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 )

Governing through unhappiness

Every sector, every profession, which can plausibly lay a claim to the 'public interest', is currently resisting austerity in one simple fashion: claiming that by hitting the sector or profession concerned, the real losers will be the public. Ironically the one industry that is now the greatest recipient of public financial beneficence, namely financial services, seems to have lost all sense of the public ever having an interest in the first place. I guess that's how they achieved such an extraordinary level of political arbitrage in the first place. So more fool the rest of us.

The police are arguing that police cuts will leave the public unsafe. Local government is arguing that bins will go uncollected. The NHS is teetering in certain areas. Nobody likes to look like they're just performing self-defence. Academics can join in this game up to a point. But at the present juncture, why not also consider the gradual but unceasing psychological injuries that are performed by techniques of audit, when combined with shrinking budgets.

The suicide of Stefan Grimm, who had been given a grant-raising target by his university, followed by the story of Warwick academics put under similar pressure (told that their positions were now indefinitely "at risk" so long as they failed to meet financial income targets, via fiercely competitive grant contests - the technique of delayed adjudication well understood by Kafka), gives a sense of how governance functions in the current climate. In my own field, Copenhagen Business School, traditionally viewed as an oasis of non-instrumentalised, social democratic, critical theorising about economy, recently announced that 80 academic jobs will go, without even any formal criteria for achieving this. And of course I write this only a few hours before the announcement of the next Research Excellence Framework results...

But rather than seek the pity of non-academics for the strains that we now live with, perhaps a more publicly-oriented way of interpreting this is as an example of how neoliberalism and austerity work more generally. It seems to me that this rising level of unhappiness in this sector is, if not the goal of neoliberal governance, then certainly one of its most important tools. Put simply, if you want less people doing publicly-funded research, you have a choice: kick them off the payroll just like that (as CBS will have to do) or make the career increasingly painful until people leave of their own accord. For those viewing the world via a behaviorist lens, the latter strategy is the more attractive one.

Audit replaces democracy

It is well understood that neoliberalism and financialisation have their political origins in the turmoil of the 1970s, which is often understood as a surfeit of democracy or (as economists might put it) 'social demands'. Work by Greta Krippner, Martha Poon and others has shown how the rise of finance in the 1980s occurred quite surprisingly, as a result of politicians trying to distance themselves from awkward political choices about the allocation of credit and capital. Equally, one way of understanding the appeal of the Chicago School of economics in the post-Bretton Woods era is that it offered to de-politicise economic policy making, and turn it into a purely technical issue. When normative and social demands are in the ascendency, and trust in formal democratic process is in decline, something has to give: those demands can no longer be channelled effectively into the democratic system. They must either be channelled elsewhere (the market, lobbying, riotting, the private sphere) or they must be neutralised. Either way, politicians can no longer broker them, and nor do they wish to.

In my book, I describe neoliberalism as the 'disenchantment of politics by economics'. What's important to realise is that this doesn't necessarily mean replacing the state or democracy by the market. What it means is that processes traditionally left in the realm of politics must now be reconfigured in calculative, economically rational terms. Yes, you can carry on expressing demands publicly; but you must now do so in ways that makes the costs and benefits of your demand explicit. You are no less welcome to stage an opera, provide social care for the elderly or research ancient manuscripts, and these may indeed be matters for the state to support. Just as long as you can explain that in the language of economics. Utilitarianism, based upon audit, becomes the lingua franca of democracy. Those who do not wish to speak this language do not acquire full citizenship, in this post-1970s model of politics. On the premise that only economic discourse makes sense, the obligatory reframing of social demands in economic jargon aims to ensure that the bullshitters reveal themselves automatically. The problem is, that 'bullshit' by this standard includes basic human sympathy and commitment.

Just as clothing designers came to realise during the 1980s that people want the label of expensive clothes on the outside, the injunction of neoliberal politics is to keep the price tag on at all times. As I argued here, the real underlying phobia of neoliberal audit is that someone might be getting 'something for nothing' - and yet that is simply another way of describing a gift.

The accompaniment to this 'price tag' mentality is a behaviorist psychological paradigm, which assumes (quite wrongly much of the time) that this explicitness of cost and benefit is adequate to control how people are likely to behave. In truth, people pursue 'benefits' for all sorts of reasons, which are nothing to do with 'outcomes', especially in areas such as the arts or care services. And 'costs' are not always offputting, in activities that are supposed to be slow, like the law. But a form of psychological government emerges nevertheless.

Austerity as managed unhappiness

Neoliberal audit is not a tool for shrinking the state in itself. On the contrary, it both requires a strong and interventionist state (imagine a genuinely liberal or libertarian state pulling off something like the REF, at a cost of £60m), and expansions in public spending are no doubt periods when audit is able to expand further. It was partly because Gordon Brown was willing to open up the public coffers from 2001 onwards that New Labour was also able to extend the demand for cost-benefit analysis and measurement. After all, people will become far more co-operative with audit culture when they think they're about to benefit. Money has a habit of silencing political doubts. So, arguably, the current politics of austerity is paradoxically dependent on the prior wave of largesse, because it is enacted via techniques of measurement and management that were only ever accepted as the quid pro quo for increased public spending.

Austerity therefore arises as neoliberalism's very own model of the Polanyian 'double movement'. First, splurge the public sector with money, but do so in a way that extends the iron cage of audit further into professional and administrative life. Second, pull back at great speed, using that same cage in order to do so in a way that can be justified. It's precisely this 'double movement' that a social democratic institution like CBS currently lacks: without an audit framework in place, senior managers have no rhetorical or technical basis on which to say who is the drowned, and who is the saved.

In the British context, life is somewhat easier for the Treasury, but the importance of 'governing via unhappiness' moves to the fore for the recipients of public money. No decision-maker really wants to get their hands dirty deciding who is worthy of public money and who is not (or not if they can avoid it). The function of competition, from a neoliberal perspective, is to save centralised politicians or experts the trouble of becoming imbroiled in normative or democratic disputes. It also allows the politics of austerity to be somewhat concealed. Every theatre or every university department in the country is welcome to continue as they always have done - but the odds of them succeeding in this venture are being progressively, deliberately cut, from each year to the next. Competitions for funding, in which everyone has a 1/20 chance of success, produce a society in which people are perfectly at liberty to remain with their cherished profession or vocation for as long as they like. It just depends on how long they can cope with the psychological torture and the feeling of earned failure. If, as a thought experiment, George Osborne had arbitrarily decided to close down Stefan Grimm's department for financial reasons, Grimm would probably still be alive. The audit + austerity model is, in some respects, crueller than what will take place at CBS, because it takes longer to achieve the same ends.

How does it achieve those ends? This is where the psychology becomes more brutal and realistic. The suffering that it causes people, through stress, guilt, self-blame, isolation from colleagues, is a way of reducing their desire to stick with it. This isn't a simplistic negative 'incentive' (like a 'cost'). This is just the plain fact that everyone has a limit regarding what they can tolerate (naturally, that limit also varies from one person or sector to another, another plain fact that is brutally seized by proto-Darwinist evangelists of 'talent'). George Osborne must know this, although it's not taught in economics. It is naive to suggest that Osborne 'has it in' for the humanities or legal aid lawyers or regional arts in any specific sense. He is simply heating up the floor to see who can keep hopping the longest. Competition, Hayek tells us, is a discovery procedure.

From discipline to control

Audit hasn't always been a tool for the production of guilt and unhappiness. It can be a mechanism for public accountability (as it was when accountancy was still a profession), or, best of all, deeply funny, when it creates perverse incentives and laughable nonsense. One thinks of audit, traditionally, as something with a certain rhythm, which comes round every so often - as the REF does. It therefore has had the imprint of bureaucracy in the past, organisation man, discipline, routinisation, and so on.

However, when audit becomes married to rapidly shrinking budgets, and the continued use of planned competition to allocate those budgets, it shifts from a technique of discipline to one of control. The subject of audit shifts from seeking to meet a periodic target, to living with a constant sense of dread as to how things are currently going right now. The rise of 'real-time' indicators and dashboards (see this, for example, shared with me by Andrew McGettigan) becomes a more honest representation of how audit works, once firmly embedded in the logic of finance, rather than the less insidious utilitarian logic of cost-benefit analysis. The best summation of this situation is that provided by Gilles Deleuze in his famous 1992 fragment 'Postscript on Societies of Control' [pdf]:

In the disciplinary societies one was always starting again (from school to the barracks, from the barracks to the factories), while in the control society one is never finished with anything... Man is no longer man enclosed, but man in debt.

Happy REF2014, everyone, and solidarity with all those being forced to play competitive games they hate.

new piece on competitiveness

I've published a new piece at the LSE Politics and Policy blog, 'How 'competitiveness' became one of the great unquestioned virtues of contemporary culture'. The argument won't be much of a surprise to any regular readers of this blog! Here is a chunk:

We celebrate London because it is a competitive world city; we worship sportsmen for having won; we turn on our televisions and watch contestants competitively cooking against each other. In TV shows such as the Dragons Den or sporting contests such as the Premier League, the division between competitive entertainment and capitalism dissolves altogether. Why would it be remotely surprising, to discover that a society in which competitiveness was a supreme moral and cultural virtue, should also be one which generates increasing levels of inequality? Unless one wants to descend into biological reductionism, the question then has to be posed: how did this state of affairs come about?

The Promises of Sport - unpublished paper

As part of my bumper Christmas giveaway, I've uploaded another unpublished article. I submitted this to Historical Materialism, shortly before the London Olympics, but it was rejected on the basis that, ahem, it didn't contain any historical materialism. Which seems fair enough, now I look back on it. If it wasn't so focused on the (then imminent) Olympics, I'd submit it elsewhere, but it's now too late.

The paper is called The Promises of Sport. It's an effort to locate and criticise sport within neoliberalism, in terms of the distinctive political logics that sport occasions and facilitates. As I explore, competition and competitiveness are critical political values under neoliberalism, which markets are only rarely able to exhibit, as corporate power increases. Hence sport comes to perform a key legitimating function, which markets as such (as opposed to market-like behaviour) are no longer able to.

Here is the abstract:

The neoliberal era saw rapid increase in the political and economic status of sport. Most empirical analysis of this phenomenon has sought to contain sport within prior theories of media, leisure or urban regeneration. But perhaps the relationship between neoliberalism and sport is more fundamental than this, and there are specific affinities between the two. The article identifies two ways in which sport and neoliberal politics have been mutually reinforcing. Firstly, sport acts as an icon for neoliberalism, highlighting the behaviours and moral visions that markets might once have exhibited, but no longer do. Secondly, sport acts as a potlatch for neoliberalism, providing a release for political sovereignty and executive decision, in an otherwise economised world. Now that neoliberalism has entered a state of existential ambivalence and with London’s Olympics approaching, we might also ask – what has become of sport and its fading promises?

 

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.

 

data's double life

Flicking through twitter over the weekend, I was struck by a peculiar contradiction between two articles that were being widely linked to. The first (which was really a cluster of articles) related to the revelations about the US government's surveillance activities, which, we now know, exploit the affordances of ubiquitous digital media, to record and analyse billions of informal communications between members of the public. As various wags have quipped, it turns out that Big Data really is very hot in Washington right now. The UK government has also been implicated, with the Foreign Secretary astonishingly blasé about the activities being alleged.

The second was an article in The Economist, complaining that the UK government has "a worrying disregard for data". Evaluations and censuses are being cancelled, statistics are being manipulated, evidence is being ignored. As a result, policies are being built on intuitions and prejudices, and New Labour's glorified 'evidence-based policy' agenda has fallen by the wayside. This is odd, given the recent flurry of excitement surrounding 'what works centres', in which the new 'gold standard' for policy evaluation, the RCT, has been promoted as the ultimate arbiter of rational policy-making.

Enthusiasm for RCTs, alongside the rise of Big Data and neuroscience, represents the emergence of a neo-positivism, in which the data is professed to 'speak for itself', unpolluted by theory or causal metaphysics. No doubt the National Security Agency's (NSA) enthusiasm for social media is that, unlike the subjects of Stasi and KGB surveillance, Facebook users are happy to speak for and surveil themselves, sharing all sorts of banal details of their lives, locations and activities voluntarily. The genius of this new surveillance state is that it, like the liberal market state before it, works with the grain of individual freedom, rather than against it.

But which is it to be? Do we want states to become more interested in data or less? The positivist answer is that we want governments to become more interested in some data, and less interested in other data. The tricky thing here is that positivists must also vehemently deny that there is any politics of data in the first place: repeat, data must be allowed to speak for itself. And yet only certain individuals, using certain techniques, are able to truly listen to what the data is trying to say to us. Positivists may end up making the somewhat underwhelming critique, that security agencies and marketing companies simply aren't good enough listeners. If only they had read their Karl Popper a bit more closely, and then watched The Lives of Others, they'd represent the perfect audience for Verizon customers.

What this reminds us, should any reminder be necessary, is of the contradictory nature of positivism generally. The primary problem with positivism isn't epistemological, but political: it seeks a monopoly on the legitimate means of truth, to match (and occasionally complement) the state's monopoly on the legitimate means of violence. It then abstains from any political engagement with the critics of this monopoly, for fear that this would be to abandon it. Hence, perfectly empirical and empiricist histories and sociologies of science (with or without post-structuralist baggage) must be simply ignored, a tacit recognition that they also carry some truth, which (like the IRA in the 1980s) must be starved of the oxygen of publicity. The same holds in the relationship between economics and the history of economics, not to mention economic history. A huge amount of political work goes into keeping politics at bay.

In Science in Action, Bruno Latour discusses the 'janus-faced' nature of modern science, which attributes its real-time 'discoveries' to individuals in certain times and places, but its past findings to some non-human thing called 'nature'. Something similar is going on with data right now. On the one hand, it is becoming hotly politicised, rarely more so than over the last few days in the context of the NSA revelations. Even aside from surveillance or governmental issues, it appears that social and economic life is becoming lived dynamically in terms of production, manipulation and interpretation of data, with (for example) live events being compulsively recorded, tweeted and connected to. Data is now part of lived experience, or rather lived experience is being 'datafied'.

On the other hand, data is being icily naturalised, with its institutional and methodological preconditions being marginalised from discussion. Arguably this is a rhetorical ploy on the part of those who simply want to collect more data. The idea of an entirely neutral methodology, which allows data to 'speak for itself', will be most appealing for those who don't wish to justify their scientific activities.

Every wave of positivism eventually comes undone, when its central contradiction emerges. The fact that the resolutely 'anti-political' behaviorists of the 1920s, for example, produced techniques of psychological control that could serve the interests of military and corporate power, is one demonstration of this. The NSA revelations arguably herald a similar moment of reckoning for digital data collectors and analysts. Google's childish political mantra of being anything other than 'evil' ignored the historical lesson, that apolitical, purposeless knowledge is often one of the greatest assets to the strategies of the powerful.

What would be the positivist (or neopositivist) response to any of this? For those who believe fMRI's reveal the 'truth' of who we are, that RCTs prove 'conclusively' 'what works', or that, with enough data, correlations start to 'speak for themselves' allowing us to abandon our causal theories, is the task now to build an even higher wall around what counts as 'science'? While Google, Facebook et al cosy up with the US security services, will Dawkins, Ridley et al still turn their backs on the increasingly obvious Nietzschean insight, that power and knowledge are entangled, rather than ontologically separate? And if they shrug, and quietly accept the role of money and violence in making knowledge possible, what will they have to say about it? What notion of democracy will they appeal to, once the boundary of the science lab is accepted as arbitrary and constructed? No doubt they fear that the choice is between positivism and a complete postmodern free-for-all, echoing the Hobbesian choice between the all-powerful Leviathan and the deathly state of nature. But if this is the case, they will find it increasingly difficult to criticise the actions of anyone who claims an exclusive right to observe and analyse, including security agencies.

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.

the problem of 'evidence centres'

Reading the news this week that the government is to set up new 'evidence centres' to inform, criticise and influence £200bn-worth of public policy, my immediate thought was - why now? New Labour came into power singing the praises of 'evidence-based policy' in 1997, and became widely celebrated for its ability to bring new insights from economics, psychology and sociology straight into Downing Street, via the Strategy Unit and academic-wonks such as Geoff Mulgan and David Halpern. Even before then, the relentless auditing and measuring of public services was introduced under the guise of 'new public management' (though new research by Christopher Hood and Ruth Dixon shows that this never achieved great savings). And the Treasury's Green Book has offered a set of techniques for policy evaluation and appraisal for decades.

It seems now that policy is undergoing quite a rapid shift from treating economics as the standard for policy knowledge to treating medical research as the standard. This is clear from the fact that the evidence centre idea arose initially from the proposal of creating a 'NICE for social policy', to find out 'what works'. Economics itself is undergoing a much slower mutation, from aspiring to the status of physics to aspiring to that of biology. The infrastructucture of government that is needed to facilitate these shifts is quite different and far more extensive.

The key thing here, epistemologically, is that the state is trying to relinquish an a priori account of causality. The methodology of neo-classical economics has a very particular theory of causality, which it packages up within its assumed psychological theory of preference satisfaction. This theory then structures what types of evidence are collected, how they are interpreted, the political uses to which they are put. Inevitably, like any useful scientific framework, it also limits what types of conclusions might be drawn and the types of knowledge that might arise. A scientific framework that presupposed nothing about the world - or in this case, society - wouldn't be able to make any sense of the world.

Yet the spread of medical epistemology into public policy is strangely anti-theoretical, thanks to a somewhat naively optimistic view of a single technique: the randomised controlled trial (RCT). RCTs operate according to induction. The facts are meant to speak for themselves; the data and the theory are kept neatly and self-consciously separate from each other. A medic, Ben Goldacre, has co-authored a paper on the policy applications of RCTs for the British government, which opens with the line 'RCTs are the best way of determining whether a policy is working'. Elsewhere, RCTs are often referred to as the 'gold standard' for scientific testing, a term that confirms the dangers of metaphorical tourism, given that, while economists are happy to speak biologically of 'toxicity' and 'contagion' in the financial system, only the crankiest libertarians amongst them would countenance a return to the actual gold standard.

This is supplemented epistemologically by the rise of Big Data, which no doubt is already on the minds of forward-thinking policy experts, especially in the domain of health behaviours. The very character of Big Data is that it is collected with no particular purpose or theory in mind; it arises as a side-effect of other transactions and activities. It is, supposedly, 'theory neutral', like RCTs, indeed the techno-utopians have already argued that it can ultimately replace scientific theory altogether. Hence the facts that arise from big data are somehow self-validating; they simply emerge, thanks to mathematical analysis of patterns, meaning that there is no limit to the number of type of facts that can emerge. There's almost no need for human cognition at all!

The problem with all of this, politically, is that causal theories and methodologies aren't simply clumsy ways of interfering with empirical data, but also provide (wittingly or otherwise) standards of valuation. The reason economics has proved so powerful as a governmental tool is not because it is empirically correct about the drivers of human behaviour (no economist since Jevons has really claimed this; sociologists are barking up the wrong tree in this particular indictment) but because it provides a very clear idea of what a 'good' or 'bad' outcome would look like, in a particular situation. Pragmatically speaking, it saves decision-makers from having to have moral arguments about things, by placing numerical values on them instead.

Health policy is one area where this type of simplification is hardest to achieve, because moral trade-offs are often impossible to keep at bay. From the little I know of NICE and health economics, a great deal of what they wrestle with is not establishing 'facts' or 'evidence', but coming up with incredibly convoluted ways of agreeing what the standards of evaluation should be in the first place. QALYs are the most obvious example of this, but philosophical arguments about 'experienced utility' versus 'reported utility' and so on rage on in health economics, because pain, suffering and life itself are at stake, which can't be easily subjected to an efficiency analysis. As a goal, 'health' or 'wellness' lacks the finality of 'efficiency' or 'consumer welfare', meaning that there is a risk that health and wellbeing policies can never truly 'work'.

It is therefore a little ironic that NICE has become the model for social policy evaluation, given that social policy-makers already have a very clear toolkit for how to evaluate policies for over 40 years (the Green Book), whereas health policy evaluation is in a permanent - and necessary - state of philosophical self-doubt. By adopting the inductivist epistemology associated with RCTs and Big Data, social policy-makers may learn a great deal more about the world, but may also become commensurately less sure of what it even means for a policy to work in the first place.

For those of us with an innate suspicion of government positivists, this should be a good thing. Government might become more humble in its ambitions, cancel policies more readily, recognise the complexity of society. On the other hand, there is a risk that, as with RCTs in psycho-pharmaceuticals, diagnoses of social pathologies might start to spiral. Whole new problematic demographic sub-groups will start to appear to the gaze of the data analyst; new correlations of behavioural problems will be spotted; the perceived sources of our social, psychological and neurological malaises will simply multiply, and we'll long for an age when it was all just a problem of the wrong 'incentives'. Tesco's Club Card is rumoured to produce 18,000 sub-groups of customer; the equivalent for the state would be 18,000 sub-groups of pathological behaviour to be nudged back into line. Without the extreme simplifications of rationalist theories, society would appear too complex to be governed at all. The empiricist response to the government's paper title, 'What Works', might end up being 'very little', unless government becomes frighteningly 'smart'. Alternatively, if theory no longer provides the procedures of evaluation, there is a risk that private backroom politics will do so instead.

I exaggerate, of course. But the political issue is really this. Where clunky-old economics, with its unrealistic models, is used to deliver 'evidence-based policy', political and moral debate can be sidelined; yet the standard by which things are being judged is not difficult to discern. There is some publicness about this (I did some interviews with government economists a couple of years ago, and they couldn't understand why journalists never dipped into departmental policy evaluations, which are all published, and many are quite politically problematic). But where the state becomes a theory-less, inductivist, RCT-ing, data-analytical state, accumulating more and more data to find out 'what works', we are entitled to ask what working might actually mean. A clear and transparent utilitarianism, oriented around efficency, may be preferable to a vague and opaque utilitarianism, oriented around some metaphor of systemic 'wellness'.

Nothing simply works unambiguously in social policy, gold standard or no gold standard. No policy delivers benefits without any 'side-effects' (to play along with the game of policy doctors and nurses). A policy might 'work' in terms of reducing unemployment, but lead to an increase in family break-down. The inductivists response would be - yes, and that's precisely the type of pattern that our new evidence centres will detect! So why use the rhetoric of 'what works', when it is plain that nothing unambiguously works, at least without also offering the standard (the QALY for social policy, if you like) through which ethical dilemmas and trade-offs will be addressed? If all of this opens up space for non-utilitarian political debate about the multiple, competing purposes of social policies, and the types of procedures and authority that might be used to navigate between them, then that would be welcome. But the alternative is a Tesco Clubcard-state, which gets smarter and smarter, and more and more opaque as to whom its interventions are targeted at and why.

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.