[size=150]Efficiency:[/size]
Intro:
There has lately, in America, been a major push by Democrats to increase the minimum wage. And while some of us can applaud the effort and see the short term benefits, and even support it in that capacity, we can’t help but look at the long term deficiencies. While it may well create demand in the short run, thereby, economic expansion, the inherent dynamic of our market economy will only over-ride the effects through inflation, via wage push and wage pull (and the greed of investors, until we’re right back where we started. We could easily see a day, for instance, when janitors are making 6 figure salaries but are no better off (if not worse) than they are now. This is because, as well intended as the Democrats are in this matter, they’re merely perpetuating more of the same by failing to get outside of the expansionary model of producer/consumer Capitalism and, consequently, may be inadvertently contributing to an ever increasing appetite for consumption that could result in our self destruction through economically motivated wars, environmental destruction, and depletion of our natural resources.
Sooner or later, whether through choice or force of circumstance, we will have to step outside of the market paradigm that works strictly in terms of more and less: more profits, more wages, more benefits, all for less investment. We simply cannot, for instance, rest on the old adage that workers want more compensation for less work, while their employers pose, against these demands, their own requirement for minimal investment at maximum return. It might seem common sense. But with a closer look, we might see that the two positions are not so deeply entrenched. If they were, the workplace would hardly be worth any amount of compensation, a perpetual battle with management while struggling to stay afoot in the mass competition toward better paying and easier jobs. And how can one be so happy at 10 an hour and another so miserable at 20? The janitor whistles, easily, while mopping his floor. He seems entranced, content, as if in meditation. Another man, sleek and muscular from hauling furniture, makes enough to go to the bar, nightly, and wakes each morning to sweat it off. At quitting time, the cycle repeats. And no random piss tests. Vagrants, drifters, and welfare recipients continue to scrimp through their hand to mouth lives. Meanwhile, a white collar manager slumps over their computer, grumbles often, and when they can, steals a moment on Monster.com. They’re hardly afraid they’ll get caught and, sometimes, even hopes.
And then there are the intellectually and creatively curious, strange creatures that, in their ass-backwardness, approach the hierarchy of needs from the top down. They neglect basic creature comforts while clinging, often self destructively, to the drug-like addiction of self actualization. And what are they working toward? That is when so many of their heroes, the successful and famous, live public lives of misery, and sometimes kill themselves.
Clearly, we need to break it down to individual needs, demands, and desires. We need to penetrate the multiplicity and interrogate the interactions. Furthermore, we need to recognize that it is primarily about expectations and their satisfaction, and that satisfaction only seems binary and digital by virtue of a molar perspective on the issue. We need to consider the molecular multiplicity of efficiencies.
Origin:
Efficiency, a mechanical term used for equipment such as pumps, boilers, HVACs, etc., concerns the actual output of a system as compared to its theoretical rating and is a product of the differential between what the designer’s mathematics tell them (what something should be able to do) and what actually occurs in practice. But at a more fundamental level, it can also be the differential between the energy or resources put in to a thing (the input) and energy or resource gotten out (the output). And it is in both senses that we use the term. Only, for our purposes, we will define it in the more abstract sense of that which seeks to maximize itself by minimizing the differential between input and output or expectation and result.
We start in the boiler room. First of all, we need to understand that there can never be 100% efficiency. Along the way, there is always a loss (heat loss) that can never return to an active or potential form. As any plant-op knows, you can never expect a 100% return on condensate on any boiler system. And like perpetual motion, everywhere we look, we find it equally elusive. Secondly, we must remain mindful that energy can never be created or destroyed, only transformed, eventually ending in its always final form: heat. Therefore, any motion or energy must be taken from something else. The pump must be driven by electricity. The electricity must be created by the turbine that, in turn, derives its energy from steam. And steam is the product of heat (remember heat loss?) taken from coal, its BTUs, that sees its efficiency reduced to ash. And finally, it must be remembered that our boiler room is a complex and dynamic interaction of efficiencies, a coexistence in which any one efficiency making too large a demand can steal energy from other efficiencies, thereby minimizing them and causing a breakdown in the supra-efficiency of coexistence. Furthermore, sub-efficiencies can be supra-efficiencies to their own relevant sub-efficiencies while also being sub efficiency to their own supra efficiencies. The pump, an efficiency in itself, is the product of a lot of sub efficiencies (the windings, the armature, etc.). It, in turn, is a sub-efficiency to the supra-efficiency of the boiler room (the plant) that, in turn, serves the supra-efficiency of the building by either heating or cooling it, thereby maximizing the tenant’s sub-efficiency of being comfortable that, in turn, serves the supra-efficiency of how they function in the building.
(And let’s recognize the always supra efficiency of the co-existence of efficiencies: not above it all (but folded into all levels of the supra/sub relationships of Efficiency…
And thus we leave the boiler room with new tools to analyze our initial questions. We now see why the janitor can whistle while he meditates on the movement of the mop: time passes quickly in thought, and he has managed to keep his life within his means. For him, it is not matter of more; it is a question of efficiency. Likewise, the furniture hauler maximizes the efficiencies of his desire to drink and smoke pot without interference from the efficiency of job security. Plus he likes the exercise. Even the vagrants, drifters, and welfare recipients make more sense. They’ve balanced their efficiencies by lowering their demands. Meanwhile, the white collar worker struggles daily with the minimized efficiencies of job security, a sense of meaning, and family life due to long hours at the office that do nothing to increase financial efficiency in his salaried position -that is while the demands and expectations that have built up in his personal life (his and those around him) strain those financial resources. We further see the minimization of the supra-efficiency of co-existence that can occur when either the workers or employers make higher demands, and maximize their efficiency by compromising others. If the employer demands higher profit, that efficiency can only be maximized, that is since energy and resources cannot be created out of nothing, by stealing from the efficiencies of the employees and their sub-efficiencies. And should the worker demand more, this can only take from the supra-efficiency of the company that will, in turn, compromise the economy by raising prices thereby lowering the supra-efficiency of the economy as a whole .
Consequently, we now see that the Occupy Wall Street movement may not be a demand for more, but a demand for efficiency. It’s not about hating wealth. Nor is it jealousy. It’s about resenting wealth at the expense of everyone else: the maximization of the large scale efficiencies of the few at the expense of others, and the minimization of their efficiencies. We can also see, finally, how our desire for self actualization can interact with other sub-efficiencies, and how the minimization of those others can lead one to misery, or even suicide. The applications seem infinite, and go beyond the issue of economics. The coexistence between the environment and civilization immediately comes to mind. But given our present focus, we might consider the possibility of a new ethical theory that says (complimenting the utilitarian) that those acts are good that maximize the supra-efficiency of coexistence. We might consider our happiest moments and ask: was it matter of having more? Or was it, rather, a matter of having all needs, demands, and desires, ours and those of others, come together in a state of harmonious co-existence: the coexistence of efficiencies?
The Anti-Oedipus and Lacan:
“It is at work everywhere, functioning smoothly at times, at other times in fits and starts. It breathes, it heats, it eats. It shits and fucks. What a mistake to have ever said the Id. Everywhere it is machines –real ones, not figurative ones: machines driving other machines, machines being driven by other ones, with all the necessary couplings and connections. An organ-machine is plugged into an energy-source-machine: the one produces a flow that the other interrupts. The breast is a machine that produces milk, and the mouth a machine coupled to it. The mouth of the anorexic wavers between several functions: its possessor is uncertain as to whether it is an eating machine, a talking machine, or a breathing machine (asthma attacks). Hence we are all handymen: each with his little machines. For every organ-machine, an energy machine: all the time, flows and interruptions.” –Deleuze and Guattari, The Anti-Oedipus
Hopefully by now I have established the framework upon which Eficiency is built: a Brownian universe very similar to that described by Deleuze and Guattarri in the intro to The Anti-Oedipus. We can even hope that we have added another tool to the process of schizoanalyse by highlighting the forces at work within desiring production. In fact, the terms are virtually interchangeable in that every desiring machine and relevant act of desiring production can be thought of as an instant of efficiency or the related term: expectation. And social production being a manifestation of desiring production, we can apply the overlap in terms to that level as well. What we must also take from D & G’s model is its multilayer character, the way it enfolds from within enfoldment, from desiring to social production, and the molecular to the molar back to the molecular, in a non-hierarchal manner in which any individual instance can be both (to put it in D & G’s machinic terms) component and machine. Once again, we return to the boiler room where a pump is both a machine to its various components while also being a component to the general system as well.
We should also consider here a concept and bring in the terminology brought up by Deleuze in his lecture on Spinoza: that of sad and joyful affects. Efficiency, down to its very core, is ultimately about power relationships or how power is exercised. (In fact, for my purposes, it is about undermining all excessive and abusive uses of power, to argue against the libertarian notion that any exercise of power is the only true expression of nature and, therefore, always for the general good.) Basically, they’re both about the power relationship any instant of desiring production can have with the thing desired. In a sad affect, the desiring machine involved lacks the power to affect the object of desire -an instance of desiring production in itself. Conversely, a joyful affect is that of being able to affect it. And it doesn’t take much to get from the concept to the issue of happiness in terms of the social or harmony in terms of our relationship with our environment. We can now see in the sad affect the minimization of Efficiency and the maximization of it in the joyful affect.
We can further articulate on the back and forth that runs from desiring production by adopting the Lacanian terminology of needs, demands, and desires as they develop in the child and carry on into adulthood. The child starts with needs (food, shelter, water, healthcare, etc.) to which the motherer attends. However, as the child grows more cognitive, it begins to develop more sophisticated expectations that it may think of as needs, but is rather an endless series of demands. And while the demands themselves can be obtained, what cannot be satisfied is the true motive behind the series itself (often a need for attention). Therefore, no matter how many of the demands are obtained, the series will never end because it is never about the thing being demanded. Eventually, due to the frustration of the motherer, who pulls away their attentiveness to those demands, and that of the child as they see less and less of their demands being met, the hope is that the child will eventually turn to what it desires or that which can be obtained but requires an active effort of figuring out what it is. This could be any number of things like self respect, meaning, achievement, or self actualization.
And we can see how these expectations can follow us into adulthood. No matter how old we get, we’ll always need food, water, shelter, and healthcare. And as much as we would like to think we outgrow our demands, they tend to plague us throughout all of our lives. For instance, what is a love relationship (and the underlying source of its volatility) but a long series of demands that two people make on each other? Like the child, we find ourselves demanding the full attention of the other while equally demanding our own space. And the sick (the body being a supra efficiency with its own sub efficiencies) will always demand to be better. The body demands it.
Finding our desire is what defines our maturity. We, the intellectually and creatively curious, for instance, define ourselves by what we come to know and create. However, we have to be wary of assuming that because we have found what we desire, we have found some way of keeping our demands forever at bay. Too many great minds have lived otherwise miserable lives to make that assumption. And too often, our desire can draw us back to it or find their selves subjected to other external and internal demands: the petty and mundane that are always seeking to steal resources from that which gives our lives meaning or the demand to be left alone and given time to practice our craft while demanding to be adored and respected, and once adored and respected, the demand to stay so.
And once we see these aspects of our makeup as different degrees of expectation given different levels of import that determine what level of energy we’re willing to invest in them, we can then translate them into the currency of efficiency and get a better sense of how this multiplicity might interact and emerge into the composite effect of the individual’s sad or joyful affects: the maximization (or minimization) of the always supra-efficiency of the coexistence of efficiencies.
We should first note that basic needs are pretty much low investment efficiencies that, if we focus purely on them, are generally easy to maximize. We could, for instance, live in a shack and eat rice as many third world people and Zen monks do. However, man does not live by bread and water alone. Not all of us want to live like monks or third world citizens, and we get further from need and closer to demand as we go from a bowl of rice to prime rib. The prime rib may fulfill the need of sustenance, but the enjoyment of that sustenance ultimately constitutes a demand. Still, at most points in between a bowl of rice and a prime rib (say a hot dog), the need for sustenance is an efficiency that is reasonably easy (at least in western industrialized nations -with qualifications in America and third world countries) to sustain at a maximum level.
Desire, or having reached one’s desire, presupposes a maximization of the always supra coexistence of efficiencies. Take, for instance, creative flow. In this state, the individual always has their individual expectations in a state of coordination in which those that are of less import are absorbing less energy while bulk of energy is being focused on what is most important thereby maximizing that particular efficiency by being able to meet the input resources required to achieve the desired effect. Take, for instance, Einstein’s wardrobe. If Cronenberg’s movie The Fly is accurate, had you of looked in Einstein’s closet, you would have found a rack of exactly the same uniforms. The reason for this is that Einstein did not want to waste any more energy than he had to on deciding which outfit to wear so that he could focus all of it on complex mathematical and physics concepts.
And it was for good reason that he set aside the demand of vanity. Demand, it seems, because it can never be truly satisfied, only obtained, is clearly the least efficient form of expectation. And in its more extreme forms it can act as an all consuming parasite sucking the energy from more efficient forms of expectation and thereby undermine (or minimize) the always supra efficiency of coexistence.
Still, let’s not commit to becoming Zen monks and completely discard demands and the value they contribute to the experience of our point A to point B. We can never be fully rid of them anyway. And those small pleasures (watching TV, having a beer and Jager while typing this and listening to my playlist, and name your desert) can add to the justification of a life. It’s a matter of degree and the extent to which they sap energy from other expectations and efficiencies. The important thing to keep in mind is that demands are not needs and always dispensable. Of course, it would seem that desires are equally dispensable. However, more so than with demands, desires are what justify our existence. And as the intellectually and creatively curious know: such a life without justification would be worse than no life at all.