Do you mean by "transcending mimetic discomforts", BB, the overall feeling that one must distinguish oneself at any cost from others? I am trying as hard as I can to decide whether any of my centers-of-attention defer my desires rather than intensify them? When it comes 'down to it', how would we recognize the difference? The great paradox of our times is, the more things we have to pay attention to, the more the quality of our attention suffers, or degrades.. It's not easy for me to see 'transcendence' in any of this, if transcendence is ever to be fully distinguished from the howlingly beautiful hell-hole of an increasingly aesthetic, even 'romantic' distillation?
Good questions. One form of attention can readily convert into the other--that's what happened on the originary scene. "Disciplinarity" is meant to address this, but I think working through Gans's understandings of morality and aesthetics is helpful here. We would have to be able to tell the difference between making something or someone a center of attention so as to blame it for our mimetic rivalries, on the one hand, and making it a center of attention by subtracting the markers of those rivalries, on the other.
The picture of markets organized as concentric circles around the sovereign is a bit unclear still. Whereas the vertical order is clear enough (as in a roughly corporatist organization), I'm especially curious about the horizontality, the article seemed to imply that multiple construction companies are a possibility, even though they will (?) answer to a single local sovereign (which answers to another one, which in turn answers to a next one until we reach the actual sovereign). Given this, how does horizontal expansion come to be? If a Mason is unhappy with the organization under his current company(ruled by a local sovereign n) could he appeal to n+1 sovereign to create a new company? Wouldn't this open the door for a bureaucracy? His calls certainly wouldn't be answered by sovereign n and current capitalism seems to solve this problem (broadly understood) through entrepreneurship which I'm not sure under which form would appear under concentric markers.
I think the appeal would go in the other direction: sovereign n+1 is not getting something he needs from sovereign n, so he gives sovereign n a chance to revamp operations so as to provide it or, if necessary, goes over the his head and solicits "appeals" from the masons. If the work coming from under n is unsatisfactory from n+1's standpoint, it's likely that some of the more competent and conscientious workers under n are frustrated as well. (If n+1, or the enterprises he oversees, gets everything he needs, what is that mason complaining about in the first place?) I also don't see why the higher up sovereigns couldn't maintain a kind of entrepreneurial fund, which takes "grant applications" from within enterprises at various levels. Those who get the grants could be left to try and make it on their own. It's always good to have some people tinkering around outside of the established channels.
Right, and n+1 can know what to expect from n because he can compare it to other ns, by internalizing the market we seem to overstep the calculation problem that creeps on pure command economies. Also regarding the fund it doesn't really need to be so specific, since our whole model is concentric those could just be general purpose banks with their relative autonomy, my worry was more with regards to how this new horizontal vertex attaches to the hierarchy. Anyone that gets approved for a grant (either from the bank or maybe from independent investors elsewhere in the hierarchy) must be "always already" under a sovereign and this could create a bureaucracy of applications and stall the market process. It doesn't seem like a problem necessarily though if the applications are not cumbersome(with regulations) and are quickly answered.
Right--someone is simply in charge. And people are known quantities. The whole game bureaucracies have to play, of looking at each application "blind," which means the applicant must know the right coded language to use, can all be set aside. This guy applying for the grant is known for having done various work and made various contributions before. It might be harder for some genius to come out of nowhere with a mind-blowing idea, but how often does that really happen anyway?