Horst & Pynchon & late capital

[Mark Kohut]

I stand by what I wrote as a gloss on Horst in BLEEDING EDGE. 
What I may not "understand" about modern money is not relevant, I say,
 
just as what I may not understand about the good things (even life-saving) 
that many shrinks have done for millions of people is not relevant if I make
the case that P is satirizing shrinkdom with Dr. Hilarious and with Kugelblitz
in BLEEDING EDGE.  
 
Satirists generalize for their vision. That there are exceptions IN REAL LIFE 
only matters in real life and if the satire is stupidly moronic or unoriginal. 
 
Bye, Bye....
 



On Tuesday, February 25, 2014 9:33 AM, alice malice <alicewmalice at gmail.com> wrote:
  
Mark,  

Those who make the argument you advance here, that is, that Horst is not productive, he doesn't make anything but money, don't understand, first, what money is, and second, what making or producing something in an economy is. This argument is common now in commercials liek the one Wlamart is flooding the Tube and the Internet with. The so-called manufacturing remnissance, sisa  farce, the re-shoreing of off-shored and out-sourced jobs is another farce, both built on the sweatshop and pauper fallacies. Krugman, an economist that has some following here on the P-List, explains how these arguments and falacies have come to be part of a narrative that, like the debt to gdp narrative, are, enriching the haves at the expense of the have-nots, preventing any real soulution to the problems that plague the world's workers, from neing advanced.  

Horst's job is very productive, in the largest and most important service economy in the world, he provides a necessary and essentional service. Is he overpaid? Sure. Could he share more of his wealth with his X? I don't know. There's not much there to suggest that Max wants or nedds more money from her on-again/off-again man. 
 
Horst makes nothing but money. Horst is the recent past and present of America's economy. Te rise of pure financial skills. A pipeline and reservoir of capital accumulation. His sucking up of money is an example of how late capitalism has impoverished so many---that incredible growth in income inequality in NYC and These United States. As it unfurls.
>
>Sent from my iPad
>
>
>On Feb 25, 2014, at 5:55 AM, alice malice <alicewmalice at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Pynchon is an artist. His business is to produce beautiful books and sells them. He is married to a famous book agent, so the family is in the business of producing and publishing and marketing fiction and poetry and so on. It seems a good marriage, a successful business. But as artist, as agent of things beautiful, the family has to live in the wold we live in where aesthetic production is fully integrated into commodity production generally: "the frantic economic urgency of producing fresh waves of ever more novel-seeming goods (from clothing to aeroplanes), at ever greater rates of turnover, now assigns an increasingly essential structural function and position to aesthetic innovation and experimentation" (Jameson).
>>
>> Jameson gos on to say:
>>
>> Such economic necessities then find recognition in the varied kinds of institutional support available for the newer art, from foundations and grants to museums and other forms of patronage. Of all the arts, architecture is the closest constitutively to the economic, with which, in the form of commissions and land values, it has a virtually unmediated relationship. It will therefore not be surprising to find the extraordinary flowering of the new postmodern architecture grounded in the patronage of multinational business, whose expansion and development is strictly contemporaneous with it. Later I will suggest that these two new phenomena have an even deeper dialectical interrelationship than the simple one-to-one financing of this or that individual project. Yet this is the point at which I must remind the reader of the obvious; namely, that this whole global, yet American, postmodern culture is the internal and superstructural expression of a whole
 new wave of American military and economic domination throughout the world: in this sense, as throughout class history, the underside of culture is blood, torture, death, and terror.
>>
>> Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism
>>
>> This famous excerpt from Jameson seems to fit our recent discussion.
>>
>> I can see how Windust and Maxine are entangled in postmodern late capitalism, in  Neo-Liberalism and its co-dependent late late Leftism, and Maxine falls into the architectural themes, the towers, but Pynchon and Horst are Flatirons, and remain, as much as that is possible, producers of raw and rare commodities.  While both move closer to the towers, to the chip makers and whiz kids of science tech and their murdering allies, both slothfully withdraw, preferring the comic mask and the humor of boyz.
>>
>>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/attachments/20140225/1501ff0d/attachment.html>