A Portrait in Four Functions

  Function one: The straight line or simple curve of we can/not go on like this. Of all mathematical functions, the straight line is of course the easiest to comprehend. One takes a trend and simply assumes that it will carry on as it is, and all worry, or all thought is over: we need not bother about it any more. It will carry on, and we will behave accordingly.

  This carry on has been of course the stuff of almost every political mantra or would-be political mantra. We were told for ten years that the boom could keep on booming, forever (or until oil ran out). Good times were here to stay, and the growth which we had known was the growth that we would always know. Or again, now in harder times once again, another party screams at us that we cannot go on like this: As if we ever would. As if the deficit would keep on growing forever if the Tories do not win, as if the recession would go on and on…. Linear abstraction is a powerful political tool, as it creates in our minds a function which we can immediately grasp at, and immediately understand. We know what is happening in the here and now, and can very easily imagine what will be, what will happen unless we act.

  More than that, the line (or the simple curve where everything continues to increase at a steady rate) has two other deep appeals. Firstly it implies some simple rule or truth is lurking behind the surface of these graphs. Individuals have acted, or a simple rule of supply or demand or prudence or whoever, is being seen, and being seen directly and simply. The straight line then allows not only the world to be simple, to be predictable, but also the causes behind the world to be at the service and ready to hand. It makes everything in order, and makes  everything feel right. One really does know where one is with the straight line.    

  Secondly, and building on the last point, the straight line is of course the mirror of ourselves and the way that we understand how we act. We make endless journeys from here to there, home to work or holiday; We go there and back again. Our world is a world of lines, and return journeys. More than this, we are all aware that our lives themselves are a straight line, we age in time, and die according to the strictest of lines, and toughest rules of linearity. Our life, our time appears then linear, and so, we assume everything else really ought to be. Or better, we are able to grasp in easy immediacy the power of the line, and act accordingly.

  Those who want the world to be easy and full of certainty need those straight lines, those simple roads to heaven, and the politicians and advertising-cum-media hacks or assorted certainty wallahs are only too happy to provide this simplicity. 

  Function two: the circle, or it is never our fault. The great circle of time or cycle of economic activity presents us with the great external verities of our times. The economic cycle of boom and bust is one of those factors that all governments (if they have any sense, and if they have not gone off their head) live in, as assuredly as we live in the passage of the months. Economies grow, and economies stagnate, and then grow again, and governments for all their economic clout and pulling of levers or printing money of destroying it, appear to be able to do nothing about it.

  We are bound then in a very deep way in a time as circular as the seasons. Economies have their winters and their springs, and there is little we can do about it. The circle forms the great backdrop of our lives, and the way in which we understand them. Circles then act in two manners to pattern lives. On the one hand they create a charmed group that no one can join, even if they aspire to it. There is a circle such as the Security Council of permanent members; or a circle of the G7 or G20; a circle of countries that come together to wield power. Behind this is of course the double assumption that certain countries at some level are more powerful  (or in Britain’s case were more powerful), and this power, this ability to do or to influence things be they the economy or our continued existence on the planet, gives the right to act and decide. Secondly there is a real pragmatics to this. A group such as the U.N. or the full Copenhagen Conference was never going to make decisions as it was too big. Small groups, where everyone can know each other, and decide hugga mugga, as it were, can act, where big groups only row. Circles then are not merely a sealed group that it is hard to join or leave (Britain in the Security Council, - like why?), but also represent effective units of power, if small enough. These circles, these cabinets or coming together really matter.

  On the other hand the circle is the great shrug of time. As once things are circular, they are sealed, and we can do nothing about the fact. They are what they are, and that is it; be that the behaviour of individuals or the economy or the environment. If things always do this, then that is that - we are bound into a circle and most accept our fate. This fatalism survives an age where faith is difficult. We still assume that economies or individuals are caught up in themselves and their cycles, their little and big repetitions, and feel that we cannot or have no right or ability to break into the charmed circles. The Circle is then the power of the external to repeat in our lives, and our name for our inability to stop that repetition. 

  Nor are circles simple phenomena  (unlike lines). On the contrary they have a marked tendency to be gathered into other circles, or other lines, creating two distinctive types of movement. On the one hand there is the fatalism of the straight circle. This is then the argument of many environmental refuseniks. Things have always been circular they urge, climates and world are merely like that. The climate warms or the climate cools, and their is sod all we can do about the fact. It just is. The only debate becomes then the length of the cycle we are in. Is it a ten year trend or a fifty year or a million year cycle? Whichever it is, the message is that we better get used to it, and live inside it. I.e., what matters are cycles within cycles, and the catching of ourselves in fates forever beyond us all.

  Alternatively, the circles are sometimes drawn out into hidden spirals, and patterns, and even lines. Hence one hundred and fifty years ago, Engles argued and Marx did not dispute, that the economy was bound in inevitable cycles of boom and bust, where each cycle was more severe and worse than last. The economy was not then merely circular, but also these circles were ever decreasing. They were then arranged in their own spiral, a spiral which would lead to the redemption of the entire system and the collapse of capitalism. The circles of absolute fate, were then drawn into a greater destiny, drawn into a straight line of time, and made to go somewhere. Or to give another example, it is the deep assumption of the way in which we give aid to stricken countries that at same point we claim that the countries will be drawn into a spiral of economic redemption. Their economy  (like that of India or Brazil) will take off, and everything will be roses. We then ignore the deep factors that might be working to prevent such a lift off. Better than that, if it does not happen, we assume that there must be something wrong with the country (that somehow they are not mature enough to change), and so that their continued poverty becomes in the face of our aid, their own fault….

  Hence the line and the circle are not opposed to one another. On the contrary the conjoining of line and spiral is powerful one. To combine the two, is to have a force, the economy or human nature, or whatever, that is not only going somewhere, but must go somewhere. We create then spirals of redemption or damnation, spirals beyond our own powers and control. They then bind us, i.e. humanity, or any action or thought up in a force beyond this nature, a force that shines through the tight little circles of human action, and comes to be known only across times. Circles and lines are not then simply given to us, but rather might hook up, and take us on a journey.

  Circes hook together with other circles, to create powerful spirals, or catch us in eternal circles. Humanity then collectively pours out its hopes and their attendant despairs in lines and circles and the latter’s powers.

  Function three: The exponential. If lines become hope, and the circle fatalism (and the feeling of being caught), then the exponential curve is the paranoid curve. It is the curve that makes us feel that everything is changing, and changing too quickly to make the call as to whether the change is positive or  negative..

  On the positive side, we clearly have a deep faith in potential. In a sense this faith underpins all government action, and all predictions about the economy. Take as an example the current Labour Government’s unwillingness to talk about the budget. Behind this apparent obfuscation lies the knowledge that the economy, when it starts to grow will grow exponentially. It will sudden get better, and there is a very real likelihood that that will change everything. There is little point then in reacting now, to what will be, as one cannot quite predict what that will be. The economy will grow in the end, and grow fast. At which point there is a real metaphysics of the exponential curve. For the Tories know this as well. Their argument rests upon the fact that the debt itself will also grow exponentially (through the effects of compound interest). The gamble which the parties then want us to make is the gamble on which of these growths is bigger. Will the economy grow faster than the debt? as Labour hopes, or will the debt grow quicker than the economy? as the Tories repeatedly claim. This is a real gamble, as at this point, one probably could not know. The exponential curve then is a real powerhouse for change, good or bad.

  This leads to its second great guise for those who do not know it well. The exponential always appears as a threat and has done since the days of Malthus (and his lament for linearity). If things are always double, be they population or pollution, we are always on the edge of extinction, come what may. That extinction might be merely the snuffing out of whatever national identity we want to assert, or the destruction of the environment: In either case it is the simple exponential growth, the doubling beyond all human understanding and power, that is the culprit. We are then told we must act now, and in the absence of any current problems to stop what would otherwise be.

  The exponential curve then means that we need to act in blind faith, and with an eye to what cannot yet be known, in the knowledge that when it is known, it will too late to do anything. The trouble is that humanity has real problems telling these apart, and deciding which to act on, as they can easily all feel arbitrary and all ‘fascist’. Or to put it differently, only those appeals which can make their case in the current political climate (irrespective of their claims to be talking of the future) are likely to succeed. Humanity is then more likely to act against immigration (according to deep racisms) than climate change…

  The third aspect of the exponential is that if everything is actually exponential (i.e. growth and retarding factors, inflation and wages or compound interest) then this changes the nature of the exponential’s power. As long as everything keeps on catching up at roughly the same rate, within the stream of change, everything is constant. This then creates two deep problems of modernity. Firstly those outside the loop, outside the growth, will find it next to impossible to join in and will be left behind. Pensioners or those on fixed incomes or (at a totally different level) less developed nations, find it impossible to compete in this game as by the time they have got money to begin, the stakes have well and truly doubled. Exponentials are then merciless on those who do not gear up in time. And yet of course they also necessarily assume a world of infinite resources. The assumption is that everything continues growing as it currently is, and that assumption, had better be right, as one will not have a lot of time to turn the entire charabanc around if it is not. Perhaps then in the last gasp we are right to be suspicious of those exponentials…

  Function four: Complexity and chaos – the very modern function. Complexity is clearly the antidote to the circle. The circle would bind us up in patterns that are fixed for all time, patterns which we cannot control. Complexity reverses this move, while keeping something of it. It is true, the claim runs, that we are bound up in forces we cannot grasp, and are part of a bigger picture, and yet this picture is not simply external to us, and never absolute and fixed. All we know is that there will be a pattern; what we cannot know is how our actions, or even our very knowledge of the pattern, or our assumptions about it, help create its eventual form. Our least action might then come to matter (or indeed our beliefs about what will come).

  Humanity on hearing this theory no doubt is at once flattered but also relieved. It is flattered as it makes humans matter. They might video their own bums or report on their own reporting, and do so endlessly and absolutely, but this reporting itself, this endless self-referentialism, matters in the world: If it has a power, humanity then, in all its egotism and vanity, matters. Likewise if the smallest action can matter, then we can all do our bit (even though that might not involve doing anything much). We are all in something together, all a part of a bigger picture, in this ultimate maths of community spirit. Little actions then come to replace government in endless bottom-uppings of the political establishment. All of which is of course well and good, and wonderfully hopeful. But it misses what is surely the point of this argument. Complexity is such that one cannot quite know what level one is acting on, nor how much those actions interact, or inter-create (and as a part of the system one cannot know where it is going, without that knowledge changing the system). One is then caught in a community, and in endless grassroots, but on the proviso that what one understands those moves as, those changes to be, what challenges one understands them to be a part of, - are themselves changing. Complexity theory is not then an excuse for humanity to give itself airs, or rejoice in its power, so much as a realization that its power is at every turn bound up with elements that are not human, and yet are powerful - elements which we need to constantly allow for, and change through and with.

  Complexity is not the excuse for humanity to be up its own arse, to assume that it will constantly change and challenge the world, but rather to be aware that it does not exist as it is thinking that it does. - That is, it is not a simple thing, a soul, cut off from the world as a separate power within nature; but is rather merely a part, an aspect of nature that is always at once greater than any individual (species) and always re-throwing its own, and so our own nature (or souls). We are no more fixed than our world, or our place in that world (which does not in itself care a fig about us or our precious nature any more than it cares about its own), and we ought to be humbled by that fact. This is surely the ‘true message’ (if a function can have a message) of complexity. A lesson which humanity is never that good at learning….

  To render a world in functions, is to bind us all up in some power real or imagined beyond ourselves, a power which we then inhabit in feeling and belief. Our problem of course is that these feelings are always uneasy in their fictions, and always unstable, liable to switch functions, and damn us by that switching….