17 August 2009: "How do u deal with ur parents being super rich?"

This post is about the valorization of social capital. In The Philosophy of Money sociologist Georg Simmel writes that "Money is the reification of the general form of existence according to which things derive their significance from their relationship to each other." Carles poses this same premise as a false either/or construct: "do u think that ‘money’ is ‘bullshit’ or ‘what makes the world go round’?" Of course, it is both at once. Money is neither true nor false as an objective substance, but its motion in exchanges, which arbitrate fairness and economic justice in the key of market morality, makes the world go round and constitute the contours of what will register as falsity, as irrationality, as "bullshit".

In other words money decenters subjectivity and symbolizes and facilitates radical uncertainty and undecidabiliy. Hence, it renders impossible a stable concept of normality, prompting Carles to draw an implicit connection between wealth and uncertain identity, the crisis of a upper class child assessing the stochastic probabilities involved in her desire to "seem like a ‘normal kid.’" Inherent to an open class society, as Veblen most memorably demonstrated, is the threat of social mobility and its capability for disrupting expectations pegged to family background. This necessitates an endless of display of status using an ever-changing set of representative symbols to prevent their being appropriated and devalued. As Marx's dynamic analysis of capitalism teaches us, capital -- even social capital -- must be in motion to manifest value and valorize itself. This means that there is always a "new normal" shaping itself at the various levels of society, and these definitions are in suppressed but palpable dialectical tension. "R u ‘rich’?" may seem a straightforward question, but it can permit of no answer and must remain rhetorical unless altered into the question, "Are you richer than X, and in terms of Y?"

Carles illustrates this by having his would-be normal teen declare, in reference to the other children whose acceptance she seeks, "I have problems that they can’t even relate to." This is at once true and more than true. They can't relate to the problems fully even though they are simply alternate manifestations of the same problems all youths face in fashioning an identity within a shifting matrix of class relations. They must appear incomprehensible to fulfill their differentiating function, the very flight from the "normality" that the rich girl would at the same time like to pursue. Caught in the irreconcilable contradictions of aspiring to a normative egalitarian personality within a dramatically unequal society -- the unique outcome of the late capitalist weltanschauung -- the rich girl must balance the benefits beholden to her station with the the alienation that comes from vampiric exploitation of the lower orders. As Carles concludes, with classic understatement: "It’s hard dealing with social perception and class issues." The identity must always change to valorize the social capital inherent within it, yet this valorization only allows the identity as measured on the ladder/continuum of classes to remain the same. The girl in Carles's illustrative philosophical homily is doomed to this fate: She flies in the family jet only to arrive from whence she departed.