Organic Waste Disposal For Rent

September 24th, 2009

Vis-a-vis the “pigs as organic garbage disposal in Cairo” story, I’m starting to see a whole new side to our deranged basset hound. My wife pointed out we could practically keep a blog on the things the dog has eaten that it’s not supposed to eat. (Oh, if only I’d had a bad dog before John Grogan did.)

She has an awesome vile-thing-that-should-not-be-consumed or “delicious human swag that I grabbed from the counter” method, as well, because she’s learned that I or other humans are likely to freak. She sucks it up when no one is looking (she definitely watches to see if we are) and then sticks it in her cheek like a minor league pitcher with a tobacco chaw. If someone notices, down the hatch it goes, otherwise, she takes her time and savors the experience.

My personal tally, directly observed:

Dead mouse.
Dead cicada.
Dead chunk of unknown mammal, carried around proudly for a bit in the front of the mouth until noticed. (Unusual break with technique).
Entire pumpkin bread loaf along with plastic wrapping and part of cardboard container.
Seven ripe tomatoes from the garden kept on kitchen counter.
Her own poop.
Poop of the other dog.
Poop of unknown dogs that visited our yard.
Deer poop.
Rabbit poop.
Raccoon poop.
Sticks of many sizes and tree species.
Rocks. Small ones. So far.
A non-pumpkin loaf of bread.
Cookies.
Flying insects of multiple species.
Grass.
Weeds.
Stuffed animals not given to her as toys.
Other toys of miscellaneous kinds.
Every kind of footwear presently known to the human species.

And the crowning achievement so far? A fairly good-sized chunk of a linoleum floor.

Posted in Domestic Life | 7 Comments »

Simplicity vs. Sustainability

September 24th, 2009

Last week, I was at an event where there was some talk about Swarthmore trying to embrace sustainability and simplicity to a greater degree. Afterwards, I was trying to parse out why those two words provoke really different gut-level reactions in me, why they don’t feel at all synonymous.

There’s a huge literature on sustainability as a concept, so I want to stress that what I’m about to say is more of an emotional reaction than a substantive engagement with that literature. But I associate sustainability with very comprehensive claims about managing the entire input and output of an institution, a household, a personal life. There’s a hubris around sustainability, a kind of aspiration to manage a huge range of decisions against a systematic checklist of criteria, with a global consciousness of action and consequence. Now there’s the very ordinary sense of a sustainable project or enterprise that’s all about how much money or resources are coming in versus how much money or resources are being spent. I don’t have any problem with that kind of discussion, it’s basic for a household or a college or a business or a government. When what’s meant by sustainable is a comprehensive evaluative grid that looks at every activity and involvement in global terms, I at best find that a dizzying bar to set. At worst, I think people end up pushing very strong claims about what is or is not sustainable in that universal sense which aren’t very supportable when you look at the fine print, and then trying to produce a strong institutional constraint to follow the logic of that claim.

Simplicity seems to me a more ad hoc, personal kind of evaluation of any activity. It’s an aesthetic, an attitude, a starting orientation. If somebody says, “Keep it simple”, I tend to think that means (for example) that good enough is the bar you’re aiming for, not perfect. That you avoid ornamentation or fussiness in staging an event, setting a requirement, carrying out a duty. That you avoid excess effort and excess use of resources. Now I grant freely that different people have very different sensibilities about what’s excess and what’s not, but keeping it simple would tend to imply that you just accept that variation and move along. Simplicity is live and let live, it’s not creating elaborate regulations or structures or standards which then need to be recited or enforced at every turn.

Posted in Academia, Consumerism, Advertising, Commodities, Domestic Life, Swarthmore | 5 Comments »

The Microhistorical Unknown

September 24th, 2009

In some forthcoming work, I’ve argued that historians tend to overinterpret or misread silences in archival records, seeing instrumental or intentional erasures of knowledge instead of the incidental accidents or the peculiar character of modern archival culture. I suggest that instead of always seeing silence or absence of information as a crisis to which historians must respond, we should just accept with grace the things we can know and the things we can’t know.

That being said, there’s nothing wrong with being curious about events, places and people that we know must have existed but that we can never know as they should be known. It’s that last point that’s really important. One thing that frustrates me at times about “big history”, world history or large-scale historical sociology is the extent to which historians writing in those traditions tend to assume that it’s turtles all the way down, that the insights of big history extend symmetrically to the smallest scales of human life, that microhistory contains no surprises or contradictions for the macrohistorian.

I’m by no means the only person to argue that a better analogy for the relationship between very small or individual experience and macrohistorical change is the relationship between quantum physics and classical physics. The lives of individuals or single communities in a small span of days or months happens within the same temporal and physical world as the life of the human species over a million years. A single event happens within the same reality as vast patterns of events and actions across centuries. But there is a profound break between the two levels or registers of historical experience, and it’s not just about scale. The microhistorical scale is where we find and interpret the meaning in other human lives, where the peculiarity and idiosyncracy of other people’s experience makes it possible to feel and imagine circumstances and decisions beyond our own individual lives. Microhistory can be causally important, in the “for want of a nail” way, but this isn’t its primary value to us. Macrohistory explains the conditions and circumstances of human societies, but microhistory offers us an endless exploration of the mystery of human circumstance.

So sometimes I find myself thinking about the inevitable, imaginable but unknowable microhistories that live in the in-between spaces of macrohistory. There are so many things that we know have to have happened that must have vividly individual stories buried somewhere in them. Think of all the individuals scattered around the world in the early modern era. Jonathan Spence’s The Question of Hu and Randy Sparks’ The Two Princes of Calabar are two great examples of these kinds of stories, but there are so many more that I’d love to know equally well. All those people lost or deliberately debarked, learning new languages and ways of live while living alone in a completely foreign society. Little forts and outposts built at the orders of mercurial or dictatorial officials and ship captains, abandoned or destroyed almost immediately after. Accidental battles and serendipitious feasts out of sight and unremarked upon. Conversations about how to grow yams and corn, sudden impulses to take a new plant on board a ship and bring it somewhere else.

A really skilled narrative historian gets a hold of a vivid, individualized story that rests on deep evidentiary foundations, on documents of many kinds and photographs and interviews, and you see just how important the details and idiosyncracies of human life can be, how much feeling and intensity we’d miss if all we had was the big story, told in the biggest terms possible. The skill of that kind of microhistory isn’t just in explaining everything: the meaning we draw from history on the smallest scales is partly that even when we know almost everything that can be known, there is so much that we don’t know, that the ends of microhistory are wisdom rather than a comprehensive theory of causation across time and space. Somehow I think that should temper the confidence of macrohistory even when we can’t speak to all the stories that we don’t and won’t ever know anything about.

Posted in Academia, Production of History | 5 Comments »

Coming Soon!

September 24th, 2009

Sorry, busy week last week and then I’ve had a cold for three days that’s left my head feeling pretty much stuffed with cotton. I have a bunch of entries being finished up: watch this space!

Posted in Uncategorized | No Comments »

Pricing the Priceless Class

September 11th, 2009

One of the hardest things about managing budgetary contraction in colleges and universities will be the differing ways that academics talk about what they value in a curriculum.

We believe that the cost of curricular programs and institutional projects has to be evaluated by different criteria depending on what kind of program or commitment we’re talking about, that value is sometimes intangible and sometimes concrete.

I think every academic I know agrees that in the last instance, how much it costs to teach in a particular way or to maintain a curriculum of a particular design matters. No one is so ethereal that they reject in principle all discussion of the budgetary implications of curricular decisions. Equally, no one is so focused on finances that they think questions of intangible value are irrelevant. A purely budget-driven curriculum would be entirely consumer-oriented: you’d just move resources around to where the enrollments clustered most heavily, without trying to exercise any judgment about what students ought to learn or need to learn. The moment you set a requirement, structure a major or lay out a curriculum by criteria that are independent of what gets you the most paying matriculants for the least institutional expenditure, you’re driven by values that aren’t purely subject to budget. (Hence, “non-profit institution”.)

I wouldn’t ever hope that a diverse group of institutional actors could come to a strong consensus about these competing visions of value. We shouldn’t want to be rescued from disagreement by hammering out a fixed rubric or single logic, because these are necessarily debatable and mutable premises for investing resources in one program or direction rather than another. On the other hand, money doesn’t exist in quantum superposition, allocated to all possible states: if you have to cut (or even grow), you have to cut something, and it’s better to do it for a concrete reason that arises out of community deliberation than on random whim or first-past-the-post cutthroat competition.

I think the possibility of contraction is easier to deal with fairly if most of the people involved in deliberation over curricular resources can keep a couple of general principles in view, most of which I think should hold even if an institution is financially healthy or planning for growth.

1) At least at small liberal-arts colleges, to the extent that it’s possible, you want faculty to partially disentangle their sense of self-worth from their sense of the importance of their discipline. At a large institution where specialization is the main principle driving the distribution of resources, it’s possible that some faculty are valued primarily for their ability to represent a specialized field within a specialized discipline, that they are their specialization. At a smaller, less-specialized undergraduate institution, most faculty deliver their primary value through the range and vigor of their individual teaching and other interaction with students. You can always hope to replace someone who is a great teacher with a great teacher, but styles and emphasis of teaching differ a lot, so you’ll also always have a change in the mood and atmosphere of the curriculum as a new teacher comes into the faculty as a replacement. Every individual wants to know that they are valued by their institution. When that sense of individual self-worth becomes powerfully submerged into a discipline or specialization, it is understandably impossible for folks to participate in conversations about shifting the emphasis in a curriculum without seeing that as a negative judgment on them as individuals. There is only so far you can go with disentangling the two: the animating passion I bring into the classroom has to draw in part on a belief that the subjects I’m teaching are important and the disciplinary tools I’m teaching are indispensible. A professor who cared about the curriculum only because he or she had a very high opinion of himself or herself wouldn’t be any better for shaping the institutional future than a person who believed that any change in their discipline’s share of the curricular market was a mortal insult.

2) Every curricular stakeholder needs to have a rolling, constantly re-considered answer to the following questions: if your pedagogy is expensive, does it have to be expensive? is it expensive because that returns proportionately better learning outcomes, or because it preserves some intangible but vital tradition of practice, a vision of craftwork? Again, it seems to me that those are questions worth answering even if the institution is rolling in money, for two reasons. First, because sometimes faculty settle on a pedagogy or curricular structure which turns out to be expensive relative to that of other departments or units without being aware that it is more expensive. Second, because asking these questions forces departments to be clear about why a disproportionately expensive practice is important.

3) Following on point 2), if cost considerations have assumed a new importance, it’s important for stakeholders in the curriculum to fish or cut bait on the reasons why they think resources should be committed to particular ends. If it’s important to teach particular subjects in particular ways, then decide why it’s important and stick to that. It’s ok to have multiple reasons why a particular curricular commitment is urgent, but not if some of those reasons are incommensurable with one another. If you claim in one context that a subject area or discipline is important because of its practical, utilitarian skill-based benefits to graduates seeking jobs in the real-world economy, then that ought to constrain your ability to argue that the same subject is important because of its intangible, impossible-to-pin-down ability to enrich the human spirit, or important because it preserves the traditions of academic institutions in Western societies. Those three things (and other rationales) can all be true, but they can’t be equally true, or true in the same way. If a subject is important because it delivers highly concrete skills that have measurable value on the contemporary labor market for college graduates, then that importance is mutable as the needs of the market change. If one makes a conservationist argument for the preservation of a subject’s traditional place in academic knowledge, then that commits the person making that case to a larger philosophy of curricular design that is in tension with a view that a curriculum should service current real-world needs for particular skills.

Posted in Academia | 2 Comments »

Clip-Clopping Across the Bridge

September 9th, 2009

A while back, I suggested that it was time for everyone to cool it a bit on linking to the craziest, least thought-through, most over-the-top writing coming from the margins of cultural conservatism. My point was that during the previous presidential administration, those figures were important to criticize because they had substantial intellectual or political access to actual policy-makers, but that after November 2008, the best thing to do was to try and shove them off into the margins where they belonged.

If they continued to be the targets of regular links-for-deserved-abuse, I felt, there was the danger that those margins would continue to drive the national conversation about policy and politics. The way I saw it, it’s the same issue that you have when you’ve got a bunch of participants in an online forum who are having perfectly interesting disagreements and conversations and then suddenly an invective-spewing lunatic troll drops into the discussion. The result is something most online writers and readers have seen happen many times: everyone will drop their previous conversations and preferentially reply to the troll, with ever-increasing hostility. There’s a lot of reasons why this happens. It’s easier to mock and abuse than to carry on a subtle discussion, but also folks who’ve treasured a sense of a respectful ongoing conversation between unlike individuals are also honestly hurt and confused by the persistent presence of someone who is determined to destroy that community, who programmatically stays outside of a consensus culture but aggressively hounds its every move.

A lot of folks back then disagreed with my point, saying that there was no surer way to check the influence of the fringes than to expose and mock their craziness. Can I just ask: how’s that working out for you all? There’s pretty wide mainstream consensus that the parents who didn’t want their precious children to hear the President’s radical, socialist message about working hard and staying in school are pretty much batshit crazy if they’re serious about believing the President was going to suck out the precious bodily fluids of the nation’s children and pretty much nihilistic saboteurs if they’re just trying to sandbag the current political leadership wherever and whenever they can by getting the batshit crazy folks worked up.

And yet here we are: the crazies and the saboteurs are driving the national conversation as reported in the MSM and masticated by the Sunday-morning TV pundits. It’s the world’s biggest trollage ever. It doesn’t matter how crazy the responses are: they’re treated earnestly as a political problem while also generating earnest replies and assurances as well as mockery and contempt. In an alternate reality, the grown-ups would collectively shrug off a speech by any President about working hard and staying in school as a wholly conventional pro forma gesture and we’d get back to talking about the actually difficult issues involved in health care reform, none of which involve death panels or similar rot. We wouldn’t debate with “birthers” in mainstream media any more than we have debates with people who think the earth is flat or that the Hale-Bopp comet is coming to cleanse the planet and we should kill ourselves now to get to the next level. That’s not to say that there wouldn’t be such people in any alternative discursive reality, but there’s a difference between having fringes and representing fringes as included within and constituting an argumentative space that will help to shape collective action.

Posted in Politics | 13 Comments »

District 9

September 2nd, 2009

Watching District 9, I could feel my mind splitting into different tracks of internal dialogue and reaction.

The first track was simply taking pleasure in the film’s deft mixture of intelligence and high-octane action in a science-fiction idiom. Even potentially trite plot hooks come off as as having a bit of satisfying ambiguity, such as whether the protagonist’s seeming moral awakening is merely a mixture of self-interest and despair.

The second internal dialogue I was having as I watched involved the film’s South African setting, which was awesomely (if unsurprisingly) spot-on. I frankly felt like I’d somehow met the faux-academic commenters who pop up in the documentary-style segments of the movie. I couldn’t really think of another film with some degree of mainstream commercial success in the U.S. market that was set in an authentically imagined South Africa.

The third internal dialogue I had took off from the film’s setting. Spoilers ahead if you haven’t seen the film. Basically, I can’t wait to teach this film in several of my classes. Obviously, it makes for an interesting retrospective commentary on apartheid, something that a lot of middlebrow American film critics have picked up on. Even more, however, I was thinking that it’s a fantastic film to show in a course that deals with cosmopolitan identity, hybridity, and creolization in colonial and postcolonial societies. Or, similarly, to frame a discussion of the situation of early modern contacts between European and non-European societies. There’s some scattered comparative scholarship on castaways, shipwreck survivors, scouts, ambassadors, outpost guards, lone traders and similar types who litter the early modern landscape, but I keep thinking that we haven’t paid enough attention overall to this motley assemblage of people in really fascinating circumstances.

I was just reading again about Portuguese explorations of the coast of Africa, leading up to Dias’ and da Gama’s expeditions, and how on a number of these voyages, they dropped off either Africans that they had captured or acquired at other stops on the journey or Portuguese men to establish outposts, make contact with the locals, and learn languages. Thinking about the circumstances of those people raises some really profound questions about cross-cultural relationships in general, but also sharp questions about how we tend to view European expansion. In quite a few cases, people dropped off or abandoned in this way disappear from historical view, or are known to have died from disease or violence. But in many other cases, they learned local languages, became a respected part of local societies, married and had families, while still quite evidently longing to return home from exile. I kept thinking that District 9 was a really fantastic, evocative compression of a lot of those kinds of experiences, a really good way to think about contact, transformation, exclusion. I kept making little “double features” in my mind: District 9 and Aguirre, the Wrath of God; District 9 and Tarzan, and so on.

What’s really nice is that District 9 isn’t just a conventional “going native” narrative dressed up with laser beams and cute aliens, because Wikus van der Merwe is not living out the typical fantasy of liminal mastery that most modern narratives of this kind offer (Tarzan, Dances With Wolves), where the Westerner turns out to be a better Other than the Others. Sure, Wikus ends up at the center of events, playing an important role in determining the fate of the prawns, but largely by accident. When the dust settles, Wikus is just an alien still mourning the life he’s lost, most of the other aliens are in concentration camps, and the critical actor with the meaningful decisions ahead is on board a spaceship heading who-knows-where. Wikus is really much more like those early modern men shoved overboard and marooned by ship captains and kings (and like them, is briefly valued not for who he is as a human being, but for his instrumental usefulness to the powerful).

————–

The last track in my mind as I watched the film was a kind of dread at the inevitable appearance of complaints from the sort of Africanist scholars who typically raise a great hue and cry about any film or TV program that doesn’t represent Africa and Africans in sanctified terms (or similarly fails to envision colonizers and colonialism in purely demonic fashion). I tried reasoning with this cognitive module: surely, said my inner voice, this film is so richly imagined (not to mention entertaining) that the usual aggrieved griping about representations of Africa will be muted or non-existent. Surely, said my other inner voice, the more cynically experienced one, such quasi-nationalist monitors of representation do not abandon their guardposts nor relax their watch for negative imagery. My more sympathetic voice replied, “Hey, don’t forget, buddy, you used to rattle off complaints about negative images and so on yourself with appalling casualness”. The cynic coughed and mumbled something about salad days, etcetera.

In the end, both voices have been right: I’ve seen some really positive reactions to the film from Africanists I know, but also some typically disproportionate condemnations, particularly of a relatively minor part of the film, the Nigerian gangsters.

I’m not really sure what a properly sensitive respectful pop-culture representation of muti murders or violent criminality in South Africa (which are real, if also sensationally reported and imagined by a variety of observers) might look like. I know, I know. The criminal warlord could be a more rounded individual. There could be less of his fetishizing lip-smacking desire to consume Wikus’ arm. The Nigerians’ “witch-doctor” could be less of a freakishly envisioned trope. Or better perhaps to excise the “Nigerian” part of the film altogether? Perhaps better that the film not be set in South Africa at all, because having aliens and Africans in the same representational frame is just dangerous to begin with. Maybe in fact better it not be made in the first place: science fiction as a genre is so deeply implicated in the colonial imaginary. If you’re going to worry about the Nigerian warlord being a stereotype, why not worry equally about Wikus’ father and his associates being a stereotype of a brutal apartheid-era bureaucrat? Or Kobus Venter being a stereotypical villainous soldier? Ah, because those stereotypes have a “good” politics to them?

It’s not that we shouldn’t talk about these questions in relationship to this film. Blomkamp’s representation of the Nigerians certainly does invoke a very specifically South African kind of xenophobia in some problematic ways.

However, the film is doing some fairly complicated work with the way that racial Others have been imagined in general: the prawns do appear to be disgusting to human sensibilities. But to simply get outraged, as some already have, that Blomkamp seems to be reproducing the idea that the racial Other is disgusting is to miss the hermeneutical forest for a few trees. Would you be able, if confronted with something undeniably alien, to see through that to some sense of a commonality and equality, to understand and appreciate and embrace the alien? That’s the situation that early modern humanity was in: not just Europeans looking at non-Europeans, but non-Europeans looking at Europeans as well. There were “Occidentalisms” as well as “Orientalisms”. The difference from the standpoint of the 21st Century is that the way that Europeans imagined other societies became vastly more socially and politically powerful than other such imaginings within the global system that coalesced between 1650 and 1950. That’s a very important history, and one that continues to confront 21st Century global society, but if we forget that the encounter with difference has always challenged local understandings of the definition and nature of the human being, we lose the ability to think in better ways about difference in the future.

The people who see District 9 and think, “Blomkamp is just reproducing the idea that racial Others are disgusting” are revealing themselves to be the real problem, revealing themselves as the reproducers of a racialized and racializing script. They say: The prawns crave cat food! They eat pig heads! They’re dirty! They look weird! They act violently! They urinate where they shouldn’t and they smell bad! The point should not be that human beings have never legitimately appeared exotic to one another in the history of cultural contact (post-European expansion and otherwise). Read ibn Battuta’s accounts of his journeys and you’ll see him offering distortions and exoticizations galore, generally based on surface impressions and gut reactions.

Blomkamp is using a speculative frame to ask whether liberal modernity is in any way more capable of looking past those kinds of filters at the underlying reality of a shared humanity. The film offers plenty of evidence that there is far more to the prawns than what human observers “see”. Even the sympathetically tweedy academic commentators in the documentary portions of the film suggest that the prawns are aimless, without purpose or guidance, having lost their commanding castes before being shipwrecked on Earth. By the end of the film, we learn that’s certainly not the case, that Christopher, his son and his friend, presumably with the collaboration of other prawns, have been working carefully to escape from Earth all along. But even early on, there’s a lot of evidence of the prawns’ “humanity” for anyone who cares to notice: they don’t want to leave their shacks, they strategize about how to evade or frustrate the authorities, they have their own desires and ways of being in the world, they all speak a fully realized language. None of them are really drones or animals. The critics who look at the film’s depiction of the prawns and see nothing but a representation of racial Others as animals completely miss the point, in the process almost absurdly proving Blomkamp’s suggestion that if 21st Century liberal consciousness were once again confronted with a new or novel experience of difference (as opposed to fighting against some historically-derived system of discrimination and oppression based on racial or sexual difference that liberalism knows that it’s supposed to try and combat) it would fail at the test.

The basic problem with this entire line of criticism in film and media studies is the theoretical and empirical simple-mindedness of how it sees the reproduction of culture. A trope is treated like a virus: if it’s visible or identifiable, it’s a contagion, and the only legitimate response is a quarantine. That leaves only representations so safely comforting and purified for a grade-school kind of nationalist or identarian sensibility that they might as well come with a “Sanitized For Your Protection” wrapper on them. The bloody-minded literalness of this approach to cultural criticism is equally exasperating: a trope is considered to come with all its possible negative meanings fully encoded inside, doing exactly the work of remaking audiences and their consciousness that it was meant to do.

That’s not the way culture works, nor the way that audiences work with culture. District 9 is the kind of film that’s good to think, not the kind of film that the representational posse should be chasing with torches and pitchforks.

Posted in Africa, Popular Culture | 13 Comments »

Running on Empty

August 26th, 2009

Ah, the sport of online champions: bashing Maureen Dowd. She makes it so easy. Today’s Dowd breaks down like this:

1) I don’t read the Internet!
2) Neither does Leon Wieseltier!
3) But I hear that someone abused anonymity on the Internet.
4) Specifically, an anonymous blogger called a woman a skank and a ho.
5) One lawsuit later, the anonymous blogger was revealed to be a “cafe society acquaintance” of the defamed person. Whatever the hell that means. More lawsuits coming.
6) In the real world, there are “noble pseudonyms” of the kind that revolutionaries in France and the great poet Fernando Pessoa had.
7) The Internet is bad because there are anonymous people there. Also there’s no accountability.

The hilarious thing is that she quotes Wieseltier complaining that online writers have no memory, that their conversations go nowhere, that it’s like closing time at a bar where everyone is “drunk and ugly and they’re going to pass out in a few minutes”. The conversation about anonymity, pseudonymity, real names and reputation capital is a long-running one in online discussion, with thoughtful contributions on all sides of the debate. Here comes Dowd, acting like she just crashed into Hispaniola and planted her flag on terra nova. That’s a fabulous example of amnesiac fogginess. If Dowd’s column were a blog entry, she’d have to cover her ears to drown out the roar of the yawns at so elementary a restatement of the basics of this long-standing debate. Anybody with skin in that game has gone beyond just noticing that the issue exists.

On some level, this kind of ouroboroic self-consumption is just what happens to columnists who have nothing left to say but have been given a permanent soapbox. But there is a particular kind of event horizon here: a print columnist complaining about the Internet in terms that are almost a parodistic reproduction of the writing that swirls around the ninth circle of blogging hell. The definition of “no accountability” is a Dowd column (or really, most op-eds at the remaining big papers): you’ll never be expected to do any reporting, never be expected to get your facts straight, and you can pretty much spin out whatever fleeting thoughts come into your head over your morning coffee.

I thought print journalism was the last refuge of reporting, of higher standards, of thoughtfulness? If the Times wants to demonstrate that, they’d be better off just running a whitespace blank on the right-hand of the op-ed pages.

Posted in Blogging | 5 Comments »

Eeyore and the Unintended Consequence

August 24th, 2009

I don’t expect much to come of John Holbo’s careful breakdown of the non-philosophy underlying Megan McArdle’s blanket antagonism to all health care proposals, but there’s one point buried in there that’s worth pulling out for its general usefulness.

Namely, that loosely libertarian (e.g., McArdle/Brooksian surface-level libertarianism used mostly to defend fixed programmatic commitments) fears of the unintended consequences of action by the state are empirically and philosophically messed up. They’re not really based on a comprehensive history of the consequences of state action, and they’re not really based on any kind of consistent view of structure-agency interaction. They seem to me to take really very specific kinds of analyses of how 20th Century states engaged in projects, especially high modernist projects, which had many undesirable and perverse effects, and generalize them to a universal law of history. Jane Jacobs and James Scott, to cite two examples of those specific analyses, are talking about concrete episodes and perhaps modestly generalizing them to certain movements, ideologies or specific bureaucratic formations.

I think you can insist on the importance of unintended consequences as a part of a generalized theory of the relationship between structure and agency. I think you can also look at discrete intellectual movements or episodes where important actors believed that they could eliminate or master unintended consequences. Certainly that’s what a lot of rationalist high modernism implied, that good planning inputs based on proper ideological premises could reliably produce exactly the intended systematic changes.

The thing of it is, as John points out, is that if you’re going to argue that unintended consequences follow on any major change or disruption to an existing system, then there are two additional points which have to be made. First, there’s not much of a difference in this sense between the state and other major institutional actors which have some degree of agency over a system or structured practice. If three or four large pharmaceutical firms decide to change the way that they interact with the existing health care system, all sorts of unintended or unanticipated changes may follow. I can’t see any reason why someone like Megan McArdle would be intensely anxious about government and yet be relatively sanguine about industry, civic organizations, and so on, if the issue is that it is impossible to account for or anticipate unintended consequences.

Unless at the end of the day, this is about a near-religious belief that institutions of the market somehow always produce a good unintended consequence. That’s a bit hard to work out if you’re that radical and simplistic a manichean, since either the market is the first condition of human history and therefore produced non-market institutions (whoops! not a good unintended result from that perspective!) or the polity is the first condition and therefore produced the market (whoops! the polity produced a good unintended consequence!). Of course, it’s not a good description of the contemporary American health care system, either, which has been produced by complex interactions between market, state and non-state institutions.

Second, if you’re really interested in the unintended consequences of structure-agency loops on complex systems, you have to allow that many of them may be positive, neutral or be spandrels of some kind or another, as well as being negative or destructive. If you believe that all or even the strong majority of unintended consequences are negative, then you don’t really believe in contingent or unintended outcomes at all. You believe in a kind of declensionist, entropic worldview that holds that everything will in time inevitably go wrong. You’re basically Eeyore. Which is ok, but it is hard to make an Eeyore-style defense of anything, whether it’s the current health care system or anything else. You’re sure it’s all going to go wrong, and in fact, must be sure that the current system is less good than something in the past. If you think the current system is acceptable or worth defending, then you must be sure that unintended consequences sometimes lead to good results, because nobody set out to build exactly the health care system that Americans presently have.

Like John, I’m all for accepting that the gap between intent and practice will inevitably be quite wide, and that in that gap, all sorts of devils can find room to dance. It’s just that those kinds of gaps also have thermals upon which angels fly. The mere existence of such gaps is not a reason to simply squat dully upon the status quo, or unchain the magic market mechanism to come along and sweep us to the promised land, nor is it reason to simply avoid discussion of what we ideally would like to see happen on the grounds that whatever we would like, unintended consequences will ensure that we never get it.

Posted in Politics | 3 Comments »

The Limits to Shill

August 24th, 2009

I continue to feel pretty diffident about the controversy among anthropologists about the Human Terrain Team and other uses of qualitative social science by the U.S. military over the past decade or so. The issue for me is not whether this is an intrinsic misuse of anthropological or qualitative research, blurring the lines between legitimate fieldwork and other uses of ethnographic methodology. That’s partly because I feel that anthropologists have a tendency to draw overly stark lines between their own disciplinary traditions and all other forms of fieldwork, usually in the process implying that all other kinds and styles of qualitative fieldwork are both ethically and methodologically suspect. Ethnography is spying of a kind. Or to flip it around, there’s plenty of kinds of intelligence-gathering that take place in plain sight.

The issue for me is not whether institutions like the police or the military can legitimately use anthropology. It’s whether those institutions are prepared to accept what they’d learn by doing that kind of research honestly, or whether the use of anthropologists or other researchers is just a way to put sugar on a brute-force shit sandwich. At least in some cases, what our military or other militaries might have learned in the past by doing genuine, sophisticated anthropological research is that there is no way to achieve the declared objectives of a military mission, and that you either alter the objectives or end the mission. In Afghanistan, for example, I’m not sure that it would lead to successful counter-insurgency if all ISAF Forces became profoundly culturally sensitive. It would help, as would the casual overuse of aerial bombardment or brutal intrusion into communities. But culturally sensitive or not, the ISAF don’t live there in the truly long-term sense, they’re not a part of villages where the residents have to make choices about whether to collaborate or tolerate Taliban forces who have an intimate knowledge of the social networks in that village and work with people who do live there.

So it’s fine to study something using any method or specialists you like. Just be ready to hear what that method is going to tell you.

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A very different example of the same issue. The New York Times today has a piece on how market researchers and others are using computer analysis to try and identify embedded sentiments within online discourse. You don’t need a computer to do that, just use the hermeneutical engine located inside your own head and do some reading.

Use computers if you like to spot trends, I suppose, but to really know what a surge in expressed feelings means in any given Internet forum means, you really have to be a long-term follower of the flow of conversation and communication at that forum or others like it. Saying you’ll do “sentiment analysis” with computers on online forums is like saying you’ll do “sentiment analysis” in a literary work. I don’t doubt that something roughly along those lines is possible, but to really make any sense of it is going to take a human being doing interpretation the old, slow and human way. An algorithm that spots a change in word usage in a long-running forum is only alerting its minders to an event: making sense of that event is another matter.

The issue is not at all that market researchers are trying to analyze sentiment at any rate, or even the methods that they’re choosing to analyze it with. It’s whether they’re prepared to understand what they find out, and to act upon it. Just to take an example from the article, when Wal-Mart looks at “Labor Force and Unions”, it finds that there is a lot of negative sentiment. The Times suggests a public-relations strategy as a response to that finding. Wrong answer. If you’re really doing sentiment analysis, you’d understand that this strategy is a great way to make more negative sentiment. Because the reason there is negative sentiment is that Wal-Mart’s labor policies are pretty bad.

That’s like suggesting that you send a shill poster into a fan forum to promote a bad new movie or video game, to counter negative sentiment you’ve detected. If your shills are new posters, everyone almost immediately detects the shill and all you’ve done is increase the negative sentiment. If it’s an old, established poster, you’d have to pay that person off a great deal to get them to shill, unless they routinely shill for things, at which point see, “increase the negative sentiment” above. A non-shill poster who starts sounding like a shill is obvious; a non-shill poster who somehow manages to promote something in an appropriately cynical, somewhat denigrating way is not really helping to counter negative sentiment in the first place.

What you really learn by doing sentiment analysis (by computer or the better human-brain-reading-things way) is, “Don’t do whatever the hell it is that is pissing people off if you really can’t afford to piss them off”. If you’re Wal-Mart and you’re seeing some impact from your bad labor-management, do better by your employees. If you’re sitting on top of a $100 million cinematic turd, try to avoid shitting out celluloid crap in the future. If you can’t or won’t change, don’t think that there’s a magic trick buried in “sentiment analysis”.

What happens when there’s a new raft of consultants selling some new thing like sentiment analysis is that as the new specialized service develops, the people selling it are increasingly pressured by clients to make the information come out in a way that is soothing and tranquilizing, that either says that the problem doesn’t exist or that there’s some superficial cosmetic strategy that lets the organization go on doing something flawed or self-interested while somehow getting rid of all the criticism and negativity that behavior has incited. The most avid buyers of that kind of information tend to be the mid-rank bureaucrats and managers who are less concerned with long-term missions and more concerned with their own short-term prospects, and they can dance a beautiful duet with consultants or pet researchers who are willing to whisper them sweet nothings as long as the salaries or payments keep on coming.

For institutions that really want to know something that they don’t already know, and think it’s important for the long-term mission, then there has to be some willingness and preparation to hear information that’s not palatable and to act on it in that form, up to and including ending the practices or projects involved outright. Because the issue is really not the use of novel methods: it’s what’s true in the world around you, and about what keeps some organizations from being able to hear or understand those truths. The world itself doesn’t conform to what middle-managers and bureaucrats sometimes need it to be. Sometimes it really is murky, or ambivalent, or confusing. Sometimes it’s exactly the opposite to the way that the CEOs and generals and political leaders pretend it is. Sometimes if you want to know how people feel, you’ll just have to join them down in the fogginess of daily life and grope your way around the hermeneutical mist like everyone else.

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