on entanglement

 

In 1991, an anthropologist, Nicholas Thomas, wrote a book entitled “Entangled Objects” in which he proposed that other dimensions of commodity exchange exist outside of what is usually analyzed in terms of production and circulation. That is, objects are entangled with other objects and situations to a degree that confounded both the theory of revealed preference and the Marxist analysis of surplus value, the latter of which held production and circulation too far apart, the former of which had forgotten production and overlapping markets altogether. 

 The idea of entanglement was taken up by two different economic sociologists, Daniel Miller and Michel Callon, who have clashed about just what it means. Callon, who is better known, is one of the architects of Actor Network Theory, has made field studies of fishermen and stock brokers to study markets and producers. His theory of markets, based in this research, accords a great role to what he calls the performativity of economics models – that is, economists model transactions according to theories of rational choice and then real markets are molded to adhere to the model. It is a sort of para-Dorian Gray effect, with the wickedness of the economist showing up in the way market participates in a particular market identify themselves. Miller has developed what he calls a virtual theory of markets – by which he means that transactions that are framed as exchanges in a market are so framed by the abstractions of economics, which paints a virtual picture of economic reality and works to make the latter conform to the former. 

Miller, unlike Callon, does not give the market framing any ontological privilege. Thus, he resists the whole idea that the market describes anything more than a locale in which commodities are exchanged.

 For both thinkers, the way objects are entangled in production and the symbolic realm make the neo-classical claim about the exchange of commodities unrealistic. Both writers are engaged in what Mill called ethology; unlike Mill, however, both Miller and Callon think that there is an experimental dimension to economic theory, which is enacted or performed in real transfers of objects.

The polemic between Miller and Callon has crystallized around an example, introduced by Miller - a transaction that does not, as it happens, involve the cowry shells beloved by economic anthrologists: the buying of a Renault automobile. 

 That it is a Renault instead of a Honda or a Ford is a sign that this is, among other things, a transatlantic debate. The French car gives us a vaguely French buyer – in Miller’s example, a woman named Sophie, who accrues a profile that would make her ideal for an Oprah interview: “So let us imagine the case of Sophie buying a Renault. What are the factors that determine Sophie’s selection of this car and the price she is prepared to pay for it? Sophie is recently divorced and, while she has kept possession of the family house, her ex-husband kept the car. Her income is now much restricted so the Renault will be a small one. This is an important decision for her, one of the most signicant purchases she has made for a while. For one thing she is suddenly redefining her image as an individual as against being a ‘partner’ in a relationship. So the aesthetics and the image of the car are important as a decision about her outward appearance, and many of her friends are very stylish. She is quite proud of that element of nationalism that leads her towards buying a French car, with a confidence bolstered by recent victories in football. So she is clear that she wants a Renault as opposed to say a Fiat or Toyota. Also the car is becoming ever more important to her since her two children are growing to an age where much of her parenting consists of chauffeuring them around to friends and activities, so the car must function well to facilitate her daily responsibilities (Maxwell 2001). Also she has realized that car journeys are actually the main time when she listens to loud music so the sound system in the car is perhaps more important than the hi-fi. in her home (Bull 2001). Sophie is also (to an admittedly rather mild degree) a bit of an environmentalist so that some of the ‘costs’ of the car, which are normally regarded as externalities, are internal to her equation. She wants an efficient engine principally to save her own petrol costs but also she is happy that this is for the sake of the earth as well as for the sake of her budget.” [“Turning Callon Right side up” ] 

 I will overlook the oddly sappy terms in which Sophie’s character is described, although they have the glaze of self-help psychology – Sophie is, as E.M. Forster might put it, a thin character, and she is all the thinner for being “confident”, or ‘happy for the sake of the earth’, that her car has good gas mileage,etc. Oddly, Miller, who has done ethnographic fieldwork, seems uninterested in saying exactly what the ‘earth’ means to Sophie. However, aside from Sophie’s cartoonishness, Miller’s portrait is distinguished by a lack of noticing both the material situation in which his purchaser makes her purchase – where does Sophie live, anyway? – and a blind spot so large as to be puzzling: Sophie is not ‘purchasing’ a car, if she is a normal car buyer – she is taking out a loan. That new cars are big ticket items for most drivers, and that they are entangled, at both ends of the market transaction (that is, the ends designated by the seller and the buyer) is, one would think, one of the primary entanglements of this transaction. It is one of the reasons that the disentanglement is so doubted by Miller and so easily imagined by Callon: 

"As noted elsewhere, the object of the transaction may be a service, irrespective of how ‘immaterial’ it may seem. For example in Sophie’s case the sale may include a leasing contract or after-sales services. But since all that is specified and qualified, salespersons and buyers are quits once the transaction has been completed. In other words... the disentanglement of the car from the seller’s complicated and heterogeneous world is accomplished. And this is because the goods are detached and reattached that the two agencies become quits: the two processes are strongly intertwined. In other words it is quite impossible to separate the two issues of the embeddedness and of the alienation of (commercial) goods.” 

 Callon’s borrowing of the term agencement from Deleuze is one way to grasp the fact that choice or consumption is only one dimension of the economy – production is the other. Marx and the classical economists knew this well; the neo-classicals have erected an entire science on forgetting it. Yet Callon, too, envisions a checkbook and the alienation of property, as though Sophie were buying a steak. The checkbook brings into this transaction a bank; it should also bring into this transaction the seller’s terms, which will certainly include an interest rate. Callon mentions the lender's terms, but doesn't seem to understand that alienation here is a highly conditioned term. Sophie operates, as we all do, in a world in which purchase is not a matter of being endowed with a supply of funds equal to one’s desire for goods, but rather in a world in which one’s continuing supply of income makes one suitable for funds flowing from other parties – banks, credit card companies, the automaker’s own lending unit – which in turn leads to secondary transactions – the bundling of loans into larger financial products that can be sold amongst parties in such derivative markets – and so on. At the time Callon published his refutation of Miller, in 2005, there was something like 300 trillion dollars of derivates contracts being traded “out there” . The entanglement of supposedly separate markets impinged, virtually, on every big ticket transaction. If Sophie were living in Dublin and buying a Range Rover, in 2011 the taxes she paid would be going to pay off bad bets made by bad Irish banks who had plunged into the credit markets that, at some point, serviced the big ticket purchases of people like Sophie – as well as the small credit card purchases. This makes it all the more interesting that economists model a market – rather than the tangle of markets that actually exist – and insist on a highly unrealistic notion of the individual revealing preferences in these simple to disentangle, recognizable markets, when of course they are operating in ways they are not sure of in markets that they cannot overview to make purchases that they ‘prefer’ due to the existential structures in which they are embedded. To trust, then, that they reveal a preference, here, is like understanding the Pickett’s charge at Gettysburg by assuming that a number of soldiers from a number of Southern states had decided, on their own, that it was a good time to take a stroll across a Pennsylvania meadow. 

The notion of entanglement helps us see how circulation and production in capitalism have, over the nineteenth and twentieth century, shaped certain ‘ideal types’: producers, middle persons, clerks and lawyers and doctors,  consumers, etc.  One of the characteristics of those types is that they have learned to navigate the hyperconnectivity of capitalism. But they have not learned, even on the level of economics, to understand it. Take someone who is supposedly much more sophisticated than Sophie: Larry Summers. I was struck by one of Summer’s responses in the brief interview with him in the NYT Sunday magazine. You have been cast as the heavy in documentaries like “Inside Job” and on “Frontline” for sowing the seeds of the economic crisis during the Clinton administration. You were against regulating derivatives and in support of repealing the Glass-Steagall Act, which significantly relaxed how banks do business. Did they miss the mark by casting you in this light? 

"Oh, these are much more complicated issues than those kinds of movies can suggest. Canada, for example, is generally pointed to as a major regulatory success. But it’s got universal banking that goes considerably beyond the Glass-Steagall reforms that happened in the United States. The major accidents in the United States — Bear Stearns, Lehman, Fannie and Freddie — had nothing to do with Glass-Steagall. Did we 10 years ago foresee everything that happened with respect to derivatives? Absolutely not." 

Summer’s is right that these are complicated issues. Unfortunately, he doesn’t understand their complication. The question that is posed, here, is: is there an entanglement between deregulating banks and allowing them to expand their services in all directions so that any crisis they experience will be violently transmitted through the economy and deregulating mortgage markets and derivatives so that they will be free to make riskier investments? And behind this, the larger question: why even have banks if the capital they mobilize is invested, incestuously, in a pyramid of bets about the capital they mobilize? Does this create a perverse incentive to keep the financial services sector from investing in longer range projects – thus creating a huge barrier to long term Research and Development by making it an unattractive investment? 

 Summers, of course, might have some inkling of these things. But he really can’t connect two things that are modularly separated by his models. Over here we have the separation between investment banks and commercial banks, and over here we have a market in financial instruments that, on the consumer end, deregulates the process of mortgage lending, and, on the other end, creates unregulated opportunities for derivatives of ‘real’ financial instruments to be traded back and forth for profit, but no real social gain. Every economist gets trained, through modeling, to bracket and separate factors that the economist knows, in reality, are interrelated. This is done, firstly, in order to build and make models work. But somewhere along the way, they begin to think that these separations and divisions actually reflect reality. Hence, their policymaking is always done on the principle that the economy is a modular system, without any thought about the fact that it is also a highly interconnected system. Summers simply can’t think through the proposition that he was the architect of a malign coupling – big banks, stinking financial instruments – and thus reverts to the logic of analogy beloved by those pushing bad policy. Analogy pushing has evidently moved on from the glory days, in which our occupation of Iraq was just like occupying Germany after WWII. It is now an excuse for turning a blind eye to the essential and massive dysfunction of financial markets. And this, in turn, manufactures a bigger blind eye, in which our supposedly ‘neo-liberal’ government, virtuously shunning central planning and ‘industrial policy’, actually operates a very intense industrial policy that is centered on promoting financial services.  

I wrote the bulk of this in 2012. And in this year, 2021, we still don't see entanglement taken very seriously, even as we live in its virtues and vices. This is where a training in Marx is a virtue, and an ignorance of Marx is a vice - for Marx, at least, had a systematic view of capitalism, while the orthodox political economist has only a mythical monster called a market. And so we go into our world-changing future with this primitive intellectual tool, which is scary. 

La Chambre (after Balthus)

 

La Chambre (after Balthus)

A stub fury stands

drawing open the vast drapes

letting in the accusatory light

upon the sprawled, naked sleeper

whose odalisque interiority

is thus so rudely summoned.

She blooms on her throne

like a migraine

in that cat fraught room.

- K.C.

sad thoughts on the end of the school year

 

I can’t hold together, in my head, these two things: on the one hand, my knowledge that myself and my cohort have loaded up the future with the unimaginable horror of climate change – the effects of which abound for anyone with the eyes to see – and on the other hand, my boy Adam, whose last day in third grade – CE2 – is today. In my regular life, my organic life, the second hand outweighs the first. Adam is looking forward to getting out and summer vacation. I have this feeling in my chest like my heart swallowed all the fallen leaves of autumn – or, at least one leaf. An ache of nostalgia, knowing that Adam is not passing by these monuments again, that he is growing up.

For the first hand – I have only a cringing fear. I wrote a piece a long long time ago for the Austin Chronicle in which I compared humans to sperm whales. I love whales, but whales do not exist in the hundred millions. I’ll quote myself – a form of auto-affection one shouldn’t do in public, Louis CK  notwithstanding, but I can’t resist: 

“Americans in particular, who are born to a degree of power unimaginable even a mere hundred years ago, might want to consider the consequences of lifestyles which require, for each of us to get through our normal day, as much energy as is used by the sperm whale. The sperm whale weighs about 40 tons. Americans talk about obesity, but in ecological terms, the real problem is this deep obesity, the structural obesity built into our lives, which is condemning those marvelous sensory worlds proper to all manner of swimming, creeping, and flying beasts to irreversible nothingness.” (by the way, my comparison of humans to whales was in advance of the little controversy, in 2010, created when the physicist Geoffrey West was quoted in Time Magazine as saying: Americans now burn through energy at a rate of 11 kilowatts per person. “What you find is that we have created a lifestyle where we need more watts than a blue whale.”  But did Time Magazine tip its hat to yours truly? No.)

There’s a philosophical conundrum, called the Molyneux problem: if a man born born blind could, by some operation, be made to see, would this man recognize visually shapes that he had previously experienced tactilely. In larger terms, this is a problem about connections that concerns us all: can we recognize, in our sensual lives, shapes that we know “only” intellectually? We, blindly, have put our fingers around the world. Will there come a day when the scales drop from our eyes and we recognize what we have done?

The problem with "white privilege"

 

On white privilege

The conservative complaint about the term “white privilege” is that it induces guilt in white people. That, oddly enough, is consistent with my complaint, which is that it naturalizes a social fact.

Here’s a story to illustrate the difference between subjective feeling and the system. A man, lets call him Marcel, lives in occupied Paris in 1943. Marcel considers himself unbigoted – he’s never felt any prejudice against the Jews. He’s even had Jewish friends! Marcel has a friend named Jacques. Jacques comes to him with a sweet deal: Jacques, due to “social circumstances”, has got his hands on a number of apartments at rock bottom prices. Does Marcel want to buy a couple? Now, Marcel reads the papers, and he is aware, in part of his mind, that Jews are being dispossessed of their homes and goods and even seem to be “vanishing”. But that part of his mind he is keeping in the background. In the foreground is a money-making opportunity, and he gladly joins with Jacques.

In 1945, nobody spoke of Gentile privilege. They spoke, instead, of resistance and collaboration. Marcel’s act was an act of collaboration.

Transpose the circs. Mark works for X corp in Palo Alto. It is a high paying job in tech. Now, Mark notices, in part of his mind, that there are almost no African-Americans in his department – or in other high paying departments. Although some African-Americans work there. Receptionist, for instance! Plus the janitorial crew, although that is subcontracted. If Mark wanted to, he could read studies, reported on in the newspapers, about the racial disparity in pay and opportunity in the tech industry. Mark doesn’t have any bigotry against African-Americans. When he was in high school, he even had black friends! But Mark doesn’t spend any effort to think about racial disparities. His kids talk about white privilege, and it makes him mad.

The better term for Mark is the term for Marcel: collaborator. And the better strategy for Mark, as it was for Marcel is resistance. In Marcel's ase, that could lead to prison. In Marks case, that could lead to some of his white coworkers calling him a pussy.

This is my sermon on “white privilege”. Leave at the exits marked in the back.

cold war: the war without a real history

 

During the Cold War, anti-communist historians were unanimous on one topic: the Communists were liars. Their statistics were lies, their trials were lies, the bones of millions in the Gulag testified to their lies

In the period after the Cold War, the anti-communist historians made an exception to the rule. Ex KGB men and archives recording the opinion and testimonies of NKVD and KGB men were solid truths. Not a single exaggeration, not a story made up for social promotion, not a taint from lives otherwise dedicated to lying. Here, here was the truth. Here was the proof that lefties and softies in the West were in contact with, or on the payroll of, or otherwise spying for the Soviets.

This went along with the blackmail by archive that helped Eastern European nationalists and conservatives sweep away the tainted socialists and their ilk.

At the same time that the NKVD files were being studied, pilfered, and marketed to the highest bidder, the files in the West were being…. Well, redacted and released if the FOIA requester had guessed the right classification. Basically, we know very little about such matters as the strategy of tension in Europe – which happened in Italy, Belgium and to an extent in Germany – from the point of view of the Western intelligence agencies because they don’t want any snoopers looking at who hired who to do what, and at what price.

This gives us a dissymmetric history of twentieth century Europe – as well as all the other continents.

Alas, the motivated gullibility of historians and the enormous gaps in the political history of, for instance, all the countries of Europe has persisted even now, thirty years after the end of the Cold War.  

There's no there, there - some thoughts about substitution

 

Anyone who reads continental philosophy or the philosophical essayists will soon be impressed by the almost obsessive mooning over the concept of absence.

This has no parallel in Anglophone philosophy – absence is at most treated as a simple description of a physical phenomenon. Jack doesn’t show up for the exam – he is absent. There is nothing here for the analytics (or post-analytics) to get moony about, or so they say.

Nevertheless, there is something strange about the absence of absence in Anglophone philosophy. The unexamined master-trope of that philosophy is substitution. Surely it if were examined, understanding substitution should encourage us to look at absence more closely.

Substitution implies that a place is preserved – in logical or physical or social space – that is filled with one or another variable. In a sense, the presence of the variable isn’t total, since it isn’t identical to the place. One can find another variable to put in that place.

The latest metaphor in the analytic tradition to designate this is “candidate”. A candidate – whether as an explanation or as a particular – is always being considered as the solution to some problem. Whether it is materialist accounts of cognitive states, theories of the reduction of the biological to the physical, etc., etc., the papers I edit in philosophy are built upon comparing one ‘candidate’ with another.

Although analytic philosophers go about closely peering at language with the fervor of a myopic seamstress threading a needle, they are curiously indifferent to their own use of language – so I have not read any account of how suddenly the candidate metaphor appeared in all the right journals. It is easy to see, though, that it is a metaphor that tells us something about how absence is thought of here. The implication is that the “place” where substitution takes or can take place is like an office. It is a position created by a political system. The politics may only be bureaucratic – it may be a position in a firm, in which the candidates compete against each other without seeing each other, before a hiring person or board. Or it may be a political system in which they compete against each other consciously, before a voting constituency. The main thing is that the competition is about filling the position. The binary in place is between the filled place and the empty place – or potentially empty place. These are pre-eminently relative states – the dialectic between them is deflected onto the system which determines them, and which has the power to simply get rid of the place – or multiply it.

The metaphysics of substitution writ large would tell us a great deal about the anthropology of  the capitalist era – or perhaps I should say industrialist era, by which I mean the era marked by the fact that the treadmill of production achieved a velocity that allowed societies to escape from the Malthusian trap. This was a perilous escape, indeed. If the notion of substitution – the notion that ultimately place is a placeholder, forever and ever – had not been so woven into the thought of the populace, it might never have happened. I believe that this weaving was achieved by literacy itself, or perhaps, a more modest claim, that the spread of literacy was the pre-condition to loosening the peasant grasp on the unique and the eternal – of the possession of land, of the relations between members of the family, of the relations between men in the polity, of the relation of the created to the creator. That chain of being, which was a chain indeed, the heaviest chain, was lifted, gradually, by the notion that all relations are between placeholders, rather than places. Place itself is nowhere. There’s no there, there, is the motto of capitalism, forever. Actually, I should say: it is the motto of all contenders for political-economic dominance in the modern era. Although, to appease the peasant spirit that inhabits all of us, this dissolution has been amply camouflaged.

To continue this thought: As every amateur of economics knows, given the usual fictions of perfect markets with zero transaction costs, there would be no need for money. Thus, the hired, petty visionaries of the capitalist system have devised a model of that system that does not distinguish money from barter – a most embarrassing situation.

Whether Marx did any better is a much disputed question. Keynes, on the other hand, does seem to have grasped the nature of money more fully than others. In the General Theory, he wrote that “the second differentia of money is that it has an elasticity of substitution equal, or nearly equal, to zero; which means that as the exchange value of money rises, there is no tendency to substitute some other factor for it; - except, perhaps, to some trifling extent, where the money-commodity is also used in manufacture or the arts. This follows from the peculiarity of money that is utility is solely derived from its exchange value, to that the two rise and fall pari passu, with the result that as the exchange value of money rises there is no motive or tendency, as in the case of rent-factors, to substitute some other factor for it.”

What this brilliantly points to is that money is the socially materialized form of the principle of substitution itself, and in this way, the money system does compete against the barter system. The latter, of course, is far from a primitive form of the economy – it is, in fact, in millionfold daily use in the U.S.A. Whenever a man says to a woman, I went to see x film with you, now you have to watch x tv show with me; whenever a child says to another child, I gave you half of my M and Ms, now you have to let me play with your game; etc., the barter system is alive and well. It is an adhoc system of socialization, and it is certainly as important as money. The competition between the money system and the barter system also goes on a millionfold daily. At a certain point, one ‘feels’ the threat of the money system to our identifying social acts of barter, which is why such rule of thumb adages about not loaning money to relatives and the like float on our breaths.

But more to my present purpose – the advent of the money system as one in which the substitution principle enters as the unsubstitutable moment was felt to have something alchemical or uncanny about it. This is captured in Faust the second part. And it was also a significant dimension in the discourse about Freedom that became so important in the eighteenth and nineteenth century. On the negative side, there is no substitute – no alternative – to the principle of subsitution. On the positive side, this frees us from the bondage of the various, infinite and intimate forms of the barter system. Simmel, in the Philosophy of Money, makes a crucial distinction between “freedom from” and “freedom to”. He uses the example of a schoolboy who, graduating from the gymnasium, steps into the freedom of his college days – a freedom that is “quite empty and almost unbearable” – and so quickly throws himself into other activities, for instance student organizations, that enforce a whole new set of rules of behavior upon him – in contrast to a businessman, who works to receive freedom from a regulation because, once that regulation is dissolved, he can expand his business in a certain way – the “freedom to” is defined by expectations that will concretely materialize upon the moment of ‘liberation”, while the ‘freedom from” is defined by the lack of any clear expectation beyond the point of liberation.

“In brief, every act of liberation shows a specific proportion between the emphasis and extension of the overcome circumstance and that of the one gained.”

Introducing the principle of substitution as the universal rule of the economic sphere does create freedom from, but – as Simmel points out – it also creates a certain alienation - our modern sadness, from which we cannot get away. There's no substitute for substitution - and thus we are cracked a little. The other name for substitution when it is dominant is: the death drive. 

 

RIP Janet Malcolm

 Janet Malcolm - one of the four angels of the 70s and 80s, with Joan Didion, Renata Adler and Elizabeth Hardwick - is dead. Damn. One of the few essayists who I read on name only - if it was by Malcolm, I read it. The NYT remembers her for the line about how journalist's practice an immoral profession - that burns them up. Of course, in the age of neoliberal BigMedia, we see them more as minions of the billionaires. Still, we can honor her as being the founder of modern cancel culture. From the beginnning, the the big male poobah - in this case, Joe McGuiness - never got cancelled. The poobahs piped us into every neoliberal disaster, every foreign policy cul de sac, every moral panic, and they keep going.

But I didn't read her for her moral judgements so much as her unobtrusive, fascinating style - her rare ability to make the question into a narrative. God bless her.

This - this is is just greatness. I didn't always agree with Malcolm's conclusions, but I always concurred  with her ambiguities. 

When I did interviews for Publishers Weekly - and a few other places - I quickly found that the tape recorded transcript was rather like the overt level of the dream in Freud's theory. Although, unlike Freud, I was not aiming at the sublinguistic generalities of the latent level. Rather, I was looking for the mid-level, in which contextual clues are inobtrusively injected for the reader's comprehension. That's why I grew pretty discouraged with tape recording. Much better to scribble your pickup from the source on a sheet of paper. Your pickup was the story. Phone interviews I always found particularly difficult, because the pickup involved an embodied person, not just a voice. The most sinister interviewee I ever encountered, via phone, was Edward Teller, the Dr. Frankenstein who "invented" the hydrogen bomb. But I couldn't insert the sinisterness of his voice, couched in my ear, because it was a matter of vocables as much as signifiers. Anyway, wholeheartedly endorse this part of the essay: "The transcript is not a finished version, but a kind of rough draft of expression. As everyone who has studied transcripts of tape-recorded speech knows, we all seem to be extremely reluctant to come right out and say what we mean—thus the bizarre syntax, the hesitations, the circumlocutions, the repetitions, the contradictions, the lacunae in almost every non-sentence we speak.

The tape recorder has opened up a sort of underwater world of linguistic phenomena whose Cousteaus are as yet unknown to the general public. (A fascinating early contribution to this field of research is a paper forbiddingly entitled “Countertransference Examples of the Syntactic Expression of Warded-Off Contents” by Hartwig Dahl, Virginia Teller, Donald Moss, and Manuel Truhillo [Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 1978], which analyzes the verbatim speech of a psychoanalyst during a session and shows its strange syntax to be a form of covert bullying of the patient.) But this world is not the world of journalistic discourse."