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.
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