[MD] U.S. Values: the Jones

[ARLO J BENSINGER JR]

[Ant to Marsha]
This continual emphasis on material success (described by the NYT article)
unfortunately shows that the concerns in ZMM are as relevant today as when it
was first published in the mid-1970s.

[Arlo]
Yes, so true. One of the gross maladies, referred to in ZMM's passage about
"vendors of substance", of this mercantilistic treatment of "value" is what
Marx called "commodity fetishism", and Lukacs called "reification". From "Marx
for a Post-Communist Era: On poverty, corruption and banality", Stefan Sullivan
writes: "Drawn from Marx's concept of commodity fetishism developed in Das
Kapital, it implied simply the lack of unity between an individual and the
object he creates..."

Let me interrupt here with Pirsig in ZMM, "It is this identity that is the basis
of craftsmanship in all the technical arts. And it is this identity that
modern, dualistically conceived technology lacks. The creator of it feels no
particular sense of identity with it. The owner of it feels no particular sense
of identity with it. The user of it feels no particular sense of identity with
it."

Bac to Sullivan, "Because of given socio-economic structures, these objects
appear alien to the producer; their human-subjective content is subverted by
their value as a quantifiable commodity of exchange."

Back to Pirsig, "Along the streets that lead away from the apartment he can
never see anything through the concrete and brick and neon but he knows that
buried within it are grotesque, twisted souls forever trying the manners that
will convince themselves they possess Quality, learning strange poses of style
and glamour vended by dream magazines and other mass media, and paid for by the
vendors of substance."

The corruptive element is the assumption that economic value is neutrally tied
to Quality. Since we assume that that which possesses _greater_ Quality has a
_greater_ cost, we tie cost to an objective, neutral assessment of Quality. You
see this in our resident neocons assessment of poverty (they're lazy and
worthless), in the newspeak associated with human relations (employees are
"resources", firing is having "your position value adjusted", etc.). "Branding"
has long been a Holy Grail for products brought to market. Our lives are
inextricably tied to our possessions and wealth as measures of our value. And
this permeates the very core of our language, and hence our very constructions
of self.

You remember the part in ZMM about John's reluctance to use a strip of old beer
can to fix his handlebars, despite the material being the highest Quality part
for the job? The position John was coming from one of commidty fetishism, or
Lukacsian "reification", value derives from economic value... the beer can has
no  economic value, and so the material holds no value. "For a while I thought
what I should have done was sneak over to the workbench, cut a shim from the
beer can, remove the printing and then come back and tell him we were in luck,
it was the last one I had, specially imported from Germany. That would have
done it. A special shim from the private stock of Baron Alfred Krupp, who had
to sell it at a great sacrifice. Then he would have gone gaga over it."

In LILA, Pirsig offers a framework to analyze and condemn commodity fetishism.
Commodity fetishism is simply the elevation of social patterns of value
(economic) over intellectual patterns of value (pragmatic) and the elusive
"code of art". Warhol, for example, manipulated commodity fetishism to show
that "value as art" was more about economic value than artistic Quality.

>From Wikipedia. "People within capitalist societies find their material life
organized through the medium of commodities. They trade their labor-power
(which in Marx's view is a commodity) for a special commodity, money, and use
that commodity to claim various other commodities produced by other people. The
social nature of society is destroyed by the abstraction of commodities, in the
sense that "use-value" (the usefulness of an object or action) is totally
separated from "exchange-value" (the marketplace value of an object or
action)."

Or, in Pirsig's words, "And now he began to see for the first time the
unbelievable magnitude of what man, when he gained power to understand and rule
the world in terms of dialectic truths, had lost. He had built empires of
scientific capability to manipulate the phenomena of nature into enormous
manifestations of his own dreams of power and wealth...but for this he had
exchanged an empire of understanding of equal magnitude: an understanding of
what it is to be a part of the world, and not an enemy of it."