Sorry, one more. I’m having trouble shutting down tonight. The central triad in Marx is production, distribution, and consumption. This should be understood to apply– in my opinion –ontologically to all entities and not just society and economy. Somewhere early in Grundrisse Marx proposes that these three dimensions be coded against one another. I can’t reproduce the table here, but basically you would have a table composed of four columns and rows with production, distribution, and consumption as the heading of the columns and production, distribution, and consumption labeling each of the rows. Marx’s point is that you get a combination of each. So you would get the following:
Production of Production.
Production of Distribution.
Production of Consumption.
Distribution of Production.
Distribution of Distribution.
Distribution of Consumption.
Consumption of Production.
Consumption of Consumption.
Consumption of Distribution.
I’m not sure what to do with all these combinations (some of them are mind bending to me), but some brief suggestions.
1a. Production of Production: Production doesn’t come ready made but must be produced. In economic terms, production of production wouldn’t be the production that takes place in a factory, but rather would be the production of the condition of production in the first place. For example, in socio-economic terms this would be science, technology, the building of infrastructure (e.g. the factory), the formation of workers, etc. In the natural world, the production of production would be the emergence of conditions that allow certain types of minerals and lifeforms to exist. I guess it would also include production of products. I have to think through this more.
2a. Production of distribution: Production of distribution would be the work required to build distribution networks. This would include both literal shipping routes (the formation of real connections), but also would include– in the socio-economic world –all sorts of media elements that get awareness of the product “out there”.
3a. Production of Consumption: This is probably the most interesting for cultural theorists. Early in Capital Marx is quite clear that needs do not come ready-made but have to be produced. Production of consumption would be all those subjectifying processes that create needs or desires. We can think about Baudrillard’s work in The System of Objects here, but also Deleuze and Guattari’s desiring-machines. Lack does not precede desire/consumption, but requires a prior set of formations to come into being.
1a. Distribution of Production: This probably comes closest to what we think of when we think of economy and production. Products have to somehow be distributed. The “primitive”, feudal, and capitalistic are all various delivery mechanisms through which products are circulated. This requires time, real connections, and infrastructures. Moreover, the distribution of production applies at both the physical level and the semiotic level. Ideas, signs, and linguistic elements (which are themselves products) must be distributed as much as products like cheeseburgers and cars.
2b. Distribution of Consumption: I really have no idea where to go with this combinatorial. Perhaps distributions of consumption refer to class and identity distributions. In other words, there would here be some process by which who/what consumes what comes to be sorted. Bourdieu’s analysis of taste would be helpful here as he shows how class differences structure taste. The beer your drink and the fact that you drink beer at all would not be a personal decision but the result of a distribution of consumption.
3b. Distribution of Distribution: What would distribution of distribution be? I’m not sure. Perhaps distribution of distribution would refer to the networks of distribution that are formed throughout the world… Their continuities and discontinuities. Distribution has to itself be distributed. Think about airline flight paths in and out of cities. Some cities are highly distributed in the sense that they are hubs (Dallas, New York, Los Angeles, etc.), while others are largely undistributed or only reachable through transfer flights (Lynchburg, for instance). Likewise with economy. If this is the case we should avoid the temptation to speak of The Market (as DeLanda notes in his misguided criticisms of Marxism). Because there are distributions of distributions there is not one market but a variety of different distribution mechanisms, some of which indirectly converge, others which are probably entirely discontinuous.
1c. Consumption of Production: This would be exactly like it sounds: A real connection between a sender/producer and a receiver in which a product (effect) is consumed. Consumption of production would require production of consumption. Consumers don’t come ready made, but need to be produced (part of the mistake of Stalinist Socialism in assuming that need is “natural” or pre-given). You have to have consumers that can consume productions. So in a very real sense, consumption of production is very far down in the line of production. Protevi’s “political affect” is important here.
2c. Consumption of Distribution: Again, I’m not sure what to do with this combination. Perhaps consumption of distribution would be the symbolic-value (Baudrillard, Bourdieu) skimmed off distributions of distributions? In other words, consumption of distribution would be the excess consumption we get from our various class positions; and this from the lowest to the highest as there’s a jouissance in each.
3c. Consumption of Consumption: This makes my head break when I try to think about it. I guess this would be one place where we locate surplus-value and surplus-jouissance? I’ll leave it at that.
March 20, 2012 at 12:50 pm
This reminds me of Buddhist meditations on the 3 marks of existence: Dukkha (loosely translated as suffering), Impermanence, and Non-Self (or refined in some iterations as Emptiness). So notable stages include the Suffering of Suffering, the Suffering from Change, and the Emptiness of Emptiness. I havent seen it set out in the fashion you do here, so Im not sure how far or how well the parrallel works. But the the Emptiness of Emptiness parraleling your Consmption of Consumption is quite important.
March 20, 2012 at 2:24 pm
@atomicgeography: Is it possible for there to be a materialist metaphysics? Your fascinating thoughts here seem to provoke one, if it’s not already been done.
@Levi:As mentioned before, whilst I am trying to get to know your frames of discourse in flat ontology, ontology is one of those words that can eventually mean nothing because if you dared to bring it into any material sense reference (I’m thinking Kripke here) you would start to see how unbelievably huge the problems are which you appear to reduce to philosophical vocabulary. To truly engage with and seek a shift in the magnitude of what you foreground as problems from a position of any ‘ontology’ might be impossible. That’s why I think Heidegger, for all his talk of Dasein as the ‘world’ and as ‘they’ and as ‘equipmentality’ has absolutely nothing to say about politics or political change in the Der Spiegel interview. There is something fundamentally inadequate in the word ‘ontology’ – but Heidegger would have known that, wouldn’t he? – that the word conceals as much as it reveals…
March 20, 2012 at 7:06 pm
Distribution of consumption could be thought of as the presumption of what people in different places will want and the distribution patterns that result. The distributor decides what the deli owner (in NYC) will sell, and therefore what the buyer is predisposed to want. No more plain potato chips, thank you — the distributor has decided that you actually like gourmet potato chips.
March 20, 2012 at 10:56 pm
Nice Dave!
March 21, 2012 at 3:38 am
‘circumstances are in fact changed by men -and the educator must himself be educated’ marx.
Capitalist Sorcery (Stengers) does give a little hope…which, if lost, is, of course, the ultimate paralysis.
March 21, 2012 at 4:36 am
Thanks. Along the same lines: drive on an Interstate in heavy dairy country, say the northern Plains or Upstate NY, where cows are just all over the place, and stop at a rest area for coffee. Do they have milk? Nope, sorry — non-dairy creamer only!
March 21, 2012 at 9:56 am
Consumption of Consumption = ideology? The way in which we get people to reconcile themselves to the operations of capital?
Will.
March 21, 2012 at 10:23 am
Love your method of analysis here, Levi! The reason the different combinations aren’t as equally ‘productive’ in this approach, is that we’ve sorta left flat ontology behind – bringing on the vertigo of expansion into the Universe. Hopefully not just a Nietzschean Eternal Return where hot cars, burger joints, and drive-in movie theaters give way to the hippies of the following decade with their music, joints, and crash pads – until the next generation of machos marches off to war, again..
Quantity abducts Quality, and old Qualifiers become vectors of plague (old rationales collapse). In this modus operandi we find that there’s a source and target that take priority, even while knowing there’s something Other that needs to be accounted for. The Narcissistic God gets a headache while struggling to wake up to something outside Itself, something Other to the other that It’s sure is Yet to Come! So, we have the paradox of any particular event being a-teleological – even while, out-of-control, developments are taking on new directions. Enough. Must go reread Baudrillard’s “The Object and Its Destiny”.