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Wolves in Women’s Clothing

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Not a word here about using trans imagery as the symbolic palette humiliationIn a (damning, though fair) review of Corey Robin’s 2011 book painting conservative ideology as united only by the revanchist urge to maintain rule (and a slightly less controversial text from a grinning TV posterboy of the American left, Chris Hayes), Andrew Seal argues that placing affect/feeling of individuals at the centre of their analysis—as he claims both authors do—means consistently mistaking hegemony for hierarchy, missing the forest for the trees, and forgetting that, if there is a ruling class, that it then needs to be addressed as a class.

It’s a mesmerizing, superb piece of writing, more than enough to scare me away me from either of his sources. Invoking Tony Soprano and Jay Gatsby, he writes that “Robin’s vocabulary of feudalism…rhymes with preconceptions not yet articulated except as myths.”

Yet, in focusing away from affect and shining the spotlight instead on an amorphous “class interest,” Seal might be cutting off too much. It may well be that the maintenance of power structures results from instincts more complex than the monarchical pretensions of individual autocrats (an idea I give some credit), but to ignore instinct, affect and feeling entirely in favour Seal’s call to conceptualize “how the group acts” risks throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

Every time another layer of the Koch brothers’ global empire of misdirection, astro-turfing and white-washing is unpeeled, each new insight into the revolutionary plot hatched at Mont Pellerin to enthrone market-friendly ideas, each time money flows from powerful hands into the palms of key US decision-makers, it becomes easier to imagine power in the form of a cabal or a clan, as a clandestine conspiracy united not only in interest but in strategy to maintain their lordship over the suffering plebes.

Of course tracing and tracking these strategies matters, and responding to them needs to be a part of everyday politics. Yet, it’s also important to pay attention to the way in which feelings, and especially in-group feeling, play a part in perpetuating power structures. A recent piece by Sam Polk, a lapsed Wall Street insider, does something similar, and it’s gotten a fair bit of attention. Polk treats the industry’s pathology in terms of addiction. Most interesting about the piece, however, is not the soulless drive for ever more money and power (it’s always odd to me that people are surprised by capitalists acting, as Marx predicted, “as capital personified”), but with the picture he paints of industry politics. It’s true that the industry hates both financial regulation, and taxes on the rich, but when Polk put the systemic advisability of certain measures in question, the response from his boss was that he didn’t “have the brain capacity to think about the system as a whole. All I’m concerned with is how this affects our company.”

It’s not that the US financial class is uninterested in politics, but many of them nonetheless have an unsophisticated view of politics, backed up by fear and selfishness, not a desire to rule per se.

All this provides proper context for a recent exposé in New York Magazine detailing the hazing rituals of Kappa Beta Phi, an exclusive club for powerful Wall Street types.  What is most striking about this soirée for billionaires (and those making due with only hundreds of millions) is not simply the fact of their gathering, but how much closer their hijinx come to the crude embarrassments of a freshman fraternity rush than a secret meeting of the Illuminati. It’s a wonder, reading the KBP piece next to a recent investigation into real college fraternities, that more Wall Street types aren’t falling off things to their death.

It’s easy to look at the incredible power that has been accumulated by Wall Street over the last 30 years and assume that its ascendance was by design, that it could only have resulted from a clandestine, concerted scheme. It’s doubly so, given that much of the still-powerful neoliberal orthodoxy is not only the brainchild of an intellectual revolution, but the result of a concerted political project. Fine. But strategy to respond has to take into account as well, how much “the smartest guys in the room” are far from it, and how much the structures of power are self-reinforcing, with or without concerted efforts by anyone. If there’s one thing Wolf of Wall Street can help make clear, it’s that.

Sleepwalking

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cross-posted from EUI Global and Transnational Perspectives Working Group

It's not like you can stop themWhen you spend every day up to your chin in the quagmire of post-national social structures, its easy to lose sight of how much power – and violence – is still exercised by states. This may in some sense be true in no area more than it is in questions of immigration and residency.

For example, it turns out that, if you’re in a coma in the United States because you got hit by a car and that means, say, that you’re no longer attending classes in the program for which you got your visa, that means your visa is no longer valid. So now you are in the country without authorization, right? So the state is within its rights to deport you, right? Sigh…yes. It’s not like you can stop them!

Sleep-walking through the ethical dimensions of these questions might allow this response to be cast as “reasonable.” Yet people working on the question, like the EUI’s Rutger Birnie, for example, might ask whether getting into a country legally, and then spending time in that country, and then getting hit by a car in that country might – might! – be the kind of thing that entangles you in the state’s ethical universe, questions of international law aside.

For some, situations like this are best resolved by thinking about the proper content state power. Yet they inevitably lead others to welcome post-national social structures with open arms, and to wish for state power that wasn’t sleepwalking, but already in a coma.

Olympic Feverish

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crossposted from EUI Global and Transnational Perspectives Working Group

camp_x-ray_detainees1Time for something (a bit) topical. Over on the facebook page, Anna Triandafyllidou raises an excellent question about justice, culture and the rule of law:

What does the rule of law mean in different places and how can we transplant western systems of justice into other contexts. What does it take to inform people about their legal rights and empower them to use the in different systems of thinking and acting?

In international development circles, enthusiasm for rule of law projects has shifted from the instrumental interest of the early 1990s in making market institutions work, to more recent focus on “access to justice” and “the rule of law” as a unified, intrinsic good that deserves unique promotion. Given this trend, critical legal scholars like David Trubek and his collaborators have put the rule of law in question, pointing to the multiplicity of its agendas, the indeterminacy of the discourses, and the unpredictability of attempting to introduce “best practice” institutional forms into domestic legal traditions.The Olympics always provide a fascinating opportunity to combine excitement about internationalism with hand-wringing about complicity in local injustices. Thanks to an interesting anecdote from Keith Gessen at n+1, the Sochi games also provide a moment to think about the rule of law. Of local police who arrested him during coverage of the run-up to the games back in 2009, he writes:
…They were like police. They were alternately friendly and threatening; they knew they couldn’t keep me there forever but they were going to keep me there for a while. They were not well informed, but neither are American police, in my experience. If they differed in a serious respect from their American counterparts, it would be in their distrust of institutions—they were, for example, under the impression that journalistic materials were paid for by the highest bidder, and written to suit that bidder’s ideological position. I’m aware that this is more true in the West than most of us would care to admit, so in that sense they are right, all media is bought and paid for—but these guys literally thought they could call me on the phone and pay me to write something. I could see, in their own work, that they were not part of a strong institution, that though there were laws (which allowed them to bring me in for lacking a registration), they were supposed to be selectively deployed, and a failure to select properly could lead to consequences against which they were defenseless.”
It’s easy to read the projects that have been critical of the rule of law project as throwing the baby out with the bathwater. The desire to transform institutions so that participants can trust them, and more importantly, to give people defenses against the arbitrary exercise of power: that’s an ethical imperative that’s hard not to universalize in principle. Yet it’s possible to read these critical projects as questioning existing “rule of law” projects precisely because of lingering doubts about how well they can put those principles into practice. Not every sport, after all, is improved by hiring more refs.

The Will to Power at Qatar Airways

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So, go read this description of the working conditions for airline attendants at Qatar Airways. What’s going on here? Sure, the working realities for south Asian men depicted in the article make it impossible to describe the attendant’s conditions as “horrendous,” but still, this seems not only unpleasant, but also irrational on the part of the employer.

Neoclassical economists have no way to explain the existence of employees at all. In the world of endless spot markets, labour is a commodity, purchased in infinitely divisible portions to perform discrete tasks under controlled conditions. There can be no “bosses,” because individual workers are only contributing exactly what they have contracted to do.

The institutionalists do a bit better. Back in 1937, Ron Coase was first economist to notice that the world of production, work and exchange isn’t just an anonymous field of spot-markets, but also contained, you know, firms and employees and managers. Of course, other economists had studied firm strategies and the decisions made by managers , but he was the first to ask, if the market is so great at allocating goods, why there were firms and employees and managers at all.

His answer was, more or less, that there were costs to buying things on the market. When it comes to the employment relationship, he argued, it was just too expensive, whenever you wanted someone to perform some task required for widget-making, or widget-redesign, or what have you, to go out and find someone who had the requisite skills, dependability, availability and willingness to work on affordable terms. So it made sense to have people who agreed to be around to perform whatever tasks were necessary. Herbert Simon put it slightly differently: if you weren’t sure what kind of tasks you were going to need done, it would be good to contract with someone to take orders, rather than to perform specific tasks.

Now read Williamson’s rejection of an alternate explanation for hierarchy at work:

Of course, if the desire was not to be controlled but to control, to exercise power over others, then people might be willing to give up something in order to direct others ; that is, they would be willing to pay others more than they could get under the price mechanism in order to be able to direct them. But this implies that those who direct pay in order to be able to do this and are not paid to direct, which is clearly not true in the majority of cases.

It is impossible to read the descriptions of Saga and Gina’s work again – “are you on a diet?” – and not conclude that the treatment falls into Williamson’s “minority of cases.” More importantly, it points to how easily rule, command, control and hierarchy seem to become their own reasons – economic efficiency and the “material” goals of the participants be damned.

Why Internationalize?

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crossposted from the EUI Global and Transnational Perspectives Working Group

As part of his (at-home) road-show to sell his plans for the institution, the President of the European University Institute, Joseph Weiler, has been touting a plan to increase the “internationalisation” of the EUI. He points out that the ideal of cross-national, cross-cultural study at the root of the EUI‘s founding has now been surpassed – and then some. Indeed, at top-rated French or British school, one not only finds students and scholars from across Europe, but a student body filled to the brim with Asians, South Americans, occasional Africans.

Weiler’s plan is partly instrumental, designed to shore up the case for the EUI among the member states and the Commission, in a context where austerity politics have led to an unsurprising fall in support for university funding among policy priorities. The strategy pursued here – taking austerity for granted, and trying to figure out, not how to deal with the bear, but how to run faster than the other guys – presents an interesting case study in the interaction between institutional citizenship and broader political citizenship.

The other obvious question is why this plan might work (taking into account that the idea is only one among many proposed by Weiler to dig out a financially-secure niche for the EUI). The instrumental value of internationalization – making the EUI look more cutting innovative, presenting it as a “good investment” – depends in turn on the idea that there is some intrinsic value to cross-cultural engagement in academic study.

This is a popular idea, one pursued with passionate intensity by a number of university administrators and public officials. Paul Well’s, a Canadian journalist, has provided a summary of the reasons proposed by a recent report from the president of Western University:

First, travel is broadening, new perspectives, yadda yadda. Impossible to measure but probably true. Second, that some portion of international students who come to Canada stay after study and add to our human capital. People like Amit Chakma. Third, that even if they go home, that’s not a loss because it adds to a global network of highly-talented people who owe Canada a lot and are likely to stay in touch. Finally, that drawing your students and researchers from a wider pool raises the bar for every participant: a university that recruits globally is a better and more challenging university than one which recruits only locally.

It seems to me that much of the advantage for the EUI, and for its European funders, lies in the “yadda yadda.” Indeed, the whole idea of the working group behind this blog seems to come from the same place.

In which ten movies are reviewed in a failed response to a request for “not too subtle”, “visually appealing” non-comedies

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One of my favourite movies from the last few years was A Winter’s Bone. Harsh, dark allegory in the small hills and hard lives of the Ozarks. Brilliant noir meets western sensibilities in a morality play about how norms, rules and power play out in the shadow of the law. Like the Coen brothers without any of Tarantino’s glib distance from what’s happening.

How dark are you willing to go? Snowtown (or, for North Americans unlikely to pick up the box of what sounds like a ski-weekend comedy, The Snowtown Murders) is a kind-of horror movie, sans both the genre’s exhausting titillation and its sense of the Gothic. Rather, a depressing window on the conditions under which criminality gets normalized. In that way like Breaking Bad, except it doesn’t try to win points by having protagonists you care about. Very violent, with some scenes of torture made all the more nauseating when you know the movie is based on real case history.

A “lighter” option (because it is about terror rather than horror) is Animal Kingdom. By making a movie about bank robbers without any bank robberies, the writers are able to create the perfect setting for a portrayal of the fear of living with people who you know are not only capable of profound violence, but also under constant threat of becoming its victims. That set up is executed perfectly, by having the camera rather than the dialogue do most of the heavy lifting. Had my adrenaline running to the point I actually had to pause it at points, even though there are no explosions, no quick cuts, no firefights, and only one (very subdued) chase scene.

Another great movie that lets the camera do most of the psychologizing is Martha Marcy Mae Marlene. Also some unsettling violence, but here most of it is implied rather than played out – save one startling scene that thankfully ends quickly. Provides an insider’s view of what it might feel like to join a cult, and in particular, of the way in which transgression is used to maintain group coherence, and what that means for members if and when they leave.

A cute, off-kilter take on cults, though one that provides less insight into what we are like as social beings is The Sound of My Voice. I dare you to watch the first 12 minutes (which you can, online) and not feel like you have to see the end game. Replaces the sociology of Martha Mae with the soft-focus metaphysics of a freshman dorm-room. Is she or isn’t she? The narrative provides just enough misdirection to make you feel at the end that the answer can only be “both.”

If dark and disturbing are not really your style, I guess I would ask a question: how do you feel about Wes Anderson? He made Rushmore and The Royal Tennenbaums. If you are into his style (and there is really no mistaking it), then rush to see Moonrise Kingdom. It provides all the twee, odd, strangely paced artifice and nostalgia, painted in pastels and tartans over the surface of every one of his films, though with less of the pathos that marked, say, Tennenbaums. Some people find his focus on art design rather than art frustrating, and can’t connect to films without the veneer of Hollywood “realism”; if you are not that person, then you will probably find more than a few things to like in this particular take on his one-man genre, a particular interation that dips more directly into the style of kids’ adventures books than anything else in his oeuvre, in some sense even more so than The Fantastic Mr. Fox. Though this one has nothing on par with the latter’s amazing wolf-on-the-hill scene.

An older movie that also borrows from the school of valorizing presentation over representation and flair over fervour, is Rian Johnson’s Brick. In its essence, it’s like a film school project on genre mixing, bringing together film noir’s mystery, caricature, hard knocks and careless violence with the lightness, nostalgia and dramatis personae of a cheesy high school romantic comedy. Except for a few moments where Johnson allows the awkwardness and doubt of actual teenagers to poke through the script’s surface, the mastery of the film lies precisely in how well these two elements are balanced, giving what is obviously pastiche the patina of reality.

Speaking of bank robberies, and of old movies, have you seen Inside Man? A Spike Lee joint that seems the most significant departure from his usual efforts to capture the lived realities of America’s black communities, the film proves that his skills go much deeper than just a commitment to faithful storytelling. By letting the narrative unfold both forward and backward toward the heist’s punchline, Lee is not only able to make a movie about the thrill of constructing and executing the job (a la Ocean’s Eleven) but also provides a mystery, or really two mysteries, one of which is as political as you would expect from one of his picture. Except for the spent payoff of knowing how the hell they pulled off the job, the whole thing held up under a recent second viewing, as well.

A movie that really lets the camera do a lot of the work, and some might say too much, is Meek’s Cutoff. For those who played it, the idea that this is “the best movie never made about the Oregon Trail video game” is sure to catch a few laughs; the movie, on the other hand, is unlikely to catch any. About the madness of heading of West in the early years, it seems to star the scenery more than any of the actors, portraying plains so flat and desolate that they allude to an unspoken intent to kill. Probably falls into the “too subtle” category, but only if you think there is supposed to be some point beyond simply portraying what it was like to be there for the people crazy enough to start the journey. Very. Slow.

The movie I am most excited for the release of this year is Upstream Color, not because I know next to anything about it, because it was made by Shane Carruth, and that he made Primer. Primer is like Rian Johnson’s most recent movie, Looper, in that it’s about time travel, except that it was made on less than 1% of the budget, is much smarter, and actually takes that subject matter seriously. Too often, science fiction gets caught up in chasing the possibilities of “what if?” in a way that ignores that all fiction works on exactly the same premise. Rather than chasing “aesthetics of the future” that almost always reveal more about present neuroses than presenting any real thought about how technological change, social change and design might interact, the film simply takes the “what if?” seriously, letting particular characters in a particular place respond to the disruption of a new technology. You could say that Carruth is also “too subtle” here, in the sense that catching the drift of the narrative probably requires a second or a third viewing, but that is a feature of a film that is unafraid to work with the real consequences – moral, metaphysical, psychological – of messing with one of the fundamental building blocks of our experience.

Ding Dongs

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Rob Ford has been removed from office (or, as many of my friends have written on facebook “ROB FORD HAS BEEN REMOVED FROM OFFICE”). Let me tell you, that makes-a-somma people angry! Say, and this may surprise you, Christie Blatchford.

I haven’t been able to read past the fold, but that’s more than enough. Here’s her headline

Christie Blatchford: 383,501 Torontonians voted for Rob Ford — not one voted for the men behind his ouster

Let’s be clear about what happened in this decision. In fact, let’s let Ivor Tossell do it, because he gives the clearest breakdown of the actual run of events I’ve seen to date:

Rob Ford runs a football foundation. He tirelessly fundraises for it from people he meets, including developers and lobbyists, and lately he did it with city resources. This is against the rules. The city’s integrity commissioner entreated him over and over to follow these rules–another person telling him he can’t do this, can’t to that—but to no avail. And after years of breaking rules that merely put him on the hook for financial penalties, Ford finally broke the rule that cost him his job: He got up in council and argued that he shouldn’t have to pay just such a penalty. Then he voted against parting with the money. That’s a conflict of interest, and some of the finest lawyers in town weren’t able to convince the judge otherwise.

Given this context, the only way of reading Blatchford’s argument, I guess, is that politicians shouldn’t be be removed from office for breaking conflict of interest rules – because it’s undemocratic. This is weird, but common: People have this vision of a democratic system where you elect a supreme ruler for 5 years and dude gets to do whatever the hell he wants. That’s not how it works, nor how it should. Politicians, especially municipal politicians, are elected to do a job. Breaking certain rules are going to get you fired, though apparently gross incompetence and not showing up to work won’t. It seems totally reasonable to me that, where the employer has clear rules about not getting involved in decisions that impact your own finances, losing your job should be a possible consequence.

Lots of people who are happy to see Ford go have nonetheless hedged their glee with the caveat that “this isn’t the way that they want to see him go.” Some of the hand-wringing seems to side with the “it’s anti-democratic” side. Me? I have no qualms about politicians who break the rules getting kicked out of office before their term is up. Others, however, are worried about the potential political fall-out from the decision. No matter the reasons of those whose renditions of “Ding Dong, the Witch is Dead” are sung in slightly hushed tones, their argument is, on the one that  “the law’s the law” and so the judge had little choice but, on the other hand (thanks again, Ivor!): “The law is too crude an implement and deserves to be revisited.”

Again, I am not so sure. As easy as is to attack the lack of discretion the legislation gives the judge – it required him, once he found a breach which did not result from inadvertence, to “declare the seat vacant” –  I am not sure that people have really thought through the alternatives. Many, I suppose, would like to see a law that gave the judge a wider set of penalties to draw from, based on the severity of the offence. The problem, of course, is that people very seldom violate a law like this so egregiously, so blatantly, so audaciously. Which means that, unlike in criminal law, there is very little precedent for a judge to rely on.

If the law had provided room for discretion, the judge would, essentially, have to decide himself what the penalty should be for Ford’s misconduct. Should it have been less because the amount in issue was “only” $3500? Should it have been more because the violation was so brazen, as in cases where “punitive damages” are applied? Should it have been less because it was done so clearly out in the open and not hidden, or does that mean it was brazen and contemptuous of the rules and everyone else’s compliance with them, and should be punished more? Should it have been more, or less, because he got involved in a decision on not paying money he owed, rather than on, say, awarding a contract to himself? These all seem like difficult questions to me, and were the judge had discretion, the answer provided would be fraught with even more political overtones. Can you imagine that anyone would have been happy with this decision if the judge had found Ford guilty and, say, “only” fined him $10000? Or if he had let Ford stay in office, but banned him from running in the next election? What decision could the judge have made in such a situation which would have seemed non-political? The judge himself – the full text of the decision is here – apparently would have liked more wiggle room:

The mandatory removal from office for contravening s. 5(1) of the MCIA is a very blunt instrument and has attracted justified criticism and calls for legislative reform

I am not so sure. Once you accept that courts can remove politicians from office for fraud, it seems to me that a “zero tolerance” approach is the only way to prevent the decision-making process from taking on terrible political proportions. The law is good enough as-is.

To be clear, I do wish that Rob Ford had not been removed from office in this way. Thanks to people like Christie Blatchford, this case will be used to attack  the legal system and to boost  the idea that the left, somehow, does not play fair. It may also, paradoxically, increase Ford’s chance of staying in office. But I also wish that Toronto’s mayor was not such a blustering, arrogant buffoon that he would break fundraising rules for city councillors, violate conflict of interest rules, ignore legal advice, and assume that the rules did not apply to him. It is the fact that he is, and that he did, which ultimately provides the fodder for Blatchford’s thoughtless, incoherent tirade. Not the judge. Not the conflict of interest law. Not the complainants in the case. Once more, Tossell nails it: Rob Ford got himself fired.

As for the meat of the decision, the only defences  Ford had to rely on was that the rules weren’t actually the rules, that he broke them accidentally, or that the amount at issue was “insignificant.” Ford has said he will appeal. The judges rulings on the first two issues seem watertight. Which means, given that they have to rule under the existing law, they could keep Ford in office by deciding that the amount is “insignificant.” But let us be clear: this would be a court saying that, when a city official owes the city $3500, there are no consequences for him voting on whether he has to pay it or not. I imagine that many taxpayers wish they had the same luxury.

But back to Blatchford’s analysis,

Toronto Mayor Rob Ford has been given the boot from office because an opportunistic citizen hired a smart and politically savvy lawyer who found a club of an arcane statute with which to tie the hands of a judge who was willing to play ball.

That’s the short and dirty version of the bombshell that has dropped

She seems to be saying : i. the people who wrote a law allowing city councillors who brazenly, purposefully violate conflict of interest laws were wrong to do so. ii. the people who brought this case to the courts to see if the law had been broken were wrong to do so; iii. the court system was wrong for hearing the case, despite having absolutely no discretion over what cases to hear. Each of these propositions seems wrong to me; I cannot read any further.