Complexity (not worth the effort)

Complexity is the flipside of the fantasy that we are somehow outside the political, witnesses to its constitutive stagings that we may, from time to time, choose to perform ourselves (to be clear, I’m rejecting the idea of a political stage that one can choose to enter, of the political as performances deliberately undertaken to generate predictable effects in an audience).  Global networks, neural networks, financial networks—it’s all just too complex for us to understand. The recourse to complexity is a move that says there is always more that needs to be known as well as unknown unknowns and unintended consequences of whatever it is that we end up doing.  Such a move says, wait, stop, do you know what you are doing? What could happen? Complexity’s appreciation of the multiplicity of interrelated and unpredictable effects forecloses the political in that sense that it presents us as so deeply enmeshed in politics that we can’t see or assess the contours of the political, the ways it’s configured.

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The appeal to complexity is a site of convergence between despotic financialism and critical theory (I’m using the term broadly here to encompass contemporary continental, Marxist, and post-Marxist developments in philosophy and political theory). Some critical theorists associate responsibility with sovereign subjectivity and moralizing impulses to punish.  The mistake both they and the bankers make is assuming that responsibility implies total knowledge, total control, or total determination of outcomes.  Both argue that since the world is more complicated than this, since our networked interactions implicate us in relations and outcomes beyond our knowledge and determination, accountability cannot rightly be localized. 

Jane Bennett is attuned to the complexity of assemblages constituted out of human and non-human actants, assemblages like those mixing “coal, sweat, electromagnetic fields, computer programs, electron streams, profit motives, heat, lifestyles, water, economic theory, wire, and wood” into an electrical grid (25).  Given this complexity, she finds the invocation of agency and strong responsibility to be “tinged with injustice.”  “In a world of distributed agency,” Bennett argues, “a hesitant attitude toward assigning singular blame becomes a presumptive virtue” (38).  As I see it, this hesitation corresponds with attitudes dominant in communicative capitalism. For examples, we might add the strings of failure dispersed in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, connected with the ill-conceived and aggressive war in Iraq, and gushing from British Petroleum’s deep water oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico to the abundant and proliferating crises in the finance sector. Even as each instance resists confinement into a singular moment or single individual decision, decisions of boards, regulators, investors, voters, politicians, consultants, and officials are made, nonetheless. The oil rig didn’t emerge spontaneously out of the ocean. The city of New Orleans didn’t somehow lose organizational capacities previously put to use in Super Bowl football games and Mardi Gras celebrations. Some decisions can be described as bets or gambles, wagers for one future rather than another.  Winners commend themselves for their prescience, presenting their good fortune as grounds for promotion, re-election, praise, a generous bonus. This commendation seems appropriate because of the risk of error—they could have been wrong.  Blame, condemnation, and punishment are likewise appropriate for those on the losing side of the bet. They had to make a judgment under conditions that were fluid, changing, interconnected, and uncertain—the conditions of any human judgment.

To be sure, Bennett is right to emphasize the dispersion and distribution of agency: decisions are intermeshed, mashed-up so as to resist confinement into specific, separable choices.  Agency is an effect of a larger set of relations. It often feels as if decisions have always been already made, as if we have no real choice, as if the current or process or circuit is in motion and there’s nothing we can do to stop it.  But we are nonetheless accountable for this sense. It’s part of the setting of our choices. We are accountable because we can be wrong, because we lack knowledge, control, and the capacity fully to determine outcomes. Responsibility arises because one has to choose not only when one does not know but when one cannot know.

Franco “Bifo” Berardi takes a view of complexity in line with Bennett’s: “the complexity of the global economy is far beyond any knowledge and possible governance.” Accordingly, he argues that “the political and economic knowledge we have inherited from modern rationalist philosophy is now useless, because the current collapse is the effect of the infinite complexity of immaterial production.” I don’t find the masturbatory fantasies of the global financial elite to be all that complex, although I think they want us to think that it is.  Bankers benefit from our thinking that there are operations and processes that compel our obedience, like so much absolutist mystical arcana. They also benefit when we slip into thinking primarily in terms of immaterial production, a kind of derivative thinking that fantasizes value in the absolutely conceptual and without price, in the enjoyment that accrues through adding, repeating, and circulating.

Given the convergence between finance and critical theory around the notion of complexity, it’s not surprising to find an overlap with Friedrich Hayek. The rejection of accountability, of politics, repeats his argument against economic planning: we cannot know. For Hayek the problem of the economy is a problem of knowledge. Economic knowledge is widely distributed. It is also subject to constant change. Infinite particulars of time and place, chance and circumstance, call for constant modulation. “It would seem to follow,” Hayek concludes, “that the ultimate decisions must be left to the people who are familiar with these circumstances, who know directly of the relevant changes and of the resources immediately available to meet them.”  His argument against central economic planning, then, is that it is impossible because knowledge cannot be totalized. Total knowledge, complete knowledge is unobtainable.

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Comments

[Neographite]

...and yet.

Complexity does transform certain dynamics into not-only-unpredictable states but occasionally even contrary ones. I'll use one of your major examples to ask this question: what is the "publicity" of Wikileaks? It exists within a network of bloggy exposition, and claims parrhesia for itself, it does not recognize national security claims. so what do you make of it? (Maybe this is a blog post in itself, or a chapter that I have not yet seen....)

[Alain]

Neographite - why do you choose this example? In the recent "whistle blower" case the individual in question is being prosecuted for sharing video of a war crime. Are you suggesting that the government's claim of "national security" is in anyway legitimate? Is it really all that complex a case? I personally do not reject the notion that there may be times where national security would justify a claim to "state secrets." But it is hard to see how this case would come justify the assertion.

And isn't this Jodi's point? That the claims of "complexity" are really an excuse to conceal what is obvious and further erode the common notion of responsibility?

[Neographite]

Alain,

I choose this example precisely because it is such a hard one re: Jodi Dean's theories about publicity. It's easy enough to be skeptical of something like the Tory torture "inquiry" as complicity in a publicity/concealment dynamic that serves state power: "Oh," the British govt. says, "we have investigated that and found some irregularities and it is now all in the past."

But Wikileaks takes a different analytic, I think (and I'm assuming you do too.) They seem to be all about exposure for exposure's sake; information must be free; the truth will out, etc. They are the good guys, on the side of exposure, not only in the example you give but in all that they do.

But Jodi (and Foucault, and Derrida, and Zizek) have taught us to be suspicious or at least critical of such openness: information circulates both for and against particular forces and according to certain logics that are not at first discernible. Which is, I think, what makes it such an intriguing example. What happens with that information, the video you reference? So far, it seems not to have slowed down the war-machine but has instead make a circuit of escape: "here," we say to ourselves and others, "here, finally, is a typical example of what the war is about. Now people will know, and that is a good thing." And thus we link to it, and we have done something (we tell ourselves) to stop the war.

Only one possible critique, of course.

[Jodi Dean]

These are interesting remarks--thanks to you both. On complexity: my sense is that over the past 30 years or so, this has shifted from a theoretical approach that emphasizes interconnections, feedback, and emergent structure to become a term that says regulation, understanding, and responsibility are wrong/impossible/unnecessary to become a stand-in for generalized inaction.

My own view of publicity is that it is a useful tactic in politics rather than a vital left goal. Insofar as it contributes to communicative capitalism, it's left efficacy is diminished, particularly as publicity takes the place of collective will formation.