potlatch

Olympics as political bottleneck

Whatever the rights and wrongs of trade unions "targetting the Olympics", as suggested by Len McLuskey, it's possible to spot some rationality in what he suggests. Compare this suggestion to an observation in Timothy Mitchell's paper (aka the best piece of social science I've read in about two years) 'Carbon Democracy' (now developed into a book I've not yet read). Remarking on the rise of coal as a source of industrial power in the 19th century, Mitchell writes:

Great quantities of energy now flowed along very narrow channels. Large numbers of workers had to be concentrated at the main junctions of these channels. Their position and concentration gave them, at certain moments, a new kind of political power. The power derived not just from the organizations they formed, the ideas they began to share or the political alliances they built, but from the extraordinary concentrations of carbon energy whose flow they could now slow, disrupt or cut off. Coal-miners played a leading role in contesting labour regimes and the powers of employers in the labour activism and political mobilization of the 1880s onwards. Between 1881 and 1905, coal-miners in the United States went on strike at a rate about three times the average for workers in all major industries, and double the rate of the next highest industry, tobacco manufacturing... The militancy of the miners can be attributed in part to the fact that moving carbon stores from the coal seam to the surface created unusually autonomous places and methods of work.

By contrast, Mitchell sees oil as transforming labour relations in the post-1945 era:

The material qualities and physical locations of oil made things different from with coal. Since it comes to the surface driven by underground pressure, either from the water trapped beneath it or the gas above it, oil required a smaller workforce than coal in relation to the quantity of energy produced. Workers remained above ground, under the continuous supervision of managers. Since the carbon occurs in liquid form, pumping stations and pipelines could replace railways as a means of transporting energy from the site of production to the places where it was used or shipped abroad. Pipelines were vulnerable, as we will see, but not as easy to incapacitate through strike actions as were the railways that carried coal.

This politics of bottlenecks recurs in what McLuskey is proposing for the Olympics. 

Applied neoliberalism, in contrast to Hayek's imagined form, involves particular notions of national space and national public spheres. As David Harvey argues, and various critical geographers have explored, neoliberalism needs a form of nationalism and shared purpose in order to operate. It cannot only operate around logics of privatisation. And nowhere is this clearer than in its valorisation of competitive rituals and financial waste such as the Olympics. The Olympics, in Bataillian style, is the pressure valve for an otherwise entirely calculable, privatised worldview (needless to say, it is a carefully regulated, expertly governed pressure valve, and not a complete potlatch, although the money being wasted is akin to a form of wanton destruction). 

The Olympics requires high level political organisation and co-operation in order to be 'delivered'. It is a staged demonstration of who 'the British' collectively are, and how successfully we 'as a people' can manage projects. There is a crypto-socialism at work here, that is rather more explicit and popular than the crypto-socialism at work in (say) the public involvement in finance. While banks depend on the Treasury for bailouts and The Bank of England for occasional free money, they are relatively independent of the public sector for their day-to-day operation: Canary Wharf has private security, private drivers (or taxis) and quasi-private spaces. Finance depends on public support, but - like oil - it flows freely, liquidly between institutions, without there being bottlenecks that any of the rest of us can influence or disrupt (other than switching bank accounts). This makes it such an antidemocratic force in public life.

This is obviously not true of the Olympics, which as a form of public-economic good has properties closer to that of coal, in Mitchell's analysis. There is political and democratic risk attached, which creates some exotic forms of paranoia such as banning certain authors from libraries. Whether McLuskey is smart to be picking this fight is another matter; but opportunities to control a bottleneck in the modus operandi of neoliberalism do not come around every day, and it would be strange if unions didn't at least consider using that power, in the same as the coal-miners considered using their's in the 1880s and 90s.

Shame: a Durkheimian take

Psychology is often how societies avoid looking in the mirror. It is scarcely any surprise that we are increasingly obsessed with the micro-politics of nudging, mental activation and neuro-processes, when any honest account of our political economy and sociology might be devastating. In the context of an economic depression, we are just beginning to speak about 'capitalism', but only on the premise that a small minority has gone feral and that the rest of us are passive victims.

The reaction to Steve McQueen's appalling-yet-beautiful Shame has exhibited this in predictable and enfuriating ways. Since the outset, the film was trailed, reviewed and discussed as a portrait of 'sex addiction', despite the fact that there is no reference to this disorder at any point in the film. 'Sex addiction' is a disorder that was scarcely heard of ten years ago, but it has everything going for it as a 21st century explanatory trope. It is exotic, titilating, intriguing and irritating all at once; it winds up The Daily Mail; we can speculate as to who might really have it, and who just needs to pull themselves together. McQueen himself has played up the concept of sex addiction in interviews about the film, maybe because that's a marketing message that travels best.

The main character in Shame, Brandon (played by Michael Fassbender), is emotionally muted, teeming with a sorrowful rage and physically charismatic. He may be described as 'depressed' and refuses to speak about aspects of his past, but he shows no signs of suffering any clinical condition. One of the many brilliant devices used in the film is that there is no explanation or any hint as to why he may have developed into this type of adult man, creating a gap in the plot that makes the film all the more suffocating. He hasn't begun to 'deal with' his problems, and shows no sign of wanting to. Nor does the audience receive the psychological metanarrative that we assume as our right nowadays (e.g. David Cameron: "I love the NHS because it helped my sick child"... for which read, otherwise I'm just another selfish Tory). Instead, he just appears utterly stuck with himself.

In these respects, Brandon's character is entirely at odds with the therapy culture of New York, his home city. Perhaps he represents some form of resistance to the 'psych' sciences in this respect, though not a very appealing one. If the film is 'about' sex addiction, then its message is simple: this is what happens if you don't treat your psychological and emotional ailments. But in a sense, he does treat them through relentless self-gratification, including casual sex, pornography, masturbation, drugs and virtually anything that avoids intimacy or verbal honesty. The treatments offered by the streets and bars of New York, combined with the internet, become a way of lancing some boil that never stops filling up again with toxins. Towards the end of the film, a scene involving Brandon and two prostitutes portrays sexual desire as a form of filth, that is desparately scrubbed away at through the act of sex. The shame being depicted in Shame is that of someone who wants to escape their body altogether (placed alongside the grotesque Hunger, it seems that McQueen has a thing about this).  If Brandon really wants anything, it's to stop wanting so much.

And this is how the film becomes sociological and, more specifically, Durkheimian. What the psychological interpretation utterly fails to account for is the fact that Brandon lives in a culture organised around giving you exactly what you want. The film had to be set in New York, the only city in the world where you can specify what sort of sesame seed you want on your bagel in what precise pattern. A pivotal moment in the film occurs when Brandon's sister, Sissy (played by Carrie Mulligan), sings a slow, mournful rendition of 'New York New York' in a club, resulting in a single tear slowly rolling down Brandon's cheek. This is the closest he comes in the film to sharing an emotion. But why is he crying? Psychologically, the answer is deliberately with-held, both from the other characters and the viewer. But culturally, the moment feels like a requiem for New York City. Shame is never quite a satire, because it's too sad for that. Instead, it is an angry lament for a social and economic model that promised to satisfy every individual desire, and ended up with an economic and social crisis fuelled by taking this promise for granted. The decline of America, and one might even say the West, is tied up with its failure to discover a legitimate limit to egoism. As Keynes said of Hayek, he was unable to stipulate "where to draw the line".

Durkheim's Suicide, which I discussed here in relation to current communitarian politics in Britain, examines these same issues. The book begins by seeking to demonstrate statistically that there are aspects of suicide that cannot be reduced to purely psychological or economic explanations. For instance, suicide rates rise during times of rapid economic progress, as well as rapid economic decline. This is crucial for Durkheim, in establishing a separate field of sociology.

'Anomic suicide', which is the form which best diagnoses the modern condition, arises from an absence of mediating institutions, between self and society as a whole. The self suffers from a problem of excessive and arbitrary freedom, finding nothing beyond the ego to value. Psychologically, this becomes a form of depressive narcissism. The problem, as Brandon might understand, is that:

Inextinguishable thirst is constantly renewed torture. It has been claimed, indeed, that human activity naturally aspires beyond assignable limits and sets itself unattainable goals. But how can such an undetermined state be any more reconciled with the conditions of mental life than with the demands of physical life? All man's pleasure in acting, moving and exerting himself implies the sense that his efforts are not in vain and that by walking he has advanced. However, one does not advance when one walks toward no goal, or - which is the same thing - when his goal is infinity.

It's a shame that McQueen himself didn't nurture a little more ambivalence in the film's interpretations. To describe Brandon's character as a 'sex addict' ring-fences his malaise as a private one, maybe even a neuro-chemical one. To recognise that there is a gripping and disturbing sociology at work in Shame is not to say that sex addiction is a sham, or simply a medicalised version of a sociological disorder. I have no reason to believe that sex addiction is a 'fake' disorder; Brandon's character has evident emotional and psychological problems that cause misery.

But what is it about sociological interpretations and meta-narratives that eludes critics? Isn't it often more interesting to ask what is the malaise that we all share at this moment in time, than to pinpoint the weirdos, the disruptive neurons or the unruly chemicals that need targetting? Sure, Durkheim was a metaphysician, but then 'addiction' is an entirely metaphysical category in its own right (the entire notion of a compulsion implies higher order notions of a compeller, a rule and a punishment). The fact that 'addiction' is a clinical condition that is straying into more and more areas of life, is itself an interesting sociological phenomenon. It's not that the field of psychology does not or should not exist, but efforts to cram more and more into this field represents a form of societal dishonesty, to rival the psychic dishonesty of 'addicts' refusing to 'face up' to their condition.

 

See also: The Wire: A Weberian Take and Mad Men: A Foucaultian Take.

Uneconomics latest

The Uneconomics debate is now up and running (RSS feed), with excellent contributions from Judith Marquand, Oliver Huitson and Glen O'Hara. There'll be a typically biting piece from Phillip Mirowski next. Watch this space. And email me if you have ideas for contributions or contributors.

Uneconomics: new debate

I've launched a new debate or essay series at openDemocracy, under the title of 'Uneconomics'. Its purpose is twofold. Firstly, to criticise the monochrome economic world, as depicted by orthodox economists, which they increasingly assist in governing and shaping. And secondly, to bring alternative forms of economic analysis and depictions to light, which are too often marginalised within the academy, and virtually ignored by policy-makers and within the public sphere. I'm keen to hear from anyone who might want to contribute an article, especially if they have empirical research that challenges orthodox assumptions, might alter public understanding or the definition of policy problems, and therefore demands a broader readership than academic journals can achieve (email me). David Graeber, and especially his recent book on debt, is a model of what we should be aiming for. There will be contributions from Judith Marquand and Philip Mirowski in the next week or two, and I should have some other interesting contributions in the pipeline.

You can read my opening gambit here, which is a polemical attempt to define what's at stake:

It is time to acknowledge an uncomfortable truth about the public status of economics as an expert discipline: it has grown to be far more powerful as a tool of political rhetoric, blame avoidance and elite strategy than for the empirical representation of economic life. This is damaging to politics, for it enables value judgements and political agendas to be endlessly presented in ‘factual’ terms. But it is equally damaging to economics, which is losing the authority to describe reality in a credible, disinterested, Enlightenment fashion. 

The status of economists in public life has taken many twists and turns, since Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations was published in 1776. The classical political economists, such as David Ricardo and John Stuart Mill, were engaged public intellectuals, whose analysis covered institutions, politics and morals. It was only after the ‘marginal revolution’ of the 1870s that economics reappeared in its neo-classical manifestation, the form with which we associate the term ‘economics’ today. In drastically delimiting the scope of economics to the study of rational decision-making by individuals, the marginalists withdrew from describing capitalism or society, creating space for rival social sciences to emerge for this purpose.

This has already attracted some scornful responses in the comments. This issue is clearly not new, but I thought it would be an opportune moment to revive some of these questions, alongside so much debate about the morality of capitalism.

article on ignorance and neoliberalism

My friend and former colleague, Linsey McGoey, has edited an excellent special issue of Economy & Society on the topic of 'ignorance', following a conference she organised on the topic at InSIS a couple of years ago. She and I have a co-authored piece, 'Rationalities of ignorance: on financial crisis and the ambivalence of neoliberal epistemology'. Here's the abstract:

The financial crisis of 2007–8 was experienced and reflected upon as a crisis of knowledge, the perennial question being why nobody accurately understood the risks that were being taken within the financial sector. In the wake of the crisis, there have been demands that rational economic knowledge be extended further and more vigorously, to prevent such ignorance being possible in future. At the same time, there have been demands for a new, softer rationalism, which factors in the possibility of errors and systemic complexities. What neither approach recognizes is that ignorance is not simply the absence of rational economic knowledge, but is a productive force in itself, something that is actively nurtured and exploited, both by neo-liberal theorists such as Hayek and by expert actors who have been implicated in the financial crisis. We explore how ignorance has been alternately an albatross [sic], a commodity and an institutional alibi to financial actors and the scholars who study them.

If you'd like a copy, email me.

the HSBC Gates

While we're in the collective mood to withdraw bankers' knighthoods and express outrage at their bonus payments, how about we also send a JCB down to the St Pauls side of the Millennium Bridge and dispose of some unwanted steel litter lumps? I speak, of course, of the 'HSBC Gates', that provide a sub-ironic guard of honour to anyone approaching Tate Modern from the north side of the river.

Long before the refrain of 'it's unfaayerrrrrrrr' rang out around Westminster in response to the monetary gluttons of the Square Mile and Canary Wharf, these ominously permanent monuments always offended me. The Millennium Bridge always had a self-conscious air of civic pride about it, that New Labour and (the bridge's architect) Lord Foster would scarcely allow to go unnoticed, back in the heady days of Tony Blair's pre-Iraq creativity love-in. The bridge would link the old and new of this great 'World City',  the religious and the secular, allowing the opposing towers of Bankside and St Pauls to stare each other down. But this civic esplanade would also force people to dodge six metallic obstacles, dumped inexplicably and unapologetically by HSBC bank.

Arguably there was a certain honesty about the HSBC gates, which reminded people what this 'World City' status was really all about. But the audacity of HSBC in colonising this space is quite unlike any other forms of corporate sponsorship or public private partnership which characterised post-1989 neoliberalism. Where Shell and BP provide sponsorship for exhibitions curated by curators, for the benefit of the public, the HSBC Gates exist only to be the HSBC Gates. They are not only called the HSBC gates, they have the words 'HSBC GATES' engraved into them (in the top left corner in the photo above). Signifier and signified are fused. Imagine if Daniel Liebeskind had been invited to erect a memorial to Western capitalism, but while it was still experiencing its final vibrant flush.

By no conceivable standard can they constitute 'art', when their inspiration, funding, design and purpose all share a single source. There is no plaque to explain them, credit an artist, provide their year or thank HSBC for funding them. They are simply the HSBC Gates. Nor do they serve any utilitarian economic purpose, of the sort that can usually be squeezed out of any form of capitalism, no matter how deranged. They have no beneficiary other than themselves, making them a form of what should best be described as 'philanthronanism'. All of which poses the question: why on earth is a bank allowed to leave their rubbish lying around like this?

What has always troubled me the most about them - though also offered their one plausible justification - is that they will outlive all of us, and probably also our civilisation. They look as if they are built for eternity. I wonder how much a bank has to pay to be associated with a public monument or space forever. How did the Department of Culture Media and Sport build the business case for such an investment? Did they use the same techniques that environmental economists use, when modelling the risk of a nuclear reactor leaking in 1,000 years time? Should HSBC have also written the word 'GATES' in a form of meta-historical code, like nuclear safety experts have to, for the benefit of future civilisations?

Archaeologists from the year 3,000 will dig through the rubble of what once was London, discover signs of what was probably a place of worship to the north of the river, a power station (maybe an art gallery) to the south, then in between, the best-preserved late-second-millennium artefacts ever found. Magnificent steel structures, with scarcely a scratch upon them, will be lifted from the mud and taken away for cleaning. Over the following years, archaeologists will debate the meaning of 'HSBC GATES', who 'HSBC' might have been and how anyone could have attained the power to plant such robust structures, with his name carved into them, in such a location. Speculations on the culture and rituals of the early 2000s will be developed on this basis, and thanks to the HSBC Gates, some of them will be spot on. Perhaps this was their justification.