The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism: Author’s Introduction

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Author’s Introduction

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Unlimited greed for gain is not in the least identical with capitalism, and is still less its spirit. Capitalism may even be identical with the restraint, or at least a rational tempering, of this irrational impulse.

We will define a capitalistic economic action as one which rests on the expectation of profit by the utilization of opportunities for exchange, that is on (formally) peaceful chances of profit.

Everything is done in terms of balances: at the beginning of the enterprise an initial balance, before every individual decision a calculation to ascertain its probable profitableness, and at the end a final balance to ascertain how much profit has been made.

For the purpose of this conception all that matters is that an actual adaptation of economic action to a comparison of money income with money expenses takes place, no matter how primitive the form.

But in modern times the Occident has developed, in addition to this, a very different form of capitalism which has appeared nowhere else: the rational capitalistic organization of (formally) free labour.

The frequent use of day labourers led in a very few cases—especially State monopolies, which are, however, very different from modern industrial organization—to manufacturing organizations, but never to a rational organization of apprenticeship in the handicrafts like that of our Middle Ages.

The modern rational organization of the capitalistic enterprise would not have been possible without two other important factors in its development: the separation of business from the household, which completely dominates modern economic life, and closely connected with it, rational book-keeping.

For without the rational capitalistic organization of labour, all this, so far as it was possible at all, would have nothing like the same significance, above all for the social structure and all the specific problems of the modern Occident connected with it.

The modern conflict of the large-scale industrial entrepreneur and free-wage labourers was entirely lacking. And thus there could be no such problems as those of socialism.

Hence in a universal history of culture the central problem for us is not, in the last analysis, even from a purely economic viewpoint, the development of capitalistic activity as such, differing in different cultures only in form: the adventurer type, or capitalism in trade, war, politics, or administration as sources of gain. It is rather the origin of this sober bourgeois capitalism with its rational organization of free labour.

When these types have been obstructed by spiritual obstacles, the development of rational economic conduct has also met serious inner resistance. The magical and religious forces, and the ethical ideas of duty based upon them, have in the past always been among the most important formative influences on conduct. In the studies collected here we shall be concerned with these forces.

the problem which is generally most difficult to grasp: the influence of certain religious ideas on the development of an economic spirit, or the ethos of an economic system.

In hierdie inleiding stel die outeur slegs wat hy poog om te bewys en hoe hy tewerk gegaan het om sy stellings te bewys. Hy is duidelik van mening dat die vorming van kapitalisme grotendeels beinvloed was deur die invloed van geloofsisteme, en daaroom wil hy sê dat kapitalisme vinniger posgevat het in die negatiewe sin in die weste vanwee ‘n mindere toewyding aan enige religieuse waarde. Die ooste aan die ander kant het egter steeds langer meer waarde aan die religie geheg en so, al was hulle voor met sekere tegnologiese uitvindsels, het hulle steeds nie onder die groot dwang van kapitalisme beland tot baie later nie. Dus, die groot dryfveer agter hierdie sosiale studie van die kapitalistiese kultuur, is vir die outeur die groot vraag na geloofsisteme, en watter rol dit het op die groter sisteme van die samelewing…

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Dit was dan die Author’s Introduction

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14/06/2012

Transmitting Culture: 7.

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Hoofstuk 7 – Ways of Doing

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Ways of Doing

The research programs implied by a mediological perspective can be divided into two branches. One side favours diachrony, asking by which networks of transmission and forms of organization a given cultural legacy was constituted. On the other side, with more importance given the synchronic cross-cut, the question is how the appearance of a new system or equipment modifies an institution, an established theory, or precodified practice.

In short, whether one surveys, so to speak, the meteor craters resulting from an unexpected object’s impact on a mental planet or reconstitutes the fluidities of magma behind forming eruptive rock, it is the shock of heterogeneous elements that will interest the observer.

Culture and technology move together and cannot do without one another: the two enemy sisters do not get along but must come to a working compromise.

Out of negative protestation there can arise a positive mutation (as every new object that is made intelligible transforms the frames of intelligence itself).

Three gestures in this direction fall unpremeditatedly into line: decentering, materializing, and dynamizing.

Decentering

There is clear evidence, however, for a causal complex in which the popularity of journalism followed from the steel railway. Industrialized mass transport enlarged printed matter’s sphere of circulation; it determined the industrialization of the press (the daily newspaper costing one sou) and brought massive influxes of money onto the intellectual.

This shift in emphasis, from the better – to the lesser-known, can be called the mediological indexation of a phenomenon. It puts what appears marginal at the very center.

Faced with a doctrine that is already constituted and presents itself as an autonomous whole, attention must be directed from literal meaning-content to the frameworks that administer belief in that content.

What institution gave rise to the indoctrination and put it across? How was its doctrine propogated, inculcated, and reproduced? Which models of conformity did it follow?

This complex in its turn served to set down, store, and circulate traces in a manner characteristic of a given, historically determined mediasphere: the logosphere, or age of orality and its first inscriptions in writing; the graphosphere, or age of print; and the videosphere of recorded images and sound, digitized and pixellated sign-pictures, and unimedia.

Some estimates are that half the species that have ever lived have become extinct since the first appearance of life on earth. A good number of ideological species encounter a similar fate, at the hands of their surroundings’ selective pressures (technological Darwinism is pitiless).

Every culture is an adaptive response to surroundings (Jacques Ruffie), and even if the “one species, one niche” principle does not apply mechanically in these more subtle matters, the technological niche of the videosphere proved fatal to a cultural tradition tending to put the (invisible) future before and above the (perceptible) present.

Before our very eyes there has occurred a slow disintegration of that grand European mosaic of the graphosphere. They had garaunteed the social viability of a bookbound culture within an ecosystem that was invisible because shared (with the internal ventilation of its pertinent oppositions).

How much thought does the myopic give to his glasses, except after misplacing them? (Can the fish discover water?)

Is it not by de-ideologizing ideologies that one can understand their appearance as well as disappearance?

The intended decentering crosses things and people, grasping relations of force incorporated into produced works that can in turn modify those relations further.

For the birth of the Artist, as someone practising a liberal profession and not just an artisanal or mechanical art, was as little spontaneous and universal an occurrence, and as intricately orchestrated, as was the birth of the Intellectual to public and symbolic prominence in the nineteenth century.

looking at the lookers, rather than the varnished veneer of canvases themselves.

In sum, at everything that is deployed to display and solemnize works of art. A careful study of this well-handled distraction, this periphery of cultural validation, puts us on the trail to a quite simple truth, which is not demystification but restoration of an aesthetic wholeness: art and the faith we put into it are one and the same.

Materializing

Civilization, insisted the historian Charles Seignobos, is roads, ports and quays. It has become so natural to speak of culture, while forgetting civilization, that our elaborate normative displays hide from view the basic levers of interaction and negotiation with things both inert and living.

Cultivated culture stands like a column covered with glorious signatures; technological culture is the poor relation, reduced to anonymous familiarities. With cultivated culture, the proper names last longer than the works; with technological culture, the inventors are effaced behind their inventions. Fire, the wheel, and steel were and remain signature-less, like the sewing machine.

Within the notion of artifex we persist in dissociating the (mechanical) artisan from the (liberal) artist. We tend to see only the painter in the figure of Leonardo, while he saw himself as an engineer.

As we pass from the book as text to the book as object, the history of the book could risk erasing that of literature.

Overvaluing the code and undervaluing the channel was yesterday’s semiocratic indulgence. Stopping before getting to the referent, the mediocrat might succumb to the opposite realist fallacy: overestimating the channel at the code’s expense.

Dynamizing

One needs to produce a complex schematic outline of flows that joins such media to the corresponding places and spheres of activity that diffuse them: the court, salons, marketplaces, cafes, public gardens, booksellers, and libraries. Oral transmission and written communication are relayed through these crossings, the first amplifying the second. So, the sphere of ideas has happily been broadened, but the entirety of the process is still conceived in terms of communication: the force of ideas lies in how widely they are spread.

Out of this came the capital formation, richer and thus less known than “the medium is the message”, that “method engenders doctrine”.

The observation can be extended to sites of sociability, the linchpins of that area of activity between the private sphere and the domain of the state that is today called “public sphere”.

The intermediary functions of images evolve at the crossroads of our belief systems and our mechanical outfittings.

Scouting out products, controlling technical operations, identifying consumer goods – all at a distance and often directed by the pressure of saving time (which dictate the semiotic efficiency of such things as logos, designer labels, brand names, and videos) – all of this falls within the regime of the visual when the production of an image of the world no longer corresponds to a lived experience of this world.

Hoe vinniger alles beweeg, hoe vinniger moet ‘n kultuur geskep word (‘n skynkultuur) deur beelde wat ‘n sekere item identifiseer en nie meer die item self nie, wat weer dinge aanjaag. ‘n Kultuur van al hoe vinniger beweeg en nie meer kan byhou nie en nou nuwe tegnologie skep om te probeer om by te hou maar in effek die gaping net groter maak.

A Disciplinary Proviso

The educated wager is that by tugging on the thread of the how, a good portion of the why can also by unravelled.

Permit me for an instant to suspend my judgement, bracket your message and ends, your perfections and truths, your salvational values, so that I my consider simply your comings and goings, your vectors and vehicles, the living stuff that conferred on you living from and without which you would never have arrived here among us.

Against the Stream

Knowledge was reduced to plays of language; history to a sequence of grand narratives; philosophy to a hermeneutics; and our most humble practices all became languages or grammars. Human action itself was labelled “communicational”.

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Dit was dan Hoofstuk 7 – Ways of Doing

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11/06/2012

Transmitting Culture: 5.

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Hoofstuk 5 – Tool Lines

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Ethnos (Nasie) contra Technics (Tegnologie)

The palaeontologist and material anthropologist Andre Leroi-Gourhan notes that cultural diversification has been the principal regulator of evolution at the level of Homo sapiens.

Anthropology conceptualizes it under culture, and it is obviously based in a language, the most tenacious of all group memories. All human beings have the same emotions but do not express them with their body in the same ways: their code is cultural (or ethnic). It would not be absurd to maintain, in opposition to the clichés, that culture is what splits apart the human species while technology unites them.

A cultural system suggests a fanning outward of places. A technological system evokes a combination of tracks.

…we replace the pair technology/culture with the opposition technological-convergence/ethnic-divergence, which would be its translation further developed.

In this sense, the technological structuring of the world, taking us from wheel to airplane, also carries with it the very real potential to culturally de-structure the world.

Likewise do we now witness the digital encoding of all information so as to make all channels in the end converge through the phone line, integrating telecommunications, nationwide computer terminals, TV, movies, CDS, and pixellated photographs into unimedia (multimedia is a misnomer, the world having become techno-uniform).

The planet toward which we are heading, in other words, will be one complete, interconnected – or intraconnected – whole, in which the interdependence of the elements will prevail over and soon frustrate any remaining values of originality.

We knew this goal as national in the last century, know it now as global, and will be known as intergalactic one day.

…imprisoning the globe in order to liberate men.

Taking into account Francois Dagognet’s formulation that matter travels faster than mind, one could understand this discrepancy as a de-synchronization of, or difference in, rates, the simple effect of inertia from culture’s relative slowness of change.

This latter is a tough fishbone to swallow and consists of a negative retroactive effect of technology on culture.

Hier word gemeen dat tegnologie en kultuur eintlik twee itenteite is wat twee teenoorgestelde funksies het. Tegnologie poog om te verenig terwyl kultuur poog of eerder inherent verdeel. Daarom deur ‘n universele voor te stel word die gevaar daar gestel dat daar geen moontlikheid gelaat word nie vir enige innoverende denke nie en so alle vordering insigself inhibeer wat weer tegnologie laat inval op ditself.

Agteruit Vordering

…ever since urbanites no longer walk they have ended up…running. And with fanatic devotion. In parks or, lacking that, in the living room, on treadmills.

Die draf effek in die argiewe

In our day of delocalized on-line access and long-distance digital consultation, electronic circulation should for all intents and purposes render the concentration of materials in physical sites useless.

The less there is of collective coherence, the greater the number of communitarian symbols, that is, ostensible mediations that knit the individual to a collective heritage whose stability and visibility are reassuring.

Rather than erasing sites of memory and commemoration, digital delocalization and audiovisual amnesia generate them in profusion.

Die teenoorgestelde van dit wat verwag word vind egter plaas as iets uitgelaat word. Die tegnologiese era met alles wat digitaal gestoor word word daar verwag dat fisiese plekke van herinnering sal verminder maar die teenoorgestelde word waar omdat hoe meer die data op digitale manier gestoor word hoe meer is daar ‘n interne drang in die mens om homself te stabiliseer deur vergestalt te gee aan die fisiese aspek van geheue.

Die draf effek in die ruimte

Telecommunications have contributed to making tourism the largest industry in the world. The real surprise is that, as we shrink distances, we are all the more compelled to explore the periphery.

What the land loses in functional value, it can soon recoup in affective flavour.

Since going to the moon, we have been relearning a certain love of the land.

The more vast distances are domesticated, the more small is beautiful.

Self in die spasie waarin ons leef is hierdie retro-aktiewe progressie teenwoordig, dat ons spreekwoordelik met elke tree wat ons vorentoe tree ook een wil terug gee.

Die drag effek in taal

We had expected that normalization by stereotype would transform all these living idioms into dead languages, confining them nobly to the literary registry or degrading them into provincial patois more or less in a state of vagrancy. Yet in the face of the new utilitarian medium, the language of choice becomes one’s native speech, territorial and useless. The vernacular is resupplying itself with mythic value, becoming a site of spiritual, religious, or magical references.

Culture is on the side of the vital principle, whose nature is to be multiple, disruptive, and proliferous – the opposite of technology, if you prefer.

Die draf effek in kleredrag

Dress too, as much as language, is a typical feature of ethnicity.

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Why should the disappearance of nation traditions of cinema, or minority literatures, or languishing arts and crafts not stir up the same worry that has focused on the extermination of whales and seals?

Still, this bottom-line preservation of differences has its risks: returning to balance can itself become convulsive.

This is the case when the identity spasm, as a reflex against the utilitarian eradication of peripheral memories, pushes one to the point of fundamentalist insurrection.

It is precisely in those richest Western countries where urban centres, political parties, churches, television stations, buildings and roads, houses and stores, and tastes and odours are the most interchangeable (or the least identifiable) that cultural singularities are most insisted on and valued.

In the zones where tradition dictated life structured by faith, fundamentalism takes on the guise of a culture for those decultured by technology or a return to the soil for those uprooted from it.

It really seems, indeed, that history takes back with one hand what it grants with the other: openness here, closure there.

When communitarian drives reach paradoxical high tide in the age of interdependencies, do we not witness, within the parliaments and governments of the most self-regulating representational democracies, a replacement, in parliament and government, by ethnocultural interest groups of the old ideologically cemented, dominant formations (witness politics in Israel, India, Turkey, and [South Africa])?

A levelling of political differences may mean a renaissance in prepolitical identities – and, after deritualization, theocracy?

We would observe an alternation of phases of decentering and recentering, to correct one imbalance with another, however gropingly (South Africa?).

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Dit wil lyk of hierdie hele boonste afdeling handel oor die ewewig wat die natuur altyd sal probeer handhaaf, inherent. Hoe ons egter tussen hierdie twee lyne beweeg is van groot belang. Die aarde sal altyd streef na balans, soos ek altyd sê, maar hoe die mens by daardie natuurlike strewe na balans aanpas/inpas is belangrik.

Soos ons hier sien, vir elke tree wat tegnologie vorentoe gee, hetsy in spasie, taal, of kleredrag wil die mens inherent ‘n tree terug gee om iets van die verlore te laat behoue bly. Dit is ‘n vreemde verskynsel, maar dit is tog daar, en weerspieel hierdie innerlike soeke na balans in die mens. Daar kan nie net heeltyd na die eenkant van die wipplank geloop word nie, daar moet ook na die ander kant geloop word om te keer dat die plank nie die grond raak nie. Partymal sal die plank meer na die anderkant na die grond wees en ander kere die inverse. Wat wel waar is, en ook baie tragedies, is dat die een wanbalans homself soms sal moet uitbalanseer deur ‘n nuwe wanbalans te skep. Hier wil ek amper neig om Apartheid as voorbeeld te noem. Apartheid was ‘n wanbalans in die kulturele geskiedenis van Suid-Afrika en nou probeer die land homself deur demokrasie weer te balanseer, maar soos bogenoem, omdat die regende party nou in ‘n staat verkeer van relatiewe wanbalans gryp hulle terug na hulle fundamentalistiese wortels wat hulle geleer is in ‘n stadium van wanbalans en so implimenteer hulle daardie waardes heel onwetend en skep so weer ‘n wanbalans. Dis ‘n bose kringloop. Dalk is dit soos die Prediker sê dat daar niks nuuts onder die son is nie, dit verander net van vorm maar die inhoud bly dieselfde.

Die mens se behoorlike studie

Mediology examines what defines the human branch in its essence, by which means it can be distinguished from that of our simian cousins, that is, Homo sapiens’ aptitude for handing down acquired characters from one generation to the next, notwithstanding the most formal laws of molecular biology.

Here is to be found all the difference between natural life and historical life, the latter an internalizing duration: man is the only animal that can conserve a trace of his grandfather and be modified by it.

Yet what I am, what I believe, and choose, depends in large part on what their works and days made them. Heredity belongs to all living beings; inheritance belongs only to man.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau writes, on this difference between man and animal, there is another very specific quality that distinguishes them and about which there can be no dispute: the faculty of self-perfection, a faculty which, with the aid of circumstances, successfully develops all the others, and resides among us as much in the species as in the individual. By contrast an animal is at the end of a few months what it will be all its life; and its species is at the end of a thousand years what it was the first year of that thousand.

A legacy is made possible on what condition?

A naturalist was able to observe that we were the only species of animals able of influencing its own evolution.

Ek het besluit om hierdie hoofstuk nie verder te lees nie aangesien dit baie op die biologiese hammer en ‘n mindere fokus het op die kulturele en bloot in verskillende biologiese terme wil oorbring dat oordrag(transmission) wel moontlik is in die mens anders as by diere. Diere se eerste paar maande bepaal hulle lewe, waar ‘n mens lewenslank in staat is om homself te verander anders as ‘n dier.

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Dit was dan Hoofstuk 5 – Tool Lines

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