. A function that in the past had been fulfilled by portraits of living persons, paintings of famous places, panoramas and monuments, as well as by scientific drawings or engravings, especially of plants, animals or parts of the human body. That was, however, the function of only one type of images limited to a large extent to scientific and professional domains. Other images like scenes from the Old Testament or portraits of saints long dead or paintings of ancient battles could not pretend to such an objectivity. Their relation to truth was different. It was either symbolic or one of illustration. In the latter case, the representational dimension of the image was generic rather than particular. A person or character, for example Augustine or St.-Peter, was represented as an elderly man. And if the image could be considered true to the saint, it was not true to the particular person. It did not look like the person it was deemed to represent, or at least we had no way of knowing.<br /><br /> The many different images that began to inundate the social world at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries were different. They shared three important and closely related characteristics that perfectly fulfilled some objectives and ideals of representational painting. First, these images were considered truthful, truth-functional one could say. That is, they were considered to reliably represent what they were the image of. They were considered to be true to what is. That truthfulness of the image was understood as a consequence of the technology used to create them. Images produced by an apparatus – the camera – that merely records what is do not lie and, it was thought, could not lie. (Remember that the name “camera” sends back to a much older technology, the “camera obscura”, that had now been used for centuries in painting to perfectly reproduce landscapes or sceneries.) Photography’s fidelity to what is was thought to result from the fact that these pictures were produced by a photo-mechanical process. That was seen to provide two great advantages over drawings or paintings: speed and objectivity. Even early photography the daguerreotype took less time than drawing and of course than painting. Objectivity which was associated with science and learning.<br /><br />These advantages led to their being preferred to mere written reports as a source of information. (Note that even today we can recognize the same evaluation of automatically produced images. For example, in the use of body cameras for policemen or dashboard cameras for car accidents. Such mechanical recordings of what happened are privileged over written reports because we assume that they do not lie, also because we think that they give us an objective view of the point of view of the police officer whose action are being called into question, the image is assumed to reveal to us the point of view which the officer would have had, since the images were taken from where he or she was.) <br /><br /> Second, the truthfulness of these images, their fidelity to what is was thought to imply that they were immediately readable. That they could be understood by anyone simply by looking at them, just as is the case of any natural scene we observe. These images were considered to be in principle evident and therefore did not require any explanation. They gave the person viewing them, the evidence of being there. As the saying goes, “an image is worth a thousand words”, suggesting that these images had a further advantage over the written word, which is that they were both evident and immediately clear. There was no need for long, complex, and often obscure explanations, the image speaks for itself and by itself.<br /><br /> These two closely related characteristics implied a third one, which is that these evident and truthful images do not change the world. Unlike an illumination or decoration, a photography simply records what is going on. It does not add or subtracts anything to what is for either aesthetic, religious or ideological reason. Their primary goal is not to embellish or to educate, but to report. Photography, news reels, live TV reporting or pictures in newspapers, just like the picture of your lover, parents or of family meeting merely revealed what is. They did not change anything. The images were neutral. They did not take side relative to what they represented. Taking an image with such a device left the world as it was, it did not change it.<br /><br /> The power of these images came to a large extent from those 3 qualities: truthfulness, evidence (readability) and neutrality. And these three characteristic to a large extent still set the stage for how we understand images. Images speak to all – they are evident – and they do not speak for anyone in particular – they are truthful and neutral. Through the image it is reality, the fact themselves that are speaking. If the publication of such images can lead to changes in the world, it is not because the images themselves change anything, but, on the contrary, because they reveal the truth, because through these truthful images people became aware of something that they did not know before. <br /><br /> Of course, as we all know that things are not so simple, that these 3 characteristics that we like to attribute to photo-mechanically produced images are not necessarily the case. To the opposite, numerous books have been published and many analyses written explaining and illustrating how images, photos, films, pictures are or can be used to distort reality and to promote specific goals. To show that the images in the media are neither neutral nor evident and that they can lie. All these essays aim to teach us how reality can be photographed or filmed in ways that bias what the pictures or film seem to report and to show how it is possible in this way to instill false beliefs in the viewers. How the images can lie.<br /><br /> This common and commonly justified criticism, however, precisely proves the point that I am trying to make. The fact that so many books and articles, documentaries and programs have been produced to demonstrate how images can lie, to denounce those who manipulate them for their own advantage, or to inform us of the different techniques used and the extend to which we can be victim of these “doctored” images, indicates that we spontaneously assume that these mechanically reproduced images are evident, neutral and truthful. The fact that we need to be “educated” in order to perceive or simply to suspect that these images can be deceptive is proof that we naturally or spontaneously tend to see them as evidently truthful. The fact that we consider that deceptive images to have been “doctored” or manipulated to prevent them from revealing the truth of what happen or of what is, also implies that a transparent relation to the truth is characteristic of what we think these images are and should be.<br /><br /> It is important to realize that this way of seeing images and of understanding their role and function is very different from what was the case before. Though some images had always been taken as representing reality, what this meant even in such genres as portraits and landscapes, was rarely simply an exact truthful reproduction of what the image was the image of. Only scientific drawings beginning in the 16th century were understood to be guided by the 3 objectives of being truthful, evident and neutral. Apart from those, the making of images was guided by different other goals. <br /><br />Most images were images of what could not be seen. Images of saints, of Christ or the Virgin, images of Greek gods, scenes from ancient mythology or of the Old or New Testament, paintings of imaginary cities or landscapes. These were not visual copies of what existed, even when for example, the image of a saint, was the image of someone who once had a physical appearance. However, if they were images of what could not be seen, they were not images of what did not have any possible visual appearance. Even in the most extreme case, images of God the Father, are images of what at the end of time will be seen, at least by those who are saved! Therefore, these images were images of what could not be seen for contingent, rather than for essential reasons.<a href="https://unicadrsi-my.sharepoint.com/personal/ivan_blecic_unica_it/Documents/TEMP/Images%20of%20the%20invisible.docx#_ftn1">[1]</a> <br /><br />However, the world that those images represented was not the world that everyone saw, nor was it the world in which people lived, the world that they naturally perceive. To put it otherwise, the role of images was not to represent the world as it appears to us, but to make visible and present what was neither visible nor present. In this way the images participated in creating a different world. Their function was not to make some aspect of the world visually accessible to those who had been momentarily absent – here is a picture of last week’s party – but to make visible what was absent, what could not be made present otherwise than as an image.<br /><br />To put this in the terminology of C.S. Pierce theory of signs, most images then were not “icons” but “indexes” or “symbols”. An icon resembles that of which it is an icon – the drawing of a fire to signify “fire”. An index entertains a normal and known (Pierce said a natural) relation to what it is an index of – smoke indicates the presence of a fire. A symbol is arbitrary, it neither resembles nor is linked by a natural relation to the object it signifies but signifies through a systems of signs – for example an X over the image of the fire to signify that you should not make fires. Unlike images in the previous centuries which were mostly indexes and symbols, the new mechanically reproduced images that invaded the world during the 20th century claimed to be icons.<br /><br /> <br /><br /><b>Images of what is invisible</b><br /><br />I name “images that are not images” strange visual objects that are not properly images, but that nonetheless present themselves as or claim to be images understood as icons. They are strange, not so much because of the way they look, as because these visual objects claim to be images, while they actually are visual representations, of what is not visible. They are images of things, phenomena, and processes that are invisible. They are to be understood as visual representations of what is not visible. They are neither illustrations nor illuminations, they are not decorations, nor do they claim to be pictures of fictional or of long disappeared historical characters. They are not representations of things that do not exist. Rather they are understood to be visible renderings of aspects of material objects that are not visible, that are properly invisible. Further, these visual representations are considered, at least to be guided by the three objectives of being neutral, truthful and evident pictures of what they present.<br /><br />These “images that are not images” are visual representations that claim to be icons of something material, but of an invisible aspect of a material object. That of course, from Pierce’s point of view seems impossible. Since an icon by definition resembles that of which it is an icon, something cannot be an icon of what is invisible. To put it otherwise, it cannot resemble what has no semblance. The question then is: Can an image resemble that which is invisible – rather than merely symbolize it or be an index of that which is invisible? What would it mean to say that an image resembles that which is invisible? What do we mean when we make such a claim? Nobody thinks of that the images I will soon present are symbolic and if sometimes we may be tempted to view one as an index rather than an icon, that is generally because the image is not clear enough, because it lacks precision. In consequence it appears more like a trace than as a representation. That implies that we expect the images to be truthful, evident and neutral.<br /><br />Furthermore, what these images claim to be visual representations of is of essentially, rather than accidentally, nonvisible aspects of what they are images of. To the opposite, objects such as, for example, what is too far away or too small to be seen or hidden in a dark cave or at the bottom of the ocean are not essentially invisible, but only accidentally invisible. Because no matter how difficult it may be to reach to them, in order to see them or for them to become visible, all that is necessary is to be close enough and to shine a light on them. Such things are not invisible in principle. It is not impossible to see them, it is only by accident or for the moment that we cannot see them. In themselves, they are perfectly visible. However, the images that I call “images that are not images” are different. <br /><br /> <br /><br />Consider brain images taken by a fMRI machine. That is using Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging technology which allows researchers to safely, painlessly and non-invasively observe brain activity. It is a brain imaging technology that detects brain activity by measuring changes in blood flow. Actually, what it measures more exactly are changes in the movement of water which is taken to be indicative of blood flow. In fact, there are some discussions among specialist as to how this data is to be interpreted.<a href="https://unicadrsi-my.sharepoint.com/personal/ivan_blecic_unica_it/Documents/TEMP/Images%20of%20the%20invisible.docx#_ftn2">[2]</a> To be even more precise what the machine monitors is the resonance time lap of the protons of hydrogen atoms. Nobody and nothing sees or shines a light directly inside the brain of the patient. Unlike what is the case when using a traditional light microscope, or during an autopsy no one is looking inside the head, no light enters there to reveal what can be seen. What happens is that a strong magnetic field is created around the patient’s head in consequence the protons of hydrogen atoms align themselves, then a radio signal that disrupts their alignment is sent and when the protons bounce back (that is re-align themselves) they emit a radio signal that is picked up by the machine. How long the protons take to bounce back is considered indicative of changes in the distribution of water, indicative also of the thickness and distribution of cellular tissue.<br /><br />All that the machine picks up, the only data that it receives in order to make an image of brain activity are the radio signals indicative of the protons’ realignment. This constitutes the sum of empirical information that the device gathers from its observation of the patient. That represents nonetheless a very large quantity of data. This data now needs to be organized, formatted, cleaned up. The essential hypothesis is that the spatial organization of the parts of the brain will reveal its structure and functioning. On the basis of this very large quantity of data and many specific hypotheses and complex theories concerning the behaviour of water molecules in brain tissue, others concerning what we know the structure of the brain and its normal activity, as well as appropriate computer programs an image of the observed brain activity is constructed. These are the images with which we have become familiar, and which generally (as above) use a colour code to indicate active regions or areas where there could be a tumour. <br /><br />These images are considered by physicians and surgeons, who for the most part do not know very well how fMRI functions, as faithful. That is as indicative of the brain regions where the activity is going on or where there is a lesion. The images are viewed as authoritative and as evidence (and to those who have been properly trained they become evident). They are authoritative and evident in the sense that they are used as guide for diagnostic or surgical interventions. These images can further be shown in 3 dimensions allowing the doctor “see” the topology of the brain and its internal structure. They make the brain transparent, so to speak. These fMRI images and other imaging technologies allow us to “see” the inside of things with minimum disruption and to discover their fine grain structure.<br /><br />What are those images, images of? The apparently evident answer is that they are visual representations of the brain, of its inner structure and of where brain activity is taking place. Since brain activity takes place all the time and everywhere in the brain, what is meant here by “brain activity” is activity linked to various specific tasks. It is important to note that these still images, in spite of appearances, are not snap shots. They are not like the photograph of a tree or of a person waving goodbye. They are more like long term exposure pictures of traffic moving at night. In those images the individual cars have disappeared and all we see are red and white lines which the succession of the passing cars’ head and taillights has created. Similarly, the fMRI in order to make an image collects data over a significant periods of time – seconds or even minutes – during which time brain activity is continuously taking place, all this activity is then compressed, collapsed or concentrated into still pictures, which may be different because of what we want to highlight, but in all cases, they correspond to long term exposures. <br /><br />Given these images lack of evidence and neutrality how is their claim to truth established? What convinces the viewers that the images are faithful to the world, and not just an illusion or artefact? (Note that this is not an entirely new question. Since Galileo’s use of the telescope, it has been repeatedly raised concerning visual access to the world through tools and instruments.) Philosophers of science generally rightly answer that it is through comparison between different ways of assessing the object that the truth value of artificially produced images is determined. For example, it is by comparing our hypotheses concerning the fine structure of the object and the results obtained using scanning tunnelling electron microscope that we determine the value of the image. <br /><br />Formulated in this way, the answer though correct remains incomplete. What ultimately convinces scientists of the iconic, veridical, evidential and objective dimension of “images of what is invisible” is that the images themselves and their meaning are the result of public discussions between members of communities of scholars. Discussions that are public, public in a sense close to the idea of “common knowledge”. Something is said to be common knowledge not only when it is known to everyone but when it is also known to everyone that it is known to everyone. Similarly, discussions about the value of such images are public not only in that they are open to all those involved in the process of their production, but also in that this is known by all to be case. It is, in a sense, the agreement of experts that determines the truth value of the image. But that agreement is not a simple “yes or no” affair, it is not an agreement that is reached once and for all. Rather it is a dynamic process that remains open to challenges, even if the dimensions of the openness to challenge change as time goes by.<br /><br /> One characteristic of “images of what is invisible” is that unlike a painting or a normal photograph they are not and cannot be produced by one individual alone. Making such a picture necessarily is a social process. Social not only in a technical sense, given that their production involves complex machines and equipment controlled by many technicians. Social also in that the images only acquire their status as trustworthy documents through a dynamic collective process of discussion and assessment (that cannot really be separated from the technical aspect). <br /><br /> <br /><br /><b>Images of what is not</b><br /><br />Important differences between ordinary images as we knew them in the 20th century and how we experience them today result from the social use of ICT and other digital technologies. Mainly they come from the sheer number of images available and the ease with which anyone can produce, reproduce, use, reuse and modify existing images, and disseminate them in extremely large quantities. In consequence, unlike what was the case, say 50 years ago, images that we produce and those that we find everywhere publicly reproduced cannot anymore be considered to have the 3 characteristics of being truthful, evident and neutral.<br /><br /> 50 years ago, anyone could make a photo-album, or make movies (and a little later videos) of trips and family events and that possibility was both new and incredible. That level of production of images does not however in any way compare to today’s situation. Back then taking a picture was something you did with care because film were expensive, somewhat difficult to change and allowed only a limited number of pictures. With one film you could take 8, 12, 24 or at most 36 pictures and that was it. So, you would be very careful about what you shoot because you did not want to run out of film. Furthermore, the images were not immediately available. You had to bring the film to a specialized store and then wait anywhere between 24h and week before you could see the pictures you had taken. Pictures were fragile and copies were not easy to make.<br /><br /> Today this has completely changed. Among other things because the internet actually is a very large and powerful reproduction device. (What is the most unlikely feature of the Star Wars movies scenario? – apart from the fact that starships fall down when they are hit as if they were a plane in the sky or a sinking boat!) Whenever you communicate on line, a copy of what you sent is made, or rather as many copies of the text or images are made as there are recipients. In principle there is no limit here. Furthermore, a trace of everything that happens on the net is created. So that anything that goes or is done on the internet can be found, nothing can be definitely deleted and entirely hidden, at least from those who have the right knowledge and equipment. Yet nothing is properly public on the internet. <br /><br /> Why? Because in digital space, contrary to physical space, presence is not reciprocal. In physical space if I am present to you, then by definition you are present to me. In order to escape from this reciprocity of presence we must resort to special means, for example, hide behind a curtain. In digital space, even if all action necessarily leaves a trace, that trace does not constitute a presence for anyone, unless special measures are taken in order to discover the trace or make the person present. There is no evidence attached to any action that is made in digital space. That action is not and cannot become known to others unless someone take special measures to make it so. That is why digital space is not a public space. <br /><br /> This may seem strange, because one of the frequent criticism that ICT threaten to destroy private life by making public, or rather known to others, everything about you, your private messages and photos, who you have been talking to, the sites you visited, the kinds of books you read, your political and sports interest, anything and everything that transits through digital space can be known because it inevitably leaves a trace that can be retrieved. However, physical space is naturally or if you prefer is by itself a public space, because anything that happens in physical space is in principle accessible to anyone who is present there. Given the reciprocity of presence in physical space anything that happens can immediately become « common knowledge » to those present. What is public is not necessarily known by everyone, rather is public what can be known by all and of which it is known by all that it can be known by all. Everything that happens in physical space has that structure. Even what is hidden, reserved, or made private is done so publicly. We build walls, we close doors, we put signs that say, « no entry » or ask people to leave. Publicity is a structural characteristic of physical space. In order to escape this publicity, we need to take special measures. <br /><br /> Digital space lacks the structure of reciprocal evidence that defines publicity. Nobody knows from the simple fact that she or he accesses digital space whether or not her or his presence is known by anyone and if it is known by who. No one knows either if what he or she learns or discovers in that space is true or not. That is to say, if it corresponds to anything and to what outside of digital space. What comes to us through digital space does not have any particular or specific evidence. It does not have any self-evidence. Unlike what happens in physical space, nothing here offers any guarantee of the truth of what happens in digital space. The content of an internet page does not have any self-evidence. In consequence, nobody can know for sure who sees or can see whatever he or she posts on the internet. <br /><br /> Today, anyone can take hundreds of picture with his or her smartphone, see them immediately, and just as soon distribute them to hundreds of persons. Pictures for us are inexpensive, they are easy and fast to take, and one can rapidly, easily and cheaply make as many copies as one wants. We are inundated by images because they are free, not only financially, but also in terms of time and effort. When personal computers and the internet were first introduced their use was understood to be essentially related to texts, to writing, reading, sending and receiving written message. However, due among other things to the exponential growth in data storage capacity, today images are everywhere. Social media are unthinkable without them. Not so long ago “You Tube” would have been impossible, an open channel where anyone can post anything, and where anyone can become famous and rich if enough people are interested in whatever it is you post. Was also unthinkable the fact that maps would be accompanied by images of what the map was a map of, as is now possible thanks to Google’s alternative “street view” or “satellite view”. What has changed is not only the quantity of images, but also the growing number of types of images and of “views” these represent. <br /><br /> In consequence of the ease and speed with which anyone can produce, reproduce and post them, the function of the “neutral”, “truthful”, and “evident” images, of the icons we make has changed radically. Before, personally taken pictures for the most part fell under the two categories of celebrations and of memories. People took pictures of important events and of moments they wanted to remember. Of course, many of the pictures we take still play those roles, but images have also, perhaps primarily, become a means of communication. Instead of collecting pictures and films in special albums and protected boxes, as precious object to be exhibited sporadically on special occasions, to selected others. Images are stored on a smartphone to be shown to anyone at any time, for any reason. We also send pictures to others immediately after taking them to say, “look where I am!”, “see the cake I just made”, “don’t you love this dress” or “me all dressed up to go to graduation”, and so on. Rather than memories these images are ephemeral visual traces of our ongoing actions, illustrations destined to those who cannot be present. Selfies are a clear example of that. Of these pictures we can make an unlimited number of copies or delete them just as easily. In themselves they are not precious objects. They will only sometimes become important, precious or damming, through the response of others. Thus, the importance of the number of “like” and “dislike” they receive which for many is what determines the value of the picture. <br /><br /> In this process, the picture transformed into an illustration loses its qualities as an icon. It ceases to exist as an image of what it is the image of. Paradoxically perhaps, the automatic means of production of the image which previously was considered as a proof that the image is true to the world, is now one of the main reasons why the images we take have lost the three qualities of being, truthful, evident and neutral. Like its ancestor the “camera obscura” the classic camera took advantage of a physical process that could not be modified to ensure the faithfulness of the image. Digitalized pictures are freed from the rigidity of that process. Even a low-quality smartphone offers you a number of filters to enhance and modify your pictures, while a computer “photoshop” opens a complete world of possibilities, allowing one to radically transform any picture. While traditional photography was interested to capture aspects of what is, today’s images aim at illustrating an event, a moment, or a mood, not at representing the world.<br /><br /> Images when they are used as illustrations of ongoing action also have a different relationship to time, they tend to become as fugacious as time itself. When an image gives itself as an immediate witness of the present, rather than a memory of the past, it loses its relationship to the future. We tend to think of images as memories as being essentially related to the past – which they are – but that is a partial description of their role and of what they are. Images of the past make the past present for the future. The picture that a person takes of an important event to keep as a memory (as a sign or document) is not for the present of when that picture is taken, but for the future, a future that is open and unknown but that the image of the past tries to constrain or to relate to the past in some way. To the opposite an image that is the mere reproduction of the present in itself has no more future than that present itself. In most cases, it is doomed to disappear, just like the action it seeks to enliven, to which it aims to give more reality by transforming it into an image. Images of the past are not only images that were taken or made in the past, but images that for some reason we, who live in that past’s future, consider as an interesting depiction of some aspect of that past. Images as memories corresponds to aspects of the past that we want to keep for the future. Illustrations of the present have no more future than they have a past.<br /><br /> It is not only the case that many more images are now available than before, but also that the nature of private and of public images have changed. Not so long ago the thinking and strategy of the media, of publicity and of all who made public images was dominated by the saying that an image is worth a thousand word. Today we are obsessed by “fake news”, by the fact that neither images, nor texts can be taken at face value. One way thinking of this difference is that before, at the moment of the rise of mass media images were understood as windows that gave a view on the world. Of course, images were also used in propaganda, they were manipulated and made to lie. But that was more difficult to do then. It was not open to everyone, and it was considered as a form of abuse, a perversion of the true nature of images. Images did not lie unless they were forced to. Today transforming an image to make it say something different from the reality it comes from is considered normal and an advantage. That is why we have all those filters, photoshop and so on. In consequence, images are now best understood as a screen. Not as windows on the world, but as a flat surface on which flash in a chaotic and disorganized way different topics and interests. Images do not reflect the world anymore, rather they illustrate various details and aspects of the world that are important for those who make the image. <br /><br />The culture of images has changed over the last 50 or 60 years. While they used to be seen as a vehicle for truth, we now feel the need to apologize when they are true, warning viewers that they may find some of the images offending. Interestingly it is essentially when they report real events, rather than in situations of entertainment that such warning are made. That is to say, it is when they reveal a reality that disrupts our normal presuppositions about the order of the world and challenge our prejudices that we are told to beware of images, and not when they present to us what is not. <br /><br /> <br /><br /> <br /> <br /><br /><a href="https://unicadrsi-my.sharepoint.com/personal/ivan_blecic_unica_it/Documents/TEMP/Images%20of%20the%20invisible.docx#_ftnref1">[1]</a> The visual representation of an abstract concept is a different issues. <br /><br /> <br /> <br /><br /><a href="https://unicadrsi-my.sharepoint.com/personal/ivan_blecic_unica_it/Documents/TEMP/Images%20of%20the%20invisible.docx#_ftnref2">[2]</a> D. Le Bihan (2012) Le Cerveau de cristal. Ce que nous révèle la neuro-imagerie, Paris : Odile Jacob.<div><div id="ftn2">
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</div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6635225884701394609.post-42668250364654048862021-02-19T23:18:00.062+01:002021-03-09T22:38:14.756+01:00If Robots Could Desire?<i><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><i style="text-align: left;">Universal Basic Income—Consumer robots—The Matrix—Work—Marx—Fetishism of money—End of capitalism—The Terminator—Synthetic (mimetic) need, or desire—Blade Runner—Duchamp—Data—Something out of nothing?<span><a name='more'></a></span></i></div></i><p style="text-align: center;"><br /></p><h1 style="text-align: center;">If Robots Could Desire?</h1><h4 style="text-align: center;">A sketchy<i> divertissement</i></h4><div style="text-align: center;">(V. 1.1)</div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;">Ivan Blečić</div><br /><div style="text-align: center;"><i>Universal Basic Income—Consumer robots—The Matrix—Work—Marx—Fetishism of money—End of capitalism—The Terminator—Synthetic (mimetic) need, or desire—Blade Runner—Duchamp—Data—Something out of nothing?</i></div><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center; text-indent: 0cm;"><i><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><o:p> </o:p></span></i></p>
<p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center; text-indent: 0cm;"><i><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><o:p> </o:p></span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">A decisive milestone in the advancement of the Artificial Intelligence
and of the AI-based automation would not be the replacement of human work with
the artificial (robots, algorithms), but the replacement of human desire with
an artificial one. One of the often-mentioned </span>effects <span style="text-indent: 0cm;">of the progressive
replacement of human work with automation is that of the reduction of market demand:
if no one works, no one receives a wage, and no one buys the products. Hence
also one of the arguments in favour of the universal basic income, handing people
money to buy products and sustain the market demand (the other argument being to
let them survive).</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">But one
could wonder, if market demand needs to be sustained, why not instead push that logic of substitution to the end?, and imagine
that robots replace us not only in work, but also in consumption: that is, to hand
out an income to troops of consumer robots to buy products. After all – from a
certain standpoint, and in particular for the functioning of capitalism – it is
perhaps entirely irrelevant what happens to the products once they are purchased:
if they are directly dumped to the landfill, or incinerated, or consumed to
satisfy needs and desires.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">In this
last word lies the starting point to unravel our little thought experiment: the
fact that humans are subjects of desire. In this they are irreplaceable. It is fairly
easy to envision how robots could be built and programmed to replace us at work,
but not how they may desire in our stead.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">But why would
an economic system need this molasses of desire at all? Why would it not suffice
to have a set of algorithms assigning some more or less arbitrary systems of
preference to robots, and then letting them make purchases accordingly?<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><o:p> </o:p></span>Before
trying to answer this question, a curious "example" imposes itself.
Much has been speculated why in the film <i>The Matrix</i>, the machines, the
Matrix, need human energy. Recall, in the film humans are used as
"batteries", a source of energy that powers the Matrix. The film,
however, never quite clearly explains exactly what that energy is. There is a brief
and vague suggestion that a nuclear Armageddon took place, obscuring the sun
and hence forcing machines to look for energy elsewhere, babbling about the
bioelectric content of human body. Laurence Fishburne’s character Morpheus
explains it in the following way:</p>
<p style="margin-left: 50pt;">
“The human body generates more bioelectricity than a 120-volt battery and over 25,000 BTUs of body heat. Combined with a form of fusion, the machines had found all the energy they would ever need. There are fields, Neo, endless fields where human beings are no longer born. We are grown... What is the Matrix? Control. The Matrix is a computer-generated dream world built to keep us under control in order to change a human being … into this [showing a battery].”</p><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">If that is
the explanation, it is strictly technically preposterous – we’re a
lousy source of energy (Carr 2014). We should also not miss to observe that the Wachowskis betray themselves of being aware of the ridiculousness of the proposition. In fact, they add that obscure “combined with a form of fusion”, a rather lazy <i>deus ex machina </i>sci-fi gibberish, signalling that the bioelectric content of human body is not in fact enough, and that some unheard-of form of fusion technology is necessary to yank out the energy. This seems the film’s biggest missed opportunity. Indeed, if the Matrix’s problem were, as Morpheus suggests,
to obtain energy intended in the ordinary physical sense, we can easily imagine
how, obviously, the machines could have efficiently produced and procured themselves
such energy on their own (from fossil, nuclear, and even renewable sources), given
their advanced level of technological-industrial capabilities shown in the film,
and could have completely got rid of humans. Still, they don't. Instead, they “grow”
humans. </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">Beyond explaining this diegetic inconsistency by a pure narrative opportunism
(the film without humans would be of little interest), closest to a possible solution
of the puzzle, which would admittedly make <i>The Matrix</i> a much better
film, probably comes Slavoj Žižek in <i>The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema</i> (Fiennes 2006), when he suggests that it must be a
completely different kind of "energy": the libido, libidinal energy,
which basically is not too far from what we are saying: desire.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><o:p> </o:p></span>Well, back
to our question then: why does the (capitalist) market economy need desire? And
hence why does it need <i>human</i> consumers to make choices about how to
allocate their money (it indeed may not make substantial difference if earned
or handed out by the state)?</p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">To get
closer to an answer we need to employ René Girard’s theory of mimetic desire, together
with a side analytical distinction between needs and desires. With that, we
could arrive at the understanding that the market proposes itself (it proposes
itself in the sense that it aspires to be, and in the sense that it can appear
to us and have the effect on us) as a comprehensive social mechanism of
construction, quantification, and exchange of desire in the form of measurable
quantities of value: prices, wages, profits, ... In short, the mimetic
hypothesis helps us understand that the market is constituted as a social but
a-personal system of creation, valuation and exchange of desire, as André
Orléan was suggesting in his insightful book <i>The Empire of Value</i> (2014). In such a system, the personal worth (of
the capitalist, of the worker) can be said to be measured through the share of
the "socially produced desire" which each participant succeeds in
appropriating in the form of a monetary quantity. If the capitalists (the owners
of the means of production, which include the rent on cognitive capital, what
Marx called the “general intellect”) reaped their profits from the sales of their
products to robots, in these profits there would be not a shred of condensed
desire, it would simply be a fruit of a more or less arbitrary algorithm of
choice, and not a quantifiable substantiation of someone’s desire. In short,
the capitalists themselves would find no "value" in this. In the same
way no one values having fake likes or followers on social networking platforms,
given by bots or bought from click farms <a href="#note1" id="1" name="_ftnref2" style="mso-footnote-id: ftn2;" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="mso-special-character: footnote;"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Yu Mincho"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-fareast;">[1]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></span></a>. So, following Girard, capitalists
want to acquire and “accumulate” other’s desire, in the form of some symbolic
token that represents it, because they are themselves desiring subjects. And
the capitalists are in competition for exactly that, who can “suck” (in <i>The
Matrix </i>the sucking is literal) more (symbolic tokens of) desire from
others.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">So, we may
say that the “success” of the system of market exchange resides in its apparent
ability to literally materialise the vanishing substance of desire, by offering
its socially shared material representation and quantification, and the possibility of its accounting,
exchange and transfer, together with the conspicuous signalling of social distinctions
(putting together Veblen (1899) with Bourdieu (1979)). If that is so, we can ascertain
the naivety of the standard and stale diagnosis of the resilience (actually,
antifragility) of the capitalist market economy, as being due to the
spontaneous individualism and, in a more unsophisticated variant, due to individual
“greed”, suggesting perhaps that a mass conversion to some less egotistic (or
pop-buddist?) individual consciousness would be required to supersede it. Herculean
though that may be, it would still be easy stuff. Because what if, rather than in our
being spontaneously and naturally hyper-individualists – and without forgetting
Karl Polanyi’s great lesson on the <i>creation</i> of the “market society” (Polanyi 1944) –, that spontaneous component of the
success of the market exchange actually resided instead in our being hyper-social?<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">The
argument of monetary exchange representing transfers of desire may also shed
light on the other side of the coin of the debate on the universal basic
income. After all, one of the critiques of the UBI is the argument that people need
to “realise” and fulfil themselves, to find a purpose, or at least a sense of
individual usefulness, through work. But what exactly is this "realisation",
fulfilment, and purpose? Of having contributed to exactly what? Can we not acknowledge
that work indeed may be a path to such a fulfilment and purpose, but still hold
that work as social relation can be separated and made independent from the monetary
transaction of wage receiving?<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">One
unsettling possibility though may be closer to the reading we’re proposing here,
ultimately by seeing that the value of work-<i>cum</i>-wage resides precisely
in that successful "capture" of some quantity of someone’s desire, established
and registered by that monetary transaction of receiving a wage. That
transaction embodies the fact that some other desires the fruits of your
labour, and hence (freely) decides to pay you a wage, that is, to transfer a (quantifiable
monetary) amount of desire from him/her to you. And thus, roughly following
Girard, filling your “lack of being” by exactly that quantifiable amount. Far
from being this a naive fetishism of money, should the market mechanisms
penetrate all spheres of social relations (Sandel 2012), and if we accept the idea of money
as a token quantifying desire and the money supply as the aggregate “socially
produced/available desire”, then that Other paying you a wage would not merely be
partaking in your “being”, it would be the very act of its creation.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">Reasoning in
this fashion throws an interesting light on Marx's idea of the fetishism of commodity/money.
Žižek (1989) correctly observes, that it is not the
money that is the fetish here, since it is nothing but a condensation of social
relations, a piece of paper that gives you the entitlement to a share of the
social product. So, when we ask ourselves where fetishism lies, the answer must
be that it lies in the social reality itself, and in the ideological substratum
that sustains it, what we are, and what we do. But we also need to supplement Žižek’s
point with our earlier thesis that – at least once the productive forces allow
a reasonable satisfaction of the basic biological needs necessary for the survival
– it is the mechanisms of (mimetic) desire which feed the market dynamics and
the economic processes and relationships, through which that social reality takes
material form.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><o:p> </o:p></span>To sum it
up, if we can imagine robots working but not desiring in our place, and if the
act of consumption is the kind of symbolic transaction in which we signal, confer
and transfer quantifiable amounts of desire, the economic exchange <i>qua</i>
social relation loses its value if it is emptied of that desire.</p>
</span><p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB">And since
we’re at Marx, another observation is in order. If we proceed with such
extension of Marx, isn’t the mechanism he imagined to be the end of capitalism a curious modality of what we're saying? Take his hypothesis of the tendency of
the rate of profit to fall, due to a progressive diminishing of the “surplus of value” with increasing mechanisation, driven by competition between capitalists, which in
the long run affects the "organic composition of capital" – the
proportion between labour and capital, the latter nowadays including software
and robots? Is not our mechanism a possible account of what Marx himself
imagined? In fact, in our hypothesis, should we give robots money also to
consume following some arbitrary algorithm of choice, the profit in the strict
sense may not disappear, but the "surplus of value" does, </span><span lang="EN-GB">being </span>though that missing "surplus value" not the lack of (socially necessary) labour-time extracted from workers,
but the lack of desire extracted from consumers! Indeed, if a comprehensive automated
production is ahead of us, fully substituting all human wage-earning work, a comprehensive
universal basic income may be, as already Van Parijs (1995) was suggesting, the only way to
save capitalism from the jeopardies of its own success.</p><p class="MsoNormal"></p><br />
<hr />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiw_2av6RoKy6x2wFC9A2_KXJdVihaF-njY4c9ZC2ob3r_2ai2aBER_Lztw4x5vt5HjTHfyW_zRTE_wx-Uys3H4w_MPO6tWnVs2iqAXB8NI-4oadddr5GWoYkztCt6KAtIMMSTqkrLdnwg/s775/robots.gif"><img border="0" data-original-height="775" data-original-width="527" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiw_2av6RoKy6x2wFC9A2_KXJdVihaF-njY4c9ZC2ob3r_2ai2aBER_Lztw4x5vt5HjTHfyW_zRTE_wx-Uys3H4w_MPO6tWnVs2iqAXB8NI-4oadddr5GWoYkztCt6KAtIMMSTqkrLdnwg/w437-h640/robots.gif" width="437" /></a></div><p></p><div><span lang="EN-GB"><div style="text-align: center;"><b>Quino, “Ok ok robots, but…”</b></div><div style="text-align: center;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>(1) “Yes, they’re fine: they work non-stop 24h a day, the robots. And I don’t have to pay holidays, social security, unemployment benefits...”</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>(2) “Also, they don’t militate in politics, create union conflicts, the robots. But… And the human side? The human side with the workers was a marvel!!!”</i></div><div style="text-align: center;"><i>(3) “Instead, with the robots!! … How the hell does one humiliate it, a robot? !!!”</i></div></span></div>
<hr />
<div><span lang="EN-GB"><br /></span></div><div><span lang="EN-GB">To return
to the Matrix, if we are on a promising track, then we must be led to the
conclusion that the Matrix hypothesis still requires or presupposes a human
conspiracy behind the Matrix. Indeed, if machines replace human labour, but are
unable to desire, to the point of extracting the latter from “human batteries”,
then we must suspect that there are still “desiring subjects”, that is to say,
human capitalists who have set up the Matrix as the ultimate solution to the will
to "extract" desire. (And by the way, isn't the progressive mediation
of social relationships by computers, mobile devices and algorithms in almost all fields a
sign that things may be more or less going in that direction? </span>(see Greenfield 2018))</div><div><span lang="EN-GB">
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB">Our idea of
a series of substitutions, of machines first replacing us as workers and then as
consumers, may though have one last step, that of machines also substituting
the capitalists. To pay homage to another film, we can call this the Skynet
hypothesis. In the third instalment of the Terminator franchise (<i>Terminator
3: Rise of the Machines</i>, 2003), the artificial neural-network group mind Skynet,
developed by the US military, goes online and, as its first act after reaching
self-awareness, launches an all-out nuclear attack on the Earth in attempt to
exterminate humans.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB">A comparison
between our Matrix hypothesis and the Skynet hypothesis may indeed clarify few things.
As we saw, in the Matrix the “desire substance” is acknowledged and plays the
key role, up to raising the suspicion we mentioned before, of Matrix being a
gargantuan and unified ultimate device, set up by other humans, for a centralised,
seamless and hyper-efficient “extraction” of desire, which, as it were, is probably
the monopolistic capitalism brought to its logical conclusion. Instead, in
Skynet, the machines – we are told – reach autonomous self-awareness, and
arrive at the quite reasonable conclusion that the humans are a nuisance at
best, and a jeopardy for their survival at worst, and hence decide to do away
with them. There being no desiring subjects at the top or behind the Skynet
once it acquires autonomy, the human desire can be done away with.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB"> </span></p>
<p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span lang="EN-GB">* * *<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span lang="EN-GB"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-GB">But what if I'm wrong?</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0cm;"><span style="text-indent: 0cm;">What if robots <i>could </i>come to desire? To
paraphrase a memorable Bentham’s passage, the key question is not, Can they
reason?, nor Can they talk? but, Can they desire?</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB">Could we
think of an (evolutionary) mechanism through which synthetic desire emerges? </span></p><p class="MsoNormal">A way to
try to imagine that could be starting from needs. If we give an elementary
definition of a “need” as something necessary for the survival and integrity of
a system (be it biological or cybernetic), then we can quite obviously talk
about needs of robots, at least of those who have acquired an adequate degree
of autonomy together with the self-evolved or pre-programmed goal of survival
and self-preservation. Mechanical/behavioural autonomy is sufficient here, no
need to presuppose any “deep” self-awareness or consciousness. Such an
autonomous robot could be said to have needs, for instance for energy,
batteries, spare parts, but also for possible enhancements, protheses, upgrades,
and so on. And if we gave it an income to let it procure those things on the
market, its consumption choices would no longer be driven by an arbitrary
algorithm, as we imagined at the beginning, but by those needs. In this way we
could also have an actual competition between capitalists, since there now are
clear “market-based” terms for product comparison and emergence of systems of preferences
in robots, and hence a proper market demand and competition among producers.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB">Besides
incorporating those parts and products in themselves, the robots could also
come to use them for procreation. They could, why shouldn’t they?, start
building their children. To pay homage to yet another sci-fi classic, such a
children-fabrication brings us to a possible better use of the term
"replicants", since sexual reproduction may not be necessary, but embedding
in robots some kind of replication drive could be evolutionary advantageous.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB">An
interesting question, which we will not pursue further here, is why then in the
film <i>Blade Runner 2049</i> do the replicants strive
to reproduce sexually? If not again a fruit of lazy narrative opportunism, why
should the capability of sexual reproduction, according to their own report in
the film, be an ultimate proof of replicants’ ontological status of non-merely-machines? Since nonsexual reproduction through
fabrication could work just as well, does it hint that it is there where the metaphysical
desire to be like humans resides? We do not get the answer to that question in
the film, likely because it may be unanswerable <a href="#note2" id="2" name="_ftnref1" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Yu Mincho"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-fareast;">[2]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a>. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB">Be that as
it may, <i>Blade Runner </i>is of interest here for envisioning a third
hypothesis on the possible progression of the relationship between humans and
robots, that of not only co-evolution, but of progressive blurring of boundaries
and differences. In the first instalment of <i>Blade Runner</i> (1982), this doubt
is presented in a more abstract, nuanced and arguably sophisticated terms. In
fact, the film does not delve much on an exposition of the “ontological”
differences between replicants and humans, the doubt is not so much staged
through protagonists’ utterances, but through their deeds and ethical choices,
up to leaving the uncertainty, to say the least, about the superior moral
character of humans vis-à-vis replicants (and of the ambiguous blade runner Rick
Deckard vis-à-vis the redeemed replicant leader Roy Batty). As memorable, moving,
and majestically delivered by Rutger Hauer it may be, the ending Roy’s soliloquy
“Tears in rain” on memories lost is ultimately a red herring, what counts as the
true “proof” in the film’s finale is Roy’s self-sacrifice to save Dekard’s life
and, in it, his definitive repudiation of violence. So, in what we could call an
ethical Turing test, we get de-ontology as an ontological proof.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB">Instead, in
the 2017 sequel <i>Blade Runner 2049</i>, the blurring and “line crossing” between
humans and replicants is literally staged through its embodiment in the
possibility of sexual crossbreeding between humans and replicants. In fact, in
the denouement of the film it is revealed [spoiler alert] that Dr. Ana Stelline
is the child of human-replicant relationship between Rachel and Deckard <a href="#note3" id="3" name="_ftnref2" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Yu Mincho"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-fareast;">[3]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a>. So, as it were, sex as an ontological proof.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB"> </span>In any
case, the mimetic capability of robots as a behavioural pattern could emerge
plainly out of the needs described above: not just the literal imitation of behaviours
but also the imitation of needs – we could call this “mimetic need” – could emerge
as an effective evolutionary strategy for quicker learning from robot’s peers,
for instance for discovering which components from which companies work better,
which are more efficient, robust, durable, and so on. So in that way the robots
could begin to imitate each other’s “desire” for things. And from this ignition
point, we could easily imagine the emergence of rudimentary Girardian patterns
(robots becoming rivals and obstacles to each other, mutual aggression, and violence <a href="#note4" id="4" name="_ftnref3" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Yu Mincho"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-fareast;">[4]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a>), of social organisation and
political structuring (differences in capabilities, wealth, status, power, and
so on), and possibly even forms of speciation.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB">Taken such
Girardian patterns at a purely phenomenological level, how far are we here from
the microphysics of human (mimetic) desire? Should we conclude that that is all
there is, or should we rather hold that such a cybernetically evolved (mimetic)
need is ultimately lacking in some ways to match all the properties of (mimetic)
desire? Should we be suspicious of the purely phenomenological parallelisms and
formal homologies, must we not then arrive to claim an altogether different
ontological status of desire? Or is that which takes the form of what we
designate as desire really special only for us, because it is the form it takes
in us as desiring subjects? Or, another fascinating hypothesis which can
perhaps be deemed as a form of radical Girardian-Durkheimian realism, does that
special status of desire reside not in its strictly immanent properties, but is
rather a purely virtual operator necessary to sustain social relationships? <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB">This is likely
yet another set of unanswerable questions. But in a funny twist, some may be,
so to say, empirically testable. If we pursue with our hypothesis of the market
economy as a social mechanism of transubstantiation of desire, thriving
precisely on its unanswerable ontological distinctiveness, then our test would be
to see if the capitalists – the Fredersens, Tyrells, Weyland-Yutanis, Shelby Forthrights, … – of the
future happily embrace that cybernetic “synthetic need/desire” we were
describing before, and thrive on their mutual mimetic competition, on who can
capture the greatest amount of it, possibly discarding the rest of the humanity
to a dump, or doing away with it through a human-controlled Skynet.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB">Or, second
hypothesis, if they will instead continue to only value our “organic desire”, possibly
making the process of its capture and accumulation ever more efficient, perhaps
through a Matrix-like superstructure. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB">Or, third
hypothesis, if there may occur “line crossings” and blurring of differences, and
a subsequent co-evolution, which of course we have no reason to believe would
play out harmoniously, as <i>Blade Runner 2049</i> presages <a href="#note5" id="5" name="_ftnref4" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Yu Mincho"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-fareast;">[5]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a>, and the possible sequel may
stage as an all-out class struggle between replicants and humans (should such an
insipid movie idea pop into Ridley Scott’s mind).<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB">So, in a
way, our empirical test of an ontological question about the status of desire
may come as an apocalyptic revelation of the way in which things will tip, as
it were, Skynet or Matrix or Blade Runner.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB"> </span></p>
<p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span lang="EN-GB">* * *<o:p></o:p></span></p><p align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;"><span lang="EN-GB"><br /></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-GB">Unanswerable though it may be, and sitting it out until the empirical
test ensues, at which point the owl of Minerva will have already spread its
wings, we can still try to characterise the deadlock in our question through one
last example; admittedly with a too lengthy an exposition, so bear with me.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB">There is an
impurity – or a surplus – in Marcel Duchamp's gesture of the urinal. As if in
it, Duchamp minimally restrains and holds himself back, invaded by a dimension
of prudery.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB">The gesture
is well known, that of showing that the work of art is not such because of
its immanent properties (the content), but for the purely formal effect of the
position it occupies in a structure (the form). On that relationship between
content and form, Duchamp's intent is obviously to mark the possibility and the
immediacy of shifting from one dimension to another, as it were, from an
excremental to a sublime one. If this is the case, the first thought that may
pop to one’s mind is that, of course, the place of the urinal must have been
occupied by the Thing itself – by an excrement.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB">Yet instead
of an excrement, Duchamp serves us a urinal. Why? Here we can fantasise the
artist seeing his great opportunity of a slam dunk, but nevertheless restrains himself
by a sense of prudery, and falls back onto a more “polite” surrogate: the
urinal instead of a piece of shit.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB">And yet
there are problems with such a purely "etiquetteological"
interpretation of Duchamp's procedure. The urinal is far from a perfect
substitute, it is not strictly zero-content, the pure entropic obliteration of
matter an excrement would have stood for. Although perhaps prosaic, in the
urinal a content abundantly persists, not only in the obvious common sense of
being an object of design, conceived, designed, and built with a purpose to
serve, but also because it is a "curious" object. Digging a little
deeper, we should also not overlook its phantasmatic and symbolic dimension.
Consider, for example, that for about half of our species the urinal is
universally quite an enigmatic entity. Its perplexing nature does not lie in
the fact that it is a "masculine" object, we all have a demystified
relationship with "gendered" objects through domestic confidence, for
example women with shaving foams, and men with menstrual products. But the
urinal is not something found in promiscuous domestic environments, but
exclusively in public ones, and for a penisless the experience of a urinal (except
for those whose work is to produce, or to clean them!) is that of a fleeting
stolen gaze in the passages of public toilets towards the women's rest rooms,
or better, of a fateful "gaze not avoided" on an alternative, ghostly
dimension.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB">Moreover,
there is a wealth of constructive varieties and styles of urinals, and it would
not be entirely impossible to imagine, in the wake of similar exhibitions of oddities
and quirks, that a certain not so small public would be attracted to an
exhibition or a museum of urinals. (This, by the way, would be an amusing
overturning of the Duchampian procedure, a urinal that from the
object-exception becomes an ordinary genre of figurative art; which, chances
are, isn’t so far from the status of some post-Duchampian art.)<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB">So, to
return to our question, why? What can we gather from Duchamp's apparent
indecision, from his apparent failure to go "all the way", and
instead of exposing the urinal, to serve us... a piece of shit? Our first attempt
to answer this was that it is nothing more than a mere contingency, precisely
an excess of prudery that ultimately weakens – as it were "dirties" –
the work of art. But eventually, we need to deem this answer unsatisfactory, in
terms of the underlying theme of the relationship between content and form, since
it presupposes the naive realism of a strict separation and independence of one
from the other.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB">Instead, what
if Duchamp were here again a step ahead, and if his "discovery" lays in
the fact that the variant with the urinal is precisely the one required to
reflect the necessary relationship, we could properly say dialectical, between the
content and the form? The counterexample should confirm this second way of
seeing things: would an installation in which the place of the urinal is
occupied by an excrement produce the same formal effect? Presumably not. That
minimal functional content in the urinal indeed seems indispensable, <i>something</i>
that already is, <i>and only then</i> can become something else, as soon as it
is framed and placed in a museum, that is, as soon as it comes to occupy a specific
position in a new formal structure.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB">The
implications of such an interpretation are numerous. Starting from the homology
with the condition of Data, the android from the glorious <i>Star Trek: The
Next Generation</i> series. Data “wants” to become human, with all the tics and
irrationalities, but also with all the creativity and – Data's true obsession –
human emotions. Here, after stumbling upon one of those unanswerable questions
we were mentioning before, the wisdom of the <i>Star Trek</i> authors was their
choice not to make it happen, not to get stuck in a melodramatic filmic staging
of a transformation of an android into a human. And in not letting him ever
quite make this leap, we find in Data one of the sweetest and most tender
objections to Pascal's method ("Follow the way by which they began; by
acting as if they believed, taking holy water, having masses said, etc.", <i>Pensées</i>
233). Indeed, Data puts in practice a permanent and increasingly sophisticated
strategy of imitating humans, "by acting as if he believed", and yet the
passage never quite happens. So much so that, as much as we sympathise with the
character, we realise that his is nothing but a mechanical repetition, imitation,
emulation <a href="#note6" id="6" name="_ftnref5" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 12pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: "Yu Mincho"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-fareast;">[6]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a>. Here, on this level runs
our homology: Data in <i>Star Trek</i> and the excrement in our alternative
Duchamp occupy homologous positions: a nothing from which nothing – neither the
form, nor the structure – can make the dynamism of a dialectical procedure to ignite
and departure. A minimal content, a surplus, Duchamp seems to suggest, would be
indispensable in both cases. And it is rather ironic that Duchamp</span> perhaps
stumbles upon this discovery by secretly harbouring prudery and honouring a minimal
code of good manners, that apparently only repressive agency, which in his case
repressed the excrement to gives us the urinal. This, by the way, should prompt
us to always wonder what, in what may appear as a pure formalism or an empty ritual,
is the minimal element of “content”; after all, in a peculiar way, this ultimately
was Girard’s greatest discovery.</p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB">The wrap-up
will be disappointing. The question if desire may emerge from (cybernetic) need
is possibly one modality of the question of “something out of nothing”. Unanswerable
though it may be, eventually, we have perhaps arrived at an unremarkable result
of reframing the question in the form: is there some minimal special essence in
desire, and required for desire to emerge, or can it rather emerge – from shit?<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB"> </span></p>
<h2 style="text-indent: 0cm;"><span lang="EN-GB" style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;">References<o:p></o:p></span></h2>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoBibliography"><!--[if supportFields]><span lang=EN-GB
style='mso-ansi-language:EN-GB'><span style='mso-element:field-begin'></span></span><span
lang=EN-US style='mso-ansi-language:EN-US'><span
style='mso-spacerun:yes'> </span>ADDIN ZOTERO_BIBL
{"uncited":[],"omitted":[],"custom":[]}
CSL_BIBLIOGRAPHY </span><span lang=EN-GB style='mso-ansi-language:EN-GB'><span
style='mso-element:field-separator'></span></span><![endif]--><span lang="EN-US">Bourdieu, Pierre. 1979. <i>La distinction:
critique sociale du jugement</i>. Éditions de Minuit.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoBibliography"><span lang="EN-US">Carr,
Kevin. 2014. «Was the Matrix Even Necessary in ‘The Matrix’?» Film School
Rejects. 8 gennaio 2014.
https://filmschoolrejects.com/was-the-matrix-even-necessary-in-the-matrix-c64070985674/.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoBibliography"><span lang="EN-US">Fiennes,
Sophie. 2006. <i>The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema</i>. Mischief Films, Amoeba
Film.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoBibliography"><span lang="EN-US">Greenfield,
Adam. 2018. <i>Radical Technologies: The Design of Everyday Life</i>. Verso.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoBibliography"><span lang="EN-US">Orléan,
André. 2014. <i>The Empire of Value: A New Foundation for Economics</i>. MIT
Press.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoBibliography"><span lang="EN-US">Parijs,
Philippe van. 1995. <i>Real Freedom for All: What (If Anything) Can Justify
Capitalism?</i> Clarendon Press.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoBibliography"><span lang="EN-US">Polanyi,
Karl. 1944. <i>The Great Transformation</i>. New York: Farrar & Rinehart.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoBibliography"><span lang="EN-US">Sandel,
Michael J. 2012. <i>What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets</i>.
London: Macmillan.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoBibliography"><span lang="EN-US">Veblen,
Thorstein. 1899. <i>The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study in the
Evolution of Institutions</i>. New York: Macmillan.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoBibliography"><span lang="EN-US">Žižek,
Slavoj. 1989. <i>The Sublime Object of Ideology</i>. </span>Verso.<o:p></o:p></p>
<!--[if supportFields]><span lang=EN-GB style='font-size:12.0pt;font-family:
"Times New Roman",serif;mso-fareast-font-family:"Yu Mincho";mso-fareast-theme-font:
minor-fareast;mso-ansi-language:EN-GB;mso-fareast-language:EN-US;mso-bidi-language:
AR-SA'><span style='mso-element:field-end'></span></span><![endif]-->
<div><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><br /><br /><hr align="left" size="1" width="33%" />
<!--[endif]-->
<div id="ftn1">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><b>Notes</b></span></p><p class="MsoFootnoteText"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference">
<a href="#1" id="note1">[1]</a> The Girardian reading of the practice of purchasing followers and likes from click farms is fairly straightforward. You do not buy them for their intrinsic value, but only to create the appearance of having followers and likes, in order to mimetically kindle in others the desire to follow and like you. That is also why such reputation faking should never be revealed, and are scandalous once discovered, revealing the vanity of the perpetrator in plain sight. Companies managing social networking platforms know all too well where the true value resides, and are good at purposefully engineering what needs to be hidden from the plain sight, and at monetising it. Curiously, and not without some implications for our argument, social networking companies call those real followers and likes “organic”.</span></p>
<p class="MsoFootnoteText">
<a href="#2" id="note2">[2]</a> As an aside, there perhaps exist three types
of unanswered questions in the works of fiction: those that don’t get answered
because the authors are foolishly unaware that there actually is a question to
be answered, those in which the authors are too clumsy and lazy to answer the
question, and those in which the question, even if only implied, is in fact
unanswerable. Foolishness, clumsiness, and laziness may all be entertaining to
observe and watch unfolding, but the interest of the latter type is not
strictly in not answering questions, but in narrowing down and pinpointing where
the deadlock in those questions resides: to again ransack Žižek, greater
purpose may sometime come not from providing all of the answers, but by asking
the right questions.<br /><o:p></o:p></p></div></div></span></div>
<div id="ftn2">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText">
<a href="#3" id="note3">[3]</a> Aptly, Ana Stelline is a freelance “replicant
memory designer” hired by the Tyrell Corporation to design fake memories to be
implanted into replicants’ minds. She is likely the best, as is suggested in the
script:<o:p></o:p></p></div>
<p class="MsoFootnoteText" style="margin-left: 63.8pt; text-indent: -1cm;"><span lang="EN-GB">K: “You
make memories, that go into Replicants. They say you make the best”.<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoFootnoteText" style="margin-left: 63.8pt; text-indent: -1cm;"><span lang="EN-GB">Ana: “Then they’re kind.”<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoFootnoteText" style="margin-left: 63.8pt; text-indent: -1cm;"><span lang="EN-GB">K: “You
work for Wallace. <o:p></o:p></span></p>
<p class="MsoFootnoteText" style="margin-left: 63.8pt; text-indent: -1cm;"><span lang="EN-GB">Ana: “Subcontract. I’m one of his suppliers. He offered to buy me out,
I take my freedom where I can find it."<o:p></o:p></span></p>
<div id="ftn3">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText">
<a href="#4" id="note4">[4]</a> An interesting question for a Girardian
scholar is whether something like scapegoat mechanism could also emerge out of
such cybernetic “mimetic need”. Should the answer be negative, the follow-up
question would then be why does it emerge in human context? Because there is
something special in the status of desire vis-a-vis need?, or because there is
some missing ingredient in the basic mimetic model, and hence there is formally
necessary something else to be at play or operating, so that scapegoating
emerges spontaneously as a mode of appeasement of rivalries and of resolution
of mimetic crises?<o:p></o:p></p></div>
<div id="ftn4">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText">
<a href="#5" id="note5">[5]</a> Closest to a Girardian insight comes K's
superior Lt. Joshi, who fears that, rather than the cause of a gullible universal
epiphany, the possibility of crossbreeding, and of replicants’ sexual reproduction
among themselves, that is to say the vanishing of differences, could lead to a
war between humans and replicants. As she puts it:<o:p></o:p>
<br />
</p><p style="margin-left: 65pt;">
<i>“The world’s built on a wall that separates
kind.<br />
Tell either side there’s no wall --
you bought a war -- or a slaughter.”</i></p><o:p></o:p><p></p>
<div id="ftn5">
<p class="MsoFootnoteText">
<a href="#6" id="note6">[6]</a> Data, which we find out is “fully functional”,
has been also asked to have sexual intercourse with at least one crew member, and
Data diligently obliged. In the third episode of the first season, “The Naked
Now”, we see Chief Security Officer Lt. Tasha Yar seducing Data, and in a later
scene telling him that “it never happened”. If there’s a whole bunch of people
saying that to Data, is open to speculation.<o:p></o:p></p></div></div>
<hr align="left" size="1" width="33%" />
<!--[endif]-->
<p class="MsoNormal"><span lang="EN-GB" style="mso-ansi-language: EN-GB;"><br /></span></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6635225884701394609.post-69793720566562634602020-07-18T14:43:00.016+02:002023-08-31T12:20:36.759+02:00On the Innocence of Guilty Scapegoats (a brief sketch)<div>This may be obvious to many. </div><div><div>But it looks elusive to some who seem to find a perplexing conundrum at the heart of what we may call the ethics in René Girard. It is his thesis of the radical innocence of the victims of scapegoating, the claim he appears to espouse that “the victim is always innocent”. </div><div>At first sight, this does not even look as a productive paradox, but outright empirically wrong. In what sense can one arrive to claim that a scapegoat is always innocent, even if the person is objectively, empirically responsible of an uncontroversial wrongdoing (say, a murder)? </div><div><br />It seems to me that the crucial subtlety of Girard's claim is that <i>in scapegoating</i> the victim is always innocent. In other words, the point here is that even if the victim is objectively responsible of the deeds which cannot but be deemed wrong (say, a murder), he or she is innocent relative to the scapegoating: the wrong the mob is committing is to use that person to deflect and appease rivalries, to obtain a communion, to punish him or her for the purpose of bonding through the violence of all against one. <br /><br /></div><div>Indeed, the victim may well be, and perhaps often is, responsible of a specific wrongdoing, but he or she is nevertheless innocent of what he or she is implicitly accused of, of jeopardising the social fabric, and is innocent for what he or she is used for, for violent communion. Here we find a parallel with a Lacanian formula Slavoj Žižek has popularised: “even if the claim of a pathologically jealous husband, that his wife is cheating on him, is all true, his jealousy nonetheless remains pathological." The point Žižek is perpetually (perpetually, and perpetually, …) making is that the pathology does not reside, nor dissolve, in being objectively right, or wrong, on the empirically ascertainable fact of the husband’s wife cheating or not cheating on him; the pathological element resides, and persists, in the husband’s need for jealousy as the only way for him to sustain his identity (should we say desire? aren’t they the same thing?). So, we could paraphrase Lacan for our purposes and say that “when a person is scapegoated “for” his or her wrongdoing, he or she is <i>still</i> used for scapegoating, even if he or she is actually responsible for that wrongdoing”. (An even more radical stance would emerge by using "punished" and "punishing" instead of "scapegoated" and "scapegoating" in the previous sentence, hence questioning the legitimacy of any institution of punishment. Can there really exist punishment without scapegoating?) <br /><br /></div><div>There is one further possible surprising twist to all of this. If the scapegoating “serves the purpose” Girard told us to serve, then the victim itself is not really picked, singled out, because of his or her objective guilt, but rather to dispel rivalries and to bond. It is for this sometimes spasmodic, persistent “drives” to pacify mimetic crisis or mimetic <i>miasma </i>through a violent unanimity, that there is a victim picked. The designated victim may even not be really hated from the outset (think of cases of gratuitous bullying), the collective hatred perhaps develops mimetically later. If that is so, the Girardian formula "the victim is innocent" has a surprising counterpart: the persecutors are not individually "evil". Perhaps the true productive paradox in Girard is that that “evil” is a systemic, emergent phenomenon, showing up at the collective level, a genuine social fact. This paradox, a figure of <i>méconnaissance</i>, is that what we could naively and at first sight even consider a praiseworthy thrust – to appease rivalries, to dispel the miasma of mimetic crisis, to bond, to create group solidarity, to strive for affiliation, to seek a way to produce communal peace and social unity – that pushes us to turn to scapegoating. And if to have that we need a victim, then no matter his or her deeds, for that specific purpose truly “the victim is always innocent”. <br /><br />I dared to talk of “ethics in Girard” at the beginning. Because, and this is highly speculative and half baked, perhaps from all this we could derive a <i>sui generis </i>categorical imperative. If there are systemic emergent phenomena I was hinting at earlier, twisting outcomes and intentions when shifting from the individual to the collective scale, a third possibility emerges between the consequentialist “do the right thing, no matter the reasons, as long as the consequences are good”, and the Kantian “do the right thing only for the right reason”. Because the holding of "right reasons" may itself have its reasons, right <i>or</i> wrong. So, that third way can be rendered as “hold the right reasons only for the right reason”, or perhaps more straightforwardly "be righteous only for the right reason". Although apparently highly abstract, such maxim can quickly turn into damning practical, given that one may hold, say, a right political stance (e.g. not racist, not homophobic, etc.), but still hold it for the purpose of, or using it for, scapegoating. There, no matter how uncontroversially responsible (say, for committing some wrongdoing) or wrong (say, for their racism, homophobia, etc.) these targets are, they nevertheless are innocent, because everybody is, as scapegoats. <br /><br /></div><div><br /></div></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><i>I thank Paul Dumouchel for providing insights and comments on the draft of this brief note. The responsibility for possible errors or erroneous claims are of course exclusively mine.</i></div>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6635225884701394609.post-44417532323494929612018-11-07T17:51:00.003+01:002019-01-14T10:59:22.291+01:00Trump Saved by Democrats’ Takeover of the HouseIn his perceptive reading of James Cameron’s 1997 film “Titanic”, Slavoj Žižek neatly illustrates how a catastrophe can save a fantasy, or an ideal. There is a scene in the film, where Rose DeWitt Bukater (Kate Winslet) and Jack Dawson (Leonardo DiCaprio) make each other a promise of eternal love: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1HprDvCHTLI">“When this ship docks, I'm getting off with you“</a>, Rose says.<br />
<br />
<i>That</i>, and not the Titanic going down, Žižek claims, would have been the true catastrophe. Indeed, we can easily imagine how, once in New York, maybe after a few weeks of good sex, this fantasy of pure untainted love would have faded away, crumbling perhaps under the pressure of social expectations, of their objective cultural and social status differences, combined with the dullness after the inevitable loss of novelty and euphoria of falling in love.<br />
<br />
This then was the true function of the iceberg sinking the Titanic in the film: a momentous real catastrophe has to happen, so that the fantasy (or the ideal) can live on. (So that Rose can be able to say towards the end of the film: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nH6Df5Ndx2w">"I promise. I will never let go, Jack. I'll never let go"</a>, while, in a twisted performative contradiction, she's literally letting go Jack's frozen body to sink). A real catastrophe needs to happen in order to save the fantasy from turning into reality, so that the fantasy can survive and persist (otherwise, as Žižek put it elsewhere, when a dream gets realised, it’s called nightmare).<br />
<br />
Here's the analogy with Trump and yesterday’s Republicans’ House debacle.<br />
<br />
If we’ve learned something in the last couple of years, it’s that Trump’s popular support is less, if at all, about policy (otherwise, how to account for it after the repeated attempts to repeal some objectively popular provisions of the Obamacare?, or the "tax cut for the rich"?, etc.). Rather, it is more about group identity, about – how should I put this – strengthening in-group bonds and sense of unity and belonging, by means of guiding and fostering a convergence of blame put on a designated guilty party, by designating the culprits, someone to blame and direct the violence against, in other words, by activating a scapegoating mechanism.<br />
<br />
The effectiveness of the scapegoat mechanism vis-à-vis policy concerns should all in all not surprise anyone. More than 35 years ago, René Girard wrote, “The scientific spirit cannot come first. It presupposes the renunciation of a former preference for the magical causality of persecution so well defined by the ethnologists. Instead of natural, distant and inaccessible causes, humanity has always preferred causes that are significant from a social perspective and which permit of corrective intervention – victims.” (Girard, <i>The Scapegoat</i>, p. 204)<br />
<br />
So, this is how we can paraphrase our Titanic story from the beginning: the very real catastrophe of the Democratic House takeover was needed, so that the fantasy of Trump can be saved, survive and live on. Instead of having no excuse <i>not </i>to<i> </i>deliver with the Republican majority in both chambers of the Congress, once the Democrats take over the House, they can be blamed for all the things not done, for the obstruction of all the imaginable “resolutive initiatives” (or, in a more conspiratorial variant, for feeding the deep state and re-filling the swamp). No matter if those initiatives are real or empty announcements (mid-October middle-class tax cut, anyone?), sensible or fantastic (border wall?), press conferenced of tweeted, truly resolutive or grounded on magical thinking. This is how the Trump fantasy survives and lives on: “if only that iceberg hadn’t struck the ship”; “if it weren’t for the House Democrats, he would have delivered, he would have really made America great again!"<br />
<br />
In other words, the briefest possible formula of analogy, in such a fantasmatic economy, would thus be: just as the Titanic disaster didn't destroy but saved the love, so can the Democratic takeover of the House save Trump.<br />
<br />
This again accounts for <a href="http://memesonmemes.blogspot.com/2016/07/listen-carefully.html">Trump’s antifragility</a>, essentially because scapegoating is antifragile.<br />
<br />
But there’s likely a more ominous prospective to all of this because this “internal blaming”, I predict, will further escalate the political polarisation of the American society. Assuming we’ve entered into that Girardian territory I mentioned before, a structural shift can happen when the blame and the (threat of) violence, from being directed outwards (to external enemies, say, foreigners, immigrants, etc.) get directed inward, to the opposite camp within the same political community (thus to internal enemies, say, traitors, or debasers of “our values”, etc.).<br />
<br />
There is some of that already going on, but, I predict, the House passing into Democratic hands will not only exacerbate the degree of internal violence, the intensity of this internal confrontation, but will bring about a whole new quality and function to that "within violence" (a new configuration and phase in the sacrificial crisis, to put it in Girard's terms). Because now, Democrats can objectively be blamed as <i>the obstacle</i> for making the Trump (and Trump’s) fantasy real. And by extension the blame can be put to all those who put Democrats in charge of the House. Now, the other camp can with greater efficiency and effectiveness be employed as an unifying scapegoat. And the fantasy can survive in the only way in which a fantasy can, as a fantasy.<br />
<br />
I want to conclude with a small personal half-baked speculation. What is to be done? Again, if we’re in that Girardian territory, how can a real emancipatory politics be imagined? What could it be and look like?<br />
<br />
Shortly after that passage I quoted before, Girard writes: “In order to lead men to the patient exploration of natural causes, men must first be turned away from their victims. This can only be done by showing them that from now on persecutors 'hate without a cause' and without any appreciable result. In order to achieve this miracle, not only among certain exceptional individuals as in Greece, but for entire populations, there is need of the extraordinary combination of intellectual, moral and religious factors found in the Gospel text.” (Girard, <i>The Scapegoat</i>, p. 205)<br />
<br />
Perhaps less ambitiously and less sonorously, there could be envisioned a space of possibility for political action proper by insisting on the revelation of the scapegoating mechanisms whenever and wherever they are operative, by stubbornly insisting that the victims we and others pick are innocent, and that resorting to scapegoating is but the easiest strategy to obtain bonding, unity and meaning of belonging to a community, when there are no strict obligations of reciprocal solidarity in traditional terms (cfr. P. Dumouchel, <i>The Barren Sacrifice: An Essay on Political Violence</i>). And to acknowledge thereafter that, under such conditions, the State can be perhaps the only place possible for such obligations of solidarity to be universalised and granted as a right.<br />
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<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6635225884701394609.post-3535822725055459582016-07-22T12:47:00.000+02:002018-11-07T18:51:33.483+01:00Antifragile TrumpListen carefully.<br />
<br />
It helps to understand why Donald Trump is antifragile, and how he's knowingly going to run an antifragile campaign: almost anything that could happen in the USA and in the world, from now to November, can in general only benefit him, and only damage Hillary Clinton.<br />
<br />
This is not a prophecy, but a simple positive observation (with a disturbing premonition, though): it doesn't yet mean that Trump will win, but it does mean that he's positioning himself on the "right" side of the bet on uncertainty.<br />
<br />
<iframe allow="accelerometer; autoplay; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture" allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="315" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/4CVTuOyZDI0" width="560"></iframe>Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6635225884701394609.post-8232556081393078942013-09-12T23:14:00.002+02:002020-05-06T00:06:40.336+02:00Skin-in-the-game principle as a justification for conscription/draft military service<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<a href="https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=10151702752578375&id=13012333374">Nassim Taleb asks</a> for applications of the <a href="http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2298292">skin-in-the-game principle</a> across domains.<br />
<br />
So, here's my take on an issue, in few coarse notes. <br />
<br />
I've been thinking about skin-in-the-game as a justification for conscription/draft military service vs. voluntary/mercenary army.<br />
<br />
I'll go there in a moment, but first an aside note. Sometimes it seems to me hearing Taleb striking some libertarian-ish notes. It's sort of a consequentialist libertarianism (arriving at libertarian attitude by evaluating the consequences of actions and policies, like the fragilising effects of centralisation and all that), which is different from categorical libertarians (starting from some fundamental moral prior, say the principle of self-possession, and constructing from there a libertarian theory, no matter the consequences). So it's kind of funny to see how skin-in-the-game may actually support something – conscription/draft military service – which sounds so un-libertarian.<br />
<br />
But let me cut the crap, here's the argument. <br />
<br />
Taleb's skin-in-the-game idea is a lot about getting right who is the agent and who bears the (possibly negative) consequences of agent's actions. So how should we think about war and national defence? Who should be thought of as the agent, who <i>ultimately </i>goes to war, and who should be responsible for it?<br />
<br />
I can't see any sensible answer to that questione other than ... the <i>political/territorial community </i>as a whole. This is even technically so: war and defence are ultimate public goods, it can't get more non-excludable and non-rivalrous than that.<br />
<br />
So if the community-as-a-whole is the agent, the skin-in-the-game principle would impose that it, as a whole, also bears the consequences. This logic to me makes incoherent the argument that there may still be allowed to transfer or trade risks (of dying or being wounded), like in the professional army or in a draft system with the possibility of hiring a substitute (as in the Union's draft system at a certain point during the American Civil War). In other words, it looks more coherent to me to frame the whole thing as a compulsory civil service for qualified individuals, similar to the popular jury system.<br />
<br />
Let's look at the consequences. The point here is to see how the attitudes towards war of decision-makers would change, and more importantly, how the attitude of the public and the perception of the collective responsibility would change if we had a draft system instead of the current voluntary professionalised army. (This is possibly a big part of the explanation why there was such a greater public concern and outrage for the Vietnam war than for the wars the USA have been involved in in the last two decades).<br />
<br />
At some point in his book "Antifragile", Taleb suggests that leaders deciding and handling the war should have their skin-in-the-game ("You want war? Go first in battle!", as was often the case in the past, from Alexander, Caesar, Hannibal to Napoleon roaming the battlefields). But the point of my communitarian twist of the skin-in-the-game principle is not <i>so much</i> that the POTUS and the congresspeople should have their skins in the game when dealing with war, but that in some way we all should. A conscription/draft system gets you there. (Perhaps with some additional skin-in-the-game mechanism, like POTUSes and congresspeople, or their fit-for-duty family members, marching ahead).<br />
Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6635225884701394609.post-24333128935830108542013-06-02T18:15:00.001+02:002020-07-17T14:23:54.386+02:00This IS about a park<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhKNHK9P5xzizwb3pYG7dleCauPTpvwxFeQrY939SilNgmtVlrG_6iuDRBjIQYSnOh60P3KAuVMoIoA_IDuhrafEWQJhfqDglJNC_a7_cYCGXta3VIa31Wmx5dQ9LrhSulvPWCE1L5wAmM/s1600/this-is-not-about-a-park.jpg" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhKNHK9P5xzizwb3pYG7dleCauPTpvwxFeQrY939SilNgmtVlrG_6iuDRBjIQYSnOh60P3KAuVMoIoA_IDuhrafEWQJhfqDglJNC_a7_cYCGXta3VIa31Wmx5dQ9LrhSulvPWCE1L5wAmM/s320/this-is-not-about-a-park.jpg" width="320" /></a>A slogan circulates on social networks about the protests in Istanbul: "This is not about a park, this is about democracy".<br />
<br />
I understand why it may appear important to whoever invented the slogan to show their demands fit into a greater scheme of things. Their intuition is right on one point: it certainly works better for drawing the attention of the world's public if you characterise your struggle as that for democracy other than just for "some stupid park".<br />
<br />
These other things – being heard, condemnation of the abuse of state power, freedom of expression and of the press, respect of minorities' rights – are of course all valuable, and don't misunderstand me, I am all for it: fully, unconditionally, with no cynicism, and for those who are genuinely advancing this more general democratic agenda. <br />
<br />
However, there is nothing wrong had it all been <i>only</i> about a park. It's perfectly ok, even more than that. Let me explain why.<br />
<br />
Cases like this are a boringly eternal return of the same. They are attempts of appropriation of the common goods through forms of modern enclosures where public spaces, places, the environment are taken away from the sphere of the public and are subjected to the logic of private profit-making. These operations bare little collective benefit, especially to the local residents who should be the primary holders of the right to the city. This is not only the right to have the city work also for them, but foremost the right to take part in the planning process about how their city should be built and organised.<br />
<br />
Let's demystify one thing. We are not talking about The Common Good, but about the common goods. The debate about what is the general common good is a complicated one, and the term can easily be (has been) appropriated and mystified. Instead, the common goods are, well, goods: very concrete things such as land, places, squares, and public parks.<br />
<br />
As long as they are commons, they provide some public service and are by definition under some societal jurisdiction. Indeed, in a way, the commons are societal at a more fundamental level than any other modern right or welfare state service. Even historically, before we had the latter, the political sphere has emerged as a question about how and what it means to govern the commons.<br />
<br />
So, the question of the commons is the question about the character of our democracy. Unless we want our democracy to be only a debate about civil rights and the likes (again, don't misunderstand me, I'm all for it), we need the commons, for they are one important thing what democracy is all about. In a way, the commons are the fundamental material basis of the democracy and so their defence and extension <i>is</i> also the defence and extension of the democracy.<br />
<br />
<div>
I'm not all that well informed to know all the demands boiling in the pot nor do I know what sorts of heterogony of ends has culminated in the Gezi Park protests. All I want to say is that there would have been nothing belittling had this Istanbul thing been "only about a park", because for that specific reason it would've very much also been about democracy. In other words, the slogan could've well been: "This is about a park, <i>therefore</i> this is about democracy."<br />
<br />
Long live Gezi Park!<br />
<br />
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6635225884701394609.post-73404460164972043412013-05-13T21:25:00.001+02:002013-05-19T23:17:36.970+02:00Why the intellectual debate (and the R&R debacle) can't change EuropeThere has rightly been much ado about the Reinhart-Rogoff <i>affaire</i>, an academic and intellectual debacle of two prominent economists who provided gunpowder to austerians' claim that terrible things happen when a country's debt-to-GDP ratio rises above the imaginary tipping point of 90%. The notorious R&R's paper where this was suggested, <a href="http://www.peri.umass.edu/236/hash/31e2ff374b6377b2ddec04deaa6388b1/publication/566/">it turns out</a>, was based on fuzzy math, buggy Excel coding and data cherry picking.<br />
<br />
<div>
This was a huge thing, possibly a tipping point, because the debate that followed helped to unveil the simple truth that behind the austerian claims there were class interests, for actually <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/26/opinion/krugman-the-one-percents-solution.html">austerity is good for the 1%</a>.<br />
<br />
Dean Bakers nicely <a href="http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/beat-the-press/robert-samuelson-tries-to-salvage-reinhart-rogoff-and-austerity">spelled out</a> why in few broad strokes:<br />
"High unemployment weakens workers' bargaining power allowing employers to get the vast majority of the gains from productivity growth over the last 5 years. While the rise in profit shares may not always offset the loss in profits due to weaker growth, this is likely true today in many countries. From this vantage point, austerity is just great for those on top. The pressure for austerity also opens the door for lowering tax rates on the wealthy in the future, for example by cutting back programs like Medicare and Social Security in the United States, and their equivalents overseas. If these sorts of social commitments can be reduced, then the wealthy can look forward to being able to keep more of their income 10-20 years in the future. And if we think there is nothing that the government can do about unemployment because of the demands of the austerity gods, then we can <a href="http://www.cepr.net/index.php/blogs/beat-the-press/the-disappearing-middle-is-a-cover-up-for-bad-economic-policy-coming-from-the-top">blame workers' problems</a> on their lack of skills and inability to deal with the technological advances of a global economy.<br />
In short, austerity serves some very useful purposes for the rich and powerful. […] It is extremely useful to have ostensibly reputable studies like Reinhart and Rogoff that can be used to make the case that austerity serves the general good and not just the rich." <br />
<br />
Being the interests thus disposed, can a change in the intellectual debate change policies? I'm not a cynic, ideas do change the world, if not otherwise then at least by unveiling particular interests behind the claims of the general good, which is always salutary.<br />
<br />
So, you'd expect all this would be beneficial for the debate in Europe on austerity. After all, eurocrats like Olli Rehn and José Barroso were blatantly using R&R findings to support their austerity shrieks, so you'd at least expect their stances to be now shaken.<br />
<br />
But not so soon, for there are good reasons why all this debate around R&R is raising much less dust and shaking much less the austerians in Europe than in the USA. Why? Because if you want even to imagine the possibility of a serious debate about what's the general good of a country, well, you first actually need to have a country. That is, a moral community where people feel and are held responsible for the good of other peoples, a community where they care for each other on a higher degree that just on that of the universal human piety. <br />
<br />
Sadly, The European Union proved to be no such community. Indeed, the effects of the European austerity are very different among European countries. And it <a href="http://www.themoneyillusion.com/?p=21058">economically favours</a> – at least for the moment – the countries of the northern economic core, led by Germany. So in Europe, you don't have just 1% vs. 99%, but also some countries vs. other countries. </div>
<div>
<br />
That it is not only an interplay of conflicting class interests, but also among countries, is demonstrated by a curious observable fact. While in the USA and in the UK, the right is austerian and the left is pro-stimulus, this is not the scheme of things on the Continental Europe. Here the southern European right is openly antiausterian (take for example Berlusconi and Rajoy), while the left in the north is austerian (take German Spd). <br />
<br />
Being things as they are in Europe, what effect may possibly have an intellectual debate, if any?<br />
<br /></div>
<div>
Which brings me to the question: what then can end the austerity in Europe? Some say Germany will change position when things get so bad it starts to feel the bites of the depression (say, from the plunge of the demand from its European commercial partners). I wouldn't be so sure that's enough, for there would be further and more prosaic political obstacles: German politicians have told their voters that it's a morality play, that PIIGS must suffer for their past sins, and that Germany should not pay the bills for their past irresponsible behaviour (which, by the way, is at most a half-truth, it may hold for Greece, but pre-slump Spain was actually very responsible, with low debt and running budget surpluses).<br />
<br />
So if and when the situation on the field changes for Germany, their politicians will be reluctant to change their moral posturing, and will probably stick to their positions far beyond the tipping point of depression starting to seriously harm Germany. Things will have to go far beyond that tipping point. As the Player from "Rosencrantz and Guildersten are Dead" would have put it: "Generally speaking, things have gone about as far as they can possibly go, when things have gotten about as bad as they can reasonably get." </div>
<div>
<br />
To see this reluctance at work, don't look far away, but just cross the channel. It is now clear by all the reasonable standards that Cameron's economic policy was self-defeating and has double-dipped the UK economy. But notwithstanding all that evidence, the Chancellor of the Exchequer Ms. Osborn's faith in austerity seems unshaken. Even when the historically austerity-maddened <a href="http://www.cepr.net/index.php/op-eds-&-columns/op-eds-&-columns/watch-out-george-osborne-smith-marx-and-even-the-imf-are-after-you">IMF is telling him to back off</a> and soften.<br />
<br />
So, no, I'm much more a sceptic on this, the fact the keynesians are winning the intellectual debate will change little things in Europe, and if it does, it will be slowly and painfully. And the reason is that Europe has proven not to be a moral community and a political space where a true public debate matters.</div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6635225884701394609.post-78148492754862304442013-05-12T01:27:00.003+02:002021-02-23T15:21:02.388+01:00Poundering Italy19 years after <a href="http://youtu.be/uYSt8K8VP6k">Pulp Fiction</a>, in Italy McRoyal becomes Quarter Pounder.<br />
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<br />Progress? </div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhQeh4vrvvDlvP6GVDThCGzl_Mk-wQFQcgF0CtrAo6KM9OyhJNGYnzqpJX85SlLHqw9EMIDdOpq6QKICe0pDaR_7tPKS6JMaIF5ap5Cc9rxRBpWGrnGfbL3q47ROKRQ8_hEOIQsKI9dtno/s1600/double-pounder.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhQeh4vrvvDlvP6GVDThCGzl_Mk-wQFQcgF0CtrAo6KM9OyhJNGYnzqpJX85SlLHqw9EMIDdOpq6QKICe0pDaR_7tPKS6JMaIF5ap5Cc9rxRBpWGrnGfbL3q47ROKRQ8_hEOIQsKI9dtno/s400/double-pounder.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6635225884701394609.post-76371022153191704742013-05-01T10:59:00.000+02:002019-01-14T11:03:33.989+01:00A Minimalist's Monetary Economy – Excel Edition (and one way in which capitalism will not end)<span lang="EN-GB">I've</span> tried to recreate an embryonic monetary economy in an Excel, inspired by Steve Keen's basic model of endogenous-money economy.<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
The guy does it with all the bells and whistles, differential equations and system dynamics modelling, so if you're after that sorts of stuff, go and read <a href="http://www.debtdeflation.com/blogs/wp-content/uploads/2007/03/KeenKeynesCircuit.pdf">his paper</a>.<br />
<br />
But I thought the whole thing may be simplified in an Excel spreadsheet without lost of the essential. Heck, isn't Excel an economist's best friend these days?<br />
<br />
This is a minimalistic approach, even sort of a suprematism of economic modelling, but it nonetheless hints at answers to few questions which seem to puzzle so many people, such as: </div>
<ol>
<li>If the firms have to repay loans with interests, where is that extra money supposed to come from on aggregate? </li>
<li>How are profits possible, if the loans have to be repaid with interests and there is only that much money in the economy? Are further loans the only possible source of money to repay the interests on the existing loans? </li>
<li>Is a steady state possible? Or the only way to keep the show running is to keep expanding the amount of outstanding loans (the debt) <i>ad libitum</i>? </li>
</ol>
So, the model. It is a highly simplified representation of a closed economy: there's only one bank borrowing money (yes, out of thin air), a capitalist who owns a firm producing MacGuffins, and a bunch of workers. <br />
<br />
The story goes like this: <br />
<ol>
<li><i>at start</i>, the firm borrows the money from the bank, to start the production of MacGuffins; </li>
<li><i>each month</i> the firm pays a wage to workers, a profit to the capitalist and an interest on loan to the bank; </li>
<li><i>each month</i> the workers, the capitalist and the banker consume MacGuffins, buying it from the firm. </li>
</ol>
<ul>
</ul>
There are just a handful of parameters in the model: <br />
<ul>
<li>the value of the initial loan </li>
<li>the monthly interest rate on the loan </li>
<li>the monthly aggregate wages paid to workers </li>
<li>the monthly profit paid to the capitalist </li>
<li>workers', capitalist's and banker's consumption rates (the fraction of savings they spend on consumption) </li>
<li>the rate of loan repayment (how much of the loan's principal is repaid each month). </li>
</ul>
So this is how our workers, capitalist and banker are faring after 36 months (the values of parameters in yellow):<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhLNalFEJ9Awe5loLOaej2d2BjCUg__coho-Ckmh1gIgNyR3bbOPRGgo4-cw4OCfzPhieB2d_b0VX1d-7AP4NtVdRWGSnauqnxYAweyEvB5CZbs7KUyqTe-8tyz1q8xD10SyV0XAviUbgc/s1600/endogenous-money-model.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhLNalFEJ9Awe5loLOaej2d2BjCUg__coho-Ckmh1gIgNyR3bbOPRGgo4-cw4OCfzPhieB2d_b0VX1d-7AP4NtVdRWGSnauqnxYAweyEvB5CZbs7KUyqTe-8tyz1q8xD10SyV0XAviUbgc/s640/endogenous-money-model.png" width="587" /></a></div>
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(Here's the <a href="https://docs.google.com/file/d/0Bxk_FiXKxoS0YVoyN3lsa1Zjb0k/edit?usp=sharing">Excel file</a> if you want to play with it yourself.)<br />
<br />
So, what does it show?</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
First off, as you can see, with those parameters a steady state is reached <i>circa </i>after 24 months. The firm's cash flow has never gone negative, even if there is a positive flow of profits, wages and interest payments. </div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
So, you <i>can</i> after all have a constant flow of monetary profits and wages, while still paying interests on loan to the bank. Indeed, in the steady state, the yearly sum of profits ($120) and wages ($240) is higher than the loan's principal ($100). This is not a surprise if you understand the difference between a stock and a flow. This example neatly illustrates the difference: the loan is a stock (the total amount of money present in the economy), while profits, wages and interest payments are flows the capitalist, the banker and the workers juggle back and forth among themselves month by month.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Of course, profits and wages are just monetary aggregates, and what's important here are their relative values which tell us the thing that really matters: how MacGuffins are distributed between workers and the capitalist. In our case for every 30.42 MacGuffins produced, ten are consumed by the capitalist, twenty by the workers and 0.42 by the banker.<br />
<br />
Now, things break apart if the firm starts to repay the principal (you can test this by putting any positive value as a rate of loan repayment). All is good as long as the firm just pays the interests, but as so soon as you set a rate of principal repayment, you are basically withdrawing money from circulation and the system comes to a halt. (I know, I know, all kind of feedbacks and stabilisers kick in in the real economy, but still there is some basic story to it.)<br />
<br />
That being said, the sustainability and the possibility of a sustainable steady state of positive profits and wages depend on how the consumption rates, wages and profits are set relative to each other.<br />
<br />
Higher consumption rates (and hence less saving), especially from the workers who make the bulk of it, bring in more cash to the firm, and thus higher profits can be paid to the capitalists. A neat explanation of the commandment "thou shalt consume". <br />
<br />
Actually that's slightly misleading, the cash brought in to the firm can be used<i> both</i> for higher profits or for higher wages (or for higher interest rate for bankers!). The relation between profits and wages depends, of course, on <strike>the class struggle between the capitalists and the working class</strike> the marginal productivity of labour and capital (if you live on a planet with competitive markets).<br />
<br />
Now, is this too simple a model to tell us something useful about a real monetary economy? I'd say no it isn't.<br />
<br />
Imagine what would happen is we had a more realistic situation with more than just one firm each producing a different good (and more than just one bank). Here the firms would compete for workers' money because now the workers could go out and buy all sorts of different MacGuffins from others than their employers. Firms would also compete to get better workers, and workers would compete among themselves to get better jobs. Firms would also compete for loans, trying to convince bankers that their MacGuffin is really special. Some firms would survive, some die. There would also be competition among bankers, as now the flow of interests from a loan (and eventually its repayment) is no longer guaranteed because, as we just said, some firms could go belly up.<br />
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So, the situation would be more intricate, b<i>ut </i>in the aggregate, you'd still get the general picture we had before: there would be some aggregate outstanding sum of loans (some firms might actually repay their loans, but then others would borrow) which would be our money in circulation, and as long as it's there the system can function, businesses can be ran, workers can produce and earn wages, capitalists can get their profits and banks collect their interests. So the general story is the same: there is no need in principle to increase the money supply in the system by further loans <i>just</i> to repay the existing ones.<br />
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Mind you, I'm not saying that in general there are no reasons<i> ever</i> to increase the money supply, there are many good ones (say, when a new entrepreneur convinces a banker she will produce a unique kind of MacGuffin everybody will go crazy for, and they both, the enterpreneur and the banker, believe they can profit from it). All I'm saying is that no extra loans (and thus money) is necessary in the system <i>specifically</i> for the purpose of paying interests on the existing ones.<br />
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Just a small final diversion: some may ask: how can the banker create money out of thin air? Well, a way could be that some guys with the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force allow her to. Another, historically antecedent way, is to have people trust in her service of keeping in the vault some kind of tokens that happen to be a <a href="http://www.theonion.com/articles/us-economy-grinds-to-halt-as-nation-realizes-money,2912/?ref=auto">symbolic, mutually shared illusion</a> as a storage of value.<br />
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So, is capitalism doomed? Of course it is, but it won't happen because we need to create loans indefinitely just to repay the old ones and still be able to have profits. People who say that may just happen to have another bug in their Excel spreadsheets.<br />
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