potlatch

gift-theft economies

Publishers seem to believe that economics explains almost 'everything', but what would the rational choice brigade make of this incident? Ideally I would put this on a wiki, so that the mini-Stephen Levitt's could annotate it, explaining just what the fuck was going on.

On Friday, as I was leaving the British Library, I sat down near the Information Desk briefly, and put my Moleskin notebook and smart new hardback copy of The Birth of Biopolitics down on the seat next to me. The latter I am especially excited by at the moment, but the former contained a rather more valuable month's-worth of notes. I left for the underground, and realised two stops down the Northern Line that I had left the books behind.

Safe in the knowledge that the British Library is a sealed enclave of social and cultural capital (creating utilitarian and normative bases for cooperation respectively) into which the public is rarely permitted entry, I was reasonably assured that my books would either be still where I'd left them, or in the hands of a friendly staff member. They were neither, and I left in a blind rage against British Library users that put me in half a mind to head for the nearest polling station and bloody well vote for Boris Johnson. By Tuesday morning, they still hadn't been handed in. Somebody had stolen my Birth of Biopolitics and Moleskin notebook, and with them, a month of notes.

Then I received the following email:

Hi there,
i`ve found your noticebook. If U need that, we could meet thursday (08 May) at 6pm in Tavistock Square Garden behind the sculpture (i will in white hat).
Cheers, Peter

He claimed to have picked it up, sans Foucault, from the cafe (the plot thickens). I was also aware that, invited to by the template of Moleskin's title page, I had scrawled $50 as a reward. Bastard! Rather than simply hand it over to the member of staff who was right there, this man had made off with it in order to extort money from me (albeit money that I was apparently ready to have extorted), and no doubt flog the brand new Birth of Biopolitics down some dodgy post-structuralist pub. Not only that, he was proposing a meeting in a park, where he would presumably threaten/blackmale/rob me. I replied, saying we could meet on Tuesday, at the same time and place.

To return to questions that David Stark poses in this paper [pdf], what is the notebook worth? There can be no price, because both the seller and the buyer hold a monopoly (he is the only possible seller, and I am the only possible buyer). In this respect, the situation is not unlike the MOD buying weapons off BAE, with my notebook as the long-range nuclear warhead (don't snigger). According to the classical labour theory of value, however, perhaps the notebook has a quantity of value invested in it by the quantity of hours of my work. For Adam Smith, this value is whatever the labour mark stipulates; Marx disagrees (but how then do we work out what the value of a month of my time is?).

The neo-classical solution, in which the value is derived from my psychology as potential consumer, is undermined by the lack of choice in all of this. And all of it is entirely undermined by the fact that it is my frigging notebook and he should have handed it in in the first place.

So I went to Tavistock Square last night (with £60 in my pocket, in case it was needed), and hung around the statue in dark glasses like a spy, and sure enough, at 6pm, a scruffy-looking man in a white hat wandered over clutching the ambiguously-valued Moleskin. 'Peter' held out the notebook, as I braced myself for some further injustice to be enacted. I took the notebook, thanked him, and then waited. We stared at each other for a few seconds, aware that we had entered some type of parallel economic universe, in which the rules of transactions were unrecognisable. I still wanted to punch, hug and pay him, all at the same time.

In the end, we both walked off in opposite directions, me to re-bond with my lost child, him to dream up new acts of criminal-charity (like Robin Hood, only he steals from the bourgeosie, only to give back to them four days later).

As I was leaving the park, my conscience then had to complicate a complicated situation further, commanding me to go back (better to do this asap, rather than leave it until 4am; history indicates that the latter would have resulted in me and my priceless notebook being chased around motels by a psychopathic Javier Bardem). I walked back to my robber-saviour. "There was a reward offered in the front of $50, and you didn't ask for money", I said. If he'd asked for the money, I would have done my damnedest not to give it to him, but he hadn't. "I live in the street", he replied. For reasons that would probably result in Stephen Levitt's brain suffering a total meltdown, I then handed him two twenty pound notes.

So there you have it: £40. The going rate, apparently, for what happens when a homeless guy wanders into a library, picks up a PhD student's notebook with one month's work and a $50 reward offer in it, chooses not to hand it in, then arranges a rendez-vous in a public park to give it back without asking for money.

Why can't Orwellians deal with theory?

Last week saw the awards ceremony of the Orwell Prize, with a dinner afterwards. Congratulations to the winners - Johann Hari for his journalism,  Raja Shehadeh for his book, Palestinian Walks, and Clive James for his lifetime of broadcasting. It was a generally splendid occasion, with some excellent speeches by Tony Wright MP, Clive James and others.

The British establishment's relationship with Orwell is always somewhat perplexing. On the one hand, the celebration of Orwell reveals British intellectualism in the best possible light. Critical, thoughtful, elegantly expressed, fearless and independent. Every speaker stressed that these were the most important features of all political writing and journalism, with Clive James mentioning that Orwell was proud to call himself a journalist.

More interesting still, celebrations of Orwell are rare instances of British public recognition that language has a politics. One suspects that were it not for Orwell, the British would allow the French to have a monopoly on semiotics (although heaven forbid that anyone on this side of the channel call it that). Were it not for Orwell, our political culture might have been given over to the positivists once and for all; save for Orwell there would be no recognition that politics must risk relativism because it involves multiplicity of perspectives. As I tried, in vain, to explain to some of my dinner companions, there is not that much of a gulf separating what Orwell was trying to say about language from what some French structuralists and post-structuralists were saying.

Why will the Orwell lobby not accept such a thing? In all liklihood it comes down to a piece of reasoning that Tony Wright displayed during his talk. Just as he was getting into his stride, attacking spin, obfuscation, and political double-speak, and just as I was beginning to feel entirely at home in this crowd of independent-minded columnists and politicians, he had to go one step too far. The next target, I felt sadly, was social scientists and theorists.

This is the territory of Karl Popper, Ralf Dahrendorf and Isiah Berlin: the emigre, conservative-liberal mentality in which purveyors of complicated ideas are equally suspect as the commanders of tanks. Kant threatens to destroy democracy, while Hegel is almost accused of inventing totalitarianism. In the late 20th century, Althusser becomes an especially popular target, while Foucault, Derrida and others are attacked for having no concept of truth (err.. but wasn't it the production of historical 'truth' that made Karl Marx supposedly so dangerous?). For committing the grievous political sin of being unclear, Tony Wright lumps these figures together with Alastair Campbell, Rupert Murdoch and - who knows - maybe more tyrannical manipulators of language.

As for sociologists, they refuse to use language in a 'normal' fashion, and are therefore equally suspect, if not as dangerous. They are obviously only speaking to each other, and therefore of no political or public relevance. Why can't they just exercise common sense using the English vernacular? Well, at least two reasons spring to mind.

Firstly, the object of social science, unlike natural science, already has a linguistic account of itself. If sociology were to stick faithfully to lingua franca, it would simply duplicate society's existing narrative. Maybe the Orwellians would like this, but then how would the linguistic politics (that Orwellians claim to be in touch with) be highlighted and deconstructed? I agree that it is sometimes irritating when sociologists constantly distance themselves from their own constructions in favour of new ones, but how much worse is it (as Orwell saw) to assert ones constructions into the status of unambivalent reality?

Secondly, the linguistic account that society already has of itself is far from perfect. The lingua franca can be racist, sexist, class-ridden and so on. When Marx 'named' capital, he was providing a language that deliberately defied a liberal vocabulary which could only conceptualise, say, an immigrant being exploited at the bottom end (or black end) of the labour market using the language of 'choice', 'freedom' and 'incentives'.  Moreover, Tony Wright et al may believe that they uphold higher standards of linguistic transparency than sociologists, but you don't hear sociologists referring to each other as 'the right honourable gentleman'.

So there we have Orwellian culture in all its ambiguity. The closest the British establishment can get to cultural sociology, but still terrified of cultural sociology. I suspect Michel Foucault would have approved of George Orwell, but, if the latter's fanclub are to be believed, the reverse could scarcely have been further from the case. A slight shame, I think.

where policy 'radicalism' comes from

Some months back, following Chris Huhne's promise to be more 'radical', I asked:

How did the word 'radical' become quite so politically inert to the ears of Middle England in the first place? I'm not familiar with it being used in the United States. Had Bill Clinton used it, I imagine it would have summoned up memories of '68 and the more truly radical years of Democrat Party politics. Does anyone know of a similar term being quite so tolerable to mainstream political audiences elsewhere in the world? And to confuse matters further, lets not forget that the term is also used in 2007 Britain in the context of 'radical Islamism' or 'young Muslims being radicalised'. We can presume that this latter phrase does not refer to them being seduced by Alan Milburn's public service modernisation agenda.

To my amazement, the answer is contained in the newly published Foucault lectures. The problem of modern government, he argues, is what juridical (i.e. normative-legal) structures are necessary to support the best veridictional (i.e. empirical-economic) outcomes. In analytical terms, this is the problem of 'rule utilitarianism'.

Foucault identifies two regimes, emerging in the late 18th century. There is the 'revolutionary response', that continues to privilege certain juridical categories, as in the French republic. Within the 'revolutionary' response, talk about 'freedom' and 'justice' still means freedom and justice, except they are now in tension with the empirical mechanics of efficiency maximisation. The occasional Gallic disregard for the latter is presumably the legacy of the 'revolutionary response'.

But then there is the response of 'English radicalism', which we otherwise know as utilitarianism. In this context, "radical designates a position which involves continually questioning government, and governmentality in general, as to its utility or non-utility." For the 'radical', "freedom is not conceived as the exercise of some basic rights, but simply as the independence of the governed with regard to government".

This is it! Policy-makers can talk of being 'radical' in the same way that one might radically rethink management structures, or software design, or baggage-handling at Terminal Five. It is 'radical' to ask a question such as  "should we privatise the Navy?" or "should we replace the NHS with a wiki?", but only in a very precise sense of the word 'radical', which owes its origins to Jeremy Bentham not to Thomas Paine. Little did I - and, I would wager, New Labour - know that this use of the term has existed all along.

legacies of 68

As if stuck in a actor-network theorist's nightmare - or perhaps a Motown song -  I am trapped at home as I wait for the POSTMAN to deliver me an Amazon parcel containing the English translation of some lectures on neoliberalism that Foucault gave thirty years ago, which only hit the bookshops YESTERDAY.  My fear is that it won't fit through the letter box. If I had a real eye for efficiency savings, I probably should have taken a few French lessons years ago, and read the French version. Once this is out of the way, then normal life (and my PhD) can resume.

Elsewhere, as May 08 nears, I have been reading Prospect contributors' take on the legacy of May 1968. You'll see mine buried in there somewhere, which includes a silent but hefty nod to this book again.

Tony Judt versus the rest

I know someone socially who I have always rather despised. On hearing this, some mutual friends told me that this wasn't a very clever position for me to take, as he was prone to violent outbursts. This obviously made me despise him even more, but my friends thought I'd missed the point. The concept of violence has a peculiar status in any conversation. Whether predicting it, promising it, or just mentioning it, the person who introduces it immediately claims some sort of high-ground. Moral high-ground it certainly is not, but they claim some form of entitlement merely by invoking it.

The peculiarity stems from the fact that violence is mute. It says nothing, and therefore it appears in discourse as a sort of empty space, but potentially renders all discursive responses void. It trumps being right. Or even if it doesn't, it destroys being right. This is the irresistable logic of Carl Schmitt that, thanks to its entirely amoral quality, finds supporters on both the left and the right, for the very same reasons that the Iraq war has done.

All of which makes Tony Judt's new piece in the New York Review of Books all the more heroic. How's this for a refutation of Schmittians (both left and right), Washington Hawks, Neo-cons and post-Marxist Hitchens-style reactionaries?

It is [the] contrasting recollection of war and its impact, rather than any structural difference between the US and otherwise comparable countries, which accounts for their dissimilar responses to international challenges today. Indeed, the complacent neoconservative claim that war and conflict are things Americans understand—in contrast to naive Europeans with their pacifistic fantasies —seems to me exactly wrong: it is Europeans (along with Asians and Africans) who understand war all too well. Most Americans have been fortunate enough to live in blissful ignorance of its true significance. [For more on the appalling legacy of European war, see his Postwar, which I am ploughing through at the moment]

The target of this critique that initially sprung to my mind was Robert Kagan, who in 2002 wrote a devastatingly simple, Schmittian explanation of why Europeans are pacifists. Europe, Kagan argued, is only able to indulge its naive Kantian fantasies of universal peace, because it has a realist Hobbesian policeman willing to defend it from disorder. Europe has moved into 'post-history', whereas the US is still 'mired in history'. Merely by invoking violence in his argument, Kagan adopts a position over and above alternative worldviews, in which violence is absent. These worldviews can co-exist with it, but only if they accept their subservience to the gun-toting father who protects them in the first place. (Speaking at LSE recently, Simon Critchley described Zizek's neo-Leninist obsession with militarism as 'homosexual', of which you can make what you will).

Judt turns the tables on this unnecessarily simple logic. Yes, violence is politically decisive, just as the Schmittians believe. Yes, Europe avoids it, just as the neo-cons argue. But to invoke violence, to introduce that peculiar anti-word into a conversation, doesn't automatically draw one into a pragmatic defence of it. Far from it; with the study of history, if not philosophy, violence appears on the page as something to be unambiguously against. And far from the pacifist being the one who has opted out of history, it is the American with the woefully short memory and shortage of real world experience who operates in a 'post-historical' fantasy. The neo-con is ignorant, not only of liberal ideals (a charge that was never likely to bother Dick Cheney), but of the one thing they claim greatest ability in, namely war.

the honesty of trains

(Something I stuck on The Prospect blog, and am copying here...)

We are falling in love with trains all over the place at the moment. As this piece by Stephen Bayley in sunday's Observer correctly observed, "What a horrible, inhuman, artless culture air travel has become... Trains have never been more popular and as the allure of air travel turns into ordure, they will likely become more popular still." The new St Pancras station is the most commonly cited cause for this new exuberance, but I have a hunch that the East London Line extension is going to attain a faintly iconic status within a few years. New and stylish bridges are cropping up amongst the flats and warehouses of Hackney and Shoreditch, and the route will be enjoyably tortuous, especially as it does a U-Turn over Hoxton. A railway at this height above street level is reminiscent of the Chicago 'L', offering that same perspective on the urban landscape that is neither birds-eye nor pedestrian-eye. 

(I used to be a trainspotter. If you don't believe me, I can tell you that in 1987 there was only one Class 40 operating in Britain, and I, err, spotted it. Just thought I'd get that out of my system.)

Technology always involves recreating the relationship between freedom and constraint. New freedoms involve new types of constraints. We don't expect to be able to do anything with technology, but it helps if the technology speaks honestly to us. This honesty is central to modernism: modernists offer transparency, and with it, humanity. Like a maths student, modernist technology shows its workings, so that even if the final answer is wrong, we can sympathise. Postmodern architecture later abandoned this commitment to the facts.

We love trains because they display this honesty, while so much technology elsewhere has become deceitful and mysterious. The East London Line bridges have not been designed to make us buy anything, or to alter the image of East London, or as some pastiche of a previous era. They have been designed to carry trains and withstand the impact of tall lorries. There aren't many artifacts in our society that are quite that frank.

Airports are places where we are entirely victimised by technology - spied upon, x-rayed, shunted around. The relationship between us and the machines is entirely asymmetrical. The technology we carry around with us, and now depend upon, carries secrets and obeys invisible internal rules. When these digital machines break, nobody shows any interest as to why, and a replacement is simply dropped in its place. Most of all, twenty-first century technology is designed to encourage us to spend money. The one part of an airport where we are permitted any agency is the shopping lounge, while Apple products seem designed to commit suicide approximately two years after their date of purchase. Save for public-spirited geeks who resist innovations such as Phorm, most people are blissfully ignorant of how their consumer habits are monitored and manipulated by digital technology.

There is something about a new railway that resists the logic of capital, and with it certain deceits. When I worked on a review of the Tube PFI back in 2000, it was explained to us that the stunning Jubilee Line extension couldn't have been built through PFI, because the time horizons involved would escape the calculations of private sector accountants. The Fosters-designed Canary Wharf station was built to exist indefinitely, because nobody was obliged - nor able - to model its future statistically. Disposable, flexible, personalised, deceitful rail travel makes no sense. This isn't kitsch fifties nostalgia; it's simply a set of technological and financial facts of how to help people move around.

more plugs

For a few months only, I'm working at the ICA organising some of their events. The May programme is now done so come along! Philip Bobbitt on the 27th should be a popular one I imagine. While I'm plugging, here's some stuff going on at Goldsmiths which will be interesting.

(I've realised my advertising skills are stuck in the 1940s. Where I'm meant to be littering my blog posts with suggestive hints that coming to these events will get you laid, instead I simply announce them like a tube of Marshall Plan-funded toothpaste. Better go and read some more Kevin Roberts.)

the spectacle of economic crisis

When central bankers announce that we are facing our worst financial crisis since the war, the adrenalin starts to flow. Having been born after the crisis that destroyed the Keynesian-Fordist settlement, and being too young to make much sense of the Tory recessions, I find it hard not to get excited by a sense that global capitalism is about to redefine itself. In terms of the historicity, this all has the feel of the 2005 Ashes - prior to that golden summer, we all knew it was theoretically possible for England to beat Australia at cricket, but only because there was the photographic evidence of mustachioed legends from the 70s and 80s to prove it. After 15 years of economic health, recessions take on a similarly mythical status.

But should this be a guilty pleasure? I liked the PJ O'Rourke quote that Peter Bradshaw employed in his Guardian review of Funny Games:

PJ O'Rourke once wrote that there are two kinds of dangerous: fun-dangerous, like speedboats and race-cars, and not-fun-dangerous, like open-heart surgery or the South Bronx.

At the moment its not at all clear (at least to this ill-informed economic correspondent) which category the financial crisis fits into. So far, one would have to say that it's 'fun-dangerous', inasmuch as the people who are suffering are those who had already benefited to an absurd extent from the status quo. If a load of buy-to-let gamblers made a quick mint then lost it, we remain in the realms of fun-dangerous; if investment banks lay off a few thousand highly paid staff, we remain in the realms of fun-dangerous. At what point does it tip into not-fun-dangerous, and does it actually have to?

Rather as with the Day Today's satirical business reports ("on now to the money markets and a quick look at the International Finance Arse..."), this crisis seems to be bubbling up in some parallel, surreal universe, without common sense or the involvement of anyone anyone's ever met. If the old adage is 'a recession is when your neighbour loses their job, and a depression is when you lose your job', what is the word for an economic event that exists primarily as media spectacle?

So calling all economists: what sort of event is this? What bridges will it use when it finally crosses from the realm of spectacle to the realm of the everyday? Will it definitely involve human suffering, and if so, when?  And please don't give that post-Thatcherite answer that 'recessions hurt the poor most, and therefore we have to be on the side of financial health', which is just trickle-down economics in reverse (if this logic holds, why is it that we even have poverty after 15 boom years?). I will gladly view these events as not-fun-dangerous once offered some evidence for doing so. But at the moment, this seems thin on the ground.

Update
Deborah Hargreaves writes a helpful piece in today's Guardian, seeking to ground this crisis in the real world and show how it will affect us. But she does the argument no favours by concluding with this less than terrifying prospect: "It means that struggling homeowners won't even be able to have a cheap holiday on the continent this year to cheer themselves up." Sorry, Deborah, but we're still not in South Bronx or open heart surgery territory.

putting the 'why?' in skyscraper

Not many people know this, but I am one of the world's leading experts on how to use first generation 'social software' (what web2.0 was called in the days before anyone used it - ask your parents) to improve neighbourly relations in high-rise, mixed tenure, mixed use buildings. In the heady days of February 2004, James Crabtree and I even delivered a lecture on the topic in a San Diego hotel.

Anyway. Now Matt Jones, who as a consultant on the project should be considered arguably the world's third biggest expert on this question, points me via Popgadget towards LifeAt, in which our ideas have been dragged into reality. Like Nietzsche and the Velvet Underground, we are men who live posthumously.

book plug

I've been fortunate enough over the last couple of years to be part of a sociological network known, rightly or wrongly, as NYLON, which led me to spend last autumn in New York. It's led by Craig Calhoun and Richard Sennett, and is explained further on the project website (complete with tumble-weed infested blog).

Plug: Routledge are publishing a few volumes of our work, editted by Craig and Richard, with the first one now available in paperback, Practicing Culture. It has some excellent work in it by colleagues of mine and is well worth buying or, failing that, reading. Look out for the second installment, addressing the topic of 'authority', later this year.