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Thursday, December 11, 2014

Networks and the Structure of Explanation

Here's a lame, underdeveloped paper I wrote for an anthropology course. This would need to be greatly expanded to stand up as an actual critique, but hey it's a start.


Networks and the Structure of Explanation:
A Study of Elyachar's Markets of Dispossession and Mitchell's Carbon Democracy

I. Introduction

Julia Elyachar's Market of Dispossession and Timothy Mitchell's Carbon Democracy share the notion “network” as one of prime importance. Though they differ in important ways, as we shall see, these two works can be read as proposing particular sorts of networks as models for various phenomena. Each work has a different subject matter, a different scale or scope, different temporalities to account for, and an accordingly different structure of explanation.

A network is, in general, a non-binary way of theorizing or representing relationships and interactions. In saying networks are non-binary, I mean that they avoid positing binary distinctions of any kind and favor various concrete particularities instead—the binaries subject-object, self-other, nature-society, and so on, are precluded by the notion of network in favor of a plurality of relations, where none are opposites or negate the others. Networks are complex and incorporative, meaning they can include any number of nodes and relations. Bruno Latour describes them as “more supple than the notion of system, more historical than the notion of structure, more empirical than the notion of complexity...” (We Have Never Been Modern 10). Networks are not hegemonic systems, overarching structures, or complex mysteries—to appeal to a network is to give it shape.

However, there is not much more we can say about networks in general, because they can take on a number of different forms with very little similarity to each other. Thus, the focus of this paper will be to compare and contrast the different networks traced by Julia Elyachar in Markets of Dispossession: NGOs, Economic Development, and the State in Cairo and Timothy Mitchell in Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil. First, I will examine Elyachar's work, drawing attention to the mutually constitutive aspect of the networks she outlines. Then, I will turn to Mitchell, focusing on his use of what I call 'flattening' and the complex causal structure of his networks. Then, I will contrast the two models with special attention to scale, temporality, and the structure of explanation.

II. Elyachar's Markets of Dispossession: Mutually Consitutive Relations and Intentionality


In this section, I will first establish Elyachar's use of networks and actor-network theory. Then I will show how her theorization of both the craftsmen of el-Hirafiyeen and her own relation to the field of ethnography follow this theory and indeed form a single network. Finally, I will draw attention to two aspects of her theory that differ from Mitchell's: the mutually constitutive character of her networks and the importance she places on the intentionality of the craftsmen.

Elyachar actually makes an explicit reference to, and an endorsement of, actor-network theory: instead of attempting to find the masters' and markets' pre-determined identities, “...we would do better to take seriously the ease with which the masters modulated among different registers of agency. A more useful way to think about agency in the workshop, I suggest, is in terms of actor-network theory” (157). However, it is not just the masters and their markets to which the theory applies—Elyachar explicitly utilizes networks with regard to two things: the relationship between master and market; and the relationship of the ethnographer to the field of ethnography. Though these may seem disparate or disconnected, they are actually easily integrated through the action of the network itself: “Networks potentially are endlessly incorporative. Such is the case with workshop networks as well. New kinds of exchange partners can easily be integrated into the networks of workshop masters. That includes ethnographers” (Elyachar 31). We now note this only in passing, though it will become important later on.

In theorizing the relationship between master and market, Elyachar presents us with a network that is composed of mutually constitutive terms:

The notion of the actor-network emphasizes the erasure of traditional social science divisions between the individual on the one hand and the group on the other. With this erasure of the duality between individual and social, master and market, it is easier to see how the workshop habitus of sociality allows masters to negotiate the movement between self and market in a range of modalities. (Elyachar 157)

In other words, there is no identity that pre-exists the relationship—there is no master without his market and no market (at the very least in the context of el-Hirafiyeen) without a master. But master and market are not simply mutual preconditions of one another, rather each creates and shapes the other. The network, in other words, is not static, does not exist as a structure which once in place can be left to its own devices. There is on the contrary a continuous flow of actions, adjustments, and translations required for the network's upkeep; this is the master's modulation between stereotypically 'economic value' and the relational value which is necessary for the market's constitution. Master and market are not just each the other's precondition; they dynamically construct each other, and their identities are never fixed and are constantly renegotiated.

Another aspect of Elyachar's networks is their accommodation of the intentionality of the craftsmen. The exchanges carried out between workshop masters “have to be intentional, purposive; without such personal action there would be no relationships. And without knowing how such acts are imaginatively appropriated, economic analysis cannot begin. For all kinds of value can become present” (Strathern, qtd. in Elyachar 143).

There are two things one should note here: intentionality is viewed as the necessary ingredient of network creation and maintenance; and this intentionality is a sort of transcendental precondition. There are relationships, and therefore there must also be intentionality, their precondition. So intentionality is related to value in some way—neoliberal programs in Cairo did not account for this particular intentionality and therefore did not take relational value into account. Instead, these programs used the category “social capital”, which misconstrued the network as a static object to be 'cashed in' or something similar. The network, in other words, was not treated as a dynamic object in need of upkeep.

III. Mitchell's Carbon Democracy: Flattened Networks and Causal Complexity
 

In this section, I will first examine Mitchell's use of the network as a way of tracing the myriad flows, the relations and interactions, among what Mitchell terms the “socio-technical” (124), or the “techno-political” (252). Then, I will explore an aspect of Mitchell's networks that is not present in those of Elyachar: flattening, the placing of all elements of interaction on a single plane as opposed to hierarchically or vertically arranging them. In addition, Mitchell's networks are causally complex, though linear.

Dismissing theories in which worker consciousness was the primary determinant of democratic political success, Mitchell writes:

What was missing was not consciousness, not a repertoire of demands, but an effective way of forcing the powerful to listen to those demands. The flow and concentration of energy made it possible to connect the demands of miners with those of others, and to give their arguments a technical force that could not easily be ignored. Strikes became effective, not because of mining's isolation, but on the contrary because of the flows of carbon that connected chambers beneath the ground to every factory, office, home or means of transportation that depended on steam or electric power. (Mitchell 21)

This passage is exemplary of Mitchell's argumentation: he claims that it is through manipulating networks that the class struggle is waged—workers attempt to control “points of passage”, vulnerabilities in the network, while capitalists seek to eliminate such points through, for example, the creation and maintenance of the flexible grid of oil production and distribution. Citing Michel Callon, Mitchell writes

Understanding the interconnections between using fossil fuels and making democratic claims requires tracing how these connections are built, the vulnerabilities and opportunities they create, and the narrow points of passage where control is particularly effective. (Mitchell 7)

In other words, we might state generally that, for Mitchell, understanding interconnections means outlining the contours of a network, its technical characteristics, and that political actions and successes are based on this network, which also determines the relative power of the actors (through those technical aspects such as points of passage/vulnerability).

For Mitchell, particular objects of knowledge are constituted through a process of assemblage and do not exist as pre-given. For example, the economy had to be constructed as a distinct object of knowledge: “In order for these flows of oil, military actions, industry rumours, supply figures, political calculations and consumer reactions to come together as a textbook case of the laws of economics, a new socio-technical world had to be assembled to hold them together” (Mitchell 176). This “new socio-technical world” was in fact “the economy”. Importantly, the economy is here conceived as an assemblage, the study of the economic being accordingly designated as a reification of the broader socio-technical field which does not admit of such borders or limits on interaction. What Mitchell does, then, is to trace the developmental history of this assemblage. Of course, he does this with a socio-technical model and not an economic one, because the socio-technical provides a framework for analyzing various particular objects of knowledge and the labor of their creation, and does so in a way that is accordingly noncommital with regard to preconceived divisions.

An important consequence of Mitchell's reliance on the socio-technical is what I call flattening. Flattening describes the above process of disassembling objects or fields of knowledge, such as the economy, the economic, the human, &c. Here we must simply note that with flattening, all relations are effectively on the same plane, with no differences in levels of abstraction, appeals to a whole or totality, or distinctions between surface and depth. In a typical passage, Mitchell invokes a rather large number of different factors, without any limitation imposed as to what may be included: “Any technical apparatus or social process combines different kinds of materials and forces, involving various combinations of human cognition, mechanical power, chance, stored memory, self-acting mechanisms, organic matter and more” (239). Here we see a vast array of things, seemingly incommensurable from the point of view of field or academic discipline, and yet they are all said to directly influence “any technical apparatus or social process.” As will be shown in the following section, this flattening has important consequences for the structure of explanation.

Finally, and this goes along with flattening, Mitchell's networks are causally complex: the material properties of oil required different transport methods, which combined with the geographical distance between oil fields and the industrialized world where oil was consumed, which lessened the network's points of vulnerability, which resulted in a lessened efficacy of strikes, which resulted in a lessening of democracy (37-38). This complexity is linear, in that A causes B which causes C and so on. Mitchell does not utilize arguments about the mutual constitution of identities, but instead presents networks of staggering size and seemingly contingent complexity. For example, he does not attempt to show how oil as such changed or negotiated its identity, or how that identity was constituted simultaneously with and by other identities, but shows rather how its function changed with the additions and subtractions of various other factors.

IV. Analysis: Scope, Temporality, and the Structure of Explanation

In this section, I will draw out some important aspects of the two models, namely how they determine and are determined by the following: the scale or scope of the phenomena to be accounted for; the temporalities to be captured; and the structure of explanation.

First, the scope dealt with by the two authors is very different: Elyachar is concerned with individual masters and their particular markets, while Mitchell is concerned with providing a grand historical account of the interactions between carbon energy production and democracy. On a scale as huge as Mitchell's, the model of complex linear causality and its consequent disavowal of consciousness as a relevant explanatory factor is much more plausible than it would be if, say, individual workers or strike leaders were in focus. This is of course opposed to Elyachar's insistence on intentionality.

Second, the temporalities of the two models are different. Mitchell's historical view traces the unidirectional causality of historical processes, things that happen and then are as such have passed, though their effects echo throughout history. Elyachar's networks are based, in an important sense, on the maintenance of possibilities, allowing the master to modulate between value systems and thus reproduce himself as master. At first glance, this might seem to fit precisely with Mitchell's description of oil networks, with the shipping routes and destinations always kept open and flexible, ready to change at a moment's notice, and with the continuous flows of oil (and discontinuous ones, because interrupting a flow is itself a flow) as their necessary precondition (Mitchell 153-154). However, due to causal complexity this is not exactly the case, for can a network retain the same structure when endless chains of causal complexity are taken into account, when the analysis includes (or even attempts to include) the myriad and flattened influences of an entire historical conjuncture? Each event, therefore, restructures the previous relations—in Mitchell, we cannot construct a historical narrative according to a singular logic or preordained principle. In any case, for Elyachar there is not a linear narrative to construct, because the master-market network is a self-regulating system, much like a cell in homeostasis. We might say, to propose a broad metaphor, that Elyachar presents us with something akin to a biology whereas Mitchell gives us a physics, chaotic and complex though it may be.

Finally, and most importantly, explanation itself is different between the two authors. Explanation, it might seem, relies on a difference of “levels” or “planes”. One level, the explicandum, is explained by reference to either something on another level or that other level itself. For example, to explain modern war we might make appeals to its imperialist underpinnings, or to explain someone's actions we might make appeals to what we know of their psychic structure. In both cases, if we remain at the level immediately occupied by the explicandum we do not end up with an explanation. On this model, then, the requirement of an explanation would be a depth structure (which Mitchell would perhaps reject).

But this is not the only way to conceive explanation, since what is at stake is the making-commensurable of previously incommensurable elements (by incommensurable I mean a disparity that cannot be compared, for instance that between quantity and quality, a disjunction). Mitchell's elements or nodes are all completely commensurable, meaning there are no boundaries between different spheres or systems—this is his concept of the socio-technical or techno-political. Any element can effect any other element without respect to whether we would think of said effect as occurring under the aspect of “the economy” or some other assemblage. What we are left with are particulars, with no sense of the labor involved in making them commensurable out of their incommensurability. In other words, they are all already commensurable, relatable and interconnected, and this is precisely where explanation loses its power—explanation is in fact nothing but the modulation between distinct spheres, the putting-together or making-commensurable of incommensurables, which without the labor of explanation would remain incommensurable, disparate.

In response, one might say that Mitchell's socio-technical elements are not commensurable but incommensurable, and this is why they cannot legitimately be gathered into any old assemblage, at least for Mitchell's purposes. However, this approach still misses the labor of modulation, and we could actually say that this incommensurability could just as easily be called commensurability—though it may have remainders that do not enter into a particular relation. I would propose that, on the whole, Mitchell does not explain so much as describe—and this is not to criticize description, only to point out its different structure. To make this more concrete, we will turn to Elyachar's theory of the master.

Instead of doing away with the distinctions between neoliberal value and relational value, Elyachar shows the modulation between them, problematizing the distinction while remaining convinced of their incommensurability. It is precisely this modulation that functions as the explanation of the role of the master—it is not a determinism because intentional, and not a flattening of explicandum and explanation onto one plane because of the principle of modulation. It is not as if the master were some elevated pre-existent thing standing over the two systems of value—rather, the modulation is a structural effect of its own necessity, created precisely because of the incommensurability of the two systems, and is itself incommensurable with them. Put another way, the modulation is explained by the incommensurability of the two value systems, while it also itself explains those value systems. So we see how the master is actually an excellent example of the principle of explanation in a non-hierarchical theory of networks.

Another consequence of this is the problem of reflexivity, of a theory being able to account for itself, take itself as its object, and most important for us, explain itself. Elyachar's principle of modulation holds good not just for masters, and we can see how the ethnographer (or others) could be integrated, the explicandum and explanation of the field in which they are situated. On the other hand, this is not to pronounce a value judgment as to the difference between explanation à la Elyachar and description à la Mitchell. Much additional labor would be involved in exploring the function of description as it relates to explanation. Here I have simply outlined the difference and analyzed the structure of explanation.


Works Cited

Elyachar, Julia. Markets of Dispossession : NGOs, Economic Development, and the State in Cairo. Durham: Duke University Press, 2005. Print.

Latour, Bruno. We Have Never Been Modern. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993. Print.

Mitchell, Timothy. Carbon Democracy : Political Power in the Age of Oil. London ;New York: Verso Books, 2011. Print.

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