Banking as Conceptual Art

From the life-imitating-art department

The BBC is currently running a dramatization of Little Dorrit, which contains perhaps the most vile portrayal in literature of a corrupt and corrupting banker: Mr Merdle. News arrives from America of an outrageous fraud by a modern Mr Merdle: one Bernard Madoff who (as it now turns out) had been running his hedge fund as some kind of Ponzi scheme [BBC News, 16 December 2008].

Emperor's new clothes

Born into a wealthy Japanese banking family, Yoko Ono moved to New York to become a conceptual artist, with the help of LeMonte Young and John Cage. In one of her best-known early performances, she sat on a stage while members of the audience cut away pieces of her clothing until she was naked. This can be seen as a prophetic metaphor for the current banking crisis.

Use your illusions

In an article for the London Review of Books (November 2008), Slavoj Žižek compares the perceived urgency of the banking crisis with the talk-and-no-trousers of our dear leaders in the face of other crises (saving endangered species, saving the planet from global warming, finding a cure for Aids, saving the starving children, . . .)

"The sublimely enormous sum of money was spent not for some clear ‘real’ task, but in order to ‘restore confidence’ in the markets – i.e. for reasons of belief. Do we need any more proof that Capital is the Real of our lives, the Real whose demands are more absolute than even the most pressing demands of our social and natural reality?"

When Žižek talks about the Real, he presumably uses this term in the Lacanian sense. [See Slavoj Žižek Key Ideas. For further comment see Jodi Dean. and Long Sunday.]


Spending all that money as a symbolic act, in order to prop up some non-existent wealth? I am sure Lacan says something somewhere about the ritual destruction of assets. Is that what they call a potlatch?

Political Double Acts

Tony Blair and Gordon Brown dominated British politics for ten years. Two contrasting personalities, once apparently friends and allies, but long divided (at least in the popular imagination) by bitter arguments.

In my post on Political Friendship I wrote

"One of the constant topics of those watching the UK Labour Government over the past ten years has been the state of the personal relationship between Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. As if the well-being of the nation depended not just on the ability and determination of the two men, but also their friendship. The collective fantasy that the government - indeed the entire nation - would collapse if these two men were unable to sustain their supposedly fragile alliance - has merely reinforced their power."

Often repeated on British television is a shot in which Tony gives Gordon an ice-cream - "the pleasure food par excellence" (Menzies Lyth).

Following the disappearance of Tony Blair, the fantasies of the British people towards Gordon Brown have turned to disappointment. Perhaps Gordon Brown needs a new partner, a running mate, but it now seems too late for him to appoint one.

Meanwhile, what are we to make of the running mates chosen by John McCain and Barack Obama? What exactly is the purpose of the running mate in the American system?

That's not the same as asking about the role of the Vice President. The official purpose of the Vice President is to take over if the President gets shot or impeached. But most Vice Presidents haven’t actually done very much while in office – just played a lot of golf, waited for the phone to ring and planned their own bid for the top job.

While Bill Clinton was president, it sometimes seemed like Hillary Clinton was as powerful as Al Gore – another de facto Vice President. Now she too has had an unsuccessful bid for the presidency. In contrast to the usual pattern, Dick Cheney was so powerful he had a running mate of his own, namely Donald Rumsfeld.

Historians are unsure whether JFK really wanted LBJ as running mate (to help carry the Southern States), or whether he was on the wrong end of a party deal. LBJ was given no meaningful responsibilities as Vice President; then JFK visited LBJ's home state one fateful afternoon, and the rest is conspiracy theory.

Vice Presidents are rarely popular in their own right. After all, the president (or presidential candidate) certainly doesn't want to be upstaged. But on the other hand, the running mate has to be popular enough to bring in extra votes. So what is the logic of choosing a running mate?

Obama, who was running as a glamorous outsider, has chosen a boring Washington insider as his running mate. McCain, who was running as an elderly but wise maverick, has chosen a glamorous but inexperienced woman as his running mate. What do these choices mean?

Does having Biden on the ticket (or at least not having That Woman) make Obama seem wiser? Does having Palin on the ticket make McCain seem sexier? You'd have thought that these choices merely exposed the electoral weaknesses of the candidates, rather than compensating for them. But then maybe that's crediting the electorate with rather too much left-brain thinking.

In the real world, associating with Sarah Palin is hardly going to rejuvenate McCain. Even on Republican websites you can find articles such as this one by Steve Chapman, How Palin Subverts McCain. But in the unconscious fantasy world of the American electorate, a rather different story may be unfolding.

If the main purpose of the running mate is to reinforce the credentials of the candidate, then it doesn't seem to make sense to have a running mate who is diametrically Other. Man/Woman. Old/Young, Black/White, Inside/Outside. These choices of running mate only make sense in symbolic terms, or in some irrational dreamworld. (Interestingly, Bush 2 chose another Texan, much like himself but older and more devious. US election rules discourage running mates from the same state, so Cheney had to move his official residence to Wyoming to evade these rules.)

In Sarah Palin: Operation "Castration", Jacques-Alain Miller (Lacan's son-in-law) sees Palin as an archetype of the dominant woman - as the Republican response to the absence of Hillary Clinton from the Democratic ticket. In An Issue That Won't Go Away, Steven Shaviro complains that this misses the specificity of what is happening in this election.

"Palin was (quite brilliantly) chosen by McCain because — like any successful commodity product in the postmodern marketplace — she embodies what Alex Shakar, in his novel The Savage Girl, calls a paradessence: a “paradoxical essence,” a conjunction of contradictory qualities."

So according to Shaviro, Palin was chosen precisely because her persona was so rich with contradiction - and therefore potentially attractive to many different sectors of the electorate. Authentic but inconsistent - this is what Lacan (via Žižek) would call the Discourse of the Hysteric.

Shaviro ends:

"It is probable that, given how gender formations work in America today, so powerful a paradessence would have to appear in the form of a woman, rather than a (heterosexual) man. But the most valid categories for comprehending Palin remain those of media theory and political economy, rather than those of the metaphysics of gender difference."

It is not the metaphysics of gender difference, true. But difference all the same, if not différance.

Footnote

A couple of years ago I read a very detailed article by Joan Didion about the Cheney and Rumsfeld double act. Cheney: The Fatal Touch. (New York Review Volume 53, Number 15 · October 5, 2006). Available online for NYR subscribers or for $3.

Overcoming Bias

Thanks to Alex, I have discovered a thought-provoking blog called Overcoming Bias, hosted by the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University.

There is some excellent material on the blog, highly recommended to any POSIWID reader, but I am puzzled by the official agenda.

"Our minds are full of natural tendencies to bias our beliefs via overconfidence, wishful thinking, and so on. Worse, our minds seem to have a natural tendency to convince us we that are aware of and have adequately corrected for such biases, when we have done no such thing. In this forum we discuss whether and how we might avoid this fate, by spending a bit less effort on each specific topic, and a bit more effort on the general topic of how to be less biased. We discuss common patterns of bias and self-deception, statistical and other formal analysis tools, computational and data-gathering aids, and social institutions which may discourage bias and encourage its correction."

In other words, bias is a Bad Thing, and needs to be Overcome. Attention will be focused not on the causes of bias but on remedies for bias. The agenda is largely written in the first person plural - we start by dealing with our own bias, in accordance with the principle taught by Jesus (Matthew 7:5).

I am minded to regard the emphasis on finding (technical) solutions rather than understanding (systemic) problems as itself a form of intellectual bias. We might observe that the Institute was in part funded by James Martin, a noted technology optimist.

I am also minded to regard the agenda of the blog as promoting what Lacan called the Discourse of the University - disinterested, abstract and apparently disembodied knowledge. (Lacan's critique of this discourse indicates hidden subjectivity in the apparently objective.)

However when I browse the actual content of the blog, I find that the contributors have a tendency to talk about the causes of bias rather than the remedies, and to talk about bias in other people rather than themselves. There's an interesting metaproblem there.

The purpose of the Overcoming Bias blog (or for that matter the POSIWID blog) is not what it says it does, but what it does.

Yadda Yadda Yadda

Over at the Duck of Minerva blog, Rodger is taken to task for saying "Yadda Yadda Yadda" in relation to the downfall of Saddam Hussein and the Iraqi elections.

"Yes, Saddam is gone and brave Iraqis voted to select their new leaders. Yadda yadda yadda. Is the Bush administration serious about American national security -- or not?" [Iraq and 9/11]

"Why not leave the Yaddaing to the Kissinger and Scowcroft types?" [Comment by "a"]

"I was 'yaddaing' the empty repetition of the claimed successes in response now to every criticism of the obvious insecurity created by the Iraq war." [Should progressives be happy about Iraq's successes?]

Rodger and his fellow-bloggers on the Duck of Minerva talk a great deal about framing, but in this post he seems to have neglected to indicate the frame in which his words are to be taken. (Can I mention the Pope again here?)

As he now makes clear, Rodger is accusing the war supporters of empty repetition, repetition of (increasingly) empty words. In Lacanian thought [see note1 below], empty repetition is a kind of obsessive evasion, trying (often unsuccessfully) to conceal what one really thinks or desires.

Many progressives simply don't believe that the purpose of the Iraq invasion and occupation ever really had anything to do with bringing democracy to the Iraqi people. And it is sometimes hard to explain the strategy of the occupying forces in terms of this purpose. Therefore it is tempting to regard this purpose as an imaginary one [see note2 below].

What I think Rodger is saying, therefore, is that the frequent invocation of Iraqi democracy and freedom is not an authentic expression of a deep commitment for the human rights and natural dignity of the Iraqi people.

He may be right, but I am not sure that's the most important thing. The words may be insincere or cynical, but they have a profound effect on the devastated country nonetheless. People are dying every day for this "yadda yadda", so it had better be worth dying for. I'm not optimistic, I don't see a good outcome here, but I really hope I'm wrong.


[Note 1] Lacan's distinction between full speech and empty speech is derived from Heidegger's distinction between Rede (discourse) and Gerede (chatter). "The subject seems to be talking in vain about someone who . . . can never become one with the assumption of his desire." [Source: NoSubject wiki: Speech]

[Note 2] For Lacan, "the imaginary is far from inconsequential; it has powerful effects in the real". [Source: NoSubject wiki: Imaginary]

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Death as POSIWID

Aidan asks whether death can be a POSIWID.

There is a nice ambiguity about the word "end", which can mean either purpose or death/ending. Thus Hegelians (from Marx to Fukuyama) discuss the "end" of capitalism or the "end" of history, and Freudians (including Lacan) talk about the "end" of psychoanalysis.

There are many entities whose ending is in exhaustion and/or structural collapse. A car runs out of fuel and into a tree, and a tree falls down in a high wind. What (if anything) does that tell us about the purpose of the car or the tree?

We can understand the car within a fuel consumption system: the purpose of the car is to consume fuel (with a obvious effect on Middle Eastern politics). We can understand the tree within the political economy of forestry: the purpose of the tree is to create wood for furniture. Obviously there are many other ways of understanding both cars and trees.

Many public figures end their careers in failure and disgrace (because they have no other way to quit), and this makes space for the next generation of public figures. In biology, we can understand death as a purpose only when we pay attention to the genotype rather than the phenotype. This involves shifting the system frame.

Some public figures even seem to hasten towards failure and disgrace, by getting caught behaving in ways that are grossly incompatible with their public persona.

In order to use POSIWID as an explanation for apparently death-seeking behaviour, we are forced to find a system frame in which this makes sense. If large organizations have a death-wish, perhaps this helps to create space and energy for the generation/emergence of small organizations, or different kinds of organization. The widespread existence of the dreadful organizations Aidan describes is a strong motivator for decent managers and consultants, urgently trying to create something better.