VOLUME III, SEMESTER 1, CHAPTER 12
The Present Age, That Position Can No Longer Be Seen
Start on the day a person signs a thirty year mortgage in high spirits and stands his friends a dinner. That gladness is where this chapter begins, because the four chapters before watched the position shed its skin down to the bare slave and the bound serf and the worker at the machine, each layer more refined and harder to see, and today’s layer is refined to the point where on the day you sign you are still glad.
The chapter comes in three sections.
The first section works the account of a one million apartment, a down payment of two to three hundred thousand saved over ten years, a loan of seven to eight hundred thousand repaid over thirty years as one million three to one million six, the part repaid over close to double, and above the price five to nine hundred thousand more, going to the bank and past the bank to depositors and pension funds and insurers, scattering into thousands upon thousands of nameless pockets so that he does not know whom he keeps alive and they do not know who he is, the purest form of the position, a holding with the person wholly taken out, where the Han clerk and the bought slave had at least met face to face. In law the house carries a mortgage in the bank’s hand through the thirty years, so his true position is working for the bank and living in the bank’s house, what is pledged out being not the body but thirty years, and the volume does not curse the house, which is Mencius’s holding and the deepest of human wishes, but speaks of what the thirty years make of him, daring not to quit or fall ill or change work or stop to think what he wants, his name on a house and the room in his hand zero, the right to say no held every day and never dared. And the deepest layer is that no one presses him, the contract read and the pen held and the name signed himself, no swindle with the terms in black and white and no robbery since he truly wanted the home, the today-version of the forty nine year contract except that even the hope he now supplies himself, the whole line from the Shang holding the person to today doing nothing while you walk over and sign and gladly hand over thirty years, the receiving side stepped all the way back out of sight until only a printed contract and a smiling self remain, wei so refined the one who is ceded does the whole argument himself.
The second section follows one ordinary day from the six thirty alarm the phone maker’s rhythm set, through the seven o’clock scroll that trains his attention for the platform, the eight thirty office seat bound by contract, the noon buy-now-pay-later, the evening auto-deduction, the child’s homework, the cat’s litter, the spouse’s emotional labor, the bedtime scroll that misses the set sleep, at least eight continuous ceding relations hanging at once, to the employer and bank and shopping platform and child and pet and spouse and algorithm and phone maker, and yet he feels himself not enslaved but a responsible employee, a steady home-buyer, a parent who loves his child, a gentle cat lover, every title real and worthy of respect with a ceding tied under each that he cannot see. And the deepest layer is that the receiving side need not be a person, the mortgage’s end an abstract financial system, the cat’s end a five kilogram creature that cannot speak, the algorithm’s end a stretch of code with not even a will, the position broken free of the physical base of one person holding another and entered onto the plane of pure symbol, the cat unable to argue it be waited on while the person argues it for the cat, the code unable to demand six hours while the person finds the reason for the code, the one who is ceded doing the whole argument himself. The five kilogram cat that has a meter-seven adult shoveling its dung morning and evening, daring not be angry when it treads his face at three, is the opening room again, the shoveler holding the cat’s rations while his time and money and sleep are held in the cat’s hand, the one who takes the constraint the slave. And the emptiest net, six hours of short video a year making ninety one days handed to a stretch of code and very nearly nothing back, unlike the mortgage’s home or the child or the purring cat, and he cannot stop because the lock is built into his synapses, a success of wei on the layer of biology.
The third section blocks the tempting conclusion that the nets should be cut off one at a time, since a person in no relation with anyone is not free but empty, and settling one another is from the first the handing over of a part of yourself. The judgment it lays down, not taking back the cruelty of the human offering or the mine child or the uncleared debt, is that the mechanism of ceding is in itself neutral, the mother ceding sleep for her child of her whole willing heart, the craftsman ceding amusement and waking glad, the married pair ceding and growing a thing of another kind, ceding being the way people enter relation and the unwilling getting nothing back. The dividing line is not the ceding but whether you know you are ceding, the clear-eyed ceding and the unwitting ceding two different things, the mother who reckoned and owns her account against the scroller felt out of his pocket who does not know the account exists, and the rod is three lines, do I know what I cede, what do I get back, do I own this account, a person who knows which position he stands on wholly different from one who does not. The old woman who guards her money to her death, seen near, guards not money but the love who saved it and died, and the volume does not answer whether her ceding is clear-eyed but only lets the person under her be seen, for the verdict is never handed down by this brush, and the aim is not to make a person uneasy but to hand over a pair of eyes that see the position and not the title, since a lock that can be seen can be bargained over and the one you cannot see is the stoutest.
That is the method this chapter hands you. When you hang on a net, do not stop at the title of owner or user or cat lover, ask the three lines and find the position underneath. What you carry away is that a lock that can be seen is a lock that can be bargained over, and the one you do not know is there is the stoutest, carried toward the next chapter where the master and the slave are set down at last as two positions and not two kinds of people.
SECTIONS:
SECTION 1. The Thirty Year Mortgage, Pledging the Future Out in Advance
SECTION 2. Twenty Four Hours a Day, in Eight Nets at Once
SECTION 3. The Clear-Eyed Ceding, and the Unwitting Ceding
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.
SECTION 1. The Thirty Year Mortgage, Pledging the Future Out in Advance