VOLUME III, SEMESTER 2, CHAPTER 20
The Market Is a Rule, and a Sieve Too
Start in a corridor in Rochester in 1975, in a company that had ruled a trade for a hundred years. Among the five chains of the last chapter the first was the market, and all that was said of it was that he cannot stop, never what it is, nor by what it locks a person, nor by what it can carry a whole trade away in a single night. This chapter lifts that one procedure out on its own and looks at it, and it does the looking in three moves: a story that shows the rule at work, two ancestors who name what the rule is and how cold it runs, and then the hard turn that keeps the whole chapter from tipping into worship of the rule, the question of what must never be set on it at all.
The first section is Kodak, the hide the last chapter spoke of, thick and firm, first in plant and patent and channel and name, the city of Rochester living by it. In 1975 an engineer in his twenties made a thing as clumsy as a toaster, twenty seconds a frame, the face barely made out, and worse than the company’s own film by an immeasurable distance, but with one difference from every camera before it, it used no film, and film was the whole fortune, the thing bought round after round that this thing cancelled. He carried it up and those above pressed it down, and the section refuses to let you curse them, walking close to see that they answered for tens of thousands of rice bowls and held the finest film line in the world, and that leaving a business earning great money to make a coarse slow thing that would ruin that very business was, in that year, a reasonable choice, every one of them doing his duty. Then thirty years passed and the coarse thing grew fine and small and cheap and bored into the pane of glass in every pocket, and the trade of film was gone, not beaten down by any rival charging into Rochester but by several hundred million people each no longer buying, a mother, a student, a traveler, each a decision smaller than small, and the company fell with its plant and patents and craft all still standing, only no one coming to buy. That is the market: not a person, not a room, not a judge on high, but those hundreds of millions of small decisions gathered into one, reckoning the account of everyone against the company’s account of its own house, asking not how hard you toiled or how brilliant you were yesterday but one line only, today, does anyone still want this thing of yours. And the section corrects the last chapter by one layer: the thing that carries the table away is not technology, technology is only the hand that sets a new thing before the buyer, and the market is the eyes.
The second section asks Guanzi out for the name. The market is the standard of goods, seven characters that fix the position dead, not a place, not an invisible hand, not the core of the economy, but a rule, and what it measures is how much a thing is worth, a number never for the maker to say. The company read enormous in 1975 and near zero thirty-seven years on, having done nothing wrong in between, no low-price rival and no accident, making new things the whole way, even making the camera that weeded it out, and still the number walked from enormous to zero. And the rule is joined to an action, first it measures and then the sieve moves, and what weeded the company was not rivals or buyers or decree or its own botching but the rule itself, no hand lifted, the position sifted to wherever the degree slid. Laozi names the coldness: heaven and earth are not kind, they treat the ten thousand things as straw dogs, the straw dog borne with solemnity to the altar’s center before the sacrifice and flung by the roadside after, not cruel, for cruelty stirs feeling, but not kind, without feeling, impartial to the point of striking cold, flinging the hundred-thirty-year company away clean not from hatred but because it only reads the number and the number reached zero. Then the section turns the rule onto the reader, who holds a real-time degree on the position he stands in, and ties it to scarcity, few who can and many who want reading high, and to last semester, to know your own degree is clear seeing and not to know it is the danger.
The third section holds down the chill the second raised, the chill that says measure everything, and answers it slowly, and only here does the chapter stand firm. First it sets out the rule’s true merit honestly, with Sima Qian, the farmer and craftsman and trader who if they do not come out leave food short and work undone and the three treasures cut off, the plow dead in the shop until the rule tells the trader where it is dear and therefore short and therefore needed, the cold rule doing a matter as great as heaven, letting a thing walk into the hand of the one who needs it most. Then it puts the question straight with two things, the mother’s breakfast and a friendship, and shows the strange fact that they cannot be measured not because the rule is too coarse but because the moment they go onto the rule they become another thing, the breakfast marked with a price turning into a breakfast sold to you with the one crucial thing gone, the bond once reckoned turning into a running of accounts with the bond no longer there. And it draws the line with a dumb usable question: does this thing stand up because it was reckoned clear, or because it was not. A trade and a wage stand up by being reckoned clear, the clearer the better, and last semester’s substance of freedom returns, the wage reckoned clear gives a person the means to say no. But a bond of mother and child stands up precisely by the not-reckoning, as do a trust and a faith and a promise kept many years, and whatever leans on not-reckoning shatters the moment the rule touches it. The section joins this to the eight nets of last semester carrying things not on the rule onto it, idle time measured into hours online and greeting measured into a click, every number real yet the thing measured quietly changing, wei the more refined the harder to recognize, the rule a wei and how far it is stretched a matter of the hand.
What you carry out of this chapter is a rule you can hold and a boundary you must hold with it. The market is a rule and a sieve, exact and fierce and without feeling, and knowing your own degree on it is clear seeing, not something to resent. And the rule is dead while the hand that holds it is alive, so the question is never whether the market is good but who holds it, stretched to where, and who draws its edge, because the deepest damage is not a wrong number but a right number laid on a thing that only lived by never being numbered. The chapter closes by turning back over the seven chapters of positions and relations and people, and pointing at the one thing never yet spoken to its face, capital itself, and the four characters shouted loudest across the century, which the next chapter will set under the lamp one character at a time: capital sucks blood.
SECTIONS
Section 1 1975, That Company in Rochester
Section 2 Guanzi’s Rule, First It Measures, Then It Sifts
Section 3 Which Things Need Not Be Sent to the Market to Be Measured
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.