Transcending Capitalism

Thoughts?

Shitting and I-Banking

[yes, that's a Thom Browne suit!, and yes, he's a real live I-banker!]

At the Denver airport, I'm taking a shit and reading Motor Trend ("The Homeland Security Administration has raised the threat level to, ORANGE."). After about ten minutes - I'm really just biding my time, this article on the new BMW 1 series (modeled on the 1978 2002) is really interesting, - I decide to rejoin my family, and I drop the Motor Trend on the floor, kick it to the side, then immediately leave for fear of being mistaken by the gentleman in the adjacent stall for a toe-tapper.

Isn't it exciting that Barack Obama won the Iowa caucuses? What an historic moment! I think that this suggests that the country is finally ready for CHANGE. Obama, to me, represents CHANGE, leadership, a new perspective - most of all, an optimism about our country. The Democratic Party represents hope and the promise of liberal democracy, a better future for everyone, not just the special interests of a few wealthy people.

Two interesting articles in the Times today - our favorite intellectual prude Stanley Fish, arguing as always that his job as a humanist is "useless", and a piece on the decline in prestige of medicine and law. To my mind, these articles are treating a similar theme - the ways in which we try to make our intellectual, critical/ethical existence coincide with our "mundane," worldly existence.

Apparently law and medicine are losing ground because young people like myself are more interested in having "creative freedom" and integrating their work and "personal lives" such that the former becomes an outgrowth of the latter. This means, of course, that we're drawn to investment banking and management consulting, where we can truly realize our creative passion, where as Marx wrote we can "hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, and criticize after dinner."

For Stanley Fish (and here I agree with the ol' curmudgeon!), no effort to justify the humanities from some outside, quantitative or social perspective (e.g., it exposes people to morally fortifying examples from literature, gives people greater critical thinking skills that they can they apply to other areas of their existence - say, their I-banking job after getting a History degree at Princeton) will work, and moreover such efforts end up devaluing humanities-oriented thought in the first place. "The humanities are their own good. There is nothing more to say."

Let me put it this way: is it a kawinkydink that I vacillate between wanting to be an arrogant, effete theory-hipster with an endowed chair at Berkeley, and wanting to be a high-fiving, Red Bull-drinking I-Banker who works 100 hours a week and can only relieve the tension created by my lifestyle through flagrant consumption that feeds the sublime machine to which I enslave myself?

No. This is a paradox that I have been trying to work through for the past two years, and I don't seem to be moving anywhere except into a more and more deeply emotional appreciation of the impossibility of resolving it.

How is it that investment banking (the Times article actually does cite this) could seem to people to be the most self-creating and intellectually 'integrated' profession? I think it's because i-banking is essentially what is going on, in the broadest sense of the term. It is simply bullshit to suggest that 21st century American culture is not defined by the confluence of global capital, highly specialized and exclusivized consumption, and a general sense of giving oneself over to a sublime, technologized, rationalized system the complexity of which is impossible to understand. No one knows what the fuck is going on in international finance. Though it is a cliche to cite the subprime issue, it really is quite indicative. Basically, people try to come up with more and more esoteric (the word I-bankers love to use is "exotic") forms of accounting for money, which entails allowing complex, interconnected systems to become more an more autonomous. Like critical theory, investment banking spins off more and more into its own autonomous, rational, Platonic realm of pure forms; like Adorno and Horkheimer's Dialectic of Enlightenment, "the fully enlightened world radiates disaster triumphant". Also like Adorno and Horkheimer, I-bankers feel fucking baller: they have situated themselves at the center of this absurd realm and have produced themselves as its product, in the same way that esoteric theory is always already an ironic self-deconstruction, an exercise in the proving of one's own uselessness, one's own ideological determination.

My latest solution to this career indecision is to try to combine them: I will be a Deleuzean schizoanalyst of the futures market (as Soros applied Popper's pragmatism to the market and made billions), I will be the next Jeff Koons, or, most recently, I will become an investment banker as an art project: I will get patrons to pay me to be an investment banker, on top of which I will make huge bonuses because I will actually be an investment banker, I will think like one, I will become one, and the patrons will get "nothing" in return, which will be precisely the substance of the art-work, and my own position as artist will be confirmed in the completeness of my existence as an I-banker, as the next Patrick Bateman.