potlatch

'I want my day in court'

Chicago Law and Economics, as pioneered by Richard Posner and others, represents one of the most extensive and successful efforts to replace moral and political reasoning with economic calculation. I've written a couple of papers about what this tells us about the character and authority of the neoliberal state. One not insignificant element of Law and Economics is that it overlooks legal, moral and common sense views of 'right' and 'wrong', by focusing on a priori incentives and measured outcomes. In place of judicial neutrality, the supposed methodological neutrality of neo-classical economics ensures that fines and damages payments are fair.

This is all very well, but it's important to recognise what precisely is lost when the notion of justice is replaced with a calculus of cost/benefit and cause/effect. This news item about the $7.8bn BP settlement with Gulf of Mexico oil spill victims included one striking quote, from a recipient of damages:

Dean Blanchard, a leading shrimp producer from Grand Isle, Louisiana, before the spill, was adamant: payment would not be enough.

"I want my day in court," he said. "If they can get off with just paying the money – well, they've got plenty of money, they are not really going to learn a lesson.

"I'd like to make sure this never happens again. Somebody has got to hold BP's feet to the fire. They have just gotten away with throwing money at problems, but that doesnt get rid of the problems."

A perceived virtue of neo-classical economics, as a tool for public decision-making, is its simplicity. It credits all people, equally, with a capacity to pursue goals in a largely rational and self-interested fashion. But here we see an equally simple psychological portrait: 'I want my day in court', 'I'd like to make sure this never happens again' and 'somebody has got to hold BP's feet to the fire'. There is nothing legalistic, liberal or especially metaphysical about any of these claims. It's difficult to treat this as 'irrational', without at the same time holding to an eccentrically narrow definition of 'rationality'. But, in resolutely obvious terms, here we see a damning critique of the entire basis of neoliberal legitimacy, correctly understood.

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.

The new conservatism began/ In nineteen seventy three...

Amidst the fall-out from David Cameron's European veto, whose logic I cannot compute (I have always considered myself far too nice to fully understand either statecraft or Tories), I've been struck by an analogy between American and British conservatism. For rightwing parties and conservative movements, Britain's membership of the European Union has a number of parallels with the US Supreme Court's abortion ruling in Roe v Wade. Just think...

In 1973, at the fag-end of the 1960s, the state takes a historic modernising, cosmopolitan, liberal decision, in keeping with the spirit of an age which is drawing to a close. The decision is supported by many modernising elites from across the political spectrum, but creates strong feelings amongst traditional conservatives, including those who had traditionally voted for the centre left party. This contributes to a conservative victory at the close of the 1970s, led by a conviction politician who spoke the language of traditional social values, winning working class support despite economic policies that later destroyed working class jobs. The rhetoric of family values and nation was turned against both left-liberals and establishment elites, both of whom were held guilty of having betrayed core national values, as manifest in that 1973 decision.

However, the conservative victors of the 1980s did very little to reverse the liberal legacies that they'd inherited, including the 1973 policy itself. They were able to blame unelected, rule-obsessed liberals, for the aspects of modern society that offended traditional values and angered the rightwing media, to great effect. The 1973 decision itself was not really a politically live one until the 1990s, when it became the cause celebre of an entirely new generation of conservatives. Until the 1990s, socialism had been the main preoccupation of conservative animosity, but this spectre swiftly disappeared after 1989. By the mid-1990s, a centrist government was finding that a new, angrier, unreasonable strain of conservatism was making governing almost impossible. The executive was in daily war with the legislative. And it was the historic 1973 ruling that got them angriest of all.

This new, less reasonable conservatism posed a serious problem to the rightwing party. It was both tempting to pander to it, but also dangerous, in view of its unpredictability and its slightly messianic commitment to a single moral issue, to the exclusion of economics or utilitarian policy analysis. The rightwing party wanted its energy, but also feared how its seething anger and obsession with matters of constitutional principle might alienate swing voters. What should they do?

There is a huge amount about the analogy that doesn't work. I don't know exactly how democratically popular abortion is in the US, but I suspect that it is much more popular than Britain's membership of Europe, which attracts very little public support. There is also a vast difference between a secular issue of national sovereignty and a metaphysical issue of 'life' (as it is defined by US conservatives). I doubt Britain's entry to the single market did much to further Thatcher's cause in 1979, whereas Roe v. Wade did much to encourage the 'Reagan Democrats'. Plus entry to Europe was carried out by an elected government, not by an unelected judiciary.

And yet the historic rhythm of each issue is similar, especially the way in which the 'angry white men' appeared twenty years after the crucial (liberal modernising) decision had been taken, and appeared hell-bent on subverting sensible government, without regard for public opinion. The removal of the socialist bogey-man led conservatives in search of a new enemy, which they found in the fallout from the 1960s. The new breed of Tories are just as hostile to their 'wet', pro-European Conservative forbears as The Tea Party is to the GOP establishment.

Today, I can see three reasons why a young, aspiring politician would want to join the Conservative Party. Firstly, because it offers them a comfortable rural existence, combined with access to London's toff circuit. Secondly, because they are ruthlessly opportunistic, and would happily have stood as Labour candidates if they'd been born 10 years earlier (this applies more to political advisors than to MPs). Thirdly, because of animosity to Europe, or at least some commitment to the British establishment that has recently become re-framed in anti-Europe, patriotic terms. Cameron and George Osborne betray elements of all three; but the point is that there is no longer a pool of Geoffrey Howe or Michael Heseltine types, for whom the Conservative Party offers opportunity for respectable and traditional public service. Ken Clarke is last man standing (would his equivalent be John McCain?).

Europe has become crucial to the identity of contemporary British conservatives, just as abortion is to American conservatives. This is not a rational or economic issue any longer, and David Cameron must have believed that his European veto would grant him the form of power over his party that Thatcher and Major never achieved. He appears to be banking on the notion (contradicted repeatedly by Tony Blair) that the adoration of his party would be an invaluable political asset.

But has he fully understood conservatism? Perhaps not. The genius of the US Republican Party over the past 20 years has been to stoke the flames of conservative anger, rather than to douse them with the policy changes they demand. Much of the Republican's political strategy has been neo-conservative, not conservative, that is, cynically and cleverly exploiting 'values' and religious belief, in the service of secular realpolitik - the lesson of Leo Strauss. Karl Rove, I'm guessing, would never have wanted to see Roe v Wade repealed (were that even possible), for that would have immediately dampened the ire of millions of angry, Republican voters. Tony Blair, also, recognised that if politics is fundamentally about 'friend-enemy' distinctions, that destroying enemies is a far smarter route to keeping friends on board, than simply giving them what they clamour for.

Cameron has opted for a far less strategic route, suggesting that he may be more 'con' than 'neo-con' - a naive position to hold, in a modern capitalist global society. His back-benchers will demand more concessions from him, leading eventually to a full withdrawal from Europe, whereupon the cause celebre that drew them from their rural idyls and their Mayfair hedge funds in the first place will be lost for good.

whatever happened to 'Japan'?

Nations, as Benedict Anderson famously proposed, are 'imagined communities'. But 'the global' is also an imaginary horizon. When we think of 'the global', we think of something, and it isn't typically a planet. It typically involves something about trade, cosmopolitanism, information and financial flows, diplomacy. And it varies constantly. In the 1960s, to imagine 'the global' would most likely have included space satellites, that made a visualisation and a technological use of 'the global' possible. But now, we're far more likely to think of telecom cables or internet platforms.

It follows that nations aren't only imagined by their residents, but also, just as importantly, as components within the (equally imagined) global horizon. There is, as I explored here, an 'America' as imagined and constructed by Americans, then an 'America' as imagined and constructed by Europeans. And it recently occurred to me that one way in which 'the global' has been transformed over the past decade is in the gradual disappearance of 'Japan' in its formulation. How could an imagined nation disappear from our cultural, political and economic consciousness quite so rapidly, yet without us even noticing?

Japan's status as our (i.e. the West's) economic and cultural horizon peaked in the 1980s, a time when Clive James created an entire television genre dedicated to marvelling at strange techno-oriental practices, which supposedly avoided the charge of racism because the Japanese economic and social model was eminently so much more successful than our's. Rumours of hotels where you slept in a small capsule, mobile phones which could communicate with microwaves, vending machines selling used underwear (please tell me I didn't imagine that one on my own) animated pub conversations in Britain throughout the 1990s, even as the supporting social and economic model was dwindling under an economic depression. By the time that the UK show Banzai was launched as a kitsch play on such things, the reference points were fading from memory. The stupidly over-rated Lost In Translation was merely a coda (its primary cultural significance is to have nudged The Jesus and Mary Chain and My Bloody Valentine out of retirement for a few months).

When I dabbled in consumer technology research circa 2002-03, Japan still carried an exotic hint of our own future. Powerpoint presentations were not complete without some reference to what Japanese teenagers were doing with their mobile phones, no doubt generating a fair amount of apocrypha along the way (there was always one rumour about teenagers ringing each other, then hanging up after one ring, as a cost-free way of saying 'hello').

So much has changed. The depression of the Japanese economy meant that the wonks and economists lost interest in the model some years ago. Japan was a scarcely-noticed absentee from the global financial crisis, having been weighed down by its own collapsed credit system for nearly twenty years.  The plundering of Japanese production techniques (just-in-time production, Total Quality Management) by American management specialists over the 1980s meant that 'Toyotism' is no longer the horizon of productivity, as these tricks have now spread. But remembering that phones-speaking-to-microwaves used to be our global future also throws our new global future into some relief. Here are a few ways in which the global is now imagined differently.

Firstly, we now imagine the global in terms of the rising BRIC economies. The future will now be produced by cheap and abundant labour, not by mysterious oriental tech-wizardry (NB I am trying to describe an imaginary, not a reality!). 'The global' is therefore a harsher, more primitive horizon than it used to be. It no longer represents scientific progress, so much as sheer scale of population. (Meanwhile, the concept of 'the third world' has also fallen away, due to a combination of political correctness and economic trends). One feature of this is that, where 'globalisation' used to be conceived as the partner to acute urban densification (with Tokyo as the iconic example), it is now conceived as the partner to a more primary process of voluminous urbanisation (with Mumbai as an iconic example), not unlike the urbanisation of Europe and the United States during the 19th century.

Second, and in combination with the first point, the internet now dominates imaginations of the global. Around the time of the millenium, companies such as Cisco started to run advertisements with Chinese and Indian children staring into the camera, asking "are you ready?" - ready, in this instance, for the emergence of a single, virtually free, global medium, which was no longer exclusive to wealthy or technologically advanced nations. Again, the global was now about sublime numerical scale. A decade on, it has become clear that the companies with most to gain from the internet are not those with the most far-fetched technological imaginations, but those with the greatest numerical imaginations. Google and facebook are mathematical business propositions, based on insight into what changes once things are measured in billions, not millions.

Thirdly, and relatedly, imaginations of 'the global' now include a somewhat different status for 'America', once 'Japan' is absent. From the mid-1970s onwards, the US became increasingly paranoid that Japan was "eating its lunch", taking American jobs by producing consumer goods and cars that American consumers then bought. The reversal of fortunes during the Clinton years changed all of that. 'Off-shoring' of US jobs went from being viewed as a 'threat' to a means of exploiting the huge new cheap labour pools that were opening up. Post-2008, the US has lost any pretence of being a financial hegemon, but it retains some status as a technological hegemon. 'The global' is now conceived in terms of the relationships between the US and the BRICs, and while dependence on Chinese surpluses means the US is scarcely in charge, nor does this balance of power look especially troubling for a US statesman.

In all these ways, the new imagination of 'the global', lacking Japan, has gone hand in hand with a new imagination of what our collective technological future looks like. The influence and status of Clay Shirky is a good indication in this respect - Shirky's expertise is in people, not in machines. As he says, it is when technology itself ceases to be remarkable that its social effects are most radical. This is quite the opposite of how 'the global future' was imagined during the heyday of Japanese tech exoticism.

If a single company defined the imagined global horizon in the 1970s and 1980s, it would have been Sony or Toyota - Japanese firms out-performing, out-thinking tired, Western competitors. Their prowess was best represented in making things that 'we' would scarcely even know how to use. Today it would be Apple - a home-grown US household name, that exploits Chinese labour and the lessons of American business strategy, to enable ordinary people to sit at home or in a cafe, idly toying with a multi-billion user medium. Their prowess is in taking the global, with all of its numerical sublimity, and somehow transforming it into a source of comfort.

intellectual firepower

Gideon Rachman's FT comment piece alerts me to a pretty hilarious 'Top 100 Global Thinkers' list, compiled by Foreign Policy magazine. Rachman wants to know 'where have all the thinkers gone?' Well wherever they are, Foreign Policy clearly has no idea.

The top ten includes none other than Warren Buffett and Bill Gates (tied 1st equal), Ben Bernanke, Barack Obama, Angela Merkel, Robert Gates, David Petraeus, Dominique Strauss-Kahn... err.. hang on, no, surely that's the invite list for a Davos breakfast seminar on 'Chinese Monetary Policy for Beginners'. But no! Quite seriously, these are presented as amongst the world's ten leading 'thinkers'.

This almost requires someone to write an updated and abridged version of Heidegger's What is Called Thinking. Because if these are the world's leading practitioners of that mysterious art, then I have no idea what it is any more. Is 'thinking' now something that requires access to billions of dollars? If so, it is certainly the case that when Bill Gates or Ben Bernanke has a 'thought', that it must be a truly excellent one. Or is (what is called) 'thinking' now a polite word for 'altering' or 'impacting'. I'd have to agree that Angela Merkel's and General Petraeus's 'thoughts' therefore put them amongst the world's great intellectuals. Or is Foreign Policy merely engaged in the lowest form of sycophancy to power, to rival that of the aristocrats deliberately letting Henry VIII win at tennis?

I diagnose come combination of all of the above. This is the problem of Reverse Platonism, common to American neo-conservatism. Plato deduced from the idea of Truth that the perfect state would be run by philosophers, ensuring that power was allied to wisdom. Foreign Policy has simply done the reverse. Where Plato asked 'who should be powerful?', and answered 'the wise', Foreign Policy asks 'who should be wise', and answers 'the powerful'.

Seeing names such as Obama, Hilary Clinton and David Cameron on this list would appear to announce the most monumental aristocracy (rule by the best) ever imagined! Or else spell the end of intellectual discourse, as something separate from the wheels of power. Kant famously defined Enlightenment as the separation between one's 'public' and one's 'private' use of reason, where the former (as exercised in the media, academia, bourgeois salons) was to be uncensored, and the latter (as exercised in one's paid employment, public office or religious role) was amenable to regulation and censorship. Where, then, does Foreign Policy leave Enlightenment, if one can only become a top 'thinker' through clambering to the top of political and financial ladders?

This may betray the profound, if unintentional, impact of a century of American pragmatism. So strong was the Deweyian desire to inject rationality into government, to connect expertise to the state, and so extensive were the efforts of think tanks and the like to support this from the 1950s onwards, that the distinction between 'truth' and 'power' appears to have been lost in some strange post-modern soup of 'power-knowledge'. What has also been lost is the progressive suspicion of money in public life, with Gates, Buffett, Jobs, Brin and other American billionaires all in the top 25 'thinkers' in the world. The blurb introducing the list remarks on the 'great new ideas' that this 'very smart crowd' has produced. The question is whether an 'idea' still exists, without the financial, technological and military muscle to convert it into something beyond its own expression. This list suggests not.

Michael Walzer and university cuts

The lumping together of the US and Britain as a shared 'variety of capitalism', most famously by Hall and Soskice, has a certain analytical appeal, but necessarily papers over various cultural and historical differences.  Maybe times of crisis make this even harder to sustain. Looking at the direction of higher education funding in the UK, my anxiety is that the British are capable of uniquely bad variations on the 'American' model of capitalism, that the US itself does not have to tolerate.

Acccording to Hall and Soskice, both nations have Liberal Market Economies (LMEs) in contrast to European and Japanese Coordinated Market Economies (CMEs). But while the US has the diverse bookshops, boutiques and cafes of downtown Manhattan, we have Oxford Street, effectively Stanstead airport without the seating. When American neo-liberals sought to unleash market forces in the 1970s, they merely had to roll back Democrat legislation and wait for their capitalist friends to do the rest. We had to invent privatisation, PFIs and various new public management trickery in order to convince ourselves that we are an enterprising nation, when quite evidently we are not.

Now consider higher education. It can be argued that the US has long treated a university degree as a private good, associated in the mind of the student with large amounts of debt, and heavily subsidised for the poor through scholarships. If one couldn't be bothered to think for a moment, one might choose to describe this as 'fair'. The model is also associated with stronger university-business links, better practical application of science, and overall a comparatively high level of R&D spending as a proportion of GDP (though this fell under Bush).

Why would Britain not want this? The answer is that Britain could indeed want this, but may find it impossible to replicate for the following reasons.

Firstly, the fairness brigade might want to put down their John Rawls, and pick up Michael Walzer's Spheres of Justice. This means dropping hallowed metaphors of 'level playing fields' and equality of opportunity (which don't seem to be having much effect in the first place), and considering how different sociological forms of inequality do or do not influence one another. Walzer's argument, very simply, is that there are multiple spheres of inequality in any society. The task is not to erradicate them, but to ensure that none trumps or determines all of the others. So, for example, political contests cannot become dictated by economic contests (which is where the US most conspicuously fails), or vice versa.

When looking at British and American neo-liberalism, the question is whether each society has robust enough non-economic forms of inequality to withstand the unleashing of capitalist relations of domination into more and more spheres of society. To put this another way, resistance to capital in the social, cultural and political spheres is dependent on non-capitalist elites and non-capitalist forms of competition, or alternatively aristocracy of some kind.

The LME/CME model is faintly Polanyian, issuing thoughts of 'disembedded' versus 'embedded' markets. What both Polanyi and the varieties of capitalism perspective miss is the Walzerian point, that market inequality is often best resisted not by 'equality', 'society' or being 'embedded', but by rival forms of inequality and by becoming disembedded from parallel social, cultural and political arenas of competition.

The anxiety regarding British neo-liberalism is that it has been used to subsume non-capitalist elites (academics, cultural elites, the BBC, the judiciary) within the logic of the market. Where the US has a fiercely competitive culture of scholarship, which is tinged by a mindset of enterprise but not remotely reducible to it, Britain has invented the Research Assessment Exercise to ensure that scholarly inequality is technically commensurable with the logic of economics.

The US university sector operates a bit like a market (there are various ways in which it self-evidently is a market, such as competing for top professors with offers of cash) but it is not the market. US universities are business-like (Weber noticed this over a century ago) but they are not businesses. The commitment to the public sphere as a non-market space of discovered inequality runs very deep, which admittedly has the side-effect of capital seeking to buy dominance of it via Fox News.

By contrast, my fear is that Britain in the future will become like a Gary Becker fantasy, in which 'human capital' is entirely governed by a logic of return on investment, of universities selling the humanities in the same way that Thomas Cook sells the Maldives, of MBA-style rankings (based on average salary after graduation) infecting undergraduate education to the point where campuses are over-run with law and marketing students, while scholarship and intellectualism simply appear like monopolies to be broken up. As Zizek argues in this piece, given Kant defined an Enlightened society as one where people had free use of "public reason" (i.e. separate from their occupations and professions), what is currently going on amounts to an attack on this use of reason, and thereby on Enlightenment.

What this all suggests is that any form of justice, from a Walzerian perspective, is extremely path dependent and fragile. Different spheres of inequality must be allowed to emerge organically, and then be kept strategically separate. Neo-liberalism may have been an Austro-German intellectual invention, but its applied form was entirely American - the Chicago School were offering a rationalisation of economic and political norms that were already present in American society. And because they were already present, they had emerged alongside rival forms of conduct that could potentially resist them. It is difficult to imagine even the most market-friendly American government managing to alter Harvard University's priorities or notion of value even slightly.

Britain, as has been our fate, was the great experiment in artificially generating US-style dynamism via government. The outcomes are potentially worse, given the lower levels of competition in non-market areas of society. Our elites are sleepier, less competitive and less assertive of their rights to remain separate from capitalism. A government-driven neo-liberalism, such as our's, is better able to bring all corners of society within a single logic. Hence the same model, same policies, that have emerged in a vaguely tolerable way in the US, are imposed without the necessary cultural checks and balances over here. Maybe, in the face of the marketization of everything, it's time to stop demanding less inequality, but more inequalities.

the British culture wars

One unexpected effect of the financial crisis is that it has brought the culture wars to Britain. The legacy of the 1960s hangs heavily over the US, with a mass theo-political movement dedicated to attacking and undoing it, which emerged almost as soon as the decade was over. But where the US has been divided over such fundamental questions as the moral rights of a foetus, we British have now joined in with some slightly less metaphysical questions, such as "have the baby boomers screwed up the pension system?"

Matthew Taylor has a blog post referring to some of recent contributions on this topic, and there is also a new book which develops the attack on my parents' generation from the position of a twenty-something. I look forward to Matthew's forthcoming Radio 4 program on the 1960s. There is something quite telling that, where Americans have spent decades committing acts of terrorism upon one another due to their polarised relationships to the 1960s, the British have only now started to argue about this due to impending downward mobility. We never really cared whether they were selling hippy wigs in Woolworths, man, until now after Woolworths has been sunk by economic crisis.

At the risk of getting all 'meta' on this issue, what it typically misses (and this is also true of the American culture wars) is that the liberal middle class baby boomers successfully frame both sides of this argument: it's always presented as 'for or against personal freedoms'. In the US, conservatives now run with this even further, by framing religiosity and tacit racism in terms of individual freedoms. Surely a real critique of the 1960s would de-centre our assumptions about the decade, highlighting how few people ever won any personal freedoms, how few people speak the language of personal freedoms, how few people want them, and how politically weightless and inconsequential they are anyway. George Irvin has a point.

It's always values. Values, values, values. But if you insist on viewing the world in terms of 'values', you will be left with the polarity of psychoanalytic politics on the one hand ("should I let my daughter stay at her boyfriend's?") and theological militarism on the other ("is it still right for me to wage war in defiance of the United Nations, evidence and law?"). The word 'values' always leaves me with the impression that what purports to be a moral concept is in fact an aesthetic one, namely taste, or perhaps even an economic one, namely preference.

I wouldn't be the first to highlight the overlaps between neo-liberal economics and 1960s liberal emancipatory discourse, but consider this. For Milton Friedman, there was no philosophical difference between a moral commitment and a desire (i.e. between the normative and the aesthetic, or the psychoanalytic if you prefer). Both are things that spring arbitrarily from one's brain, and therefore my right to pursue some moral project such as 'justice' is no different from my right to pursue some other type of preference or taste, such as cocaine. But only the market can ensure that I am free to choose which of these I exert my energies upon. 'Values' are therefore what's left up to the individual to work through, select and pursue, after society has been appropriately reorganised by a set of invisible elites. This is neo-liberalism in a nutshell.

As I wrote of Mad Men, there are some important contributions to the de-centering of the sixties we need. It's a tragedy that Tony Judt has left us just as this debate is developing in his home country. Where else can we look? Erik Olin Wright's Envisioning Real Utopias is now out, which pointedly begins with a recollection of a Berkeley seminar of wide-eyed hippy draft-dodgers in the early 1970s, but then goes on to lay out the blueprint for a very different sort of leftist politics. Rather than obsess over values (which, as Thomas Frank and Boltanski & Chiapello have brilliantly demonstrated, is something that business leaders and gurus are also endlessly happy to join in with) Olin Wright's new project is focused on institutions, experiments, innovations, case studies and visible structures. It's quite close to the civic republican approach of Stuart White and others. I offered some further thoughts on how the left might move beyond the respective traps of moralism, nostalgia, utilitarianism and ideology. 

The boomers still want to have a debate about whether their values were right or not, whether they were  liberating or anti-social. Did sexual freedom unleash a new era of expression and female autonomy, or did it destroy the family? Did cultural hedonism overthrow the shackles of wartime austerity, or un-do the very basis for community? How about this, boomers: maybe it was neither. Maybe casual sex is neither life-affirming and liberating, nor immoral and self-destructive, maybe it's just casual. And maybe the bored 30-year-old smoking weed in front of an action movie is neither sticking it to the man, nor falling into the crevices of a broken society, but simply trying to forget about his boring job. Could it be that the real legacy of the boomers is neither anarchy nor utopia, but a sort of masturbatory tedium of people wondering which itch to scratch next? This is what Mark Fisher defines as neo-liberalism's "depressive hedonia... constituted not by an inability to get pleasure so much as by an inability to do anything else except pursue pleasure."

We need more bridges out of the arbitrary moralistic language of values, and into the political-economic language of institutions, governance, ownership, consumption and work. Part of this involves recognising how those bridges have been strategically dismantled since the 1960s, such that advertising and managerialism generates a closed loop of economics and psychology (centred around the self, desire, incentives, dreams, identity, efficiency etc), which remains safely insulated from sociology (centred around inequality, power, government, authority etc). People who either praise or criticise the legacy of the 1960s, but only in terms of what it meant for the individual, have not found a critical position external to that of the boomers themselves.

The question that interests me, at this juncture, is how sustainable this 'for or against the 1960s' really is, or how much mileage there can be in this 'my values are better than yours' wordplay. At a certain distance from the nineteen bloody sixties, a less hysterical aestheticised version of the New Left might appear, which is interested in institution-building and the promotion of positive political-economic freedoms, via carefully designed structures and templates. This, for example, is where Olin Wright appears to have got to. I enjoy whinging about baby boomers as much as the next man, but lets not attack them in the same values-based, de-politicised language that they themselves invented.

finding homo economicus in Manhattan

Continuing an aborted blog series of a few years ago, I was walking through Manhattan a couple of weeks ago, and overheard the following three conversational excerpts within a couple of blocks of each other:

- Immaculate woman disagreeing with companion on street corner: "No, he has a much more nineties hairstyle than that."

- Perfect-looking man, gazing adoringly at silhouetted woman under street-light: "I mean, I'm not sure, but I'm gonna say... sesame seed."

- Furious-looking, sharply-dressed woman, mouthing into her mobile phone: "no! Get three litres!"

Taste. Everywhere, taste. Glorious, pointless, incomparable, comparable, perfect, stupid taste. Get over the taste you morons! Don't you realise it's only taste? There you are posing, beautifully tatooed arm struck angularly on hip, quiff artfully folded above forehead, rivettingly expressionless vocal intonation that would make Lou Reed weep, just to specify what kind of seed was on your frigging bagel this morning? Hell man - if I looked like you, I'd be reciting Coleridge off the top of the Seagram Building through a nuclear-powered megaphone.

As The Great Gatsby peerlessly testifies, everything that is pristine and mesmerising about New York culture is also strangely weightless and disappointing. This issue points to one typically under-explored feature of a genuinely competitive, dynamic marketplace: the importance of cultivating endlessly diversifying individuals, holding endlessly diversifying tastes. As Caliskan and Callon argue in their paper on 'economization' (working paper [pdf]):

[The neo-classical economic] model of instrumental rationality is sufficiently abstract (it is enough to distinguish means from ends and to posit that individuals are endowed with adequate calculative capacities) to have a universal scope and simultaneously to account for the wide diversity of observable realities. From this point of view, the concept of culture is crucial because it makes it possible to explain why certain ends and means are valued more than others within a particular community, as individuals can moreover conform to these values or reject them.

Or to put this another way, a philosophy or methodology that strips people right back to what they are deemed to have in common, generates a great deal of space for some parallel philosophy or methodology to dictate what differentiates them. In the case of Rawlsian liberalism, the sheer emptiness of its anthropology arguably necessitated the subsequent communitarian critique, merely to fill the huge descriptive space it had opened up. In the case of neo-classical economics, this space is filled by taste: we are all rational maximising consumers, but we simply want different things.

Institutionally speaking, it's important to note that it is only open, competitive markets (as imagined by the liberal economist) which require this assumption about people. Capitalist institutions, which seek to constrain and dominate, pursue precisely the opposite strategy, to determine and clamp down on taste. Somewhere in between the appeal to freedom and choice, and strategies for control and predictability, is marketing; this is what Franck Cochoy explores brilliantly in his work.

The reason I think New York has such an extraordinary appeal to so many inhabitants of capitalist societies is that, on the face of it (and ignoring Wall Street), it is scarcely a capitalist city, but a market city. It is full of people and businesses doing the things Adam Smith imagined: trading, competing, differentiating, innovating. British people never get over the fact that restauranteurs and cafe owners in New York attempt to profit from producing better food, offering good value and coming up with better ideas. Yet isn't this miraculous system of incentives precisely what 'liberal' economies such as ours are supposed to be founded on? New York (or certainly downtown Manhattan) offers a glimpse of what economic modernity might look like without corporations, large management hierarchy, advertising and monopoly.

Of course it's an illusion mainly. Every perfectly spherical tomato got picked by a labourer on a temporary visa without any rights or social insurance, and if you return to the restaurant where you received it at 9am the next morning, it's being mopped by a Mexican man who travelled two hours to work that morning. Exploitation comes in various guises. It's just not quite a capitalist guise, in the orthodox sense of serving capital.

Who is it serving? Above all, our friends with the nineties haircuts, the sesame seeds and the three litres of whatever. It's their tastes that have spiralled so out of control, and narrowed so surgically, that requires this level of perfection to be upheld.  Their energy, their capacity to want and to know - to want their eggs done in a style that is unique, but also to know which of the 2,000 breakfast joints in Manhattan will do this for them - is an absolutely necessary feature of a this liberal economic utopia. 

As Caliskan and Callon point out, by simply assuming some model of a rational choosing consumer as the driver of competition and efficiency, neo-classical economics also assumed a great deal else. It assumed that cultural diversity would prevent everybody wanting the same thing. It also assumed that people had the capacity to pursue what it was they wanted, and to calculate how much energy or money to invest in this pursuit. 

The problem is, as the example of my overheard New Yorkers testifies, the capacity to desire and to calculate varies tremendously. To be blunt about it, nobody in London gives that much of a fuck. If you offered them that level of choice, and that level of perfection, they'd probably still go to Pret a Manger and select an All Day Breakfast and a white Americano please. We lack what Caliskan and Callon call sufficient 'socio-cognitive prostheses' to behave as New Yorkers, a fact which neo-classical economics conveniently ignores. We're not trained to hold sufficient information in our heads to know exactly which egg we desire, nor where we can find it. This can be as much an explanation for why markets don't function as the standard definitions of market failure (and, no, it's not a bloody 'information assymetry').

Interestingly, policy-makers are now conscious of this 'socio-cognitive prosthesis' issue: behavioural economists now advise consumer protection agencies on how people can be helped to take better decisions, when faced with a range of choices. (A Callonian economic sociologist friend of mine recently described his empirical object as a 'device' to a government policy-maker, and they loved it; hence the overlap between performativity school and behavioural economics). Whether anyone - perhaps the School of Life? - will ever offer to teach people the skills to behave like a desiring, calculating Manhattan shopper remains to be seen.

Caliskan and Callon ultimately reject the plausibility of the neo-classical framework, but only on the grounds that it fails to appreciate its own important role in socio-economic constructions. It fails to appreciate that, in the cases where it is most plausible, a huge amount of cognitive and social work has gone in to the production of this self-serving, calculative, maximising behaviour. Callon says elsewhere that 'homo economicus does exist'. What he doesn't add, in view of soliloquys to haircuts, sesame seeds and litres, is that, when he exists, he tends to be a little banal, and sometimes even a brat.

American technologies

I added some time on following the excellent SASE conference in Philadelphia to do a bit of exploring and see some friends. This included the somewhat jolting experience of wandering around South Philadelphia one day, and driving around Los Angeles the very next.

The identity of 'America' is America's own preoccupation. And not only America's either. Rob Kroes argues in the stupidly titled If You've Seen One, You've Seen The Mall that some imagination of what lay out west was integral to European identity even before anything had been discovered. Jumping from some of the oldest streets in the United States, directly into Los Angeles, a different thought struck me very strongly: that there is America as imagined and built by Europeans, for Europeans, using European technology, and then there is America as imagined and built by Americans, for Americans, using American technology.

The former has always excited me - New York and Chicago mostly. Yet with the exception of the skyscraper, these cities grew out of European conditions, rationalities and constraints. French and German organisational innovations (statistics and bureaucracy) combined with British technological innovations (manufacturing, especially textiles, and industrial agriculture), but with the added pressure of rapid population growth and aspiration. Even the aesthetics with which we like to associate a city like New York - 1920s lights and modernism - initially trailed behind Paris. 

Philadelphia conforms to this, only more so. Its historical political status adds to the sense of being an experimental outpost of Europe. One touching representative detail is in the city's Old Swedes' Church, in which models of the boats that carried 18th century emigres hang from the ceiling like icons. Again, with apologies for convoluted Kantian jargon, this is European technology as the condition of America's possibility, hanging there in recognition of this fact.

The old streets of South and East Philadelphia are strangely reminiscent of Hampstead, London, and certainly no more modern. The technological resources are similar - paper, bricks, carts. The development of decisive twentieth century, American innovations - the hierarchically integrated business corporation and steel - occur fractionally after the largest waves of 19th century European immigration. The sociological difference between 1870s Manchester and 1870s Philadelphia would have been heavily ideal in character - the associated dreams of the latter.

Maybe this is a way to understand Los Angeles, and side-step the now burnt-out debates about post-modernism: as a city imagined and built by Americans, for Americans, using American technologies. The issue of the imaginary is no different in either case, whether 'modern' or 'post-modern'. An 18th century American city on the east coast is no less mired in fantasy and myth than a 20th century one on the west coast. The difference is technological: the invention of celluloid and the automobile transforms the latter. If we have never been modern, but simply equipped with tools to produce such an effect, then equally I wonder if we have never been post-modern, but simply equipped with the giant problem of Los Angeles. Every cliche of 1980s post-modern sociology (the public that is private, the private that is public; the loss of spatial reason; cultural schizophrenia; image-based production) might actually be traceable to this one urban region, arisen from there to dupe Jameson et al into envisaging a new epoch altogether. How different would the Dialectic of Enlightenment been had it been theorised in New York, and not LA? As Mike Davis points out, LA was founded as a post-industrial city, but surely this raises questions about the prefix 'post' in that instance.

Driving around in Los Angeles for the first time, you can imagine how it must have felt to go on a train or a motorway for the first time, attaining an entirely new experience of space/time. That an hour can pass or 40 miles, and yet nothing appears to have changed, is a different modernity altogether. And while Europeans can get romantic about New York's critical edge or Chicago's modern architecture, one has to remind oneself that it's the hazy drift of parking lots, freeways, drive-throughs and architectural anarchy that resulted once Europe was finally off the nation's back. The historic dream of freedom is seductive in the alleys and industrial districts of the East Coast - that is, while it remains frustrated - but California possesses freedom as technological practice, while dreams themselves head off into David Lynch-style mania.

In the 1980s, my dad got very into Sodastreams. He had all the bottles, the concentrates, gas bottles and went through a number of the machines themselves. It meant that for years, my family never bought a single bottle or can of fizzy drink. It could have been the future. The production of soda could have been so privatised as to render public outlets for Coca-cola and Sprite redundant or, alternatively, illegal. But one can imagine the additional strains and stresses this would have placed on consumers, as all their soda needs had to become served by themselves.

Mobility in Los Angeles has become trapped in its imagined Sodastream future, with the most absurd form  of technological lock-in that any city can have produced. That a capitalist city can function so inefficiently is a marvel in its own right. The absence of what I once termed 'free market collectivism' is only just about accomodated for via strange traffic management innovations and parking etiquettes. In the imagined  Sodastream future, had Coca-cola and Sprite factories all been forcibly shut down, society would have to  develop weird new coping mechanisms - patience as drinks exploded, co-operation for when gas canisters emptied. Technological privatisation eventually encounters its own limits. I found something similar with Los Angeles driving etiquette, that strange new rules and practices seemed to have emerged organically, to make the whole dreadful experiment manageable. The other absurdities, so beloved of the 80s po-mo theorists, such as private malls that resemble bustling East Coast or European town centres (the one I visited possessing the very public transport system that is absent outside), are further compensation mechanisms for several thousand square miles of grave technological error. 

But to say there is no public space is surely incorrect. No less than Paris or New York, the street is public space. It's just not a place for walking. Flaneur-style behaviour exists, but between cars (or maybe it was only me) and forms of communication emerge accordingly. I encountered less aggression than in the traffic jams of London and greater use of tacit knowledge, even sympathy. Whole lanes exist, purely to be adapted for whatever contingent uses they may be put to - slowing, parking, shopping, looking. Is it impossible that people might occasionally flirt with one another or, in a fit of Habermasian hubris, debate politics from the car? In his status as Los Angeles's Walter Benjamin, Mike Davis never quite captured these arcades - not the malls which pastiche Paris and fascinated the po-mo sociologists, but the city's more distinctive contribution to urban mobility, the public mingling of automobiles.

Mad Men: A Foucaultian take

I previously offered a Weberian reading of The Wire. And now I'm equally convinced that Mad Men is an outstanding Foucaultian deconstruction of contemporary American capitalism. In some ways the two play off against each other very well. The Wire is concerned constantly with norms, rules, duties: to whom am I responsible? What are the uses and limits of public law? Should I uphold tradition? How can I live in multiple moral orders (family, community, city; public, private) simultanteously? How to overcome the 'irrational rationality' of bureaucracy'? The Wire is a sociology of Kantian moral questions. If one were being very high-minded, one might say it is another 'answer to the question 'what is - or isn't - Enlightenment?'', certainly inasmuch as it appears driven by a tragic moral sense that society ought to be able to do better.

Mad Men, meanwhile, is concerned constantly with desire, egos, aesthetics: what do I want? Who can I fuck? How can I throw off morality? It is a sociology of Nietzschean ethical questions. Most importantly, in contrast to The Wire, it is empty of any moral hierachies (it lacks an Omar) or notions of Enlightenment, and in that respect is genuinely genealogical. The Wire confirms Walter Benjamin's dialectical slogan "only to the hopeless is hope given", whereas Mad Men has nothing to say about hope or hopelessness, only contingency and strategy.

The first Foucaultian trope is to perform a 'history of the present'. Mad Men is self-evidently not about the 1960s, any more than Discipline and Punish is about the late 18th century. It is about us today and the contingencies through which we came to be so. One very smart way that Mad Men goes about this is to shift our habitual understanding of when a key historical break occurred. We typically equate 'the sixties' with the late 1960s, with 1968 as their epitome. But this is only what the self-important baby boomers want everyone to believe, on the solipsistic basis that they insist on having changed the world, not their parents.

Mad Men overthrows this assumption, with a similar disdain as Tony Judt pours on the Western boomers who think throwing rocks in Paris was historically important. By focusing on the exit from the 1950s and the early sixties, it reminds us that the decade was about a shift from one model of middle class conformity to another, from one model of capitalism to another. The supposed abandonment of conformity and capitalism was a hippy delusion or, at most, a sideshow (Thomas Frank's Conquest of Cool is also brilliant on this point; see also this smart piece by Alex Petridis on the nineties reinvention of the sixties).

Then there is the subtle questioning of liberation. The historical constant in Mad Men is libido, which empowers and dominates in equal measure. The shift from one epoch (of sexism, domesticity, formality) to a new one (of equality, self-fulfillment and informality) is not represented as progress in any way whatsoever, but simply what Foucault might call a reconfiguring of the economy of desire. In this respect Mad Men - and this is the genius - is a satire of both conservative and liberal America, showing the choice between the two as arbitrary. 

The era that is arriving in Mad Men, which is implicitly the present, is one in which the rhetoric of freedom and self-actualisation is simply a new strategy of power, particularly as mobilised by capital. There is no inner subjectivity being freed by the dawn of the 1960s, just a new one being constructed and then pampered to. It's not as if nobody was unruly, hedonistic, sexual or selfish prior to 1963 (Philip Larkin is also dispatched by this revisionist history), they just exercised these impulses via different means. Therapy may be a new arrival on the scene, willing to unleash a new rhetoric and analysis of self-actualisation, but the notion that repression was otherwise the norm in the 1950s appears utterly ridiculous, as everyone happily drinks, fights and fucks their way through their careers. The arrival of a new, post-1950s question 'but what do I really want' is, as Foucault would see it, simply another force for control.

These issues are there in every scene, making it utterly captivating. Every individual is a bundle of desire, and the society at large is simply an aggregate of desires that needs to be understood and then tapped for personal monetary and sexual gain. The fact that Mad Men looks aesthetically magnificent is entirely necessary for it to take effect, for this then plays on the viewer's own desires also. Note how there is never any representation of actual sex going, and yet the entire show feels faintly sexual, making it pornography without nudity. The idea that 'very little happens' (an oft-reported criticism) is risible. It is staggeringly good.