Inside and outside Occupy Wall Street

New Tendencies in Economic Sociology

Ann-Christina Lange

At the moment Elizabeth Price’s video installation called ‘Choir’ is running at the New Museum in New York. The 15-minute video brings together a range of visual and auditory material and archival technologies to reflect on spaces of assembly and performance. The photographs and film footage captures visuals that all together sketch out the space of an ecclesiastical auditorium. Afterwards the film stages a sardonic or provocative performance taking the shape of a chorus. The soundtrack underpins the visual impressions involving throwing tambourines and forcing houseguests to chant ‘We Know’ into a microphone around eighty times. A synthesis of architecture creating a collective voice is presented through the installation.

Moving away from this performance another collective assembly is takeing place in the Zuccotti Park close to the New York Stock Exchange at Wall Street. In the park occupants have settled to demonstrate against the neoliberal economic system. Hundreds of people gathering with signs saying “Healthcare not Wealthfare”, “People before profit” and singing statistical numbers of the increasing unemployment rate in the U.S. A girl dressed in a clinical uniform with a sign saying ‘PhD Biochemical scientist seeking full time job’ is giving an interview to a reporter from one of the many news magazines present at the scene.

The encampment of the protesters in itself forms an assembly surrounded by reporters, photographers, tourists and most of all police. Demonstrators have painted their faces like zombies and are eating false dollar bills. The event has been portrayed in the media as a theatre play or mere acting. The New York Times writes that: ‘some people have suggested the Occupy Wall Street protest is a mere form of street theater, that the protesters have a myriad of grievances…’. However, considering the Wall Street Occupation from the perspective of economic sociology something else might be at stake than what comes to the front said in the New York Times. That is, the performance that might not be devalued as merely acting, but staging a new form of social critique within the emergence of an ‘attention’ economy. Thinking of this event in concert with recent tendencies in the field of economic sociology there is no doubt that the Occupy Wall street movement touches upon the intermingling between the field of economics and the social.

The protests located outside Wall Street have spread across the world. They want to gain attention from the government in order to change the current capitalistic regime and claim their right to participate. On Monday in Chicago one sign read: “If corporations are people, why can’t we put them in jail?” The protesters are blaming the banking system of producing social inequality, which they take as proof of a ‘sick system’. MacKenzie and Milo (2003) explores the cultural and legal barriers to the creation of financial derivatives markets in the United States in the late 1960s and early 1970s and explain the role of economics in undermining those barriers – it seems that the diversions between the social and the capital world are at issue once again.

The material written on socializing finance mainly addresses the tools and devices of financial trading from ‘inside’ the wall of the trading room. However Stark and Prato are currently working on developing a notion of ‘attention spaces’ in a future publication, which might open up for a different interpretation.

The protesters claim sharp dichotomies such as economics versus society and calculation versus sociability. In this case it might even be said that Callon’s (2007) attempt to merge the field of STS with economic sociology legitimizes this point of view – saying that the economists need to make a cut in order to trade implies that the operation of financial models rest on a logic incompatible with a social world. Furthermore, Beunza and Stark (2011) explore the social dimension of quantitative finance through ethnographic studies inside a derivatives trading room of a major investment bank. Their study demonstrates how traders engage in a practice of reflexive modeling (using models to translate stock prices into estimates of what their rivals think in order to detect possible errors in their own models). They found that this practice turns modeling into a vehicle for distributed cognition.

Projecting the argument from inside the trading room to the protests outside of its walls one could say the division leads to resonance where Wall Street becomes a metaphor for the financial industry and, thereby, is to be blamed for the current credit crisis. This means that financial instruments are not just abstracted from the social world and not embedded within society, but are trading the social itself while making cuts and divisions. The models produce an image of the economics as abstracting or trading the social – which might be what the protestors outside Wall Street object to. A vision, of course, co-produced by the media reporting on this event, the signs as well as the bodies themselves are material devices that altogether constitute the assembly in a style similar to the way in which Price wants us to perceive of the choir, the auditorium and its construction of space.

A collective voice is heard screaming over the crowd in the park and around Wall Street accusing the bankers to be criminals – a division in which traders again become gamblers. One of the protestors is quoted in New York Times saying: ‘I think a good deal of the bankers should be in jail’ – again the traders becomes multiple objects and new divisions are produced. The crowd outside Wall Street is, in Beunza and Starks words, ‘a systematic formation of human bodies’ (2012 p. 10) positioned in the streets that form the financial district of Manhattan in full display, and not only dressed up for the city but dressed up for the news and reports around the world. Facing the protesters at Zuccotti Park I felt that such materiality is to be included in the analysis of the sociality of finance. Following an STS approach Beunza and Stark refer to Callon who analyses the materiality of calculation including financial models saying that ‘[m]odels frame decisions and quantify alternatives, thereby exerting a mediating role on financial valuation’ (Beunza and Stark 2012 p. 11).

In continuation, Prato and Stark (2011) attempt to understand how the distribution of attention in markets affects valuation. Looking at trading of securities Prato and Stark investigate the network that are created from the attention allocated from multiple agents to multiple objects saying that ‘the resulting patterns yield a social structure of attention’ (2011 p. 8). Objects are located within a network structure of attention given by the actors who observe and evaluate. The actors are connected by a local space of attention and mediated through objects and not necessarily personally connected. They hypothesize that the more members of a group are proximate in the social space of attention, the more similar will be their assessments of a given entity.

However, testing this in the trading of securities can also be said about economics in general and the demonstrations against Wall Street in particular. That is, how the division between the social and the financial world are made up, that is, how the embeddedness of the economic field within society are sustained by such representations. The last months occupation of Wall Street demonstrates a socio-technical network that directs collective rage (or civil unrest) against the financial sector. The network is part of attention structures that produce divisions and diversions making Wall Street responsible for the economic crisis. From Elizabeth Price’s video installation saying “we know” to financial trading there seems to be a gap of dimensions – one that might be bridged by our understanding of performance pointing towards new tendencies on the field of economic sociology. I suggest that Prato and Stark (2011) do not only contribute to economic sociology by developing a socio-technical account that grasps the new forms of sociality introduced by financial models ‘inside’ the trading room, but also the divisions and diversions it produces outside the walls of the stock exchange. As also Stark and Beunza argues, financial models are ‘disembedded yet entangled’ (2011 p. 3). As if the choir was envisioned as a response to the events outside Wall Street it seems that the protestors were filling a space – almost an architectural staging of resistance proposing a new kind of social critique.

References

Beunza, Daniel and Stark, David (2011): “From Dissonance to Resonance: Cognitive Interdependence in Quantitative Finance.”   Economy and Society, forthcoming.

MacKenzie, Donald and Millo, Yuval (2003): “Constructing a Market, Performing Theory: The Historical Sociology of a Financial Derivatives Exchange.” American Journal of Sociology 109(1):107-145.

Michel, Callon (2007):  “What does it mean to say that economics is performative?  Pp. 311-357 in Donald MacKenzie, Fabian Muniesa, and Lucia Siu, eds.,  Do Economists Make Markets? On the performativity of economics.  Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Prato, Matteo and Stark, David (2011): “Attention Structures: Cognitive Networks among Security Analysts” , COI working paper.

CSISP Salon One 2011/12: On Scale

The CSISP Salon is an ongoing forum for discussion that seeks to provoke dialogue between (un)complimentary objects. Our theme in the 2011/12 season is scale. Subject matters such as climate change, electronic waste, brands and branding, disasters, or life science data manifest themselves on and in multiple scales (the home, the nucleotide sequence, the environment, the United Nations, the T-Shirt). For the sociologically inclined enquirer, such scales occasion many vexing questions: What to analyse? Where and what to observe? How to integrate different scales? Seeking to grapple with matters and materials of different sizes, visibilities, durations and complexities, we explore the practical and ethical implications of doing and accomplishing scale.

The first Salon of the season met on 26^th October. Here, the first three chapters of Jean Ricardou’s late 1960s novel encountered an STS informed provocation piece, written by the organizers of the Scalography event that took place in Oxford in 2009. What follows is a retelling and reshaping of the session, co-organised by Tahani Nadim and Joe Deville.

CSISP Salon 2011/12 poster

Provocations on ants and scale Tahani Nadim

In their conclusion Woolgar and others suggest to look at the “natural sciences” to escape the conventions of scale and learn about how to do scale somewhat differently. In this Salon, literature, or more specifically, Jean Ricardou’s Place Names (1968[2007]), shows us some interesting even inventive but certainly different routes into the lands of scale.

Jean Ricardou, born 1932, is an author of both fiction and theory. He is one of the key figures in the nouveau roman, a literary genre or rather movement that emerged in the 1950s in France. The new novel rejects – in some cases spectacularly ejects – such things as linear chronology, discernible plot and coherent characters. Readers learn very little about inner motives or the psychology of protagonists and so the nouveau roman collapses the panorama of the novel. There is no evident order, no rational space-time context or other intelligible frame of relations. It is thoroughly disorienting, for readers and characters alike, hence it is particularly apt that this book should offer itself as a guide book.

A guide book is of course a scalar device that allows acting at a distance and makes problems doable: a vast region, too big to take in, becomes neatly ordered for us to peruse. In our case however perusal quickly turns into fluster as this guide book offers little if anything in matters of direction and location. And the meagre bones it does throw quickly disintegrate without leaving even a spot of dust for triangulation. Rather than mapping a region and its sites and sights, Place Names unfolds strange worlds – in pictures, recollections, parks and antique shops – which it is only too happy to collapse at a moments’ notice. The valley’s chequerboard landscape introduced in the beginning pages, is reminiscent of another equally confounding chequerboard – the one encountered by Lewis Carroll’s Alice. Like her, we oftentimes feel as if we’re peering through a looking-glass, we’re not really granted the proper, proportional, proportioned vista. This is not necessarily detrimental to our travels: discrete things such as ants, white flags, mirrors, the crusades, red cars and slightly crazy park wardens enter into fanciful associations and demand of the reader too to entertain curious entanglements.

By denying us a congruous panorama, Place Names and the nouveau roman in general, constitute a provocation. So here we arrive at one possible intersection for Ricardou, Woolgar and others: They can all be considered as provocations. They provoke by confounding our expectation and experiences of scale. Scale requires a vantage point from where to put things in perspective and establish an order, a vantage point that Place Names denies us. Similarly, Woolgar and others provoke on multiple fronts, demanding, among other things, an end to imprudent use of adjectives of scale and an investigation, preferable ethnographic, of scale as an effect of scalar practices. Also, their provocation piece is written, as so many provocations (from Luther to Wittgenstein) were, as a number of theses. Scale is often associated with comfort: objects, relations and ratios of relations are scaled in such a way as to fit our bodies, please our senses and spare our minds. In both texts, scaling or the practices of doing scale perturb some convenient positions.

The second junction I’d like to suggest for the texts relates to their respective or mutual topography: The novel precipitates between two seemingly opposite poles, projecting a “garden of opposition”: On one hand, the belief that things emerge from words, that discourse is generative of reality, that the name precedes the object. On the other hand, the contrary: It is words that name things, and language is but a translation of a prior real reality. Ricardou’s book itself is a product of this very struggle, continuously changing from guide book to novel and back. Woolgar and others too begin by presenting an opposition. Here, this “fundamental split” is between those social scientists that study the macro and those who observe the micro. More fundamentally, this is perhaps the tragedy of scale, locked into a matrix that by default distributes value, worth and relevance unevenly.

Between the two camps, there is not much common ground but there are ants. Lots of them. We encounter them throughout the book. They’re usually in peril: encircled by raging, furious waters, encased in cellophane glued to a plane tree, or subjected to microscopic flamethrowers, they struggle and they perish. Yet they steadily re-appear, sometimes as non-ants as in the figure of the woman in the red car named Atta, a name which also describes leaf-cutter ants. Or the protagonist Olivier Lasius, Lasius referring to a genus of boreal formicine ants. The ants then represent not so much an intractable opposition of scales but point to the fictitious nature of the split between micro and macro. This is not to say that this split has no material consequence. But it suggests some relevant questions, not least of which concern the possibility of ethical practice in incommensurable and incongruous entanglements with words, ants, wars and reading groups.

Scalar frustrations Joe Deville

Ricardou’s traveller frowns at a painting, bending closer to get a better a look at a detail that has drawn his attention. In getting closer, what had seemed so important – a clue to the painting’s meaning perhaps? – changes. He wonders if it is an effect of his shadow. But he can’t be sure. He is left, Ricardou tells us, “disappointed”.

I don’t think it would be a surprise if, in trying to scrutinise our two objects, we too are left with a tinge of disappointment. One way of seeing Ricardou’s account (there are inevitably plenty of others) is as a meditation on the frustrations that accompany the search for clarity and closure. Ricardou toys with his traveller, resists satisfying him with answers, denying him the authority of events, places and history. Many of the things that might help ground his journey, that might provide him a place, a time to think from, to live from, are made to slip and slide around him. And then up pops the poor ant, similarly striving to keep his (six) feet on the ground, as the stone he is on threatens to be engulfed by a miniature flood. This ant is engaged in a very real life and death struggle, to whom the questions which so perplex Ricardou’s traveller seem wholly irrelevant.

Bringing this to this Salon’s themes, one question of the many in the Scalography team’s provocation piece, that perhaps speaks to this sense of frustration, is the following:

“How and why is it so difficult to think scale differently?”

On the one hand, such difficulties are unexpected – they speak to the challenges that often accompany attempts to pin down slippery concepts. On the other, as the provocation piece points towards, there are ways in which, as a social scientist, the frustrations of working with scale matter in some quite particular and important ways. It speaks to the extent to which the problems we explore can come loaded with forms of scalar awareness that shape and are shaped by well worn, stubborn, value-laden patterns of thought. There are also the pressures we might feel for, example, for our work to scale – in particular – up. To speak, for example, to ‘big’, ‘important’, ‘wider’, and ‘relevant’ issues. Or there are the frustrations that accompany the way in which our own work is scaled in particular, unwanted trajectories by others, in REF matrices, for instance.

Here are some areas where the politics of the scalar thinking – both our own and others’ – become apparent to us. These operate around the question of what matters and how this matters (and to whom) (on this, see Isabelle Stengers). Here we can return to Ricardou’s ant. Ricardou seems to pose the reader a question: what is more important: the life of a tiny ant, struggling for security, or the traveller’s struggle for security, manifest in his attempts to pin down the character of the world through which he moves. In these chapters Ricardou does not offer an answer. Instead, the question becomes more specific. Should a traveller, seeing the plight of the ant, extend it a leaf and transport it to safety? Or should he or she, as Ricardou puts it, “on the pretext of shortening the animal’s agony”, crush the ant, judging it as an irrelevance (to the human world anyway) and keep walking? In both cases, the choice is not without consequences. In the first, the ant threatens to “run hither and yon over the guidebook’s pages” – disrupting the attempt by the author to communicate to potential travellers a clear account of the world around them. In the second, the crushed ant’s unwitting revenge is the damp spot left on the traveller’s shoe. This will become a series of guilty footprints marking a trail back to the scene of the minute murder.

One likely lesson from Ricardou is that we shouldn’t look too closely for a meaning behind this apparently ethical allegory, that seems to ask us to compare the value of the small to the value of the big. Perhaps our attention should instead be focused on the value of the question – here brought to the ethical questions that surround the scaling of things: what does matter, to whom, and in what way? And how do things that are variously scaled as small and big interfere and disrupt one another – or not? It is the value of such questions that also cross cuts the Scalography team’s provocation piece. These questions include trying to interrogate how and why things are scaled – but at the same time being attentive to the ways that some things do not scale or are not scaled. This is what they refer to as the ‘uneven play of scalar ethics’ (I’m paraphrasing). It is this uneven play we are confronted by (and confront?) in our own research.

Discussion and questions

Entirely in the spirit of the texts and theme, the discussion conjured a panoply of entities, from bacteria to markets. How can and should we understanding the scaling practiced by different, non- human or more-than-human entities? For example, to what extent are scalar categories like ‘the individual’ appropriate in the case of an ant, or bacteria (see the work of Myra Hird). The issue of scale has received considerable attention from human geographers. Particularly, in circles that choose to follow the ostensibly very small in order to draw up detailed material geographies, like water voles or bacteria. The text “Of eagles and flies: orientations toward the site” by Woodward et al. was mentioned. In this and other works the emphasis is on the production of singularity, hence the problem is not one of scale but of kind. There remains however always the (methodological) question about how small to go? What do you, for example, decide to pursue and make representative for an issue such as “electronic waste”? To what extent do concepts, ideas, linguistic devices, hold together and continue to operate as they try to speak to entities operating with different types of scalar effects? Scalar transformation can also obfuscate certain purifications – tempting us into ignoring the messy work that accompanies the movement of entities up/down different scalar registers. Similarly, the “small” should not be fetishized by endowing it with some a priori privilege in accessing more ethical perspectives. Yet, how can this be productively attended to? Another line of enquiry focused, more self-reflexively, on our position vis-à-vis current political transformations. What are, for example, the scalar politics of the ‘big’ society? Are we seeing forms of political action being rescaled and thereby co-opted and at the same time marginalized? With reference to Annelise Riles‘ work on networks, we wondered how to account for the problem of scale as a “figure seen twice”: as both a circulating concept and a lived, experienced encounter.