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Saturday, September 26, 2020

WHAT I WAS THINKING THIRTEEN YEARS AGO

The comments of the past few days have reminded me yet again how odd and unnatural is the activity of blogging. How did I get into this? Well, as I approached retirement from a 50 year career, I was extremely apprehensive about how I was going to fill my days and when I expressed this anxiety to my sons, Patrick suggested that I start a blog. I did that in 2007, the year before my retirement. I think I must have posted roughly 20 posts but then I stopped and did not return full time to blogging until 2009. During those first days, I don’t think I had many readers at all but I enjoyed what I was doing and so, after Susie and I had sold our house in Pelham Massachusetts and moved to a condominium in North Carolina, I started again and have been at it ever since. I went back and read several of my original posts and one in particular caught my attention. It says something that I have not seen discussed elsewhere – something that has nothing at all to do with contemporary politics, needless to say – and so I thought I would reproduce that early post here some 13 years later since there cannot be anybody now reading my blog who was around then to read it when it was first put up. It dates from June 9, 2007. Here it is.

 

June 9, 2007

Iceland, Transparency, and Language

Last Sunday, Susie and I arrived in Iceland, en route to Paris, for a three day visit with Pall Skulason and Ardur Brigitsdottir. Pall is a philosopher, and the former Rector of the University of Iceland. He and I met through a common interest in the philosophy of education, and Susie and I have spent time with Pall and Ardur in Paris and in Metz. The stopover in Iceland was arranged so that I could give a talk at the University on "The Completion of Kant's Ethical Theory in the Tenets of the Rechtslehre." [don't ask.]


Tuesday was devoted to a sightseeing ride across the Icelandic countryside -- very bleak, very beautiful, enlivened by a visit to an extraordinary waterfall. It rained on and off, and the wind was at gale force, so we spent a good deal of time in the car rather than wandering about on foot.


During one drive, Pall said a series of things about the difficulty but also the virtue of trying to write philosophy in Icelandic -- things that connected up with remarks he had made about the history of Iceland and his experience of it. These remarks triggered in me a series of thoughts related to the [as yet unwritten] third volume of the trilogy I planned long ago on the thought of Karl Marx. The first two volumes have been published -- Understanding Marx, an exposition of the mathematical foundations of Marx's economic theories, and Moneybags Must Be So Lucky, a reflection on the literary and philosophical significance of the first ten chapters of Das Kapital. The third volume, tentatively titled The Mystification of the Capitalist World, is intended to unite the mathematical economics and the literary analysis of the first two volumes with a sociological and philosophical explication of capitalism, in order to illuminate the way in which capitalism's mystifications defeat our efforts to create a more humane and just society.


The purpose of this post is to try to put down in coherent form the thoughts triggered by Pall's extraordinarily interesting observations about Icelandic history, the Icelandic language, and the unique experience of trying to do philosophy in Icelandic. Whatever there is of interest in these remarks is owed directly to him.


All of this began the day before, during a visit to Iceland's national museum. Pall observed that Icelandic is a very ancient language pretty much unchanged by time -- a fact that he demonstrated by reading without difficulty a 9th or 10th century text exhibited at the museum. He observed that Iceland's history is transparent [his term]. Its founding can be traced to a known date in the 10th century [I may have some of this wrong, for which I ask Pall's forgiveness, but the details are not important], and since the population is very homogeneous, most Icelanders can trace their lineage back many centuries. The origins of the country do not recede into the mists of legend, as do those of France, England, or Germany. I remarked that Americans make the same claim, but that their inability to confront the fact of slavery makes their story of origins mythical and mystified. [I have explored all of this at length in Autobiography of an Ex-White Man, the book I published several years ago about my experiences as a White man in an Afro-American Studies department.]

The next day, as we drove, Pall talked about the challenges posed by his attempt to write philosophy in Icelandic. The problem is that Icelandic lacks the words for many of the key philosophical terms that play so large a role in European philosophy, especially of the past two centuries. One solution to this, which he rejects, even though most of his colleagues adopt it, is simply to bring a number of loan words into Icelandic, taking them for the most part from the German, but also from the French. Now, Icelandic, as Pall explained, is a transparent language. Because it is pure, exhibiting very little in the way of influences from other languages, and really tracing itself back to a proto-Indo-European, when a native Icelandic speaker uses an Icelandic word, he or she can see immediately and without any obscurity exactly what its roots are, and what their original meanings are [since they continue to have those meanings in modern Icelandic.]

This is, when you think about it, an extraordinary fact. If a word used for philosophical purposes is derived via a metaphor from some common root, then the Icelandic ear hears that fact immediately. Since I am the world's worst linguist, I cannot give very good examples of this, but here is one. The German word for "object" is "gegenstand." Now, gegenstand literally means "standing [over] against," which, if I am not totally mistaken, is not far from the root meanings of the Latin words from which "object" is derived.

Imagine, if you will, trying to write philosophy using only words that carry their metaphorical origins, as it were, on their sleeves. I observed that the effort, which was essentially what Pall was attempting by writing philosophy using only Icelandic words, would force you to think through exactly what you were trying to say, and it would stop you from writing something that really was meaningless but sounded good, because it was expressed in words whose origins were obscured both from the writer and from the reader. [Something like "In the Post-Modern world, the de-centered self interrogates meaning by (dis)joining ego and other."]

What does all this have to do with capitalism, exploitation, and the price of gas? Well, if Marx is right [see Moneybags], the exploitative nature of capitalist economic relations is concealed from us, for the most part, by the opacity of the wage-labor relationship and the misrepresentation of commodities as quanta of objective value. Seeing through that mystification to what is really going on, Marx thought, requires not only a critique of economic theory and an unillusioned description of the sphere of production [pace Capital chapter 10] but also a clear-eyed examination of the language with which we talk about our work, commodities, profit, and a society that rests on them.

Perhaps it requires that we try to talk about our own world, as Pall is trying to do philosophy in Icelandic, in a way that makes all the metaphors manifest, all the dissimulations apparent, and all the ideological rationalizations so transparent that they immediately lose their force. The central task, for a radical critic like me, is to speak as much as possible in that fashion, as a way of combating the dominant mystifications of the public discourse of our society.

Just a thought.

 

10 comments:

David Palmeter said...

Could you elaborate on what’s meant by “objective value” and how it’s misrepresented?

If you and I are in the widget manufacturing business, we both may pay the same for our inputs of labor and raw material. But you make blue widgets and I make green ones, and it turns out that the widget-buying public prefers blue widgets to green, and therefore you can command a higher price than I can.

Isn’t value on a capitalist economy totally dependent upon what someone will pay for something? If that’s true, I don’t see anything “objective” about it.

Marc Susselman said...

This comment has nothing to do with linguistics or capitalism but is related to the post in only a very narrow respect – it is about one of the few movies in which Iceland is the backdrop for the movie’s plot. The movie is Land Ho!, about two brothers-in-law, married to sisters, one of whom is now a widower, the other a divorcee. The latter, a retired surgeon with an extremely foul mouth, decides to reunite with his former brother-in-law, a serious and contemplative Australian, by taking him on a vacation trip to Iceland. The Icelandic scenery is beautiful, and the theme, that even as we age we can continue to enjoy life, is refreshing in this time of pandemic and harrowing political news. If you can find it (I found it at my local library), it can offer temporary diversionary relief from these trying times.

MS

LFC said...

@ D Palmeter

w/r/t the phrase in the post (I'm abbreviating it a bit): "the exploitative nature of capitalist ec relations is concealed from us by the opacity of the wage-labor relationship and the misrepresentation of commodities as quanta of objective value..."

At least the first part, viz. "the opacity of the wage-labor relationship," is pretty easy to unpack. On the surface, the worker is selling something he possesses, namely his labor- power (his capacity to work), for something the capitalist possesses, namely money (a wage). Looks like a free exchange in the marketplace, much like a baker sells a chocolate cake to a customer. No one, at least in theory, is forcing the baker to sell that cake, and no one is forcing the customer to buy it. Similarly one might think no one is forcing the worker to sell his labor-power, and no one is forcing the capitalist to buy it. It looks like a free uncoerced exchange among "equals," as Marx says in the famous passage at the end of ch 6 where he refers to this exchange as occurring in a setting that is "a very Eden of the innate rights of man."

The "opacity" derives from the view that this is not really what's going on. The worker is in fact forced to sell his labor-power if he wants to survive. So only on the misleading surface is this a free marketplace exchange. The imbalance of power is built into the exchange from the start, since the capitalist has to buy *someone's* labor-power but not any particular person's, whereas the worker *must* sell his labor-power or die of starvation -- or perhaps more realistically, I suppose, in the context of Marx's time, end up on some kind of "poor relief" that may amount to a slow death. (sorry, my history of the English Poor Law is a little rusty right now, though it used to be less rusty)

Does this "power-imbalance" model (my phrase) of the exchange of labor-power for wages still apply to contemporary capitalism? To some considerable extent, yes. There are lots of workers in so-called advanced capitalist countries who have no assets other than their labor-power and who have to sell it if they want to live anything even approximating a minimally comfortable (or quasi "middle class") existence (and remember Marx says or implies in Capital that the definition of "subsistence" changes over time). Put that way, it applies to a large majority of workers in the U.S. There are, however, some people, albeit a smallish minority, who sell their labor-power for a wage or salary not because they have to but b.c they prefer to; think, for example, of a person who cd afford to retire but decides to keep working. Or, for instance, the partner in law firm X or accounting firm Z who, for whatever reason, just likes her job even though she, through a combination of factors, has 10 million dollars and doesn't have to work, i.e. doesn't have to sell her labor-power to a client (the capitalist-analogue, in this case) for 450 or 500 dollars an hour. And there are prob more such persons in the 21st cent U.S. than there were in 19th cent Britain, which was Marx's main ref pt in much of vol 1 of Capital. Which is a long-winded way of saying that in this respect the somewhat ideal-typical model of capitalism w which Marx is dealing in vol 1 was somewhat closer to the reality of 19th cent Britain than, say, the 21st cent U.S. (which doesn't of course mean that the model is totally irrelevant, since clearly it isn't that).

P.s. Above is my view, of course (and I don't know w how much of this RPW wd agree).

Marc Susselman said...

LFC,

Thank you for your lucid explication. The American capitalist would respond, however, that in a free market economy, where there are no restrictions based on class, nothing is to prevent the individual who sells his/her labor to become an entrepreneur and purchase the labor of others, e.g., like the fellow who invented those superior pillows which he sells on tv and now employs a lot of pillow makers. The hitch is, of course, that in the case of American society, there are still class based divisions which present a practical impediment for the laborer becoming an entrepreneur. In addition, there will always inevitably be genetic limitations which prevent a person who, no matter how hard s/he tries, s/he simply cannot become a computer programmer, and as our society becomes more and more technologically advanced, there will be fewer and fewer jobs available for those who simply are unable to master the skills necessary for those jobs, let alone become entrepreneurs who can take advantage of those advances. There was a time when such individuals could still make a living by the sweat of their brows by becoming farmers, but there is no longer available the land which would allow them to become self-sufficient. What is to become of these individuals? With the predicted advent of self-driving trucks, what is to become of all the people who make a living driving trucks and have no other skill?

MS

LFC said...

MS,
Yes, I basically agree w/ that.

LFC said...

P.s.
Though I suspect most (though not all) people have the smarts to learn high-tech or other employable skills; but, of course, educational opportunities of various kinds are unequally distributed.

Eric said...

A South African journalist discussed similar challenges involved in trying to communicate certain science concepts to readers in Zulu or other indigenous African languages. He mentioned an example of trying to talk about dinosaurs, for which there is no specific Zulu word. He concluded that sometimes it may be more practical to try to describe what is meant using words people are already familiar with than to try to invent entirely new words or to adopt existing words from languages like English. (The journalist discussed some of the issues in an interview with Black Agenda Report earlier this year.)

(The anecdote from Iceland also brought to mind the approach that was needed when Israelis began to bring Hebrew into the modern world. Apparently, before trailblazers like Eliezer Ben-Yehuda embarked on an effort to bring Hebrew into modern life, the language was mostly used for prayer or discussing theology and by virtually no one as a first language. Ben-Yehuda helped establish an academy to create new words for concepts applicable to all aspects of modern life that is still at work coining new words today.)

Perhaps it requires that we try to talk about our own world, as Pall is trying to do philosophy in Icelandic, in a way that makes all the metaphors manifest, all the dissimulations apparent, and all the ideological rationalizations so transparent that they immediately lose their force.
I gather a potential benefit of periodically communicating with lay audiences, or teaching entry-level undergraduates, is that doing so helps keep the scholar honest, in that regard.

David Palmeter said...

LFC,

I get the point about a worker having only his labor to sell, and that because of the imbalance of power employers often can say “take it or leave it,” but I don’t see how that gets to anything about “objective” value. A worker’s bargaining power would seem to me to depend on what her or she can offer in the way skills and what the demand for those skills is in the locale where the worker lives. In some cases, of course, workers decided to move to other areas where they can get higher pay. But in all of these cases, it seems to me, the value of the worker’s labor depends on what an employer is willing to pay, and that can vary because of varying conditions. I don’t see what’s “objective” about it.

LFC said...

Right, the phrase "objective value" as used is something I'm not equipped at the moment to elucidate. Marx thought that the value of any commodity, including labor-power, is the amount of "socially necessary labor time" required to produce (or reproduce) it, but even if one accepts that as valid (which I'm strongly inclined not to), I'm not exactly sure how that helps here. But then I'm not a Marx expert.

LFC said...

Come to think of it, David P., I think you may be misreading the OP here. The pt being made is not that Marx thought commodities have "objective" value but that capitalist ideology misrepresents them as "quanta of objective value." So however that phrase is construed, the pt being made is that it's a misrepresentation (or mystification).