Capitalism, time and space

Over the last two months I've been reading the first volume of Marx's Capital. Today I was reading, among other things, about the compression of time and space in manufacturing, how divided tasks are brought together into a close space (the factory, for instance) and how the time between separate stages of an article are shortened so that the "establishment and maintenance of a connection between the isolated functions requires that the article be transported incessantly from one hand to the other, and from one process to another" (Ch. 14).

Talking about the division of labor Marx also mentions the specialiazation of instruments and tools and how in Birmigham, for instance, 500 different hammers were made for all sorts of different processes. I'm curious about how these two different issues, compression of time and space and specialization of instruments, play out in the archive.

What's curious to me here is the excessive nature of the archive, the lack of utility for all sorts of different records and collections. The factory compresses space and time while the archive expands it, constantly requiring more space for more entries, keeping things stored that will, probably, never be accessed or used. Of course criminal records are used be prospective employers, credit records or used by landlords and lenders, driving and medical records are accessed by insurance companies, but I suspect that these utilize the minority of records and statistics being kept and compiled all the time (especially taking into account, for instance, records of dead people). Part of what was interesting about working in a library was how much of the collection is never touched, the thousands of books and records that are never looked at and probably never will be looked at until someone finally decides to throw them away.

Which shows the reverse for the specialization of tools: that the specific and potential uses for an instrument disguise all the situations for which its totally useless. Prime examples just in the home are kitchen appliances and garage tools.

I'm also interested in time and space in reference to work and home, or the degree to which the workspace is identical with home. Isn't part of the point of factory work, or archiving and office work, that it cannpt take place at home? In other words, part of the point is an expansion of time and space. Not that no one works from home anymore, a lot of the shops in Thailand have either a back room or upper living quarters, and certainly there are sections of the underground economy that operate out of homes. But then there are other spheres of work that seem entirely impossible to conduct at home, like large varieties of scientific research and experimentation, the tools for which are expensive and rare enough that they won't be owned individually. A curious contrast to, say, Darwin who worked almost entirely at his own house, or to the early and mid 19th century in general, where amateur science was not equivalent to incompetent science...

the only reason I would resist the legalization of drugs...

...is that it would mean the gentrification of an entire industry. Other than that things seem good.

meaning

The question of meaning always comes up in talking about interpretation: what did the author mean, what is the meaning of this phrase, etc. Most of the times I've seen it brought up, except within biblical hermeneutics, the point is to talk about the impossibility of returning to an original or inherent meaning within the text. My own interests have, perhaps, gone towards what Hegel writes in the Phenomenology of Spirit: "We learn by experience that we meant something other than we meant to mean; and this correction of our meaning comepls our knowing to go back to the proposition, and understand it in some other way."

My own interests, in other words, have moved towards functions, the functions of statements, beliefs, statements, stories, especially functions obscured by the apparent objectives (the meaning...) of what has been written.

Familiarity

"I love grilled cheese sandwiches because I used to have them everyday" might just as well be "I hate grilled cheese sandwiches because I used to have them everyday." The one makes as much, or as little, sense as the other. Who knows where the difference comes from...

cosmopolitanism

Isn't what is missing from cosmopolitanism the recognition of the other not as an external object but an internal voice? Isn't the celebration of many voices, heterglossia as we called it our studies, missing the same? And what does the inclusion of the voices of the other actually accomplish?

What I'm curious about is the internal difference and in the other, less as the difference between my self and others as between my self and myself. I worry that cosmopolitanism attempts to be too objective, literal objects bearing the distinctions of identity (race, ethnicity, gender, class, sexuality, etc). Appreciation for the other in this way functions just like bigotry, by making room for what makes the other distinct. For instance, studying queer or ethnic or women's literature as such. Doesn't Slavoj Zizek address this same concern when he writes, "Better to do nothing than to engage in localized acts whose ultimate function is to make the system run more smoothly (acts like providing space for the multitude of new subjectivities, and so on). The threat today is not passivity but pseudo-activity, the urge to "be active," to "participate," to mask the Nothingness... of what goes on"?

On the other hand, apprecation for the other does examine the internal difference as hybridity, bisexuality, hermaphroditism, etc. What's disappointing about this is that the hybridities are still posited as distinguishing marks between groups, so that what's happening isn't a disruption of the logic of the system as much as a brief alteration in taxonomy: what is pathological is revealed, finally, to be normal.

But that turn towards understanding the pathological as normal is also where I think this all begins to go right, focusing on a logic of madness. What I want to see is the normal become pathological, so that heterglossia isn't so much about the inclusion of different objects as different subjectivities within the same object.

Blah blah blah.

economy

What is interesting about economics is economy, or relationships of exchange where every gain is also a loss. What's disappointing about economics is that it doesn't deal enough with annihilation, where there's pure loss, or where the one thing exits the relationship. Aren't suicide bombers totally irrelevant to economics?

This is one of the interesting ideas in the history of science to me, that there is not pure scientific progress involving increasingly accurate representations and understandings of the natural world. Instead, scientific progress necessarily involves some sort of loss of knowledge as well. Thanks Thomas Kuhn.

Isn't the same thing true about changes in belief? That there is no pure progress of understanding, but each change is a gain as well as a loss. Isn't the idea that scientific research is pure gain just as ridiculous as the idea that change in religious belief is pure loss? Or, to put this another way, aren't scientists who ignore scientific history just as ignorant as believers who only pay attention to religious origins and have no concept of changes in belief?

history

The best thing that could happen for historians of our present is a massive catastrophe that wipes out massive chunks of the internet and digital history. Otherwise good luck.