Money
On Hypopsia
I want to think about several things. First, the word “hypopsia.” It’s taken from ancient Greek and appears in Jacques Rancière’s book On the Shores of Politics. The word means “to look underneath,” meaning, to check and see if there’s something underneath, say, your bed. You are checking because you are suspicious that the bed you are on is not safe or is not all there is. Hypopsia is the condition of being suspicious about the way things appear to be. And philosophy as a project, as a mode of thought begins with hypopsia, suspicion, and not, as some thinkers have argued, with thaumadzein, “the wonder at that which is as it is.” (“As far as philosophy is concerned, if it is true it begins with wonder”—Hanna Arendt Introduction to Politics. On the other hand, the English philosopher Simon Critchley believes philosophy “begins with disappointment,” which, of course, is very English of him.)
What is it that Marx brought to the emerging science of political economy (Smith, Ricardo, Mills, Malthus) in the 19th century? It was not heated wonder but cold suspicion. He did not trust the appearance (specter) of capitalism or the international market system, and his whole life was spent trying to remove its appearance and reveal its real. Capital is all about looking underneath the bed—what’s really there?
Let’s now think about a short but important work of semiotic theory by Roland Barthes, Mythologies. The opening essay in that book, “The World of Wrestling,” decodes the language and tropes of professional wrestling, which was then (the early 1950s) as theatrical and scripted as it is today. In the essay, Barthes expresses fascination at the spectacle professional wrestlers make of their moments of victory and defeat. When a wrestler is doing well in a fight, he is in a state of extreme happiness and excitement; if he is losing, he makes a big show of his suffering—the wrestler moans, groans, and squirms like a worm. His suffering is bottomless.
Let’s now think about the recent events on Wall Street. Like Barthes’s professional wrestlers, Wall Street only has two emotional states: absolute euphoria and absolute suffering. When happy, it is too happy; when sad, it is too sad. When it laughs, it laughs way too loudly (showing teeth, gums, and a demented tonsil). When it weeps, its tears fall and fall and fall. But why this primitive performance? We must be suspicious of it. Why can’t Wall Street be just sad or just happy? Why this need to go to such extremes? What is this (joy or joys) or that (sorrow or sorrows) appearance obscuring?
In the case of the present performance, all of this suffering and crying about the stage, Wall Street is obscuring a spectacular transference and concentration of wealth. What looks like a crash and a great amount of pain is in fact a socialization of losses (accumulated by, yes, neo-liberal policies—these people are shameless) and a mass movement of the universal equivalent to an even smaller percentage of the global population. What we are really watching is the whole world becoming a Third World.
Comments (15)
Actually, Ancient Greek had no such word: this is a learned neo-Greek coinage from the 1970s, sometimes also encountered as "hypopsy."
Posted by Simac | September 17, 2008 1:49 PM@1) From On the Shores of Politics ... "Suspicion, in Thucydides' Greek, is called hypopsia: looking underneath. What characterizes democracy for Thucydides is the rejection of this looking underneath."
Posted by charles mudede | September 17, 2008 1:54 PMwe have a looooooooong way to go before we experience half of third world poverty.
Posted by SeMe | September 17, 2008 1:55 PMI read the first line of this post and suddenly became narcoleptic.
Posted by manbaby | September 17, 2008 2:05 PMWhat was it Charlie Gibson said to Palin recently? "I'm sorry. I got buried under a blizzard of words there."
If your point were valid, I doubt you'd need to use false anthropomorphisms and irrelevant tangents to make it. As is, I'm not actually sure what your point is.
Posted by Dan | September 17, 2008 2:12 PMWall Street usually _is_ happy or sad or indifferent. We (that is to say the masses in the public who don't know the actual workings of it) only pay attention to it when it is Ecstatic or Morose and that's usually because the media is throwing the information up every three seconds: "OMG! BEST DAY EVER!!!" "WTF! WE'RE SCREWED!!!!" In a very real way, all these numbers and these pictures, for all that they represent, are as meaningless to daily life as the Top Ten Box Office numbers.
That's why I'm watching all this with a grain of salt, because while I don't dispute Golob's posts and don't know enough to imagine that everything is going to be just fine, I feel inured to the hype of the news. Worst day EVER? Really? Hunh. Get back to me on that.
Posted by Chris B | September 17, 2008 2:14 PMlook at it this way;
SKF was up more than 10% 2 days ago, down 10% yesterday, and up again more than 10% today. Smooth that over a 3 day moving average and it doesn't look that manic.
Posted by Bellevue Ave | September 17, 2008 2:19 PMI like getting all my financial tips from "people" who lurk on blog comment threads all day
Posted by um | September 17, 2008 2:30 PMIm actually a bot from bloomberg.
Posted by Bellevue Ave | September 17, 2008 2:39 PMThis post is an excellent example of bad writing. Its meandering path of thoughts and failure to make a clear point reveal that it was poorly thought out and its excessive use of big words makes the author look like he is trying to look smarter than he is. It requires a complete and honest revision.
Posted by east coaster | September 17, 2008 3:19 PMbig words?
Posted by charles mudede | September 17, 2008 3:33 PM@11:
Oh, come on, Charles. The signal to noise ratio in your posts is absurdly low. Much as I dislike what you write, I'm not saying this to be mean; this is simply why I dislike it.
You can play at ignorance--perhaps it is we, the audience, who are too dimwitted to appreciate you?--but isn't the point of writing to communicate with your audience?
What's the quotation attributed to Pascal (and Cato and many others)? "I apologize for the length of this letter; had I had more time, I would have made it shorter."
Posted by Dan | September 17, 2008 4:29 PMI wonder if either of the Coen Brothers read "The World of Wrestling" before making "Barton Fink".
BTW @10, ever spent time on the West Coast? Try it sometime. Maybe you'll understand Seattle writers better.
Or maybe not...
Posted by Jeff Stevens | September 17, 2008 6:13 PMI was with you until the end. "...a mass movement of the universal equivalent to an even smaller percentage of the global population."
So the government is taking over a lot of these banks and companies that are going bankrupt, right? And so this amounts to a "socialization of losses".
But what's the upshot?
Posted by Lorenzo | September 17, 2008 7:18 PMCharles, you're exactly right. The massive consolidation of wealth that will result from the failure of so many big players in the financial sector is the ultimate consequence of a series of deregulations that have been pushed through in the last decade. According to reports on Bloomberg, this isn’t the first time that the loopholes of the new regulatory environment were coveted by a lucky few as the market corrected to reflect looser restrictions. Last night the new revelation seemed to be that without people noticing, the short sell regulations had been softened.
Anyway, essentially a few very smart people are working the system and they are making ridiculous amounts of money at the expense of everyone else. I don't think this was an accident.
Posted by M | September 17, 2008 11:15 PMComments Closed
Comments are closed on this post.