the suicide attempt of the author

There is a bit in Anthony and Cleopatra where the hero attempts to kill himself tragically, fails, and thereby performs an act that is not-even-tragic. In fact, it's comic. Anthony  stumbles around the stage saying "How not dead? Not dead?", confirming that humour is 'tragedy plus time'.

This would have made rather a nice metaphor in this review of the latest books on mass collaboration and amateurisation by Clay Shirky and Charles Leadbeater. As the review puts it:

Both authors have produced books that are hardly exemplars of the mass collaboration they affect to champion. At least Leadbeater has the wit to qualify his byline, adding ("And 257 other people"). But the fact that these two men are writing books surely shows they are the equivalent of the Abbot of Sponheim: they support We-think in word, but betray it in deed.

These authors have thrust a sword in their own top-down, copyrighted stomachs, then stumbled around mumbling "not dead? Not dead?". No! Not at all dead, in fact probably doing quite nicely, thankyou very much. Remaining in the world of networks and mass collaboration, I remember an invite to the launch of Demos's Everyday Democracy pamphlet a few years back, which included a line from its author saying (I paraphrase) "although the name on the front is my own, the ideas belong to a large number of people". One wag in the ippr office  suggested that it might equally have said "although the ideas belong to a large number of people, the name on the front is my own..."

These books are what social theorists might call 'performative contradictions', a charge that has been levelled at po-mo pub relativists over the years. What led Shirky down this path is unclear, given that he had been remarkably consistent in distributing his ideas (or as Leadbeater might prefer it, 'some' ideas) via his website for free. For several years, his online essays were feverishly received by millions around the world, certainly far more than will buy or read his book.

So assuming that consultancy work will pay the mortgage, why write books? The obvious answer is 'ego', followed by the slightly less obvious answer 'to get more consultancy'. This has shades of the competitiveness experts that I've interviewed for my PhD, who recite the mantra "there is no one-size fits all solution" before going into detail about how their model can cope with all and every type of policy problem that the world can throw at them.

But more pertinently, who are these books written for? And the most plausible answer is 'people who have something to lose'. People are not psychologically predisposed to embrace flux and innovation. And people in positions of power and wealth are even less predisposed to embrace flux and innovation. But capitalism, being the whirlwind that it is, they need to know which bits of flux and innovation they are going to have to live with, and which bits they can resist. Principally they can tolerate any bits, save for those which threaten their power and wealth. As Marx saw, capitalism is an animal that gnaws away at its own flesh, with each individual capitalist desparately trying to position himself as close to its teeth and as far from its flesh as possible.

So when a business person or policy-maker engages with futurology, chaos or complexity, they are not actually engaging with these things, but trying to locate the islands of stability on which they will avoid being overwhelmed by them. It's not the polar ice-caps or the sea that Gordon Brown cares about, it's the low-lying areas of South East England.  And it's not emergent, irrational forces of innovation that executives care about, it's how to sustain top-down, rational forces of conservation in amongst them. People who talk incessant turbulence generally do so in the hope that they don't become victims of it.

This explains the existence of these walking-wounded prophets of mass collaboration. They still offer traditional airport books for traditional profit-seekers, managers, marketers and policy-makers. The books are acts of espionage, in which the spy travels undercover into a dangerous world without hierachy, rules or money, and channels back information about what the status quo needs to understand about this world to survive. In this sense, the performative contradiction is necessary, just as the spy must adopt a paradoxical identity, at once loyal to their paymasters and native to the culture they are immersed in.

Think how often politicians describe something as both an "opportunity and a threat" (the rise of China, climate change, the internet). Threats without opportunities are empty, but opportunities without threats are blind.

Comments

[Anne]

Very nice!

[max]

Quite so. I think there's also something else going on here - managers' and marketers' desire for danger, for a bit of edge. Buying a book like this enables them to hang out with difficult ideas, without having to follow through. And politically, it enables one to cloak some pretty conservative instincts in progressive / anarchic clothing.

An example of this - I spent the other evening doing some future-gazing for a large developer. It was amazing how most of the 'experts' there - I include myself in the quote marks - were deploying Marxist analysis, post-structuralism, chaos theory and Bourdieu all over the place, but then using this to show the client how to extract more value from their new shopping centre. I talked about regeneration and what people want, and sounded like the most right-wing person in the room ...

[Will Davies]

...and as May approaches, no doubt we're all expected to express our gratitude to the 68ers and the wonderful legacy they left for the rest of us. I suspect Guy Debord killed himself because he sudddenly developed an urge to go to Ikea.