Cyborg love-rats

Glamour Magazine. Blows. My. Tiny. Mind.

I was flicking through last month's Glamour on the loo a couple of days ago (too much information?) when I came across this beauty. That's right folks, it's a handy flowchart telling you when you should split up from your partner if he's [sic] been unfaithful.

As you can see, there are only two basic varieties of 'emotional infidelity'. Either you work together, or you don't. Similarly, physical infidelity comes in just two flavours: drunk / not drunk. (Actually, that bit does pretty much cover the many-coloured palette of my sexual experiences, but we'll skip on). If it happened more than once while drunk, he's probably an alcholic.

And so on.

What I love most about this diagram is the kind of business-skirt-Bridget-Jones-too-many-chardonnays life pattern it assumes everyone lives. As in any flowchart, there are at least two different kinds of reduction going on here.

First there's the category reduction in the boxes: reducing a universe of emotional experience - a thousand years of cultural and literary reflection on the subtle, sinuous, tragic and comic ways in which two people's relationship flexes - into ten fifty-word scenarios.

Then there's the causal reduction in the lines between the boxes. In this case, the progress of the 21st-century Western middle-class relationship is explained by alcohol, work and communications technology. These are the three fundamental forces that govern emotional motion in this universe. Meaningless flirtation outside the workplace? Emotional infidelity not mediated by email or text message? Loss of control caused by anything other than substance abuse? None of these things can exist. They're against the laws of physics.

Or maybe I'm reading a tad too much into what is, essentially, Just a Bit of Fun.

But I'm not so sure. The more I think about it, the more I wonder whether maybe this flowchart might actually be true. At least for Glamour magazine's core demographic. Or rather, maybe it and its friends have made themselves true. Maybe a decade of Cosmo relationship flowcharts, shackled to the growth of post-industrial capitalism's casualised* white-collar service sectors, has actually made Western urban life like this? Maybe this flowchart actually diagnoses the entirety of our under/overemployed, lower-middle-class, low-seratonin metroliving in ten pastel-coloured boxes? A schematic for emotional-death-by-temping. The more I think about it, the more I think maybe it's a work of genius. AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRGGGGGGHHHHHHHHH.

The bigger point is that there's total coherence in Glamour magazine's choice of schematic. The flowchart and its cousins are the emblematic technology of 'management science': the 20th century's ur-science, whose rise both created the business models that keep us permanently overworked yet casualised, rootless and moving from short-term job to short-term job; and which thereby confines our emotional lives to workplace flirtation, inappropriate emails and after-work drinking. It seems only appropriate, then, that those impoverished emotional lives should also be described and directed by flowcharts.

The important thing, of course, is the self-fulfilling cognitive impact of this kind of diagramming. There's nothing wrong with using a diagram to summarise important temporal and causal relationships (although there are diagrams better than flowcharts to do this - they're designed for computer programmes, not the kinds of complex systems better described, in fact, by the allusiveness of formal language). But once you start to use any schematic to explain things, there's a temptation to think that this is how the situation you are trying to explain actually is. That the model is the thing it models. Etc. And then to act that way.

Beyond the ordinary propensity of any sufficiently influential model to make itself true, flowchart capitalism works to make flowchart psychology true. Egged on by the narrow models of management consultants and the OECD, companies and governments seek to reduce labour costs and labour market rigidity. The less job security we have, the more time we need to spend organising our employment arrangements (and organising our lives around our employment arrangements). The more we're forced to do more labour for less money and with fewer people, the more we have to spend our entire lives at work. So, ironically, the less job security and fewer labour rights we have, the more significant the workplace becomes in our social lives. And the more our labour conditions increase the combination of repetitive boredom and stress that we need to assuage with flirty emails and heavy drinking.

In short: deregulation makes us office sluts. As Karl Marx would say.

I'm actually being pretty serious here. The genealogy that gets us from flowcharts to Bridget Jones remains one of the most under-explored narratives of 20th-century history. Philip Mirowski's provocative re-writing of the history of economics (and the history of science) provides, as far as I know, the most detailed account so far. The Ladybird version goes something like this:

1. In the 19th century, thermodynamics begat neoclassical economics. Physicists - and, more significantly, theory-minded engineers, especially ones that were working on steam engines - are the forgotten theorists that produce the doctrines of the new economics, based upon thermodynamic models. Utility is patterned on potential energy, down to its formal mathematics. In other words, the scientific ideas and machines that fuelled industrial capitalism also provided the economic theory that - after the fact - describes and justifies industrial capitalism.

2. In the 1940s and 1950s a new strand of thinking about automata and robots provided the forgotten intellectual origins of post-war mathematical economics: developments in neoclassical price theory, rational expectations theory, theories of institutions, and computational economics. Physical scientists and engineers, working mainly in the United States on operations research, game theory, computers, missile servomechanisms and strategic bombing models, are again the central thinkers. And consequently the model human at the heart of neoclassical microeconomics is not Adam Smith's homo economicus. It's the cyborg.

In Mirowski's account the axial figure of this second phase is mathematician, operations researcher, game theorist and CIA consultant John von Neumann. The eccentric genius of whom his Princeton colleagues said that "he had made a thorough, detailed study of human beings and could imitate them perfectly".

Then there's the third act to this account, which I think has still to be adequately written. It starts from the fact that the other thing these precocious operations researchers and engineers are doing in the first half of the 20th century, as well as revolutionising neoclassical economics, is creating management science. Moving beyond the factory time-and-motion studies of Ford and Taylor, they're trying to make missiles and machines and factories and businesses work more efficiently, in part by making people more like machines.

Somehow management 'science' - not economics - becomes the master discipline of the late 20th century. The management consultants who make up the discipline's priesthood start fanning out from McKinsey and PA Consulting and Booz Allen, determining not just how manufacturing processes, but soon how whole corporations, cities, armies, government departments and societies, should be organised. By the late 20th century the re-imagining of workers, processes and institutions as industrial machines - and their re-engineering for 'efficiency' - seems to have won out over other candidate 'ur-sciences' (economics, social anthropology). And of course the basic spanners and wrenches of the management practitioners mirror, but in totally bastardised form, the prescriptions of the economics that was also substantially generated by management science's progenitors: identify ineffeciencies or 'synergies'; fire those workers unfortunate enough to be employed in an 'inefficient' position; and ensure that everyone left is working as long and as fast and as cheaply as possible.

And of course, with this parenthood, it was only natural that management science should so enthusiastically embrace the flowchart: the analytical tool first probably formalised (for designing computer programmes, not factory processes or business models) by John von Neumann.

See!

I've been meaning to write a lot more about the global intellectual triumph of 'management' and its bizarre manifestations (to take one small instance, how the management consulting firm Adam Smith International, in conjunction with DFID, are currently restructuring the Sudan People's Liberation Army). And the homogenous picture of neoclassical economics I've badly sketched here is, of course, a total caricature. But this is already way too long. So for now, I'll leave it with this.

NATO have a new strategy for Afghanistan, right? The proposed solution to what is arguably Europe's and the United States' most important foreign policy problem. In December, NBC's Richard Engels got hold of a copy of some declassified bits from the office of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The master document is this - produced, it appears, by noted counter-insurgency specialists, er, PA Consulting.

The Mother of all Flowcharts.



This is how we're bringing peace to Afghanistan. And romance to our tired treadmill lives. And we wonder why we're so fucked.









* In case Per or any other actual economists are reading this: I think I mean increased external numerical flexibility in the labour market. I'd be grateful for correction if there's a more appropriate metric, though.

Retooling Françafrique

I've never been a big fan of reading the entrails of press releases trying to divine signs of intrigue. But there's been one under-reported corner amid the reams of coverage of the Clotilde Reiss saga this week. The European media's cloak-and-dagger speculation has been all about possible prisoner-swap deals cut by the Elysée to get Reiss out of Tehran: speculation fuelled by the recent shuffle of high-profile Iranian prisoners out of French jails - first Majid Kakavand, the Iranian engineer the US were trying to extradite for alleged illegal procurement of US components for Iran's arms industry; then Ali Vakili Rad, convicted in 1994 for assassinating the Shah's last Prime Minister, Shapour Bakhtiar.

But there's been little in the Anglophone media - and scarcely more Francophone coverage - about France's diplomatic wingmen in the Reiss negotiations. The Elysee's short statement after Reiss' release thanked "Mr Lula da Silva, President of Brazil, Mr Abdoulaye Wade, President of Senegal, and Mr Bashar al-Assad, President of Syria, for their active role in securing our compatriot’s release."

It would be fascinating to know what Lula and Assad did to help smooth the wheels. Wade, though, clearly wanted everyone to know how helpful he'd been: the Senegalese presidency put out a press statement on the day of Reiss' release with a detailed narrative of shuttle diplomacy between Paris, Dakar and Tehran since October 2009, which he claims sealed the deal on Reiss' release after last-minute meetings in Tehran on 14-15 May between his son, Karim Wade, his foreign minister, and the Iranian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

It's hard to know how much of this is puff from a president under increasing fire from accusations of corruption and nepotism after a decade of power - Senegal's Socialist Party criticised Wade this week for blowing his own diplomatic trumpet "like an elephant in a china shop".

But what's most interesting about Wade's account is the cast of supporting characters on all the late night Air France flights. Wade says that he initiated discussions on the Reiss dossier unilaterally on a trip to Tehran in October 2009, and was initially encouraged by France; but that after a 2 hour meeting in Dakar in November 2009, he was told by Andre Parant, one of Sarkosy's African affairs advisors, that France wanted Senegal to suspend its diplomatic efforts.

Senegalese efforts were revived, Wade claims, in late March, when his son Karim Wade met at the Elysée (not, of course, the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs on the Quai d'Orsay) with Claude Gueant, Sarkozy's chief of staff. From then on, according to Wade's account, Gueant is his point-person as his ministers shuttle back and forth between Tehran, Paris and Dakar.

One way of interpreting this might be to see Senegal's president playing off two factions in Paris: Sarkozy's new foreign policy advisers like Parant, reluctant for Wade to, er, wade in; and older contacts in the Françafrique networks like Gueant (deputy-director of 'arms-to-Angola' Charles Pasqua's cabinet during the 1990s), accustomed to circumventing the Quai d'Orsay to deal straight with France's West African friends in high places.

It's surprising (and widely remarked upon) how these old networks have returned to the Elysée in recent years. When Sarkozy came to power in 2007 much was made of the 'death' of Françafrique, the shadowy post-colonial political-business system which channelled French aid, political support and military muscle to a stable of reliable (if slightly murderous and dictatorial) West and central African leaders, in return for a complex system of double-bribery in which aid and loans trickled back to France as illicit funding for both Gaullist and socialist parties. French influence in Africa was waning, commentators claimed, as the US and new powers like China and Iran offered assistance with fewer strings attached to France's traditional African clients. At the same time, Sarkozy's Blairist new dawn came complete with a Robin-Cook-esque gesture at a new ethical foreign policy: in 2008 Sarkozy's new secretary of state for overseas cooperation, Jean-Marie Bockel, said he wanted to "sign the death certificate of Françafrique." Yet two months later, Bockel was removed from his ministry (allegedly, the New York Times claimed, after he annoyed Gabonese president Omar Bongo, the centre of the Françafrique system since the 1960s, by referring to Gabonese corruption). Meanwhile advisers like Gueant straddle the divide between Sarkozy's young turks (he's been Sarkozy's chief of staff since 2002) and the old Pasqua Africa networks. Most telling is the man who the Senegalese presidency claims accompanied Karim Wade to Tehran in April: "the lawyer Robert Bougi", Bongo's confidant and Jacques Foccart's inheritor as the lynchpin of the Françafrique system. Bougi apparently now also has an advisory role on African affairs at the Elysée.

Françafrique was always as much about stability as corruption: keeping France's reliable friends in power for as long as possible with aid, loans and battalions of French troops stationed at the presidential palaces (Bongo, the lynchpin, was the longest serving non-monarchical head of state in the world, in power for 42 years). So it's interesting that Wade's power play seems at least partly to do with the reported grooming of his son, Karim, to succeed him smoothly as Senegal's next president. The Senegalese press has widely reported that Gueant and Bourgi have been promoting Karim's candidature in Paris. Whether or not that's true, on the other side Andre Parant slipped out to a French regional journalist at the end of April that 'the government' was worried about political unrest in Senegal if Wade undertook a "monarchical succession" (an 'off the record' comment duly published by Republican Lorrain).

So it looks like the reseaux are back, albeit with rivals for Sarkozy's ear. But the Reiss saga shows how fortuitously the old African networks may be serving new purposes for French policy - giving France an oblique diplomatic lever with newly important powers like Iran. Many Francophone West African states - with substantial or majority Mulsim populations and a string of Francophile Muslim presidents at the heart of the old Françafrique networks (Gabon's Bongo, Chad's Deby, Niger's Tanja, Senegal's Wade, Mali's Touré...) - are important in diplomatic configurations not accessible to powers like the UK, US and France - the Organisation of the Islamic Conference, for example, and Tehran's 'two-fingers to the G-20' G-15 group. Iran and some Gulf states are growing investors in West Africa. It's become a bit of a truism that Senegal in particular is Iran's 'bridgehead' in Africa: a major Iranian car factory is due to start exporting from Senegal; they've been promised an oil refinery; and Senegal (along with Zimbabwe, Sudan and Gabon) continues to defend Iran's right to civilian nuclear power and denies that Tehran's making a bomb.

Just when this new polyamoury of France's former colonies is making French columnists faintly wistful for the days of quiet phone calls and cash-stuffed briefcases (and, of course, making the Heritage Foundation priapic with gleeful fear about Shi'a empire-building in West Africa), the cosmopolitan ties of France's old friends in West Africa - tapped into by the oldest of old-school Françafrique operators - suddenly look rather useful. With the French deficit at 7.5%, I wonder how long it can it be before Paris is asking some of its old friends in the Gulf of Guinea to put in a friendly word to a few Gulf State sovereign funds to play nicely? Perhaps there's even a more general point - are former colonial powers, with their culturally-anchored deep networks of oblique international influence, actually peculiarly well-equipped to operate in a new polycentric international order? And is this something that the US lacks?

that they could call you

I've just finished reading James Meek's excellent novel We Are Now Beginning Our Descent. His anti-hero, an insufficiently deracinated British journalist (clearly, in part, Meek), moving between Afghan airstrips and Islington dinner parties, describes at one point the "battle for distance", on which the practice of journalism depends. And human rights research. And war.

There was a cult of seeing without knowing and watching without touching. The generic foreign faces on television: you knew them, because you could see them, you could hear the foreign sounds they made. But you had to avoid knowing enough about them to prevent your imagination making them out to be what you wanted them to be. You had to turn away from the knowledge that you could reach them on the phone. That they had phones. That they could call you. The horror of the labour required if these truths were accepted drove people to celebrate the distance and nurture it, to turn their will towards preserving the difference between a here and a there, in a world where there was no there any more, where everyone was already here.

As a nascent (and insufficiently deracinated) professional voyeur of human misery, I'm beginning to have a few of those experiences. Where you're sent 'abroad' and you meet people, real people, who might as well be ghosts, and you store up their stories for research reports and self-aggrandising dinner party anecdotes. And you file each encounter in the compartment in your head which is condescendingly labelled 'source', or even 'victim'. But which is really labelled 'people from that place on the news'.

And then the ghosts materialise on the end of a mobile phone. And occasionally, which is worse, after a while they don't.

There's a second myth which goes along with the myth of distance. The myth that you are powerless to help, because they are so far away. And they are so many. And so you're helping as best you can, because you're helping to tell their story or lobby their government or support their court case or their counselling or their compensation. When of course you are perfectly powerful enough to help directly and concretely, with your airline tickets and bank transfers and phone calls and consular letters. If only you pulled out your finger and did something in time.

There's no trite lesson at the end of this post. Except to glumly remark that our liberal Ummah doesn't stretch anywhere near as far as we would like to think. That our (or my) habit of picking and choosing the acquaintances we maintain at a distance - between the friendly, well-educated, useful ones we want to keep up with on Facebook, and the ones who aren't on Facebook at all - is repellent. And that there must be a way of doing better?