potlatch

Writings on Brexit

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

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

who wants to know?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

against the neo-behaviorists

The LSE Impact Blog have been hosting a debate on the future of the social sciences, in anticipation of this event tomorrow evening, with Nicholas Christakis, whose article on the need to 'shake up' the social sciences made a bit of a stir last year. A more recent article by Amanda Goodall and Andrew Oswald lept enthusiastically aboard Christakis's bandwagon, from a British context.

The tenor of this debate irks me. It employs the rhetoric of 'modernity' and 'anti-conservatism' in a similar way to Tony Blair, namely, to back all critics into corners where they do not all justifiably belong. So I wrote this piece in response. The heart of my argument is this bit:

Goodall, Oswald and Christakis demonstrate scant curiosity about what the social sciences are, or where they came from. The unspoken implication is that they are simply a junior off-shoot of a naturalist project which began around the time of Francis Bacon. Is it not significant that they emerged in late 19th century Europe, in the context of the collapse of Victorian liberalism? Would it not be useful for one of their neuro-economists to know that the aspiration to ground decision-making in the physical body has been a repeated obsession of behaviorists over the past century, which has run into a pattern of familiar failures and crises during that time? Viewed this way, it might be possible to ask about the status of the social sciences in 2014, as something other than mere understudies to the natural sciences. A new form of ‘interdisciplinarity’, possibly a new vision of experimentation, may be the welcome result.

The difficulty is that this would involve placing demands on the natural sciences, as well as on the social sciences. And this seems to be the one thing that Goodall, Oswald and Christakis cannot countenance. The shared terrain rests on various acts of forgetting on the part of the social sciences (a forgetting of history, a forgetting of the reflexive nature of human beings), but no acts of learning on the part of the natural sciences.  It involves no searching questions regarding the natural sciences – such as their status within the American military-industrial complex – but merely encouragement to the social sciences that they should become equally co-operative. Is this really what we mean by interdisciplinarity?

Head along to the LSE tomorrow evening to carry on the debate.

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.

 

Richard Dawkins is a post-structuralist

This from Christopher Hitchens' Hitch-22:

From King Lear: "Thou rascal beadle, hold thy bloody hand! Why dost thous lash that whore?... Thou hotly lust'st to use her in that kind, for which thou whip'st her." This is why, whenever I hear some bigmouth in Washington or the Christian heartland banging on about the evils of sodomy or whatever, I mentally enter his name in my notebook and contentedly set my watch. Sooner rather than later, he will be discovered down on his weary and well-worn old kees in some dreary motel or latrine, with an expired Visa card, having tried to pay well over the odds to be peed upon by some Apache transvestite.

This is rather how I feel about positivists ranting and raging against 'post-modernism'. What is it you are so frightened of, guys (and you do tend to be guys)? I recall the clever boy in my college bar, who, rocking on his heels while wiping a wisp of snot from his nostril, would repeat his little mantras such as "but would you fly in a plane designed by a post-modernist?!", leaving a gleeful silence afterwards in the expectation of laughter which never actually came.

For those such as Richard Dawkins or Larry Summers, who spy a French constructivist lurking down every alley, no doubt up to their perverted and mischievous tricks, what precisely is the peril? That knowledge might turn out to be hard work? That it might be expensive and time-consuming to assemble? But isn't that precisely how you came by your large houses in Cape Cod and your treasured prizes, and the rest of us didn't? Or do you attribute that good fortune to spontaneous natural or economic forces as well?

I was discussing Nietzsche and Foucault with some students the other day, and it was remarkable how quickly the discussion turned towards Hayek and neoliberalism. Read Hayek on the problem of 'scientism', and you see that the root of the neoliberal project is the same as the root of post-structuralism, namely that knowledge cannot be disentangled from politics. Hayek's solution is to run society like a competitive game, in which perspectives battle it out for supremacy, using the market as the principle arena in which to do battle in. Foucault's solution is... not to have one. The Marxist critique levelled at Foucault or Latour, that they are actually neoliberals deep down, is wrong in many ways, but has something to commend it epistemologically. Perhaps this is why Foucault read the early neoliberals so well.

Something similar can be said about late Wittgenstein and behaviorism, whose common threads have been identified in papers such as this. To argue that all language is a form of practice (but that it's all we have) as Wittgenstein does is only a short jump away from saying that observable behaviour is all that we can know about human beings (as behaviorists do). The difference is simply that behaviorism implicitly appoints certain elite experts to do this observing, whereas for Wittgenstein we're all immersed in the social-linguistic soup equally. Time and again, the question is: how do we deal with the truth of Nietzsche? Do we accept it in the service of expression, or accept it in the service of repression? Ignoring it would be much easier, but its interesting that this is something that positivists feel curiously unable to do.

Could it be that someone like Dawkins is a secret, shameful, torch-under-the-covers reader of Nietzsche? Because if he believed in the deeper truth of science, would it really be necessary to exert so much rhetorical and political energy in defending it? And as per the Hitchens quote above, could Dawkins' latent post-structuralism be causing him so much guilt and self-loathing, that he has developed a public profile which tears into 'philosophy' and 'sociology', when really he wishes to expunge them from his own soul, or else admit his devotion to them? (Perhaps in his effort to appear antipathetic to philosophy, he sometimes goes too far, and exaggerates his own stupidity for effect; this would explain tweets such as this.) For if Dawkins doesn't believe that knowledge and politics are entangled, then surely there is no danger: nature itself will falsify the teachings of the creationists and the Muslims. Only someone who knows that he is ultimately a constructor and a narrator would grow to care so deeply about the constructions and narrations of those around him, and become so paranoid about the baneful influence of those philosophers or sociologists who threaten to point all this out. 

gift and the loathing for it

The paradox of the gift is that it cannot be recognised as such, while it is being received or enjoyed. The true gift is the one that is simply given and received, unappreciated as a 'gift'. This is why 'gift economies' do not really involve gifts at all, but semi-formalised norms of exchange, that can tip into monetary economies. As Nietzsche observed, there is nobody more selfish than the person who self-identifies as generous and altruistic. An all-loving Christian God would not have demanded love in return - which is why Christianity required ressentiment injected into it by the Church in order to sap it of its original vitality and joy. Gifts are best understood as things which get noticed as such only later. Derrida suggested that the fake banknote may be our exchange-obsessed society's last real gift.

A few things over the past month have got me thinking about intellectual gifts, and the ressentiment for them that currently seems to weave its way through modern government. Firstly, this two-part Radio 4 documentary on the Birmingham School of Cultural Studies, which is just coming up for its 50th anniversary (commemorated by this project). Despite doing a PhD in a Cultural Studies centre, I've never known all that much about the history of this intellectual project, but have recently been trying to find out more.

What struck me listening to the documentary was the tacit generosity of the project, that spoke of another political age from our present one. Not only a generosity to the people whose lives it sought to study and understand, but also to the public and subsequent publics. Someone in the documentary, I can't remember who, spoke of cultural studies as something that had since trickled into our public sphere, beyond the bounds of the university, via the work of people like Suzanne Moore and (less plausibly) Charlie Brooker, in whom the original spirit of cultural studies is perceived to survive. Maybe there is a Burkean version of socialism, in which goods escape calculation by virtue of spilling over from one generation to the next.

This is not 'impact'; it's the gift of new critical and theoretical resources, which are then available to people, to make sense of their own lives and to criticise the terms on which they're lived. Nor is it about making social science 'jargon free', an ideal that seems to excite Popperians and English empiricists, while really concealing a ressentiment against the inventiveness of German and French intellectualism. Policy-makers like their social science 'jargon free', but the history of cultural studies and its non-academic celebrants suggests that the public, including its auto-didact working class members, is not as terrified of complexity and 'pretentiousness' as the managers and accountants.

Which brings me to a second piece that's been kicking around: this article by Simon Price, bemoaning the demise of the cultural critic. Price was one of several critics who lost their jobs at the Independent this year as a cost-cutting measure, but the article is not simply an expression of private grievance. The catalyst for it was a moronic argument by someone who should know better, Will Self. According to Self, in the digital age:

the role of the critic becomes not to help us to discriminate between 'better' and 'worse' or 'higher' and 'lower' monetised cultural forms, but only to tell us if our precious time will be wasted – and for this task the group amateur mind is indeed far more effective than the unitary perception of an individual critic

Doing facebook's bidding for it, Self appears to collapse critical judgement - the edifice on which Kant believed all of our hopes for Enlightenment were built - into a form of unreflective 'liking' and 'disliking', of the form that was invented by market researchers in the 1920s. Self's vision of our critical future is one in which 'good' rises to the top, through force of what Adam Arvidsson calls 'general sentiment', while the 'bad' is trodden under foot. Journalism on any topic other than business (where it is subsidised by company subscriptions) is now considered something people ordinarily do as a hobby, for free. In place of paid-for criticism, using money as currency, we have exchanges of sentiment, where units of recommendation and reputatin are the currency. The latter is no more gift-like, indeed by making it impossible for critics to pay their rent, it arguably collapses aesthetics further into the market.

What Price was unable to say in his understandably downbeat piece was that, very often, criticism not only contributes to the value of artistic production, it is a gift in and of itself. The famous quote he refers to, that "writing about music is like dancing about architecture", ignores the possibility that the dancing is often better than the architecture, more worthwhile, more gratifying. I say this because the journalism of Price and a small clan of music journalists (Taylor Parkes, Neil Kulkarni, Everett True, Simon Reynolds) in the mid-1990s was just as valuable to me as a somewhat confused teenger as all of my Manic Street Preachers and Smiths records put together.

No doubt partly as an inheritance from the Birmingham School (via punk and its fanzines) Melody Maker, as I've written before, was an absurd, brilliant, enfuriating, downright silly, furiously intellectual, frustrated and frustrating, commercially hopeless venture, that found beauty and genius in the least likely of places. Often it found them where they didn't actually exist, in the trousers of bands who clearly hung around Camden in the hope of impressing Melody Maker journalists. The politics may have been socialist, but the cultural values were never egalitarian. There were ruthless, sometimes sadistic critical batterings handed out to bands that seemed too average, and utterly excessive plaudits heaped upon those that were extraordinary. There was nothing democratic about it, nothing fair. There was no economy at work. If you want cultural criticism to reflect public opinion, then twitter followers and spotify listens will represent that for you.

But this was all also a gift, unappreciated at the time. It gave far more than it had to, with the critics leaking philosophical reference points all over the page, without fear of mockery. It was one thing for Morrissey to stand up and flaunt his bookishness; I never believed I would ever stand on a stage waving gladioli. It was quite another to discover, a la punk, that members of the audience could do the same thing. In that respect, the 'dancing' was a far greater inspiration than the 'architecture'. So, Simon Price, if you're reading this - and especially if you're not - thankyou.

And finally, this - Stefan Collini's brilliantly depressing overview of the emerging state of British higher education, published a couple of weeks ago. There is too much in there to analyse in detail. But the piece, together with my own experiences of the contemporary university, speak of a mysterious dysfunction, that courses through the veins of neoliberalism and financialisation. Collini's piece raises more questions than it answers. Why pursue reforms that won't actually achieve any obvious efficiency savings or improvements in education? If you want to think of this in narrowly economic terms, why destabilise one of Britain's last remaining worldclass export industries? Things are certainly wrong with higher education, and lets admit that they do include some of the bugbears of managerialism (lack of transparency and accountability, though rarely lack of effort); but it doesn't even seem that these reforms will fix them. They will, however, inject a financial logic of leverage and return on investment into the everyday lives of universities, constraining their freedoms even further and ripping off students and teachers alike. Within twenty or thirty years, it will be the public, lacking legacies such as the Birmingham School's, that will be most ripped off of all.

I don't know what psychoanalysts would call this, but I diagnose it as a form of gift-phobia. The greatest fear of the policy-maker or manager today is what is disparagingly called 'something-for-nothing', but is more traditionally known as a 'gift'. Unless this is recognised in Nietzschean terms, as a form of impulsive hatred or paranoia, neoliberalism can appear entirely baffling. Privatisations rarely save public money, and often benefit nobody but the bankers and consultants that oversee them (the most helpful analogy for privatisation I can think of is the stay-at-home parent who pays for a full-time nanny: they certainly don't save themselves money, or in the long-run responsibility, but they pass a problem over to someone else in the medium-term). Endless audit saps the life and - yes - the productivity out of public sector workers, including academics. The declared logic of neoliberalism simply does not stack up, unless this psychoanalytic ressentiment is understood.

Attacks on 'something-for-nothing' take many forms. One form, pushed by social media, is the emergence of a calculus of reputation. We increasingly 'share' things we find, not because we believe that the public deserves them, or they deserve a public, but because we want to be recognised as a sharer of interesting things. When something great happens to us, when a beautiful experience befalls us, we look around for a camera to record and 'share' and 'tag' it - almost as if the sheer gift of a wonderful performance or beautiful view is too much to receive, without inserting it into the broader calculus of the new 'social'. 'Gift economies' may indeed be more corrupting modes of exchange than 'money economies', where at least the non-identity between quantity and quality, exchange and use value, is written into the fabric of the market.

 We can also witness this in the logic of workfare, which makes little sense as a labour market policy, but a lot of sense as a vent for ressentiment against leisure or the political and cultural possibilities of free time. I remember, under John Major, an outcry amongst musicians against very early forms of workfare in the UK, which, they argued, would make it impossible for anyone to form a band in the future. Those celebrated British exports, Jarvis Cocker and Noel Gallagher, declared that the traditional dole was a necessary condition of what they'd done. In its innocent optimism, this argument now seems to come from another age. David Cameron is happy to cite his love of the Smiths, but his government oversees policies that will generate only Mumford & Sons.

The problem with gifts is that it matters deeply how they're accounted for, or rather, that they're not accounted for. There are plenty of manifestations of neoliberalism which involve large investments in public goods, either for reasons of 'competitiveness' (investing in R&D and infrastructure) or reasons of 'equity' (investing in public services) or reasons of 'security' (military and surveillance). Neoliberalism has never offered much obstacle towards public expenditure. But it does possess a paranoid utilitarian sensibility, that the return on that expenditure be predicted and delineated in advance, even against all common sense.

Much of the time, the unintended 'efficiency' or 'productivity' of a public expenditure can indeed be witnessed in hindsight. But this is not unlike saying that the true gift can only be appreciated after the fact, that gratitude must come later. And perversely, a culture which is unable to relax, let go, let money flow just a little, will find that imagination and dedication are crippled, to the point where efficiency itself is impossible. Funding applications to British Research Councils now require academics to engage in a strange speculative leap, whereby they have to describe the entire project, its outcomes and 'impact' in advance. These pieces of science fiction serve little purpose of ensuring that money goes to the 'best' recipients, but a great purpose in reassuring the state that nothing unexpected will happen. Rendering universities predictable (even when those predictions are absurdly rationalist) is perhaps the most crippling political strategy of all.

I'm not sure what therapy would like for gift-phobia. Setting fire to a million pounds in cash? Confronting a situation where the world's leading money-men hold a gun to their own heads, as occurred in autumn 2008? Strangely, positive psychology senses something of this problem, by endlessly urging people to focus on giving, and not simply consuming or accumulating. But this prescription is offered as a 'top tip' for handling depression and anxiety. The politics is stripped out of it. It's difficult to imagine a public body, with sufficient authority, that it could give in an unaccounted way; this would, by definition, be an unaccountable act, maybe even a corrupt act. What seems clear is that the culture of neoliberal ressentiment is growing more extreme, and save for the occasional potlatch of a royal wedding or a banking bailout, the capacity to relax, breathe and let the future just happen, is being extinguished.

 

Blairite modernism

It is often easiest to imagine what is meant by 'modernity' through envisioning the planning and non-planning of urban space. Projections of the future are laid down as grids of streets or parks, which then rapidly become out-moded and then historic, posing the question of whether to preserve them, merely tolerate them or destroy them to make way for a new wave of modernity. The city can then be read in terms of the layers of different futures that have been laid down in the past, some merely peeking out above others, others boldly preserved as our 'heritage', and others lost altogether. Nowhere is this process better described than in Marshall Berman's All That Is Solid Melts Into Air.

Visiting the unspeakably ghastly O2 Arena for the first time on Friday to watch Leonard Cohen, I was struck not only by the intense sadness of this element of modernity, but also by two other things. That it also afflicts the way in which pop culture drapes layers of 'progress' upon previous layers, leaving people desperately scraping away at the new ones in search of the older ones that are becoming obscured. And that Blairism had its own particular version of this time-worn modernising dance.

We desire Cohen because he comes from another age. To still be playing today, and playing so well aged 79, means he must be some sort of time-traveller. To witness him stirring gravely over his microphone, surrounded by dole-faced artisans on Spanish guitar and fiddle, must be a more high-tech version of putting Lawrence Olivier on stage as a hologram in the musical Time a few years after his death. Cohen played for nearly four hours on Friday night, seemingly out of some out-moded sense of decency or maybe because he'd applied the labour theory of value to justify ticket prices that he lacked any control over. His wit, intensity and relentlessness, constant generosity to his band and the audience, became spectacles in their own right, almost making sense of the strange aircraft hangar in which they were placed. This is the path between corny cabaret act and introverted perversity that Bob Dylan has never been able (or wanted) to master.

As Cohen left the stage, lights flickered around the auditorium (I guess it is technically an auditorium, although when people began clapping the beat in a different corner from where we were sitting, the time-lag meant that they gave the impression of suffering some congregational arhythmia). Those lights spelled a single iconic emptiness: O2. O2. O2. O2. Then, as lights began to rise above us, a second band of digital displays lit up: Barclays wishes you a safe journey home. Virgin looks after your family. Vodafone keeps you connected. Global purveyors of talk, money, risk calculus and other liquid goods place a comforting arm around you.

Just as cricket grounds now come flooded with men in flourescent jackets, preventing people from standing where there is 'no standing', from drinking beer where there is 'no drinking' or from using exits which are 'no exit', the post-1990s music venue is a vast crowd- and customer-handling machine. Whenever the proportions and technologies of the O2 loomed into view, I kept thinking: this is where successful 'indie' bands now play. What used to be called a gig, since reinvented by mobile phone companies as a derivative of ring-tones called 'live music' (as I discussed some years back) has been resolutely modernised. From my seat high up in the O2 dome, I noticed there is a new measure of value or critical judgement at work in performance spaces today: how many small blue lights are on in the audience in front, indicators that the moment has earned digital preservation above mere enjoyment. When it becomes so technically easy to discover the next Kings of Leon, and to purchase e-tickets, the flipside of such uber-liquidity is the need for industrial-scale processing plants, to ferry customers in and out of the band's presence. No wonder hipsters prefer listening to two mates and a ukelele.

Blairite infrastructure has a common shabby-chic feel to it, both monstrously expensive and cheap at the same time. Think the new Wembley stadium. Think PFI hospitals. It's a public sphere subjected to cost-benefit analysis (and subsequent security audit), with private surpluses creamed off at a state-guaranteed 10%. What distinguished New Labour was a refusal to abandon certain pre-Thatcher 'values' or 'goals', but a complete agnosticism regarding the means that might deliver them or the types of allies required to deliver on them. The result was that space was indeed secured for what was essentially valued - delivery, public space, live music - but that this value became increasingly over-burdened by the vast bulk of communications and financial garb that packaged it up, mediated and administered it. Men make their own history, but not under conditions of their own choosing. And I got to watch Leonard Cohen, but not remotely under conditions of my own choosing.

The Blairite version of 'modernisation', which became increasingly (and I think inaccurately) mocked as mere 'marketisation' was a process of endlessly sacrificing integrity of means, in a desperate bid to maintain ends or outcomes. To be a modernist under such conditions, that is, to seize modernity enthusiastically, necessarily requires a paradoxical embrace of the past, for that is where value is derived from. Hence, the 'modernisation' of the NHS is defended with appeals to Nye Bevan's original vision, and Vodafone et al's celebration of 'live music' is increasingly dependent on dead bands from the 1990s reforming and near-dead individuals from the 1960s staggering on.

Eventually, as Max Weber foresaw, modernity's rationalisation may reach a point where human goals and intrinsic values start to get crowded out all together. Resistance to this takes many forms. Circa 1918, Weber was concerned by the dangerous promises of prophets and gurus. Today, nostalgia grows stronger as the economic efficiency of the entertainment industries grows more extreme, because it grows more extreme. Strange to think that the weightless, po-mo 1990s are now viewed as fertile historical territory, to be mined, authenticated, re-formed and put on the Barclays stage in Hyde Park once a summer. The question that this modernity always confronts is how far can the juggernaut of delivery expand, before the purpose of an event becomes inverted altogether. The best thing you could say about Cohen on Friday night was that, for a while, it didn't matter that we were sitting in the O2 Arena. This isn't always the case; the ship can capsize, as BT's performance in Hyde Park (sponsored by Blur and New Order) last summer clearly demonstrated.

Postmodernism involved planting lurid and incoherent classical styles in defiant opposition to the futuristic visions of the twentieth century. It transpires that, after postmodernism, comes an untheorised, profit-maximising nostalgia, in which the past becomes an anaesthetic against the machinery of the present. If you're very smart, you deliver both the anaesthetic and the machinery via a single vehicle, as Mumford & Inc have noticed, looking to the past and the future simultaneously. Otherwise, we cling to fragments of the past, as new pasts get chucked on top of it, from newer, seemingly worst modernities. In Walter Benjamin's words:

There is a painting by Klee called Angelus Novus. An angel is depicted there who looks as though he were about to distance himself from something which he is staring at. His eyes are opened wide, his mouth stands open and his wings are outstretched. The Angel of History must look just so. His face is turned towards the past. Where we see the appearance of a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe, which unceasingly piles rubble on top of rubble and hurls it before his feet. He would like to pause for a moment so fair, to awaken the dead and to piece together what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise, it has caught itself up in his wings and is so strong that the Angel can no longer close them. The storm drives him irresistibly into the future, to which his back is turned, while the rubble-heap before him grows sky-high. That which we call progress, is this storm.

 The faster the rubble piles up, the more desperately we scrabble to find something of value underneath it, and - like earthquake rescue teams - the more exuberant we feel when we emerge from it with something still vaguely living.

who will defend liberalism?

People will always round on 'liberalism' (in the European, not American, sense of the word) at times of perceived crisis. Opponents of liberalism will even seek to engineer crises in order to attack it. New Labour was blessed with one of those rare periods of human history, when military conflict is minimal and wealth seems to grow almost naturally. In response, Tony Blair and John Reid invented a fantasy of ubiquitous Arab terror, so as to advance their instinctive political assault on liberalism. This had the no-doubt-anticipated consequence of re-framing 'liberals' as a special interest group, obsessed with human rights law, magna carta, old men in grey wigs and Europe. Even the Liberal Democrats no longer want anything to do with that kind of liberalism.

That those in the executive branch of government like to hurl rocks at the judicial branch is not so surprising. Even in the US, Presidents simply have to refer to something as a 'war' (on terror, on drugs) to know that they are then virtually free from judicial interference. But it bothers me when the Left starts to beat up on liberalism. The leftwing New Statesman's editorial this week argues that "with its emphasis on abstract individualism, liberalism, the great driver of social emancipation and economic prosperity, now feels inadequate to this new age of insecurity." This repeats the line espoused by Blue Labour and Red Toryism, that both the 'social liberalism' of the 1960s and the 'economic liberalism' of the 1980s have now reached their limit, and some sort of more substantive, collectivist communitarianism is needed.

Of course everyone is entitled to their own definition of 'liberalism'. But allow me to offer my own interpretation of the term, and question what on earth the Left would be left with, if it became genuinely 'post-liberal', as for instance the think tank Demos has been recently proposing. Liberalism doesn't favour 'abstract individualism', because it doesn't want to get entangled in culture or history. What it favours is identifying a common and stable basis on which to judge people, actions, institutions and economic distributions, that is robust enough to survive inspite of cultural or historical contingency.

This is, admittedly, partly a search for principles, giving it a necessarily philosophical and discursive dimension. Certain ideas are at work, especially regarding what it means to be a human being. But this is an open philosophical or anthropological debate. 'Deontological' liberals, such as Kant and Rawls, view humans as reasoning creatures. But there are more materialist answers to this question, including those provided by Marxists, which represent human beings as productive creatures. Hayek, if he believed anything at all about humanity, probably believed that we're all equally prone to be wrong about the world. There is no reason whatsoever why liberal debates about common humanness couldn't now be entered by neuroscientists or neo-Darwinists, if they weren't so busy re-categorising details of the pope's religious affiliation or the sylvanian geography of bear's toilet habits.

But it is never only about principles. It is also about the material, technical and institutional means by which equal judgement on people is to be enacted. For neoliberals, this is some notion of price (often mutating into an audit of competitive performance). As Stuart White's fascinating article, Revolutionary Liberalism, details, liberals of the early 20th century saw worker ownership and profit-sharing as the institutional basis on which to ensure individuals could attain equality in the public and political realm. There is a long tradition of liberal socialism, now exemplified by people such as Robin Blackburn and Erik Olin Wright, who would view capitalism as the main enemy of liberalism.

There are multiple philosophical liberalisms, and even more technical or practical manifestations of liberalism. All that they essentially share is a vain Enlightenment hope, that there might be some basis on which to govern people, that does not discriminate according to contingency. Or rather, to flip that round, they are explicit about which element of contingency they are using as the basis for discrimination. For judges, it is the contingent fact that one is guilty of something. For neoliberals, it is the contingent fact of being able to pay for something. For republican liberals, it is the contingent fact of being a skilled orator. And so on. But there must be a criterion, it must be named in advance, and there must be some publicity surrounding how it is employed. That is all liberalism necessarily means.

Abandon this in favour of what? I can at least understand the catholic theological critique of liberalism, that underpins John Milbank's theological critique of modernity, Phillip Blond's Red Toryism, possibly John Cruddas's Blue Labourism, and Alasdair MacIntyre and Charles Taylor's communitarianism. The basis for political judgement ceases to be purely institutional and philosophical, and attains an element of divinity. Ordinary people may not understand how judgement is meted out, but they can believe that it is good nevertheless. But what do we secularists have? There are some answers to this question, and some of them are hideous.

The other question I would put to 'post-liberals' is this. Why do you automatically assume that liberalism is a watchword for elitism, technocracy and establishment, whereas post-liberalism will usher in community, organic relations and rekindled tradition? Isn't that the same lie that Karl Rove based George W Bush's political career on, whereby working class anger with judicial rule (in the US case, Roe v Wade) is channelled to facilitate a cynical extension of power by existing elites? Surely elites are often delighted to see liberalism diminished. Remove rule of law or rule of market, and elites - including technocratic ones - simply acquire new freedoms to meddle and rearrange institutions in their own interests.

In After Virtue, MacIntyre poses a horribly simple ethical question: do we side with Nietzsche or Aristotle? Or to put that another way, do we abandon morality altogether, or sign up to virtue ethics? MacIntyre opts for the latter. But when a choice is put this starkly, there is a dangerous tendency of people to flip from one to the other, or even dwell in both realms simultaneously. The only solution to nihilism is the church. The only freedom from moral repression is a form of hedonistic nihilism. MacIntyre's dilemma works very well for many cynical elites, who talk Aristotle, but act Nietzsche. The post-liberals are naive about politics, if they think that the rhetoric of 'faith, flag and family', as Maurice Glasman likes to put it, will actually install virtue ethics into modern public life. The abandonment of liberalism can create a polarity, in which some select substantively meaningful rituals (as Blue Labour and Red Tories hope), while others enjoy an even greater form of hedonism.

Neoliberalism, of a certain variety, is able to proceed without having much of a liberal component, other than a basic common recognition of money (but even money is now constantly propped up by the executive branch of government, via central banks). The neoliberal tradition had thrown off much of its 'liberal' heritage (such as the ordoliberals and Henry Simons) by the time it achieved its political takeover in the 1970s. The effect of the financial crisis on neoliberalism was to shed the remnants of its claim to treat all market actors equally. Today, the poor aren't even trusted with money...

I've written a couple of papers on what 'post-liberal' neoliberalism looks like, and I'm not convinced that it involves morris dancers swilling warm beer on the white cliffs of Dover. As I argued here, a version of technocratic communitarianism is now increasingly plausible, to replace technocratic liberalism. And as I argued here, a type of Schmittian market exception, in which the market is sustained only through periodic acts of extra-legal emergency measures, may be what we're left with, post-2008. These are examples of 'post-liberalism', in which the status quo is defended out of fear, but not on the basis that it serves the common good.

Maybe this is all a problem of definitions. If the issue is, how can secular, modern societies find a basis on which to sort 'good' from 'bad', then I'm sure that I would find far more common cause with a catholic communitarian like John Cruddas than with a neoliberal such as Larry Summers or a legal liberal such as Shami Chakrabarti. But why is liberalism the problem, and not, say, utilitarianism, with its brutal statistics, expert weightings and clinical interventions? Or why not defend democracy, with its specification of voice, rather than community, with its darker implications of exclusion and suppression? Somebody other than just the liberty 'lobby' needs to defend liberalism, and I don't see why that shouldn't be the secular left.

For what it's worth, I would view the present as the moment to do neoliberalism all over again, though this time with a sociologically coherent notion of what economic freedom (and domination) means, where it is likely to arise, and the types of institutions and public policies that are likely to support it. Thatcherite belief in 'enterprise' and 'entrepreneurship' was never liberal in the first place, because it treated some individuals (the 'talented', the 'leaders', the 'innovators') according to a different set of standards from everybody else. That's the opposite of liberalism. Real economic liberalism would be a monumental achievement. Whether it's compatible with capitalism is another question altogether.

article published in Theory Culture & Society

My article, 'When is a market not a market?: 'Exemption', 'externality' and 'exception' in the case of European State Aid rules' has now appeared online at Theory Culture & Society (I assume this means it will be in the March issue). I probably blogged about this when the article was originally accepted back in 1934 on whenever it was. Anyway, here is the preprint version, below is the abstract, or email me if you'd like the actual published pdf version.

The reach of markets and market-based forms of valuation is never unlimited in any society, which invites empirical and political questions regarding how limits to markets are instituted, justified and enforced. Under neoliberalism, the state performs a key role in expanding the reach of markets and associated principles and techniques of valuation, using law and governmental techniques. But this then poses a question of the relationship between the neoliberal state and the market that it endorses and enforces: is the state internal or external to the market order that it helps to construct? European Union state aid rules provide an empirical entry point to consider such questions, providing a combination of normative, technical and sovereign principles, via which the division between state and market can be justified, tested and enacted. The article identifies three separate though overlapping logics within state aid documents, each of which offers the state a justification for suspending the competitive market order: exemptions, in which non-market values are upheld, externalities, in which markets are shown to be technically inefficient, and exceptions – such as the 2008 financial crisis – in which the state abandons the market to save the market.

the problem with clever people

Flicking through my Guardian app on my way to work today, I came across David Mitchell's Sunday column, which opened with the following vignette:

My old flatmate, as I've mentioned here before, was fascinated by the question: "Which would you choose, the washing machine or the vote?"... To clarify, I don't mean a washing machine. It's not just swapping your vote for a free washing machine – not many of us would do that. And neither is it the invention of the washing machine. You're not being asked merely to live washing machineless in a world where such things don't exist so you couldn't miss them. No, you stand to permanently lose access to a labour-saving technology, which you will still observe everywhere, in exchange for a continued ability to minutely influence the democratic process.

Mitchell's old flatmate is clearly a 'clever' man (don't try and tell me that kind of smart-ass clever question didn't come from a bloke). Maybe he met Mitchell at Cambridge. He probably studied a difficult subject, like mathematics, or one of those subjects that requires lots of memorising, like law. Something tells me he didn't study politics though. And reading the opening of Mitchell's article, I immediately wanted to punch Mitchell's old flatmate, mostly in the face.

The main reason why I felt this way was that David Mitchell's old flatmate (DMOF heareafter) had successfully planted this thought in my head, like an irritating sonic logo, from where it then refused to budge. If his task was to pollute perfectly good minds with irritating problems that might have fallen out of MENSA-branded fortune cookies, he had delivered on it with gusto. Faced with DMOF's challenge, my instinctive response was to put my head in my hands and wish it would go away. How can I possibly know which I'd choose, the washing machine or the vote you bastard? But what made it worse was the image of the glee that would come over DMOF's clever face, as he witnessed another victim snared in his clever net. Clever old DMOF.

One of the problems with clever people is that they transport their cleverness around like confetti, to chuck at people whether its wanted or not. They turn up at perfectly pleasant parties and events, with pre-prepared conversational gambits and questions, aimed at unsettling people and putting them to the test. They only start cleverness contests that they suspect they will win. They sit at the interface of computer science and bad political philosophy, offering Nietzschean interpretations of the Starwars trilogy, and then changing the subject once somebody starts actually talking about Nietzsche's writing. I suspect that DMOF has already worked out his answer to his own challenge, and that his answer is 'washing machine', for cleverly nihilistic-mathematical reasons that he will explain to an attentive audience, if only he can get one.

But lets suppose, for DMOF's sake, he actually has a background in political philosophy. Then what is he doing? Presumably he is helping us to interrogate many of our most deeply held beliefs, illuminating what is at stake when we claim to be 'in favour' of something. He is using his clever device to put history and social reality on hold for a moment, and helping us explore our priorities. He is doing so for 'heuristic' purposes, maybe even for our benefit. He means to help us, does that generous DMOF!

Or perhaps DMOF has some neo-conservative or neo-liberal sympathies. His games are less innocent than they appear, seeing as they force us to admit how perillous our 'Western' luxuries are. Only through intense work in securing the pillars of Western civilisation might we have either a vote or a washing machine, and we should be damned happy with either. One can imagine Milton Friedman pointing to a 1960s socialist nation, and arguing that we liberals patronise them with our assumption that it is votes that they most want, and not washing machines. DMOF's little games are a reminder of so much that we 'Westerners' take for granted, the 'killer apps' which keep tyranny and hand-washing at bay. Hang on a minute... did David Mitchell once share a flat with Niall Ferguson??

Yet while DMOF can doubtless give endless ingenious explorations of what his choice means, would he have anything to say about the world he has completely erradicated from his clever little trope? If he is interested in the choice between political and economic values, does he then explore ways in which the two are in fact traded off, the policies which promote one over the other, the intellectual shifts through which one colonises the other? I fear not. And yet through his sheer cleverness, he has made political philosophising his own personal terrain, and struck depression into the heart of all those who once aspired to practice it.

One of the reasons I've ended up doing sociology is because it's a good way to avoid people like DMOF. The fact that they no doubt view the feeling as mutual only strengthens that view.