yet another embriology of money

if you’ve ever wondered, as so many of us are wont to do, why it is that the Conus Textile shell pattern:


follows the cellular automaton Rule 30:


then look no further! the dynamics of financial crises has got your back. both are prize-winning examples of the complex properties that emerge out of simple interactions among a large number of things neighbouring each other.

as mentioned in another post, you can prove mathematically without much of a fuss that in a system where everybody imitates everyone else, everyone will converge to a single behaviour. if desire is what is being imitated, money is the behaviour towards which everyone converges. the striking feature of this convergence, of course, is that it relies on no planning and no intentionality - it is merely a formal property of the behaviour of mimetic agents.

this is also (i had it confirmed with canadian authorities) what’s responsible for the supposedly endless variety in snowflakes. even though a pre-printed general snowflake plan is blatantly nowhere to be seen, the interaction between each water molecule according to the well-established rules of mineralogy allows for the emergence of a limitless number of possible complex geometrical combinations.

in ‘the greatest show on earth’, richard dawkins provides a welcome look of respectability to the cellular automata business by arguing that the extraordinary complexity of the patterns governing the operation of organisms is also brought about by the low-level, local rules of engagement between individual cells - and not by any sort of general top-to-bottom plan. fascinatingly, this can actually be easily observed in the early stages of embryological development - the very moment where things take the daring leap from single cell to pluricellular crazysauce.

besides laying claim to the smooth(ish) functioning of the capitalist economy, then, cellular automata are also responsible for the possibility of complex life and evidence of the absence of a general plan for the universe. not many of other areas of science can claim that, i don’t think.

as far as emerging properties go, however, money is a bit lacking in charm. it FEELS a little less arbitrary than the proverbial sign, there's none of the funky recursivity of language to it. i suppose it IS pretty astounding as a means of coordinating productive behaviour in a maddening scale... but i mean, will you just look at that sexy mollusc! rule 30 seems to generate several repeating but distinctive patterns, and not simply a homogenization of the entire field of possible patterns through convergence towards a single self-instituted kind-of-boring imaginary thing. if there was some way to extend the automata notion to every human institution, language most of all, things might start to get a bit more engaging.

this automata scene is in cahoots with the field of mathematics known as complexity theory, an unholy union that spawned the notion of ‘emergent property’. now a lot of things can be said of complexity theory, but that it isn’t FUN isn’t one of them. it is to the credit of complexity theory, besides, to reaffirm orthodox economics’ long-held belief that if you can differentiate twice, you’ll never want for knowledge of the world. it deals very well with time, and isn’t prone to chill out in the usual comfort zone of synchronous or comparative statical analysis. and finally, it’s common knowledge that if you have never been personally elated by a long and intimate examination of the bifurcation diagram,

you haven’t lived.

in biology, niche theory shows that one of the keys to figuring out (biological*) life is not only in the vast and amazingly convoluted self-sustaining patterns that make organisms, but in the higher level patterns formed in the relationship between organisms themselves! consider only that the same ecological niche can be occupied by a flying squirrel and by a flying lizard. that is, animals from completely diverse evolutionary trees can evolve similar attributes that make them apt for one particular function. THAT IS, the form of the organism is in direct relation to whatever is going on in his ecosystem - THAT IS, to whatever is going on with all of it’s other neighbouring organisms. the very notion of an environment, on top of that, makes it almost as if the higher-level ecological interactions demand certain attributes to be evolved to fill certain gaps - in better words, it’s almost as if there’s a co-determination between the several orders of complex emergent patterns.

in its fanciest moments, if it doesn’t check itself, the analytical mind dreams that there’s a way to draw out the simple base rules backwards from observation of emerged behaviour. it dreams of pulling INvolving properties out of established patterns, and of a great chain of orders and orders of pattern complexity, one above the other, ad nauseam, with no beginning or end in sight (this would have the added benefit of reeaaally pissing off all of reductionist physics, which has been going on since - unless i have no idea what i’m talking about - the early hindus). it dreams of the outstanding computing power of the universe, that all the patterns are in the observing mind, and none in the phenomena themselves - and that the minds of men have been cured of their addiction to causality. it dreams the very funky places where complexity might reside, and of life's patient zero in molecular biology.

it dreams, basically, of a field of science dedicated simply to the study of patterns in general. short of being a victorian-futurist mercenary crimefighter, or of having the sex life of Conus Textile, i can imagine few things cooler than a phd in Pattern Sciences.


*the key to figuring out personal life, of course, belongs to the different field of specular escapology.

sen and chihiro's monetary crises

if you have just watched Spirited Away and, while trying to figure out how come it has affected you so much, understandably sought the solace of the wikipedia page discussing the film’s main themes, you will be aware of the role played by Liminality on making the film so meaningful to watch.

on the other hand, if you - heretical disbeliever - haven’t watched it (or checked the wikipedia article) the movie’s title should be enough to convince you on the issue. the original japanese title is ‘Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi’, which wikipedia kindly translates as ‘The Spiriting Away of Sen and Chihiro’. a lot of things get lost on translating the title to english.

first, there’s an issue with the kid’s names. one of the most powerful images in the film has Chihiro signing away her name to the hag yubaba, which in turn gives her a new name: Sen. aside from a providing a good representation of the power of the contract in cultural imagination, and making you wonder what would be the narrative equivalent of signing away your name in our password-oriented contemporary societies, the scene has the merit of stating the whole business of the film: quite plainly, chihiro/sen’s search for her own lost identity. it is crucial, then, that the spiriting away is not simply of chihiro, but of both chihiro and sen: the ambiguity of the name, and the child’s desperate effort to either remember or rediscover who she is, are the fundamental liminar experiences on which the entire narrative relies. actually it’s TERRIBLY KIND of miyazaky to say so on the VERY TITLE, which we can take as enough support to the point above to let the matter rest.

second, kamikakushi . kamikakushi is a folkloric japanese term literally meaning ‘hidden by gods’, and while ‘spiriting away’ might be a beautifully appropriate way to put the concept, it might also lead us to overlook its mythical implications - especially in the absence of the ambiguity provided by adding ‘sen and chihiro’ to the title. it appears that the folkloric japanese gods get people kamikakushied, so to speak, out of anger. if you’ve read girard’s ‘violence and the sacred’ you’ll know, in turn, that angry gods are the very province of Liminality in sacrificial communities, and a mythical symptom of socio-symbolic Trouble Times.

(here it’d be fun, but probably unprofitable, to comment on english-speaking cultures' allergy to ambiguity. comically enough, the brazilian portuguese title is quite simply 'chihiro's trip'. blessed be all brazilians in denial)

one major component of girard’s thought has to do with the blankness of human desire. it we’re not afraid to ravage the issue out of all recognition, we can present it as such: humans don’t know what they want, so they look to other humans to figure it out. other humans know as little as the first ones, and look to other humans to figure it out. nobody quite knows what to do. repeat until extinction of the race.

the race not being so far extinct to the best of our knowledge, it arises that something in the dynamics of imitation must allow for the convergence of people’s desires towards a certain object. in ‘mimetic speculation’ (1985), andré orlean has shown how it so happens that this is exactly what comes about if everyone imitates everyone else: everyone ends up doing the same thing.

the issue can perhaps be extended to encompass the very formal properties of language and of the emergence of such funny things as subjective identity (this argument is slightly less lazily presented here). identity comes about through a certain relationship with The Other. it is forged on looking at everyone else while everyone else does the same, and seeing through the other’s eyes a certain imaginary version of yourself. this makes it a bit flimsy, to be sure, especially considering the passage of subjective time and our need to change as life (or social norm) requires. chihiro goes through that: she has to grow old(er), she loses her name, she enters a spirit-land of ambiguities bewildering enough to rival Hades’ best efforts at nonsensical comedy, she has to find a new place in her own life and in other people’s, and to cross through liminality towards either a new stability or death - with severe costs in identification either way.

what is more, social identity comes about when a community manages to do the same thing as a whole and assign certain differential places to certain of its members. girard’s specularity of desire, however, is mimicked in the specularity of social violence: violence committed against a member of a community will engender reprisal over reprisal until either an ever-widening cycle of revenge ends up in the extinction of the community or the community finds a way to polarize all of its violence and make it converge upon a single half-arbitrary victim. hence the formal mechanics of sacrifice as a social life-preserver. crucially, when new violence arises, or when social stability is somehow threatened, society starts to drift dangerously close the the realm of nobody knowing what they want or who they are. ambiguity rules! the gods get angry! liminality takes hold of mythical thought!

there is A LOT to be said about the power of liminality and the formal properties of girard’s notion of specularity. it’s the foundation of greek tragedy, the biblical apocalypse, and actually of at least one narrative in every mythical record. if that’s not enough for you, suffice it to say that it’s the operating principle behind ‘batman - the dark knight’ and any other passable representation of the joker (cesar romero’s included with honors). if it’s what makes spirited away touching, it’s also what makes the original version of ‘dark water’ some creepy-ass shit. it’s the logic behind the appearance of every meme, and possibly the fortunes of academic peer-reviewed publications. it’s the cornerstone of the bildungsroman, and the very structural background against which any mental activity or social process takes place (or fails to). it's the reason why it took humanity ten thousand years to come up with a decent god of confusion (fnord). on a more personal note, i think liminality might be what makes kibbutz life so irrevocably awesome - like no other type of travel that i know of, volunteering suspends the regular rules of ordinary life and sends you to this kind of otherworld where, things and identities being so much NOT well established, you kind of have the joy of recreating them all from scratch. quite interestingly, as you travel, the subject (ideally) shifts as much as your surroundings - as much as its objects.

it’s also behind some other things worthy of more careful consideration:

first, it’s behind the emergence of money - and in a sense of any human institution. money is the very thing towards which desire converges in the thick of its primordial object-less specular mimeses. financial crises, in turn, are precisely what happens when the ordered system of convergence towards money falters. stock market crashes and bank rushes are, in their own particular ways, prime instances of liminality taking hold and of people tumbling about trying to get around the very institutions they put in place - often by undermining them entirely. (institutions are, of course, the contents of the socio-symbolic order, and their instability is the instability of the system of social differences itself, etc!).

second, it’s behind the rise to power of charismatic figures in times of social unrest. Szakolczai argues that while the trickster - a character present in virtually every mythical system - occupies a marginal and out-of-place position in the social order during normal times, in times of crisis he’s likely to be the very point of convergence of the whole social order. being the one who always lives a liminal existence anyhow, he’s also the prime candidate for society’s search for new order when liminality takes hold of it. this is supposed to be the path by which a totalitarian regime takes hold of social disorder.

that the same mechanics should underlie such a variety of phenomena is enough to give pause for thought. but finally, and to sum this up with the inevitable post-post-x-ism twist, liminality can probably be said to be behind our very understanding of liminality itself.

consider the divide between continental and analytical philosophy. lacking the austere comfort of positive evidence and formal logic, continental philosophy becomes in a very dangerous sense a matter of faith. and faith, as girard would probably point out, is specular in nature and subject to rules that are not those of thought itself.

there is, however, more to the matter. this very specularity is what might make continental philosophy so much the more appropriate for social studies than the hard, tightly-wound positive sciences. it can be said - if we are allowed one last shameless mutilation of scientific rigour - that no amount of evidence and formal logic can ever be enough to equip analytic philosophy to understand meaning itself. the way the object is construed in positivism suspends all possibility of self-referentiality, which is the precondition for thinking about meaning, about the subject, about social processes, and about humanity in general.

in turn, the soft, wanky continental sciences of meaning - where you dive so deep into meaning that it stops making proper sense - operate almost by definition precisely in the realm of liminality. looking at meaning itself is its regular functioning - the approach disturbs the order of differences on which meaning relies and opens up a freakish world of ambiguities and uncertainties. continental science, then, operates in the spirit-world - in a permanent state of exception from itself. maybe this is what allows charismatic leaders like girard, barthes or althusser to rise to power - and to so brilliantly, and ambiguously, draw some sort of sense out of the general mish mash of social life.

a needlessly long ramble on the macrodynamics of unselfawareness

sources high up in the brazilian financial sector informe me in incontrovertible terms that orthodox econometric models, while useful, are almost entirely useless.

a typical model will select a bunch of presumed relevant variables - say, previous market growth, consumer confidence and expected interest rates - and mix them up, based on their past or logical behaviour, to try to come up with either a prediction or an indication of what a certain decision, affecting a certain variable, will do to the others.

the funny thing is that these models aren’t, strictly speaking, built to work. although their results will be used to support managerial decisions, they are not, in the parlour of the model-maker, ‘fit for backtesting’. another way to say that is to say that their predictions are almost always almost entirely wrong. real world* economic variables have a sleep-disturbing inclination to misbehave, sometimes wildly, and it stands to reason that the more they deviate from the innocently assumed correlations they were suppose to be working upon, the less useful the model's conclusions will be. that is, the model is only useful as long as it predicts things that there's not much point in trying to predict them after all.
*bear with me here

the same thing happens, more or less, when you are going to travel and make a list, drawing some projections about what places you expect to visit and how much each activity should cost you - only to actually get there and throw the list shamelessly out the window as the trip takes on a life of itself and you can barely remember when was the last time you took a shower because you’ve been drunk for the last 3 days even though you lost your wallet on the cable car ride to the itinerant circus.

honest middle-managers will recognize a similar problem as the one that arises when they receive some gibberish order from above and have to convince their reasonable employees that - based on all available evidence and operational reality notwithstanding - all is well, the the CEO has a plan, and that their actions will not in fact be contributing to their own unemployment in the very near future. i have the good fortune of being acquainted with one particular manager who, in her rise to the most rarefied heights of the career ladder, managed to observe her own transformation from someone who had to force herself to believe the rationale of decisions imposed from the top to someone who has to come up with rational excuses to pursue semi-arbitrary strategic paths to feed her peers at the lower levels of the chain. in her own words, her job these days is to produce believable narratives (or models!) to ensure compliance to certain top-level decisions.

the sheer amount of managers a typical company needs to be able to get anything done should serve as evidence enough that humans are not very good at coordinating their behaviour even in modest scales. also, and a bit oddly, there’s reason to believe that the more humans to be coordinated, the more likely coordination is to get fucked up.

this issue, as we can see, is routinely tackled through the crafty expedient of pretending that it isn't there. even cognitive psychologists concede that pigeons, when given food by a machine at random intervals, will start adopting certain repetitive behaviours in the apparent belief that they can make a difference in how the machine works - assigning, to random phenomena, whatever goes for causality in a pigeon’s mind. (wasn’t there a tv show that did a similar thing with humans? can’t quite remember its name)

reality, as we all must know by now, is an unwieldy bitch. a lot of the time it is one random pigeon-feeder. it's a system whose basic purpose seems to be to generate massive ammounts of cognitive dissonance in humans, and one of the top three causes of anxiety in modern societies.
even though we seem to have figured out the workings of the occasional natural process - at least when they stick to the 3 usual dimensions and fit the periodic table - we can’t quite claim to have become masters of the universe just yet. all social processes are inherently unstable - not the less so because a great deal of this uncertainty comes from everyone trying to come up with arbitrary solutions to unsolvable problems, often by imitating each other.

so why do economists and other misguided creatures of the dark bother with modelling at all? out of desperation? just because they can? because all the cool kids are doing it? in other terms, what is the purpose of this mass-scale process of collective rationalization (beyond, of course, instituting symbolic reality as such)?

save it for another post to argue that The Economy is the embodiment of the social-as-such, entitling it to the blatant honour of capital initials at this time of night. suffice it to say that it's slightly less predictable than the weather, and that we display similar reactions to both - usually in the form of bland statements on the line of 'it seems to be quite pleasant today mate' followed by a terrible rush for dear cover when a storm suddenly materializes.
(this is a tropical country analogy, for which i make no excuse)
when not relying on misguided optimism, in one case and the other one of two strategies is usually employed: asking your mom for advice, or declining to leave the house at all.

as the expression goes, however, no battle plan survives contact with the enemy. in short, the more uncertain the trip, the more we need to rely on half-baked guidelines about how things are supposed to turn out. and the economy is a pretty uncertain trip, as i’m sure you will all agree.

one could even argue - if one wasn't so afraid of everybody arguing back - that the sort of economic model here presented serves little more than the purpose of supplying the vast array of clueless agents with a foundation for their collective pretending that 'everything is alright after all'.* keynes said so in 1937, but it is a message very difficult to listen to. even the more so, perhaps, because hearkening to it would undermine the very self-delusion on which the working of the system relies.
*bill bryson mentions the same phenomenon taking place in academic physics, where there seems to be a very slight possibility that the universe won't either collapse upon itself or expand until it cools down entirely. physicists call this possibility the goldilocks hypothesis.

the economist’s or the investor’s model, in this sense, is little more than rationalization for his actions, aimed at smoothing over the cognitive dissonance caused by having to make decisions about sleep-disturbing things that are for the most part entirely out of his control. this is in itself nothing new, and while economists brawl bitterly about how to properly account for this uncertainty, they mostly acknowledge it in some (more or less hypocritical) form.

however!
in view of the blatant disregard for common sense displayed by economic thinking (and often by common sense itself), we could say that there’s another, less widely accepted dimension to economic uncertainty. people in the human sciences often defend the startling position that consciousness has got it all wrong, that the so-called material world is not all it’s made up to be, and that language creates reality in a very fundamental way - a way to which us, beings subjected to language and not at all cruising comfortably above it as unbiased observers, are necessarily a little blind.

this potentially disconcerting claim echoes in a way keynes’ little quip about financial instability and the silly ways people try to deal with it by all looking at each other blankly until they can all fool themselves into whatever arbitrary arrangement most conveniently masks its own lack of concreteness. 

complexity and uncertainty are spiritual sisters, and the reason why humanity had to wait 10 thousand years to finally come up with a god of confusion is frankly beyond me. reality is much closer to what douglas adams graciously refers to as the Whole Sort of General Mish Mash that to whatever fits into an economist’s model: it’s a messy jumble of somethings, and if we scarcely know what is going on at the subatomic level, we know even less about about collective human behaviour.

for tricia mcmillan, each possible arrangement of possible ways of looking at the mish-mash constitutes a particular instance of reality in the multiverse. this is, incidentally, a good way to support the argument (privately held, but tough to sell) that language creates reality. in a milder version of the douglas adams proposal, language creates reality by cutting it around and colouring the selected bits with meaning. whatever is said, is imposed upon the mess, and it’s easier to believe in the existence of words than of the things they refer to.

to make matters a bit worse, but also a bit more understandable, there's what dawkings here refers to as the queerness of middle world, and of biologically evolved perception. it's more or less the same concern that led niels bohr to claim, according to legend, that the physicist is the atom's way of looking at itself (this was at the time rutherford claimed that all science is either physics or stamp collecting. good times, good times).

to drive the point home with overwhelming certainty, let us consider the matter of tying and untying knots. as any experienced sailor knows, the ancient art of untying knots is all a matter of directional poking... no human mind can fully comprehend the vast complexity of a sufficiently fancy knot. to begin with, a knot is tied based on little heuristics and rules of custom, simple instructions like ‘pull your right hand over your left like so’ and ‘maybe you should bring an umbrella with you today, son’. once a knot is tied, it drifts beyond the realm of human understanding and your only hope of untying it is ignoring it in its complexity and selecting little sides to push, and little connections to unwind, and hope that each partial doesn’t end up causing an increase on the level of complexity on the rest of the jumble. it’s all a matter, in short, of framing, screening, and cutting it around on the symbolic sense. it’s an essentially metalinguistic activity. not to waste the analogy, let us mention that social reality is more or less equivalent to what happens to your earphones when left unattended for quite surprisingly not that long.

even the most skeptical reader will find it hard to deny that the world tends to be a bit confusing, and that we have to occasionally select through a couple of its less disconcerting bits and force them sheepishly into some semblance of sense. this should be argument enough to force academic economists to add metalinguistic uncertainty to their neatly taxonomized lists of instances of uncertainty in the world out there.

so, next time you feel justified to get mad at an economist’s doomed predictions or, if you’re into that sort of thing, your financial advisor’s unwise investment tips, kindly forgive them and remember that they are just little misguided observers, subjected to mostly self-inflicted power structures, and unable to keep tabs on their own imaginary creations. much like the rest of us. they don’t know much more than you. in fact, after a few years of college there’s a good chance he’ll be less confident about his predictions than someone who didn’t study economics at all, and as such is still under the spell of the economic not-to-be-named name-of-the-father. that this doesn’t look too good on a resumée might be the strongest of the reasons-d’etre for the continued existence of the whole profession.