The unintelligible crisis, part III

So, part of what I like about this conversation is that it is taking place with friends who are not part of my little corner of academia. Intelligibility is something that occurs or does not occur not only across disciplines but also social spaces and friendships.

In that vein let me try to clarify some of the confusions elicited by part II. The debate was taken to be an ethical one. It might be true that we may have to reward some of the people who got us into and profited from this mess, but it would be ethically worse to punish them while the world collapsed. To use Buffet's metaphor, the patient is on the table, and we must put aside debate, do what is necessary, and save the patient's life (or pearl harbor has just been attacked, and we must put aside debate, and act to secure the nation (by interning Japanese-Americans? By nuking two cities?)). In other words, we are in a time of crisis. Rather than take issue with this ethical situation as it is, I am more interested how we come to understand ourselves to be in this particular ethical situation. That is, in what ways is this crisis made intelligible (or is 'crisis' itself a mode which helps us understand and come to terms with a situation?)? How is a particular ethical situation narrativized and deployed, and in what ways does it direct political energies?

These registers were confused in the previous post. The distinction I drew between a private ethics and a public pragmatics was probably also not helpful, because what I was trying to get at the way in which (multiple and shifting) frames of intelligibility push various discourses and affects to its margins. I think my basic contention was that, while I am in favor of an anti-ideological, ethical pragmatism I am equally suspicious of a discourse of pragmatism that claims to be apolitical and unideological. The irony of our particular situation is that the pragmatic, the thing we must do to save the patient on the table, comes to us not by reason but by faith in a technocratic class and network of institutions that have shown themselves to be anything but pragmatic or apolitical. But maybe this is too top-down. Perhaps we can say something like: from the perspective of someone who beleives that the government is inherently bad at running big insitutions like banks, that history has shown this, emprically, any suggestion to nationalize the banks will appear impractical. In turn, people who suggest such an option, even if credible, mainstream, and numerous, will appear to be emotional ideolouges.

Anyway, all of that was intended to be preamble for what I had thought was my main point, though as I come to this point I find that I have the least to say about it.

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All that I wrote a few days after 'Part II,' and then some version of life got in the way of me writing more in this blog. What motivated the original post is lost to me now, but I think what I wanted to do is think a more about what it feels like to be in the middle of an economic crisis. A refrain I heard a lot throughout the winter from all sectors was that no one understood the economics of the crisis, not even perhaps the bankers and traders that facilitated the crisis. What is it like, then, for us to have a public debate about something that we don't understand? What sort of qualified faith do we have to have, and in whom? Or could we, with enough patience and study, come to master the inner workings of the system?

I think these concerns came from an article I read linking neo-liberal capitalism (since the 70s or so) with a sort of unintelligibility, a feeling that the system of interconnected markets had grown so complex and so global, that it was impossible to apprehend in its totality. In any case, now that I look at them, I think the posts themselves and the comments are a performance of the types of reasoning one uses to talk about something absent any claim to expertise.

I have now ended this topic in my blog.

Some links on the way out:

About the banks influence. Goldman in particular. On the Wall Street Journal, of all papers, criticizing Summers and Geithner. And one on Joseph Stigliz.