Rules for the Incommensurable

Bibliographic Data

ID5339775
AuthorsChristian Marazzi, Giuseppina Mecchia (0000-0002-4689-1369)
Year2007
Volume36
Issue1
Pages11-36
Publication date2007-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueSubStance (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0049-2426 • E-ISSN: 1527-2095
PublisherProject MUSE (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1353/sub.2007.0014
OpenAlexW1969302060
LanguageEN
Citations received10
References cited3

Rules for the Incommensurable Christian Marazzi (bio) Translated by Giuseppina Mecchia (bio) 1. The Fair of Meanings In the years between the second half of the 1970s and the explosion of the recession of 1989-1991 (United States) and 1991-1994 (Europe and Japan), the gradual emergence of post-Fordism generated a growing "existential malaise," a climate of pervasive insecurity, a social and political disorientation whose explanation exceeds the conjunctural data.1 This climate of uncertainty, the "no future" widely anticipated by some youth movements of the 1970s, can be attributed to several factors: mass unemployment; the pauperization and occupational instability of ever-increasing sectors of the population; the awareness that investments were creating less occupation and that in absolute numbers they were in fact reducing it; problems related to the aging of the population and the financial difficulties these problems were beginning to cause. But it is only in the years of the recession that what had previously remained latent emerged in its full gravity and complexity. The recession of the early 1990s simply tore away the "veil of ignorance" that allowed us to postpone addressing the new socio-economic paradigm politically. Before analyzing the roots of this "crisis of meaning" and its most immediate political implications, we need to consider the reasons for the time lag between the processes of social transformation, the emerging awareness of the mechanisms behind these processes, and the crisis of the political forms intended to govern the transformation. First we should ask ourselves: What are the times of diffusion proper to a new productive paradigm such as today's new "universal instrument," the computer (or "language machine")? Today the computer corresponds to what the electrical motor was a century ago, and the steam engine before that. In response to a question about the times of diffusion proper to the new information technologies, Andrew S. Grove, founder and CEO of Intel corporation, explained in an interview to Business Week that the [End Page 11] experience of innovation is different from that of immigration. A Hungarian immigrant who escaped from his country during the 1956 revolution, Grove arrived in the United States at the beginning of the 1960s. He went on to become one of the famous Silicon Valley pioneers. According to him, the difference between innovation and immigration resides in the fact that immigration is a break, a radical separation between a before and an after, while technological transformation is an experience that is lived minute by minute in everyday life. The latter transition is gradual: at a certain point we find ourselves holding in our hands an electric razor or toothbrush. We actually register the experience of the new "universal machine" when it has already become part of our everyday life, when it has already entered our homes and our children's gadgets.2 .Leaving one's own country, as in the biblical exodus, is a different experience because it implies laceration and suffering, and thus the awareness of what is happening in one's life. When we leave, we always think we will come back one day to embrace our friends and family, to see the colors, hear the sounds and smell the air of the country where we were born. If we can't go back, memory will do all it can to preserve what we have left behind: There are two types of Hungarian immigrants of my age: the people who were constantly bitching about America because they couldn't find the things they left behind in Hungary, and the people who accepted what was available here as a kind of moral equivalent of what was left behind. Once you got into that mode, you went with the flow and did quite well. The others were still bitching that "they don't have sideways cafés in New York." This is a little like that.3 The "universal machine" affirms itself gradually, minute by minute. When the crisis explodes, revealing to everyone the epochal nature of the transformation, it's already "too late." We can't go back; either we go with the flow or we keep resenting our time. Either we try to extract the "moral equivalent" of a

Development economics · Economic growth · Economics · Epistemology · Financial crisis · Ignorance · Keynesian economics · Meaning (existential) · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Population · Positive economics · Recession · Sociology · Unemployment · Economic Development and Digital Transformation · Law · Political Economy and Marxism · Post-Communist Economic and Political Transition

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