potlatch

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

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'.

in praise of family existentialism

When it comes to the cultural injunctions of the Guardian and Radio 4, I'm pretty obedient. In the past couple of weeks, I've seen Richard Linklater's film Boyhood and ploughed through most of the second volume of Karl Ove Knausgaard's My Struggle. The parallels are very striking, as many have noticed. On a superficial level, they include an attention to minor, arguably banal details of everyday life; a preoccupation with family and the parent-child relationship; a length that runs the risk of boredom; an absence of plot, conventionally understood; and above all, a heroic commitment on the part of their creators, that is perhaps more life-affirming than anything actually represented in the artwork itself.

It cannot be a coincidence that these two epics of the everyday were being created concurrently. Linklater's project begins in 2003, while Knausgaard's didn't start until 2008. But the desperation to convert ephemera into something monumental through sheer artistic commitment is very similar. In that sense, both can be seen as acts of rage against the torrent of social media and digital content, which render creation and 'consumption' of the aesthetic so easy, as to become pointless and worthless. Converting writing and filming back into something difficult, something involving major economic and emotional costs, is almost a raison d'etre in its own right. Linklater and Knausgaard reject the Clay Shirky/Jeff Jarvis insistence, that there is no alternative but to live in a world of free-as-in-worthless data flows. The rise of social media is a constant sub-theme within Boyhood: Linklater would not have known that 2003 would later become marked as the turning point from 'web 1.0' to 'web 2.0', with all of the commodification of social connection that went with that. Given that, his film - concerned with friendship, family, love, failure of relationships - represents a thrilling act of resistance.

Whether or not it is deliberate (and one suspects that Knausgaard himself regards social media with a similar disdain that he regards bad writers and parent-and-baby groups), it is not irrelevant that both Boyhood and My Struggle concern themselves with issues that we many of us now document remorselessly, thanks to facebook and instagram. Babies, poached eggs, children, holidays, grandparents, man on the bus is annoying me, on the swings, best curry eva, more babies, perfect holiday... We are mostly all doing what Linklater and Knausgaard have done, just with considerably less effort or artistic grace.

Their version represents a challenge to 'our' version of it, in a number of ways. Firstly, 'our' version is crippled by narcissism and dishonesty. We put up the photo of the sunset, the cuteness, the beautiful poached egg. They document the arguments in the airport, the vomit, the yoke that has spilled all over the cooker spawning an argument. They stop our self-branding in its tracks, and say: this is what honesty would look like, if you were brave enough to confront it. Knausgaard comes across as an arsehole most of the time. But who's to say that most of us wouldn't, if we used facebook in the same way he uses novels?

In that respect, this is a (for want of a better word) normcore aesthetic. In an age when people are desperately trying to distinguish themselves through being special and beautiful, the epic is found in the mundane and the occasionally ugly. Linklater and Knausgaard are leaving the 'genius' rat-race to the likes of Dave Eggers and Christopher Nolan, ducking out, and achieving far more by doing so.

Secondly, Linklater and Knausgaard are resolutely modernist, in quite an old-fashioned sense. Social media has arrived two stages after modernism, that is, after post-modernism. Boyhood and My Struggle are epics of two early 20th century artforms, which they seize and apply to our current instagrammed preoccupation with the banal. One of the most extraordinary things about both Knausgaard and Linklater is quite how seriously they take the possibilities for the novel and the feature film respectively. Is the novel dead? Is cinema dead? They render these sorts of cheap panel debates wholly laughable.

As the publishing industry has become more commercialised, but the capacity to publish less commercialised, one outcome has been the tired old format of doing something every day for a year, then writing a book about it. I photographed my dog every day, then turned it into a short film. Alan Rusbridger spent a year trying to play Chopin, then published a book about it. I begged a publisher for a book contract every day for a year, then wrote a book about the rejections. This is where things have got to. From 2003 to the present, Richard Linklater has been secretly upping the stakes in this game, to the point where everybody else might as well give up.

So much for the effects of the digital on our artistic forms and sensibilities. But why family? Why parenthood? I think there are a couple of things going on here. Again, I say this as a cultural interpretation, rather than because I think Linklater and Knausgaard are doing this intentionally.

Firstly, it's not insignificant that the family has become increasingly targeted by rationalist forms of policy and economics. From Gary Becker through to contemporary state-funded parenting classes, the act of raising a child has been increasingly viewed through the lens of economics and investment in human capital. Today, that project is now largely viewed through the language of 'resilience', backed up by neurosciences which can explain how your child's brain benefits from the experience of being cuddled. Mothers have been relieved of the burdens that Freud placed upon them, and given a new set of economic responsibilities, of producing adults who can manage their own careers, finances and emotions adequately. The lunacy of the neoliberal view of the family is that it wants love to become a functional investment, with a measurable return, thereby erradicating those things which make it love in the first place.

Linklater and Knausgaard show that families are a bit of nightmare - but that they survive. Their nightmarish qualities are neither entirely destructive nor productive. They just are. It is true, as per the tedium of the social media 'stream' today, that having a child alters your relationship with time. An hour can pass incredibly slowly, whereas a year disappears almost unnoticed. That is partly what Boyhood and My Struggle point towards. But by declining to leave anything out of the parent-child relationship, they offer a beautifully untheorised portrait, neither psychoanalytic nor economistic. Just day to day crap.

In this sense, Linklater and Knausgaard offer Big Data without quantification, and therefore a very different spin on the 'end of theory'. Everything is included first, and the narrative emerges (if at all) second. I guess this makes the reader the equivalent of the algorithm, seeking patterns amidst the mess, but having to accept that there's no causal grand theory.

Linklater comes close to offering a theory, when he puts the words of John Bowlby in the mouth of the film's unsung hero, the mother (Patricia Arquette), while putting the words of B. F. Skinner in the mouth of one of the film's villains. Skinner's brute rationalism would depict child-raising as a training exercise, whereas Bowlby's represents it as an imperfect, everyday commitment. Boyhood celebrates the latter. What there is not, at any point in Boyhood or My Struggle, is a 'rational choice' or an 'investment' being made.

There are, on the other hand, clear signs of existentialism in both Boyhood and My Struggle. Decisions count for a great deal, and Knausgaard has a strongly existentialist perspective on his own life, that occasionally comes across as adolescent (incidentally, the entire project of My Struggle - a 6 volume work about oneself - is precisely the sort of thing a teenage boy would dream up, but then not deliver). What drags it out of some Nietzschean mire is the fact that the existentialism is located in the family, that great scene of "I wish I'd never been born!" type faux-Sartrean struggles. Knausgaard is locked in a battle between his adult life (father, husband) and his pre-adult desires (for fame, authenticity, machismo). Linklater's boy is muddling his way towards adulthood, encountering and abandoning desires and ambitions as he goes. We leave him aged 18 with his 'life before him', as people like to say, hoping (as adolescents) that he will avoid the mistakes of his parents, but knowing (as adults) that he will make mistakes all of his own.

I finally got round to reading David Graeber's Debt recently, and found myself asking the question: is David Graeber a conservative? The reason I ask is to do with his celebration of 'communism', as 'from each according to his ability, to each according to his need'. For Graeber, this is to be contrasted with norms of reciprocity, including the market, 'gift economies' and liberal morality. Communism, in Graeber's account, does not leave credits and debts, but is immanently justified in terms of what's available, and who needs it. You never have to 'settle up' under communism, because nobody's counting.

Immediately this made me wonder about my own domestic existence as a parent and husband. Trying to achieve equality in the domestic sphere (in the early years of a child's life) is a constant struggle, but would collapse altogether unless there was some type of commitment to the right of both parents to have a career, a social life and so on. Women are immediately and physically clobbered by having children, a fact that can quickly impact upon their other capacities such as capacity to earn money. It is not difficult to see how Graeber's vision of 'communism' could comply with pre-1960s domestic arrangements. In the absence of counting or reciprocity, who's to say what inequalities might result? Clearly the parent-child relationship is never 'settled up', but other relationships depend on forms of euivalence and balance.

On the other hand, appealing to things like 'rights' (with the deontological, public dimensions that the word implies) in the home is not necessarily a basis for happiness. Potentially, it leads towards arguments about how labour is to be properly accounted for, an issue that is rightly at the heart of feminist economics, and which couples with children implicitly have to deal with in one way or another, but which also has a coldness about it. The culture wars were not, by Graeber's definition, kicked off by a demand for communism, but for justice. The two things are very different. The former (as Boltanski and Thevenot stress) makes appeals to the common good, common rights, of everybody in society; the latter is about forming relationships between qualitatively different parties which are mutually beneficial.

Politically and culturally, the message of Boyhood and My Struggle appears to be the following. The Culture Wars are not over, and have not been won by either side. But we are exhausted by them. We are now at the stage of muddling through, hoping still for justice, but perhaps making do with the form of conservative communism that the family can still offer. Boyhood's chronology is punctuated by Presidential elections, none of which seems to have changed a great deal. Boyhood contains a fair amount of suffering, but people recover, not thanks to a righting of wrongs, but simply because people can do that. That's not a message that fits easily with liberal assumptions, but nor is it an endorsement of the current vogue for 'resilience' training. Linklater's vision of motherhood gloriously out-shines every bullshit injunction to 'lean in', to strive for gender equality through force of entrepreneurial will alone, though without offering any clear alternative politics either.

Make no mistake, Knausgaard is a sexist pig (or maybe he's just an excessively honest pig...), though not nearly as unpleasant as the male villain in Boyhood. He could no doubt give a 'communist' defence of his ability and his need to write, while his wife is caring for children; the problem with existentialists is they apply Graeber's principle to themselves in isolation. Maybe Knausgaard's wife should document her own 'struggle', as Linklater documents the various struggles of the mother in Boyhood. What is moving and saddening in both Boyhood and My Struggle is the beauty and failures of such 'communism', but this is also partly about the lack of any larger hopes, beyond the struggling through.

 

Leveson and the cultural contradictions of conservatism

With the usual half-hearted apologies for recycling my own chat, watching the delightful spectacle of the Murdoch clan and the Tories knocking chunks out of each other reminds me of this piece on the cultural contradictions of conservatism I wrote last summer, when Hackgate first exploded:

The greater significance of ‘hack-gate’ will lie in how it affects the character of British conservatism more generally. Conservatism, as a cultural and political movement, is intrinsically unwieldy and self-destructive, as hack-gate may now be demonstrating once more. From Edmund Burke’s critique of the French Revolution onwards, conservatism has achieved its identity through what it rejects and despises. It projects a pessimistic scepticism towards political deliberation as a basis for authority, insisting that modern societies are too complex, human beings too different, and language too frail, for us to reason our way towards a collective destination...

All modern conservatives have a love-hate relationship with the establishment, which ultimately is their undoing. They can never really make up their mind whether they want more government or less. Complaints about bureaucrats, ‘red tape’ and tax are matched by despair that the state has lost its nerve in various ways, until this ambivalence is eventually overwhelmed by events. Political leaders and parties that appeal to ‘traditional values’ are undermined by revelations of fraud and sexual intrigue; financial markets that are untouchable because ‘self-correcting’ end up costing the taxpayer a figure that is (according to the National Audit Office ^↑ ) more than eight times the annual budget of the NHS; military efforts to impose democracy eventually retreat into actual negotiation. That News International profited fabulously from highlighting all of these hypocrisies and U-turns in the past does not mean that the public won’t take some glee in witnessing the latest contradiction of conservatism: Rupert Murdoch’s inner circle being investigated by the Metropolitan Police, cheered on by the families of murdered children, military charities and – no doubt – the vast majority of the ‘great British public’. How loudly the Conservative Prime Minister is prepared to cheer may be crucial to how this conflict plays out.

To paraphrase the old American political adage, we might now say: "watch two pigs mud-wrestling; they both get dirty, but you can enjoy it."

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.

new issue of The Point

A quick plug for a newish journal, The Point, established by three graduate students at Chicago. Their latest print edition has a symposium of essays on the topic 'What is the Left for?', with contributions from me (plug plug) and Erik Olin Wright. Mine challenges the assumption that the Left is anti-market, and the associated assumption that neoliberalism is pro-market (an argument that is also well made in Colin Crouch's new book), and demands instead that we focus upon hierachies within capitalism.

I learnt from the ippr's roundtable commemoration of Marxism Today that the secret of its success lay in relentless, unsparing editorial intervention by its editor Martin Jacques (afflicting every author great and small except Bea Campbell, so it was said). By that standard, great things can be expected from The Point!

'political correctness' revisited

We live in the age of 'transparency' or what I once heard Michael Power describe as 'the age of permanent audit'. This is thanks to the presence, sometimes ubiquity, of technologies which make audit the default option, and inaudit (or privacy) a form of specified opt-out. For celebrities, these include legal and quasi-legal forms of media surveillance; for the powerful, it means the constant threat of leaks, the publication of money-grabbing memoirs and Freedom of Information Requests; for the rest of us, it means facebook and digital cameras.

Under these conditions, words, actions and decisions have a nasty habit of catching up on one. Interestingly, we've largely forgotten about the intrusion of the Big Brother state (for the time being), and discovered that the public sphere can be a far more brutal and effective mechanism for surveillance than the all-seeing, expert panopticon. This is partly thanks to the on-going furore around 'hackgate' in the UK, but also because of a strange new form of political correctness that appears to be emerging, as the public etiquette of the twitter age.

As Chris Dillow argues, a number of recent events suggest that the British have become incredibly over-sensitive recently. Despite having been one of the marchers that Jeremy Clarkson said he would like to shoot (in front of my family) in November, I was depressed by the scale of reaction against a man who (as Stuart Lee points out) is paid specifically to recite predictable rightwing slogans in public. The saga over Luis Suarez's finger - which hilariously now gets reported with the offensive gesture concealed - suggests that we're reviving an Edwardian sensibility. This at a time when no Guardian or Observer op-ed is complete, without an anonymous cabinet minister being quoted that someone or other is "completely fucked" (serving only to demonstrate the intimacy of quoter with quoted).

Levels of rudeness, obscenity and pornography are becoming normalised everywhere, while the stakes surrounding a stray finger or badly-judged joke are also rising rapidly. It's hard not to feel sorry for the BBC and Channel 4, who have to muster unprecedented levels of confidence (that are impossible to defend, if challenged persistently enough by enough people) that Franky Boyle or someone is within his rights to use a certain word or sentence.

Clearly, twitter and chatrooms have changed things in two obvious ways. Firstly, registering disgust has become massively easier, a problem which afflicts various service and hospitality industries, via user feedback websites. Secondly, movements of disgust can gather momentum and experience tipping points, until they dominate the headlines. This means that complaints can far outstrip the number of initial viewers, as 'Sachsgate' demonstrated best of all.

All of which turns public offence and defence into a game, involving strategy, scores, winners and losers. Offence can be measured partly in terms of how many people claim to be offended. But there are also PR-type strategies at work in terms of getting things into and out of the public 'conversation'. If they hang around for long enough, then it becomes apparently insensitive for political leaders to avoid confronting them (as both Ed Miliband and David Cameron seemingly felt in relation to Jeremy Clarkson's joke). Because the threat of over-reaction by the public is now so great, authorities often opt to over-react in the first place. For instance, this mildly irreverant Tim Minchin Christmas song was apparently pulled by ITV, before any offence had been taken. OfCom, which ironically was set up according to the most boldly technocratic principles of any regulator, is now in the unfortunate position of having to adjudicate over many such moral issues. Humour experts cannot be far behind.

What gets forgotten in amongst all of this is a fairly simple question: what does offence consist of in the first place? This NYRB article, reviewing two books on digust, might be a good place to start. I am perfectly willing to call Jeremy Clarkson a 'tosser', or even - if I thought I could get a cheap laugh - suggest that he be chopped into slices and fed to the rest of the Top Gear team. But I would find it difficult to watch the clip of him asking for marchers to be 'shot', and report that I am experiencing 'offence' or 'disgust'. To do so would be to descend to another form of moral failing: it would make me a 'liar'.

So what about the recent scandals surrounding racism by Premier League footballers? Maybe all of this over-sensitivity is a price worth paying, if it helps to out John Terry and Luis Suarez as racists and condemn them accordingly. But the problem is that these cases still feel like they're part of a game. The moral repugnance of racism gets almost overlooked, in favour of empirical questions, such as who said what, how do we know, what does the camera or microphone pick up, whose responsibility is it to act, what does the FA (or police) have to do in order for the issue to go away again, how will this affect his football or the England football team. It's almost as if John Terry's greatest mistake was to be so easily lip-read. Quite how or why a multi-millionaire England football captain thinks like that in the first place (or whether he really does) gets left in the shadows, by debates about what can be seen and confirmed as true.

As a result of all this, the age of transparency is also the age of the choreographed grovelling apology. The most disgusting - yes, I think I really mean that - aspect of the Aiden Burley 'nazi-themed stag party' scandal was the report that:

Aides tried to arrange for him to join a trip organised by the Holocaust Educational Trust to Auschwitz, the Nazi concentration camp in German-occupied Poland. But the Tory leadership moved against Burley after the newspaper reported on Sunday that he was responsible for hiring the Nazi uniform.

So their ruse didn't quite work. But the point is this: in the game of public offence and defence, Aiden Burley's aides sought to instrumentalise a Nazi concentration camp as a strategy to wrong-foot his opponents (perhaps in time for the lunchtime news). Personally, I hope Aiden Burley and his aides suffer serious disappointments in their careers, leading to prolonged regret and self-doubt. In front of their families. I'm not joking, but I am being offensive.

John Terry's PR team pulled off an equivalent coup, with this surreal headline. Is this where we're all heading to? Mobilising children, monuments and history as a means to distract the twittersphere for a few hours? Some bizarre logic of equivalence is underway, that one regrettable photograph or youtube clip can be cancelled out with one carefully planned (and photographed) gesture towards transcendent political ideals or tragedies. I suspect that Princess Diana may have set the stage for the politics of this new era.

The first wave of political correctness was idealistic, with shades of Orwellian mind control, but too technologically naive to tip into totalitarianism. It sought to police how people spoke, but with no means of achieving this, other than traditional education, debate and disapproval. As the inverse of this, the new wave of political correctness is technologically sophisticated, but with no ideals attached. It is purely concerned with catching people out, making them look foolish, putting them through the ringer for a few hours, days or weeks (depending on how much they are considered to deserve it).

But as a result, it has no concern with the unseen, the undetected or the not-yet-detected. It can work in tandem with professional investigative journalism (as with hackgate, MPs expenses and wikileaks), but it only judges what it can see. It reduces crimes and misdemeanours to their visible evidence, which can be cancelled out by the creation of equivalent visible counter-evidence.

Charlie Brooker: Charlie Brooker is like a giant robotic penis (on steroids)

In the 1980s, there was a game called Pacman, in which a small yellow monster charged around the screen eating lots of little dots, trying to get away from big purple monsters. I used to play so much Pacman, that sometimes I used to go around my friend's mum's house eating anything that happened to be yellow, while at the same time jumping with fright every time anything purple appeared in the vicinity. In the age of youtube, this has been replaced with spotify, in the sense that there is too much bandwidth for me to know what sandwich to select from my own fridge - just like in that scene from Night of the Living Dead where a postman eats his own face.

My fans are a bit like Pacman. I know that as long as I carry on shitting out the little yellow dots, littering the Guardian - and now Channel 4 - with references to new media, computer games and boringly shocking satirical exaggerations, they will continue to eat them up. I don't know who the purple monsters are in this analogy, because it doesn't matter. Just like how that little paper clip man in Microsoft Word used to jump up at an unwanted moment in the 1990s.

The problem is, if you only deal in exaggeration, then sympathy, realism and humanity start to appear like under-statements. Worse, humour is simply a quieter version of Russell Brand and Jonathan Ross leaving obscene messages on Andrew Sachs's voicemail. Of course, I realise this, so I'm allowed to do whatever the hell I like. Using an iPhone 8. Hence the premise of the first episode of my hotly-anticipated 'drama' series, Black Mirror, was so ludicrous, so 'shocking', and so obviously the product of Charlie Brooker (TM), that the next 50 minutes (which would have been 30, had it not been for the five ad breaks, self-importantly represented as 'End of Part Three') was simply an exercise in very undramatic extrapolation. The plot was basically lifted from Love Actually, but replacing Martine McCutcheon with a pig. Just like how laser-discs were going to replace VHS. Not.

Being Charlie Brooker, I'm well aware that great political satire takes aspects of reality, and allows them to build towards absurdity. I'm also aware that reality includes people, characters and institutions, and not only technology. But when did 'great political satire' ever spend week after week as the 'Most Read' article on the Guardian website? Which is why the only elements of reality in Black Mirror were laptops and youtube, a sort of Silicon-Valley-product-placement-fest, while everything else was just hysteria, not unlike Melanie Phillips's worst nightmare. The difference is that Melanie Phillips doesn't remember the noise that Bowser used to make in the Nintendo64 Mariokart.

Remember Nathan Barley? I don't. I was playing a massive multi-player session of Doom, while smoking jellie babies and living in the 1990s when I wrote that. Which is why it has to go down as one of the worst satirical missed opportunities of recent years. While Shoreditch was being gentrified out of recognition, the streets of Hoxton were filling up with vomit and 'art' became an excuse for the most intellectually vacuous forms of elitism, I made out that these people wore blue-tooth headsets (like in the future!) had Adam Ant haircuts (like in the 1980s!) and wore shades the whole time. This saved me from having to make the difficult transition from reality to satire. Hey, lighten up. It was an exaggeration!

So get ready for episode two of Black Mirror next Sunday. According to the website, this is "is a satire on entertainment shows and our insatiable thirst for distraction set in a sarcastic version of a future reality. In this world, everyone is confined to a life of strange physical drudgery. The only way to escape this life is to enter the 'Hot Shot' talent show and pray you can impress the judges." The really clever thing is that the episode itself will play to this thirst for distraction (I do know that's what I'm doing). The episode starts with Simon Cowell having sex with the pope, in exchange for beatification, and basically goes down hill from there. It won't be to everyone's taste. For example, all the key plot devices will only be accessible to viewers familiar with the term 'trending on twitter'.

With apologies to Craig Brown and, less so, to Charlie Brooker.

the great parliamentary spectacular

It was always the case that, once our Watergate arrived, it was going to be special. The yanks might generate good conspiracy theory fodder, what with being the most powerful country in the world and everything, but you never heard of anyone threatening to do this in Washington DC:

John Whittingdale, the Tory chair of the committee, was advised by the parliamentary authorities that he could refer the matter to the Commons if the Murdochs failed to accept the summons to appear on Tuesday. MPs could then vote to summon them to the bar of the Commons – the strip on the floor of the house marking the end of the standing section for MPs – where they could have been informed of their punishment. This could have included admonishment, a fine or imprisonment, possibly in a cell under Big Ben. (Full article)

Thankyou, Britain. Sometimes the fact that our version of political modernity got jammed somewhere around 1700 almost seems worth it. But it's worth noting that, when it comes to parading pre-modern ritual as post-modern spectacle, The Royal Family are really making the running these days, as Wills and Kates are managing to demonstrate, without so much as a third person in their marriage.

If Parliament wants to keep up, I recommend that the Murdochs are not only imprisoned under Big Ben, but that Hugh Grant and Steve Coogan adopt the livery of Cromwellian prison guards, and keep watch over them 24/7. Cameras will be on standby to broadcast the gradual deterioration of the Murdochian mental state, while The Guardian live-blogs the whole sordid affair, until eventually Alan Sugar decides which one of them is garrotted in the grounds of the Tower of London. You think Nixon had it bad?