Man Vs the System
This project brings together the new book covers of the classical books that were created as a result of the new interpretations of them. In this regard, the series combines the book covers of the XVII-XX century authors (Bernard Mandeville's "The Fable of the Bees," "Leviathan," by Thomas Hobbes, Karl Marx's “Wage Labor and Capital”), as well as one political treatise - Niccolò Machiavelli's "The Prince." and fiction - a collection of Franz Kafka's novels under the title "Kafkaesque."
In the cases of Hobbes and Machiavelli, the state is presented as an example of the system, and thematically - in the first case, the relationship between man and the state from the perspective of the citizen, and in the second case - from the perspective of the ruler. The cover of Mandeville's book addresses the problem of the relationship between public order, and personal and social lives, therefore, in this case, the legislative system is presented as an example of it.
The typographical work of Karl Marx, on the other hand, presents the economic (capitalist) system and its relationship to man. The last book cover will be about the place of man in the bureaucratic system in general - presented in a number of novels and short stories by Franz Kafka.
This is how Machiavelli's famous Deism describes a true leader - toughness and at the same time cunning, strength, and resourcefulness, in other words, the qualities of a lion and a fox combined in one person.
In modern society, people are constantly forced to make choices for the benefit of a micro-social group (or family) that may be detrimental to others outside the group. Still, they are always necessary, according to Machiavelli. The series "Person versus the System" opens with this book.
Machiavelli belonged to a group of people who viewed politics as an “immoral” thing. this definition was later roughly interpreted into the famous saying "the measure justifies the means" and was considered a derogatory epithet everywhere. In fact, everyone had forgotten that Machiavelli's first loyalty was to his country, so he even forgot his struggle and decided to dedicate his book to the Italian leader, Lorenzo de Medici.
The Machiavellian deism is portrayed on the book cover- a ruler who, for his political legitimacy and successful rule (the crown in his hand), must be equally a lion and a fox...
Machiavelli's answer to the problem of modern man can be summed up in this way: the end justifies the means if the end justifies higher reasons.
“Leviathan” by Thomas Hobbes was the first to use the terms sovereign and sovereignty. Based on the Old Testament, he pictured an earthly god, Leviathan, which must be powerful over any force on earth. Hobbes uses the Leviathan as a metaphor for a state with both the secular and the spiritual realms at its core.
According to Bruno Latour, creator of the Actor-Network theory, Hobbes sought to create a totalitarian system of government model in which knowledge equals political legitimacy, meaning that science, technology, religion, and everything else should serve only and solely the "worldly God" - the state. Even the process of cognition should serve and derive from political legitimacy.
The cover of the book shows the image of a Leviathan getting ready to rule the country in the politician's cabinet, which, to put it metaphorically, is preparing to “plunge into the disordered public ocean and establish order.”
We can consider Hobbes's work as one of the first descriptions of the artificial intelligence system and the person subordinate to it in the process of building the country. In such a definition, an individual without a public contract, "becomes a wolf for another individual", that's why there should be limits to free will in order for to common good to be achieved.
In this work, I tried to convey Marx's most famous principle, that the factory worker is completely alienated from the final product of his daily routine of labor. At the same time, I wanted to show a very specific, everyday interaction between factory machines as Non-Human agents (Bruno Latour) and the people who work with them.
I also tried to bring into the claustrophobic factory environment characteristic of the industrialization of the 19th century a representative of the bourgeoisie that owns the productive forces, which I wanted to be technically (by a stroke of brushes) not too different from the worker. I presented this assumption as an illustration of one little-known passage of Marx's critique of capitalism - the bourgeois, in the classical sense, is not automatically associated with evil (as the communist interpretation of Marxism preaches), but the main culprit is the capitalist production relations themselves, which force even the noblest bourgeois to start the exploitation of a working class.
The book cover depicts a claustrophobic factory setting in 19th-century London. The dark tones of the factory are accompanied by the blurred image of the worker, against the background of which the image of the capitalist can be clearly seen.
Particularly interesting from Marx’s critique of the system as a determining factor of individuals' motivations and behavior. In today's world, when evaluating another person, we all have to consider that the determinant of behavior is often the objectively given capitalist system rather than the subjective motivation of the individual.
Particularly interesting from Marx’s critique of the system as a determining factor of individuals' motivations and behavior. In today's world, when evaluating another person, we all have to consider that the determinant of behavior is often the objectively given capitalist system rather than the subjective motivation of the individual.
Dutch-born 18th-century philosopher Bernard Mandeville articulated the intersection of private and public life in a very clear and original way. And more specifically, how is it possible for a society to function properly as an organized system of bees? His answer is that even the most successful society cannot exist without some amount of badness and immorality among its members.
“The fable of bees” is a type of comment on the poem written by the author himself - Prosperous society is described with every ugly detail which is characterized by problems that are typical to any society - criminals, corrupted politics, and lawyers and yet, the system as a whole was functioning without any problems. As the author put it this way - “Thus every part was full of vice, yet the whole mass - a paradise"
The cover of the book depicts a beehive in a hole in the tree, from which dawn can be seen with dark gray tones in an urban environment.
Mandeville shows the need to reveal the full human potential in order for society and the state as a system to function properly. Thus, this book suggests the importance of an individual free from systemic pressures, who Inter Alia, is free to express his own, including immoral, potential (compare “A Clockwork Orange” by Anthony Burgess).
The series "Individual versus the system” ends with a complete collection of works by Franz Kafka. Kafka's texts (especially his Metamorphosis, The Trial, Poseidon, and The Tower) represent symbolically the bureaucratic labyrinths of the modern world that we have to navigate every day.
Kafka's work is an interesting reference to the words of Frederick Winslow Taylor, considered the father of modern management: "In the past, the man was first, in the future, the system will be first". The protagonists of his works have to find their way through a complex procedural system whose only task is to reproduce itself.
On the cover of the book, I show the image of Gregory Zamza - a man turned into an insect in the process of transformation (from the “Metamorphosis”), who along with other Kafka characters, is in an insurmountable labyrinth of the bureaucratic system and for some unknown reasons can not get into the "Tower". The collection is called "Kafkaesque" - a term that, under the influence of Kafka, became synonymous with the nightmarish, the terrible in English and other Indo-European languages.
Although Kafka does not offer a specific recipe for navigating within the bureaucratic system, the descriptions he presents allow us to understand our place in the modern world.
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Have fun with the System.
Thanks for checking-in.
Have fun with the System.
