Oh Geneva

Off on a little trip to Geneva


where the famous Jet d'Eau jets (from here) when it's jetting


 for a conference at the UN: my part being bag-carrier, soother of nerves and Z-List delegate. Remarkably easy to get lost and no decent coffee.

The Musée Barbier-Mueller
is a serence and beautiful place












while the Centre d'Art Contemporain / MOMCA features... well, a view out of a window is an experience as engaging as any other.

Story of My Life

Life at the moment, anyway. From the excellent Oglaf.

Self-Improvement, meet Torpor and The Great Inane.

Positive Twitter Day

Friday 31st August.

                       Problem?

Not sure what the problem is. The nasty woman is still complaining interminably about 'immigration' at Mr Patel in the corner shop; the troupes of suburban malcontents are still trooping to Trafalgar Square with their timed-out placards and some new ones; the grouchy old loser has not left off grouching in the snug: Ingrowing Stupidity is not a new condition.

Not an absolutely positive view but this is not Friday or Twitter.

What Price a T-34?

₽433,000 to you, sir...

...all right guv, ₽170,000 to get it off the forecourt and I'm robbing m'self.

The production cost of the T-34 tank 1940-45 listed here.

The Russians continually cut cost out of production, assessing for instance the life expectancy of tanks in service to plan the durability of new units. An apocryphal story has German factory inspectors sending a new Tiger back to the workshop to get a blemish in the paint job fixed.




from the Tiger Manual: expensive, very.

Art For The Sake Of... What

To ordinary workaday folk the average Guardian article may seem remote from their concerns; tosh even (picture: Evgeni Zubko)

Helen Gørrill in the Guardian, on women artists not getting snarfed up wholesale by the Tate:

Today, when men’s artwork is signed, it goes up in value; conversely when work by women is signed, it goes down in value, and the addition of a woman’s signature can devalue artwork to the extent that female artists are more likely to leave their work unsigned.

Does anyone buy unsigned work, at all? And how would a suitably artsy signature give away the artist's sex? Intriguing.

Hysteria, the female-specific Victorian malady, has returned to the UK, with women accused of being mad and out of control if they don’t conform to gallerists’ often unreasonable demands.

Will she go on to give examples of the alleged "often unreasonable demands"? Nope, just have to take that as given.

We cringe at the voices of famous male artists and critics declaring their disdain for artists who happen to have been born female: women can’t paint! There’s no such thing as a great woman artist!

In the relentlessly PC world of the Arts, such a declaration would surely be instant professional death. Who then is doing the disdainful chorusing?

And Tate appears to align with these views by collecting only a token proportion of work by women, who form the 74% majority of our fine art graduates... its allocation of annual budget is even worse, with as little as 13% spent on works by female artists.

Oh my! How can that be?

Tate fails to mention gender or equality in its collection policy, seeking only to collect works of art of outstanding quality as well as works of distinctive aesthetic character or importance.

Aha. So what should an art gallery be about?

Tate should make urgent efforts to reflect the diversity of the population in its collections and allow female graduates the same life chances as men.

Never mind the quality, feel the quotas, o Welfare Galleries!

Tate’s support of the activist art collective Guerrilla Girls is a clever tactic that gives the illusion of equality, yet politically correct press releases from the likes of Tate championing female artists could actually be doing more harm than good.

b b b b but

It could be argued that museums raise the question of whether female artists are worthy of collection at all, because no similar promotional material or articles discuss the worthiness of male artists.

Can't live with 'em, can't live without 'em. Can't win any ways no how no sir.

74% of fine art graduates are women?

End of Empire

Yuri Maltsev, at the Soviet Bank for Foreign Trade in the mid 80s:

I had a secretary, Lena, a very nice young woman, an ex-student at Moscow University, and I saw her picking up paperclips putting into her purse. And I said, "Lena, why do you steal State property in such a strange form, paperclips?" And she went ballistic on me, she said, "Yuri! What else can I take from this" - she used a very bad word - "office? Well, show me, I'll take that. Nothing, nothing! Paperclips, nails picture, nothing!" And I was walking back home thinking, if the youngest and the brightest are going to work only to steal something there, that's the end of this economy and this experiment [30:32].

Maltsev is very funny and very scathing about the Soviet 'experiment' and on the world since and now.

Alas, watching his lectures has triggered me to buy three books so far from Amazon clicketty click click. I am arsing around on sabbatical studying at the mo, and the faster the money flows out the sooner I will have to go back to seeking an honest day's work for an honest crust, paperclips not included.

Internet Satire

It's easier than you think.

Try Reading The Book

From the comments on a Guardian article by Kathryn Hughes about Wuthering Heights:

Strange how Heart of Darkness and Conrad doesn't get the same verbal contempt and disdain from humanists as Wuthering Heights and Emily Bronte.
It might be because that Conrad darkness was over there - in Africa.

That the heart of darkness is over here, in London or Brussels, not in the Belgian Congo, is clearly one of the points of the story. Clearly, that is, if you read it.

But then, to judge from the article, Kathryn Hughes has not read Wuthering Heights: as in actually turned the pages, conned the words and so forth.

Would suggesting that Guardianistas try reading a book or two, just so's they know what it's like to and all, be..?

Guardianistas: That's nazi TRUMPY talk, now you're barred from Twitter la la la la la not listening la la la la la.

Birthday

Three years ago today I was sitting in the Dog'n'Duck in Mitcham with eight hours drinking done, six more to do and a bottle of famous in my bag for home time.

By a miracle (yes indeedy) that bottle was the last alcohol I drank, and today I am grateful to God as I understand Him and to AA, for my deliverance.

More On Commodities

Having magically discarded unwanted use-value and done the cookery to homogenise, congeal and crystallise labour into a commodity, Marx sets up a nice straw man:

A use-value, or useful article, therefore, has value only because abstract human labour is objectified or materialised in it. How then is the magnitude of this value to be measured? By means of the 'value-forming substance', the labour, contained in the article. This quantity is measured by its duration [in] hours, days etc.

Cue an internet meme about, who wants to live under a system where the value of something is greater the slower and dumber the producer?

The straw man is duly knocked down, making Karl appear entirely reasonable:

It might seem that if the value of a commodity is determined by the quantity of labour expended to produce it, it would be the more valuable the more unskilful and lazy the worker who produced it

sounds like Britain in the 70s... but it

only needs, in order to produce a commodity, the labour time which is necessary on an average, or in other words is socially necessary. Socially necessary labour-time is the labour-time required to produce any use-value under the conditions of production normal for a given society [...] The individual commodity counts here only as an average sample of its kind.

Marx goes on to ponder, in the first real-world example cited in the book, that:

The same quantity of labour provides more metal in rich mines than in poor. Diamonds are of very rare occurence on the earth's surface, and hence their discovery costs, on an average, a great deal of labour time [... William] Jacob questions whether gold has ever been paid for at its full value [...] The total produce of the Brazilian diamond mines for the eighty years ending in 1823 still did not amount to the price of 1½ years' average produce of the sugar and coffee plantations of the same country, although the diamonds represented much more labour, therefore more value.

Karl Marx "Capital Volume I" (1990) pp129-30

Could the explanation be that the theory is a hopeless hack that has fallen at the first fence?

Or is this a Conspiracy Theory in the making? I will read on with my expectations raised as high as my hackles.

Revision

Pictured: Homo neanderthalensis confronts humans with shirts.

In my young days the Neanderthals were primitives without language or culture who radiated into Europe before being overrun and wiped out by our ancestors; unsurprisingly as they were nasty, brutish and short, and no good to be said for them.

No language because they had no hyoid bones. True, only a few chunky pieces of skull and long bone had been found at the time, but no hyoids and therefore no language or anything that goes with that.

Humans definitely did not interbreed with them, no siree, fastidiousness in matters of mating being a characteristic of the Homo sapiens of course.

Today, after the discovery of a hyoid at Kebara in Israel, some apparent settlements and a few smeary bits of "art", they are pictured as a cross between Noble Savage and Eco Warrior, who would undoubtedly have opposed Brexit and Capitalism, re-nationalised the railways and so forth, given the option.

The few percent of Neanderthal genes found in Europeans, Western Russians and their descendants is cited as proof of local interbreeding and proposed as the likely cause of smoking, alcoholism and other such defects: it doesn't seem to sit well with us. This explains why alcoholism and chain-smoking are unknown in Asia or Africa.

Inspirational Again

St George's Day

Pictured: A typical happy Englishman. He possesses neither flat hat nor whippet, but the cheerfulness of the Englishman in a tight corner is legendary.

A happy St. George's Day to all my reader!



St. George battles the Dragon, medieval church graffito at Marsham, Norfolk. The "fringe" at the bottom of the Dragon may show it is a mummer's costume, or it may just be a bit badly drawn.

It is also probably Shakespeare's birthday (the baptism was recorded, not the birth date) but I have had enough for today of being happy or wishing happiness to others.

Persian Perplexity

Not sure the Microsoft Translator has quite got the point. But if the Trump crazy has indeed fucked your milk cow Bay mondem, there is surely yet another gripping Investigation in the offing. Stormy Daniels, move aside.

Vanishing Concrete

A simple geometrical example will illustrate this. In order to determine and compare the areas of all rectilinear figures we split them up into triangles. Then the triangle itself is reduced to an expression totally different from its visible shape: half the product of the base and the altitude.

It's that "totally different from its visible shape" that is weird: true, a 

does not look like a

                                                

but what of it? A lot of what, according to KM...

In the same way the exchange values of commodities must be reduced to a common element, of which they represent a greater or lesser quantity. This common element cannot be a geometrical, physical, chemical or other natural property of commodities [because exchange values are quantities not qualities!!] clearly, the exchange relation of commodities is characterized precisely by its abstraction from their use-values.

Karl Marx "Capital Volume I" (1990) p127

So in abstracting the formula for the area of a triangle, I have extinguished all the triangles, made the triangleyness of the triangles disappear?

                                     

Marx Out Of Ten? A TL;DR Production

The commodity is, first of all, an external object, a thing which through its qualities satisfies human needs of whatever kind. The nature of these needs, whether they arise, for example, from the stomach, or from the imagination, makes no difference.

Okey dokey.

The usefulness of a thing makes it a use-value. [It is] the physical body of the commodity itself which is the [...] use-value or useful thing.

Yeppity yep.

Exchange value appears first of all as the quantitative relation, the proportion, in which use-values of one kind exchange for use-values of another kind [...] A given commodity, a quarter of wheat for example, is exchanged for x boot-polish, y silk or z gold [...] clearly, the exchange relation of commodities is characterized precisely by its abstraction from their use-values. Within the exchange relation, one use-value is worth just as much as another, provided only that it is present in the appropriate quantity [...] As use-values, commodities differ above all in quality, while as exchange-values they can only differ in quantity, and therefore do not contain an atom of use-value.

Good-o. As a kiddiwink I learned that 2 apples + 2 pears = 4, 2 hats + 2 pencils = 4, that 2 + 2 = 4 without reference to any physical objects. Within the exchange relation, as within the arithmetic relation, the material existence of a given commodity is not a consideration: 2 quarters of wheat exchanges for x boot-polish and z gold, or for 2z gold, or for x boot-polish and y silk, indifferently.

If then we disregard the use-value of commodities, only one property remains, that of being products of labour.

Well, we haven't disregarded use-value at any point, just agreed that it is not a consideration within the exchange relation. But, yes, another feature of commodities is that they are the product of human labour.

But even the product of labour has already been transformed in out hands. If we make abstraction from its use-value, we abstract also from the material constituents and forms which make it a use-value. It is no longer a table, a house, a piece of yarn or any other useful thing. All its sensuous characteristics are extinguished.

Wait, what? We have agreed to understand the exchange relation as an abstraction in which the use-value of a particular commodity is not a consideration. That "already" adds a temporal dimension: we are no longer within the exchange relation; we seem to be present at the slow-moving funeral procession

of use-value, witnessing the corpse being taken solemnly away, life and identity extinguished.

Nor is it any longer the product of the labour of the joiner, the mason or the spinner, or of any other particular kind of productive labour. With the disappearance of the useful character of the products of labour, the useful character of the kinds of labour embodied in them also disappears; this in turn entails the disappearance of the different forms of concrete labour. They can no longer be distinguished, but are all together reduced to the same kind of labour, human labour in the abstract.

Off to Boot Hill with specific human labour and use-value both, then? The simple operation of proposing that abstraction, the exchange value, seems to be having a vampiric effect. But when I accepted that 2 + 2 = 4, I did not drain the world of apples, pears, hats or pencils, nor of the distinct labour of the farmers, hatters or factory hands who grow or make them, any more than now when I accept the abstraction of the exchange value notion.

If I buy a pencil, say, I am certainly thinking of its use-value, which has not in any way disappeared or been extinguished from the commodity by virtue of its being in an exchange relation.

I am admittedly not thinking of the people who worked the pencil-making machines, nor of the people who designed or built them, nor of those who mined or smelted the ores that compose them, nor of those who made the graphite or the paint &c &c... call me inattentive.

Others did, though, pay individual attention to the myriads of people involved in making the existence of the pencil possible - trained them, hired, employed, promoted them and so on. They are only "reduced to the same kind of labour" by my human inability to pay attention to much at all at any given time.

Let us now look at the residue of the products of labour. There is nothing left of them but the same phantom-like objectivity;

the ghosts wafting around in the wake of the funeral procession... and Marx was a failed poet/playwright, could the outbreak of dramatic rhetoric in these last few paragraphs have some purpose to it?

                     they are merely congealed quantities of homogenous human labour, i.e. of human labour-power expended without regard to the form of its expenditure.

Ah yes, earlier to distract our attention from the inexplicable soul-reaving powers being taken on by the mere mental operation of 2 + 2, and now to disappear the use-value without disappearing the human labour, drawing attention away from the miraculous survival of one (albeit congealed) but not the other.

As crystals of this social substance, which is common to them all, they are values - commodity values [Warenwerte].

I have the feeling that this fraudulent (done by sleight of hand, masked by rhetoric, not established by argument) reduction of all commodities to nothing other than homogenised and congealed human labour (the warenwerte) is going to be the big thing in Volume I.

We have seen that when commodities are in the relation of exchange, their exchange-value manifests itself as something totally independent of their use-value. But if we abstract from their use-value, there remains their value [warenwerte], as it has just been defined. The common factor in the exchange relation, or in the exchange-value of the commodity, is therefore its value [warenwirte].

Karl Marx "Capital Volume I" (1990) pp125-28

Absurd, like asking after getting rid of those pesky apples, pears, hats, pencils etc and arriving at 2 + 2 = 4, "but please, Sir, what is 2 + 2 made of?"

It is an abstraction, there is no external "common factor" needed to in some way give it, or its terms, substance.

Scores on th'doors? 9/10 for entertainment, if nothing else. Sorry, that's a use-value... 9/10 for sheer bloody effort on Marx's part. No, not Karl Marx, that would be non-homogenised, ummmm...

Shall I plough on with the rest of the book? Ignoring the introductions, prefaces, appendices and so on, I have got to page 4 of 936.

If I do, I undertake not to paralyse the gentle reader with any more posting on the matter, and I am a blogger of my word,

And if you believe that, ...

Longevity

 Ficino remains of the same opinion as Plato and Galen: in the act of seeing, the "internal fire" is externalized through the eyes, mixed with the pneumatic vapor and even with the thin blood that engendered it. That theory is confirmed by Aristotle himself, who relates that menstruating women who look at themselves in the mirror leave little drops of blood on its surface. This can only mean that it is the thin blood brought to the eyes along with the pneuma.

Ioan Couliano "Eros and Magic in the Renaissance" (1987) p29

So the stuff (spirit, pneuma) of the eyebeams is generated in the heart, where blood is hottest and thinnest, and in a menstruating woman - who is up over the gunwales in blood - especially, this blood is carried along the eyebeams to anything the gaze rests on.

On first reading I found this suddenly depressing. The menstruating woman meme is not I suppose new with Aristotle, is here cited by Ficino in the late 1400s and presumably lurks around for another couple hundred years or so.

Over 2,000 years and nobody bothered to plonk a menstruating woman in front of a mirror and check the results, not even for a lark.

Inspirational