Bataille's "The accursed share" and Absence: An analytical approach to data, decision and economics

I'm in the process of completing a paper on George Bataille's economic theory set out in his book "The Accursed Share" (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Accursed_Share). It is perhaps surprising that Bataille, who wrote so powerfully around deep human issues of sex, eroticism, and religion should have regarded his work on "general economy" to be his most significant: but "The Accursed Share" is an extraordinary work which builds on the earlier work, using it to probe the depths of human motivation in economic behaviour. Where Keynes brushes over deeper psychological issues (going no further than assuming psychological dispositions or 'propensities' to save and consume which react to broader socio-economic conditions), and where Kahneman has more recently brought to bear the somewhat narrow and reductionist epistemology of modern psychology and neuroscience on economic behaviour, Bataille does something quite simple but very different. Where most conventional economic thinking revolves around ideas of equilibrium, Bataille points to the fundamental asymmetries of economic behaviour - particularly the asymmetry between the acquisition of commodities and wealth and their waste. It's waste not equilibrium, Bataille argues, that we should focus on - and waste in all forms - not only the destruction of war which seems to keep capitalism on its feet (as Marx described), but extravagant waste by societies on temples, pyramids and cathedrals, or the waste of life in primitive rituals of human sacrifice (the Aztecs of course build pyramids too!), or the waste in sexual excesses (where Bataille's earlier work becomes important), or more benignly in the luxury of artistic expression. Now, as sovereign wealth hemmorhages in a frantic attempt to keep the world and its banks afloat, and as public institutions self-destruct in a desperate attempt to live within their means, Bataille's perspective deserves attention.

Bataille links the need for waste with the accretion of 'energy' which, he argues, creates a surplus which must eventually release itself (he produces a somewhat mystical account of how the sun's energy is continually absorbed and must be released somehow). What causes energy to be released in particular and usually violent ways is the constraining power of social prohibitions. He argues, drawing on Marcel Mauss's idea of the 'potlatch' - gift giving rituals amongst eskimo tribes - that we need to find less damaging ways of releasing this 'energy', and advocates potlatch-style 'giving' as a way of casting off commodities for no immediate gain. In order for this to happen, the constraining power of prohibitions needs to be understood better if not overcome. Bataille's focus is on those prohibitions, and because of this, his is an economic theory which is fundamentally 'negative' - it's looks at the negative 'ground' of economic behaviour for an explanation, rather than at the positive 'figure' of equilibrium  theory, or psychological modelling.

The negative focus of his theory makes me think of Bhaskar's concept of absence, and it also ties in with my own thinking about critical and negative thinking (see http://dailyimprovisation.blogspot.co.uk/2013/01/towards-negative-cybernetics-home-for.html). Bataille goes through a process of determining the prohibitions and understanding how they bear on economic rationality. In his view, economic rationality isn't rational at all - it effectively amounts to patterns of communication (rather like Habermas's communicative rationality) orbiting 'black holes' of prohibition, taboo and transgression. Understand the taboos and you can understand the dynamics of 'economic rationality' and make interventions which can steer a path towards benign forms of waste of commodities.

What interests me is whether an analytical approach might be taken to put some meat on Bataille's arguments. I'm currently working on an agent-based model of Nigel Howard's 'Paradoxes of Rationality'. When we look at data, what we see is an epiphenomenon of decision. The form of reflexivity behind that decision will bear the imprint of absences which will have had a causal bearing on the decision taken. An analytical approach would examine data and model possible absences which might have existed to produce the decision that produced the data. With enough data, there should be common ground about absences. I'm hoping that a regression-type analysis would be able to at least show some interesting patterns.

Such an analysis can only pinpoint the 'dark matter' of decision. But the point of any analysis is that it itself leads to decision. Inferring meaning in the dark matter, i.e. determining the absence, is something that happens in the observer of the analysis. In this way, this kind of analysis can be a way of catalysing decision-making processes. Because it is on a computer screen, there is also the possibility of sharing the experience and the reasoning with others.

Bataille's economic theory is either crazy or brilliant. I suspect it's the latter. But operationalising it in a way where it might have some practical utility would be the best way of proving it.

The Stratification of the University Sector and the Importance of Critique

Can uninspected absence and insufficient critique of the education system lead to unequal and pathological structures? Is critique regulatory?

I'm thinking this with regard to the way that the University sector is developing in the UK in the wake of the marketisation reforms. The current regulatory framework is provided by the Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education. Their job has been to 'safeguard standards' across the different institutions that call themselves universities.When pushed however, no-one can say what 'standards' actually are safeguarded, for it is clear that a degree from Oxford is different from a degree from Leeds Met (say). It's not as if everyone sits the same exam: institutions, and individual lecturers, have autonomy in setting and marking exams and assignments, overseen by appointed 'external examiners'. Typically, safeguarding standards amounts to adherence to some sort of localised norms of perceived fairness towards students in different parts of the sector. Whatever localised norms are adhered to, students will gain the award of a degree that is notionally regarded as a selection filter for career advancement, and yet the differences between the value of degrees and the respective merits of different institutions (and courses) is at once obvious and absent from wider debates about fairness.

In 'regulating' quality and 'safeguarding standards' what the QAA appears to do is to stifle debate about a thorny subject. Quality in HE cannot be an issue because the QAA says it's ok and they know what they are talking about! As a result, the regulation bears upon the discourse about equality and fairness, not on actual issues of equality and fairness. The reason for this may be that deep critique about quality, fairness and the respective merits of degrees from different institutions would destabilize the nascent education industry as it seeks to present to the world a 'united front' of 'quality products'.

The deep problem is that the role of government in regulating Higher Education (and education in general) is contested (see http://dailyimprovisation.blogspot.co.uk/2012/12/what-is-role-of-government-in.html). The priority with the rise of marketisation and entrepreneurialism within institutions is the maintenance of a viable business model for selling education. "Safeguarding quality"  is part of this strategy. But what of "safeguarding fair access to employment"? That, it seems to me, is a more pressing regulatory task.

The consequence of not safeguarding fair access to employment is social balkanisation. But what would we need to safeguard fair access to employment? I think we would first have to acknowledge the differences between different institutions of Higher Education, and the differences in the opportunities which they afford, the social classes who have access to those institutions, and (most importantly) the relative achievements of individuals within different social and educational contexts.

The natural reaction to this might be to reach for sophisticated indicators (a bit like 'value added' scores). But there is quite a lot wrong with these kinds of indicators - or at least, how we tend to approach them. They produce a kind of 'positive regulation' which involves adherence to the indicators and the production of evidence: all things that can be said to 'positively' exist. As we know from other examples in health regulation and in schools, an emphasis on positive indicators creates the conditions for the production of favourable indicators. A number of uncontrollable processes are set in motion. First, and obviously, manufactured conditions for the sake of indicators do not tell the truth; indeed, their purpose is often to hide it. But worse is the fact that some institutions are better placed to manufacture conditions for positive indicators than others. Given that the indicator system is designed to identify differences (otherwise, what is the point of indicators?), the success of successful institutions is self-perpetuating, and the gap between successful and unsuccessful grows at the expense of improving real problems on the ground, and exacerbating problems in certain areas where disadvantage reigns.

I think we need 'negative regulation'. Indicators are important and useful (like the fact that 7% of kids who attend private schools get 37.5% of places at Oxford - and Oxford was really proud of that!!). But only because they present questions about phenomena which need to be explained. Our regulatory structures need to be structures that produce better explanations. The questions relating to the successful institutions are as great as the questions relating to the failures; the questions relating to successful careers are as important as the questions relating to the long-term unemployed. Regulation of HE should mean better ontological understanding and more socially efficacious interventions. It is at once strategic and operational. We need to be asking better questions of our Universities than shallow and meaningless probing of 'quality' and data in the Key Information Sets. There is nothing wrong with collecting the data - indeed, it is important. But we have no way of explaining it, and there is no effort to explain it (other than to say that institution x has a failure of 'quality'!). In place of an explanatory effort, it is left to the 'market' to evaluate the meaning of KIS statistics, in the hope that solutions will rise through a Darwinian process that eliminates weaknesses. This is clearly ideological nonsense: a profoundly mistaken social ontology.

The absence of critique means that other uninspected absences rule the day, and since some of the regulatory agencies (like the QAA) nullify deep consideration of those absences (like the supposed equality of degrees), what takes their places are tacit but acceptable forms of bigotry and elitism. The consequences of this are already apparent in the HE sector today as the Russell group universities split off from the rest playing a giddy game of powerful research grant lobbying, global brand marketing, and Research Assessment metrics. Increasingly unaccountable by virtue of their 'quality', their rising socio-economic power should worry us as much as banks and global corporations.

The role of government ought to be to critique their rise. It ought to critique the gaps that are forming in the sector. We need to know why this is happening, what its long-term consequences might be, and what might be done about it. But it is the very absence of deep critique that could turn out to be the number one suspect for a causal agent in the process of pathological stratification in the first place!

Absence, Mindfulness and Decision

I find that Easter is a mindful time of year. It is a time for letting go of what's past and renewing hopes and readiness for what lies ahead. But because it is such a meditative time, there is also an opportunity for thinking about the nature and power of prayer and meditation itself. It feels like a regrouping of strength, a gathering of resources, a process of 'listening' and authenticity which produces a general nourishment. My experience is that it works. But I am mystified as to how it works. What's the mechanism?

Mindfulness researchers have been looking at this for some years now. In a research area growing from psychology, there are numerous theories around, looking at the social and neurobiological effects of meditation. I must confess this isn't really my thing, although much of it looks interesting. I worry about the tendency (which is not universal) towards a mentalist description of mindfulness. Indeed, the polarity between mentalist and behaviourist conceptions dog most attempts to grasp what are fundamentally metaphysical ideas.

What interests me most is the relation between mindful behaviour and decision. It is, after all, the decisions we take, not whether we can retreat into a meditative state, which count. I have been arguing for some time for a model of decision-making where what is not thinkable has a causal bearing on the decision that is taken (see http://dailyimprovisation.blogspot.co.uk/2012/11/towards-negative-theory-of-learning.html). In other words, it is what is absent from thought which determines action, not the internal logic of thought itself. In fact, our very conception of logic is bound up with  the communicative decisions we take and the way that discourse is coordinated (as in Habermas's 'communicative rationality').

This is slippery territory, because rationality lurks somewhere - even in arguments that seek to challenge conventional notions of it, it is the best (only?) thing we have as humans for coordinating ourselves. But the challenge appears to be finding effective ways of using rationality so that we don't steer ourselves into catastrophe.

There seems to be a relationship between mindfulness and absence. We often feel disposed towards different kinds of decisions after meditation or prayer. Is the difference an opening-up of new areas of thought? If it is the case that absence causally determines decision, then we could see that if meditation determines areas which were previously absent from thought, then this would have an impact on decision.

I have a hunch (only a hunch!) that meditation and prayer are moments of determination of absence. This is what listening does. New concepts are discovered. In the process of doing this, the landscape of absences changes. From a game-theoretical perspective (see http://dailyimprovisation.blogspot.co.uk/2012/09/tension-and-thinking-game-theoretical.html - I'm talking in short-hand to get it all down!), new concepts may be recursively applied thus changing the decision-tree and identifying new kinds of equilibrium points.

But there is another question concerning the 'brain' within which this happens. My description as it stands appears 'mentalist': it appears that the determining of absence happens within a person's head. I do not think this is what happens. As I argued here (http://dailyimprovisation.blogspot.co.uk/2013/01/understanding-face-to-face-one-to-one.html) I think the deep experience of dwelling on an absence is deeply social. Prayer is not personal; it is social. It is social because the sensation of dwelling on something deep is quite universal, and we know that our feeling of being 'in the presence of a higher power' is the same feeling that every other member of the species experiences in these circumstances. It is not a moment of personal discovery (as it is sometimes portrayed). It is a moment of social identification borne from the realisation of a shared biology.

If this were not the case, no composer would ever be able to calculate the effect of the deep piano bottom note with a soft tam-tam and tubular bell (as in the opening of Britten's War Requiem) as being sufficiently universal to be not only recognised by a group of people as 'art' but whose emotional intention is successfully communicated.

But if prayer is fundamentally social, if it is the moment of deep identification not of the individual but of the species, doesn't that also mean it is political? 

Politicizing Educational Technology

Technology seems to just happen to us. MOOCs are 'just happening' to us. But as the recent backlash against Google Glasses shows (see http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-21937145) it is social change which legitimates itself according to a progressivistic logic, but for which nobody votes. There is no democratic accountability for technological change.

This is a question that Andrew Feenberg and Ulrich Beck have been asking - the challenge seems to be "how can technical developments be considered within a context of an informed political debate? How can the will of the people count in technology?" This is tricky. It is not true that all technical developments are 'off' the political agenda. Developments in biotechnology and genetic engineering are very much political issues. But developments in social technologies arguably have a greater impact (certainly a wider impact) than any of the "niche" technical developments that people worry about, yet there is little discussion about beyond 'healthy living' advice ("don't spend too much time online!", "video games are bad/good for you", etc) which appears more as lifestyle advice rather than political force.

The deep problem is one of distinction-making. Social technologies blur the boundaries between the person and their environment. It challenges us to think of what we mean by 'will' and 'freedom' in the first place. The very assumptions of democracy become blurred in the corporate strategies of global technology companies. And they, of course, like it like that.

Where do we start to draw distinctions? What measures can we use to keep our bearings? The social sciences abounds with competing theories and methodologies by which academics grapple with this - often only servicing the needs of the academic machine and academic careers rather than making concrete social progress. One theory - a cybernetic one - which I think is particularly pernicious is the "everything's a process" theory. "education's a process, society's a process, we're all in a process..!" The technology companies love that! There's nothing to get hold of in a sea of relavistic logic which is always defensible, but which invites those who can dictate the processes to run the show. The technology firms, the financial services industries are very much 'dictating the process' at the moment. Governments, the representatives of the will of the people, are dancing to their tune.

We are not processes. We are "persons". If you ask me what a "person" is, I cannot really say abstractly, except to say you and I are one, and there are things that we share: there are people we love and who love us. There are hopes and dreams and there are fears. And all people are like that, and yet they are all fundamentally different in the details. And whatever fancy ideas we have for the way the world works, those ideas take second place to our dreams, our loves, and the drive for meaning in our lives.

The essential problem of the social sciences and politics seems to be that we can't get beyond 'persons'. There is no satisfactory abstraction into institutions and social structures (although those things certainly have causal powers); there is no satisfactory abstraction into the components of experience of consciousness (yet mental process too are important). Persons are not divisible and each is different.

What does "the will of the people" mean when we look at things like this? My will is not a statement. It is not an abstraction. It is a movement towards something which I cannot tell. It is an absence. Ah! But there's a clue. Because the will of people is not the will of a person. It is what happens when many persons understand their common absences. Then politics is possible.

Our technology world is largely 'positive'. E-learning has been particularly guilty of a positive self-presentation and an entrepreneurial drive. Criticality gets pushed aside. Instead we assert things which are there, rather than the things which are left out. Politicizing technology means concentrating on the absences. It is through the process of determining what isn't there that coherent distinctions can be made. 

Objects and Processes

Are objects processes? There is a view in 2nd-order cybernetics that this is the case. Is it right?

The qualities of processes are different from the qualities of what we think objects to be. I tend to think of  objects as concrete, intrinsically intransitive and heterogeneously composed (composed of many parts). Processes, by contrast, I think are intangible (apart from our abstractions which attempt to describe them), intrinsically transitive, and recursively composed (processes make up processes and so on). If I am a process, I am recursive, intangible and transitive. If I am an object, I am concrete, intransitive and composed of diverse parts.

How can something be intangible and yet we can say it is recursively composed? My idea of process is an object, which in turn is a process (if objects are processes). To think of myself as an object, rather than a process, I would have to say that my concreteness is certainly hard to pin down (which suggests I may be a process!), although the concreteness of a rock is a reasonable assertion. But it is not beyond possibility that rocks are processes! But I would say of myself as an object that I am composed of parts. It may be that those parts are themselves processes, and that I might be a process thinking of sub-processes. I change and yet I am the same.

This hurts my brain!

That's interesting. What happens there? These ideas of processual whirl leads my brain to hurt, and paralyze me into inaction. But part of me is hungry. What has my hunger to do with the processes? Is it just another process? A whirl in my biological mechanism aimed at maintaining the viability of my body? But my brain is equally part of that... How is my biology no more than an idea of how I might be a mechanism? An idea which has parts, recursions, etc.

I am really hungry! I need to eat! But why does this stuff about objects and processes matter? Why am I driven to sort out the difference between processes and objects? Maybe because coming down on one side of the argument or the other, I want to be right. The clambering after the truth of the matter is clambering for status - social advantage in conversation and academic debate. My "rightness" might have a bearing on my influence and power in the world. Because "I want to be right!" is related to "I want to be powerful!", which in turn is related to "I want my life to have meaning!".

If I am right about being a processes, then I am right about the recursiveness - in essence I am right about everything. That makes me very powerful ... if I am right. What I have to do is convince everyone. The promise of a meaningful life and global adoration is only around the corner!! If I am right about being an object, can I only be right about a particular object? Other objects may be different. Maybe I might persuade everyone to categorise all the different kinds of object and produce giant taxonomies! My object-focusedness, if I am right, drives everyone into a kind of bureaucratic methodological process.

But what's driving this is the search for meaning. That appears to be deeply tied up with my relations with other people. It appears to be tied up with love in some way. Meaning may be a coordinating process - a process whereby I anticipate the likely actions of those around me (and anticipate them correctly because I control them!). But the entities which are tied up with my meaningfulness are concrete: other people, who tend to be different, who defy universalising descriptions. If I am a process, they are processes. There must be some Archimedean point where our processes meet.

But there isn't. We are different. I don't think I'm either object or process. If this is (deep down) all about love, then too much thinking can get in the way! We need to concentrate on looking after each other...

Conviviality and Absence: An Interactive Theatre approach

I've been playing with some interesting technology recently. Using the Wookie Widget Store from the iTEC project, I've developed an easy way to 'present' widgets (apps) to users remotely in real-time. I cobbled this out of Wookie's default 'voting' widget, and it wasn't too difficult. But the result is that participants are looking at a web page which displays a widget through an embed code, and the activities/widgets that they can engage in can be coordinated by a teacher. I first tried this out for a talk I gave in Eisendstadt - which stimulated a lot of discussion. Although there are many ways in which this kind of real-time control can be achieved these days (Google hangouts has similar functionality, for example), this works outside the Google ecosystem. It's just a web page; no login - it just does the job.

Then I thought that rather than change the tools remotely with human intervention, why not create a 'sequencer' that sits behind a video. So there is video instruction, and as the video progresses, so the tools available change. That's more interesting, because it's a bit like watching a video, but it's also a bit like engaging in a shared activity as the video runs. Trying this out in Spain and Austria a few weeks ago has suggested that in these situations of 'shared experience' something tangible happens to learners - they talk to each other about their experiences. In a quiz, for example, when everyone is asked to vote on a question, they will turn to each other and say "what do you think?".

The level of conversation and interpersonal engagement is interesting. There is a question: do learners engage more with each other when they have a shared experience and they have a shared activity, or do they engage more with each other when they are doing different things? That is an important question, because much of the pedagogy of inquiry-based learning suggests the importance of individual needs-based activity (or at least group activity only where it is appropriate to learner needs). It is also interesting theoretically, because it relates directly to the relationship between communication and reflexivity: there are some environmental parameters which can be tweaked in order to understand (for example) how Luhmann's 'psychic' system might relate to his 'social' system; or perhaps how Harre's 'storyline' relates to 'positions' and speech acts. And of course it provides a way where those (and a number of other theories) might be tested and their absences explored.

But maybe understanding the role of absence goes deeper than just the absence in the theories. I have been suggesting recently that communicating processes implicate deeper levels of coordination of absences as well as coordinations of communications. For example, we might paint 'consensus' (which is a difficult concept) as when we all agree on something that is missing for all of us, rather than something which is present (which is how most cybernetic theories of consensus portray it). With differentiable elements (individual personal environments/shared environments) we can ask how the configurations of elements produce different communication patterns. We can ask how the dynamics of communication are related to the dynamics of personhood and the dynamics of absence.

I think this important. Because if there's one thing we are learning at the moment with all the drastic institutional changes we are living through, we are interconnected in very deep ways which cannot simply be accounted for by the concrete/present acts we make with each other. Removing one person from a team (however useful or not that person may be deemed to be) has unforeseen consequences on the whole body of people. This is poorly understood, and there is no coherent theoretical explanation. And yet it appears to be the case. It means that our intellectual life may be more deeply socially entwined than we thought. It means that distinctions between electronic social media and physical conviviality are important, and that one is not equivalent to the other. And it may mean that those institutions that thrive and those that don't will be separated by the extent to which organisational change is conducted and managed in the knowledge of the deep impacts each change has.

The Pathology of Entrepreneurialism in Universities

Patrick McAndrew's (@openpad) talk at #cetis13 made me reflect on the increasing drive for Universities to be more entrepreneurial and the different forms this takes. Behind initiatives like globalisation, strategic recruitment of AAB students, drives in increasing retention, online initiatives like MOOCs, better analytics, etc, there are latent messages: "be more entrepreneurial", "bring in more money", "increase customer satisfaction", etc. They are the kind of demands that any business would make; they are the fundamental demands that entrepreneurialism makes. As Ronald Barnett (in his recent book "Imagining the University" and in the TES: see http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/head-in-the-clouds-feet-on-the-ground/422221.article) has commented, the 'Entrepreneurial University' is the dominant model in the sector. Yet, the idea of a university is deeply contested within the academy itself (Barnett produces a wonderful list of possible 'ideas' of the University!). He argues for the University to be a place for the exploration of 'feasible utopias' (although this has attracted some criticism in the TES, particularly from Simon Blackburn: see http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/books/imagining-the-university-by-ronald-barnett/2001135.article)

My sympathies are divided between the two sides of the argument: but it is an important argument. Barnett acknowledges his debt to Roy Bhaskar, and his language is somewhat abstract as so much writing around critical realism can be (no doubt this is not Roy's fault, but if one becomes an evangelist, it is easy (ironically) to lose perspective on reality!). I think however, he lands some powerful punches, and there is a dearth of good critical writing about Universities. And Critical Realism can be a powerful way of unblocking one's thinking. Simon Blackburn's comment is much in the vein of my criticism of Sir Ken Robinson: "Well, so everything's terrible and we need more creativity/utopianism/openness/etc... what, exactly, are you going to DO about it, rather than just talk??" Barnett, as Blackburn points out, is short on practical detail.

Universities are asking some very practical questions right now: "how to attract more students? how to increase employability? how to increase retention? how to expand globally?" etc. These are the questions of the entrepreneurial university. But there are many other questions that might be asked in a university. For example, why do we never hear "how do we get students to think better? how do we get people to think about harder problems? how do we increase creativity?". One would have thought in an institution for thinking, these would be important questions. But they are not the questions of the entrepreneurial university. They are questions of the kind of university universities used to be (I don't want to give them a label - but just to say they were places to think).

The entrepreneurial model ignores these questions. It is as if it regards the failure to address the challenges of deep thinking as inconsequential as to their future and viability (and inconsequential on the society that sustains them). This is unlikely to be true, but critical engagement with the issue demands precisely the same kind of deep thinking that is precluded by the entrepreneurial model.

But the entrepreneurial model is where we are and what we've got. The thinkers are having to take shelter (Barnett's shelter, and certainly Blackburn's will probably weather the storm) whilst a brash breed take the steering wheels. But this is very frightening.