Capitalism and Pleasure

Adam Smith (Scottish National Gallery, given by J.H. Romanes l945)

Is capitalism based on the deferral of pleasure? This was an issue that Max Weber was dealing with in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. If you believe in predestination which was one of the tenets of Protestantism than the difference between the saved and the damned would be demonstrated by their adherence to values of frugality and saving. But forget the religion, if you're a true capitalist you expend effort in order to build your wealth. Those who believe in seizing the day (carpe diem) indulge the pleasure principle at the expense of their principal. While the sybarite might, with his or her Dionysian spirit, delight in wine, woman and song, the capitalist who's more reason bound and Apollonian, to invoke Nietzsche’s famous duality, actually experiences pain at the loss of his potential wealth. The outflow of capital registers as a diminution of spirit. The anorexia of Kafka’s Hungerkunstler (Hunger Artist) is a perversion of the Protestant ethic. It’s capitalism in extremis to the extent that self-deprivation eventually leads to suicide. The legal philosopher Ronald Dworkin pointed out that self-sacrifice is no longer a form of good if it results in doing harm to the self. So it is with the emetic notion of grace. A true capitalist is not an anorexic since his deferral of pleasure is predicated on the notion of future bliss. While the capitalist defers pleasure, he or she does so in the spirit of anticipation. However, the pleasure that results is more like gestation to the extent that by saving he or she derives satisfaction not from the possibilities of enjoying what money can buy, but in seeing his or her nest egg grow.

Shame

In his l968 film Skammen (Shame) Ingmar Bergman tied the personal to the political in exploring the emotions of a couple who escape war torn Europe by living on an isolated Island. Bergman famously lived on the Island of Faro though that didn’t spare him the shame of pursuit by Sweden’s tax authorities and the humiliation of self-imposed exile to Berlin as a result of the scandal. Shame is a potent emotion in many Bergman films and it's certainly a universal. Shame was also the title of Steve McQueen's 2011 film in which Michael Fassbender played a sex addict. Remember those childhood dreams of being caught with your pants down and how they anticipated the humiliations of adulthood in which you lived in fear of having your foibles exposed? You may have acted like a coward when you wanted to be a fearless tough guy. You found yourself troubled by an attraction to someone of the same sex when, however enlightened you might have been sexually, you still gloated over being straight. At the end of the film Bergman’s protagonists Eva (Liv Ullmann) and Jan (Max Van Sydow) find themselves on a boat riding through a sea of bodies.  In this crossing of a figurative Styx even their Charon has perished; their purgatory is to drift without direction to the underworld. “History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake,” says Joyce’s Stephen Daedalus. But what is the eponymous shame that constitutes Eva and Jan’s literal and metaphoric hell and is it real? You are ashamed of being naked because there's nothing to cover up what you’ve become, what you are. Bergman made his film during the height of the Vietnam war and of course if you are responsible for the My Lai massacre you have something to be ashamed about. But the average human being suffers from a shame that’s an embarrassment at being. Even if they aren’t guilty of any crimes, no one wants to be known, no one wants to have their limitations exposed. “Like a dog,” he said. It was as if the shame of it would out live him,” are the last lines of Kafka’s The Trial.

Agnieszka Holland’s Burning Bush

Agnieszka Holland's Burning Bush, which is currently playing at Film Forum, takes place in the aftermath of Prague Spring when Russian tanks invaded and repressed the Czech revolution.
The movie, originally produced as a TV mini-series, is not a philosophical mediation like Milan Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being (which was filmed by Philip Kaufman), but more a political thriller in the style of Costa-Gravas Z or Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers. The title of the film comes from the biblical miracle that's echoed in the image of Jan Palach’s self-immolation with the conceit lying in the fact that while the body might have died his spirit lived on. Twenty years after his death came the Velvet Revolution of l989 in which Communism was finally overthrown. Apparently, the biblical metaphor still remains relevant. In a flagrant slap in the face to post-modernism with its promise of non-ideological drives in an equally  non-Manichean universe, what was deemed unthinkable in our day and age, occurred only weeks ago in the Crimea. Burning Bush splices real life footage as well as characters into its partially fictionalized narrative and the central figure is the real life figure of Dagmar Buresova (Tatiana Pauhofova), a lawyer who brings libel charges against a party apparachnik named Novy (Martin Huba) who had claimed that Jan Palach’s death was the result of a reactionary conspiracy. Novy claims Palach’s act was intended as a circus trick, “cold fire” in which the illusion of burning is created. The conspiracy theory derives from the notion that the Russians would be provoked into a full out annexation of Czechoslovakia if the ante were raised--something which those who preferred a veneer of autonomy to the truth of subjugation were out to forestall.The leitmotif of appearance and reality actually inserts itself from the beginning of the film when the iconic burning scene, which also recalls the Buddhist monks in Vietnam in a similar period, is reflected in a ticket kiosk and a number of other mirrored surfaces, mimicking the distancing effect the mind creates to protect itself from traumatic perception. Kafka’s cockroach, an honorary citizen of Prague, makes a cameo appearance in Holland’s film and he's neither killed nor freed from the box in which he’s kept as food for a lizard, which is one way to view the geopolitics of Eastern Europe at the time. Political films tend to create a black and white universe and Burning Bush is rescued from being a lives of the saints, employing the Czech penchant for ambivalence and irony, which serve to broaden its moral spectrum

The Metamorphosis

Let’s say you see a water bug. You grab a piece of toilet paper and prepare to crush it. Sensing the cloud over its existence, the water bug scampers away. You give chase and the water bug becomes fairly elusive like a fleet-footed boxer whose able to duck and slip a powerful opponent’s punches. Water bugs aren’t supposed to think and yet they’re plainly capable of sensing the danger to their existence. Science Times recently ran a piece on quotidian sadism ( "'Everyday Sadists' Among Us” NYT, 9/16/13). The subject of bugs even comes up in one of the experiments the article refers to which tested sadism in run of the mill individuals who aren’t proto Hannibal Lecter’s. It’s like the notion that there is a little bit of larceny in everyone.  Of course Stanley Milgram’s famous experiment which tested obedience to authority by use of shock was also a measure of sadism. Some people turned the shock up even though the actors seemed to be writhing in pain and some couldn’t even though they were told not to pay attention to what they were seeing. But back to that water bug. The fact that the animal gives you a run for the money is a clue to the fact that it experiences something akin to emotion—at least the emotion of fear. However, paradoxically it’s just the presence of this human trait that whets one’s appetite. After being tormented by a little fly, you feel no moral compunctions about using a swatter on it. It’s Kafka’s Metamorphosis in reverse. The fly or water bug has become human.

Letter From Croatia V: Ston Walled

Photograph of Ston Wall by Hallie Cohen

Modern man’s full of inner defenses. The world of Franz Kafka is one in which inner states of mind take the form of impenetrable fortresses like The Castle. But these are merely projections. Ston a city whose name mirrors its function is an example of how man fortified himself in medieval times. It’s the Great Wall of Croatia—and the longest fortified wall in Europe. Of course during the cold war there were the Iron Curtain and the Berlin Wall. However, these mechanisms of crowd control involved electronic surveillance and primarily barbed wire and electricity. Ston, which dates back to 1333 protected the nearby Ragusian salt works which themselves emanate from Roman times. During that period of history Dubrovnik, itself famous for its massive battlements, was a City State (visitors to Dubrovnik today walk its 2 km wall). And Ston was acquired since it was deemed to be so essential for the survival of the local economy. Today tourists ascend the old Ston wall and from sea level they look a little like Gregor Samsa, the man turned into an insect in Kafka’s famed Metamorphosis. The walls of Ston are still providing protection in the form of perspective, chastening against the delusion that man is the master of his own fate.