potlatch

going, going, gone

"Commensuration is the expression or measurement of characteristics normally represented by different units according to a common metric. Utility, price, and cost-benefit ratios are common examples of commensuration, although the logic of commensuration is implicit in a very wide range of valuing systems: college rankings that numerically compare organizations; censuses and social statistics that make cities and nations numerically comparable; actuarial projects that attempt to quantify and compare vastly different kinds of risks; commodity futures that make uniform units out of products that may not yet exist; voting, and the pork-barrel trading of diverse interests that often lies behind it; calculation of different kinds of work in terms of labor costs."

Wendy Espeland & Mitchell Stevens (1998) 'Commensuration as Social Process', Annual Review of Sociology, 24: 1 

 

To which they might have added: "the reduction of high culture to the status of consumer preference, via a direct comparison to a tawdry lunchtime snack". These are currently littering the new development around the back of Tate Modern at the moment:

  

 

 

 

 

I think that 'Mozart, Matisse, Muffin' might rank as the silliest way that any human civilisation has ever announced its own termination.

nerdish announcement

I am becoming an obsessive Zotero weirdo. If anyone else is using it, here is a link to my profile and library, and lets follow each other!

For everyone else, apologies. Normal service will be resumed forthwith.

'fairness' revisited

I hope you'll forgive the BBC3-style re-hashing of my own content, but the bizarre rhetoric that has been emanating from the Conservative Party conference makes me even more convinced of the argument I put forward in this piece a few months back. Henceforth, the word 'fairness' should set alarm bells ringing for anyone who believes in political and economic reform.

Here's a chunk from my article:

To apply pain and gain equally, proportionately and fairly across every rank in society is the ultimate legitimation of the ranks as they presently stand. The status quo receives an endorsement, not in economic terms (it is efficient) nor in conservative terms (it has worked in the past) but in liberal ones (it will be managed fairly). It is the final abandonment of the possibility that the rankings might be rearranged, that power might be challenged or society reorganised. The disavowel of inequality getting significantly greater is at the same time a morally confident statement that it needn't get any less either. The next step would be to throw the odd sacrificial CEO into jail, as occurs periodically in the US.

This is Rawls's 'justice as fairness', but instead of being designed from behind a veil of ignorance, it is being designed and upheld within a set of contingently unequal social, economic and political relations. "What", the Rawlsian Tory asks "would it mean for this political-economic arrangement to be made fair?" To which the answer is "5% pay-cuts for everyone."

speaking at Essex about economics after crisis, 28th October - CANCELLED

This event is now being rescheduled for a few months time!

I'll be speaking at a seminar at University of Essex next month, giving a paper clumsily titled 'Varieties of Rescue Mission: Financial Crisis and Conventions of Neo-Classical Failure'. This is a developed version of what I initially presented at the CRESC financial crisis conference in April, and now exists as a paper (which I'm happy to share if anyone is interested).

The paper borrows an approach from the French convention school of Boltanski, Thevenot et al, to consider different ways in which experts have set about trying to save core fundaments of neo-classical economics from the apparent catastrophe of the financial crisis. These are defined as rival normative ways in which the same technical apparatus is defended as justified, and rest on rival claims to authority on the parts of the economists concerned. As I argue, if the crisis can be effectively contained and explained within the neo-classical project, broadly understood, then it will be prevented from disrupting it or causing any significant paradigm shift (as, for instance, stagflation led to the demise of Keynesianism).

The first derives from English welfare economics, and suggests that the crisis was a 'market failure', that is, it occurred due to inadequate third party or government intervention. This seeks to bestow regulatory authority upon the economist. The second derives from Chicago neo-liberal economics, and suggests that the crisis was a problem of incentives and arguably too much regulation, or at least insufficient attention to the agency problems within regulation and credit-rating. This seeks to bestow critical authority upon the economist. And the third derives from behavioural economics, and suggests that the crisis was a problem of excessive complexity and systemic risk, ultimately caused by the inadequate calculative capacity of the human mind. This seeks to bestow therapeutic authority upon the economist. 

I wouldn't pretend that this is an exhaustive list. What's interesting about these three traditions is that they are all seeking to prop up the same core claims about human rationality and economic value, but in very different ways and for very different reasons. And they have all had to go into overdrive in order to rescue their discipline over the last three years. If you want to hear more, come to the seminar!

Envisioning Real Utopias review

There's a new double issue of Renewal out, and I have a review of Erik Olin Wright's Envisioning Real Utopias. The book is hugely impressive and will hopefully inspire new empirical work on non-capitalist economic structures and practices. What I found tough and somewhat grating about the book itself was its austerity and endless, laborious deductive rationality. I guess producing a wholly new version of socialism isn't meant to be fun - but (and here I contradict my Schumpeterian scepticism of last week) I couldn't help wondering if there couldn't be a little more room granted for the experimental wing of anti-capitalist institution-building. A pdf of my article is here.

desire and duty in The Big Society

I was at The Young Foundation last week, to listen to Geoff Mulgan speak about their new report, Investing in Social Growth: Can the Big Society be More than a Slogan? There is something quite canny about this - with admirable brevity, the report sets out various tangible actions that the Coalition could take towards their declared goal, and which it can therefore be judged by. 

There is an emerging consensus, which Mulgan adheres to, that if The Big Society does mean anything at all, that it transcends left and right. Various former and non-former Labour thinkers have stressed that they must fight for this territory, and not dismiss it merely as state-shrinking rhetoric. But during the event, it struck me that there is one very notable schism within this agenda, which may not be a conventional Left-Right divide, but is still a (small c) conservative-progressive divide. 

In theoretical terms, this is between Schumpeterians and Durkheimians. Or in more intuitive terms, between people who think we are inspired to engage with one another out of excitement, and those who think we are bound together by obligation. Larkin tells us that "life is first boredom, then fear". In which case perhaps the Schumpeterians can target the first, and the Durkheimians the second. But I wonder how much the Big Society enthusiasts have really considered the latter.

Mulgan himself is an unabashed Schumpeterian, fascinated by innovation and institution-building, though not so much so that he overlooks the need for long-standing institutions in incubating and supporting this. He pointed out the paradox of Tory political rhetoric, that it claims that 'society' is both broken and the answer to all our problems. Something surely has to endure (or be added to the mix, such as the state) if the embers of civic activism are to be reignited. 

Then there are the government's own cheerleaders for The Big Society, such as Nat Wei, whose authority to advise on civic action derives from their own high levels of energy and entrepreneurial zeal. They possess, in Weberian terms, charismatic authority. They come to motivate, to build, and to renew, offering youthful dynamism to lure people away from their televisions and out into their neighbourhoods. The contrast with the bankrupt traditional authority of the leader of the biggest society of all, who visits London this weekend, is dramatic. 

But there is a foundational sociological question here which needs addressing, and which entrepreneurs are uniquely ill-equipped to address: to what extent can society be held together out of volition?

Social bonds, if that's what we want more of, are just that - bonds. They constrict, oblige and demand. The primary bonds that people experience in a modern society are provided by three institutions, the family, religious institutions and (as Durkheim explored) the division of labour, resulting in work. It also transpires that these institutions, along with physical health, are most crucial in generating the 'wellbeing' that the Young Foundation report suggests we start to measure.

If we are to use the paradigm of wellbeing, there is one very indicative finding that it points us towards. As Daniel Kahneman and others have explored, there is a major difference between 'experienced' happiness and 'life satisfaction', where the former is a moment in time, and the latter is a reflection based on a narrative about oneself. And the finding is this: that being at work is an unpleasurable experience, but that being unemployed has an extremely negative impact on life satisfaction. 

Most policy-makers would read this and say that the latter is a higher priority. But then they need to follow the logic. The reason work is so important is precisely that it structures social relations without depending on pleasure and on life satisfaction. It is repetitive, predictable, often dull and often demanding. Richard Sennett views this as a quality of sorts. This is a (small c) conservative insight, namely that what people find fulfilling is often less choice - and certainly less upheaval - not more. To put this in more positive terms, they want to feel needed, valued and capable, but in ways that don't require them to reinvent themselves or their environments. 

It stands to reason that a conservative, and maybe even a (big c) Conservative, government would do anything it could to defend families, religious institutions and, above all, work. From the perspective of The Big Society agenda, it appears like a historical quirk that the first two of these have ended up as rightwing ambitions, and the third as a leftwing one. Every time policy-makers are celebrating some social innovation, charismatic entrepreneur, or optimistic individual who bucked the trend towards ennui, they should also ask the following question - how much bigger would society be, how much more well would we be, if only we could all have reliable, honestly-rewarded work?

It is not, then, so much that The Big Society is being used to disguise a shrinking state (although the jury's still out on that), but that it is likely a poor substitute for relationships of obligation and sustained reciprocity, especially within the economy itself. Why is it that 'social capital' is only ever found outside of markets and firms? Or as Marxists (e.g. Ben Fine) would say, why is volunteering or tweeting considered 'social', but production not?  And this brings me back to the Schumpeterians and the entrepreneurial blindspot. 

Entrepreneurs, by definition, find it plausible to that things can be built out of nothing. They find the creation of new social ties a doddle. But they also get easily bored, and want to then move on to something else. If there's one thing they get most bored by, it's that the rest of us struggle to keep up. "But it's easy", imply the public faces of The Big Society. "Just be a bit more like me".  The entrepreneur shares something with the situationist: artistic, disruptive, mildly solipsistic. And the situationist attitude to the repetition of capitalist labour is well known.

When David Willetts suggested that young people who fail to get into university should go out and volunteer, he implied that institutions and volition can be substitutes for one another. The difference between being inside an institution (be it a university or a workplace) and outside of one could be dealt with through a little more will-power. The sad fact is that it is probably those who are already inside institutions that also have the greater degree of volition, energy and desire to use in their free time. The notion that unemployed people can view free time as their resource is economistic in the extreme. 

All of this suggests that there is something wrong with the word 'volunteer', and which the Schumpeterian worldview might cloud. Action that is unpaid or uncoerced is considered 'voluntary', but we then leap to the assumption that it has bubbled up from within, either through an economic preference or a psychological urge. But has it? I wonder how much civic action is experienced this way. Certainly those fund-raising posters on the tube ("text 'disaster' to give just £1 and save this child's life") operate on our volition in this way, reducing gift-giving to the twitch of a neuron followed by a few prods of a thumb. But sustained, bonded, repetitive civic engagement cannot rely on a wellspring of desire and charisma, which is by its very nature explosive and unreliable. Duty and sustained recognition motivate when desire is absent.

The question of whether 'society' can plug the gap left by a shrinking state is one thing. But the question of whether it can compensate for a reduction in reliable work is a whole other problem altogether. The production of an entirely new sociological category, neither 'work' nor 'welfare' but as solid and binding as either, may be required. I can't even imagine it, but then I guess that's because I'm not an entrepreneur.

Battle of Ideas

I am, for my post-marxist techno-nihilistic whats-so-bad-about-paedophilia sins, partaking in the Battle of Ideas next month in a session about cooperatives and employee ownership.

'predatory elites'

"Any society in which massive gains are privatised and massive losses are socialised is one which is suffering from a problem of predatory elites."

Karel Williams speaking at Social Life of Methods this week. More thoughts on the conference in due course.

what exactly is Tony Blair's problem?

I have no intention of reading Tony Blair's memoirs, let alone buying them. Bad writing has the same effect on my humour as people who get to the top of escalators and then just stop. I'd prefer to just avoid it. However, I'm grateful to the various bold journalists who have been gleaning this over-sized beast for its choicest, fattiest, most toxic, and most unbelievable cuts. Strangely it was a quotation from one of the, ahem, sex scenes in today's Guardian, that got me thinking - what exactly is Tony Blair's problem?

Lets put this another way: what is it that Tony Blair lacks? What might we have hoped for from his book, but nevertheless known not to find? There are three possible overlapping answers which are worth interrogating.

Guilt: Guilt is a moral, legal and religious category. One feels guilty when one transgresses morally, is found guilty when one transgresses legally, and may confess guilt when one transgresses Christian norms (or is simply born guilty in certain more ascetic traditions).

One suspects that Blair is open to all possibilities, with the likely exception of the second (though not due to cowardice, perhaps, as much as due to total lack of interest in law as a worthy political device). Many will have pored over his memoirs for signs that he feels or has confessed guilt, but will come away disappointed. He is not afraid of confessing his responsibility for the loss of human lives, but that is not quite the same as confessing guilt. If anything, the excerpts dedicated to the loss of British soldiers show him strangely comfortable in this position of responsibility - not comfortable with the deaths themselves, but comfortable with the anguish that they cause him. Like any good existentialist, Blair wants to take on the burden of responsibility, even when - maybe especially when - this involves pain and trauma for himself.

As a Catholic and a moralist, Blair surely recognises the category of guilt, at least as a possibility. He is at least in touch with it as a way of being. He just manages to avoid it in favour of some more Schmittian concept of leadership, responsibility and authenticity. So while he lacks guilt with respect to the Iraq War specifically (in his own eyes), lets say that he likely accepts it in other parts of his life. His expression of regret regarding the fox-hunting ban might confirm this.

Shame: This is a psychoanalytic category. Shame is not a consequence of moral, legal or religious transgression, but from a subjective perception that some behaviour is transgressive, regardless of whether or not it is. So puberty might be a shameful experience, even while society views it as 'normal'. From a Freudian point of view, shame would be less interesting for what generated it in the past (even if it did happen to involve some act of obvious transgression), than for how it constrains and harms the individual in the present.

I await a psychological deconstruction of Blair's memoirs with interest. No doubt there is something of interest lurking there. Does Blair suffer from some sense of shame? Does he feel he erred as a child, or was constrained as a child, in such a way that he now has something to prove? Did someone belittle him? Who knows. But if the Iraq War has inculcated a sense of shame in him as an adult, it is presumably in the nature of shame that he will work hard to hide it, until it becomes easier to offload it in some way.

As a human being, he will at least have the capacity for shame. As a somewhat war-loving Prime Minister, it's possible that he even possesses a more recently-formed sense of shame, which redoubles as an effort to keep anyone from knowing that. Again, Blair must at the very least be in touch with shame as a possibility and have experienced it at various points of his life.

Embarrassment: Embarrassment is a less clear-cut category. It is, if anything, a mere failure of etiquette. It derives from discovering that one has got things slightly wrong, has got the wrong end of the stick, or has been found out to comic effect. It is not something that requires a trial in order to demonstrate, nor therapy to erradicate. It's far softer and more common than either guilt or shame, and a more fleeting experience than either. And my thesis is that it is embarrassment that Blair has no sense, knowledge or experience of whatsoever: he is clinically unembarrassable.

Back to that, ahem, sex scene, published here. It reads: "On that night I needed that love Cherie gave me, selfishly. I devoured it to give me strength. I was an animal following my instinct."

- Pause -

Now think of the man prepared to swagger around Camp David in tight jeans and a bomber jacket. Then think of the easy way he wandered in front of TV cameras with a mug of coffee. Then think of how he sat casually on the Match of the Day sofas dropping his aitches while talking about his respect for Steed Malbranque. And now think of the ex-Prime Minister, hunched over his manuscript somewhere in a private jet or Knightsbridge mansion, thinking that the British public might enjoy those three sentences regarding Cherie Blair and his own animal instinct.

It all adds up. Every strength and every weakness, every talent and every myopia, ever coup de grace and every cringe-worthy grin - all of these are attributable to one single pathology. Former Prime Minister Tony Blair cannot experience embarrassment. 

There are those who want to diagnose a deeper deficiency than this - narcissism and worse have been levelled at him. But all of these depictions of the sociopath, the egomaniac and the pathological liar conveniently overlook the fact that Blair is and was, in all manner of respects, a truly regular guy and (as far as its possible for me to say) an open book. He didn't need or want to act, hide or conceal. If anything, his flaw was that he refused to do these things - he could have acted out the role of a European peacemaker, hidden his deep admiration for George Bush and concealed that god awful sex scene from his readers. He could have been less of an open book, and the world might even have benefited. Richard Sennett's The Fall of Public Man argues that a persona - literally a mask - is a crucial precondition of a public culture, in contrast to one dominated by intimacy.

One question that this analysis poses is whether being unembarrassable also contributed to the rashness of key political and military decisions and the willingness to trust instinct. While embarrassment is a lighter and more ephemeral experience than either guilt or shame, maybe it also acts as a crucial early warning system that errors, indiscretions and worse are just around the corner. Maybe the breezy sharing of criminally-scripted sexual anecdotes is on the same spectrum as the failure to think twice before committing unconditionally to any post-911 idiocy the neo-conservatives could dream up. In short, Blair would have benefited from some inhibitions.

Social Life of Methods

This coming week sees CRESC's annual conference, The Social Life of Methods, in Oxford, which looks set to be a great summit for all things culturally and epistemologically sociological. The programme is here.

A couple of friends and I have put together a panel on Thursday at 1.30pm, The State and Numbers, on different varieties of quantification and measurement enacted by governments. I'll be speaking about 'subjective wellbeing as commensuration device', that is, the entry of this psychological category into the discipline of economics, such that objects, assets, practices and distributions can be evaluated and compared in terms of their psychological effects.

The concept of 'commensuration' is one that I'm getting quite excited by. For anyone who is curious, check out the work of Wendy Espeland and this paper in particular. There is much to say on this, and at some point I'll be submitting the CRESC paper somewhere.

I will endeavour to report back in week or so.