potlatch

New website

I have recently set up a new website at Williamdavies.blog . All my articles and other outputs are now collected there.

Writings on Brexit

Since the Brexit referendum result on 24th June, I've written a series of blogposts and articles trying to make sense of this crisis for the UK, both its antecedents and implications. I've collected these below, and will continue to add to this post as more appear.

• The Sociology of Brexit - interview with Mark Carrigan for Sociological Review blog
• The Protective State - PERCblog, 6th October
• Interview on Brexit, Trump and 'post-truth' - Wisconsin Public Radio, 21st September
• The Age of Post-truth Politics - The New York Times, 24th August
• Brexit: Views from Wales - BBC documentary I participated in, 19th July
• Liberalism after Brexit - PERCblog, 13th July
• Brexit will make things worse: is that why people voted for it? - Washington Post 1st July
• What sort of crisis is this? - PERCblog, 29th June
• Thoughts on the Sociology of Brexit - PERCblog, 24th June (generously translated by readers into Greek, Italian and Spanish )

Britain's Got Behaviour

It is relatively obvious, I'd have thought, that talent shows and reality television rest on a format that has been found (or at least felt) across a range of economic institutions over the past 30 years. The critical event in X Factor, Big Brother, The Great British Bake-off and other similar shows is the elimination of the unworthy. Moments of elimination are what allow the show and the series to be sustained over time. Unless the winner were found by a slow process of elimination, talent shows and most reality TV shows would simply be regular entertainment.

As I argue here (and in The Limits of Neoliberalism), a privileging of competitive dynamics is a hallmark of distinctively neoliberal forms of government and regulation. Friedrich Hayek described competition as a 'discovery procedure': it is a necessarily dynamic process, that must be planned for and sustained in order that truth, value and beauty can come to light. What reality television does is to convert that epistemology into a form of entertainment, to be watched, safe in the knowledge that - at least on this occasion - the viewer herself is not about to be shown the door. X Factor is really an interplay between facial expressions (on the part of the judges) and tears (on the part of the contestants). The vibrato butchering of 60s soul classics and operatic hate-crimes against The Beatles are merely the vehicles that keeps this 'discovery procedure' going.

Away from TV, austerity has added bite to these procedures. Failure is becoming more doggedly manufactured, and survival harder to come by. As is clear from recent government pronouncements about universities, and the need for more failure in the sector, the game is to deliberately heat up the floor, to see who can keep dancing the longest. If everyone can still cope, heat up the floor further. No suffering, no discovery. No tears, no number 1 Christmas single for Simon Cowell.

It is worth noting that this is a dogmatically relativist epistemology. Cowell's philosophy is that there is no such thing  as a 'good' pop song, so there must be several weeks of raised eyebrows, hugs and tears, to identify a winner by a process of elimination. Jo Johnson's philosophy is that there is no such thing as a 'good' university, so the climate for research and teaching must be made harsher, until certain universities have gone under.

Dragon's Den is in many ways the apotheosis of this entertainment format, in that it fuses the talent show format with actual capital investment. (Incidentally, I am greatly looking forward to the forthcoming book on 'capitalisation' by Fabian Muniesa and colleagues, which I understand explores the rituals through which capital and entrepreneurship perform for one another, and seek to win credence from audiences.) However, in the current climate, the image of 'dragons' (i.e. VCs) sitting surrounded by piles of £50 notes, distinguishing the drowned from the saved, is now a pretty horrific one. The main ideological effect of the financial crisis (and policy responses to it) was to demolish the credibility of 'meritocracy' as a legitimating principle of capitalist inequality. Bake-off is sufficiently innocent and free of economic logic that it can still feel like a safe space for discovery-through-competition. But Dragons Den, like Location Location Location, is now a simple and transparent mis-representation of what's going on in the economy.

(As an aside, imagine a reality television show that was an honest representation of contemporary capitalism. "Depressed John is 24, has sent out his CV 200 times and is willing to work for minimum wage. Anxious Sarah is 32, lives with her parents and is willing to work for free: lets find out what happens next!" Or "the Dragons have no capital of their own nor any experience of business, but they are taking advantage of negative real interest rates to purchase start-ups in the hope of selling them on before the credit bubble bursts. Which contestant's start-up will allow them to exit fastest?")

Perhaps because the competitive talent show format has gone off the hegemonic boil somewhat, I've noticed a new strand of reality television over the last year, resting on a rival epistemology. Rather than competition acting as the 'discovery procedure', shows such as Married at First Sight and The Secret Lives of 4, 5 and 6-year-olds return to a behaviorist fetishisation of expert scientific observation as the basis for spectacular revelation. It seems to me that this signals something interesting about the shifting culture of capitalism.

The pivotal figures in both of these shows are the 'scientists'. I put the word in scare quotes, not because I doubt their academic credentials (although the 'evolutionary anthropologist' on Married at First Sight seemed to be auditioning for something, ahem, other than an academic career) but because 'science' is represented as a form of magic within these entertainment formats. Rather than confront the disappointment of all empiricism - that it's the most provisional, least reliable account of reality - pop behaviourism needs the illusion that 'science' will reveal what's really and ultimately going on with us under the surface. This isn't unique to television, but has been fuelling a massive non-fiction book industry for many years.

Whereas talent show judges are permanently positioned on the set, the 'scientists' are secret observers. On The Secret Lives Of x-Year Olds, their furtive quality is impressed upon us by the fact that they wear headphones the whole time, listening in like the stasi operative in The Lives of Others, despite the fact that they are plainly out of ear-shot of the children. The 'scientists' on Married At First Sight sit around discussing data and methodologies, expressing shock at the fact that one of their couples is almost a perfect statistical match (I'm no biologist, but isn't perfect matching counter-evolutionary, and probably incestuous?).

Without wishing to accord reality TV producers some magical gift of their own for tapping in to our collective unconscious, the fact that these shows have appeared now may suggest something about shifts in the 'structure of feeling'. More specifically, it seems to point towards a change in (what I think Boltanski terms) the 'reality principle' of capitalism. We all consciously or unconsciously carry around assumptions about how things work, what is keeping the show on the road, what makes society cohere. Anyone who uses public transport or the internet or visits a pub relies on some kind of social theory in their everyday life. They make tacit or explicit assumptions about why everyone is carrying on in a faintly similar way, despite their differences. They don't express shock when trains arrive on time, crimes get punished or strangers are discussing the same news items as friends.

These tacit, pragmatic social theories come in various guises. They may point towards the state, in more authoritarian societies, or towards religion in more traditional societies. Conspiracy theories may be a sign of the fracturing of the sociological imagination, suggesting that things must surely be held together by invisible elite networks, for there is no other way. 

Reality television toys with these, holds them up for examination, and isolates them. The 'reality principle' is removed from its real context, and turned into something unreal. Talent shows involve a toying with the principle of competition, on the basis that this principle is what allows liberal society to cohere as a complex web of institutions and individuals in the first place. The emotional tug of X-Factor only works because it seems to be touching on something with sociological and not just (the more obvious) psychological pertinence, namely the fear of discovered failure.

The rise of algorithms (or, more specifically, the rise of the cultural awareness of algorithms) in everyday life over recent years represents the rise of an alternative mode of interpretation, as well as an alternative mode of organisation. As I've argued in various pieces, this has facilitated the return of 'social' logics of government which neoliberalism ostensibly eliminated.

When 'smart' environments appear to recognise you or anticipate your desires, without you having consciously communicated anything, the feeling is of a social world being expertly designed and observed. Navigating a city today is now something which involves a web of smart-phones, apps, vehicles, dot matrix systems and so on. Within the neoliberal imaginary, the decisive type of question was 'is it worth me paying for a taxi, or waiting for the bus?'. Today, the question would be how to adapt one's behaviour and decisions around the personalised feedback provided by Uber and Google Now. What knits the social world together has subtly altered.

One of the more frustrating charges I've received since the publication of The Happiness Industry is that I'm 'paranoid'. This rests on a couple of bad extrapolations from the critique of behaviorism. Firstly, it mistakes the claim "those people are watching us" for the claim "I feel I'm being watched". The latter is an expression of paranoia, but the first is just a simple observation concerning how both government and social science work. Secondly, it assumes that surveillance is largely malign. This is rarely true, and is certainly untrue today. Most surveillance today is 'benign', aimed at making us healthier and happier, though retains the capacity to flip into something else. At worst, it feels creepy, (as with the endless 'hello!', 'how are you feeling?', 'we care about you' which is the front-end code of social media today) but even that is not quite the same as paranoid.

To inhabit a behaviourally-attuned, 'smart' environment is to experience this strange sensation of being cared for in ways that one doesn't understand, using powers of data analytics that are beyond human cognition. In the digital age, serendipity feels uncanny. The 'scientists' in Married at First Sight and The Secret Lives of X-Year Olds personify this behaviorist power, just as the judges in X-Factor personify neoliberal judgement more generally.

Perhaps the greatest difference between the two is in the degree of agency that is attributed to the participants, which is theatrically exaggerated in two opposite directions. On talent shows, it all comes down to the individual, he is entirely responsible for his performance, hence the extremes of emotion that are encountered along the way. On the behaviour shows, the individual is just a lab-rat: Married at First Sight involves the extraordinary, discomforting spectacle of two people handing over a major life decision to scientists; The Secret Lives of X-Year-Olds explores adult questions of morality, friendship and leadership, via analysis of humans without moral agency. Where talent shows create entertainment by burdening us further with a sense of individual culpability, behaviour shows create it by removing that culpability altogether.

Some reflections on cybernetics

I've been reading about cybernetics recently for the first time, for reasons to do with the research project on 'data dashboards' I'm working on with colleagues at Warwick. I can see that there are various ways in which my happiness book might have been written very differently, had I known more about cybernetics when I wrote it. In particular, Jevons was not simply a utilitarian, but an enthusiast for calculative machines (this piece by Simon Shaffer has lots of interesting details about the pre-history of cybernetics in Britain).

Along the way, I've had a few articles and a blogpost published, each of which is partly a reflection on cybernetics. I thought I'd post them here together:

• 'Mark Zuckerberg and the End of Language', The Atlantic
• 'How to give a damn about data', Reading Dashboards blog
• 'Silly Robots!', The Chronicle Review

who wants to know?

The great mystery of our present behaviorist-digital moment, with all of its attendent surveillance, constraints and cultural impoverishments, is the question of why we not only submit to it, but actively embrace it. Given that Western societies continue to conceive of themselves as 'liberal', in the sense of being founded on some sense of contract between free individuals and a coercive state (regardless of how plausible this characterisation is), the rush to a future of 'smart' objects and 'predictive' software would appear to contradict core tenets of who we consider ourselves to be.

I'm currently reading Cass Sunstein's Choosing Not to Choose. This is an important text in this context, not because it answers the question I've just posed, but because it demonstrates the various acts of theoretical chicanery and sociological self-delusion that are necessary to keep the idea of liberalism alive, in a society that is gleefully abandoning Enlightenment notions of subjective agency. Like Weimar liberals or contemporary neoliberals, Sunstein shields himself from his historical circumstances by clinging all the harder to that which must be true (in his case, the notion that choice is the a priori). I'll be publishing a review in due course.

I can think of two or three routes we should explore, when seeking to understand why we might embrace a post-liberal, always-on, high surveillance future.

The first is, as I explored in this New Inquiry essay, that relinquishing subjective agency or consumer sovereignty is experienced as a profound existential relief. There is comfort to be found in giving oneself over to analytical powers that one cannot comprehend, almost like a form of post-socialist melancholia. To be a citizen of the 'smart city' is to be integrated into a form of collective intelligence, where the individual no longer has to think or decide. The outsourcing of individual choice allows us to immerse ourselves back into society, and to abandon the burdensome requirement to take constant decisions.

The second related answer is that behaviorism reinstates quasi-bureaucratic norms, that we wrongly believe we have out-grown. The ideology of 'flexibility', 'creativity' and 'entrepreneurship' celebrates heroic, self-authored individuals, who act outside of any normative paradigm. Behaviorism, with the help of apps and nudges, allows us to maintain this collective self-delusion, while also ensuring that we retain some semblance of sanity (by constraining arbitrary freedom) and that society remains faintly governable.

If we were to drop the Schumpeterian-Nietzschean fantasy, of a society of constant self-transformation (a fantasy that really oughtn't to survive a short visit to any shopping mall or office, but somehow manages to), then we wouldn't need nudges and apps to provide us with - whisper it - rules for how to behave in practice. Instead, we might be able to debate normativity in a more honest and public fashion. That, however, seems impossible, hence the need for clandestine methodologies, interventions and half-remembered neuroscientific facts.

I have a third hypothesis, that I've been musing on a lot recently, partly inspired by reading Josh Cohen's The Private Life. This is that smart technologies and social media promise us what we most crave: a psychological mirror.

A whole essay, maybe even a book, could be written about the simple question with which facebook succeeds in conducting social research on several hundred million people, without so much as an incentive: "what's on your mind?" I wonder how much thought goes into that question, consideration of alternatives, whether it remains the right one, and why. After all, leaving algorithms aside, that's the question on which facebook's entire business depends. Get that question wrong, and nothing else quite works.

"What's in your mind?". "How are you?". "What's on your brain?". "What are you thinking?" (woh there, Descartes!). "What are you feeling?" (that's a bit more like it). "What's happening" (twitter's lawyers might have things to say about that). "What's going on?" (Marvin Gaye's lawyers might have things to say about that). And so on. But no: it has to be "what's on your mind".

The much-discussed rise of wearable technology, combined with 'quantified self' apps and habits, is clearly predicated on the idea that there is a 'truth' about oneself, and that self-surveillance is the way to discover it. One such product, Realifex, takes this to an almost romantic extent, where an app promises to reveal truths about oneself that nobody else could ever know, nor need ever know (problems of 'private language games' would arise, were it not for the fact that, of course, the data is not entirely private to the individual, but crunched by a company).

Cohen argues in The Private Life that, contrary to popular (and even some Foucauldian) conceptions of it, psychoanalysis is not a project of knowledge or of revelation of some inner truth. It is rather a process through which we learn to live with our own mysteries, frustrations and unknowable depths. In an age of crass empiricism, where everything must be 'mined', Cohen argues that some things will always remain 'in the dark'. Honesty would mean recognising this.

I guess we now live in a largely post-psychoanalytic age, where the inner reaches of the self are deemed knowable through fMRI or self-quantification. We no longer search for truth or explanations from therapy, but by donating more and more data to social media platforms, wearable technologies and smart objects. The Faustian pact appears to be this: if you are willing to give away liberal autonomy, in return you will be told the truth about yourself. The more freedom we relinquish, the more facts we will receive about our bodies, minds and behavior.

Leaving aside the severe epistemological problems in all of this, it poses a question that interested Nietzsche and Foucault (and, in a different way, Cohen): what is it you really want, when you say you are looking for self-knowledge or psychological truth? Are you paranoid that, as per the narrator in Julian Barnes' The Sense of an Ending, you might fundamentally be something of a loser? And why would you want to 'know' that exactly? Psychoanalysis has one major advantage over neuroscience or behavioral interventions, in being able to reflect on why it is even worth doing in the first place, and the types of misunderstandings and follies that might have led people towards it.

I don't suggest that quantified-selfers or enthusiasts for smart technology do not reflect on what they are doing. Clearly they are not simply hamsters in a cage. But their narratives tend simply to reinforce the practice, to the effect that "I realise that I'm not drinking enough water, and that that effects my sleep, which is why I have this app which... etc" or "I was wondering if my commute was effecting my moods, and so I decided to find out.. etc" or, at best, "I know that I'm quite a lazy person, so I decided to download this app which... etc". The source of the will-to-know or will-to-change is not even noticed, let alone questioned.

The epistemological flaws in positivism have been explored endlessly. What I think need studying right now are its psychoanalytic seductions and disappointments, and the way in which purveyors of 'smart' technologies and data analytics carefully nurture this promise of self-disclosure. For the good of the industries behind these tools, every disappointment will be framed as a reason to mine even more data, to monitor even more behavior, as if the 'truth' of the self is only ever one more app away (just like neoliberal nirvana always needs just a bit more competition to be realised). But if this endlessly delayed gratification eventually runs out of steam, then a far more interesting question could come to the fore: who wants to know?

Discussing The Happiness Industry in NYC & Philadelphia

I'm going to be in the US for the first week of June, for a few events where I'll be discussing my forthcoming book, The Happiness Industry. All the details of where and when are on the Verso website here. Drop me a line if you'd like to know more or meet up while I'm over.

The Happiness Industry - out in May

For those blissfully absent from the twitter-sphere, I have a new book out in May (and since you're such twitter refuseniks, you're probably still neurologically capable of reading such things). It's called The Happiness Industry: How the Government and Big Business Sold Us Wellbeing. It'll be available in most book-shops, and online via non-tax-dodging-bastard websites such as Housmans Online.

I will be speaking about the book at a few events over the course and May and June, including one or two in the US. I'll stick the dates for these things, along with other articles about the book in the list on the top right of this blog. So watch that space!

the society of exit

If death used to be a 'great career move' for rockstars - if only that were still the case - it is hard to escape the sense that being axed is now a 'great career move' for the mega-celebrities, who occupy the intermediary space between the secretive private jets of the billionaires and the spectacles of broadcast media and major sports. In the UK, Jonathan Ross and Kevin Pietersen are two examples of this. Jeremy Clarkson is clearly another.

These individuals represent a particular class of celebrity: hugely rich, 'talented' in the sense of willing to 'be themselves' in front of very large numbers of people (the opposite of how a great actor is talented), famous for going slightly too far, and constantly, maybe deliberately flirting with the possibility of being booted out. Their very identity as public icons resides in the fact that they pose a challenge to the primacy of institutions over individuals, goading institutions to assert themselves, in the sneaking suspicion that they lack the authority any longer. Behind them lurk a risible bunch of courtiers - Louise Mensch, Piers Morgan, Keith Allen-types - who are principally known as disciples of 'talent', and go around demanding that their chosen uberman be granted even more adoration. Alastair Campbell's new book sounds like an addition to this "always side with the big guy" vacuous philosophy.

In my book (now in paperback!), I suggest that our present political condition is one of 'institutionalised anti-institutionalism', manifest (for example) in the normality of elite fraud. Along with errant investment bankers, Clarkson et al are the ideological symbols of this, asking us to imagine a society in which the authority of the self were greater than that of any institution. Institutions - the BBC, the FSA, the ECB - have little choice to act in response, if only to prove that they still exist at all. However, they rarely come out of such confrontations with any greater authority, indeed the opposite is usually the case, given how much dirt is spilled in the process. Never mud-wrestle a pig, etc.

But I also wonder whether things like the Clarkson saga tap into our society's lurking fetish of exit. According to Hirschman's famous tripartite analysis, there are three types of mutually-understood power that exist within socio-economic relations. 'Exit', where a party asserts power, through the right to cancel a social relation, as manifest in the norms of the market (it is understood and accepted that I can constantly seek a better deal elsewhere). 'Voice', where a party asserts power through dialogue and participation, as manifest in industrial relations or corporate governance. And 'loyalty', which determines the extent to which individuals choose 'exit' or 'voice' (e.g. a 'loyal' customer could opt to 'voice' a complaint, rather than 'exit' in search of a better deal).

As markets become more powerful, so the ethos of 'exit' becomes more dominant. Figures who are perceived to have the latent capacity to leave - the super-rich, star footballers, productive and mobile industries, 'talent' - end up being granted greater 'voice', for fear that they may otherwise push off. They certainly end up being granted greater remuneration. So powerful has this ethic become (especially with regard to the ghostly notion of 'capital flight'), that few of these figures ever have to pull the trigger, and even if they pretend to (think of Wayne Rooney's 'move' to Manchester City, which resulted in his income going up by a few more million a year) it's usually possible to pull back from the brink. One of the great fears of the mega-celebrity is, presumably, that they will leave, and end up worse off. But for those who are given the boot, this is rarely the case.

This tedious game theoretical choreography is now a spectacle in its own right. Think of Theo Walcott's pathetic triannual 'negotiations' over his Arsenal contract. Think of how the risible disciples try to keep the drama alive, as in Piers Morgan's #bringbackKP campaign. For some reason, the news media plays along with it, powerless to understand or challenge the fact that this is simply a case of the Big Brother House, expanded to a multi-platform scale, beyond the limits of any individual show. The phrase "you're fired", uttered from the mouth of Alan Sugar, successfully converted enforced exit into something intriguing, spectacular, fun. Who's next? Who deserves to go? If even Clarkson can be axed, then presumably it could be any of us! How exciting... 

Central to the drama of these individuals being axed, as opposed to leaving, is that it pushes authorities to the limits of their own market nihilism. The behaviour of Clarkson or, for that matter, investment banks, poses the question to institutions: what else is there, other than money? How else to regulate, if not in pursuit of filthy lucre? The axed celebrity typically makes more money elsewhere, and becomes more famous in the process. Hence, the whole event is really a cruder, televised playing out of Michael Sandel's philosophical debates regarding the moral limits to markets. Can the BBC really afford to lose Clarkson? What's the trade-off between punching someone and tens of millions of pounds? Maybe the Treasury Green Book can help.

For the most part, exit resides as a type of metaphysics, like the constant possibility of death. The existential facticity of our own deaths, which we either face up to or not, becomes the economic possibility of eventually cutting one's ties, or having them cut. And where religious rituals involve the playing out of death, via forms of sacrifice, so the spectacle of Clarkson, KP et al becomes a communal way of facing up to the inevitability of being dumped or doing the dumping. There is a catharsis going on. How else to explain the fascination with a borish middle-aged man being sacked for gross misconduct? Wasn't he the guy who used to drone on about how many miles-to-the-gallon you can get out of a Ford Focus?

What all of this ignores, including Hirschman's analysis, are the forms of exit which are silent, unseen and unjustified. I'm a privileged academic, but have a visceral memory of being marched off a site I once worked on as an agency worker, during an undergraduate holiday, by security staff who decided I'd stolen something (the managers all had their hands in the till, so picked off agency workers when it became too obvious). It was an exit of sorts, but it was a violent one: unjustified, unacceptable, based on lies, with no opportunity to contest the charge. One thing I remember about the experience was the silence as the security guard and I walked from the manager's office to the gate - it wasn't 'exit' in Hirschman's normative sense, but expulsion. I've no doubt that this sense of unpredictable threat is a common feature of working life for millions.

In our new condition of contingent neoliberalism, in which norms of fair competition can no longer be upheld, this is the sort of violent settlement that is being increasingly relied on. Punishment is becoming a normalised form of management and governance, and the question of 'justified' or 'unjustified' is cast aside. While the audience continues to obsess over whether the latest celebrity Christ figure should or shouldn't be axed, with the risible disciples chirping away in the background, for those elsewhere, 'exit' is turning into 'expulsion'.

new article: from cigarettes to smartphones

I have a new piece in openDemocracy, exploring cultural and economic transitions, via the shift from a society of cigarettes to one of smartphones. Here's a chunk:

...on a deeper psychological and cultural level, the difference between these two framing devices could scarcely be more profound. This touches on the malaise of anxiety that has become the dominant psychiatric disorder of our age. While smoking affirms the limits of time and space around us, smart phones do precisely the opposite. While one allows you to spend a finite chunk of time in a given space, as a break from the flux of work or travel, the other connects you to a more complex and fluid world beyond your immediate situation. 

As framing devices go, the smart phone suffers from the inherent problem that it is leaky. It is constantly connecting us to other times, other places, absent people, absent places, some in the future and some in the past. The selfie may seem narcissistic, but it is captured with the possibility of being seen by others who are not present (at least, not yet). If it is an expression of anything, it is one of paranoia: paranoia that human memory is no longer adequate for experiences, that one may be seen by others, that one may not be seen by others.

This is a restless condition. Where the cigarette allows us to (in the immortal words of Oasis's horrifically bombastic 1997 album) be here now, a smart phone allows us to do precisely the opposite. In this psychological sense, it is the very antithesis of a cigarette. The transition from the one object in our pocket to the other speaks of a more general shift in the character of capitalism.

PERC Events

In case I haven't already tweeted about it enough, I've been in the process of setting up a new Political Economy Research Centre (PERC) at Goldsmiths over the last few months, together with some great colleagues. PERC sits alongside our new heterodox PPE degree, which is currently in its first year.

You can read about our research ambitions and interests on the website. Hopefully there will be projects and publications to follow. In the meantime, here are two events that are open to all (registration via Eventbrite links is required), both at Goldsmiths:

• 'From REcovery to DIScovery: changing the terms of debate on the economy' - 19th-20th March. Speakers include Andrew Gamble, Ann Pettifor and Steve Keen. Registration here.

• ' What Can Economics Learn from Science Fiction?' - 23rd March, 5.30pm. Lecture by Ha-Joon Chang, followed by drinks reception. Registration here.