Rhizome 3/27/16:
“At the same time, what I see in this is the genealogical root of Deleuze and Guatarri’s desiring production: that which works through sad affects (that which takes power from the individual (and joyful effects: that which empowers the individual.
My mission (should I choose to accept it (is to somehow meld it into my golden egg: the concept of Efficiency: that which is maximized by minimizing the differential between the energy put into an action and the energy gotten out of it.
It just seems to me that our culture has primarily been based on the Capitalist value of more. And, thus far, it has proved unsatisfying.”
“I also wanted to mention that ‘more’ is not inherently to be despised. Capitalism is a perversion of ‘more’ love, more life, more solidarity and community, more joy.
Instead it has symbolically transferred all these ‘mores’ into more profit. It has convinced people psychologically that profit is the only more that matters- that all the other mores are dependent on the foundational one of profit. Almost everyone has internalized this now and it becomes increasingly hard to question.
But more itself is not to blame!” –my respected peer, Greg Enge
First of all, Greg, thanks for today’s rhizome.
That said, ‘more’, in itself, is not altogether to blame and can even be useful within the model of Efficiency. Unfortunately, a lot of our difference on the issue comes out the fact that I have, for the most part, only mentioned the term and given an entry definition (that which is maximized by minimizing the differential between that put into an act and that gotten out (without actually describing the interactive matrix it works in. This, once again, is why I really need to write that article.
And I hate to be the bearer of bad tidings, but you, my friend, have stepped on the landmine of giving me an opportunity to go into it in a little more detail -which could take several rhizomes/days. And as a great thinker of the 90’s, the Brain from Pinky and the Brain would say:
“Now I’ll be able to carry out my diabolical plan to take over the world.”
First of all, I’m guessing that your point comes out of Efficiency being thus far thought of as a single entity. Which is my bad for not describing it in any detail. But what I’m actually talking about is an ecological system (very similar to that of Deleuze and Guatarri’s desiring production (in which various instances of efficiency/expectation interact. You, for instance, are an instance of efficiency consisting of various sub efficiencies (your various needs, demands, and desires (to which you are the supra-efficiency (that are, in turn, supra-efficiencies to the various sub efficiencies that constitute their makeup. At the same time, you are a sub-efficiency to the various social systems you find yourself affiliated with: your family, your workplace, your city, your state, your country, and your world as a whole. And threading throughout these various degrees of locality is the always supra-efficiency of the coexistence of efficiencies or what (now that I have described it (we can reduce to (for sake of brevity ( coexistence.
Now I hate to break this down, so soon, into the atomistic building blocks of the model, but it goes to the issue of the role “more” plays in it. It comes down to a formula I have devised:
Epot=R/e
Or to blue-collarize it: Efficiency potential =Resources/expectations. So let’s play with it. Let’s say you and I are working on a project (an instance of coexistence (and have a resource pool of 30. We divide that pool into 15 apiece. Now we have 2 instances of expectation/efficiency that look like Epot=15/e. Then we say we both have an expectation factor of 2: Epot=15/2 which means that both our Efficiency potentials comes up to 7.5. Now say I decide to become a self indulgent prick and decide I have higher expectations: say 3. Now what I have to do to maintain the same Epot is take more from the resource pool which would add up to about 24 which would leave you 6 and an Epot of 5.This threatens our instance of co-existence in that you have one of 2 choices in order to get back to the Epot you were at. You either have to take, by force, those resource factors I took from you or break away thereby stealing resource factors from the initial instance of co-existence (put mind here that your cooperation with me in the first place was a resource to me (in order to seek resources elsewhere.
To bring this back to a more nominal level, Greg, and to get to the question, I not sure that the Democratic and union solution (while helpful (of more (more wages, more benefits (is as useful an answer to our problems as a more thoughtful distribution of resources and the expectations being imposed on people. People, for instance, should not be forced to focus resources on owning a car in order to function in the job market –resources, BTW, that they could be focusing on what justifies their point A to point B. To me, it is not so much a matter of more wages as lowering the money they have to put into just getting by. The problem isn’t that we’re not making enough; it’s that everything costs too much.
Anyway, it’s a lot to explain. Hope I haven’t totally mucked it up.