Notes from Greil Marcus's Lipstick Traces

I took these notes when I read the book seven or eight years ago. 

Bataille’s notion that humanity wants to act with no end in mind, to commit free acts of “destruction” not linked to civilized utility. Humans, instinctively wanting to act destructive, are made by a civilized society to feel alone in their destructive impulses, but others share this repressed urge, which expresses itself in society’s dark vices: gambling, incest, prostitution, drug addiction, wasted potential of all kinds. The bourgeoisie have forfeited this kind of open pleasure (which once formed the potlatch, the humiliation that can’t be returned). Marcus sees punk as a kind of potlatch, an eagerness to destroy for no reason, and assert a primal sense of being alive as opposed to dead, rationalized bourgeois culture. (395)

Isou: “Let youth cease to serve as a commodity merely to become the consumer of its own elan.” (271)

Postwar project: “To prove that real life was back, and to restrict the definition of real life to the pleasurable consumption of material goods within a system of male supremacy and corporate hegemony.” (258). This goes hand in hand with the “reality principle” or the quasi-Hegelian notion of accepting the limits of reality, of seeing reality as compromise of one’s ideals. To be realistic is to accept the hegemony and seek circumscribed happiness there (which is always just not quite attained, the unquenchable thirst is what the hegemony instills)

From a leftist book in 1984: “ The sixties is merely the name we give to a disruption of late-capitalist ideological and political hegemony, to a disruption of the bourgeois dream of unproblematic production, of everyday life as the bureaucratic society of controlled consumption.” Were the radical movements of the sixties products of capitalism overreaching itself, succeeding too well? “Too many people had too much of everything that was on the market, and so they had the leisure to think about what else they might want.” (133)

Good quote from Arendt: “The transformation of the family man from a respectable member of society, interested in all public affairs to a ‘bourgeois’ concerned only with his private existence and knowing no civic virtue, is an international modern phenomenon… Each time society, through unemployment, frustrates the small man in his normal functioning and normal self-respect, it trains him for that last stage in which he will willingly undertake any function, even that of a hangman.” This is the effect of bogus private life and pseudo-individuality divorced from social interaction, and the consequences of man lacking meaningful work.

The 190s perverted 1960s rhetoric about risk, adventure and personal fulfillment and freedom as an individual to underwrite dog-eat-dog capitalism without an ounce of civic decency or common empathy among citizens.

The “popular” must be fashioned, must be produced as a rabble, and are thus made to be constitutively unstable. Popular culture creates this unstable rabble. The rabble doesn’t precede the junk culture made for it, made to make it. (149)

The idea of being “blackmailed by utility,” that one can’t criticize something that functions even if it demeans. Since it works, it must be accepted, must be accepted as “real” as in the “reality principle” of compromise.

Life lived as spontaneous art, as a utopian realization of pure freedom, with no moment continuous from the previous one, a commitment to perpetual reinvention at every instant -- who wants this as a permanent state, even as an ideal? Isn’t this better experienced convulsively, in carnivalesque fits that surprise us, or are even planned -- it may be that this is all we can tolerate, that to live like that is insane.

           

Ads conjure a desire for this kind of unknowable spontaneous freedom, this kind of eternal retransformation at every instant in the name of maximum happiness, and diverts it to take solace in goods when we realize that it can’t be fulfilled, that we can’t live up to the daring of our own dreams (planted by the ads, of course, but we don’t recognize it). So we blame ourselves and not the ads for the impossible desires we come to possess, and consume the ads even more eagerly as wish fulfillment dramas for those dreams of metamorphosis.

Capitalist value and cool

This line of thought occurred to me while I was in the dentist's chair having my teeth scraped. Why do I worry so much about being cool? This feels like an alien imperative, yet it cuts to the core of my social being. It seems like an objective necessity that benefits no one in particular; it's something I just seem to owe to my particular slice of the society. Cool would seem to have no practical relevance whatsoever (things are cool because they somehow exceed functionality -- they express style, purity, etc.) yet it feels like an inescapable compulsion. I am saddled with a subjectivity that responds to cool, that is structured by it, even when I struggle to reject it, evade it.

Whenever I am worried about being "cool," I am caught up in the capitalist configuration of social relations and turning my consumption, my efforts to sustain and "reproduce" myself, and even my efforts to concretize and express my identity into labor on capitalism's terms. I am regarding social relations as intrinsically competitive with the reward being not reciprocation in the abstract but validation as a zero-sum thing -- I win the exchange when I am seen as cool relative to someone else, who is less cool. And the cool I have produced in my person, through my mediation of my everyday existence, will extend the tyranny of cool over social life that much further (I've enhanced the "value" of other commodities in symbolic terms, in terms of their coolness); in exchange I get to feel a little more secure in my status. I get to feel a little better about myself by feeling better than someone else.

The degree to which one accepts cool as a legitimate positive value, as something that enhances life, is also the degree to which one has bought into capitalism in its current stage. This is why I'm often puzzled when writers talk about something being cool without any shade of irony or apology; they are taking cool at face value as something that is making society better and not worse. Such people (Tiqqun calls them "Young Girls" in some allegedly nongendered way), I imagine, can shop at Urban Outfitters without a moment of hesitation because they actually respect what that company does in its cool hunting. It gathers the "valuable" things of culture in one place and distributes them to a broader base. Democratization!

But pursuing cool is always the pursuit of self-alienation as self-realization. It's accepting the purpose of self-actualization as winning approval in terms of the relative value of commodities one can display (or become). It's mistaking value (a specifically capitalist mediation) for wealth (a transhistorical value attuned to some more basic pleasure of existence). I'm deriving this distinction from Moishe Postone's analysis of value in Time, Labor and Social Domination, which is largely about how capitalism generates a confusion between value and wealth so that our energy is directed toward reproducing capitalism and its categories and social hierarchies rather than, say, ending poverty in the midst of plenty. All labor within consumer capitalism only seems to make useful things; in fact its main purpose is to make "value" -- what I'm calling cool. I just think passages like these from Postone make a lot more sense when you understand "value" as "cool" -- this weird social category of value that has nothing to do with use value but absorbs a great deal of effort and seems objectively important nonetheless:

Marx argues that what characterizes capitalist production is that the transformation of matter by labor is simply a means toward the creation of the social form constituted by labor (value). To say that the goal of production is (surplus-)value is to say that that goal is the social mediation itself.

This makes a lot more sense if you think about it in terms of "immaterial labor" as Virno and Lazzaurato describe it -- the enhancement of commodity values through our virtuosic consumption or deployment of them. When I'm posting a Faceook update, I'm creating value/cool via the work on my personal brand, and that is objectively relevent in capital though totally useless as a form of collective material wealth. I haven't added anything to the pile of stuff we need as a species, really, but I have produced value, I've made something that can circulate and add cool/value to other things. The point of posting to Facebook is "social mediation itself" -- the premise that doing so is a valuable thing to do, that we should all recognize it as such. That we should all acknowledge "cool" as value, whether or not our striving for it in any given attempt is totally successful. In other words, "surplus value" is another way of saying "cool" in consumer capitalism; its "surplus" because it has no basis in labor as such -- in the material transformation of stuff -- but in the way social relations are transformed by the work we do (on stuff, on ourselves, in communicating, etc.).

Postone argues that

The goal of the expenditure of labor power no longer is bound intrinsically to the specific nature of that labor; rather, this goal, despite appearances, is independent of the qualitative character of the labor expended — it is the objectification of labor time itself. That is to say, the expenditure of labor power is not a means to another end, but, as a means, has itself become an "end." This goal is given by the alienated structures constituted by (abstract) labor itself. As a goal, it is very singular; it is not only extrinsic to the specificity of (concrete) labor but also is posited independently of the social actors' wills.

Again, I think this is far less cryptic and implausible if you think of it in terms of making things "cool"  -- not that all work is about cool, but "cool" work is paradigmatic -- also "Cool" is what value is called perhaps in my hipster corner of the world; it might have some other name elsewhere, but would be describing the same phenomenon, the same capitalistic social relation. Anyway, the point of work is make "value" in the form of cool (value in the form of "value"), which then justifies the effort spent on it. Such "value" is limitless, not bound by material restraints, and thus suits capitalism's need for perpetual growth and the fantasy that wealth (personal and social) can be infinite. If we are measuring the worth of what we do in cool, we can never stop doing more to get more of it (and the distribution of this social "product" will never really be geared toward alleviating human suffering or mitigating inequality).

So yes, this is a product of my privilege that I can think of it this way, but I see the difference between "value" and "material wealth" as mirroring the difference between walking out the door full of anxiety over whether or not one is dressed in such a way as to be noticed positively (and then feeling reassured or depressed depending on what sort of attention one gets) or walking out the door and feeling immersed in the processes and abundance of life. When I am thinking about being cool, I am worried about producing value; when I manage to forget about it and stop worrying about being "productive" with my time, I am much closer to experiencing and perceiving the material value of being alive.

That probably sounds a little bogus and spiritualized. Mainly I am thinking of the difference between perpetual self-consciousness (which is an effect of capitalism requiring everyone to always self-commoditize, whether as a wage worker as a prosumer) and being able to see the world beyond oneself and not through that instrumental filter, looking for "value" everywhere.

Social media, etc., obviously makes this harder to avoid, extending the anxiety of leaving the house insufficiently cool into a full-time mode of existence, since every time you check Facebook, Twitter, etc., you are metaphorically walking out the door, worrying about how cool you are seeming. I've generally been afraid of going to Brooklyn because I am not nearly cool enough and the environment makes it hard for me to forget it, to see past that game, to escape that construct of value. Social media means Brooklyn everywhere.

Cool is a ramification of communication as commodity; social media are merely the latest means for capitalism to extend its form of value into everyday life and leave fewer spaces for respite from it. This is why social media represents "real subsumption" -- reshaping life to suit capitalism's functioning (rather than the adoption of precapitalist, transhistorical forms of life to capitalism's ends). Social media would not exist in a noncapitalist society; communication as mode of expressing "value" would not exist.

Anders Ramsay makes a similar point about value here. (I quoted this is a previous post; I added the bolding.)

As Heinrich states, "Value does not arise somewhere to then be 'there'." Value is not a thing but rather a social relationship. It emerges neither through production nor through exchange, but presupposes both. It is a property something is assigned in relation to other things, which then gives the appearance of possessing it quite apart from such a relationship. As Marx insists on repeatedly, value is a ghostly or over-sensual property, not a substantial one. The conception of a commodity possessing its value objectivity independent of these relations is a semblance that transforms a social property into what is taken to be a natural one.
...

The same situation applies to Pierre Bourdieu's non-economic concept of capital. One must both work for one's capital, get an education, practice, and produce something which is recognised by the field of science or art in order to become a scientist or an artist, or else one becomes neither, regardless of what one has produced for the drawer or the hard disc. Similarly, the value-relation does not arise in exchange without a labour process, but without exchange, concrete labour would never be reduced to abstract labour either, and thus, no value would emerge. One might also bring to mind Ludwig Wittgenstein's by now famous, and to modern social sciences so significant statement, that one cannot have a private language. The same thing applies to the value, one cannot decide it on one's own.

Cool is a damaged capitalist form of that shared social value. But it has the virtue of being social, at least, and there is no way backward from it. The point is to turn the self-consciousness cool induces into something that doesn't posit anxiety-inducing hierarchies and doesn't make us feel enslaved by notions of what is important that seem entirely alien and uncontrollable. The goal is to make self-consciousness and social presence not merely compatible but indistinguishable.

potentially useful quote from Lazzarato on immaterial labor, de-consumerizing

This is quoted in Coté and Pybus's article for Ephemera 7:

The activation, both of productive cooperation and of the social relationship with the consumer, is materialised within and by the process of communication. It is immaterial labour which continually innovates the form and the conditions of communication (and thus of work and of consumption). It gives form and materializes needs, images, the tastes of consumers and these products become in their turn powerful producers of needs, of images and of tastes. The
particularity of the commodity produced through immaterial labour (seeing that its essential use value is given by its value contained, informational and cultural) consists in the fact that this is not destroyed in the act of consumption, but enlarges, transforms, creates the ‘ideological’ and cultural environment of the consumer. This does not produce the physical capacity of the workforce, it transforms the person who uses it. Immaterial labour produces first of all a ‘social relationship’ (a relationship of innovation, of production, of consumption); and only if it succeeds in this production does its activity have an economic value. This activity shows immediately that which material production ‘hid’: in other words, labour produces not only commodities, but first and foremost the capital relationship. (Lazzarato, 2001)

Immaterial labor produces certain sorts of measurable, value-generating social relations. And like all labor, it reproduces capitalism as a set of relations revolving around commodities.

I guess I would argue that immaterial labor fashions a commodity in the form of relationship that veils the value that can be harvested in its "circulation," which has to be understood not as a transfer of property by as networked communication. "Immaterial" commodities mask the process of commodification and value extraction precisely because there is not tangible property involved, but instead a proprietary claim to communication flows. Immaterial labor is another way of saying the commodification of communication. It allows companies to extract a rent from meaning-making and symbolic exchange. Because it involves a relation and communication, it foregrounds the ways in which consumption is productive. It's "labor" insofar as it produces harvestable value, but it doesn't make the consumer a laborer; rather it hides the value that consumers create because their value creation doesn't appear to them as labor. This is why the critique is to stress consumer's productivity, and to try to strip the pleasure from this kind of production only so that consumer-producers will make an effort to disentangle their consumption from the reproduction of capitalist forms. We mustn't be distracted by how we are paid in affect for immaterial/communictive/consumeristic labor from the ways in which this labor reproduces capitalism. The question becomes how to withdraw affect from this circuit, how to extinguish its value in the process of consumption instead of producing it in a recirculatable way (i.e. in social networks). The trend is running in the other direction: we are being subjectivized to only experience pleasure (or positive affect) when our affect is captured in networks and "shared." It's only real feeling if it is mediated, preserved, not "destroyed." Pics or it didn't happen, even for yourself.

Not sure if that is theoretically coherent. Basically, consumerism reproduces capitalist relations because the consuming process makes capitalist value. Only the consumer can intervene and de-consumerize their consumption (I wonder) through a consciousness of the value they are producing and then ... what? An effort to destroy it or deny it or claim its value for themselves?

The authoritarian commodity

This manifesto from Tiqqun, "Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl"makes a lot more sense to me if you replace "Young-Girl" with "hipster." The idea of using "young-girl," which the authors insist is a "not a gendered concept," is apparently to suggest something about the sort of power this new cultural type generated at this stage of consumer capitalism can exercise through apparent vulnerability and submissiveness to fashion and peer pressure. Updating Marcuse's notion of repressive tolerance, Tiqqun suggests that social control is administered through the coercive appeal of youthful fun and permissiveness, through flattery and seduction, through transforming liberalist autonomy into debilitating desire and tractable envy:

The function of the Young-Girl is to transform the promise of liberty contained in the achievement of Western civilization into a surplus of alienation, a deepening of the consumer order, new servitudes, a political status quo. The Young-Girl lives in the same horizon as Technology: that of a formal spiritualization of the world.

I can't figure out what that last sentence is supposed to mean, but I agree that technology is a prime culprit in lodging a higher degree of sensitivity to fashion deeper into our subjectivity. New communication technology -- smartphones, etc. -- allow for more self-surveillance and more access to the reassuring judgments of others. It amplifies our self-consciousness and our sense of the self as a performance. Identity doesn't drive our behavior but is the end result of it, a product. The "young-girl" epitomizes this, serving as a model (the "authoritarian commodity") that can direct the endless self-fashioning and give meaning to all the opportunities we now have to declare what we are.

"What we are" becomes a problem only when technology allows for it: Once we can mediate identity, we become aware of identity as a malleable, manageable thing, which of course makes our sense of self far more insecure. Tiqqun, I think, is using "young-girl" as shorthand for all the ways in which our sense of self is rendered more insecure in the social networks that are becoming more material, surveillable and elaborated. Subjectivity has insecurity built into it: "In the world of the authoritarian marketplace, the living recognize, in their alienated desires, a demonstration of power that has been made inside them by the enemy."

I think this is the legacy of the hipster, regardless of whatever new term comes into fashion to discuss them. The hipster is the authoritarian commodity that uses only soft power, regulating all who come into contact with it by inspiring feelings of inadequacy, disappointment, envy, boredom, etc. The effective hipster/young-girl signifies a plenitude of cool that it cannot actually possess but that nonetheless inspires a kind of hopelessness that you yourself will never measure up or be seen enough for what you are. The hipster/young-girl was the bellwether for the sort of subject that only understands itself through surveillance, through the assumption that its every desire is being judged, and that desire is pointless unless it can be displayed and surveyed. "Social" technology has made this sort of anxiety commonplace, the feeling that it's, say, pointless to read something if you are not going to Tweet out the highlights, or pointless to listen to something if Spotify won't notify everyone in your social network. I want to blame hipsterism for this, but they were merely the first victims of this more aggressive phase of the society of the spectacle. They were the first to see no alternative to seeing themselves as a commodity among commodities and to try to find the advantages of that, the pleasures.

Managers not to blame for capitalism

The main thing I am taking away from In the Age of the Smart Machine is Zuboff's effort to view technology as a possible way to save capitalism from itself and resolve the tension between capital and labor. If only information technology was used correctly, managers would share authority and all workers would become well-respected knowledge workers who are not alienated but enhanced and fulfilled by their working life. Authority would never again be a matter of exploiting anyone but instead would become a way of collectively negotiating the best way to seize the "innovative" possibilities that ubiquitous data about work processes make possible.

Zuboff never ceases to be amazed that managers would make the apparently petty decisions to use technology to spy on workers and shift blame and protect their prerogatives and power rather than to seize opportunities to "informate" the workplace and develop the skills of blue-collar "operators." She likens the belief in managerial authority to a spiritual faith, a sort of false consciousness holding back cooperation and the general intellect. "The informating process sets knowledge and authority on a collision course," she claims, but what that means in practice is that middle managers are getting proletarianized, having their managerial leverage eroded by automation.

As long as organizational members are unwilling to critically examine their faith in this system, individuals at every level will remain like weeds in the wind, able to do only as much as their roles prescribe, seeking the psychological equivalent of the graveyard shift in order to test one's wings, only to be pulled back daily by the requirements of the faith.

Capitalism is premised on those prescribed roles. They are not a flaw in the system but its essence. Capitalism is a way of organizing production precisely so that individuals become "reeds in the wind" without sufficient agency to redirect the system toward a goal other than profit (like, say, empowering or enriching the lives of all workers and not merely the managing elite or property owners). They are brought to be dependent on the system and generally have incentive only to protect their own interests. The system invests them in the existing hierarchy and precludes alternatives. It's not a failure of the individual imagination that such alternatives don't appear to workers and managers; it's a failure to organize, a failure to believe in a collective imagination worth fighting for. The alternative is to embrace class struggle.

Without a capacity to imagine an alternative, it is likely that our work organizations will continue to reproduce relationships that impede a powerful understanding of the economic and social potential of new technology.

Yes, that is capitalism's purpose — to reproduce its necessary relations, which are ones in which managers (representing capital) maximally exploit workers. Workers must organize resistance to this; they can't count on technology to resolve the struggle with better data and managers' sudden beneficent desire to communicate better. If communication is "improved" by management, it is in service of extending exploitive opportunities and subsuming more of workers' capacities to capital, to the production of surplus value. The "powerful understanding" of technology's potential involves undoing capitalism, so it's useless to expect capitalist managers to recognize it and nurture it. The extent to which they see it, they will thwart it in their institutional capacity. They have to operate outside or against the firm to nurture it.

Technology is neutral, but authority is necessary to exploitation, which is necessary to maximizing profit and justifying patently unfair distribution of the surplus. Technology, that is, doesn't automatically solve exploitive relations in capitalism but merely exacerbates them, moves then to a higher and deeper level, absent the sort of deliberate politics to prevent such deepening. Politics solves capitalism's inhumanity, not technology.

Quantified self as executive unfitness

Notes on Shoshana Zuboff, In the Age of the Smart Machine (1988)

1. The effect of information technology and increasing mediation of personal interaction and communication in the workplace (and the social factory) is to make the "acting-with" skills of the executive function seem even more mystified and ineffable. Executive skills are defined by a negative theology; they are precisely everything that can't be quantified. As Zuboff puts it "the work of the executive has been, by definition, work that is not subject to rationalization." They are defined ex post as intuition or feel or comfort with authority or leadership. The executive function consists of the remainder after everything else has been rationalized. It is primarily a mode of distinction, not a tangible and transmittable set of skills. The transferability of other skills is what makes them non-executive. They are like all other information subject to digitization and redistribution: radically devalued.

2. In other words, information technology abets the process of purifying the executive function of its quantifiable components, leaving the perfectly mysterious executive, whose power can only be understood through a cult of personality, in terms of charisma. The boss operates on inscrutable hunches that can't really be challenged; these form the basis of the boss's authority.

3. When an individual's contributions to a productive process (and sociality is a productive process) are quantified, they can accrue no surplus. They lose the ability to negotiate for compensation on the basis of something arguable, intangible. ("Your tweets had a declining retweet rate of 24%, therefore your pay will be reduced accordingly.)

4. People who choose to self-quantify, who seek out ways to turn themselves into data, are in essence opting out of executive responsibilities, then. They are volunteering to be deskilled and controlled. The logic of their decisionmaking is not a matter of hunches but a matter of data, and thus a decision anyone could make for them, given the same data.

5. To put that in reversed form: the quantified self, the data self, is a means for excluding people from qualifying for executive decisionmaking. Because production is shifting to the social factory, and most people's social lives are being quantified in social media, that suggests that self-quantification is a way of extending the workplace hierarchy into the social sphere that once at least appeared to be sheltered from it. If your friendships are mediated and quantified, they are controlled; the network is stabilizing them and draining them of their potential for power or value creation independent of pre-existing systems of sociopolitical management. They are internal to the "System." Maybe sociality, identity, etc., are always internal to the System. But the quantification of sociality strengthens the prison bars. Sociality in everyday life ceases to be a resource for resistance to the system; it becomes a source of innovation for refining it, perfecting it, completing its totality. (Our destiny: Everything is subsumed.)

6. Maintaining the ineffability of social behavior becomes a primary form of resistance as well as a way to claim bureaucratically acknowledged power, since power in bureaucracy is distilled into ineffable, unquantified forms. That is, to maintain power in the social factory, one has to evade quantification and preserve the sense of being a subject of the social process more than its object. The more of your social life revolves around uncaptured face time, the more you are the executive of your own productive social life. The more your social life is captured in media, the more you are an employee in your own social life "acting-on" others rather than "acting-with" them, to adapt Zuboff's terminology. (Acting-on means you are a body transforming other objects through direct labor; acting-with means you coordinate, communicate, produce cooperation, do all that general-intellecty virtuosity stuff.) The quantification of the self implies the management by an outside force, even if the nature or identity of that outside force is known, or even if one believes it is oneself doing the managing. Self-quantification still limits one to instrumental tasks, even in the social realm, and prohibits one from assuming the power-accuring qualitative, charismatic tasks.

7. Leadership means refusing to be quantified.

8. Will Davies argues in this paper about the "Emerging neo-communitarianism" that neoliberalism is a technocratic means to guarantee liberalism's idea of freedom as rational choice. It's technocrtatic instrument is quantification to ensure efficiency, which verifies freedom in the way it understands liberalism.

Bureaucrats, teachers, social workers and so many other professionals are all ultimately trusted to take their own decisions in a neoliberal society, but only on the basis that their outputs are made explicit, so that this trust can be reviewed at regular intervals. The liberal faith in individual reason just about survives, but freedom is now located within carefully designed systems of audit and incentive management, which by the 1990s had become collectively referred to as ʻgovernanceʼ. The task of neoliberal government is to quantify the outcomes of social and economic behaviour, such that individuals are able to exercise choice in an informed way, whether inside or outside of markets.

That analysis fits well with my contention that Facebook and other social media are neoliberal policy tools, or how I usually put it, that they prop up neoliberlist ideology and support/constitute neoliberal subjectivity. The point is that quantification is a modality of control more than of information; it is about auditing and not self-empowerment. If you think it is about self-empowerment, that is because you are mistaking self-auditing as not being in service of existing external authorities. Quantification is confessing yourself to the authorities. (Foucault's view of confession's function applies here.)

9. Quantifying the self is doing the neoliberal state's work for it; it's collaborating rather than resisting. It is making oneself subject to power, circumscribing the space in which one might be free to operate. Instead one inscribes oneself in the space delineated by incentives and targets and goals, all of which are subject to optimization not on the self's behalf but for the state or the firm.

10. A quantified self is a neoliberal self is a postauthentic self is a data self. (?) It is the sum of information that can be known about itself and processed; its goals are to more precisely quantify itself, elaborate its connections, and perhaps perfect its feedback mechanisms to achieve some short of ecstatic short circuit of self-reflexive identity. Information wants more information. It doesn't want to be free, it wants to replicate and proliferate. That is, the data self wants to broadcast richer and richer data sets of itself in an attempt to make life more meaningful. It can no longer find meaning through action; it can only be processed into meaning.

notes from Machine Dreams

Economics as the search for a meaningful definition of "rationality" -- the impact of computer science on economics has been to dissolve the illusion of the individual as the "rational subject" or agent, and to instead regard individuals as cellular automata of a larger "rational subject" that subsumes them. Rationality in the economic sense -- the sense of the most efficient distribution of resources, etc. -- is an aggregate phenomenon that exceeds the individual's grasp.

The market is then viewed as the "rational agent," as a cyborg entity that computes and wills outcomes and so on. Individual humans, with their limited and irrational self-directed goals, are subroutines to the market's higher functioning and purpose.

Mirowski cites a 1993 paper by Gode and Sunder that pits autonomous automata against one another in a double auction, revealing that this framework "had managed to induce 'aggregate rationality not only from individual rationality but also individual irrationality.' ... aggregate rationality had no relationship to anything the neoclassicals had been trumpeting as economic rationality for all these years." (554) The most idealized neoclassical market model "produces its hallowed results in experimental settings with severely impaired robots."

The individual's calculations, such as they are, need not be "rational" to yield rational macro outcomes. Motives at the individual level are ultimately inscrutable -- their logic cannot be inferred from outside analysis of achieved outcomes. Their unique rational choices not necessary to the larger outcome, which can be produced by AI agents operating on simple automatic imperatives. People have reasons for what they do but they can't be connected with economically rational outcomes.

(Mirowski argues -- I think -- for regarding multiple market forms themselves as automata in an evolutionary competitive process seeking an emergent "allocative efficiency." The scary thing is we are enmeshed in the process, though the "efficiency" it discovers may have nothing to do with our limited human notion of individual thriving or social justice, etc. We may be agents serving the flourishing and reproductions of markets for their sake and their incomprehensible ends.)

I think there is an analogy to spy fiction and the chaotic behavior of individual spies caught in the infinite regress of double-triple-quadruple agents and simulated opponents and disinformation and the rest. Personal agency is meaningless in this context; the game is on a whole other level, so to speak. Individual spies may have all sorts of complex reasoning to defend their acts, but it is all local rationalization, irrelevant to the broader outcome or bigger logic. They are just individualist ideology that demands the assumption that their choices are constitutive of outcomes, but really the logic of the rational outcome only comes when their choices are merged with reactions and choices of a host of other agents whose moves can't be anticipated or incorporated in the individual's thinking process. Spies (like individuals in markets) don't know how their acts shape the rules of the game they are playing; they think the rules are perhaps already fixed (their limited individual scope -- the mistake the way they are programmed in their subroutine for the entirety of the software) when the whole system is calculating something they don't understand or even know of. Like the humans on Earth in Douglas Adams's books, part of an organic computer program determining the question of meaning.

The rationality of the espionage system perhaps exists at the level of national goals, or perhaps nations are players, automata is a larger game/market of war that has its own agenda, its own equilibrium that has nothing to do with human thriving or human goals.