One Way Weave Part 3: Milking it
Perhaps the most original move that so-called continental philosophy made, was to raise the question ‘what is an effect?’ We all hark on about cause and effect, and all pretend that somehow cause creates effects; If one triggers that cause, and then garners the benefits of the effects it gives. If this argument is made with verve and passion, it can appear quite unanswerable, for our very ability to reason, is vain at the best of times, and loves the idea that its moving from cause to effect somehow contains the ultimate secret to the world. Moreover there is something beautifully comforting about the idea that there are underlying (simple) causes to all the hurly burly of chaotic existence. Taken to its logical extreme, causes drop out of the liveable world altogether (which is always merely seen as their effect). This is then the territory of that supreme mental mogadon, the conspiracy theory. Such theories rest on the double assumption that chaos has cause, and pain is to someone / something’s gain. Even if of course, it is essential to such theories that it is never the weaver of the conspiracy theories who gains. Indeed it is a critical element in such thinking that the ‘thinker’ (the one who believes that conspiracies are going on) is rendered powerless by the consequences of their thought. It is always something else, something on the other side of the causal line, be it the FBI, global capitalism, or Genes – for what is the Selfish Gene hypothesis but yet another conspiracy theory - which stands to gain.
To think by supposing that thought involves the quest for underlying causes, is to suppose that thought retreats from the world that I experience, even as it reaches out to control it. As Hume noted we never perceive causes, merely successions of events. The mind that looks to a world of causes, finds it in the existence of apparently necessary sequences. Early members of an often repeated sequence are treated as the cause, and of later members of the same sequence. One thereby ties the very possibility of the latter’s reality to the previous presence of the former. (For example ‘Eating cream makes you fat’.) This move however fails at two points.
On the one hand, the connections so imposed are fundamentally arbitrary. Cause understood in this way is no cause at all, merely the correlation. Truth and statistics merge. Which is all very well (and by and large inevitable anyway), and to a degree undermines many of the pretensions of causes. Take the example this week of drug companies. Such companies have ‘suppressed’ the fact that in drug trials, the placebo does often better than the drug, although both do better than nothing (or than taking a mere sugar tablet without any ‘promise of a cure’). The problem here of course is that the causal chain between putting a small piece of sugar and chalk with or without some noxious chemical in one’s mouth, and the eventual result, is utterly complex, and probably not understandable in any simple (causal) manner (including as it does all the complex play of brain/body chemistry, and thoughts and feelings which feed back into these chemistries). The logic of cause cuts through this ‘confusion’ (which is named Life), and alleges that without the drug (or the expectation which one has of the drug) there could be no improvement. A claim which of itself makes logical sense (taking a tablet and hoping comes first in the series of getting better) and yet distorts the clear complexities involved in this process (it is not the drug which ‘formally’, that is chemically, which produces the result). In short, between an alleged cause and its supposed effect, a very great number of subsidiary causes and their effects lie, and without the presence (or absence) of these other causes, a supposed ‘cause’ cannot operate as it does. Causal claims are therefore always claims posed on the edge of an abyss of causes which must also be assumed (all the way down to the subatomic level).
On the other hand, as Hume and Nietzsche noted, the problem with causes is that they necessarily jolt thinking beyond the world, and do so in the interests of the desires of the thinker. It is far better, Hume and Nietzsche suggest, to start with what we know, the rich world as effect, and the intricate series of desires associated with those effects; and through understanding how these two conjoin in distinct and complex ways, to grasp at the world created in these shifting conjunctions: a world that we directly inhabit and experience.
The problem is thereby shifted, away from the following of causes, and onto the attempt to understand the world as a sequence of effects. A move that is highly complex, and took the entire philosophical life’s work of two of the greatest thinkers of recent times (Foucault and Deleuze) to even begin to unpick. A full exposition of such a domain is therefore clearly beyond this Rant, and all I will attempt here is to outline one strategy, which will cast light on the problem raised in last week’s Rant as the status of money, and its complex interaction with the problems of climate change.
The status of money is clearly tied into the intricate debates of causes and effects. On the one hand, money clearly is the supreme register of effects. One is rewarded because one has had an effect, because one has transformed lives (or not). Money is theoretically built upon the evaluations of different effects, and the attempt to quantify their differing powers and scope. Moreover in our society this is the only way in which we value such links, with the result that we over value the immediacy of any effect. Food that makes us immediately feel good is valued over any subsequent effect that the food might have. Junk food (or alcho-pops) are therefore very much the stuff of these times. Likewise money has effectively stripped out any other way to assess effects, than itself. To sell junk food and make money becomes itself such an ‘inherent good’, that it is very difficult (politically and economically at least) to act against it.
On the other hand, money is always a cause. To have money is therefore to have power. It is to overspill any set of effects within which one currently finds oneself, and to always have the power to instigate other effects. And yet it is worth noting that this instigation of effects on the part of money will be rooted in a world of effects rather than causes. That is, one makes money by starting with a series of effects that one wishes to produce, and then spends one’s money on ensuring that one can (in some way or other) get to those effects as quickly as possible (junk food, or chemically induced happiness). Money therefore might have a ‘causal’ power of its own, and yet that causal power is always tied up in the creation of ‘cheap’ effects.
Money is therefore caught up in two rather different registers. On the one hand it is the ultimate evaluator of the effect: money follows the power and efficacy of effects (results are what matters). On the other, it overspills all effects, and endlessly opens up the possibility to create effects elsewhere. The problem is that, besotted as we are by the notion of causation, we tend almost invariably to value this latter point over the former. Money as cause (that is as instigator of numerous extra effects) becomes the engine of globalised capitalism (and the driver of the money market). The excursion into the mucky world of effects is kept as simple (and as abstract) as possible, it becomes a mere matter of options trading (or hedge funds). The abstraction here is necessary, in that for capitalism to become globalized it needs money’s weave of effect and cause to bind all human processes within the same web (and thereby invent a language which the effects and causes can, in terms of money at least, be traded off against one another). Money, in capitalism as it is currently configured, ‘globalizes’ on the level of the ‘master cause’ – that is, that which overspills all the effects within which it is temporarily lodged, and thereby forces some jangled connection to be established between different effects (that is Products).
Moreover the minute one moves out of the domain of pure abstraction (where nothing but numbers exists anyway), two transformations become clear. Transformations that offer rather a different take on what money is, and what it might (in a world globalized on ecology, not economy) do.
Firstly money, like the gene, is effectively powerless in itself, it is only made to have value by large corporations which are at once money’s own effect and cause. That is, they are the immediate product of that money (and last only as long as it lasts), and yet also are its cause (in that money is held, used, made, only in the corporations). Corporations (as Money’s RNA) ‘shadow’ money: as its immediate effect (as money can be said to be a cause), and its distant cause as money is said to be an effect (products are made by companies). Moreover it is clear enough that corporations could be understood or even could move in two rather different directions. On the one hand, they can blindly follow the laws of their causation in money. A company exists to make money and nothing more: the blind Darwinian logic of the market place. Alternatively they could understand their position in terms of relations to effects. A Corporation is then as good as its product, and the way that that product is viewed. Unless this last point feels hopelessly idealistic, it must be remembered that all corporations, in that they must advertise, worry about this last point. Now to make this claim is not to justify advertising itself (which often attempts to impose new ‘effects’ on the mind). Be that as it may, it remains the clear case that this second dimension of corporations is to a large degree independent from the first dimension (a fact that made Adam Smith loathe big business, and Marx look to it as the necessary precursor for capitalism). It the worry that corporations have about how they are viewed (a worry which includes of course concerns about global destruction), and in the massive philanthropism of the super rich, that other possible worlds emerge – worlds separated from the all too simple tyranny of money.
Secondly, and following the last point, it is clear that the rift between money as effect, and money as cause, is integral to what money is. This rift runs right through money. That is, it is as true for individuals, as it is for large corporations, that they want to be valued for what they do (that is for the effects that they produce), but also have a desire to effect other changes elsewhere and possibly ‘illicitly’ (cheap flights or food are the demand of individuals just as much as business). Moreover this divide runs right at the heart of parallel systems to money (be they LETS trading schemes or Kula exchange rings). That is, there needs to be at once an imbalance in the system (a going into debt, a demand to have more than what one has done, justifies), and an ability to pay that debt back (in some way, and for someone else, who thereby goes into debt). And yet there is here a clear difference, in that in a money-based system, it is this appeal beyond a current consequence which is turned into a proactive cause (the game becomes about manufacturing new desires and new effects – that is new products): In a LETS scheme (or Kula exchange ring) the move merely serves to facilitate the exchange of effects (that is, it is to make each effect itself count, to give it a value). The LETS scheme therefore uses debt to ensure the ‘effects’ (that is what each person themselves can do) is of itself valued. Where in a money system, money (and the demand by folk for what is not theirs) is the driving force. (And creates new effects, and so devalues the ones which we have). In the LETS scheme, debt is the way that the value of effects is itself confirmed.
The point here is that the LETS scheme (or Kula Ring) opens up different ways to understand the way that one values effects. Each effect in such a scheme is valued in terms of other effects, and without the need to invent and so abstract schemes of valuing (which then seize control of the entire process). The larger point is that there is nothing sacrosanct in the position of money. - It is perfectly possible to make the division of cause and effect integral to money (and to trading, and therefore for globalization) move not around abstract money, but rather other points, either in the system or out of it. LETS makes the system turn on effect. It would be perfectly possible to envisage a currency system based on the right to (or not to) pollute. In a sense this is of course what carbon trading schemes are. (Or green taxes for that matter), Likewise fair (not free) trade systems, are clearly making a move towards quite different ‘takes’ on what money, debt and currency are.
This last point has though, raised a deep problem of its own. Perhaps the current problems associated with carbon options trading, (or fair trade for that matter) rest in the very ambiguity of its position. On the one hand it clearly is looking towards a way of understanding exchange, that is rooted in a system quite other to global capitalism, as we currently understand it (that is money as sole driver); and yet at the same time the system must exist within capitalism, and profit margins as they currently are. The result is a strange ambiguity in such schemes. - However worthy an option trading scheme might be, there is therefore always a suspicion that it is just the rich countries bribing the poor not to develop (as it indeed it is, if money is seen to be in the driving seat – it only becomes something else if it is allowed to present an alternative to money). Likewise there is something curious about Oxfam setting itself up as a global fashion house…
Perhaps one does not need to be a Marxist (but it helps) to look in a current system for point of ambiguity, and ambivalence where other systems are muzzling gently through. Global multi-nationals are of course the ‘big Satan’ of the anti-captialism movement (and quite rightly so). And yet in their wake (or rather in the consequences of their actions) another rather different world is also present, a world that perhaps needs to be pulled out and used. Likewise it is arrant folly to bribe the poor not to develop or to turn a charity into a multinational business, and yet in the shadow of these phemomena, other higher corrosive forces are also operating: and our game must be to allow them to dissolve the whole. This Rant started with the problem of effects (and our besottedness with the power of cause), it is therefore no surprise that it looks to a world of only partially intended ‘effects’ for solutions to global problems. For it seems more than likely that one can only radically change the world if these effects are allowed to stand clear of the abstract worlds of causes in which they are caught. I for one certainly hope so.
