potlatch

i've published a book!

Well, sort of. I've published an e-book as part of the Proboscis Diffusion series, entitled Waiting for Crisis. Please download, bind and read it at your leisure. The binding is only a minor fiddle, and requires scissors (there are instructions).

The piece looks at the promise and threat of intellectual and economic crises, analysing our contemporary condition as one that is hungry for a crisis that never quite appears to erupt. We're at the end of that shitty 'post-modern' era that began in the 1970s, but without quite being able to envisage something more. As I argue:

What are we now to make of crisis, at the end of a period that rendered it constant and banal? How are we to imagine real change, in the suffocating managerial atmosphere that sees change everywhere and nowhere? Our current condition is one of dissatisfied waiting – waiting for failures to tip over into crises, waiting for judgement to be declared, waiting for history to happen. It is also one of nostalgia for modern critique and modern capitalism, both of which promised and threatened that radical disruption would arrive, rendering the future unrecognisable from the past. Obama spoke to this yearning in his 2008 campaign rhetoric, but it is no coincidence that he had to reach repeatedly for the past in order to found his promise of ‘change’. Lincoln, Roosevelt and – much less explicitly – the civil rights movement, were invoked as proof that change was a real possibility. A year on, many feel that they are still waiting for it to begin.

Some of what I'm grasping at is similar to Mark Fisher's concept of 'capitalist realism', a state of affairs in which lack of political alternatives or conflict is so crushing that capitalism ceases to even require ideology any longer. It just is.

I'm also working with Proboscis on a board game based on the same theme, to be released in January. Inspired by Nikolai Kondratiev, WarGames, Samuel Beckett and The Wire, this will be a game so protracted and frustrating, that the players' sole purpose is to find a way to stop playing it. It's working title is 'Capitalism', and is coming to a toyshop near you.

one thing financial markets can't do: melodrama

Newspapers are suggesting that the government is stepping up a discrete campaign of vengeance on the City of London, albeit a primarily symbolic one. But there is nothing new in the notion that states and financial markets are locked in some sort of wrestling match. Bretton Woods saw the state pinning finance to the canvas for nearly three decades, with a lengthy hold. This was eventually overthrown, before the triumphant 'power slam' (thanks, wikipedia) of the late 1970s when domestic capital controls began to be dropped. Since then the state's spent 30 years on the wrong side of financial 'neckbreakers', 'chokeslams' and 'doomsday devices'.

Every political ambition has had to be tested against the opinions of financial markets, to see whether it possesses economic credibility. Bill Clinton's initial despair that he was being bossed by a "bunch of fucking bond-traders" rapidly became common sense. If, as David Harvey argues, the current crisis is in fact the consummation of the neo-liberal project, demonstrating once and for all the supremacy of finance over democracy, New Labour may end up looking like Mickey Rourke in The Wrestler, hurling his bruised body triumphantly at his opponent as an act of suicide.

But consider one thing that financial markets can't do in all this: act politically. This, after all, is precisely why Hayek and his neo-liberal followers praised markets as liberal safety mechanisms. Sure, there have been those such as the CBI who employed political rhetoric in order to keep politicians in check, warning against capital flight, a 'talent exodus' and a run on the pound, if ever politicians considered interfering with the liberty of finance capital. This threat performed a regulatory role, but has never been practically tested. 

It may be that, following a tax on bankers bonuses, Switzerland becomes a more competitive location than London (though this reminds me of those 'Quality of Life' rankings which place Gothenburg 40 places above New York, on the basis that the latter has less off-street parking). But the glorious thing about markets is that, if this isn't true, if it has turned out to be 30-year ideological conceit, the facts will speak for themselves. A government can act 'irrationally' and vengefully in the face of markets, but markets can not respond in kind. No cartel or trade union of hedge fund managers will decide collectively to up sticks and move to Zurich so as to 'teach the government a lesson'. Sure, they might decide in the aggregate to do that, but only if their calculations point that way (and this is quite aside from the tacit, cultural and incalculable reasons to stay in London, that they may or may not consider).

The conflict therefore has a philosophical, epistemological quality to it. Politicians inhabit a reality that is always partially symbolic and constructed. They select when to be objective and scientific, and when not to be. Even when they are objective and scientific, they must also consider whether also to appear to be. They decide how image and fact are to be assembled.

Markets, on the other hand, are computational devices for translating opinions into facts. It's not so much that they don't lie, as that they can't. In the words of George Stigler they "lay the cards face up on the table". Whether prices reflect 'real' value accurately or not is a separate philosophical question. Of course they experience irrational bubbles, but never on purpose. What I'm suggesting is that markets are rather bad at playing a political game of cat and mouse, because their own celebrated rationality gets the better of them - hence the need for the CBI to play it for them for the last 20 years.

Which raises a question. If bankers are as rational and footloose as they claim to be, and if they're as tempted by the wonderful cosmopolitan cultural millieu of Geneva as they hint at, maybe the UK government should have run an economic experiment at some point in the 1990s. Raise the top rate of income tax (and/or capital gains) gradually, year on year, until bankers began to leave. Once too many had departed (however understood), the rate could be reduced again to the point where they returned to London. If they're that footloose and rational, surely they'd come straight back! It's toying with a migrational version of the Laffer Curve.

In celebrated neo-liberal style, this would bipass centralised expert judgement and political grand-standing, and root policy firmly on empirical market data. Speculation and rhetoric would become unnecessary. In place of fifteen years of Digby Jones and The Daily Telegraph warning us of some fabled exodus that is just around the corner, we would have found out once and for all.

I want I want I want I want I want

With apologies for my crappy camera phone, I noticed this on the tube today, an advert for Middlesex University:

The grey blurry text, which appears to harbour an image of Engels or someone in the background, is made up of a series of sentences beginning 'I want'. The first couple of lines, for example, say:

I want to do it before anyone else does. I want to explore London. I want time to think. I want to have a great social life. I want to get a great job when I graduate. I want to be close to home. etc

It goes on, with some typically twitter-era slogans such as "I want to advance my opinion", "I want real life experience", "I want value for money" and so on. Hmm..

Weirdly enough, I saw the poster just as I was finishing off Mark Fisher's rather fine recent essay/book Capitalist Realism. Allow me to quote from Fisher on his recent experience of working in Further Education colleges:

Many of the teenage students I encountered seemed to be in a state of what I would call depressive hedonia. Depression is usually characterised as a state of anhedonia, but the condition I'm referring to is constituted not by an inability to get pleasure so much as by an inability to do anything else except pursue pleasure. There is a sense that 'something is missing' - but no appreciation that this mysterious missing enjoyment can only be accessed beyond the pleasure principle. In large part this is a conseqence of students' ambiguous structural position, stranded between their old role as subjects of disciplinary institutions and their new status as consumers of services.

No further questions.

defending ResPublica

Anthony Barnett recently wrote a thoughtful critical analysis of ResPublica, Phillip Blond's new think tank. The article pays me the unprecedented complement of suggesting I was involved in a conspiracy of silence surrounding ResPublica, seeing as I've been appointed one of it's fellows. In the fine spirit of openDemocracy, they invited me to respond, defending ResPublica to whatever extent I chose, which I've since done in this piece. There's clearly a fine line between defending aspects of a 'Red Tory' political economy and becoming politically aligned with actual Tories, but I think I just about avoid crossing it. It was similar with this piece from a few months back. If however you disagree, feel free to unload any anti-Tory vitriol against me in the comments field below.

more on employee ownership

Partly inspired by my Demos report, BBC Radio 4's In Business has just aired an episode looking at alternative company structures, which I and various more expert individuals contributed to. You can listen to it here (probably only in the UK, as it appears to be via iplayer).

more receipts

If you get your hands on the new edition of Prospect, you'll discover that my pointless whitterings don't always come to nowt. Sometimes they grow into bigger, more widely-read pointless whitterings. This post on receipts grew up to become this article on receipts.

digital exuberance in space

Last week, I experienced two separate moments of bitterness regarding our contemporary cultural geography. Depending on your levels of Benjaminian pomposity, you might even call them moments of mourning for what capitalism discards unthinkingly.

The first occurred on a train from Birmingham to London, a journey of a mere 70 minutes. I am not one of those enviable people who find it easy to lose themselves in books (that's why I became an academic: to turn reading into a professional obligation), but I find that a combination of a train journey and super-ego provides the perfect opportunity to read. Across the aisle from me, a man of my age was fidgetting with his iphone. In between scrolling, clicking and browsing, he was ringing people up, for no discernible reason. His lack of mental peace started to infect me, until I experienced a Basil Fawlty-esque urge to lean over and offer him my newspaper. His 70 minute journey was spent scratching a technologically induced itch.

Mobile telecom companies, as I've argued before, are so culturally pernicious because they are effectively flogging language itself. In an age when there is scarcely any limit to what can be mediated, and where or when it can be distributed, there is no relationship or artefact that isn't on sale at your nearest Vodafone stockist. Your granny, Coldplay, BBC, work, dating are all part of the package. It's everything.

As the scarcity of Everything gradually wanes, the companies are becoming bolder in their branding of the infinite. T-Mobile now has an advert asking 'What would you do with limitless texts?' with a photo of a happy punter saying things like 'I'd text everyone I know and put together the world's greatest super-group!' (sorry??). Infinite opportunity to say, share, broadcast everything all the time anywhere has to be sold as a positive achievement, with a tangible result. But the truth was sitting across the aisle from me on the 15.03 from Birmingham: a restless child, pawing at a toy which promised everything and delivered scarcely anything. I had the gift of forty pages of a book. He had the gift of an anytime unlimited nothing. This isn't progress.

The second was when I found myself near the Astoria. I say the Astoria, I mean the crane in this picture.  I'd read about the Astoria being demolished and some of the protests being staged to defend it. But you don't experience the full sadness of 'all that is solid melting into air' until you witness this sort of vast, oppressive absence. Many others have written far more eloquently and knowledgeably about the creative destruction of the capitalist city than I can. What struck me, however, was - it being a venue, and a wonderful historic one at that - my overwhelming urge to start ranting, a la James Murphy, "But I was there! I was there at the Manic Street Preachers gig in December 1994! I was there in 1997 when etc etc!"

This is more than the impulsive reaction to seeing heritage destroyed. It's connected to my unfortunate co-passenger on the 15.03 from Birmingham. As James Murphy sees all too clearly, the age of the internet (and especially the mobile internet) has accelerated the development of William Mitchell's Economy of Presence, in which the most scarce form of communication (i.e. co-presence, such as gig) becomes the most valuable, and the most abundant (i.e. data sent over time and space, such as a text) drifts to worthlessness like spam.

In technological terms, the Economy of Presence looks something like the table on the left. The mobile phone company's task is to convince us that moving more of our lives into the column entitled 'Different place' is a form of liberation (the clue is in the word 'telecom'). This isn't to say that they wage war on face-to-face communication, only that they don't typically extract any surpluses from it either. As for the empty space above it, nobody has discovered many cultural forms that sit neatly in that box (one example I can think of is the BFI Mediatheque, which is limited by place presumably as part of a copyright deal on their archive).

And yet, the regrettable impact of all this digital mediation creates the forms of pathology in the box on the right. Consumers have developed their own unfortunate behaviour to sit in that troublesome empty box (Vodafone must be delighted!), namely the drifting out of conversations, and into text messaging and email. As far as the 'different place' column is concerned, my co-passenger on the 15.03 was certainly eating up his free minutes like a good boy, but I wonder if he was enriched by this experience in any way. I wonder if he felt liberated, or actually vaguely oppressed. As Zizek argues, contemporary capitalism replaces the moral imperative 'thou shalt' with a new permissive imperative 'thou may', which is no less burdensome. (Zizek also defined neo-liberalism as 'you can do whatever you like, as long as it involves shopping'. There is a variant of it which says 'you can do whatever you like, as long as it involves an iPhone').

Which brings us to the bottom right hand box. My nostalgia for the Astoria was partly nostalgia for an age in which cultural production was simpler, less ubiquitous and more value-able, just as people now treat vinyl records as sort of tombstones for their more cherished music. The 'But I was there!' plea is an attempt to cling to something that cannot be watered down and rendered worthless by over-production.

What is more appalling about the marketing strategies of contemporary telecom companies is that they see this, and then seek to control this form of presence too. O2 are currently leading the way, with their Priority tickets campaign, in which they grant their customers early access to tickets at their growing network of venues. As I discuss here, the contemporary marketer loathes the notion that cash alone might grant someone access to something as rare as a concert, so much so that they'd almost rather make it free and exclusive than priced and inclusive. Evidently aware that their customers increasingly cherish live music (in an age when other forms of music have been reduced to frigging ring-tones, I wonder who's responsible for that), they have staged a landgrab on the 'same place' column, offering proxi-communication as part of their telecommunication packages. 

Having removed all constraints on the 'where' and the 'when, they discover to their horror that people actually liked many of those constraints, just as I liked being stuck on a train with my book for 70 minutes. Not tolerating this, they then move on the individual in a pincer movement, offering cultural immediacy as part of their sales pitch for cultural mediacy (thought: the words 'media' and 'mediocre' both stem from the same word, 'medium').

A few years back, I argued something along these lines in an article for Prospect, entitled Digital Exuberance [pdf here], in which I argued that we need an 'ethic of inconvenience'. This was partly inspired by the Marshal Berman-esque critique of capitalist urban churn, in which the past is constantly sacrificed for the future. One spin-off from the modernist critique of modernity is the Jane Jacobs defence of slowness and social complexity, which I think can contribute to a defence of co-presence, un-packaged by telecoms. I asked what might be the equivalent of a speed-hump for the digital age.

Now I'm wondering if the two forms of critique need to be fused in some way. With telecoms inter-woven with everyday social life, be it long distance or otherwise, all varieties of space are being marketed. We're cajoled to relinquish our enjoyment of just being there, and when we refuse, we're sold a new package which allows us to shout 'but I was there!' It's suffocating.

advertising catchup

It's been a while since we caught up with the boys in the advertising studio loft pod.  Here's an update:

Rex: guys, there's a problem with the Egyptian Tourism Board gig

Ned: what is it? [sniff]

Rex: the focus group hasn't turned up.

Kris: So who are all those people outside?

Rex: oh, forget them - they're all morons

Ned: is that a problem? [snort]

Rex: no, believe me, they're proper morons. We can't use them.

Alix: But they can't be as stupid as the ones who told us to compare a photocopier to a footballer or the ones who persuaded us to convert Tower Bridge into an S&M display?

Rex: no, believe me, guys, these ones are worse

Interruption - Kevin Roberts sticks his head through the door

Kevin Roberts (for it is he): guys, can you get on and finish that Egypt stuff. I'm trying to machine gun a coca-cola vending machine next door.

The focus group goes ahead. Two weeks later, the boys gather again in the pod, to inspect the outcome

Rex: So, here it is.

Ned: She's fit [sniffle]

Rex: thanks.

Kris: what stones?

Rex: like, the parthenon and stuff

Loz: Rex, man, you can't start a sentence with the word 'and'. Don't you remember that from school?

Rex: No, you're missing the point. It's meant to sound weighty, old, primitive. Basically the focus group told us that Egypt was where the bible happened, so we thought we'd make it sound like that.

Loz: what and the bible is full of bad syntax?

Rex: yes, loads of it. "And Adam begat John and John begat Stephen. And he did this. And then he did that". We checked. 

Kris: Stones don't speak.

Rex: Ah, but the focus group also told us that Egypt was where Indiana Jones happens, so we thought we'd put in some speaking stones.

Ned: What else did the focus group know... [sneezes]... excuse me...  know about Egypt?

Rex: that was it. Where the Bible happened and where Indiana Jones happened. Oh, and that it was where humans come from. So we thought we'd riff on that with the strap-line further down, by playing on people's desire to go somewhere a bit more authentic, what with the recession and everything.

Pure genius. And now this poster is blanketed all over London's public transport system. Thanks, guys.

the economic sociology of receipts

When someone comes to write a cultural history of Britain, post-Thatcher, they should dedicate a chapter to data collection. The political arguments for and against surveillance are well rehearsed, with the Home Office on one side and Henry Porter on the other. The economic arguments for and against back office restructuring and knowledge management technologies are equally well rehearsed. But none of these analyses quite manages to explain why the production of data, evidence, a trace occupies such a prominent  place in our contemporary national psyche. This is a cultural issue.

This sign adorns the flapjack tray of Costa coffee in Paddington Station. The normalisation of receipts in the last two years is, frankly, an irritation. It introduces a new way of giving change, where the coins are placed in the customers hand on top of a small piece of paper, which is then unavoidably trapped there beneath the weight of the money. "Here's your money - and in case you're wondering, yes this did just happen".

I've developed an expert way of then withdrawing my hand with the money in it, but ejecting the receipt back onto the counter with my thumb (where it sits along with the dozens of other little data trails that customers have dumped there).

This trend's been growing for years, gradually engulfing newspapers, sandwiches, beer and all the various other sub £5 items that used to be traded less accountably. Costa appear to have now normalised it further. To bemoan this politically would be fairly absurd, but I'm not doing this (although I do wonder how much it is explicable in terms of management surveillance and distrust of staff: it becomes impossible to keep an order out of the till, if the customer is demanding a receipt).

No, it's the cultural aspects that are strange. We know all about the British love of CCTV, that since the Bulger murder of 1993 has grown from being an anti-crime strategy to something that is adopted as a matter of course. We know that CCTV has long since ceased to be a tool for policing, not least because it's so useless in achieving convictions. The latest London buses use CCTV in the weirdest way yet. A prominent screen on the lower deck constantly plays real time images being recorded by the five or six cameras dotted around the bus. If it were only showing the upper deck, then one could argue that it encourages people to feel safer when they go upstairs late at night; but it also plays back to them pictures of the viewers on the lower deck. The "syn-opticon" indeed. But why?

At a seminar on visualisation in InSIS last week I wondered whether one could analyse such things in terms of the multiple justifications on which they rest (a la this theoretical favourite of mine). When is something justified as 'surveillance', when as 'efficient', when as 'aesthetic', and when does it collapse into pure voyeurism? I suggested here that often there is slippage between one justification for digitisation and another, such that democratic and voyeuristic arguments for transparency can morph into one another.

Sometimes justification gives way to sheer existentialism. Maybe the British need their data-gatherers in the same way that Estrago and Vladimir need each other in Waiting for Godot: simply to prove that they still exist. Maybe there are some Costa customers who take comfort in the fact that their coffee at 10.21 06:09:2009 is a matter of record, not because it is an alibi for a crime or because it is tax deductible, but because it is something to cling to. And maybe those TVs on buses are simply there to say "look - here you are." (It could be a situationist prank, aimed at sending people on their way with a nauseous sense of the vacuity of urban life, which eventually spills over into riotting).

Culturally, I think the normalisation of receipts is a shame, insofar as it effects the character of urban commerce. In the language of Michel Callon, economic exchange always 'overflows' its calculative devices, of money and accounting. There is always something not entirely accounted for, which the economist calls an 'externality', and the rest of us call 'the social bit'. Buying a coffee is a messy business, because the pleasure (or pain) of interacting with a stranger in a cafe always exceeds the calculations at the heart of the exchange. One of the joys of New York, and of its bars in particular, is the very shakey attitude to calculation and accounting that goes on - the tills are ancient mechanical things, the tips pile up haphazardly all over the place, the drinks are not measured and the free ones not counted.  The effort to eliminate 'the social' from the calculated exchange is much less severe. 

By contrast, to normalise receipts in cafes or bars is to strive for the perfect, 'disembedded' clean exchange, of the liberal-economic imaginary. It depersonalises the interaction and substitutes data for memory. It declares the exchange over, with nothing more owed by either party. Frankly, this is futile, as exchanges always leak into society. Marcel Mauss's lesson is that the perfect, calculated market exchange is as unrealisable as the perfect, uncalculated gift - actual, lived economic experience sits on a spectrum between these two poles, with the uncalculated and the calcuated parts entangled. But receipts wrestle economistically against this fact, impoverishing both the producer and the consumer of a coffee.

'consumer-experts'

Thursday saw Tim Mitchell visit the LSE, to give a superb lecture on the politics of oil. I don't know of anyone who is so theoretically and empirically interesting, while at the same time impossible to place in terms of discipline. Following the politics of oil involved everything from the nature of money (dematerialised notions of economic growth that emerged in the 1930s implicitly assumed infinite energy resources), the impact of different energy forms on labour politics (coal requires greater manpower to extract and circulate, thereby empowering labour across society; oil undoes this), the status of geologists in oil companies (the importance of maintaining a split between 'above ground' politics and 'below ground' knowledge) and the nature of calculation (from measuring rate of flow, to measuring quantity of resource, to fundamental uncertainty of measurement). Some of it is contained in this Economy and Society article.

But the constant political question in all of this is that which underpins French science studies: who gets to represent nature, and how is it strategically excluded from the realm of politics? Mitchell's interest in energy and climate change lies in the fact that nature is becoming politicised (so the culture/nature split is dissolving) while authoritative knowledge claims are fracturing (so the expert/lay person split is dissolving). Challenged by a questioner that he was being unduly pessimistic in his analysis, Mitchell gave a resolutely Latourian response in saying that he welcomes the disintegration of the rigid boundaries that science typically builds to depoliticise things.

Which got me thinking again about this post on transparency and neo-liberalism, that has received record quantities of attention (believe me, that's not saying much), due to Bill Thompson picking up on it at the BBC.

I should be clear that my purpose in this post was to analyse and anticipate, and not particularly to bemoan or criticise. Using the term 'neo-liberalism' can be dangerous, as it is so frequently a term of abuse. But I like to flatter myself that I use it in a slightly more nuanced way - drawing on Mirowski, Foucault and my own reading of the Chicago School - than the likes of George Monbiot. Part of what I try to do in deconstructing neo-liberalism is (in this instance drawing on Weber and Boltanski) to understand how it functions and succeeds as a moral and political proposition. Even the harshest critic of Thatcher or Reagan might benefit from reading Hayek in an effort to sympathise with the particular paranoid, dystopian sensibilities that left him with nothing but the market for political comfort.

All of which is to say - neo-liberals needn't necessarily be embarrassed of what they believe in, although I appreciate that there is now scarcely anyone who identifies themselves as a 'neo-liberal'. There are compelling normative and political arguments against bureaucratic legitimacy founded on objective, efficient expert knowledge. It so happens, as I argued, that usually these arguments lead only to the substitution of one form of expert objectivity by another rival form; the rise of consultants in the public sector demonstrates this. The sheer hypocrisy of so much conservative anti-state stateism is one reason to oppose it. But the case for transparency of information is potentially more consistent than this.

Perhaps the promoters of government2.0 transparency should be more explicit in their criticisms of objective knowledge claims, as Hayek was. Mitchell, Andrew Barry and those applying science studies to the state have more than a whiff of Hayek in their work (which was got me thinking again about this). Their efforts to deconstruct governmental expertise are an effort to expand the sphere of democratic politics, such that facts, evidence and data are open to critical, political scrutiny. The case for government2.0 could be made on a very similar basis. To say that the 'post-bureaucratic state' would encounter legitimacy crises was intended as a descriptive analysis, not a criticism necessarily. Legitimacy is something states can either have or not have, but it's not intrinsically good and never beyond question. Maybe the argument against state legitimacy needs to be made explicitly.

In the meantime, I've already learnt of one new category that the transparency movement has mobilised to advance its claims. In this reply to me, Tony Bovaird makes the distinction between 'formally-validated expertise' and 'experience-based expertise'. In one sense, this is an abuse of the concept of 'expertise', as it implies that authority can be founded on the sheer possession of human consciousness ('experience' being something that is unavoidably accumulated). Andrew Keen's head would explode at the very suggestion. But it is an interesting and useful category for anyone wishing to challenge scientific or bureaucratic hierarchies.

I wonder if in time, we will see the rise of a related but subtly different category. OfCom and some other New Labour institutions speak of the 'citizen-consumer', to account for the public goods that can't be captured by the neo-classical definition of a public good. Might we soon see the rise of the 'consumer-expert'? Again, the concept could exist specifically to straddle economic and non-economic logics, in this instance regarding the nature of knowledge.

The economist assumes that the consumer is correct, but only with regard to their own preferences; they know what they want. Beyond this, information is partial, rationality is bounded, the nature of reality is disputed. Prices are about the closest we can get to objectivity. But the consumer who possesses this oxymoronic 'experience-based expertise' has slightly more than just a perspective. They have a form of scientific authority by virtue of their consumption. Every time they use or consume a public service, they are accumulating data. The age of 'permanent audit' makes every consumer also a social scientist, assessing and surveying as they consume. The formal division between the representative sample and the represented social reality gradually fades, in ways that the science studies brigade would probably celebrate.