Sociability

Interest (What is this for?)

Sociability

0.0 BILL: And now, another lens on interest, sociability. By “sociable,” we don’t just mean humans. Many other sentient creatures are also sociable in their various ways, within and between species. Even plants are sociable to the extent that they are sensitive to each other’s presence.

Here, we want to contrast antagonistic and sociable interests, and the more complex case where these two aspects of sociability transpose. This can happen in many ways, where antagonistic interests cynically leverage solidary interests, for example, or rhetorically articulated solidary interests are a cover-up for antagonistic interests.

Reference: Kalantzis, Mary and Bill Cope, 2020, Adding Sense: Context and Interest in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning, Cambridge UK, Cambridge University Press, pp. 274-76.

0.47 BILL: Here is one of the great thinkers of modernity, Adam Smith, whose work encapsulates both sides of this contradictory play of sociability in our modern lives. First, I want to offer a quote from his “Theory of Moral Sentiments” of 1759.

1.03 BILL: “[O]ur senses … never can carry us beyond our own person … By the imagination we place ourselves in [another’s] situation, … conceiving what we ourselves should feel in the like situation … It is the impressions of our senses only, not those of his, which our imaginations copy.”

This process Smith calls “sympathy or correspondence of sentiments.” Here Smith sounds very like that other great philosopher, Edith Stein, when she speaks about empathy. This we would call the expression of solidary interests.

1.35: BILL: Now here’s another side of Smith’s thinking, this time from “The Wealth of Nations,” the foundational text of modern economics, published in 1776. In it he describes a new arrangement of sociability, the division of labor. His example is a pin factory, where even something like making a little pin involves 18 different steps, with each person undertaking one absolutely mindless, repetitive step.

This illustrates is the contradictory play of sociability. People need pins – this is their use value. To get them they need to be bought, and when they are made by wage workers in a factory, there is a whole lot of human misery, including having to do soul-destroying work in a factory in order to earn a living, then the question of the affordability of commodities when the pay is meager. So, in the sociability of the pin factory and a world where some people make pins because other people buy them, we may parse a complex amalgam of solidary and antagonistic interests.

2.41 BILL: Here, from Smith’s “The Wealth of Nations,” is one of the most famous quotes in all of modern economics and social theory.

“It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from regard to their own self-interest … [M]an has almost constant occasion for the help of his brethren, and it is in vain for him to expect it from their benevolence only. He will be more likely to prevail if he can influence their self-love in his favour … [G]enerally, indeed, [he] neither intends to promote the publick interest, nor knows how much he is promoting it … [B]y directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end that was no part of his intention … By promoting his own interest, he frequently promotes that of society more effectually than when he really intends to promote it.”

This captures perfectly the strange play of antagonistic and solidary interests that we live in market societies. It also captures the process of reification, where we are immersed in a world of whose underlying dynamics we are not aware on a daily basis.

Then, Adam Smith and his followers turn this into rhetoric. They make it an explicit justification for market societies. But today, market advocates today often forget the other part of Smith, where he was a critic of the alienation that came with working in the pin factory and just because the workers have been forced to sell their labor on this employment market.

Reference: Kalantzis, Mary and Bill Cope, 2020, Adding Sense: Context and Interest in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning, Cambridge UK, Cambridge University Press, 268-71.

4.21 BILL: Here now is a rough map with a few examples of solidary contrasted with antagonistic interests. Both kinds of interest are equally sociable – some of the social connections may not be nice, but they are still social in their sources and meanings.

Reference: Kalantzis, Mary and Bill Cope, 2020, Adding Sense: Context and Interest in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning, Cambridge UK, Cambridge University Press, p. 275.

4.36 BILL: Now, I want to parse sociable interest in the case of the inventor of one of the most influential textual artifacts of the modern world. This is a statue of Francesco Datini, standing in the town square of Prato, a town just north of Florence. Datini became head of a trading empire that by the end of the fourteenth century extended from England to North Africa to the Middle East. It traded in goods only the rich could afford – silk, exotic spices, religious pictures and slaves, as if trading human beings were the same as any other chattel.

5.10 BILL: The remarkable text I just mentioned was the bill of exchange. This was a promise that a trusted trading partner would make good the payment for a purchased object at the place it was purchased, a long way distant. Here is one of the first of these texts:

“In the name of God, 5th February 1410.

“Pay by this first letter … to Guircardo Catani, four hundred and eighty-three lire, twelve soldi, five denari … equivalent to 617 francs … Make good a payment and pay into the account of Barolino de Nicolao Bartolini of Paris …

“Antonio di Neve di Montpelier, greetings.”

Today we have all sorts of objects for the exchange of value across distance. In fact, Datini becomes one of the inventors of the key textual artifacts of modern finance and banking. To trade across such long distances requires a lot of trust, that the Bill of Exchange will be honored. But Datini was an anxious and not very trusting man, hoping that God would help him so that value that was his would not be stolen. So, the Bill of Exchange is a complicated expression of solidary and antagonistic interests.

Reference: Kalantzis, Mary and Bill Cope, 2020, Adding Sense: Context and Interest in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning, Cambridge UK, Cambridge University Press, pp. 285-87.

6.30 BILL: Moving forward into the digital era we have crypto-currencies based on the distributed ledger system, blockchain. Just as Datini had the parties endorsed the bill of exchange so its value would carry across time and space, blockchain works on the same textual principle, where every transaction is registered in a ledger.

It is the same mix of sociable and antagonistic interests that underlie blockchain-based currencies such as Bitcoin, where scamming is always about happen, when antagonistic self-interest that is part of the logic of the text goes too far.

The larger social price paid in the case of blockchain is the environmental effects of the horrible amount of electricity it needs to prevent the antagonism from becoming self-destructive.

Reference: Kalantzis, Mary and Bill Cope, 2020, Adding Sense: Context and Interest in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning, Cambridge UK, Cambridge University Press, pp. 287-91.