— Machine-made products invaded the markets; perfectly identical industrial objects frustrated the eye accustomed to discriminate between similar things.
Ivan Illich makes that remark, one that concerns what began to develop during the mid-nineteenth century when the railroad began to spread everywhere, in his 1995 essay “The Scopic Past and the Ethics of the Gaze: A Plea for the Historical Study of Ocular Perceptions,” which is available online by that title. In my mind, what reading that line by Illich produced — which literally means “led forth,” from Latin pro- “forward, forth” + ducere “to lead” — was the following thought:
“What the market will bear is nothing, and only nothing.”
I’ll briefly trace the path that thought took in bearing itself to me.
* * *
The old adage “whatever the market will bear” is traditionally used to express what is presented as an answer to the question of what determines the price of any marketed product. Used in that way, it means that the price of a given marketed product rises to meet market demand. That is, the price is set by what consumers are willing to pay for whatever is being marketed.
To put what is really the same point just a bit differently: market-prices are always a function of “supply and demand.” The greater the demand, the higher the price goes; and when demand goes lower, so does the price. Conversely, to flip the same old worn coin over, the greater grows the supply of some product, which means the more competition there is among sellers to produce a given product they wish to sell, the lesser grows what the market will bear as its price, that is, the less consumers are willing to pay for the product. In short, supply and demand vary inversely, according to “the law of supply and demand,” fixing the price that stocks, for example, will bear on the stock-market.
* * *
As it true of so many words, the word bear has multiple senses in our language. One sense is that I used in the immediately preceding section of this post, in citing the so-called law of supply and demand as the determining factor of how high a price for mass-produced items — from anvils and zeppelins to stocks and bonds and everything else in between — can rise before market booms go bust and “Bull Markets” become “Bear Markets.”
In the final locution of the proceeding sentence, the word bear is used in a metaphorically nominative sense to mean a type of animal. That is, of course, another one of that word’s senses.
Yet one more is the sense used in the final sentence of the first section of this post: “I’ll briefly trace the path that thought took in bearing itself to me.” In that case, bear means “to bring, carry, convey, deliver.” It has such a meaning, to give another example, in the ancient adage from the days of the Trojan War: “Beware of Greeks bearing gifts!”
My own advice would be to beware of any global marketeer bearing gifts, which prove no less destructive upon being opened than did the great wooden horse the Greeks bore the Trojans.
* * *
When those who are pregnant come to term, they bear children — to use that same word in yet another sense. In that sense, to bear does not mean “to tolerate or endure,” as it does when one says that the highest price the consumer market with “bear” is a function of supply and demand, nor does it mean to carry or deliver, nor does it name a fierce sort of beast. Rather, it means “to give birth to” or “to yield,” Just as humans and animals bear young of their kind, so do fruit trees bear fruit, cultivated soils bear crops, and meditation practices bear serenity.
It is above all in that sense of bear that the global capitalist consumer market bears nothing, absolutely nothing. It never gives birth to anything truly new.
Rather, it always kills.
