As part of the Goldsmiths festival of economic sociology, I'm helping to organise a big conference on the idea of 'performance', on the 14th January. All details are here. We have some great speakers, including Nigel Thrift, Laurent Thevenot and Michael Power. I'm going to give a paper in the afternoon, on how management gurus came to apply performance evaluations to national economies. You need to register, by emailing performanceconference@gold.ac.uk .
Psychogeographers across London are weeping with excitement/despair at the prospect of visiting Westfield, a mall the size of the Isle of Wight that recently replaced an area of London formerly known as Shepherds Bush. I've not been yet, and in any case lack the Benjaminian nous to do justice to such sprall. We better hope that Mike Davis or Iain Sinclair publishes a multi-volume work on the place at some point. But lets just reflect on the image that is currently plastered across the London Underground, selling the place:
The lights rising to the left of the picture are supposed to be from Westfield, breaking through the gloom of these dark, post-credit days. The shepherds and Wise Men will be making their way there shortly. Ignore the woman with the bad posture in the red shirt for a moment. What is that in the middle?!
Tower Bridge has been replaced by some 'shiny, shiny, shiny boots of leather' (perhaps the woman in the red shirt is the 'whiplash girlchild in the dark'), chained to the ground, and strapped together with taut leather belts. Gosh. Is this further evidence of 'fausterity' on the rise? Or do I just see S&M everywhere? Don't answer that question.
Actually what is more striking about that image is the violent abuse of scale. Why have they replaced Tower Bridge with some leather boots, belts and bling chains? No, honestly, why? Perhaps even their advertising drones were struggling to capture the full gaudy scale of Westfield, recognising that there is no neat or simple way of conveying quite what the place is all about. Only an inexplicable act of wanton consumerist devastation - replacing London's most famous landmark with Victoria Beckham's wardrobe - gets close to an image of Westfield.
You've got your work cut out, Messrs Davis and Sinclair: Westfield is the first shopping centre that already knows its full awfulness.
At an event yesterday, The Politics of Hope, Les Back mentioned something I'd not heard before. Apparently 'Yes We Can' (translated into Spanish) was the organising slogan of a hispanic labour union in Texas. I doubt this is well known, or even necessarily provable as the origins of a pretty bland mantra. Some, after all, have attributed it to Bob the Builder.
Then consider the subtle reference to Sam Cooke's Change is Gonna Come in Obama's acceptance speech: "it's been a long time coming... but change has come". Was this the same change - i.e. civil rights - that he was referring to throughout his campaign? Suddenly that would make him seem a far more radical politician. The sort of black politician that, in contrast to the centrist post-racial one he projected, America would have been unlikely to elect.
So was Obama blowing dog whistles? It would be extraordinary if both of his favoured slogans - 'yes we can', 'change' - were selected or derived from parts of American political history that the Democratic party has spent the last 20 years trying to disentangle itself from. But it would be a brilliant piece of strategy if labour activists and civil rights activists could de-code these messages, but the media and the Right could not.
The Left tends to have a bigger problem knowing how to relate to its long ideological tail than the Right. In Europe this is partly (simplistically) explicable by the fact that some on the Left took much too long to criticise the gulag. In the United States, there is the shadow of '68 violence and George McGovern self-obsession to cope with. It is also because, a la the People's Front of Judea, the Left's tail tends to tear itself to pieces. The Right has its own problem, which is that people fairly close to its core speak a language that is not appealing or, sometimes, deemed acceptable. Hence Cameron's 'de-toxification' of the Tories.
So the Right has to blow dog whistles simply to communicate to some of its core supporters. As Michael Howard's deeply creepy slogan ran, 'Are you thinking what we're thinking?', the implication being that the media, Westminster, London, capitalism and who knows what else had created some vast cosmopolitan hubub, that crowded out the thoughts of both the Conservative Party and the electorate. Through some act of telepathy (or rather a Lynton Crosby focus group), the Conservatives would adopt the anti-immigration policies that this mystical demos actually wanted.
But could the Left blow dog whistles to sections of its long tail? Under Blair and Clinton the centre Left sent them in the opposite direction, sending out coded messages to the right, that bi-passed its own historic base. But there are votes in that historic base, and they can no longer be counted on in Britain (and haven't been countable on in America since the Reagan Democrats of 1980 onwards). To this end, it might be time for Gordon Brown to think what aspects of socialist history he might want to subtly allude to in speeches, in the hope that they might be picked up in the heartlands.
To suddenly drop the word 'comrades' in might be too much. But with neo-liberals in retreat, there are aspects of Labour that needn't be swept under the carpet - the welfare state, industrial policy, work (as opposed to 'hard working families'), nationalisation - that mere references to might awaken the odd dog around the North East and North West. Precisely what Labour's Leftist dog whistles would sound like is, quite rightly, not divinable by a London toff such as myself. But Obama didn't win in Indiana through Clinton-esque appeals to middle class mothers, and the same will very soon be true for Labour in Newcastle and Liverpool.
I performed two acts of anti-anti-social behaviour in quick succession this morning around Old Street. Neither could strictly be described as 'pro-social', to borrow Matthew Taylor's expression (the first involved berating a man who chucked his litter away from a nearby litter bin, and ignored me; the second involved berating a woman who pushed past a blind person on an escalator, who then also ignored me), thereby contradicting that old mathematical wives' tale that a double negative is a positive. So anyway, here I am publicly patting myself on the back.
This got me thinking about how civic software, web2.0-type, mySociety-ish stuff might be reoriented to incentivise gallant (though admittedly pointless) acts of this nature: what's needed is a cross between Twitter and Habermas. Bear with me.
Habermas, following on from Kant, defines modernity in terms of the schism between the True, the Good and the Beautiful. These correspond to Kant's three Critiques (of Pure Reason, Practical Reason and Judgement). The first engages with the question 'what can I know?', the second with the question 'what should I do?' and the third with the question 'what do I like?'
Now, imagine a version of Twitter (or any other social software) in which the user had to explicitly categorise which of these three domains their announcement fell into. A cursory glance at how social software is currently used (at least in my networks) might suggest that it is in the second of these, the moral domain, where there is most room for improvement. Currently, these three domains are represented on Twitter and Facebook mostly as follows:
- What can I know? The first time anyone ever convinced me that Twitter might be anything less than excessive was when Bill Thompson explained to me that he'd once been lost in some American city, unable to find his conference venue, and he'd simply announced this on his Twitter feed. Within a few minutes, information had been sent to him by the hive mind of his various Twittering friends. This domain seems to be all working quite satisfactorily. There are endless other examples of effective social software in action, such as fixmystreet, Google's new flu scanning service etc, which employ networked technology to cognitive ends, as a supplement to bureaucratic organisational forms.
- What should I do? Consider cases when someone updates their Facebook status or Twitter feed around purely practical content. What would be a typical example? The most common genre is exemplified by "John is at home with the family", "Susan is tucking into a lovely dinner in front of the television" or "Chris is relaxing on a beach". Fine, but this is scarcely the stuff of Blue Peter Badges. Now what would happen if the following suddenly popped up: "Will has just berated a woman on an escalator for pushing past a blind person". I imagine the reaction might be one of 'stop showing off, you self-righteous bastard'. Indeed. Stop showing off. Except...
- What do I like? "Peter is in Tate Modern loving the Mark Rothko!" "Jennifer can't wait to go to the opera!" "Graham enjoyed the latest Coen Brothers movie". We all do this. I do this. Here's a dreadful, dreadful confession: I have some Coldplay on my ipod, but sometimes when it comes on, it occurs to me that it will show up in my lastfm profile, and I experience a momentary shudder of lost kudos. I wouldn't be surprised if I've subconsciously skipped it for this very reason. So I'm a narcissistic freak, but you get my point. Just as we display a deficit of moral pride, we display a surplus of aesthetic pride. On dating sites, people queue up to declare their cultural passions, but would fear looking evangelical if they sold themselves in terms of their charitable activities. And we wonder about anti-social behaviour...
Lets leave aside cognitive issues ('what do I know?'). My question is - why are we so comfortable reporting on the aesthetic peaks we scale, yet so conservative in reporting on our practical, moral decisions? To which the answer is - because we don't reflect on it in quite this way, and see it as all just reputational stuff. But codifying behaviour invariably alters it, once we come to view it differently.
With the reworked, Habermasian Twitter programme, people are forced to reflect on their public image in a three-fold way. What do (or don't) I know that I'm prepared to form a cognitive reputation on? What should I do, that I'm prepared to form a moral reputation on? What do I like, that I'm prepared to form an aesthetic reputation on?
The Nietzschean rebuke to this would be 'aha, but you're forgetting how Christianity polluted ethics with a self-destructive veneration of humility! It is far more acceptable in our self-loathing, Pauline world to declare that one is making mashed potatoes than that one is battling a mugger!'
Except, consider political spin in 2008. As far as we are led to believe by Downing Street, Gordon Brown's answer to the moral question 'what should I do?' is 'save Africa, be courageous, and help the poor'. But as far as we are led to believe by Downing Street, Gordon Brown's answer to the aesthetic question 'what do I like?' is 'X Factor and Raith Rovers'. Bizarrely enough, the spin politicians apply to their own lives is the direct inverse of the spin we apply to our own lives; while they play up their moral heroism and play down their aesthetic taste, we do quite the opposite.
If there were greater potential reputational currency connected to the moral sphere, perhaps we would be more inclined - out of sheer vanity, but so what? - to go about performing extroverted ethical acts. Don't knock spin: people who choose to project a positive image of some form are typically obliged to at least partially live up to it (this is the same reason why Corporate Social Responsibility should not be dismissed too lightly).
The truth is that I don't go around berating people in the street very often. The sun was shining, and I was mildly hungover. But if we all came to view ourselves as distinctly moral agents in the public eye, a la Gordon Brown, who knows what competitive reputational incentives this would then create?
If anyone was thinking of applying to our Goldsmiths January Workshop, and hasn't yet, try and get an application in before Monday!
Accusing tabloid newspapers of hypocrisy is like accusing babies of being selfish. That unreasonableness is the whole point. Get exasperated by it if you must, but that's what makes them so compelling.
The heady enjoyment of the Russell Brand & Jonathan Ross saga lies in the fact that it is a slowly played out pantomime of faux-moralism and faux-perversion. It's rather as if a drama teacher had got the Daily Mail and some self-parodyingly 'edgy' comedians in a room, and invited them to act out Freud's theory of the self. We the assembled parents turn up in the school hall, waiting to see how our little darlings have interpreted the conflict between civilisation and the libido. Fortunately our expectations are quite low, but it's the familiarity and naivite of the actors that comforts us.
"I fuck" mutters the unconvincing child playing the id (Brand). "Yes, he really does!" churps the portly pupil dressed in the ego outfit (Ross). "But, but... that's out-rageous!" protests the unpleasant assemblage in the super-ego costume, stamping its feet melodramatically (Daily Mail).
"Aaaah", sigh the parents, enjoying the predictability and safety of the whole occasion. The joy is that they don't even have to take sides. Yes, they recognise the Daily Mail has a role to play in the whole drama, and applaud after it completes its faltering monologues. But they wouldn't want to miss out on the titilation factor of the other two players either (understanding this all too well, The Sun has now moved beyond the moralism phase, lasting all of two days, and returned to its comfort zone). The great thing about the moral high-ground is that, from such a vantage point, you get to see into other people's bedrooms.
(One further endorsement of my Brand/Ross, id/ego analogy: it's interesting to see how Russell Brand has effectively escaped the greatest wrath, on the basis that he is out of control and literally beneath contempt, whereas Ross is having to suffer lashings of shame and punishment.)
Here's an irony. Back in the comforting days of manic house price inflation, the media was awash with images of houses as places of warmth, cookery, family and garden furniture, with occasional nods to the fact that unearnt wealth was rocketting on the back of them. One could scarcely turn on the television, without witnessing Carole Smiley clambering up some oak-panelled shag-piled staircase, saying "ooooh, this is looovely. It feels so... hooomely! Woonderful for the kids as well! And how much are you hooping to get for it?". Like green-eyed grannies on the Antiques Roadshow pretending not to care about the heirloom they've already listed on eBay, in the age of surging exchange value, we kid ourselves that we're all about cutesy use value.
The reverse is now happening. Just as we enter an era in which houses will again become, as Corbusier said, machines for living, all we hear about is markets. If there were any honesty left in the world, now would be the time to talk interiors, furniture and bizarre objects, all "shaped to the comforts of the last to go". But since they're no longer connected to rising capital, we've lost interest in that stuff.
Following my excursis on the representation of financial mood, here is how the picture editors are dealing with the falling housing market. It goes in four stages.
Stage 1: remind people that houses are NOT individual places of comfort, family and unique history, but are actually mass produced objects of exchange. Do this by representing them in the most standardised fashion possible. This is typically done when news on the housing market is uncertain. See below.
Stage 2: draw attention to the fact that, as mass-produced exchangeable objects, these are all subject to market forces which place them all in a similar predicament. Do this by including some market signalling device, ideally a 'for sale' board. This is typically done when prices are falling. See below.
Stage 3: employ the signifiying capacity of the aforementioned 'for sale' board to convey information that is more specific and more unsettling than a mere market trend. Indicate that, within the widespread trend inculcated by the market, there are instances of misery and panic. This is typically done when repossessions are rising. See below.
Stage 4: abandon the signifying capacity of the 'for sale' board, rendering it a mere piece of timber. This is done to signify that forces are at work that are greater than anything that can be signalled in the market, and that the market itself is now being tossed around, in the same way as individual home owners are. It is not just markets that are at work, but larger forces that estate agents don't have a vocabulary to represent (i.e. capitalism). The 'for sale' boards are now just pawns in this larger process of creative destruction. This is typically done when precedents can't be found and panic breaks out. See below.
There is already a Facebook group entitled 'Society for the Appreciation of Pictures of Stockbrokers in Visible Pain', pictures which are presumably grabbed from online news coverage of the plummetting stock market. But other financial moods are trickier for picture editors to cope with. I noticed the other day that a mood of uncertainty surrounding the bail-out was represented on the BBC website with a photograph of a member of the public outside a highstreet electronics shop, watching a TV showing lines of numbers. Well it certainly confused me.
Elsewhere, how does one represent the sheer joy of resurgent capitalism? Here are a couple of options. The seasonally suspect one on the left accompanies today's story of the US bail-out, appearing to suggest that the news has transformed Washington into a land of new life and fluffy bunnies. The second (also from a BBC report) was apparently the reaction to the rising stock market yesterday - sheer hilarity by the looks of things. The panic seems almost worth it, when you see quite how happy it makes people when it abates...
Once we go back to keeping our money in building societies earning 3% a year, picture editors will no doubt be tasked with tracking down photos of people looking 'content but a bit bored in a German sort of way'.
Martin Kettle is right. We now have an opening up of political possibilities, which represents a liberation of sorts, though a far from comforting one. This is existentialism on a mass political scale: the bases of our former certainties are being shaken, allowing us to recognise the phoniness of what we took for reality, with all of the shock and anxiety that goes with that. It's a collective version of the moment at the beginning of Bonfire of the Vanities, when the banker's car breaks down in the South Bronx.
After September 11th, rumour had it that the Federal government had hired a team of Hollywood directors to imagine the next terrorist attack. Something so unsettling, so spectacular as 911 expanded the realms of possibility to the point where producers of spectacular fiction were potentially better judges of the future than the confounded experts. Right now, apart from Robert Peston - who must be suffering from bouts of solipsistic psychosis, as his thoughts and reality gradually blur into one - we are left only with confounded experts.
So the time has come to identify some financial science fiction writers, to come up with visions of the future. We're hearing too much about the post-apocalyptic Mad Max visions (the worst one is set in 2009 and involves the US President living in Alaska shooting moose). We need to put the bankers and economists together in a room with Hollywood directors. Here's a start:
- Speculation Day: New York, 2009. As the crisis worsens, and the state bail-outs prove powerless, one thirty-year-old hedge fund manager wanders into a second-hand bookshop and picks up a worn copy of Marx's Capital volume three. Flicking through it later in his private jet, he is horrified to discover that capitalism is structurally guaranteed to collapse. He immediately goes short on the entire future of global capitalism... and wins. He destroys, and also acquires, the infrastructure of capital, erradicating private property. In fact, this may not be so different from the type of scenario that would precipitate capitalism's collapse in Marxist theory. There has to be a mechanism that is internal to the system (unless you're a Leninist I guess), and it will be particular to the capitalism of the day. Of course the resulting scenario sounds closer to feudalism than socialism, which would mean history reversing. Or perhaps not so different from the collapse of the Russian economy into the hands of oligarchs in the 1990s.
- The Economist is bought by Hello!: I've always found Hello! magazine to be culturally rather interesting. Not simply for the gross bling imagery and weird voyeurism into the lives of John Terry-level arseholes, but because of one constantly recurring story-line. It goes something like this: "the Duchess of York invites us into her 50-acre bungalow to talk about depression, alcoholism, weight-gain, death and how she's put them all behind her to rebuild her life, find love again, shed nine stone and set up a donkey sanctuary for the children of Africa". There's a sort of post-therapy narrative that binds a lot of it together. Once The Economist's readership has dwindled to a few hundred remaining economic liberals, it will be victim to a takeover (arranged by HM Department of Magazines) by Hello!. The resulting magazine involves profiles such as "the state of Germany invites us into their post-capitalist wilderness to talk about the depression, insolvency, the end of days and how they've put it all behind them to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening and criticise after dinner (as somebody once said)."
- The Fed appoints a sociologist as its Chairman: OK, so this doesn't make a lot of sense. But now that the godlike genius of Alan Greenspan has been shown up as naive short-termism, it might be time for someone who understands how to employ concepts such as 'power', 'the state', 'ideology', 'culture', 'nationalism' and so on. Who knows? Maybe someone walking in the footsteps of Simmel, with a cultural-philosophical take on money and its associated psychology, might be just the person. Failing that, give the job to someone like David Harvey with a proper understanding of crises.
I've just remembered that The Corrections ends with a rather clawing attempt at something like financial science fiction (one character buys shares in an Eastern European nation from his stockbroker) which slightly tarnishes the book, so apologies. But any additions, gratefully received below.
The feeling of capitalism's largest historical cog turning a notch or two is currently over-whelming. There are now three dates with which to call time on the twentieth century - November 1989, September 2001 and September 2008. Take your pick. Marxists, especially with a regulationist bent, will be competing over the coming years to try and define the next settlement or 'fix' that will succeed the neo-liberalism of the past thirty years.
The state's function, from a Marxist point of view, is to defend capitalism from its own contradictions and prevent capitalism expanding to the point of meltdown. Once capitalism cannot grow any further, it collapses, hence one of the state's roles is to set its limits in order to protect it from this totality. This role is also inherently contingent - there is no necessary logic to what the capitalist state actually does. However regimes of accumulation will be sustained for limited periods, with the state acquiring a certain role within them (e.g. Fordism + Keynesianism).
Taking all that as read, it strikes me that what succeeds neo-liberalism (and maybe what succeeds, in Bob Jessop's analysis, the 'Schumpeterian Workfare State') may not be immediately recognisable. It also strikes me that many people are getting a little duped by the current behaviour of the state. A few observations:
- Western states are (obviously) not currently behaving in a way that reflects a new political economy or some shift to the left. They are trying to navigate a crisis, and have no rule-book for how to do it. They literally do not know what they are doing, through little fault of their own. Once they arrive at a situation where they do know what they are doing, there is no reason to think that nationalisation or traditional leftwing policies will have anything to do with it.
- The post-1929 and post-1973 settlements both emerged thanks partly to a confident, rationalist political economy. In the case of the latter (monetarism), it was actually waiting in the wings, precisely because Chicago-style neo-liberalism was a critique of Keynesianism. Can we really assume that another will emerge or succeed? It is not only the particular technocratic paradigm that has been discredited (neo-liberalism) but also perhaps the excessive faith in a single economic creed. Just because the crisis of the 1930s and that of the 1970s were dealt with through the wholesale adoption of a rationalist economic paradigm (a plan in the case of the former; an anti-plan in the case of the latter), I don't see that this crisis will necessarily end in the same way. The twentieth century Western state opted to wear a single economic logic in the same way that a mod opts to wear clothes - trouser hems x inches wide, suit with three buttons - but there have been plenty of capitalist states in history that have not been so rule-bound.
- As John Gray has consistently argued for some years (recently here), the ideology of neo-liberalism rests on the distinctly American illusion of economic globalisation as Enlightenment. Meanwhile, both Keynesianism and neo-liberalism depended for their enaction on American hegemony - the former via the concerted action of Bretton Woods, the latter via the equally concerted dismantling of Bretton Woods. This poses two questions - what happens when there is no hegemon, and what happens when capitalism becomes divorced from Enlightenment? As has been widely pointed out, the wealth-creating, creditor states of the next epoch will not be in hoc to Western Enlightenment myths of progress, nor to any Western economic rationalism regarding policy. They will be more Schmittian in their political economy (mercantilist, if you like), and none of them will have much interest in acting as the hegemon. Even if a new Keynes (or Friedman) were to arise, there would be no equivalent of twentieth century America to employ the new rationality to any great effect.
- The centre-left's nostalgia for the Keynesian era means that, perversely, there is a low-level excitement about what is currently taking place, as if more government intervention were automatically desirable. But government to what end? If the answer is a Keynesian macroeconomic one - raising demand - then fine, but while we don't even know if there is a macroeconomic rationality at all, let alone whether it shares anything with Keynesianism, surely we ought to face the next few decades with considerable trepidation.
So for the time being, it will be easiest to understand events using analogies to 1929 and the emergence of Keynes. In time, however, I wonder if we will come to see both Keynesianism and neo-liberalism for what they were: rationalist sticking plasters, that disguise the fact that the capitalist state doesn't have to abide by a set of political-economic rules at all.
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