Artificial Dementia

Economic “growth” is a euphemism for the desired outcome of government and corporate policies to countermand chronic overproduction intrinsic to capitalism with engineered “overconsumption,” largely through artificial obsolescence of commodities, the arms race, which is driven by yet another strand of artificial obsolescence, and so-called “demand management.” The third strategic pillar in the overconsumption drive is the collaboration and/or compliance of intellectual labour required for designing and carrying out the overconsumption policies – the proverbial “professional-managerial class” or PMC. Amnesia, narcissism, alienation, or dementia are metaphors for the consciousness determined by the artificial obsolescence mode of overconsumption.

In Social Amnesia (1975), Russell Jacoby argued that purported innovations in psychoanalysis were not necessarily improvements. He borrowed the insight from Herbert Marcuse that the much heralded “obsolescence” of Freud’s thought was akin to the planned obsolescence of consumer durable goods:

The evident acceleration of production and consumption in the economic sphere, and hysteria and frenzy in life itself, does not preclude that a fixed society is simply spinning faster. If this is true, the application of planned obsolescence to thought itself has the same merit as its application to consumer goods; the new is not only shoddier than the old, it fuels an obsolete social system that staves off its replacement by manufacturing the illusion that it is perpetually new.

Christopher Lasch wrote an introduction to Jacoby’s book. Four years later his The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations was published. U.S. President James Carter’s 1979 “Crisis of Confidence” speech was inspired, in part by Lasch’s book, although Carter missed its point. Social Amnesia and The Culture of Narcissism shared their extension of diagnostic terms for individual “disorders” to a collective. Both authors also referenced planned obsolescence. It is a recurring subtext in Jacoby’s book. In Lasch’s, it appears in one section that addresses aging and contemporary society’s “instrumental view of knowledge, according to which technological change constantly renders knowledge [and wisdom] obsolete and therefore nontransferable.”

The term “planned obsolescence” was popularized in the 1950s by industrial designer, Clifford Brooks Stevens, who designed the Oscar Meyer Wienermobile:

Our whole economy is based on planned obsolescence, and everybody who can read without moving his lips should know it by now. We make good products, we induce people to buy them, and then next year we deliberately introduce something that will make those products old fashioned, out of date, obsolete.

The idea of making obsolescence the cure for chronic overproduction and the cornerstone of a new consumption-led prosperity was first fully articulated in investment banker Paul Mazur's American Prosperity: Its Causes and Consequences (1928). The word “obsolescence” appears 41 times in the book and “obsolete” another ten times. “Obsolescence is a great force in the recreation of consumer markets,” observed Mazur, “and as such will be an essential factor in the economic future.” Mazur’s friend, advertising executive, J. George Frederick, adopted Mazur’s argument and prefixed the uplifting adjective “progressive” to it in his article, "Is Progressive Obsolescence the Path Toward Increased Consumption," published eight months after American Prosperity. Vance Packard’s The Waste Makers (1960) decried planned obsolescence. Influenced by Packard’s book, Herbert Marcuse cited planned obsolescence frequently as one of the mainstays of 20^th century capitalism.

In his 1971 Deutscher Memorial Prize Lecture, Alienation and Social Control, István Mészáros referred to the concept as artificial obsolescence, and that seems to me a more apt descriptor. Mészáros was awarded the prize for his 1970 book Marx’s Theory of Alienation. Alienation is another recurring theme in both Social Amnesia and The Culture of Narcissism, especially the former. But Mészáros’s – and Marx’s – examination probes beyond the psychological symptoms of alienation to its ground in the objectification of the labour process in which the workers’ surplus labour time is appropriated by and enlarges the capital that exercises power over them. Alienation, in this analysis, refers not merely to a psychological symptom but to a real social relationship in which the product of the labourers’ own actions are transformed into an alien power that stands over and against them as capital.

In a sense, Lasch’s narcissism and Jacoby’s amnesia are synonyms for Marx’s and Mészáros’s alienation – albeit with subtle distinctions. In a passage, relating alienation to consumerism, Lasch wrote, “the propaganda of consumption turns alienation itself into a commodity. It addresses itself to the spiritual desolation of modern life and proposes consumption as the cure.” Jacoby decried equally the “reduction of the Marxist theory of alienation to a subjective condition by liberal sociologists” and the counter-culture conceit of Theodore Roszak that "[t]he revolution which will free us from alienation must be primarily therapeutic in character."

Why artificial dementia? Admittedly dementia, as a metaphor, can be viewed as yet another nuanced synonym for alienation. But there are two main reasons for choosing dementia. First, it refers to a degenerative condition, unlike the arrested development of narcissism and the possibly reversable condition of amnesia. Second, a recent “personal view” in The Lancet Healthy Longevity focused on the relationship between clinical dementia and temporal inequity: “The unequal distribution and control of time across individuals and groups, shaped by structural and social conditions, constraining opportunities for brain-health promoting activities.”

In his 1971 lecture, mentioned above, Mészáros spoke briefly about the function of “artificial obsolescence” (and other artificialities) as “an antidote to too much ‘disposable time’ – to spreading knowledge and to increasing social consciousness…” In subsequent articles and books, over the course of five decades, Mészáros wrote extensively and passionately about the key role disposable time would have to play in any transition away from capital’s increasingly destructive and wasteful drive for solely profit-oriented “minimal time allowed in production.” “The only conceivable way out of such contradictions from the standpoint of labour,” he wrote in a 1988 article, “– namely, the general adoption and creative utilization of disposable time as the orienting principle of societal reproduction – is of course anathema to capital.” That is to say, a more just and equal “distribution and control of time across individuals and groups” advocated by The Lancet article’s authors would be anathema to capital.

It is one thing to write the above conclusion. It is another to demonstrate the analysis behind it. I have reviewed István Mészáros writings on disposable time, some of which are clearer than others. In my view, his best discussion occurs in a 1995 article, “The Communitarian System and the Law of Value in Marx and Lukács” that is also compiled in the book published the same year, Beyond Capital: Toward a Theory of Transition (1995). The article is structured around a critique of György Lukács’s 1968 book, The Process of Democratization (originally published as Demokratisierung Heute und Morgen). Lukács had been Mészáros’s mentor before 1956 when the latter left Hungary after the suppressed uprising.

In The Process of Democratization, Lukács criticized Stalin’s claims that the law of value, “is a historical category and thus related to the existence of commodity production. If the production of commodities ceases to exist, value in its manifestations and the law of value likewise disappears.” Lukács countered that position with a quote from Marx “that the share of each individual producer in the means of subsistence is determined by his labour-time.” The rebuttal to Lukács from Mészáros was not in any respect a defense of Stalin’s argument. He pointed out that Marx had qualified the statement as assuming “merely for the sake of a parallel with the production of commodities.” Mészáros relied on key passages from the Grundrisse to argue that the law of value based on the appropriation of labour time would be superseded in a post-capitalist economy of time by the maximization of disposable time. There would still be an “economy of time” but it would be an economy of qualitatively different times. An appendix to this post contains the passage where Mészáros makes his remarkable disposable time analysis, which draws on notebook VII of the Grundrisse. In other writings, he cites passages about disposable time from notebook IV. What is remarkable about Mészáros’s faithful reading of those notebooks is that it hasn’t become the standard interpretation of Marx since publication and translations of the Grundrisse.

The use of a diagnostic term like dementia as a metaphor carries with it the risk of amplifying the stigma associated with the condition. This is another reason I chose artificial as the modifier, rather than, say, social. Social dementia has a few prior usages. Ruth Sanz Sabido used the term in Memories of the Spanish Civil War: Conflict and Community in Rural Spain: “...this book suggests the term 'social dementia,' a concept that highlights the negative and 'degenerative' consequences that the loss of social memory may inflict on a particular group or community.” Sabido points out the difference of choice or the lack of it “between forgetfulness in dementia sufferers, on the one hand, and socio-politico-legal oblivion, on the other… a person does not choose to suffer dementia, and has no control over the effects and reach of the disease.”:

The matter becomes more convoluted when we consider political and legal oblivion, which is a choice for those who impose it, and is welcomed by those who agree with, or benefit from, the erasure of the past. For those who do not support this form of suppression, but are forced to forget their own history, there is no question of choice.

Svjetlana Nedimović has spoken, in an interview, of the “engineering of social dementia” and elsewhere has written about “the engineering of political dementia.” She also worried about the potential misuse of clinical terms as sociological metaphors:

One cannot be too cautious when employing medical terms in relation to the phenomena of social life. I do not, however, suggest turning this metaphor into a diagnosis or concept. It is meant to help visualise the effects upon society of barring ways into its past and denying its experience. The metaphor conveniently, even if provocatively, links technical and medical jargon, which indicates the intentional crafting of desired outcomes, which then turn out to have semi-desired implications.

The notion of “semi-desired implications” is suggestive. It is a way for officials to disown responsibility for “unintended consequences” or “collateral damage” even in the event of those consequences being readily foreseeable. The loss of social memory is the loss of historical time. “Disposable time is the individuals’ actual historical time,” Mészáros wrote in 2007, “by usurping the role of real wealth and subverting the potential use to which it could be put, capital is the enemy of historical time.”

Of course, artificial dementia resonates with that other currently fashionable artificiality, known as “intelligence.” To the extent that source data for large language models is contaminated with politically-motivated erasure and falsehoods, the output will tend more toward dementia than intelligence, making literal Nedimović’s metaphor of engineering social or political dementia. To paraphrase Juvenal, “who will guard the data?” But the motivation for the immense investments in AI is an even bigger revelation. It is the planned obsolescence of the intellectual labour of planned obsolescence. Where 19^th century capitalism sought to minimize the necessary labour time of productive labour, AI investment strives to minimize the necessary labour time of control labour. There’s no question this would be profitable for a single capital to do. But each capital views the workers of all other capitals as consumers of its products:

To each capitalist, the total mass of all workers [including PMC intellectual workers], with the exception of his own workers, appear not as workers, but as consumers, possessors of exchange values (wages), money, which they exchange for his commodity.

Eleanor said...

Sandwichman -- Have you read Istvan Meszaros? I am struggling with The Challenge and Burden of Historic Time. I find his style very difficult and opaque, but interesting ideas about time in capitalist society float to the surface now and then. I keep thinking of your work as I read him.

January 9, 2009 at 10:22 AM 

Sandwichman said...

I've read some short pieces by Meszaros and found him interesting but highly academic.

January 9, 2009 at 11:12 AM