Feels like the night before Christmas. I'm inside getting corners squared away, listening to every Astronautalis song I own, anticipating, anticipating, waiting to get up really early and rush in to see what I've got.
I've got the day off work, I've borrowed a car, and I'm waking up at 7am to pick up Anne and her sister from the airport.
31 August 2009
28 August 2009
Kaupthinking is thinking beyond normal thinking
I had a period of ecstatic happiness this morning. I Kaupthought.
It all started when I saw an ad for the Kaupthing Bank. It told me that "If we want to change the world. We can. We just have to think we can." This is a fantastically great idea! I am very enthusiastic about Kaupthinking!
Furthermore, said the promotional video, which was a montage of film and newsreel clips from Einstein to Lawrence of Arabia to Tiananmen Square to The Matrix, exponential growth was infinitely possible. I didn't even need to obey common sense or the laws of physics!
Kaupthinking, I was informed, allowed the bank to expand like an exploding sun: "We thought we could double in size. And we did. Every year for eight years. We thought we could increase our balance sheet. And we did. By 500 percent in just three years. We think we can continue to grow the same way we always have."
Floored - well, not literally floored, as I was sitting down at the time - I realized the implications. I found a dollar on the way to work today, so I decided to think that I could find double that tomorrow and the day after. With that sort of growth, I would be a millionaire within the month. So I handed in my resignation, as prospecting for sidewalk dollars is clearly a more enriching activity.
To say nothing of the fitness benefits of Kaupthinking. If I can run five miles today, I should be able to run ten miles in a week, and twice as fast. Within a few months, I’ll never have to buy a plane ticket again as I’ll be able to run there faster! (Except to leave New Zealand, but I doubt that Kaupthinking recognizes such trivialities as oceans. Even if it does, I could learn to Kaupswim.)
Kaupthinking is liberating!
Of course, some people point out that Kaupthing Bank came to a sticky end, destroying Iceland in the process. That's exactly the sort of pessimism that is anathema to all serious Kaupthinkers.
It all started when I saw an ad for the Kaupthing Bank. It told me that "If we want to change the world. We can. We just have to think we can." This is a fantastically great idea! I am very enthusiastic about Kaupthinking!
Furthermore, said the promotional video, which was a montage of film and newsreel clips from Einstein to Lawrence of Arabia to Tiananmen Square to The Matrix, exponential growth was infinitely possible. I didn't even need to obey common sense or the laws of physics!
Kaupthinking, I was informed, allowed the bank to expand like an exploding sun: "We thought we could double in size. And we did. Every year for eight years. We thought we could increase our balance sheet. And we did. By 500 percent in just three years. We think we can continue to grow the same way we always have."
Floored - well, not literally floored, as I was sitting down at the time - I realized the implications. I found a dollar on the way to work today, so I decided to think that I could find double that tomorrow and the day after. With that sort of growth, I would be a millionaire within the month. So I handed in my resignation, as prospecting for sidewalk dollars is clearly a more enriching activity.
To say nothing of the fitness benefits of Kaupthinking. If I can run five miles today, I should be able to run ten miles in a week, and twice as fast. Within a few months, I’ll never have to buy a plane ticket again as I’ll be able to run there faster! (Except to leave New Zealand, but I doubt that Kaupthinking recognizes such trivialities as oceans. Even if it does, I could learn to Kaupswim.)
Kaupthinking is liberating!
Of course, some people point out that Kaupthing Bank came to a sticky end, destroying Iceland in the process. That's exactly the sort of pessimism that is anathema to all serious Kaupthinkers.
25 August 2009
A sentence of sorts in Stockholm
I spent the last month or so editing a friend's MA thesis, which deals with how the Swedish model of labour relations responded to a European Court of Justice ruling that effectively negated some of its core provisions. My final commentary:
Kelvin will submit it on Tuesday, after an intense weekend of revisions. Well done!
From my perspective, it seemed that it had the potential to ask (and answer) three quite interesting questions:
1) How do labour market institutions react to an external shock, and why do they react in that way?
2) What is the relationship between institutions and actors? Are actors only empowered within specific institutions, or are institutions only maintained through the work of actors? Alternatively, is there a sort of feedback loop between the two?
3) Under what conditions is it possible for a unified working-class movement to maintain hegemony in the face of neoliberalism?
I think that you did a quite good job, overall, in answering these questions in the Swedish case. Your clearest focus was on the first question, but I think that you presented the second as an important part of the narrative in the last three chapters. I think that you let the third slip away from you slightly - from related conversations I can tell that you're aware of the implications of your work for that question, but it's remained slightly below the text. To lift Derrida's phrase, like the spectre of Marx... a phantasmal half-presence in your work.
Returning to the second question, I would make two points. The first is that actors are, to some extent, given power only due to the existence of institutions. For example, even a politically conscious working class will not be able to press its claims without some connection to a "friendly" institution - whether a political party, labour union, or state bureaucracy. (The tragedy of the working class in the US is also the story of Reagan's union-breaking in the 1980s and the working class's marginalization in a newly neoliberal Democratic Party. Once state and political institutions were captured by capitalist interests, and unions marginalized, the long wage stagnation was bound to happen.)
The second is that actors also have power bases that rest outside of institutions. For example, a union's power rests not in its head office but in its membership and social legitimacy; a competent lobbying group is no use if they have no money to contribute to political campaigns.
Mapping this onto the Swedish example, we can see the following:
(a) Unions were strong in membership (largely due to their key place in wage bargaining, provision of unemployment insurance, etc) and ideologically united around "working class interests" defined in a broad sense.
(b) Pre-Laval-Case institutions (the Swedish model of industrial relations) created a strong bargaining position for unions due to rules around wage formation, industrial action and sympathy action.
(c) The ECJ ruling effectively negated those institutions, or at least threatened to progressively undermine them through an inflow of foreign labour.
What you observed was that, after having their institutional underpinnings knocked away from under them, the unions pressed successfully for the reconstruction of a distinct Swedish model that would continue to empower them. That is, their strength didn't solely depend upon the existing institutional relationships. (Although it sounds like tactical savvy and institutional ties were helpful in winning some key debates!) Rather, their ability to reconstitute the Swedish model relied upon other factors. It would be productive to investigate what those factors were - membership? social legitimacy or hegemony? money? or something else?
This leads neatly onto the third question that I identified in this study. More broadly, this is a question about class, which is a notoriously difficult topic.
I noticed that you tended to soft-pedal class divisions in your analysis. You often said things like "Social partners wanted X", or "They thought that Y", without really defining which particular social partners wanted X, etc. This might be a legitimate approach insofar as social gulfs seem a lot narrower in Sweden, and solidarity between the social partners much more valued. However, it did sometimes hamper your approach to the underlying issues of class solidarity and cross-class alliances.
Let me first say that I think that the notion of two distinct and inevitably opposed classes is both analytically helpful and analytically ridiculous. Yes, in a broad sense, it's true that some people buy labour-power for money in the hopes of profiting, and that most people sell their labour-power in order to buy the means of subsistence. In that sense, a division between "labour" and "capital" is helpful.
On the other hand, there may be other classes in action as well, ranging from precapitalist formations such as smallholding peasantry and landed aristocracy to modern-day inventions such as state bureaucracy. (That's us!) In the Swedish case, the state-sector employers association might be considered to be one of these "other classes" - for as your study showed, its interests deviated significantly from those of the private-sector employer groups. It was significantly more willing to place social solidarity in front of lower wage bills - maybe because it was beholden to voters (most of whom were workers) rather than share owners.
Furthermore, classes are seldom if ever homogenous. The remarkable thing about the Swedish case, to my mind, is not that the bourgeoisie was divided, but that labour was so united. This point is clearer if you consider that the Swedish "proletariat" is composed of a variety of distinct groups with distinct interests, represented by two separate peak level organizations. Here, the contrast with the US, which you mentioned to me early on, is instructive. In the US, labour is essentially split down the middle, between high-wage, high-skill employees (think doctors and lawyers) who have been very effective in organizing for their own interests and low-wage, low-skill employees (think most of the service sector) who remain disorganized and relatively unrepresented. The former group is quite capable of lobbying for its own sake, but has little interest in solidarity with the latter.
I think that there are a few potentially fruitful avenues for exploration lurking within this suspicious language about class. It would be interesting to trace the origins of these groups' interests. In particular, why are government employers committed to maintaining the Swedish model when private-sector employers aren't? And how and why have the two labour organizations shared a long-term commitment to that model when they represent quite different interests? Once again, this would require an investigation of the social basis of each group - in the most simplistic sense, who are their members, and what do those people think? I suspect that there is an element of path-dependency here - if professionals and blue-collar workers initially organized together, they might have built lasting ties that did not exist in (say) the US.
Kelvin will submit it on Tuesday, after an intense weekend of revisions. Well done!
????
You Are a Question Mark |
 You seek knowledge and insight in every form possible. You love learning. And while you know a lot, you don't act like a know it all. You're open to learning you're wrong. You ask a lot of questions, collect a lot of data, and always dig deep to find out more. You're naturally curious and inquisitive. You jump to ask a question when the opportunity arises. Your friends see you as interesting, insightful, and thought provoking. (But they're not always up for the intense inquisitions that you love!) You excel in: Higher education You get along best with: The Comma |
22 August 2009
Blast from the past
I wrote this over a year ago for the last political theory class I took. I am currently working on a project that traverses some of the same space, so to speak, so it's worth my digging through the archives. Reminds me how much I enjoy this sort of thing.
"Acheronta movere" (1)
Kant's discussion of war in "Perpetual Peace" emphasizes what we might call the spatial character of war. He argues that, when a state of war exists between two individuals, two solutions exist: "I can either require him to enter with me into a state of civil law or to remove himself from my surroundings." (2) In other words, Kant theorizes the state of war as a territorial problem: It can only exist when individuals must live on the same land.
Kant, therefore, looks at war as a means of dispersing human populations over the globe. When possible, he implies, humans want to avoid living in a state of war, as it "denies [them] security and injures [them] merely by being in this state." (Kant 112) And, similarly, they will seek to avoid entering a social contract (or "civil law"), as it will be a constraint upon their actions. As a result, he concludes, humans have spread themselves into every inhabitable space.
By this point in history, he concludes, an individual cannot escape the state of war by "remov[ing] himself from my surroundings." (Kant 112) The space available to humans is limited: "for since the earth is a globe, they cannot scatter themselves infinitely, but must, finally, tolerate living in close proximity." (Kant 118) When all available open spaces have filled up, the remaining choice is between living in war and accommodating oneself to the law.
Kant, drawing upon Hobbes, begins from the premise that individuals have already accepted sovereign power rather than choosing "the war of every man against every man." (3) But the Leviathans under which they live are spatially limited ones; each one holds sway over a fraction of the earth's surface. And, as sovereignty is a "multitude so united in one person," the state of war arises once again between sovereign bodies. (4) (Hobbes 129)
As each warring Leviathan controls, and excludes others from, a given space, they violate what Kant calls cosmopolitan right, or "the right to visit, to associate." (Kant 118) The right to hospitality throughout the world, which "belongs to all men by virtue of their common ownership of the earth's surface," can only be guaranteed by perpetual peace. (Kant 118) As a result, Kant argues for a "federation of nations," or a "league of peace," to establish a state of peace. (Kant 115, 117) In other words, the Hobbesian dilemma of a permanent state of war between nations is "solved" by the establishment of a social contract (or international law) between those nations. (5)
We will step back from Kant's concern with perpetual peace to note a few important features of his theorizing. First of all, he depicts the state of war as a spatial problem - it arises only between individuals or sovereignties living in "close proximity". Proximity is, of course, a historically mutable concept: transportation times and communication costs have shrunk dramatically since Kant's day, thereby bringing distant parts of the globe into closer and closer contact. (6) Nevertheless, we might look at two individuals or states as proximate if they share an interest in the same piece of land.
Second, note that Kant repeatedly describes this space - the commonly owned earth - as a surface. Commerce, and other forms of intercourse between humans, is carried out on the surface, by way of "ships and camels (the ship of the desert)." (Kant 118) Kant emphasizes the fact that cosmopolitan right applies on the earth's surface. The goal of his league of peace is to eliminate restrictions to access of the surface, to give free play to the flotillas and caravans that make commerce possible. By establishing peace and the right to visit, Kant hopes to formalize the "right to the earth's surface that [...] makes commerce possible." (Kant 118) In other words, the establishment of universal commerce, which for Kant would require perpetual peace, would eliminate all divisions and enclaves on the surface.
However, Kant fails to consider the possibility of chthonic space, of unexpected depths lying below the earth's surface. He introduces space into his discussion of war, peace and commerce, but fails to think of it as anything more than a one-dimensional surface. In doing so, Kant leaves us with more questions than he answers. First, if space is not simply a surface, what does it look like? What is the nature of its depths? Second, how does the existence of this "dimension of the abyss" alter the relationship between civil law and the state of war? (Schmitt 69) To invoke Carl Schmitt, how does partisan warfare depend upon irregular space? Finally, we might end this (theoretical) discussion by asking who the contemporary occupants of the depths are.
Kant uses the ship, which skims across the surface of the ocean, as his model for commerce. But, by our time, the submarine has "opened up an unexpected deep dimension beneath the surface on which sea war in the old style was fought." (Schmitt 70) The existence of the submarine, therefore, challenges Kant's one-dimensional view of space. While law can prevail on the surface, submarines can fight a war, protected from the traditional methods of sea war (i.e. ship-mounted artillery), from beneath. Their introduction during World War I undermined the existing regime of legality and commerce.
Partisan warfare, Schmitt argues, is similar to submarine warfare in that it opens "an unexpected space unknown to the former space" of commerce and warfare. (Schmitt 71) This space is, from the existing perspective, an irregular one, as it challenges the existing conception of space as a surface. It is a counter-space to the surface that Kant describes. He argues that when two individuals exist in proximity, they must resolve the state of war by establishing civil law or leaving - and as the earth's surface is more or less totally populated, they must choose the former option. However, the existence of irregular spaces beneath the surface enables a third option: waging war from a relatively protected zone that lies within the same territory as the opponent but outside of the legal norms prevailing on the surface.
Space is made irregular by partisans, who fight an irregular type of warfare. It comes into being not through physical or tectonic changes that fundamentally alter the geography of a region, but through the implementation of new modes of warfare. The invention of submarine warfare, for example, opened up the space beneath the sea's surface - a space that already existed but had not previously been accounted for by traders, navies, or international law. Schmitt lays out four characteristics of the partisan. First, he says, they are characterized by "irregularity, increased mobility of active combat, and increased intensity of political engagement." (Schmitt 20) By this, he means that they are out of military uniform, and are able to move rapidly and blend in with a civilian population. Furthermore, they fight with a direct political aim - which, although they are easily assimilated into global revolutionary projects such as Marxism, is primarily "a fundamentally defensive position." (Schmitt 92)
Finally, the partisan has a "telluric" character - he or she derives from and is rooted to a particular piece of land. (Schmitt 20) As stated above, the partisan's project is a defensive one: it is the struggle to hold on to a particular space. More than that: the partisan's existence depends upon the existence of that space, which is characterized by its "autochthonous population" and "geographical particularity." (Schmitt 21) Schmitt names the national liberation struggles fought by Mao Tse-Tung, Ho Chi-Mihn and Fidel Castro against colonial intrusion (from Japan, France and the U.S., respectively) as examples of partisan warfare. In each case, partisans relied upon "conditions of terrain, climate, and society," including their intimate knowledge of local geography and the support of local populations. (7) Mao emphasizes the partisan's close relation to the "autochthonous population," commenting that "guerrilla warfare basically derives from the masses and is supported by them." (Tse-Tung 44)
Schmitt's examples of partisan warfare all take place within underdeveloped landscapes - "mountain-ranges, forests, jungles, or deserts" - that provide easy access to irregular space for rural peoples living within those landscapes. The existence of such land, and the presence of people with an autochthonous relationship to it, was the condition of possibility for both the earliest example of partisan warfare (the Spanish guerrilla war against Napoleon's armies) and the latest (the Vietnam War, Che's Latin American adventures). As I have suggested above, partisan warfare in irregular spaces undermines (sometimes in a very literal sense) the civil and international laws that guarantee Kant's cosmopolitan right to commerce on the earth's surface. The irregularity of the partisan challenges international law by challenging the "clear distinctions between war and peace, military and civilian, enemy and criminal, state war and civil war" upon which it is founded. (Schmitt 32)
The partisan, who exists only insofar as irregular space (an "unexpectedly deep dimension" beneath the surface) is available to him or her, fights a defensive battle against a real enemy. He or she seeks to defend the land against those who have other designs upon it - in other words, to secure their enclave against the extension of the "new nomos of the earth." (Schmitt 95) The partisan seeks, in other words, to preserve the distinctive character of his or her territory against colonial projects - which may include commercial interests. To do so, he or she depends upon the existence of a depth into which he or she can escape from the reach of civil law without leaving the land entirely. This, for Schmitt, is the condition of possibility for the continuation of warfare in an age in which commerce and the modern-day incarnations of Kant's "federation of nations" - the United Nations, World Bank, and International Monetary Fund - are attaining hegemony over the whole of the earth's surface.
At the same time, the traditional milieu of the partisan, the rural population with close ties to underdeveloped, irregular terrain, is declining in importance. Rural population growth has flattened, while urban populations in the developing world continue to skyrocket. Within a few years, most people in developing countries will live in the cities. (8) For the partisan to thrive out of Ho Chi-Mihn's jungle environs, irregular spaces must exist within urban environments. We must, therefore, discuss the nature of urbanism in the Third World.
Frantz Fanon comments, in The Wretched of the Earth, that colonialism has produced a "compartmentalized world, this world divided in two." (9) In the colonies, which have since been liberated from their European masters, two sectors - that of the colonist and that of the colonized - confront each other. Each sector has radically different physical characteristics. "The colonist's sector is sector built to last, all stone and steel. It's a sector of lights and paved roads, where the trash cans constantly overflow with strange and wonderful garbage, undreamed-of leftovers." (Fanon 4) Fanon depicts this sector as a smooth surface, a rationalized space on the model of European cities. It absorbs the fruits of commerce, sating itself on the products of its "cosmopolitan" interaction with the colonized space.
By contrast, "[t]he colonized's sector, or at least the 'native' quarters, the shanty town, the Medina, the reservation, is a disreputable place inhabited by disreputable people. [...] It's a world with no space, people are piled on top of one another, the shacks squeezed tightly together." (Fanon 4) This sector, which feeds on the refuse from the colonist's sector, is chronically underdeveloped. As a result, it is irregularly-formed space, populated chaotically by a chaotic mass of human beings. We might consider it to be the "underworld" of the colonist's sector. Its inhabitants, although they rely upon the land, "which must provide bread and, naturally, dignity," are displaced to the illegal margins of the urban landscape by the colonists. (Fanon 9) They must defend the land that they occupy only irregularly and tenuously.
Although colonialism has ended, Fanon's description of these two sectors has not ceased to be relevant. Cities in the Third World have been evacuated, largely, of their former colonial masters, but the same pattern of underdevelopment continues. The space into which the vast majority of new urban denizens are moving, or being born, is irregular: it consists of slums and shantytowns, constructed by residents on ground that is not theirs. Just as Fanon said, these slum-dwellers, the new milieu of the partisan, must defend the irregular space in which they live, autochthonously. As we are finding today, they will fight against the extension of the new world order - in Mogadishu, Palestine, Sadr City, Fallujah...
References
(1) A Latin citation from Otto von Bismarck; it is translated as "mobilize the netherworld." Theory of the Partisan. Carl Schmitt. New York: Telos Press, 2007. p. 40. (Further citations are in text.)
(2) Perpetual Peace and Other Essays. Immanuel Kant. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1983. p. 112. (Further citations are in text.)
(3) Leviathan. Thomas Hobbes. Petersborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 2002. p. 95. (Further citations are in text.)
(4) Kant recalls this definition, writing "As nations, peoples can be regarded as single individuals who injure one another through their close proximity while living in the state of nature..." (Kant 115)
(5) Kant comments, however, that this "federation" would not be a Leviathan on an international level, as "a nation consisting of nations" would be "contradictory." (Kant 115)
(6) See David Harvey's classic map on the subject, reproduced online here.
(7) On Guerrilla Warfare. Mao Tse-Tung. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2000. p. 42. (Further citations are in text.)
(8) See The Challenge of Slums: Global Report on Human Settlements. United Nations Human Settlements Programme. Sterling, VA: Earthscan Publications, 2003. p. 24.
(9) The Wretched of the Earth. Frantz Fanon. New York: Grove Press, 2004. p. 5. (Further citations are in text.)
"Acheronta movere" (1)
Kant's discussion of war in "Perpetual Peace" emphasizes what we might call the spatial character of war. He argues that, when a state of war exists between two individuals, two solutions exist: "I can either require him to enter with me into a state of civil law or to remove himself from my surroundings." (2) In other words, Kant theorizes the state of war as a territorial problem: It can only exist when individuals must live on the same land.
Kant, therefore, looks at war as a means of dispersing human populations over the globe. When possible, he implies, humans want to avoid living in a state of war, as it "denies [them] security and injures [them] merely by being in this state." (Kant 112) And, similarly, they will seek to avoid entering a social contract (or "civil law"), as it will be a constraint upon their actions. As a result, he concludes, humans have spread themselves into every inhabitable space.
By this point in history, he concludes, an individual cannot escape the state of war by "remov[ing] himself from my surroundings." (Kant 112) The space available to humans is limited: "for since the earth is a globe, they cannot scatter themselves infinitely, but must, finally, tolerate living in close proximity." (Kant 118) When all available open spaces have filled up, the remaining choice is between living in war and accommodating oneself to the law.
Kant, drawing upon Hobbes, begins from the premise that individuals have already accepted sovereign power rather than choosing "the war of every man against every man." (3) But the Leviathans under which they live are spatially limited ones; each one holds sway over a fraction of the earth's surface. And, as sovereignty is a "multitude so united in one person," the state of war arises once again between sovereign bodies. (4) (Hobbes 129)
As each warring Leviathan controls, and excludes others from, a given space, they violate what Kant calls cosmopolitan right, or "the right to visit, to associate." (Kant 118) The right to hospitality throughout the world, which "belongs to all men by virtue of their common ownership of the earth's surface," can only be guaranteed by perpetual peace. (Kant 118) As a result, Kant argues for a "federation of nations," or a "league of peace," to establish a state of peace. (Kant 115, 117) In other words, the Hobbesian dilemma of a permanent state of war between nations is "solved" by the establishment of a social contract (or international law) between those nations. (5)
We will step back from Kant's concern with perpetual peace to note a few important features of his theorizing. First of all, he depicts the state of war as a spatial problem - it arises only between individuals or sovereignties living in "close proximity". Proximity is, of course, a historically mutable concept: transportation times and communication costs have shrunk dramatically since Kant's day, thereby bringing distant parts of the globe into closer and closer contact. (6) Nevertheless, we might look at two individuals or states as proximate if they share an interest in the same piece of land.
Second, note that Kant repeatedly describes this space - the commonly owned earth - as a surface. Commerce, and other forms of intercourse between humans, is carried out on the surface, by way of "ships and camels (the ship of the desert)." (Kant 118) Kant emphasizes the fact that cosmopolitan right applies on the earth's surface. The goal of his league of peace is to eliminate restrictions to access of the surface, to give free play to the flotillas and caravans that make commerce possible. By establishing peace and the right to visit, Kant hopes to formalize the "right to the earth's surface that [...] makes commerce possible." (Kant 118) In other words, the establishment of universal commerce, which for Kant would require perpetual peace, would eliminate all divisions and enclaves on the surface.
However, Kant fails to consider the possibility of chthonic space, of unexpected depths lying below the earth's surface. He introduces space into his discussion of war, peace and commerce, but fails to think of it as anything more than a one-dimensional surface. In doing so, Kant leaves us with more questions than he answers. First, if space is not simply a surface, what does it look like? What is the nature of its depths? Second, how does the existence of this "dimension of the abyss" alter the relationship between civil law and the state of war? (Schmitt 69) To invoke Carl Schmitt, how does partisan warfare depend upon irregular space? Finally, we might end this (theoretical) discussion by asking who the contemporary occupants of the depths are.
Kant uses the ship, which skims across the surface of the ocean, as his model for commerce. But, by our time, the submarine has "opened up an unexpected deep dimension beneath the surface on which sea war in the old style was fought." (Schmitt 70) The existence of the submarine, therefore, challenges Kant's one-dimensional view of space. While law can prevail on the surface, submarines can fight a war, protected from the traditional methods of sea war (i.e. ship-mounted artillery), from beneath. Their introduction during World War I undermined the existing regime of legality and commerce.
Partisan warfare, Schmitt argues, is similar to submarine warfare in that it opens "an unexpected space unknown to the former space" of commerce and warfare. (Schmitt 71) This space is, from the existing perspective, an irregular one, as it challenges the existing conception of space as a surface. It is a counter-space to the surface that Kant describes. He argues that when two individuals exist in proximity, they must resolve the state of war by establishing civil law or leaving - and as the earth's surface is more or less totally populated, they must choose the former option. However, the existence of irregular spaces beneath the surface enables a third option: waging war from a relatively protected zone that lies within the same territory as the opponent but outside of the legal norms prevailing on the surface.
Space is made irregular by partisans, who fight an irregular type of warfare. It comes into being not through physical or tectonic changes that fundamentally alter the geography of a region, but through the implementation of new modes of warfare. The invention of submarine warfare, for example, opened up the space beneath the sea's surface - a space that already existed but had not previously been accounted for by traders, navies, or international law. Schmitt lays out four characteristics of the partisan. First, he says, they are characterized by "irregularity, increased mobility of active combat, and increased intensity of political engagement." (Schmitt 20) By this, he means that they are out of military uniform, and are able to move rapidly and blend in with a civilian population. Furthermore, they fight with a direct political aim - which, although they are easily assimilated into global revolutionary projects such as Marxism, is primarily "a fundamentally defensive position." (Schmitt 92)
Finally, the partisan has a "telluric" character - he or she derives from and is rooted to a particular piece of land. (Schmitt 20) As stated above, the partisan's project is a defensive one: it is the struggle to hold on to a particular space. More than that: the partisan's existence depends upon the existence of that space, which is characterized by its "autochthonous population" and "geographical particularity." (Schmitt 21) Schmitt names the national liberation struggles fought by Mao Tse-Tung, Ho Chi-Mihn and Fidel Castro against colonial intrusion (from Japan, France and the U.S., respectively) as examples of partisan warfare. In each case, partisans relied upon "conditions of terrain, climate, and society," including their intimate knowledge of local geography and the support of local populations. (7) Mao emphasizes the partisan's close relation to the "autochthonous population," commenting that "guerrilla warfare basically derives from the masses and is supported by them." (Tse-Tung 44)
Schmitt's examples of partisan warfare all take place within underdeveloped landscapes - "mountain-ranges, forests, jungles, or deserts" - that provide easy access to irregular space for rural peoples living within those landscapes. The existence of such land, and the presence of people with an autochthonous relationship to it, was the condition of possibility for both the earliest example of partisan warfare (the Spanish guerrilla war against Napoleon's armies) and the latest (the Vietnam War, Che's Latin American adventures). As I have suggested above, partisan warfare in irregular spaces undermines (sometimes in a very literal sense) the civil and international laws that guarantee Kant's cosmopolitan right to commerce on the earth's surface. The irregularity of the partisan challenges international law by challenging the "clear distinctions between war and peace, military and civilian, enemy and criminal, state war and civil war" upon which it is founded. (Schmitt 32)
The partisan, who exists only insofar as irregular space (an "unexpectedly deep dimension" beneath the surface) is available to him or her, fights a defensive battle against a real enemy. He or she seeks to defend the land against those who have other designs upon it - in other words, to secure their enclave against the extension of the "new nomos of the earth." (Schmitt 95) The partisan seeks, in other words, to preserve the distinctive character of his or her territory against colonial projects - which may include commercial interests. To do so, he or she depends upon the existence of a depth into which he or she can escape from the reach of civil law without leaving the land entirely. This, for Schmitt, is the condition of possibility for the continuation of warfare in an age in which commerce and the modern-day incarnations of Kant's "federation of nations" - the United Nations, World Bank, and International Monetary Fund - are attaining hegemony over the whole of the earth's surface.
At the same time, the traditional milieu of the partisan, the rural population with close ties to underdeveloped, irregular terrain, is declining in importance. Rural population growth has flattened, while urban populations in the developing world continue to skyrocket. Within a few years, most people in developing countries will live in the cities. (8) For the partisan to thrive out of Ho Chi-Mihn's jungle environs, irregular spaces must exist within urban environments. We must, therefore, discuss the nature of urbanism in the Third World.
Frantz Fanon comments, in The Wretched of the Earth, that colonialism has produced a "compartmentalized world, this world divided in two." (9) In the colonies, which have since been liberated from their European masters, two sectors - that of the colonist and that of the colonized - confront each other. Each sector has radically different physical characteristics. "The colonist's sector is sector built to last, all stone and steel. It's a sector of lights and paved roads, where the trash cans constantly overflow with strange and wonderful garbage, undreamed-of leftovers." (Fanon 4) Fanon depicts this sector as a smooth surface, a rationalized space on the model of European cities. It absorbs the fruits of commerce, sating itself on the products of its "cosmopolitan" interaction with the colonized space.
By contrast, "[t]he colonized's sector, or at least the 'native' quarters, the shanty town, the Medina, the reservation, is a disreputable place inhabited by disreputable people. [...] It's a world with no space, people are piled on top of one another, the shacks squeezed tightly together." (Fanon 4) This sector, which feeds on the refuse from the colonist's sector, is chronically underdeveloped. As a result, it is irregularly-formed space, populated chaotically by a chaotic mass of human beings. We might consider it to be the "underworld" of the colonist's sector. Its inhabitants, although they rely upon the land, "which must provide bread and, naturally, dignity," are displaced to the illegal margins of the urban landscape by the colonists. (Fanon 9) They must defend the land that they occupy only irregularly and tenuously.
Although colonialism has ended, Fanon's description of these two sectors has not ceased to be relevant. Cities in the Third World have been evacuated, largely, of their former colonial masters, but the same pattern of underdevelopment continues. The space into which the vast majority of new urban denizens are moving, or being born, is irregular: it consists of slums and shantytowns, constructed by residents on ground that is not theirs. Just as Fanon said, these slum-dwellers, the new milieu of the partisan, must defend the irregular space in which they live, autochthonously. As we are finding today, they will fight against the extension of the new world order - in Mogadishu, Palestine, Sadr City, Fallujah...
References
(1) A Latin citation from Otto von Bismarck; it is translated as "mobilize the netherworld." Theory of the Partisan. Carl Schmitt. New York: Telos Press, 2007. p. 40. (Further citations are in text.)
(2) Perpetual Peace and Other Essays. Immanuel Kant. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1983. p. 112. (Further citations are in text.)
(3) Leviathan. Thomas Hobbes. Petersborough, Ontario: Broadview Press, 2002. p. 95. (Further citations are in text.)
(4) Kant recalls this definition, writing "As nations, peoples can be regarded as single individuals who injure one another through their close proximity while living in the state of nature..." (Kant 115)
(5) Kant comments, however, that this "federation" would not be a Leviathan on an international level, as "a nation consisting of nations" would be "contradictory." (Kant 115)
(6) See David Harvey's classic map on the subject, reproduced online here.
(7) On Guerrilla Warfare. Mao Tse-Tung. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2000. p. 42. (Further citations are in text.)
(8) See The Challenge of Slums: Global Report on Human Settlements. United Nations Human Settlements Programme. Sterling, VA: Earthscan Publications, 2003. p. 24.
(9) The Wretched of the Earth. Frantz Fanon. New York: Grove Press, 2004. p. 5. (Further citations are in text.)
21 August 2009
20 August 2009
You are reading a blog post about a conversation about the possibility of reviews of an as-yet unwritten book about a cultural phenomena
Down at the bar tonight, I speculated that the essence of modern life was recursion, self-referentiality. Witness Twitter, I said. We micro-blog about the events that are currently unfolding, which inevitably devolves into micro-blogging about what we are micro-blogging about. In short, we end up examining the examined life, in real time as it "happens".
We don't personally have Twitter accounts, of course.
So I said: I want to write a scholarly treatise about this phenomena. A book about our recursive modern life. The cover could have a picture of a snake biting its own tail, or a recursive function without a base case.
Furthermore, I said, I would never actually publish this book. It could molder away on a hard-drive and eventually be lost in a housecleaning or an update to Microsoft Word. Instead, I would publish a series of reviews, critiques, retractions, and letters to the editor criticizing the reviews and critiques. Possibly under one or more assumed names. After all, the only way to write about recursive phenomena is to write about writing about recursive phenomena. (Ad infinitum.)
Having expounded this point of view, I began to wonder: Was this idea more reminiscent of Derrida, with his infinite chain of signifiers, unhinged from any "base case" of meaning, or of Borges, with his stories about imaginary authors and their nonexistent books? It's at times like these when I am glad of my education, which made me capable of asking such questions, and incapable of stopping doing so at a reasonable point.
We don't personally have Twitter accounts, of course.
So I said: I want to write a scholarly treatise about this phenomena. A book about our recursive modern life. The cover could have a picture of a snake biting its own tail, or a recursive function without a base case.
Furthermore, I said, I would never actually publish this book. It could molder away on a hard-drive and eventually be lost in a housecleaning or an update to Microsoft Word. Instead, I would publish a series of reviews, critiques, retractions, and letters to the editor criticizing the reviews and critiques. Possibly under one or more assumed names. After all, the only way to write about recursive phenomena is to write about writing about recursive phenomena. (Ad infinitum.)
Having expounded this point of view, I began to wonder: Was this idea more reminiscent of Derrida, with his infinite chain of signifiers, unhinged from any "base case" of meaning, or of Borges, with his stories about imaginary authors and their nonexistent books? It's at times like these when I am glad of my education, which made me capable of asking such questions, and incapable of stopping doing so at a reasonable point.
18 August 2009
Experiment week two
It's not so much of a running joke any more, as I ran 45 seconds faster than last week. 19:31 over 5k.
Perhaps I should start thinking about interval workouts and time goals? Yeah right.
Perhaps I should start thinking about interval workouts and time goals? Yeah right.
17 August 2009
Some thoughts on running
So I'm running again. I am not a fitness jogger, I realized. While I don't like to be unfit, I also can't quite bring myself to reduce a competitive sport down to a plodding after-work pursuit.
I will run to race, I realized. Or because my friends are running with me. Shorn of running friends, I motivate myself with weekly 5k jaunts on the waterfront.
Running is enjoyable by itself. There's the thrill of remembered excitement as thoughts of zipping through balmy summer nights or arriving at the final back-straight of a race shiver down my spine. On an unexpectedly humid Saturday, beginning a five-mile run brought back times when I'd head out to run bearded and shirtless, with a Medic-Alert dogtag jingling behind me. I run next to memories these days, and at times my pace creeps faster to keep time with them. Speed-play.
Racing, by contrast, is zen. It's the only way I know to spend five minutes to an hour thinking of nothing but what I'm doing. Life lasts from the gun to the finish-line, and all of my thoughts in between are spent monitoring pace, injecting surges, instructing me to sit back and wait for the moment. My thoughts wander freely while running; they never waver an inch while racing. Forget the thrill of competition; forget the frisson of anticipation I feel every time I see the gun go up; forget the malicious urge to taunt my opponents as I pass them. I'd race solely for this feeling of total concentration.
I realized the other day that I hadn't been outkicked in - how long? Almost two years now. I mean, I've been beaten in races, but I can hardly think of the last time that I was beaten in the final sprint. (Ah - yes! It was Matt Simonson, but key parts of my anatomy were painfully frozen and bleeding at the time so I think that I can get a pass on that one.) This must have something to do with the zen business - or it might have something to do with the fact that I've settled on a tactic of negative splits. This tends to ensure that I spend the first third to half of every race hardly breathing hard, and the last half passing the dead and dying.
Beer tastes better after getting back from a run. It's all cool and fresh-tasting; it tastes like bodily health and manly virtue; it's practically a completely different beverage. The beer alone is a reason to run again. Fortunately, I've got others as well.
I will run to race, I realized. Or because my friends are running with me. Shorn of running friends, I motivate myself with weekly 5k jaunts on the waterfront.
Running is enjoyable by itself. There's the thrill of remembered excitement as thoughts of zipping through balmy summer nights or arriving at the final back-straight of a race shiver down my spine. On an unexpectedly humid Saturday, beginning a five-mile run brought back times when I'd head out to run bearded and shirtless, with a Medic-Alert dogtag jingling behind me. I run next to memories these days, and at times my pace creeps faster to keep time with them. Speed-play.
Racing, by contrast, is zen. It's the only way I know to spend five minutes to an hour thinking of nothing but what I'm doing. Life lasts from the gun to the finish-line, and all of my thoughts in between are spent monitoring pace, injecting surges, instructing me to sit back and wait for the moment. My thoughts wander freely while running; they never waver an inch while racing. Forget the thrill of competition; forget the frisson of anticipation I feel every time I see the gun go up; forget the malicious urge to taunt my opponents as I pass them. I'd race solely for this feeling of total concentration.
I realized the other day that I hadn't been outkicked in - how long? Almost two years now. I mean, I've been beaten in races, but I can hardly think of the last time that I was beaten in the final sprint. (Ah - yes! It was Matt Simonson, but key parts of my anatomy were painfully frozen and bleeding at the time so I think that I can get a pass on that one.) This must have something to do with the zen business - or it might have something to do with the fact that I've settled on a tactic of negative splits. This tends to ensure that I spend the first third to half of every race hardly breathing hard, and the last half passing the dead and dying.
Beer tastes better after getting back from a run. It's all cool and fresh-tasting; it tastes like bodily health and manly virtue; it's practically a completely different beverage. The beer alone is a reason to run again. Fortunately, I've got others as well.
14 August 2009
Gone to California
Harry and Jill have flown off, gone to California. It's been a good winter (or summer, depending upon your hemisphere) with them.
I thought that it was an appropriate time to post this tribute to the great state of CA (and Tupac), spotted just down the road.
..from Oakland to Sactown
The Bay Area and back down
Cali is where they put they mack down...
11 August 2009
Sandbagging
With three days training and a sprained ankle, I can run a completely flat 5k in 20.16.
That is almost an impressive fact. Granted, I drafted like it was the Vietnam War, and cut all the tangents that I could, but still...
That is almost an impressive fact. Granted, I drafted like it was the Vietnam War, and cut all the tangents that I could, but still...
10 August 2009
So America was being run by dangerous lunatics...
I am honestly surprised that it's taken six years for this ghastly story to be aired:
I need a new initialism. YFG. Ye fucking gods. Naturally, the French president, not being a religious lunatic, had no idea what Bush was talking about. So he had to contact a religious scholar to explain Bush's rationale for invading Iraq.
I mean, I have a sympathetic view of Bush, which is to say that I think that he was a basically simpleminded, credulous man who, due to his upbringing, found himself elevated to power in the company of dangerous war criminals. But this! This is absurd, embarrassing, and appalling. He wanted to invade a sovereign country due to some vague suspicion that some biblical events were coming to pass.
And what is that about Gog and Magog, anyway?
So, basically, this insanity has only the thinnest textual foundations. Moreover, Bush wasn't the first president to buy into this madness:
Someone less appalled than me - say, Slavoj Zizek - would note that this delusional irrationality actually camouflages a type of rationality, one concerned with "geopolitics, ratios of power, and oil pipeline maps". It serves a purpose in legitimizing it to a (certain) domestic political audience, and defuses domestic opposition (to a certain extent) by focusing it on the religious irrationality, rather than the underlying imperialist logic.
Reagan's administration played that game expertly, trotting out a senile old man as the public face of a set of dangerous gambles and questionably legal maneuvers. (Arms buildup, Iran-Contra, etc) While the left spent its contempt on Reagan himself and the religious right adored him for his end-times simplicity of purpose, a set of astute, unprincipled negotiators and hatchet-men carried out the real work.
The Bush administration dropped the ball, in a way. It employed a set of twisted monstrosities who spent the 90s calling for a revival of a territorial American empire. The international community knew that the neoconservatives (Rumsfeld, Cheney, Wolfowitz, etc) weren't to be trusted. So the administration used Colin Powell, a generally principled man, as its messenger. And when that wouldn't work, it had to front up with Bush himself, who didn't have the native wit to say anything better than this horseshit about Gog and Magog.
With luck, his failure to convince the French that the end times really were here presaged the end of this model of politics, but I'm not hopeful. Religious lunacy and foreign-policy imperialism have had a long and successful marriage in America...
"The telephone rang. It was the head of the Biblical Service of the Protestant Federation of France [Service biblique de la Federation protestante de France]. She asked me if I could write a page on Gog and Magog for the French President." Thomas Römer, a theology professor at the University of Lausanne (UNIL) and specialist in the Old Testament, had just been plunged into the midst of international politics. This apparently banal theological inquiry had unsuspected ramifications, for it was incited by George W. Bush.
"The prophecies are being accomplished."
"I also learned during this phone call that the President of the United States had brought up Gog and Magog in a conversation with Jacques Chirac. The discussion was about current events in the Middle East. After having explained that he saw Gog and Magog at work, George W. Bush added that the Biblical prophecies were coming to pass," Thomas Römer continues.
This conversation, which also included the Axis of Evil, took place at the beginning of 2003, a few weeks before the American intervention in Iraq. George W. Bush was then trying once again to convince Jacques Chirac to follow him in his Operation Just Cause, which the Frenchman obstinately refused to do.
I need a new initialism. YFG. Ye fucking gods. Naturally, the French president, not being a religious lunatic, had no idea what Bush was talking about. So he had to contact a religious scholar to explain Bush's rationale for invading Iraq.
I mean, I have a sympathetic view of Bush, which is to say that I think that he was a basically simpleminded, credulous man who, due to his upbringing, found himself elevated to power in the company of dangerous war criminals. But this! This is absurd, embarrassing, and appalling. He wanted to invade a sovereign country due to some vague suspicion that some biblical events were coming to pass.
And what is that about Gog and Magog, anyway?
An uncertain and unclear text
"I wrote a one-page paper which explained the theological foundations of Gog and Magog, two creatures who appear in Genesis and especially in two very obscure chapters of the Book of Ezekiel, in the Old Testament," the UNIL theologian remembers, before adding that on more than one account, Ezekiel is a disconcerting book.
"The transcription which has come down to us is not certain, the names that are cited pose a problem, and the text is difficult," Thomas Römer adds. If that were not enough to embroil the 21st-century reader, this book "also contains a message that is a bit hidden. It is part of a kind of writing that speculates on the future, in a cryptic language, and is destined for initiates," the UNIL researcher explains.
However, it is not necessary to be an expert in esoteric studies to understand the outline of this apocalyptic prophecy. In chapters 38 and 39, the authors of the Book of Ezekiel added a vision according to which a great world army will form, and that this coalition of peoples will bring a final battle upon Israel. "This confrontation is willed by God, who wants to take advantage of this conflict to wipe out the enemies of his people before a new age begins," Thomas Römer goes on.
So, basically, this insanity has only the thinnest textual foundations. Moreover, Bush wasn't the first president to buy into this madness:
Before [Bush], another American president [also] believed in the imminent realization of Ezekiel's prophecy.
"As Ronald Reagan knew the Bible well, he believed that the Cold War and the existence of the atomic bomb made it possible for the prophecy of Ezekiel to come to pass, therefore that the moment had come," Thomas Römer continues.
Someone less appalled than me - say, Slavoj Zizek - would note that this delusional irrationality actually camouflages a type of rationality, one concerned with "geopolitics, ratios of power, and oil pipeline maps". It serves a purpose in legitimizing it to a (certain) domestic political audience, and defuses domestic opposition (to a certain extent) by focusing it on the religious irrationality, rather than the underlying imperialist logic.
Reagan's administration played that game expertly, trotting out a senile old man as the public face of a set of dangerous gambles and questionably legal maneuvers. (Arms buildup, Iran-Contra, etc) While the left spent its contempt on Reagan himself and the religious right adored him for his end-times simplicity of purpose, a set of astute, unprincipled negotiators and hatchet-men carried out the real work.
The Bush administration dropped the ball, in a way. It employed a set of twisted monstrosities who spent the 90s calling for a revival of a territorial American empire. The international community knew that the neoconservatives (Rumsfeld, Cheney, Wolfowitz, etc) weren't to be trusted. So the administration used Colin Powell, a generally principled man, as its messenger. And when that wouldn't work, it had to front up with Bush himself, who didn't have the native wit to say anything better than this horseshit about Gog and Magog.
With luck, his failure to convince the French that the end times really were here presaged the end of this model of politics, but I'm not hopeful. Religious lunacy and foreign-policy imperialism have had a long and successful marriage in America...
09 August 2009
Towards a new research agenda II
Or: What do I think matters (within political science)?
[See part one here]
Path-dependence
Since graduating from university, I've had the freedom to set my own intellectual agenda. It's path-dependent, as what I am now reading has been influenced by what I read in my courses, and is influenced to a certain extent by my day job in an economic development agency. However, this time has offered me some space in which to develop new areas of interest and articulate connections between concepts.
At Williams, I studied mostly political theory. The three broad currents that interested me most dealt with questions of power and inequality, war and revolution, and the shape of the polis. In general, I tended (and tend) to be more sympathetic to arguments from the left, rather than conservative or liberal thinkers.
I had (and have) a predilection for supertheories of supereverything; I like to make connections (at times prematurely). As a result, I left myself with the job of more clearly articulating some common themes that run through these three theoretical currents. First, there seems to be something about growth and change - how do political/economic societies expand and mutate? In what ways does capitalist growth have a democratic, leveling tendency, and in what ways does it tend to concentrate power and exacerbate inequality? Under what conditions can society be reformed or radically changed?
I connect this with what I would describe as the critique of progress. In general, we seem confuse the concept of economic growth with that of social progress, lending the latter a self-defeating aura of inevitability and the former a false halo of legitimacy. I would set against that confusion an iconoclastic stance towards the future - i.e. a strategic refusal to see any particular outcomes as either inevitable or impossible. This iconoclasm attempts to disentangle agency and circumstances by analyzing how political actors are free to construct their own agenda, and how they are constrained by history, institutions, and ideologies.
Second, space seems to be important to all three theoretical currents, in obvious and nebulous ways. On the most basic level, all political phenomena depend upon (and construct) particular forms of space - territorial divisions, international integration or disintegration, meeting-rooms, town squares, fences and walls, cyberspaces, etc. So when we discuss the democratic polis, we are also talking about the place in which citizens meet to discuss. Likewise, when we discuss inequality, we are discussing the way in which poverty and riches are distributed and segregated across a territory. When we discuss a revolution (or counterrevolutionary measures), we are talking about terrains - the mazelike Paris that Haussmann cut his boulevards through, the Bolivian jungle, the rubble and shattered streets of Gaza. When we mention power, we are also talking about its dispersion or concentration across space.
As of yet, I have no systematic way of thinking about space.
Rethinking
In the last year, I've attempted to build on these concepts where possible. To a certain degree, my thinking has been influenced by my work in government, which has focused my attention on economic issues (not to mention requiring me to develop an understanding of economics). As I am slightly subversive, not to mention aware of the limits to economics' understanding, I've tried to develop alternative views as well.
Two points from economics strike me as relevant to political science. First, economics pays a great deal of attention to growth and development. It looks at the conditions under which economies can expand, and the results of doing so. As part of this, it considers why some economies are less developed than others - why, for example, most of the Third World has failed to "catch up" to the First World, or why New Zealand has grown more slowly than its neighbor Australia. As a society's political options are circumscribed (in part) by its wealth and income, these are important perspectives.
While it focuses on growth, economics tends to skim over questions of sustainability and distribution. In particular, I am concerned with the effects of various kinds of growth on inequality and concentration of wealth and power. Additionally, I try to keep in mind that our current model of economic growth is rooted in resource extraction and physical expansion, both of which cannot continue forever, as natural resources are limited. As far as I'm concerned, it's worth the time to build these perspectives into our understanding of growth.
Second, economics has recently had to come to terms with a serious financial crisis that the vast majority of its practitioners failed to anticipate. As a result, it's had to revive earlier literature on economic crises. I've found this strain of economics valuable as it tends to highlight capitalism's persistent systemic instability, the longer patterns into which crises fall, and methods for (temporarily) overcoming that instability.
While valuable, economics' response to the crisis has several blind spots. Economists tend to approach such matters with a technocratic mindset. That is to say, they focus on the policy and regulatory errors, such as the repeal of the Glass-Steagal rules separating investment and retail banking or the Federal Reserve's decision to keep interest rates excessively low in the early 2000s, that precipitated the financial crisis, rather than the broader political dynamics that led to those decisions. As a result, economists tend to take too narrow a view of what is needed to put capitalism back on a "stable" footing.
Economists tend to lack the language to place the crisis in context. I might prefer to ask questions like: What is the relationship between financial crisis and inequality? Will the result be to concentrate power, or distribute it more widely as in the Great Depression? Can we use it as an opportunity to create more democratic governance structures? Will it result in the economic exclusion of a greater number of people, and, if so, will that lead to violent struggle? In short, while many have been repeating the words of Obama's chief of staff, who says never to let a crisis go to waste, it takes a dose of political science to understand how that can be done.
Concrete forms
I've been searching for a project or projects to bring together these currents. As I noted earlier, I've concluded that theory is done best when it arises from a practical problem. I've been building up a store of observations that want to turn themselves into research projects.
One project that I keep sticking on is this: Within a decade, most of the world's population will live in urban areas. Third World cities are already the biggest growth areas; they are swelling with unplanned, disorderly growth from millions being driven off the land (by changing climates, land enclosures, competition from subsidized First World agriculture, or city growth itself) or moving into the cities in search of opportunity (for example, in China's burgeoning manufacturing and construction industry).
This migration, which is manifested in part as the rapid growth of slums, shantytowns, and illegal settlements, is an emerging challenge due to its scale and its irregularity. In short, a large mass of people - larger than ever before - is moving from isolated obscurity in the countryside into dense and volatile urban conditions. In short, they are becoming more organizable at the same time as they are cutting themselves loose from their existing social and economic ties. Urban living brings with it new types of poverty and exclusion, but it also places people in a common space, giving them new means to pursue politics.
We think of urban/suburban growth as a Californian phenomenon, in which repetitive tracts of identical single-family houses are bulldozed across the landscape. But the biggest housing boom of the past several decades has taken place in Third World cities, where new migrants without the means to buy or rent claim unused or marginal land and construct their own shelters. In Lagos, for example, shantytowns radiate out for miles along the motorways and fill in the gaps in the city center. These "developments" are spatially and legally irregular - they are typically maze-like, haphazardly constructed, and against the law.
While this strikes me as a crucial feature of today's world, relatively little research has been done on the topic. (Mike Davis's polemical Planet of Slums is one of the few exceptions.) Off the top of my head, I can think of four interlinked ways in which the widespread existence of slums will affect political realities.
1) As mentioned above, slums represent a distinctive form of space. We have become accustomed to cities that are spatially regular - usually laid out on a grid and usually with a tendency to exhibit a concentric social structure, with distinctive "layers" radiating out from the center. The slum-city is an entirely different animal, and its irregular and often chthonic space can give rise to different types of political mobilization. (After witnessing the dampening effect of Haussman's reorganization of Paris on insurrectionary movements there, Engels called for socialists to switch tactics and gain power through legislatures. Could the reverse happen now?) Furthermore, as I saw in Buenos Aires, slums can often emerge in blighted or toxic pockets of land within existing city limits, confounding to a certain extent the existing spatial regularity.
2) Deeply connected to this spatial irregularity is a legal irregularity: Slum-dwellers rarely if ever own the land that they are living on. Instead, they squat on marginal or unused land. When the land does become valuable, they are usually forced out. As a result, they occupy a legal "gray zone" - their home lives are officially illegal, but generally tolerated until it becomes too inconvenient for legal authorities or landowners. This is a significant barrier to their integration within the "normal" rules of society. As the number dwelling in slums increases, this challenge of integration will present a greater challenge to existing property rights structures. In effect, slums present a choice between the legal marginalization of an increasing portion of society, and a significant change in how property is treated.
3) Another option, of course, would be to make slum-dwellers wealthier and more able to purchase their way into legal regularity. However, any attempt to do so will run up against one further irregularity: employment. If slum-dwellers can find work, it is generally within the informal sector. Several views exist on this sector: some (like Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto) describe it as an opportunity for micro-entrepreneurship; others (like Davis) see it as a zone of fine-grained, penurious exploitation. However, as the informal economy also operates within a grey zone of legality, its connection to the formal sector of the economy remains nebulous. The degree to which it is incorporated within national, regional and international divisions of labour is still unclear. As a larger proportion of Third World employment is diverted off into irregular employment, this question will become quite important.
4) Finally, the above three facets all bear upon a topic that is close to the heart of political sciences: war, insurrection, and revolution. In short, the expansion of slums indicates that an increasing proportion of humanity is being thrown out of formal systems of legal rights and economic existence. This "accumulation of misery at one pole" is unlikely not to result in conflict. (In fact, it already is causing conflict.) But what shape will those conflicts take? Here, I suggest, our traditional theories of war, which are rooted in assumptions about state actors and relatively centralized armies, are not a great deal of help. Nor are traditional theories of revolution, which place stress on the role of activism by an organized lower class with a clear place within the economic apparatus. Slums, therefore, should force a rethinking of theories of war and insurrection, just as they have effectively forced the Israeli and American armies to rethink the way they do battle.
This is obviously a quite large topic, and there are some further facets of the situation that I have not addressed here - such as the environmental unsustainability of slum growth, or the public health risks slums pose. But I think that it is one topic that ties strongly into the broader themes discussed above, and that bears upon the central concerns of political science. (It goes without saying that, on a practical level, our goal should be to escape from the planet of slums.)
[See part one here]
Path-dependence
Since graduating from university, I've had the freedom to set my own intellectual agenda. It's path-dependent, as what I am now reading has been influenced by what I read in my courses, and is influenced to a certain extent by my day job in an economic development agency. However, this time has offered me some space in which to develop new areas of interest and articulate connections between concepts.
At Williams, I studied mostly political theory. The three broad currents that interested me most dealt with questions of power and inequality, war and revolution, and the shape of the polis. In general, I tended (and tend) to be more sympathetic to arguments from the left, rather than conservative or liberal thinkers.
I had (and have) a predilection for supertheories of supereverything; I like to make connections (at times prematurely). As a result, I left myself with the job of more clearly articulating some common themes that run through these three theoretical currents. First, there seems to be something about growth and change - how do political/economic societies expand and mutate? In what ways does capitalist growth have a democratic, leveling tendency, and in what ways does it tend to concentrate power and exacerbate inequality? Under what conditions can society be reformed or radically changed?
I connect this with what I would describe as the critique of progress. In general, we seem confuse the concept of economic growth with that of social progress, lending the latter a self-defeating aura of inevitability and the former a false halo of legitimacy. I would set against that confusion an iconoclastic stance towards the future - i.e. a strategic refusal to see any particular outcomes as either inevitable or impossible. This iconoclasm attempts to disentangle agency and circumstances by analyzing how political actors are free to construct their own agenda, and how they are constrained by history, institutions, and ideologies.
Second, space seems to be important to all three theoretical currents, in obvious and nebulous ways. On the most basic level, all political phenomena depend upon (and construct) particular forms of space - territorial divisions, international integration or disintegration, meeting-rooms, town squares, fences and walls, cyberspaces, etc. So when we discuss the democratic polis, we are also talking about the place in which citizens meet to discuss. Likewise, when we discuss inequality, we are discussing the way in which poverty and riches are distributed and segregated across a territory. When we discuss a revolution (or counterrevolutionary measures), we are talking about terrains - the mazelike Paris that Haussmann cut his boulevards through, the Bolivian jungle, the rubble and shattered streets of Gaza. When we mention power, we are also talking about its dispersion or concentration across space.
As of yet, I have no systematic way of thinking about space.
Rethinking
In the last year, I've attempted to build on these concepts where possible. To a certain degree, my thinking has been influenced by my work in government, which has focused my attention on economic issues (not to mention requiring me to develop an understanding of economics). As I am slightly subversive, not to mention aware of the limits to economics' understanding, I've tried to develop alternative views as well.
Two points from economics strike me as relevant to political science. First, economics pays a great deal of attention to growth and development. It looks at the conditions under which economies can expand, and the results of doing so. As part of this, it considers why some economies are less developed than others - why, for example, most of the Third World has failed to "catch up" to the First World, or why New Zealand has grown more slowly than its neighbor Australia. As a society's political options are circumscribed (in part) by its wealth and income, these are important perspectives.
While it focuses on growth, economics tends to skim over questions of sustainability and distribution. In particular, I am concerned with the effects of various kinds of growth on inequality and concentration of wealth and power. Additionally, I try to keep in mind that our current model of economic growth is rooted in resource extraction and physical expansion, both of which cannot continue forever, as natural resources are limited. As far as I'm concerned, it's worth the time to build these perspectives into our understanding of growth.
Second, economics has recently had to come to terms with a serious financial crisis that the vast majority of its practitioners failed to anticipate. As a result, it's had to revive earlier literature on economic crises. I've found this strain of economics valuable as it tends to highlight capitalism's persistent systemic instability, the longer patterns into which crises fall, and methods for (temporarily) overcoming that instability.
While valuable, economics' response to the crisis has several blind spots. Economists tend to approach such matters with a technocratic mindset. That is to say, they focus on the policy and regulatory errors, such as the repeal of the Glass-Steagal rules separating investment and retail banking or the Federal Reserve's decision to keep interest rates excessively low in the early 2000s, that precipitated the financial crisis, rather than the broader political dynamics that led to those decisions. As a result, economists tend to take too narrow a view of what is needed to put capitalism back on a "stable" footing.
Economists tend to lack the language to place the crisis in context. I might prefer to ask questions like: What is the relationship between financial crisis and inequality? Will the result be to concentrate power, or distribute it more widely as in the Great Depression? Can we use it as an opportunity to create more democratic governance structures? Will it result in the economic exclusion of a greater number of people, and, if so, will that lead to violent struggle? In short, while many have been repeating the words of Obama's chief of staff, who says never to let a crisis go to waste, it takes a dose of political science to understand how that can be done.
Concrete forms
I've been searching for a project or projects to bring together these currents. As I noted earlier, I've concluded that theory is done best when it arises from a practical problem. I've been building up a store of observations that want to turn themselves into research projects.
One project that I keep sticking on is this: Within a decade, most of the world's population will live in urban areas. Third World cities are already the biggest growth areas; they are swelling with unplanned, disorderly growth from millions being driven off the land (by changing climates, land enclosures, competition from subsidized First World agriculture, or city growth itself) or moving into the cities in search of opportunity (for example, in China's burgeoning manufacturing and construction industry).
This migration, which is manifested in part as the rapid growth of slums, shantytowns, and illegal settlements, is an emerging challenge due to its scale and its irregularity. In short, a large mass of people - larger than ever before - is moving from isolated obscurity in the countryside into dense and volatile urban conditions. In short, they are becoming more organizable at the same time as they are cutting themselves loose from their existing social and economic ties. Urban living brings with it new types of poverty and exclusion, but it also places people in a common space, giving them new means to pursue politics.
We think of urban/suburban growth as a Californian phenomenon, in which repetitive tracts of identical single-family houses are bulldozed across the landscape. But the biggest housing boom of the past several decades has taken place in Third World cities, where new migrants without the means to buy or rent claim unused or marginal land and construct their own shelters. In Lagos, for example, shantytowns radiate out for miles along the motorways and fill in the gaps in the city center. These "developments" are spatially and legally irregular - they are typically maze-like, haphazardly constructed, and against the law.
While this strikes me as a crucial feature of today's world, relatively little research has been done on the topic. (Mike Davis's polemical Planet of Slums is one of the few exceptions.) Off the top of my head, I can think of four interlinked ways in which the widespread existence of slums will affect political realities.
1) As mentioned above, slums represent a distinctive form of space. We have become accustomed to cities that are spatially regular - usually laid out on a grid and usually with a tendency to exhibit a concentric social structure, with distinctive "layers" radiating out from the center. The slum-city is an entirely different animal, and its irregular and often chthonic space can give rise to different types of political mobilization. (After witnessing the dampening effect of Haussman's reorganization of Paris on insurrectionary movements there, Engels called for socialists to switch tactics and gain power through legislatures. Could the reverse happen now?) Furthermore, as I saw in Buenos Aires, slums can often emerge in blighted or toxic pockets of land within existing city limits, confounding to a certain extent the existing spatial regularity.
2) Deeply connected to this spatial irregularity is a legal irregularity: Slum-dwellers rarely if ever own the land that they are living on. Instead, they squat on marginal or unused land. When the land does become valuable, they are usually forced out. As a result, they occupy a legal "gray zone" - their home lives are officially illegal, but generally tolerated until it becomes too inconvenient for legal authorities or landowners. This is a significant barrier to their integration within the "normal" rules of society. As the number dwelling in slums increases, this challenge of integration will present a greater challenge to existing property rights structures. In effect, slums present a choice between the legal marginalization of an increasing portion of society, and a significant change in how property is treated.
3) Another option, of course, would be to make slum-dwellers wealthier and more able to purchase their way into legal regularity. However, any attempt to do so will run up against one further irregularity: employment. If slum-dwellers can find work, it is generally within the informal sector. Several views exist on this sector: some (like Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto) describe it as an opportunity for micro-entrepreneurship; others (like Davis) see it as a zone of fine-grained, penurious exploitation. However, as the informal economy also operates within a grey zone of legality, its connection to the formal sector of the economy remains nebulous. The degree to which it is incorporated within national, regional and international divisions of labour is still unclear. As a larger proportion of Third World employment is diverted off into irregular employment, this question will become quite important.
4) Finally, the above three facets all bear upon a topic that is close to the heart of political sciences: war, insurrection, and revolution. In short, the expansion of slums indicates that an increasing proportion of humanity is being thrown out of formal systems of legal rights and economic existence. This "accumulation of misery at one pole" is unlikely not to result in conflict. (In fact, it already is causing conflict.) But what shape will those conflicts take? Here, I suggest, our traditional theories of war, which are rooted in assumptions about state actors and relatively centralized armies, are not a great deal of help. Nor are traditional theories of revolution, which place stress on the role of activism by an organized lower class with a clear place within the economic apparatus. Slums, therefore, should force a rethinking of theories of war and insurrection, just as they have effectively forced the Israeli and American armies to rethink the way they do battle.
This is obviously a quite large topic, and there are some further facets of the situation that I have not addressed here - such as the environmental unsustainability of slum growth, or the public health risks slums pose. But I think that it is one topic that ties strongly into the broader themes discussed above, and that bears upon the central concerns of political science. (It goes without saying that, on a practical level, our goal should be to escape from the planet of slums.)
Not quite first thoughts: An exchange on the theory of surplus value
[A response to Jesse, who is reading David Harvey's essay, Right to the City.]
Jesse asks:
I reply:
Now Jesse has to get me doing math again (he will, quite shortly) and all will be well with the universe again.
Jesse asks:
First thoughts
Surplus Capital, what and why is it? Is it inherently good or useful? or as I might believe rather destructive. In the absence of surplus capital creation there appears to be some semblance of stasis and/or equilibrium, with the constant creation of surplus capital we find the need for creative destruction etc. It would seem to be a current necessity born out of the methodology of debt financing that currently exists in our economic structures, where we underwrite our current expenses by promising future profits and production, which does all sorts of good things like create capital multipliers, but also requires that future returns exceed current value, due to the fun that is interest. This seems fundamentally unsustainable in an environment that contains finite resources.
I reply:
You seem to have that mostly correct, although I think the surplus generally plays a creatively-destructive character rather than a purely destructive one. You are also right to flag the question of financing, although I don't believe that the need to produce a surplus is rooted within debt.
In a broad sense, surplus-value is the Marxist term for profit. The accounting methods differ, as Marxists believe that all surplus/profit basically results from exploitation of labor or nature. (Explanation: Assuming perfectly competitive markets in which all actors have the same information, goods will trade at some equilibrium value that reflects the amount of expected benefits they will confer upon their holder. In short, you can't buy a ton of iron and expect it to make itself into something more valuable - if you could, that would have already been reflected in the price. The exception is labor-power, the only commodity that carries itself to the marketplace. The marginal cost of hiring workers is equal to the amount of money that they will need to sustain and reproduce themselves - for as long as poverty exists, you will always be able to find someone to undercut his fellow worker for a subsistence wage. However, workers can produce more value in an hour than they are being paid for. You can verify this for yourself by looking up figures for average wages and average labor productivity in the US. There are some complexities to this picture - technological change and machines, chiefly, and the role of the entrepreneur - but basically, surplus value is derived from labor exploitation.)
You can understand why the surplus has to be used as it does by thinking through the logic of the individual capitalist. Essentially, he or she is in the game to make a profit. If they can't expect to have more money at the end of the year than at the beginning, they wouldn't put their time and money into business. They'd go sit on a beach instead. So they fall within what Marx describes as the M-C-M' cycle - they trade money for commodities (including labor power) which they then expect to exchange for an increased amount of money at the end of the year.
The problem of surplus-value arrives when the capitalist is deciding what to do with the increased amount of money - M' - that they have at the end of the year. Essentially, they have three options: They could spend it, they could have it redistributed (i.e. through progressive taxation), or they could reinvest it. The second option, taxation, is generally frowned upon. The first option, conspicuous consumption and philanthropy, sucks up a fair amount of the surplus. (In the 1930s, Gramsci described the rise of a class of "luxury mammals" attached to the bourgeoisie and totally devoted to consumption.)
However, the surplus cannot be totally consumed - for if a capitalist wants to stay in business, he or she must reinvest a portion of his/her profit. Not doing so will mean falling behind compared to his/her competitors, and eventually ceasing to be a capitalist. So a portion of the surplus capital must go into enlarging production facilities, expanding sales into new markets, developing new lines of products, increasing marketing, etc.
At this point, we must remember that the capitalist is in business to make a profit. He or she expects their new investment to produce a return. However, anyone will be able to tell you that expansions tend to produce diminishing returns. Presumably, the capitalist class as a whole will begin by investing in the most profitable activities, and only move on to less profitable activities after these are exhausted.
At this point, we can see the "creative" side of surplus capital operating. Material expansion, new technologies, physical infrastructure, increasing world linkages, etc, are the results of such a phase of expansion. (Although these tend to impose ecological and social costs as well. For example, I don't see suburbanization as a particularly progressive type of material expansion.) At some point this expansion hits a road-block: too much has been promised from the reinvestment of surplus capital, and too little profit can be delivered.
A crisis, in short. Assets are devalued, businesses are written off, and the working class is thrown out of jobs en masse. This "destruction", like the "creation" that preceded it, is a direct result of the incentives faced by capitalists as a whole. In general, capitalists compete amongst themselves to decide who will bear the costs (witness the dispute between Chrysler bondholders over who would bear the first losses) and attempt to fob off as much of the cost on the working class as possible (e.g. the $700 billion TARP bank recapitalization scam). A messy period of losses and reorganization ensues. This in itself often sets the stage for further continued expansion. For example, the 1870s and 1880s railway boom in the US resulted in the bankruptcy of most rail companies after they had laid tracks and discovered that the rail business wasn't as profitable as they had thought. After the bankruptcies, others snapped up the "distressed assets" at a lower cost and used them to grow across the continent. A similar thing happened after the IT booms-and-busts of the 1990s and early 2000s.
At this point, I will break from the standard analysis and note that your point about finite resources is spot-on. Capitalism, as an economic form, rests upon the exploitation of labor and the large-scale extraction of natural resources. Limitless resources are a necessary (but not sufficient) precondition for limitless growth - and I believe that most economists ignore this fact. Seen from the perspective of limited natural resources, much of the activity that we think of as generating income - e.g. mining, non-sustainable forestry, oil drilling - is in fact a cost imposed upon the earth and upon future generations.
If the above analysis is correct, growth is tied inextricably to capitalism. Accepting that planetary resource limits exist would require us to (a) stop growing, and cease to be capitalist, or (b) go off-planet, either by space exploration or large-scale capture of other energy and resource sources.
A second addendum: Finance and debt doesn't by itself cause problems with surplus capital, but it does tend to generalize the need to make a profit. Individual entrepreneurs may be in business for all sorts of reasons - some want the money, some love the product or service. But as soon as they indebt themselves, they commit themselves to producing and reinvesting surpluses to make good the claim against their future income. I have other thoughts on finance, but I will save them for later as I need to go buy vegetables.
Now Jesse has to get me doing math again (he will, quite shortly) and all will be well with the universe again.
08 August 2009
Where everyone gets a bargain
New Zealand is a strange country in a number of ways, one of which it is the fact that it largely lacks a manufacturing sector. Ever since the 1984-87 liberalization of the economy, manufacturing has been bleeding to death, except for food manufacturing and some small niches. Agriculture is the chief export industry, while most people are employed within a domestically-focused service sector. There are, of course, remnants of manufacturing: carpets and clothing here and there, some metal fabrication, etc. Cars haven't been assembled here since 1990, when the Holden plants in the Hutt Valley closed.
There were peculiarities associated with import-substitution manufacturing, of course. Televisions were built in Japan or Korea, disassembled, shipped to New Zealand, and reassembled. Costs were high, and quality was mixed. (On the other hand, it led to distinctive local innovations, as Kiwis have a practical culture that extols the virtues of getting more done with less. This is a sort of national myth - the bloke tinkering in his shed, fixing it with number 8 wire, etc.)
Wellington itself is situated within a strange regional economy. The city center itself is largely an administrative hub. It contains some corporate headquarters (although most have now drifted to Auckland or Australia) and many government departments. People tend to be employed either in government - in a puckish mood, I introduce myself to people by asking what ministry they work for - or in the burgeoning culture-and-cafes service sector, which is itself a recent invention. There is also a dockyard, and a movie colony in Miramar. It's a post-Fordist city.
The city contains the leftovers of a time when things were built and made there. My favorite cafe, Ernesto's, is located in what appears to be a former clothing factory. If you go down to Newtown, the more proletarian end of the city, you run across what used to be small factories: Milford Engineering, French and Colonial Door Factory...
On the whole, though, Wellington has always been a place where paper was pushed. It was, however, integrated within what seems to be a regional division of labor. If Wellington is an administrative center, Lower Hutt and Petone, which sit at the far end of the harbor, are still blue-collar towns. Storage tanks for oil and chemicals sit at the east end of the shorefront, and the other side of the road is filled with panelbeaters and machine repair places - the poor relatives of machine-making - and a few factories. It is - or possibly, was - a light-industry town.
Today, we took the train up to Lower Hutt for an afternoon of mini-golf and liquor - a great success, although nobody will ever see some of those balls again. While returning on the bus, we passed through the rougher streets of Lower Hutt, down the motorway that sits on the continental fault, and out near the Wellington docks. This last section gave me pause - for today, it's composed entirely of warehouses and big-box retailers. Furniture and mattress sellers seem particularly common. Many of the retail warehouses are obviously former factories. Machines emptied out to be junked or sent overseas, bright colors painted on outside, and shipping containers fresh off the docks disgorging their wares inside.
(The most odd example of this was a former wool-processing factory Anne and I saw on the coastal walk from Oriental Bay to Hataitai. It was weatherbeaten, long out of its manufacturing prime, and had been reclaimed as a huge shop selling wool products at outrageous prices to tourists.)
That dislocation of purpose - from production to consumption - strikes me as particularly important. (Perhaps it's just my Protestant ethic outing its prejudices!) I suppose the question is this: Do we measure people by what they do, or by what they consume? New Zealand, like the United States, has a consumption-driven economy. But does dignity reside in new consumer electronics, shipped halfway around the world, or do we find it in the eight hours (or more) that we spend every day in wage-labor?
New Zealand currently has a surplus of shipping containers. Essentially, a much greater volume of goods enters the country than leaves, and the spare boxes stay here. At the same time as this surplus has been accumulating, a disaffected human surplus has been building up in the prisons. Recently, the government floated a trial balloon: How about converting the shipping containers into cost-effective jail cells for the growing "dangerous classes"?
There were peculiarities associated with import-substitution manufacturing, of course. Televisions were built in Japan or Korea, disassembled, shipped to New Zealand, and reassembled. Costs were high, and quality was mixed. (On the other hand, it led to distinctive local innovations, as Kiwis have a practical culture that extols the virtues of getting more done with less. This is a sort of national myth - the bloke tinkering in his shed, fixing it with number 8 wire, etc.)
Wellington itself is situated within a strange regional economy. The city center itself is largely an administrative hub. It contains some corporate headquarters (although most have now drifted to Auckland or Australia) and many government departments. People tend to be employed either in government - in a puckish mood, I introduce myself to people by asking what ministry they work for - or in the burgeoning culture-and-cafes service sector, which is itself a recent invention. There is also a dockyard, and a movie colony in Miramar. It's a post-Fordist city.
The city contains the leftovers of a time when things were built and made there. My favorite cafe, Ernesto's, is located in what appears to be a former clothing factory. If you go down to Newtown, the more proletarian end of the city, you run across what used to be small factories: Milford Engineering, French and Colonial Door Factory...
On the whole, though, Wellington has always been a place where paper was pushed. It was, however, integrated within what seems to be a regional division of labor. If Wellington is an administrative center, Lower Hutt and Petone, which sit at the far end of the harbor, are still blue-collar towns. Storage tanks for oil and chemicals sit at the east end of the shorefront, and the other side of the road is filled with panelbeaters and machine repair places - the poor relatives of machine-making - and a few factories. It is - or possibly, was - a light-industry town.
Today, we took the train up to Lower Hutt for an afternoon of mini-golf and liquor - a great success, although nobody will ever see some of those balls again. While returning on the bus, we passed through the rougher streets of Lower Hutt, down the motorway that sits on the continental fault, and out near the Wellington docks. This last section gave me pause - for today, it's composed entirely of warehouses and big-box retailers. Furniture and mattress sellers seem particularly common. Many of the retail warehouses are obviously former factories. Machines emptied out to be junked or sent overseas, bright colors painted on outside, and shipping containers fresh off the docks disgorging their wares inside.
(The most odd example of this was a former wool-processing factory Anne and I saw on the coastal walk from Oriental Bay to Hataitai. It was weatherbeaten, long out of its manufacturing prime, and had been reclaimed as a huge shop selling wool products at outrageous prices to tourists.)
That dislocation of purpose - from production to consumption - strikes me as particularly important. (Perhaps it's just my Protestant ethic outing its prejudices!) I suppose the question is this: Do we measure people by what they do, or by what they consume? New Zealand, like the United States, has a consumption-driven economy. But does dignity reside in new consumer electronics, shipped halfway around the world, or do we find it in the eight hours (or more) that we spend every day in wage-labor?
New Zealand currently has a surplus of shipping containers. Essentially, a much greater volume of goods enters the country than leaves, and the spare boxes stay here. At the same time as this surplus has been accumulating, a disaffected human surplus has been building up in the prisons. Recently, the government floated a trial balloon: How about converting the shipping containers into cost-effective jail cells for the growing "dangerous classes"?
06 August 2009
Yesterday, they buffed this
In the morning, it was sitting there in all its glory at the top of the Terrace. By nightfall, it had been painted over in black. It had to happen eventually.
I had always thought that buffing off graffiti, as the obscene double to tagging and stenciling, would also have to take place under cover of night. After all, it is a controversial act that often makes walls look worse than before. But somebody must have just rolled right up in broad daylight and brazenly painted this over.
05 August 2009
Towards a new research agenda
Or: Why I still think it's important to study politics after a year working in government.
[See part two here]
Political science in general
One part of me is a political scientist by inclination and training. I am skeptical of some of the things that label implies - in particular, its flawed aspiration to science - but I've come to recognize that many of the disciplinary boundaries are useful signposts.
Think about the other word in that description - "political". A political scientist is generally committed to understanding events and dynamics as manifestations of political forces. This, of course, drives us into greater nebulosity - what does "political" mean? I know libertarians who claim that politics is merely a surface distortion of underlying, impersonal and beneficial market forces, and math professors who claim that that publication in respected journals is fundamentally politicized. So there are a range of opinions on the matter.
Here, I will largely sidestep this question, and refer you to Machiavelli, who likened the ideal prince to a "centaur". That is, half-man, half-beast: An entity that deployed equal measures of consent and coercion to rule. Politics, therefore, is what happens when some people get others to do their bidding by convincing and forcing them to do it. Pace Gramsci, you can't have one without the other, either.
What does this mean? Broadly speaking, it means that I look at phenomena in a distinctive way. An economist might ask: What's the market? What's the comparative advantage? What's happened to dairy prices this month? A sociologist might ask: What are the cultural norms and practices? Why are all the men wearing those things around their necks? A political scientist, by contrast, might ask: Who exerts power in this situation? How do they do it? Why don't other groups rebel?
What I can't do (yet)
Ultimately, we must base our investigations in some theory. If you claim to be doing otherwise, you just kidding yourself. (As JM Keynes famously said, "Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.”)
I decided relatively early on that I should take up this point, and become as theoretical as possible. If one needs a good theory to proceed, I reasoned, that should be my first priority.
This logic led me to a very theoretical attempt-at-a-thesis in my last year at university. It was an attempt to reconcile - or draw out the gaps between - the writings of Walter Benjamin and Karl Marx on the subject of historical progress and repetition. It turned out to be an extremely broad topic that had the nasty tendency of slipping away from me every time I tried to get my hands firmly on it. I wrote three or four versions of the first chapter and gave it up as a bad job.
The problem was this: Benjamin and Marx, while marvelous founts of theoretical insights, both proceeded from the material facts of a situation or phenomenon. They developed different methods of historical materialism, but kept their theories firmly tied to the facts, to the concrete material.
In short, I realized that if I took their theories seriously, I was going around my investigations the wrong way. Rather than committing to a theory about the workings of the world, I needed to commit to a methodology that would allow me to draw theory out of reality. Benjamin talked about constructing theory as montage, or the building of the Crystal Palace: for him, it meant drawing together and assembling many many minute components, fragments of history. I suspect that it will mean something similar to me.
Just the facts, ma'am
One of the first lessons I learned in government was that assertions usually wouldn't cut it. Evidence is needed - often in the form of hard statistics. I've spent a great deal of time perusing releases and datasets from Statistics NZ, looking for expected and unexpected findings. Where possible, I've tried to let data drive my questions - first, ask what has happened, and then ask how.
Naturally, it's not that simple. The first things one learns about any source of data are its limitations. Comparison between countries or years can be difficult even where broadly similar statistics exist. And in most cases, rigorous social and economic statistics only began in or after the Great Depression - a period of time too short to allow any rigorous analysis. (Let alone perceive any long-run systemic dynamics!) So I am not naive about quantitative views on the world - important, but limited.
So: Data, concrete facts. But data on what? Broadly speaking, there are two approaches. The first is top-down; it examines the broadest-picture data on a society - measures of national accounts, growth, income distribution, expenditures, etc. The second is bottom-up; it goes down to the level of daily life and starts seeing what it can find there.
These two "levels" at which to examine a country (state, city, region, world, etc) are linked, of course. Let me give an example: The global financial crisis last year.
The broadly accepted view of the crisis was that it resulted from high-level disorders ranging from global current account imbalances (i.e. China lending a lot of money to the US) to excessive liquidity (caused by the US Federal Reserve keeping interest rates dangerously low) to poor corporate governance (or, as some of us call it, widespread corruption in the investment industry) to negligent regulators (possibly as a result of that corruption).
A less commonly heard version of events is this: That the global crisis had its roots in a household debt crisis (particularly in the US). As real hourly wages have stagnated or declined over the last three decades, the it is only possible to increase consumption in the US's "market of last resort" by increasing indebtedness. A related although not identical phenomena was the two-decade-long housing bubble, which effectively underwrote this increasing debt. Naturally, this model was not sustainable, and when it fell apart, it blew huge holes in banks' balance sheets. The basic problem, therefore, was not a "macro" disorder, but an everyday problem (stagnant wages, rising debt) generalized and replicated across the continent.
In short, in order to understand many of the things that I want to understand, I must discover how they work in daily life, how they operate on a "micro" scale. In a sense, this is a version of the conclusions I arrived at after three and a half months in Argentina: that a global climate change model is all well and good, but what do carbon dioxide concentrations mean for a small farming village in an already-dry place?
I should mention one more thing about the household debt/global financial crisis example. Both of those two (stylized) explanations are partial. Without the "macro" imbalances - reckless lending and "securitizing" practice, the Chinese need to lend us money so as to maintain their principal export market, etc - household debt never could have risen to the level it did. (In other words, if you can't find someone to lend you money, you can't get it - no matter how much you need it.) And without rising household debt (or some similar phenomenon) the "macro" imbalances would not have had the same scope to express themselves as destructively as they did.
Drawing connections between these two "levels" is often the task. And, as my dad tells me, I am very good at thinking globally, and very good at thinking about specific cases. It's just the steps between the two that I could do better...
Weaponizing the results
At the end, there will be findings. I will investigate, pontificate, conclude, write. But what to do after that?
The second major lesson from working in the government has been that policy matters. An undergraduate education in political science taught me quite a lot about what governments can do, and why they might choose to do it. I learned about state power, and the justifications for its exercise. This ignored a third major question: How do states exercise power? How do they get things done? (The most insightful book I read on the topic was State, Power, Socialism by Nikos Poulantzas.)
It goes without saying that the making of the sausage is not a pretty operation. But it's got me thinking: If I think that x, y, or z is happening, what should I do with that knowledge? How can it be used to change course on policy? And if I think that a, b, or c should be done, how could I do it? What means are available to do what I think should be done, and how can they be deployed?
If political science is to have ambitions to change the world, rather than just explain it, it has to answer these questions. (This leads into all the uncomfortable questions about accommodation and compromise, and the inevitable gap between vision and praxis. But I will set those aside for now.)
To my mind, this involves two main considerations. The first is simpler: it requires one to complete the circuit, in a way, returning from conclusions or theory to the real-world situation, and then asking two questions. First, what do you want to change, and how? Second, what policies would need to be enacted to do so?
The second consideration leads quickly to a confusing morass. After deciding what is to be done, one must consider how it is to be implemented. This, inevitably, involves dealing with institutions, and, to the extent that any radical or disruptive proposal is put forth, swimming against the bureaucratic current. (Like salmon: hopefully to spawn rather than be eaten by a bear.) In my experience, institutions tend to be inertial, and there tends to be an accepted discourse in which you must speak. (Foucault talks about power-knowledge. He's not wrong, regardless of what you think of his evidence base in History of Sexuality.)
Summary of a sorts
There is something here about theory, something here about information and concreteness, and something about praxis. Tensions exist within this general agglomeration of approaches; it is more an attempt to draw out the beginnings of a methodology than an actual research agenda. More on that later.
[See part two here]
Political science in general
One part of me is a political scientist by inclination and training. I am skeptical of some of the things that label implies - in particular, its flawed aspiration to science - but I've come to recognize that many of the disciplinary boundaries are useful signposts.
Think about the other word in that description - "political". A political scientist is generally committed to understanding events and dynamics as manifestations of political forces. This, of course, drives us into greater nebulosity - what does "political" mean? I know libertarians who claim that politics is merely a surface distortion of underlying, impersonal and beneficial market forces, and math professors who claim that that publication in respected journals is fundamentally politicized. So there are a range of opinions on the matter.
Here, I will largely sidestep this question, and refer you to Machiavelli, who likened the ideal prince to a "centaur". That is, half-man, half-beast: An entity that deployed equal measures of consent and coercion to rule. Politics, therefore, is what happens when some people get others to do their bidding by convincing and forcing them to do it. Pace Gramsci, you can't have one without the other, either.
What does this mean? Broadly speaking, it means that I look at phenomena in a distinctive way. An economist might ask: What's the market? What's the comparative advantage? What's happened to dairy prices this month? A sociologist might ask: What are the cultural norms and practices? Why are all the men wearing those things around their necks? A political scientist, by contrast, might ask: Who exerts power in this situation? How do they do it? Why don't other groups rebel?
What I can't do (yet)
Ultimately, we must base our investigations in some theory. If you claim to be doing otherwise, you just kidding yourself. (As JM Keynes famously said, "Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist.”)
I decided relatively early on that I should take up this point, and become as theoretical as possible. If one needs a good theory to proceed, I reasoned, that should be my first priority.
This logic led me to a very theoretical attempt-at-a-thesis in my last year at university. It was an attempt to reconcile - or draw out the gaps between - the writings of Walter Benjamin and Karl Marx on the subject of historical progress and repetition. It turned out to be an extremely broad topic that had the nasty tendency of slipping away from me every time I tried to get my hands firmly on it. I wrote three or four versions of the first chapter and gave it up as a bad job.
The problem was this: Benjamin and Marx, while marvelous founts of theoretical insights, both proceeded from the material facts of a situation or phenomenon. They developed different methods of historical materialism, but kept their theories firmly tied to the facts, to the concrete material.
In short, I realized that if I took their theories seriously, I was going around my investigations the wrong way. Rather than committing to a theory about the workings of the world, I needed to commit to a methodology that would allow me to draw theory out of reality. Benjamin talked about constructing theory as montage, or the building of the Crystal Palace: for him, it meant drawing together and assembling many many minute components, fragments of history. I suspect that it will mean something similar to me.
Just the facts, ma'am
One of the first lessons I learned in government was that assertions usually wouldn't cut it. Evidence is needed - often in the form of hard statistics. I've spent a great deal of time perusing releases and datasets from Statistics NZ, looking for expected and unexpected findings. Where possible, I've tried to let data drive my questions - first, ask what has happened, and then ask how.
Naturally, it's not that simple. The first things one learns about any source of data are its limitations. Comparison between countries or years can be difficult even where broadly similar statistics exist. And in most cases, rigorous social and economic statistics only began in or after the Great Depression - a period of time too short to allow any rigorous analysis. (Let alone perceive any long-run systemic dynamics!) So I am not naive about quantitative views on the world - important, but limited.
So: Data, concrete facts. But data on what? Broadly speaking, there are two approaches. The first is top-down; it examines the broadest-picture data on a society - measures of national accounts, growth, income distribution, expenditures, etc. The second is bottom-up; it goes down to the level of daily life and starts seeing what it can find there.
These two "levels" at which to examine a country (state, city, region, world, etc) are linked, of course. Let me give an example: The global financial crisis last year.
The broadly accepted view of the crisis was that it resulted from high-level disorders ranging from global current account imbalances (i.e. China lending a lot of money to the US) to excessive liquidity (caused by the US Federal Reserve keeping interest rates dangerously low) to poor corporate governance (or, as some of us call it, widespread corruption in the investment industry) to negligent regulators (possibly as a result of that corruption).
A less commonly heard version of events is this: That the global crisis had its roots in a household debt crisis (particularly in the US). As real hourly wages have stagnated or declined over the last three decades, the it is only possible to increase consumption in the US's "market of last resort" by increasing indebtedness. A related although not identical phenomena was the two-decade-long housing bubble, which effectively underwrote this increasing debt. Naturally, this model was not sustainable, and when it fell apart, it blew huge holes in banks' balance sheets. The basic problem, therefore, was not a "macro" disorder, but an everyday problem (stagnant wages, rising debt) generalized and replicated across the continent.
In short, in order to understand many of the things that I want to understand, I must discover how they work in daily life, how they operate on a "micro" scale. In a sense, this is a version of the conclusions I arrived at after three and a half months in Argentina: that a global climate change model is all well and good, but what do carbon dioxide concentrations mean for a small farming village in an already-dry place?
I should mention one more thing about the household debt/global financial crisis example. Both of those two (stylized) explanations are partial. Without the "macro" imbalances - reckless lending and "securitizing" practice, the Chinese need to lend us money so as to maintain their principal export market, etc - household debt never could have risen to the level it did. (In other words, if you can't find someone to lend you money, you can't get it - no matter how much you need it.) And without rising household debt (or some similar phenomenon) the "macro" imbalances would not have had the same scope to express themselves as destructively as they did.
Drawing connections between these two "levels" is often the task. And, as my dad tells me, I am very good at thinking globally, and very good at thinking about specific cases. It's just the steps between the two that I could do better...
Weaponizing the results
At the end, there will be findings. I will investigate, pontificate, conclude, write. But what to do after that?
The second major lesson from working in the government has been that policy matters. An undergraduate education in political science taught me quite a lot about what governments can do, and why they might choose to do it. I learned about state power, and the justifications for its exercise. This ignored a third major question: How do states exercise power? How do they get things done? (The most insightful book I read on the topic was State, Power, Socialism by Nikos Poulantzas.)
It goes without saying that the making of the sausage is not a pretty operation. But it's got me thinking: If I think that x, y, or z is happening, what should I do with that knowledge? How can it be used to change course on policy? And if I think that a, b, or c should be done, how could I do it? What means are available to do what I think should be done, and how can they be deployed?
If political science is to have ambitions to change the world, rather than just explain it, it has to answer these questions. (This leads into all the uncomfortable questions about accommodation and compromise, and the inevitable gap between vision and praxis. But I will set those aside for now.)
To my mind, this involves two main considerations. The first is simpler: it requires one to complete the circuit, in a way, returning from conclusions or theory to the real-world situation, and then asking two questions. First, what do you want to change, and how? Second, what policies would need to be enacted to do so?
The second consideration leads quickly to a confusing morass. After deciding what is to be done, one must consider how it is to be implemented. This, inevitably, involves dealing with institutions, and, to the extent that any radical or disruptive proposal is put forth, swimming against the bureaucratic current. (Like salmon: hopefully to spawn rather than be eaten by a bear.) In my experience, institutions tend to be inertial, and there tends to be an accepted discourse in which you must speak. (Foucault talks about power-knowledge. He's not wrong, regardless of what you think of his evidence base in History of Sexuality.)
Summary of a sorts
There is something here about theory, something here about information and concreteness, and something about praxis. Tensions exist within this general agglomeration of approaches; it is more an attempt to draw out the beginnings of a methodology than an actual research agenda. More on that later.
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