Arendt on Racism

Following yet another mass shooting in the United States, @DanielTorday quotes Hannah Arendt on the purpose of racism.

Hannah Arendt: “Racism has proved to be the the most ingenious device for preparing civil war that has ever been invented.”

Racism is not a mental illness.
Racism is a long-developed plan to destroy a culture from within. pic.twitter.com/FyZ6IXfcoG

— Daniel Torday (@DanielTorday) May 15, 2022

Arendt's legacy on the question of racism is complex and disputed, and there is much commentary on a controversial article she wrote in 1959, criticising some of the measures enacted by the Eisenhower administration to protect black students attending a white school in Little Rock, Arkensas, and affirming the right of white parents to send their children to all-white schools.

However, if we can overlook her naive and wrong-headed opinions about American racism, there is still a valid question about what kinds of anti-racist measures might be most effective in defusing the situation and reducing the risk of civil war. While I completely reject the argument that the victims of oppression should be encouraged to keep their heads down and avoid provoking their oppressors, there is still an important question about how best to achieve and maintain racial justice and social harmony, and how to challenge racist rhetoric without causing its supporters to double-down.

Meanwhile this is how news media presents the perpetrator of the Buffalo shooting. 

Noting that in AP copy, 18-year-old Michael Brown was an “18-year old Black man,” while 18-year-old Payton Gendron is a “white teenager.” pic.twitter.com/53Jt1vWuqf

— Dr. Thrasher (@thrasherxy) May 15, 2022

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Hannah Arendt, Reflections on Little Rock (Dissent, 1959)

Connor Grubaugh, Hannah Arendt on Anti-Racism as a Totalitarian Ideology (Tablet, 18 November 2021)

Edward Helmore, It was by design: Black residents try to come to terms with horror of shooting (Guardian, 15 May 2022)

Julian Honkasalo, Hannah Arendt on the origins and consequences of ideological racism (Kone Foundation, 16 March 2017)

Kevin Miles, Anti-Black Racism in Arendt, and Philosophy’s Dangerous Commitment to Purity (APA Blog, 7 July 2016)

David Smith, Little Rock Nine: the day young students shattered racial segregation (Guardian, 24 September 2017)

Jason Stanley, Buffalo shooting: how white replacement theory keeps inspiring mass murder (Guardian, 15 May 2022)

Lynne Tirrell, Words matter. Trump bears a responsibility for El Paso (Guardian, 10 August 2019)

Michael Tomasky, The Buffalo Shooting Is the Latest White Rage Backlash, Brought to You by the GOP (New Republic, 16 May 2022)

POSIWID - The Acronym

POSIWID stands for Purpose Of System Is What It Does

Although the phrase is associated with Stafford Beer, credit for the acronym is claimed by the engineer Bill Livingston.

I heard Stafford give a speech in Orlando in 1986 where he used 'The purpose of a system is what it does'. Using the concept so much I found the phrase ungainly I came up with POSIWID as a code word. In 1993 when I went to see Stafford in Toronto, I presented him with a pen I had engraved with POSIWID. He sort of chuckled and that was the end of it.

POSIWID is always used as an absolute. That is, no assignations about purpose are invented. What it does is, by definition, its purpose. I have never encountered a disconfirming example, nor have any of the thousands that have adopted the concept. Of course, it all started with Ashby. Bill Livingstone

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Following my post yesterday on Some Key Features of POSIWID, I received some suggested variations on the acronym.

The simplicity of the phrase belies its depth acknowledging that a system can't have a purpose, as that would allude to object intention. So more like: function of a system is what it does, or...

Purpose Of A System Is The Effect Detected #POSITED

...by whoever looks for it 🤓

— ComplexWales 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿💙 (@ComplexWales) April 24, 2022

Beer should have answered his own question and added three more letters to this already long acronym: #FTS (For The System).
An observer can ask:
1⃣ - What is this system doing for me?
2⃣ - What can I do for this system?
3⃣ - What is this system doing for that system?

— The Kihbernetics Institute (@Kihbernetics) April 24, 2022

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William Livingston, Have Fun At Work (FES 1988). Review by James R Fisher (September 2006)

Some Key Features of POSIWID

The Plurality of POSIWID

A system doesn't necessarily have a single purpose, and different observers may detect different purposes. Or even different systems.

POSIWID should be plural (January 2010) - with thanks to Chris Bird

Constructing POSIWID (April 2022) - with thanks to Harish Jose

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What You Measure Is What You Get - WYMIWYG

Label: Target-Setting

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Inertia

Large organizations have strong feedback loops that maintain and restore the status quo against the most forceful and ingenious interventions.

Enterprise POSIWID (March 2012)

Corporate Grind (November 2014) 

And is the Aim of Human Society (September 2021) to maintain its equilibrium?

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Conspiracy

POSIWID appears to encourage the creation of conspiracy theories - looking for the hidden agenda that will explain actions - especially when the official story doesn't seem to add up.

But it is one thing to search open-mindedly for a hidden agenda, and another thing entirely to presume its existence without evidence. Sometimes it is not conspiracy theory but chaos (cock-up) theory that best explains some complex series of events.

Label: Conspiracy

Sometimes a dreadful event is so politically convenient for certain parties or interest groups that they may be accused (by their opponents or by conspiracy theorists) of having engineered the event themselves. 

See Visible Problems (June 2010), The Value of Chaos (December 2021)

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Invisible Hand

Economists and Marxists may regard the whole sociopolitical system as having a higher purpose, beyond the control of individual actors.

Are Markets Tools? (January 2012), Culture War - What is it Good For? (July 2021)

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Determinism

Biological determinism (e.g. evolutionary biology). As I see it, one of the main problems of evolutionary biology is that for any plausible hypothesis, one can invent any number of equally plausible alternatives. Explaining Bodies (February 2013)

Technological determinism (December 2020)

Labels: Determinism, Indeterminacy

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Delayed reaction

Sometimes it takes a while for another purpose of a complex system to emerge.

Example: Walter Wolfgang Returns (August 2006)
 

Or perhaps purposes are tacked on afterwards (October 2006)

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Absence of purpose

Absence-of-purpose at one level may be sustained by a deeper purpose. POSIWID helps us to search for a purpose, but doesn't reveal what kind of purpose we might find.

Example: Pact with the Devil (June 2006)

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Whole system

There is an interesting relationship between the purpose (effect) of the individual and the purpose (effect) of the system. We cannot infer a strong purpose for an individual based on a very low probability effect. But the aggregate effect of the whole population may have a reasonably high probability.

See Purpose and Probability (September 2005)

There are also interesting questions about the purpose of diversity, which can only be addressed relative to the whole system.

Label: Diversity

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Reframing purpose

From failure to success, from stalemate to victory - see Political Theatre (May 2012), Culture War - What is it Good For? (July 2021)

Label: Framing

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Symmetrical POSIWID

For gardeners, the worm's purpose is to chew up grass cuttings and vegetable peelings and torn-up cardboard and produce compost.

For worms, the main purpose of the gardener is to provide a regular supply of grass cuttings and vegetable peelings and torn-up cardboard.

So there is a pleasing symmetry between the purpose of the gardener and the purpose of the worm. For religious folk, both the worm and the gardener are fulfilling God's purpose.

The Mirror of POSIWID (July 2008)

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Identity versus viability

The primary purpose (POSIWID) of closed systems is to maintain their identity, and to resist all challenges to this identity. However, in complex dynamic environemnts, viability often requires responding creatively to change. Identity is therefore often in conflict with viability.

Example: Tribal Identity (October 2005)

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Simplicity and complexity

If things seem unnecessarily complicated, this may be the result of some conscious or unconscious motive. Gagan Saxena notes that sometimes bad websites, phone-trees and policies have a dark purpose.

See Badly Designed Websites (August 2010)

Sometimes a corporate bureaucracy appears to be designed to make life difficult for employees and customers; even if such a design is not consciously planned, it may be sustained by the short-term benefits it confers (such as cost-saving or corporate convenience).

See Contradiction and Ambivalence (June 2011), Enterprise POSIWID (March 2012)

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Denial

This is not who we are (September 2021) - yeah, right

What is the purpose of denial, and what does it achieve? For example, climate change denial. When a famous scientist stakes his reputation on denying some widely accepted environmental belief. Is this akin to other forms of denial, such as AIDS denial or Holocaust denial? Given that a given belief is a basis for collective support for a given position, denial appears to have the effect (and therefore the implicit purpose) of undermining this position.

Purpose of Denial (May 2005)

Label: Denial

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Amplification

If you know the effect that your actions are likely to have, and you go ahead anyway, this only makes sense if the alternative is far worse. Or if you imagine you won't get caught. For example, concealing or destroying evidence. POSIWID thinking therefore acts as an amplifier, accentuating the whisper of suspicion into a bawl of accusation.

Example: Erasing the tapes (September 2007)

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Communication and Rhetoric

If a communication has diverse effects, how shall we determine the underlying purpose of the communication? Who is the real audience?

Real Audience (November 2006)

There is also a question as to whether the effects can be attributed to the rhetoric or to something behind the rhetoric.

Scarcity and Poverty (January 2011)

Are the effects of a communication more important than whether it is true or not? (Note Foucault's notion of Fiction Functioning in Truth)

Discourse Wars (June 2020)

And if a communication causes people to be upset or angry, can we assume this was the purpose all along?

Label: Outrage

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Adam Curtis

Finally, let me put in a plug for Adam Curtis, whose documentary films provide a huge wealth of material on this subject. I still need to post something on his latest series.

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See also POSIWID - the Acronym (April 2022)

The Purpose of Shame

Weapons expert @mathbabedotorg Cathy O'Neil is best known for her account of algorithms as weapons (of math destruction). Her new book tackles a related topic, the use of shame as a weapon. 

Many people have written about the psychology and sociology of shame. O'Neil's focus is on how shame is manufactured and mined, how organizations gain commercial and sociopolitical benefit from propagating shame, how individuals are coopted into circuits of shame, and (to quote her subtitle) who profits in the new age of humiliation.

One use of the shame machine is to persuade people to buy products and services. O'Neil describes her own experience being targetted with fat-shaming advertisements. Such advertisements are designed to make people feel ashamed, and to believe that the advertised product will somehow help. She also notes how shame can undermine a person's capacity for rational evaluation, and trigger impulsive actions. 

Shame is also used socially, to reinforce social norms. In some cases this is centrally planned - for example, in China where people are publicly shamed for acts that are officially disapproved, such as jaywalking. In other cases, this can be the result of what O'Neil calls Networked Shame, where people feel empowered to shame strangers, supposedly for their own good. As if pointing out the health risks of obesity to a fat person is somehow being kind and helpful to them.

Immediately following the 2020 US presidential election, Judith Butler noted how Trump and his supporters saw the left as a shame machine.

Shame occupied a permanent and necessary place in the Trumpian scenario insofar as it was externalized and lodged in the left: the left seek to shame you for your guns, your racism, your sexual assault, your xenophobia! The excited fantasy of his supporters was that, with Trump, shame could be overcome.

Of course shame was not really overcome, it was merely redirected onto others, using a version of the Shame Machine that Geoff Shullenberger calls the Scapegoating Machine, tracing back to René Girard. (O'Neil also references Girard.)

So shaming the Other becomes a political tool. Making people feel ashamed that they need help is a lot cheaper and more convenient than actually helping them, so politicians make unfortunate circumstances shameful (addiction, homelessness, single parenthood, etc) as a way of signalling that people in such circumstances don't deserve our help. And by creating a sense of Us and Them, it reinforces loyalty to populist politicians. Shullenberger credits Peter Thiel, a former student of Girard, for helping to plan Trump's successful 2016 campaign, and notes that like the social media platforms on which it has thrived, Trumpism channels violence mainly toward victims it wishes to marginalize.

While there is nothing new about public humiliation and scapegoating, the Internet and social media clearly provide new affordance to those wishing to shame others. Is that merely an unfortunate side-effect of an otherwise beneficial and beneficent technology? Not surprisingly, O'Neil doesn't think so.

Digital titans, led by Facebook and Google, not only profit from shame events but are engineered to exploit and diffuse them. In their massive research labs, mathematicians work closely with psychologists and anthropologists, using our behavioral data to train their machines. Their objective is to spur customer participation and to mine advertising gold. When it comes to this type of intense engagement, shame is one of the most potent motivators. ... It spurs traffic and boosts revenue.

One possible remedy, suggests O'Neil, is to redirect shame back towards the powerful, or what she calls punching up. She notes how Google could itself be shamed, for example in relation to its treatment of Timnit Gebru, and notes at least the possibility of what she calls healthy shame. She ends, not with a plan to end all shame, but with some recommendations for detoxifying shame.

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Judith Butler, Is the show finally over for Donald Trump? (The Guardian, 5 November 2020)

Cathy O'Neil, Weapons of Math Destruction (New York: Crown, 2016)

Cathy O'Neil, The Shame Machine (New York: Crown, 2022)

Geoff Shullenberger, Mimesis, Violence, and Facebook: Peter Thiel’s French Connection (Cyborgology, 13 August 2016) The Scapegoating Machine (The New Inquiry, 30 November 2016)

Related posts: Weapons of Math Destruction (October 2016), Ethical Communication in a Digital Age (November 2018), Dark Data and the US Election (November 2020)

The Lipstick Effect

In November 2001, writing in the Wall Street Journal, Emily Nelson noted a correlation between economic downturn and lipstick sales.

Lipstick sales are red hot. So why is no one smiling? The reason is that women traditionally turn to lipstick when they cutback on life's other luxuries. They see lipstick, which sells for as little as $1.99 at a supermarket to $20-plus at a department store, as a reasonable indulgence and pick-me-up when they feel they can't afford a whole new outfit. "When lipstick sales go up, people don't want to buy dresses," says Leonard Lauder, chairman of EstéeLauder Cos.

Psychologists may think this has something to do with sex, arguing that the only reason women wear lipstick is to get laid. For example, Hill et all argue that "conditions of economic resource scarcity should prompt individuals to increase effort directed toward attracting mates, particularly for women".  

Meanwhile, management scientists think it may have something to do with work, because of course women will wish to create a favorable impression of themselves in the workplace. For example, Netchaeva and Rees argue that "women with high economic concern elect to improve their professional appearance more frequently than their romantic attractiveness".

Both of these explanations see lipstick in instrumental terms, as a means to an end. Whereas economists may see lipstick simply as a consumer product, whose purpose may be as much to enhance the mood of the woman herself as to enhance the way she is treated by other people. As Elliot notes, "rather than lose the spending habit consumers simply trade down to cheaper items to cheer themselves up".  And Murgea notes how quickly the lipstick can change the person's image, therefore serving as a rapid mood enhancer.

What exactly is the consumer behaviour that economists (and cosmetic executives) are interested in? Zurawski notes that when shoppers stop buying high-end luxury, "a well-documented side effect is the tendency to compensate by buying more high-end versions of lower-priced items".

If a relatively expensive lipstick is still cheaper than even a relatively cheap pair of shoes, then switching from one product to another may be a clue that the two products perform a similar function for the purchaser. Economists call this substitution.

So what exactly is the purpose of the lipstick? Is it to enhance the body image? Or is it to enhance what philosophers call the body without image?

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Larry Elliott, Into the red: 'lipstick effect' reveals the true face of the recession (Guardian 22 December 2008)

Mike Featherstone, Body Image / Body Without Image (Theory, Culture and Society, 23/2-3, 2006)

Sarah E Hill et al, Boosting Beauty in an Economic Decline: Mating, Spending, and the Lipstick Effect (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 2012, Vol. 103, No. 2, 275–291)

Aurora Murgea, Lipstick Effect in Romania (Annales Universitatis Apulensis Series Oeconomica, 14(2), 2012)

Emily Nelson, Rising Lipstick Sales May Mean Pouting Economy and Few Smiles (Wall Street Journal, 26 November 2001). See also John J Xenakis, Is the Lipstick Debate a Sign of the Times? (Web Log, 11 September 2008)

Ekaterina Netchaeva and McKenzie Rees, Strategically Stunning: The Professional Motivations Behind the Lipstick Effect (Psychological Science, Vol. 27, No. 8, AUGUST 2016, pp. 1157-1168)

Lu Zurawski, The Lipstick Effect And The Epidemiology Of Payments (Forbes, 16 May 2020)

Related post: Playboy models and economic crisis (October 2008)

The Value of Chaos

In a recent article on Vladimir Putin, continuing a line of argument to be found in his 2018 book, Bruno Maçães summarized something Joseph Brodsky wrote in 1990 about the relationship between power and chaos, particularly in relation to Russia.

What Brodsky identified was the connection between power and chaos, Since power needs the presence of chaos as a source of legitimacy, then chaos itself is legitimised and may even be celebrated. ... Brodsky recognised that power and chaos feed each other and grow together. Power is born from the act of bringing order to chaos. If there is no chaos then power itself must be used to create it. ... Chaos is never completely pacified, It continues to exist beneath the veneer of civilisation and the role of the sovereign consists in its management, so that it does not erupt to the surface.

Accusations of this kind have been directed at different regimes at different times, with varying degrees of justice. Paul Robinson, a professor at the University of Ottawa, disputes the relevance of this model to President Putin, and suggests that the model might be more relevant to Western foreign policy instead.

Two entirely different narratives, with entirely different things labelled as chaos, and different notions of Putin's responsibility for anything. So before we can ask who benefits from chaos in a given situation, we have to ask what even counts as chaos.

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Bruno Maçães, The Dawn of Eurasia: On the trail of the New World Order (Penguin 2018)

Bruno Maçães, Agent of Chaos (New Statesman, 24 November 2021). 

Paul Robinson, Putin mentions Gandhi: proof he loves Hitler! (29 November 2021)

Related posts Don't Waste a Crisis (November 2008), Political Theatre (May 2012 updated January 2013), Culture War (July 2021)

The Use of Popularity

In November 1968, the Beatles released their ninth studio album, known as the White Album. Alongside an assortment of different musical items and styles, it included a piece of musique concrète entitled Revolution 9, inspired by Karlheinz Stockhausen, and largely put together by John Lennon, George Harrison and Yoko Ono.

Critics and fans have been divided on this track ever since. Many fans regard it as the worst track the Beatles ever made. Following a line of enquiry that can be traced back to a remark by George Martin himself, the vlogger David Bennett recently suggested pruning the White Album, dropping most of the more experimental tracks including Revolution 9, and retaining only the more aesthetically pleasing ones.

But what is the point of being the most popular band in the world, if you merely pander to conventional expectations and production values?

Fifteen years later, the Police released the Synchronicity album, containing another track that divided critics and fans - Mother, written and sung by Andy Summers. A range of critical opinions can be found on this archive page http://www.thepolice.com/discography/album/synchronicity-23441

• quite out of context (Henry Everingham, Sidney Morning Herald)
• revelation ... part-spoof, part-manic (Robin Denselow, The Guardian)
• wild card (People)
• foolish Psycho scenario set to obvious programmatic music (Richard Cook, NME)
• Guitarist Andy Summers' corrosively funny 'Mother' inverts John Lennon's romantic maternal attachment into a grim dadaist joke (Stephen Holden, Rolling Stone)
• spritely 7/4 timing (Adam Sweeting, Melody Maker)
• novelty song (Richard C Walls, Creem)
• blast of pure primal scream in 7/4 time, the sarcastic cut of his Freudian recitation intensified by a brute rhythm attack recalling Robert Fripp's experiments with spoken words and white rock noise on 'Exposure' (David Fricke, Musician)
  

 

Until the mid 1960s, pop albums were merely collections of songs from the same artist in a similar style, often including songs that were not good or commercial enough to be released as singles. Then some groups started to produce so-called concept albums: Pet Sounds (Beach Boys), Freak Out (Mothers of Invention) and Face to Face (Kinks) all appeared in 1966, and Sgt Pepper (Beatles) followed in 1967. Labelling something as a concept album implied that the album needed to be experienced and evaluated as a whole rather than as a random collection of songs. The best-known examples of concept albums are from groups that were already popular, which obviously helped to build an audience for something unexpected. And Revolution 9 was certainly that.

The ways that people consume music have changed several times since then. Once upon a time, people used to curate collections of their favourite songs onto cassette tapes, for themselves or their friends. Then other devices emerged, such as the iPod and its successors, allowing people to listen to their playlists in an apparently random sequence. Nowadays, most people consume music via downloads or streaming services such as iTunes or Spotify.

Perhaps tracks like Revolution 9 or Mother may not appear on many popular playlists. But that's not going to worry extremely popular bands like the Beatles or the Police. It's not just that they can afford to have a few unpopular tracks, it's that the demands of creativity and innovation produces tracks that their fans don't always love.

Hopefully it's not only these groups that can afford to take these creative risks, or to take a stand against what Adorno called Atomized Listening. Dorian Lynskey argues that the concept album is back. Threatened with redundancy in the digital era, albums have fought back by becoming more album-like. And as Adorno said in praise of Beethoven, serious music achieves excellence when its whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

Meanwhile the curious thing about both Sgt Pepper and the White Album is that nobody was quite sure what the concepts were. Perhaps this is what enables David Bennett to apply his own concept?

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Theodor Adorno, Political Protest and Popular Music (3sat 1968). Video available on archive.org and YouTube. See also commentary by Josh Jones, Theodor Adorno’s Radical Critique of Joan Baez and the Music of the Vietnam War Protest Movement (Open Culture, 3 December 2014)

Theodor Adorno and Peter von Haselberg, On the historical adequacy of consciousness (Akzente 1965, Telos 1983). See below for extract, taken from Stefan Müller-Doohm, Adorno: A Biography (Polity 2005) p 420

Mark Athitakis, A Beatles Reflection: What the White Album says about us (HUMANITIES 34/5, September/October 2013)

David Bennett, Should The White Album have not been a double album? (YouTube, 25 November 2021)

Georgie Born, Listening, Mediation, Event (Journal of the Royal Musical Assocation, 135/1, 2010)

Dorian Lynskey, Why everyone from Beyonce to Daft Punk is releasing a concept album (GQ 13 July 2015)

Related post Shuffle (June 2005)