The Wire: a Weberian take

What a summer of achievements it's been for me. Submitted my PhD, wrote a report for Demos (published next week) and have so far ploughed through about 37 hours of The Wire. My 2010 new years resolutions will include Life: Get One.

A great deal of ink has been spilled on the topic of The Wire, and I may be rehashing what someone has written far better elsewhere. Have a look at this great piece some colleagues of mine at Goldsmiths have written, which I believe will eventually feature in an edited collection dedicated to The Wire. There is also a conference coming up in November on the topic. But here, for what it's worth, is a Weberian thought.

Others have already highlighted the Marxian undertones of the drama, the sense that there are urban political-economic forces driving the narrative that are deeper and more autonomous than the agency of any individuals or institutions. Season Two is clearly Marxian in this respect, focusing on deindustrialisation and globalisation as ghostlike historical factors that condition choices and overwhelm individual lives.

But it strikes me that a Weberian interpretation captures even more, especially outside of Season Two. The central problematic that The Wire examines is surely this: that there is not only a discrepancy but a conflict between governance through knowledge and justification through ethics.

The central theme running through the drama, which its title aludes to, is the political challenge of collecting and mobilising evidence. The wiretaps used by the police are the most prominent example of this (which leads to various counter-surveillance strategies by criminals) but there are also examples of data being mobilised and manipulated by politicians. Then there are the frequent courtroom scenarios, in which empirical evidence is (or isn't) mobilised in the form of witness statements.

The implication running through all of this is strictly Weberian: modern society involves relationships of domination based on the capacity to know, test and prove. None of the above is a classic example of instrumental rationality, as would be found in the ideal of the modern bureaucracy, though paperwork plays its role. But policing and surveillance is a more graspable way of highlighting the empiricism - the need to record experience - of modern power. One can envisage a bleaker, less exciting version of The Wire, in which its cops'n'robbers aspect was reduced to a banal level of everyday bureaucratic rule-following. Think of the famous, scarcely empiricist first line: "Someone must have been telling lies about Joseph K". I guess what elevates the world of The Wire above that of The Trial is that law is, in Weber's much misunderstood phrase, a marginally greater 'respecter of persons' than pure bureaucracy.

What gives the series its gravitas is the fact that its characters are not entirely consumed by this, though nor can they escape it. They retain (what Weber called) their own individual substantive rationalities - sources of meaning, value systems and ethical goals. These substantive rationalities are not necessarily compatible, and may - as with Omar - be entirely private to the individual concerned. Read Weber's Science as a Vocation and you encounter this bleak sense that we moderns must each develop our own individual sources of meaning, comfort and justification, in amongst an over-arching technological apparatus that is entirely devoid of such things. At best we can build miniature lifeworlds of ethics, potentially moving between rival spheres of value. As Weber put it "we are placed in various life orders, each of which is subject to different laws". The Wire is a tour through a single city's multiple life orders, each of which makes sense to those inhabiting it, but fails to translate beyond its own code and language.

Some higher order 'life orders' exist, dragging individuals and groups into them, constantly referred to by drug-dealers as 'the game'. I guess markets provide some binding logos, which Stringer Bell appears to intuit with his dabbling in liberal economics. But there is no form of 'public sphere' or 'polis' in which all actors might achieve some shared goal or meaning. There is nothing like Arendt's vita activa in which a person becomes visible to an entire public. Season Three shows the formal realm of democratic 'politics' to be as devoid of any Aristotelian substance as any of the other social spheres.

It's the clash between empiricism and ethics that creates the show's mood, which is a mixture of sadness and absurdity. Good people become ensnared by facts, by things that have happened, that they have done (even if - mild spoiler - they didn't mean to or would never do again as with Ziggy). Bad people are expert at escaping the past at every juncture, leaving no trace, generating no facts about themselves. The most senior gangsters, encountered in Season Two, have no fixed identities at all. Police mess up their fact-gathering, and bad people escape, sometimes to their own surprise (as when Stringer Bell waits to be hand-cuffed in Season One, but is ignored). The courtroom, the sphere formally ring-fenced for 'justice', is no different in this regard (perhaps the only unambiguously loathesome character is Levy the lawyer, who single-handedly embodies everything that is unjust about justice). Our own sympathies and ethics are pulled to and fro, regardless of the guilt, innocence or even factual behaviour of the individuals. The rest is just an 'iron cage' within which these miniature lifeworlds are sustained, then sooner or later extinguished. 

And if you dispute any of the above on the basis of events in Seasons Four and Five, ssssshhhhhhh!

Comments

[Mull]

Thous shalt not speaketh of The Wire until thou hast consumed the Gospel of the Fourth Season.

It is 'the bomb'.

[twitter.com/paul_sagar]

Really good piece, and I think you can add another dimension drawing upon Politics as a Vocation.

Weber's deep-running anti-Kantianism in politics is essentially a rejection of the idealised view that rational discourse and reflection can eliminate political conflict, with all rational beings converging on the same final conclusions. Rather, Weber believes that there is an irreducible level of violence inherent in the political, and what matters is who has ultimate control over the exercise of that violence. What we need in society are not Kantian rationalists, but leaders with an ethic of responsibility:

"However, it is immensley moving when a mature man - no matter whether old or young in years - is aware of a responsibility for the consequences of his conduct and really feels such responsibility with heart and soul. He then acts by following an ethic of responsibility and somewhere he reaches the point where he says: "Here I stand; I can do no other". That is something genuinely human and moving. And everyone of us who is not spiritually dead must realize the possibility of finding himself at some time in that position. In so far as this is true, an ethic of ultimate ends and an ethic of responsibility are not absolute contrasts but rather supplements, which only in unison constitute a genuine man - a man who can have the 'calling for politics'."

Stirring stuff. Weber's point about an ethic of responsibility is deeply echoed in The Wire. As you're only up to Season 3 I don't want to spoil too much...but let's just say that certain politicians turn out to not to have an ethic of responsibility - despite setting out with the best of intentions; an honest desire to achieve praiseworthy "ends" (hence having an ultimate ethic of) but lacking the ethic of responsibility to constitute the true calling for politics, instead becoming what Weber called "windbags".

Yet what is fascinating about The Wire is the way it takes this and shows the interplay between Politics as a Vocation and the issues drawn out - as you point to in your piece - in Science as a Vocation and Bureaucracy. Namely, it is the bureaucratic iron cage that ends up driving politicians with the best of intentions away from an ethic of responsibility.

So The Wire isn't just amenable to a Weberian analysis, it quite possibly expands it, by showing how the modern capitalist bureacracy inhibits the development of an ethic of responsibility even in the well intentioned politician; that is, iron cages breeding windbags.

[alice]

Brilliant post! As is one on Mad Men which sent me over here.

I dealt with particularly traumatic/ boring part of my PhD by applying Frederic Jameson to Life on Mars (went to cultural studies journal in the end, though maybe I should have just blogged it).

Slightly more seriously, a colleague at the Uni of Manchester (David Kirby) deals with all the "Science of..." various fiction works by sociologically studying the scientists who act as consultants for film and tv (e.g. Prof. Brian Cox and Sunshine). Although there aren't (m)any active sociological consultants, the Wire did, I believe, applying a deliberately ethnographic approach. It also interacted with a range of social experts, many of whom may have been well versed in a repertoire of social theory (one of the reasons I thought the conference on the Wire sounded tad more interesting than similar Buffy Studies projects). Similarly, I wouldn't be surprised if people working on Life on Mars had read a fair bit on postmodernism. Maybe I'm just projecting, but my point is that the causal effect of intellectual ideas in popular culture is interesting. Lit studies conventionally applies x or y theory to a particular cultural product, but arguably the cultural product got there first.

This comment isn't a criticism of your post in any way. I'm just rambling through ideas while I wait for the washing machine to finish.

[Will Davies]

At the risk of sounding like an old fart, Alice, I read that comment thinking "how could anyone read so much into one David Bowie song??" But I think I'm off the pace with popular culture.

Yes, I see your point. There is this weird assumption that, while film-makers and bands (and obviously novellists) can know what they're doing, TV can't, and therefore requires culture studies to come along and lend it gravitas.

[alice]

Will,

Firstly :P, because I wasn't being nearly so serious as that, I was just rambling slightly incoherently at rather complex connections between social theory, social realism, cultural commentary and television while I was waiting for the washing machine. I apologise for doing so on your blog.

I think it is worth saying that most of the cultural studies people I know are quite reflexsive about various weightings of "gravitas" (or rather cultural status given to producers, audiences and critics). If anything that's what drives a lot of their work. I suppose we could argue about the differing approaches of Richard Hoggart vs Stuart Hall if we so wish, but I think the basic point that cultural studies doesn't exist simply to make TV look "ok" stands.

(and there wasn't much read into the TV show, or Bowie song for that matter, it was just a paragraph in larger paper on cultural imagery of the child with respect to pomo ideas of progress).