GRGR (15): Good & Evil: Utilitarianism

[Seb Thirlway]

From: Paul Mackin <pmackin at clark.net>

>Trouble is,
>the  alternative to psychology might be to veer more in the
direction
>of the DISMAL science namely Economics--the Good being the
Maximization of
>Utility. Bearing on what I think rj alluded to, would it do us
any good
>discussion-wise to fall back on the Utilitarianism ideas of
Benthan and
>the Mills--that is that the aim of moral action ought to be the
>maximization of the balance of pleasure over pain in the world
(back to
>p&p though somehow differently

Dismal all right!  Who was it made the connection between
Utilitarianism and the Panopticon, that ideally efficient
surveiilance device?  Something like that has to be implied by
any application of Utilitarianism.  Reminds me of Spectro's
"filing cabinet of pain", and this bit from Pointy

"when we find it, we'll have shown again the stone determinacy of
every soul.  There will be precious little room for any hope at
all..  You can see how important a discovery like that could be."
(p86)

>Not sure I see where this would get us
>however since it has a slightly sterile feel to it. Worth a try.
Heck I'm
>nothing if not flexible.

Exactly the sterility that Roger at least thinks he's up in arms
against.  Just started reading from the start again, and Beyond
the Zero is full of contrasts between efficiency, every unit
commensurable under one system, "even Jews are negotiable, just
as much as cigarettes, cunt and Hershey bars" (105), and
something else - much later in the book (not a hope of finding it
right now) there's something about the singularity on the curve,
where all derivatives are infinite, which hits the nail on the
head as the other side of this opposition for me.  Also, that
incredible riff starting "near her battery one night, driving
Somewhere in Kent, Roger and Jessica came upon a church..." puts
the contrast across - between everything out there, the mass
machine, with a part missing because you've shaken off your
War-identity (for a while), and what's here, the singular.

For me this utilitiarianism topic goes a hell of a long way -
connections cropping up everywhere, more than I can pull together
while still making sense.  It's TRP's answer to the old question
"who decides what the happiness of the greatest number is?".
Utilitarianism implies commensurability of happiness, knowledge
of every other's scale of happiness, implies surveillance as a
necessary condition, implies the wonderful, Holy Grail (to Them)
possibility of control.  Gives Them a wonderful ambiguity - well,
isn't efficiency a good thing?  "we're not evil control-freaks,
we're just nice utilitarians, and why shouldn't we control to a
good end?  Come on, chin up young man, there's a war on you
know".  Tie in with Roger as a statistician, a handler of
attributes of large populations... but going on like this there's
a risk of just attempting to rewrite Beyond the Zero in dry
philosophical terms.
It makes Roger and the Counterforce more ambiguous as well -
economics and large-scale management are always presented as the
domains of clear-eyed, unsentimental adults (cf. the rhetoric
here in the UK in the Thatcher years).  So what does that make
Roger, or anyone else who isn't at home in the Panopticon?  More
human than the rest, or a child, a weirdo, a freak?

So going back to an earlier topic, the S/M fits in nicely.  The
only escape from the Panopticon and its cut and dried, generic,
categories of pleasure and pain is through weird, passed-over,
opaque and ambiguous pleasures and pains - if all "normal",
"natural" (read "statistically normal") pleasure and pain has
been pressed into service as a lever in Their machinery, then you
can still escape by deliberately trashing your own pleasure/pain
categories - a meta-solution (as in Katje escaping from Blicero's
scenario).  Pointy discovers this, academically, without
realising it, because for him it's a step on the way to the
precise opposite - more control: one way out of the game is to
deliberately make youself go paradoxical, i.e. turn your
pleasure/pain scale upside down, or ultra-paradoxical (and I've
never worked out the implications of this "ultra-paradoxical"
business - is it authentic Pavlov, or TRP's own invention?).
 So - S&M.

Or maybe what Pointy has discovered is going to result in more
control, as he hopes - then not only do They have access to your
ordinary pleasure/pain, but They can also read, catalogue and
influence any meta-solution you come up with ---  AARGGHHH!  I
remember an article recently on the more advanced marketing
categories (or "tribes", as they're known) which are coming into
use - replacing the old very class-based A,B (professional), C1
(skilled manual/clerical), C2 (unskilled manual).  If I remember
rightly one of these categories was roughly "people who reject
marketing categories and see themselves as "alternative", against
consumption etc".    AAARRRGGGHHHHH!

First time I've read GR with this in mind, so I'll keep turning
the pages and see what happens.



seb