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Potlach - Will Davies UK (10 unread)

August 15, 2008
5:24
the paradox of the digital network
» ‎ Potlach - Will Davies UK

Culturally speaking, mobile phone companies look set to be the oil companies of the twenty-first century: vast, arrogant, lumbering businesses, that make money without even trying, and colonise virgin territories without much permission. Long before the Jont Orange horrors, there was the sickening O2 Wireless Festival (featuring a VIP platform, open only to O2 customers) and the invented Vodafone Live Music Awards, whose main award appears to be 'Best Live Return', thereby offering centre stage to some Richard Ashcroft tribute act known as The Verve.
Whether the consuming public shares my distate for this is open to question of course. But I suspect that there might be a structural economic reason why mobile phone companies are quite so uniquely awful in their encroachment upon our cultural lives.*
Communication is of course the oxygen of the networked digital age [O2 execs nod sagely...]. In the analogue age, different technologies supported different genres of communication. Television was for broadcasts, telephones were for speaking, walkmen were for music, and so on. Today, there is simply data floating around between various devices, each of whose function is becoming increasingly ambivalent. Endless different genres of communication are possible, each morphing into others. Music, text, speech, broadcasts, event invites, adverts, pictures and so on are being distributed according to all sorts of different social and economic models.
One consequence of this is the growth in very niche models of distribution and organisation. We can now, as Shirky, says, organise without organisations. Being 'grass roots', 'original' and 'authentic' does not require nearly so much effort or entrepreneurial drive, and is of course the basis for a whole new way of making money. This, I suspect, partly accounts for the rise of a paradoxical mass counter-culturalism, orthodox heterodoxy, uniform multiformity, most apparent in hipsterism. Peter Saville used to say that his aspiration for Joy Division/New Order sleeves was a 'mass-produced secret' - something which fans could recognise immediately, but others couldn't. But this paradoxical aspiration is becoming the norm in the age of professional viral marketing. If Hipsterism isn't the dead-end of Western culture, then this perfect synthesis of Boris Johnson and The Prodigy most definitely is.
The blurring of professional and amateur identities brings culture and economy into a more intimate relationship. Make of this what you will: Schumpeterian exuberance at the entrepreneurial opportunities, or Adornian despair at the final dissolution of the boundary between capital and art.
But think where it leaves the telecom companies. Someone has to provide the network within which all this micro-entrepreneurial, micro-commodification takes place, and the network is neither small nor cheap. It is not built by amateurs or even by entrepreneurs, it involves no accoustic guitars; it is an old-style industrial venture with huge sunk costs. To be commercially viable, such a network must have millions of users, each of whom prefers to identify as an increasingly narrow cultural segment. Our cultural-economic drift towards the niche, the hip and the grass roots is dependent on infrastructure that is definitively none of those things.
Pity the bind that Orange et al find themselves in. They are providing the technology through which people are morphing from audience into participants; but they can only facilitate this mutation by adhering to mass market, industrial responsibilities. Their response is the clumsiest, ugliest attempt to insert their vast, over-inflated brands into the most treasured corners of our lives. "If it weren't for us, you wouldn't be able to phone your grandmother, organise a small gig, share a joke! We are truly the essence of your social and cultural life" they tell us. To which our response (mine at any rate) is "so what? Now fuck off and leave me alone!" Maybe I need to develop more sympathy.
* Carling lager is the exception that proves the rule, being responsible for the crimes against culture of hosting publicly advertised gigs at the 'Islington Carling Academy' in which tickets are only available to Carling customers, and forcing London Underground buskers to stand on horrid little branded 'stages', under the auspices that 'Carling sponsors live music'. From now on, if any music lovers ever participate in a marketing focus group, can you please please please not tell them that you enjoy live music; lie and tell them that nothing beats Clapham All Bar One or Tory Party Conference for that authentic urban feel.
August 13, 2008
7:27
the Hinterland of anti-social behaviour
» ‎ Potlach - Will Davies UK

Now here's a strange political fragment. I spotted this poster in a tube station yesterday, and was faintly disturbed by its epistemological presuppositions. 'Were you aware' it wants to know, despite declining to end the sentence with a question mark, that 'begging and unlicensed busking is [sic] anti-social and can be dangerous'. I should confess that I was not aware that begging and unlicensed busking can be dangerous, but its reassuring that the presence of a busking license successfully averts this mysterious threat.
What troubles me more is the implication that anti-social behaviour is now something that operates in some clandestine, invisible fashion, where only experts can see it. Alan Partridge used to have a stock line, "please don't phone in and say that's sexist - it's not". Similarly, London Underground are pulling back the curtain, revealing the ethical truth of certain forms of conduct. If the boss of London Underground were to fart loudly and noxiously in polite company, perhaps he could get away with it by asking "were you aware, farting loudly and noxiously in polite company is perfectly acceptable".
Anti-social behaviour has now become some ontological substrate that is invisible to the lay-person's naked eye. It is a Hinterland whose correspondence to the world of appearances is suddenly thrown into doubt. How did we get to this point? Obviously anti-social behaviour gets codified somewhat via policy mechanisms for dealing with it, such as ASBOs. But surely the point - and controversy - about the ASBO is that anti-social behaviour is a constantly moving target, and requires a law that is fully maleable. At least where ASBOs are concerned, anti-social behaviour is still in the eye of the beholder, it's just that some beholders count (sufferers, police, courts) while others don't (the, err, 'behavers'). It would be odd, even where ASBOs were involved, to inform someone that contrary to all appearances, behaviour was (or wasn't) technically anti-social.
It strikes me that there are two forms of dualism that might be at work in this poster: a philosophical one involving a depth metaphor and an economic one involving a breadth metaphor. Plato's philosopher employs wisdom to see beneath appearances to the world of forms. Beneath the appearance of a man playing a violin in a tube station lies the reality of anti-social behaviour that the average punter can't know. The economist, on the other hand, often serves to look beyond a particular phenomenon, to calculate its aggregate effects that might lie elsewhere altogether. So away from the happy instance of a man playing a violin in a tube station, anti-social consequences are taking place in the aggregate that are not apparent to the average punter, or indeed the violin-player.
Both are projects of counter-intuition, the first via essentialism, the second via consequentialism. It's very difficult to see how either can successfully colonise the concept of 'anti-social behaviour' (though I suspect the invented concept of 'pro-social behaviour' will assist in stablising its opposite). ASBOs may or may not represent a governmental over-reach, but they do at least accept the irreducibly ethical nature of ethical problems; the question is whether there is a role for the state in solving them. But if London Underground is anything to go by, ethics is soon to be reduced to a matter of concealed fact. Next time you hold a door open for someone, make sure you're fully aware of what you're doing...
August 08, 2008
11:12
hello, public
» ‎ Potlach - Will Davies UK

When it comes to waging discursive battle in the global public sphere, this blog is the equivalent of the Territorial Army: while the big bloggers, authors, pundits and experts are out there ducking cannon-fire for Queen and country, potlatch is to be found in a small field in Kent, practicing how to make a magazine rack out of nothing but drift-wood and old string. It takes some serious shit before reservists such as myself are dragged into the front-line, but it happened briefly today, thanks to the BBC linking here.
So, you few hundred people who have wandered in here, welcome! I doubt many of you will be back, so I expect to soon be left alone again, with my small band of friends and dis-armed ex-military equipment. But you are welcome to hang around or return at your leisure in future. On the topic of the original BBC article, this post of mine develops a similar analysis of the strange 'unveiling' that American 'rogue' economists like to perform. More importantly, this one explains why Thatcherism was basically a mobster plot. Enjoy. Or don't, you decide.
August 04, 2008
17:10
a suggestion for Foxtons
» ‎ Potlach - Will Davies UK

While I'm on the topic of satan, has anyone heard of 'SoDa'? This, I've discovered, is estate agent speak for a small area of Hackney just round the corner from where I grew up, which features developments such as this. Why so called you ask? Because it's South of Dalston and - hang on, that reminds me of somewhere. Holy shit, it's like SoHo in New York! Lets add another £25k onto the asking price.
Of course this festival of stupid is nearly over, at least for a few years. But as the Foxton's Perrier 'islands' fall into disuse and the Minis are returned to the car dealers, I propose softening the blow by rebranding this downturn as CreCru - a unique Credit Crunch benefitting from fewer estate agents, which affords all of the striking characteristics of city centre financial meltdown.
July 30, 2008
8:31
keepin' it real on a film-set in Dorset
» ‎ Potlach - Will Davies UK

Scene: 'Ideas Pod' in one of Soho's leading boutique advertising agencies. The room has no rectangles, and no flat surfaces, to avoid the risk of someone thinking inside the box. The floor is covered with random objects, including beachballs, exotic fruit, a 1980s games console and a live goat. Five men are playing croquet, pausing occasionally to snort cocaine (off the games console).

Rex: the thing about individuality is its all about community these days.
Ned: yeah, and if you think about it, community is actually all about individuality... [sniff]
Kris: so, lets get this clear - I am actually lots of people; and lots of people are actually me?
Alix: that's what my focus group said, yep [snort]
Loz: I'm feeling this, I'm feeling this! [big snort]
Rex: not only that, but community is actually all about your friends, and not really about large multinational corporations selling manufactured shit at all...
Kris: which means... hang on - that means that I am not really about large multinational corporations selling manufactured shit either! This is ground-breaking...
Interruption - Kevin Roberts sticks his head through the door
Kevin Roberts (for it is he): guys, can you keep it down - I'm trying to machine-gun a coca-cola vending machine next door. Cheers
Kevin Roberts exits
Alix: so what we need is a way of communicating to people that it's OK to be themselves, and just because they're not famous and dont work in advertising, doesn't mean that their lives are entirely pointless.
Rex: yeah, there's nobody out there telling them this shit. No wonder they all hate themselves [snort]
Loz: I'm really feeling this, man... [nose streaming]
Kris: I know! To show them that this is real, rather than manufactured shit from a multinational corporation, lets include some accoustic guitars. And a white person with dreadlocks!
etc etc etc. OK, so I can't be entirely sure out how they reasoned their way to middle class crusties, but I assume the conversation went something like the above. And here, ladies and gents, is the resulting video. God help us.
July 27, 2008
5:32
the politics of Wetherspoons
» ‎ Potlach - Will Davies UK

I've got an idea for a Demos project, for when their new director arrives clutching his new liberal agenda: it's called 'Wetherspoons Democracy' and looks at Britain via the microcosm of Wetherspoons pubs.
Indeed, I had a veritable Charlie Leadbeater moment when wandering down Old Street at around noon yesterday. Leadbeater is the master of experiential political philosophy - finding moments of miniature political crisis in everyday settings (in the original sense of the word 'crisis'; note how we have become fixated on only the third of these definitions). The beach typifies a problem of self-organisation; a piano-teacher typifies a crisis in professional and amateur identities.
Old Street Wetherspoons was at the peak of its powers as I walked past. Through the wide open windows I could see people slamming coins into slot machines, tucking into £2.99 fried breakfasts, arguing with each other, staring into space and arguing with themselves. But most of all, drinking - pint upon pint of cheap beer, very very cheap beer. No doubt there were cheap alco-pops involved too. Outside, in a miniature example of al fresco London of which Lord Rogers should be proud, there was a small fenced-off area in which people could stand, sit and crouch to smoke cigarettes.
It's odd that in the space of my adult life, the scene that I apprehended has gone from being an entirely legitimate, potentially laudable example of consumer capitalism, to being a socio-cultural problem to be solved, if not necessarily by the government, then by someone. Viewed positively, here is a source of community for elderly people, a place to eat and drink that doesn't mock people with its prices, a culturally-inclusive and inter-generational space in which nobody is judged or asked to move on, and a reliable brand. Viewed negatively, it is pumping 'negative externalities' into society - obescity, lung cancer, alcoholism, low aspirations, lower surrounding property prices.
Lets suspend judgement as to whether the government is right to view things in this latter sense. What's interesting is that, as the more lucrative ends of consumer capitalism and service production have absorbed radical emancipatory philosophies within them, it's now at the lower end of the market that genuinely heterodox, disruptive, autonomous forces are alive. Wetherspoons is, in certain respects, an unknowingly democratic space. A few hundred yards down the road in Hoxton, 'radical', 'creative' forms of democracy are at work, that produce all manner of 'positive externalities' - tourism, contained diversity, rising property prices, with little harm for anyone's health or cost for the state. A couple of miles north, Stoke Newington nimbies work round the clock to prevent chains from encroaching on their hallowed turf, under leftwing radical rhetoric, but with rightwing exclusionary goals.
Wetherspoons is a model of market efficiency. Prices are low, economies of scale are passed on to consumers and people are offered real choice, on the assumption that they are intelligent enough to deal with it. The New Labour retort to such economic libertarianism is that we also have something called the NHS which mops up the mess these choices create. Maybe there aren't principles at stake here after all, just costs. But unforseen by the architects of New Labour, this is surely where British politics is most critical right now, and where liberals, paternalists and, no doubt, soft paternalists need to test their arguments. Over to you Mr Reeves...
July 23, 2008
8:44
the nudging state
» ‎ Potlach - Will Davies UK

Hanging around like Brian Adams's '(Everything I Do) I Do It For You', this week's number one Big Idea is... still behavioural economics! Perhaps a slushy single called '(Everything I Do) I Do It For You Without Even Meaning to' might also spend seventeen weeks at the top of the charts.
For those who haven't been paying attention, or wanted to pay attention but were distracted by some psychological law they weren't aware of, there is a book out called Nudge, by Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler. You can find out why George Osborne loves it, what Matthew Taylor thinks of it, which restaurant Sunstein and Thaler discuss it in, and why we need more pictures of flies in urinals. Between policies which force us to act in the public interest (e.g. a smoking ban) and those which free us to act in our own interests (i.e. markets) is the third option of 'soft paternalism' - policy interventions that frame choices in ways that lead us to act voluntarily in the public interest.
It seems immediately obvious that, while intellectually interesting, this cannot be much more than a gloss placed upon existing policy machinery. This is not to discredit it. There is often a gap between the clumsy rule-making apparatus of state bureaucracies and the potentially disorientating arena of markets. A while back I wrote in this Renewal article [doc] about how New Labour was operating with a conflicted notion of the self, in which crude constraints and erratic freedoms were constantly pulling in opposite directions. Perhaps nudges can act as a buffer zone between the two, like that expanding foam you inject into the gaps around windows as insulation. But taken to any greater extent, 'soft paternalism' implies too much freedom to be compatible with the political needs of the state, and not enough to be compatible with the economic commitment to self-regulating markets. As I wrote here, if behavioural economics were taken too literally, a great deal of the current policy-making apparatus would become redundant. Which is why it won't be taken too literally.
But what is far more perplexing about this new Big Idea is its apparent selling point - the insight that 'free' choices can be strategically affected, for better or worse, without being constrained. If this is news to government wonks, this suggests that government thinking lags behind business thinking by approximately forty years.
Out in the big bad world of business, homo economicus is kept on a very tight leash indeed. Investors are, for the most part, vicious examples of homo economicus, impersonal buyers and sellers who - as Donald MacKenzie has shown - actually employ neo-classical economics in their day-to-day calculations. This isn't to say that stock markets behave 'rationally' (one of the most famous works of behavioural economics has shown that they don't) or that there aren't meta-narratives at work. But the aspiration to calculate in an asocial, rational fashion exists, and this aspiration exerts constant pressure upon business management.
This makes it all the more important that other 'stakeholders' such as customers and employees do not behave in this fashion, switching allegiances and calculating at every turn. This explains two of the most important forms of expertise in the economy today, namely Human Resource Management (HRM) and Advertising. Neither of these is based upon a model of a rational, self-interested self, but builds upon empirical studies of the emotional, social person as they exist in actual economic situations, in order to draw individuals into non-price-based relationships. Admittedly, HRM might be built upon a plausible body of social psychology, while Kevin Roberts et al prefer to get five people pissed then ask them which car most reminds them of a penis, but neither assumes that people know what is best for them. For a great case of 'nudging' in action, see Eddie Izzard's depiction of advertising.
Is it actually news that people voluntarily take bad decisions? When economists go and buy household cleaning products in the supermarket, do they think they select Mr Muscle on the basis of calculation? (I sometimes try and select cleaning products with my eyes closed, but when I open them, I'm usually disappointed to discover I haven't selected Mr Muscle and so I buy it anyway). And what about HR? Is this considered too 'soft' to be real, or not part of the economy?
So there already exist sophisticated forms of expertise, dedicated to alligning 'my' interests with those of companies. And not a decade too soon, we now see the emergence of a body of expertise dedicated to alligning 'my' interests with those of the public (or the government, depending on how you prefer to see it). There must surely be opportunities for governments to use the expertise that is already out there, as it does with advertising against smoking or drink driving. Couldn't the advertising industry 'nudge' us to recycle or pick up litter? Couldn't HR experts 'nudge' parents to restrain their children? These people actually specialise in understanding irrationality, as opposed to discovering it as an amusing economic after-thought.
The policy-maker might respond that advertisers and HR exist to prevent me taking a good decision, while the state wants to help me take a good one. In this respect, perhaps the 'nudging state' is necessary as the corrective to a society polluted with bad incentives. Richard Layard's criticisms of advertising and OfCom's commitment to raise media literacy are in line with such a view.
But good in whose eyes? In an Aristotelian paradigm, my greatest happiness consists in behaving virtuously, and I simply need to learn this. But it strikes me that behavioural economics remains in the paradigm that views virtue (the will of all) and autonomy (the will of the individual) as at war with one another, with capitalism (the will of capital) as a third aggressor to be taken into account. Nudging then becomes a means of optimising the level of individual autonomy in society, to achieve an uneasy balance between the three. I suspect that one set always gets squeezed in the process, and it aint capitalism.
July 16, 2008
3:46
models of neo-liberalism
» ‎ Potlach - Will Davies UK

The instinctive view of party politics in neo-liberal times is that competing parties talk different but act the same. Elections are a symbolic battle for majority support, which obscures a consensus on economic and security issues that may or may not be what 'the people' want. In the US, this analysis is commonly associated with Thomas Frank. Barack Obama is almost performing this strategy nakedly, promising the same policies but with new symbols.
But what if the Conservative Party are about to reverse this? David Cameron's most significant project as leader has been to get them to talk the same as New Labour, and to lose what made them culturally specific, given how repugnant this was to about 80% of the British electorate. If the Labour Party is decimated at the next election, it will be (given the government's frankly impressive competence, and how similar the Tories aspire to be) one of the most erratic acts by the British electorate in history. The fact that George Osborne is trying to define himself by name-checking behavioural economics is only the narcissism of small differences. The Nudge thesis is interesting, but it provides window-dressing for policy, and not its mechanical innards. Most of the British public probably believe that they now have neither a symbolic nor a policy choice between the two main parties, while at least Americans have the former.
If there is one issue that appears to confirm that 'they're all the same' in policy terms, it is Gordon Brown's 10p tax rate fiasco, and the evidence showing that poverty has been rising. I have friends who voted Labour in 2005 only because they felt it was the altruistic thing to do for the most needy in Britain. I'm not sure what these people will do next. But here's a discomforting question - is poverty a policy red herring? Should it, in fact, now be bracketted under the 'symbolic' dimension of politics, not the 'policy' dimension? Following Make Poverty History, being against poverty is a cultural stance that involves scarcely any material commitments. David Cameron has nothing to lose from wearing a white rubber band around his wrist. Probably the last wing of government that would really benefit from making poverty history is the Home Office.
Once the focus on poverty has been abandoned, or handed back to the church and the charitable sector, an entirely new vista on British politics may open up. The two parties may speak the same (including about poverty), but their economic models may be different. I wrote here about the phenomenon of 'free market collectivism' that New Labour has adhered to, in which the categories of 'market failure' (from welfare economics) and 'competitiveness' (from Michael Porter et al) provide a neo-liberal rationale for a state-led communitarianism. It is naive to assume that New Labour's commitment to a larger state is based on normative rather than efficiency grounds. There is little evidence that the state has been expanded to help the poor, even if that can be an inadvertent consequence. High quality, efficient public services are a component part of New Labour's overall economic model, defended on grounds of market failure and competitiveness.
The Tories will not offer a different 'model of capitalism' in the sense that was keenly discussed in the 1980s and early 90s; but might they offer a different 'model of neo-liberalism'? According to Foucault's analysis of neo-liberalism, the difference between liberalism and neo-liberalism is (and I simplify) that the former makes the state a condition of the free market, whilst the latter does the reverse. The state can only exist and grow to the extent that it is efficient for it to do so. However, given the uncertainties that plague economic analyses of public entities, the most efficient size for the state is virtually impossible to specify. Could it be 50% of GDP? 20%? 80%? There may be no clear economic or normative basis for choosing between these, but there will certainly be special interests who prefer it smaller rather than larger, and they are on the Tories' side. Welcome back to a good, old-fashioned, right-wing conspiracy.
The peculiar thing is that the lentil-munching classes might now have more material reason to vote Labour than ever. They are the beneficiaries of the New Labour model of neo-liberalism, and may end up being the losers from the Tory's model. They enjoy public services, public spaces, high quality public infrastructure, consumer protection. The definition of 'efficiency' that has been employed for the past decade has put them at the centre, even if they didn't notice because they were engrossed in ethical debates, not empirical ones. Within two years, we may discover there is another definition of 'efficiency', which does not privilege these things. The fact that there is no definition of efficiency that privileges the poor does not mean that they 'all the same'. (Allyson Pollock was on the radio yesterday talking about the 'market failure' that occurs in privatised health systems when poor people end up uninsured. But, as I've seen civil servants declare with a nihilistic gleam in their eye, that's not inefficient, it's just inequitable.)
Models of neo-liberalism are never quite true to either their symbolic-ethical gloss, nor to their economic-empirical analyses. They differ, but it is hard to know how to judge them, when neither a normative nor an economic account is quite appropriate. Strangely, the realisation that New Labour was neither a moral project, nor quite an efficiency-maximising one, returns us to a variant of Hannah Arendt's core (if tautologous) question of political judgement - how do I judge this model of neo-liberalism?
July 14, 2008
4:32
the emergence of 'Trauma-Lit'
» ‎ Potlach - Will Davies UK

Waterstones is clearly the place to spot emerging consumer neuroses. Following the launch of 'Fausterity', here is the latest frontier in the marketing battle for the nation's self-loathing psyche: 'Trauma-Lit'. What is Trauma-Lit, I hear you beg? If I worked in marketing I would charge you £2k for the answer, but since I am a not-for-profit sole-trader, I shall give you a glimpse of it for free. Here is a photo taken of a genre that Britain's largest book-seller refers to as 'Real Life', in the Oxford Street branch at the weekend.
The accompanying text on the covers is too small to make out, so let me help. Betrayed has a quote on its cover from Judy of Richard-&-Judy fame saying 'A really shocking story'. It is clearly failing to keep pace with Broken, whose cover boasts that it is 'The most shocking true story of abuse ever told'. Destroyed serves up a 'secret that can't be told. A life forever ruined'. Offering a more sociological spin on Trauma-Lit, Street boys reveals '7 kids, 1 estate, [but just in case you thought you'd spotted a light at the end of the tunnel] no way out'.
To paraphrase Erving Goffman, just what the hell is going on here? Since when was brutal, physical, sexual, economic, irreparable and actual abuse a cultural genre? In Adorno and Horkheimer's famous analysis of the 'culture industry' mass culture acts as an anaesthetic, but never as a source of pain. Where 'high culture', for Adorno, draws attention to its own wounds, especially in the work of Beckett and Schoenberg, mass culture offers a mirage of resolution, synthesis and happiness that is absent elsewhere. The genre of horror is of course an interesting phenomenon in its own right, which reams of psychoanalytic theory have been dedicated to. But is it not the case that horror movies tend to conclude with resolution and some sense of peace? Funny Games has been widely interpreted as deliberately playing with the boundary between horror-entertainment and actual horror, but the boundary is still there.
By contrast, Trauma-Lit is parasitical upon, resident within actual horror. This is not a cultural exploration of the dark underbelly of humanity, but the identification and commodification of it; it is presentation not representation. Notably, it sells only those cases where horror clashes with the utmost innocence. Horror enacted upon adults might seem murky, morally repugnant and tasteless, but still somehow worldly and complicated. An assault upon an adult might lack the sheer theological other-worldliness that Destroyed and Punished purport to offer. Complications would arise if adults were involved - what if it turned out that the victim was profitting heavily from the book, or that some people were reading it as quasi-pornographic? But these children suffering what is presented as unprecedented, life-ruining abuse have the privilege of absolute victimhood that makes these tales almost biblical in their quality.
These books obviously perform a sense-making role in people's lives, but there is a significant transition being undergone. For those who bought into it, the death of Diana was Christ-like - society destroying its purest, most beautiful emblem, in order to expunge all of its latent evil upon one sacrificial figure. Diana's death was an erruption in time, which created a sense of before and after. A decade on, there was Madeleine McCann. Again, purity and beauty were of the essence, but here the temporality was different. There was no moment of sacrifice, just rolling news, with various objects - fluffy bunny, tapas restaurant - gradually becoming holy. As I wrote here, it became - and to some extent remains - the nation's favourite soap opera. A shift occurred from sacrifice as one-off public ritual, to something more day-to-day, consumable and therapeutic.
Trauma-Lit is production-line sacrifice - the Gospel according to Henry Ford. "You can have a victim of whatever age you like, so long as it's seven", he says. We've moved beyond the epoch-making trauma of Diana's smashed car, through the rolling news soap opera of the McCann's pained expressions, to consumption of child abuse. The sense-making remains similar, namely that the pure, insurpassable injustice of an act brings more everyday, less theological forms of injustice under some form of rationale. The evil that is rendered naked in Broken and Scarred must be the same evil that plagues us, but heavily disguised as financial anxiety, failing relationships or a directionless job. The promise made by Trauma-Lit is to pull away the mask.
The question is whether Trauma-Lit could ever become a fictional genre. The answer is probably not, not least because the notion of dreaming up such stories from scratch may be too abhorrent even for mass market publishers. The fictional end of 'the culture industry' - cinema, novels, tv soaps - will then remain a source of false resolutions, as identified by Adorno and Horkheimer, to sooth us when we feel broken, punished and destroyed. But for those wanting to know why we feel these things, Broken, Punished and Destroyed offer to reveal their logic.
July 07, 2008
16:10
why Google can't replace theory
» ‎ Potlach - Will Davies UK

Being measured and reasonable is no way to make serious money if you're a public intellectual, but Chris Anderson's recent article 'The End of Theory' is so exaggerated as to become a monument worthy of analysis.
Anderson believes that the presence of unprecedented quantities of data on everything imaginable, combined with Google's ability to identify frequent internal linkages within that data, fundamentally alters the nature of cognition. From now on, there is no requirement for hypotheses, speculation or theory regarding the world, given that Google will answer all questions on the basis of commonalities of data. "Correlation supersedes causation," he argues, "and science can advance even without coherent models, unified theories, or really any mechanistic explanation at all." His gravest threat relates to social science:
Out with every theory of human behavior, from linguistics to sociology. Forget taxonomy, ontology, and psychology. Who knows why people do what they do? The point is they do it, and we can track and measure it with unprecedented fidelity. With enough data, the numbers speak for themselves.
There is so much wrong with this, intellectually and politically, it's difficult to know where to start. One thing is worth noting at the outset, namely that Anderson is at least performatively consistent with his own argument - like Google, he clearly 'knows' very little about the various phenomena he discusses, but simply notes that many of them happen to cluster together. Yes, it is true that sociologists and philosophers speak to each other, share certain categories and concerns, dabble in each other's territory. But this doesn't mean they can be lumped together as 'theory'. Yes it is true that the philosophy of science and the history of science are informed by each other, and occasionally merge, as in the work of Ian Hacking or, arguably, Hegel. But this doesn't mean they are an integrated thing that can be lazily titled 'theory'.
It is on these misunderstandings that Anderson's argument depends. Crucially, Anderson misses the difference between those engaged in the Kantian epistemological project of seeking to understand how knowlege is possible as a cognitive artifice, and those engaged in the Weberian sociological project of seeking to understand how knowledge is handled using technological artifices. (A Latourian may well argue that we can do without this distinction, but you'd never know if they were joking or not). Ignorant of this distinction, Anderson comes to view epistemological and bureaucratic questions as interchangeable. He spots the fact that both are concerned with the artificial nature of reality, and that correlation is as much confirmation as he requires.
With this elision complete, 'theory' comes to appear dispensable, a 20th century relic not dissimilar to the fax machine, say. In our post-theory future, Google's mathematical algorithms perform the function that Kantian epistemology had granted cognition, namely of creating synthetic unities out of an over-whelming mass of sense data.
Of course this is non-sensical. Theory never ceases, because it is existential not technological. It resides in the fact of self-consciousness and the distinctly human ability (or desire) to view the world in a non-immediate, non-idiotic fashion. We have no option to abandon theory, only the option to pretend as much, as Anderson advocates here, and this is where the politics comes in.
I would suggest that Anderson is extending the Chicago School project of selectively dismantling the bases for authoritative knowledge claims. Chicago economics renders social knowledge so fragile and polluted with self-interest, that it becomes impossible to produce a better model for society than that of the unimpeded market. Again, there is a sleight of hand at work here - man's epistemological condition leads not just contingently but logically to the technological solution of the market. Readers of the Becker-Posner blog may note how often they get entangled in philosophical questions, and immediately reach for either technical or common-sense answers. I guess it's partly an outcrop of American pragmatism. And why is this a 'selective' dismantling? Because it doesn't dismantle the authority of the economist, nor of the aggregate knowledge contained in the market, but attacks all other forms of centralised expertise.
For Anderson it is not the market that comes to our rescue, but the world wide web. What the market can do for material resources, the web can do for knowledge. In each case, we are relieved of the political and theoretical burden of trying to produce a good, coherent model for society, and put ourselves in the hands of an ignorant, amoral mechanism - price in the case of material resources, algorithm in the case of immaterial ones. Obviously there are borderline cases between the two, which is why copyright is such a controversial issue for neo-liberals. But the myth of both Chicago School price theory and Anderson's algorithm theory is that the problems of political theory needn't be solved so much as evaporated, thanks to tools of knowledge aggregation.
The problem for both price theorists and (what I now term) algorithm theorists is that people are incapable of becoming as stupid and apolitical as these strategies require. Neo-liberal economists rage against the fact that the market is constantly distorted by the state, and is thereby prevented from confirming the claims they make for it. Likewise, the neo-liberal technologists will no doubt rage against the fact that Google is constantly distorted by professional scientists, who attempt to stipulate the facts drawing on bogus authority.
The analogy is a helpful one for exploring the threat Anderson poses. For instance, what would the equivalent of 'shock therapy' be for algorithm theorists? Perhaps developing countries would be advised to bulldoze all of their universities in one go, so as to move immediately to a Google-mediated society.
Finally, markets and Google both suffer from one severe defect: they are highly effective at identifying two separate things as the same, but very bad at specifying the difference between them. A market can tell you how many apples 'equals' one newspaper, but has nothing to say about the difference between biting into a braeburn and reading the news. Similarly, Google can unify a book-seller, a beer and a deceased Labour leader under the single category of 'John Smith', but where the differences become more subtle, it offers little assistance. Anderson may be right, if he is arguing that we have less work to do nowadays in performing acts of identification; but if he has forgotten that intelligence consists also in differentiation, then he is not just a bad social scientist and philosopher, but a sociopath. Then again, fifty years ago, people probably thought the same about Gary Becker...

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