Last fall, I finished a year-long research project on the statistical foundations of Keynesian macroeconomics. It grew out of several strands of thought that came together after a fair amount of time spent in New York City’s great cathedral for thought, the 42nd Street Public Library. The project started as a final paper for Mark Blyth’s Foundations of Political Economy seminar, for which I had to write about the financial crisis using any o the theoretical frameworks we had developed over the semester. While reading Keynes’ General Theory, I noticed striking parallels in the theoretical relationships between Keynes’ macroeconomic aggregates and individual market actors and that between bulk matter and the individual particles that compose it. At the time, I was finishing up my physics degree with a course on thermodynamics and statistical mechanics – two theories of matter on different scales – and researching the development of nineteenth century physics for my honors thesis. After many revisions, the paper was accepted by the peer-reviewed Journal of Philosophical Economics and is coming out in their May, 2011 issue.

Since October, I’ve been a regular contributor to 3QuarksDaily, writing a monthly “Monday Musings” column on philosophy, economics, and whatever else strikes my fancy. So far, I’ve discussed how to use probability to model decision making in a psychologically accurate way (focusing on football and finance), the dualing politics of fiscal austerity and stimulus spending, and the ontology implicit in BBC’s Planet Earth. I’ve also written a couple more, about why credit rating agencies are systemically risky and something on David Harvey’s Marxist theory of capital overaccumulation.

From here on out, I’ll try to post on here whenever I’ve published something elsewhere, and perhaps put up a few original things as well. Thanks for reading.

Speaking of torture, I’ve was working on an essay (On Defining Torture) in my writing seminar earlier this semester about the unintended consequences of the use of medical language to legally define torture. Thought I thought I had some “good” material to work with back in early February, last week’s leaked, top secret ICRC report was unbelievable:

Medical personnel were deeply involved in the abusive interrogation of terrorist suspects held overseas by the Central Intelligence Agency, including torture, and their participation was a “gross breach of medical ethics,” a long-secret report by the International Committee of the Red Cross concluded.

Based on statements by 14 prisoners who belonged to Al Qaeda and were moved to Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, in late 2006, Red Cross investigators concluded that medical professionals working for the C.I.A. monitored prisoners undergoing waterboarding, apparently to make sure they did not drown. Medical workers were also present when guards confined prisoners in small boxes, shackled their arms to the ceiling, kept them in frigid cells and slammed them repeatedly into walls, the report said.

Facilitating such practices, which the Red Cross described as torture, was a violation of medical ethics even if the medical workers’ intentions had been to prevent death or permanent injury, the report said. But it found that the medical professionals’ role was primarily to support the interrogators, not to protect the prisoners, and that the professionals had “condoned and participated in ill treatment.”

From my essay,

The situation is similar with regard to torture and interrogations; sections 2.067 and 2.068 of the AMA ethics code unequivocally prohibit physicians from participating in either [torture or executions]. The rules not only prevent doctors from providing material assistance to interrogators but also prohibit supplying or withholding their professional knowledge in the service of intelligence agents. Physicians may not even “monitor interrogations with the intention of intervening in the process, because this constitutes direct participation in interrogation.” These standards clearly oppose the kind of physician involvement that would be necessary were torture’s legal definition to be defined by medical standards of harm. Even ex post facto medical evaluations of previous interrogations would be problematic, since doctors’ participation would enable intelligence personnel to get by with harmful actions that don’t meet the bar for classification as torture. This is analogous to the existing ban on doctors pronouncing inmates dead on the execution table. Consequently, medical participation at any stage in the interrogation process would force doctors to either violate their professional codes of conduct or require groups such as the AMA to unreasonably weaken their ethical expectations….

Deploying medical knowledge onto this situation reasserts some level of authority, organization, control, and professionalism that counteract the frightening sense of the “War on Terror” as an abusive free-for-all. But, the very characteristics of stability and respect that make medicine an attractive basis for defining legal categories extend to conceal the acts themselves. Just as pancuronium bromide conceals the corporeal violence of execution, cloaking torture in the discourse of medicine bestows human rights abuses with a veneer of respectability. For people seduced by the allure of information extracted by waterboarding an “al Qaeda operative,” knowledge of medical supervision might be sufficient to excuse this otherwise objectionable practice.  One can already imagine Limbaugh’s quip: “Liberals should stop complaining, these terrorists’ interrogations are conducted under the supervision of a doctor. That’s more than many Americans without health insurance can say about their own lives.”

I would have to label myself as being unjustifiably forward were I to simply say, “I am interested in the concept of the orgasm” and leave it at that. This would be unacceptably presumptuous for two reasons, neither of which concerns the ethical propriety of discussing this matter in the Rock, during a class presentation (of sorts), or in front of my professor. Indeed, I believe we’ve all slipped a few phrases into our responses or essays that might be heard – perhaps by someone uninitiated in our seminar’s familiarity or our university’s general liberated-ness – as insults to our kindly professor, underminers of our collective academic seriousness, or insults to the reputation of our well-endowed Ivy League institution. For the sake of disclosure and to ensure that there is complete honesty between reader and writer before moving on, I must admit that, although I have been pondering the concept of the orgasm for several months without raising the issue in class, I am not concerned about our professor taking offense to this discussion, since it comprised the bulk of my application for this course.
No, the concerns are more serious and strike at the very heart of the issue in question (which is, by the way, not exactly “the concept of the orgasm”). What I’d really like to hone in on is not the orgasm per se, but its position, its function in language. Or rather, languages. The thing I’m really interested in, to put it another way, is not a thing at all but particular sets of relations that exist between languages, their speakers, and jouissance. When thinking about language, something I do quite a bit of in my occupation (and I mean this not in the sense of mon métier but instead mon activité or mon occupation), theories of signification can end up being easy to believe but difficult to understand ou sentir. It’s easy to comprehend Saussure’s arguments (and diagrams) that explain how the signifying function brings both the signified and the signifier into existence as two sides of the same coin, but I find it more challenging to think about what that means for the meaning of these elements. This difficulty doesn’t really present itself in Cours de linguistique générale, which presents signification as a process that deals with solid, concrete things and names them arbor and equos.

But that is why “the concept of the orgasm” presents a more interesting challenge. Its existence is surely real (a statement I do hope, for your own sake, you have no trouble accepting) but cannot be grasped as one can a tree. Instead, it exists as a specter, a figure at the limit of language itself. By its nature, jouissance resists closed up, stable signification (for what it’s worth, Lacan argued that one of the symptoms of the neurotic is that he is so unable to give up his hold on a stream of conscious language that he tries to maintain a coherent thought through the moment of sexual climax). Here you might be able to discern the first reason I said this essay is too forward. I am interested in how different languages speak of orgasm, the words they use to approach it from different angles. But saying that I am “interested in the concept of the orgasm” begs precisely the question I aim to ask. That is: What can we learn about different cultures from studying their words for le petit mort? Is there anything to be learned about America’s famous puritanical prudishness from the un-descriptive, nearly derogatory “to come” (which highlights what can safely be said to be an aspect of the experience less connected to intense pleasure than the apparent targets of its French counterparts)? By claiming to be interested in “the concept of the orgasm” I’m unfortunately taking the signified itself to be as stable and easily recognizable a thing as un arbre when I’m really trying to untangle a web of signifieds not easily, or feasibly, translated.

The second reason is more personal still. The truth is I’m terrible at language learning. It took me a long time to learn how to read English (I am still proud of finishing that first Amelia Bedila book, a particularly writerly place to start I must say) and I still have trouble with spelling. Just recently, I’ve all but given up on the prospect of learning French, which was my first attempt at another spoken language. But still, I’m interested in this comparative language issue even though I don’t know any good vernacular for orgasm beyond the few French ditties I’ve busted out so far. My assumption, still unconfirmed by more linguistically-talented friends, is that there must be some good ones out there in German, Chinese, Arabic, Sanskrit, Japanese or Esperanto. But this is just an assumption; one I think might be, again, getting ahead of itself, this time in a manner more directly connected to writing.

The problem seems to me to be the expectation that I will find something incredibly illustrative in these different languages. I’m all ready to see a tightly controlled, frustratingly roundabout, and surprisingly violent Japanese word and I have a lot of hope for German, which a friend described to me as a language designed for abstraction and powered by word play. But my concern, which I believe has prevented me from taking up this topic for my third essay, is that I will write what I already “know” and find what I already expect to see. On the one hand, I think I’m envisioning writing this as an exploration but I also know that it is a stand-in, a fetish object covering up my inability to really learn another language. I fear that my curiosity about “the concept of the orgasm” is really compensation for my feelings of failure coming out of French class. I think my unconscious drive to write this essay perceives it as a way to write myself out of my English trap: if I try hard enough, maybe my multilingual essay will stand in for my shame at only being able to see the words of other languages as novelties instead of as richly meaningful signs.

When I applied to be a Writing Fellow during the spring semester of my freshman year, I remember having some trouble with part B. Simply put, I hadn’t done enough college writing yet. After a spending much of that fall and winter holed away in Barus and Holley, MacMillan, and the BioMed Center, I didn’t have a large stable of essays that satisfied the application’s injunction against submitting writing samples from high school. And it surely didn’t help that I thought “discuss the paper’s strengths and weaknesses” actually meant that I should summarize my essays and tell your predecessors why they were good.

Knowing all of that, I’m sure you’re not surprised that I wasn’t chosen.

Now that I’ve spent much (most?) of the last two years writing, I have plenty of essays to choose from. But there have been more important evolutions in my writing and thinking about writing since my last letter. It feels like my writing has taken me on a broad tour of Brown; during my three years here I’ve visited MCM seminar rooms, experimental physics laboratories, philosophy lecture halls, the Brown Daily Herald newsroom, and the Indy’s flannel-filled quarters in Faunce. I feel lucky to have both written explanations of theoretical physics concepts for science TAs with limited English and shared the BDH Op-Ed page with Sean Quigley. I’ve even tried my hand at a writing seminar.

Switching back and forth from these different disciplines has done more than just give me a long list of places to flip open my laptop. It has, I hope, kept my writing fresh. By continually moving from one mode to another, I’ve been forced to keep thinking about my writing. And it’s not just about keeping track of which jargon word box I’m working with at that moment; everything about the writing process from the ways sentences should flow, and what formal structures to deploy, to how quickly my fingers move across the keyboard changes from one day – or hour – to the next. When I’m able to successfully resist the turbulence of all these confusing shifts in style, I end up spending more time than I realize thinking about such writerly concerns as audience, tone, and pacing.

Through it all, I would like to think that I’ve developed a much more nuanced and thoughtful approach to writing for each of these venues. Most importantly, all of this academic agitation has, I hope, prevented my prose from getting stuck in a particular style. In my lines of work – epistemology, physics, post-structural theory – this would be a real danger, since the pressures of rigor can stultify writing just as easily as gently settled silt can turn to rock.

I don’t blame the selection committee for turning me away a few years ago. It was as much the right decision for me as it was for the program. That said, I think that my writing has grown almost as much as I have in the interim, and I’d love to be a Writing Fellow next year. I’d like to think that I might be able to add something, even if it’s only my own productive confusion.

Sincerely,

Nick

“As for what motivated me, it is quite simple; I would hope that in the eyes of some people it might be sufficient in itself. It was curiosity – the only kind of curiosity, in any case, that is worth acting upon with a degree of obstinacy: not the curiosity that seeks to assimilate what it is proper for one to know, but that which enables one to get free of oneself.

After all, what would be the value of the passion for knowledge if it resulted only in a certain amount of knowledgeableness and not, in one way or another and to the extent possible, in the knower’s straying afield of himself? There are times in life when the question of knowing if one can think differently than one thinks, and perceive differently than one sees, is absolutely necessary if one is to go on looking and relecting at all. People will say, perhaps, that these games with oneself would better be left backstage; or at best, that they might properly form part of those preliminary exercises that are forgotten once they have served their purpose.

But, then, what is philosophy today – philosophical activity, I mean – if it is not the critical work that thought brings to bear on itself? In what does it consist, if not in the endeavor to know how and to what extent it might be possible to think differently, instead of legitimating what is already known? There is always something ludicrous in philosophical discourse when it tries, from the outside, to dictate to others, to tell them where their truth is and how to find it, or when it works up a case against them in the language of naive positivity. But it is entitled to explore what might be changed, in its own thought, through the practice of a knowledge that is foreign to it.

The “essay” – which should be understood as the assay or test by which, in the game of truth, one undergoes changes, and not as the simplistic appropriation of others for the purpose of communication – is the living substance of philosophy, at least if we assume that philosophy is still what it was in times past, i.e., an “ascesis,” askesis, an exercise of oneself in the activity of thought.”

-Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality Vol. 2 – The Use of Pleasure (pp. 8-9)

I just finished an extremely interesting article about how the economic stimulus money could provide opportunities around the country to redesign struggling cities. The article looks at competing visions for several cities – New Orleans, Los Angeles, Buffalo, and The Bronx – that aim to improve infrastruture, reduce reliance on cars, and reclaim public green space. Many of the plans also try to foster social justice by removing elevated highways that cut through neighborhoods (guess which ones). While there are certainly urban planning problems in Providence, the increased (potential) density downtown seems quite progressive compared to some other sprawl-inducing development plans. At least when things eventually recover, there will be plenty of existing housing downtown that should make Providence a relatively sustainable city. The developers will surely lose money on their buildings but I don’t think there’s much use in worrying about that at this point…

There’s been a lot of focus recently on how the geography of the future will be different from the sprawling, Levitt-esque suburbs we’ve been building thus far. The Atlantic recently ran a brilliant story about how the geography is inextricably tied to modes of capitalist production. Like many articles, it argues that the building we’ve been doing for the last fifty years is both shortsighted and unsustainable. But the ironically named author, Richard Florida, also predicts what kind of geography might be the most viable moving forward. Mega Regions, he argues, will be the best suited for the future by permitting low-emission lifestyles and providing the density required to incubate the creativity necessary to succeed in an information-driven economy.

Providence, it just so happens, is at the center of what Florida argues is one of the world’s premier mega regions: The Bos-Wash mega region. This is why I think the biggest key to Providence’s future success is something that the instate proposals of shovel-ready, stimulus-funded construction projects cannot reach: high-speed rail. There is some money in the stimulus package for high-speed rail initiatives but it isn’t enough and the current plan is to divide it too many ways. After traveling around Europe on the TGV this summer, I am quite enamoured with high-speed rail. Hopefully, Obama and Amtrak Joe will be able to make subsequent funding requests to build a true high-speed rail line in the Northeast Corridor. Providence will really need it.

Prague’s Franz Kafka International Named World’s Most Alienating Airport

Paul Krugman has posted a few times in the past couple days about the bank rescue plan. He argues that the Geithner plan is treating this crisis in the wrong way. By propping up the prices of the “toxic waste” that is at the root of the financial problems, the plan assumes that these investments are basically sound, but the underlying value has just temporarily dived below a reasonable value. Krugman argues that this is a misunderstanding on the part of Treasury, since the problem here is the investments themselves: the result of a (largely poorly planned) construction binge the country can ill afford.

His suggestion:

“if you think that the banks really, really have made lousy investments, this won’t work at all; it will simply be a waste of taxpayer money. To keep the banks operating, you need to provide a real backstop — you need to guarantee their debts, and seize ownership of those banks that don’t have enough assets to cover their debts; that’s the Swedish solution, it’s what we eventually did with our own S&Ls. Now, early on in this crisis, it was possible to argue that it was mainly a panic. But at this point, that’s an indefensible position. Banks and other highly leveraged institutions collectively made a huge bet that the normal rules for house prices and sustainable levels of consumer debt no longer applied; they were wrong. Time for a Swedish solution.”

Essentially, Treasury is betting that this crisis is merely the result of a panic that has distorted an otherwise functional market system. But Krugman argues the market itself is the problem here; to enact the necessary fiscal policies requires that the decision makers recognize the depth and bredth of the systemic problems in our economy.

It’s a shame that Congress hasn’t provided any leadership on economic issues. It started to react a bit after public anger seemed ready to boil over after the A.I.G. bonuses became news. Many commentators have rightly argued that there are more serious problems with the financial industry than these bonuses and that $165 million is a drop in the bucket compared to the total cost of the bailouts. Indeed, Spitzer, speaking from his moral exile at Slate, reminds us to be careful to peak behind the curtain here: A.I.G. bailout money has been funneled to a bunch of other firms (including Bank of America, Merrill Lynch, UBS, JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, Deutsche Bank, Barclays and Goldman Sachs), who are getting paid back 100 cents on the dollar for their adventures with the (morally) bankrupt company. But the public outrage at the bonuses is real and justified. There are quite a few things to be mad about right now, and desite widespread real, material pain for much of the country, there hasn’t been much visible anger about this situation. Of course the country is still feeling good because of the election, but we need to look at the economic team Obama has surrounded himself with.

There is still a narrow set of voices represented at Treasury (certainly not helped by the fact that Geithner is still working virtually alone). The recovery plan is being designed by the best and the brightest, sure, but it is the best and the brightest from the team that created the systemic economic problems in the first place. Greenwald argues the extent to which Goldman Sachs and its alumni are both the designers and beneficiaries of the bailout packages thus far is representative of the extent of true “oligarchic decay” in the governing and management of our financial system. I think he’s correct when he says this justifies real public anger; the hypercomplex, two-tiered natures of  contemporary financial apparatuses demand the vigorous public response our deading media has thoroughly subdued.

In Providence, I recently saw Les Énfants de Don Quichotte, an experience that really dramatized the difference between our political universe and France’s. The documentary followed organizers of a citizen’s movement fighting for a universal right to housing. Here, we see the Today show visiting Sacramento’s twenty-first century shanty town while thousands of area homes sit empty in foreclosure.

There should be some public anger here. The offensive A.I.G. bonus scandal has only been the most dramatically personal and was therefore able to catalyze a lot of vehemence. Instead of trying to repress this populist energy, I wish the fourth estate would articulate the true depth of the problem so there could be public consensus for bringing in new economic voices to initiate legitimate structural change.

And finally, the market response should not be used as the sole standard of economic health here. As we’ve learned from Jim Cramer, that’s a metric completely controlled by the people who both created and are now trying to fix this mess. In other words, the plan was designed for them, and it gives them trillions of dollars more to play with. I should hope that they’re happy.

On Monday, the BDH published a front page story criticizing Brown VP for International Relations David Kennedy’s ’76 agenda for the Watson Institute. He’s currently serving as the interim director of the Watson Institute and, according to the BDH, has been making some controversial decisions about the direction of the Internationalization Initiative. The article cited faculty opposition to Kennedy’s signature Watson global governance initiative. In particular, the BDH criticized the personal relationships between Kennedy and a few of his new hires. Worse, these new (non tenure track) professors only have Harvard J.D.s, not Ph.D.s! Other professors hurled accusations that Kennedy is trying to turn the Watson into a law school. The article included not only innuendo, claims acknowledged to be rumors, and critical statements from anonymous sources but also delved into his romantic life.

Later on Monday, I saw my friend Evan Pulvers, who is in one of the international law classes at issue. She told me she had written an Op-Ed response to the article defending Kennedy’s programs, explaining the value of her class, and criticizing the BDH’s reporting. Since I was not excited about my own column, I offered her my regular spot in the Op-Ed rotation this week. However, the BDH opinions editor is refusing to print Evan’s column until after break. (Apparently my space in the paper just disappeared this week.) At that point, it will be too late for the response to matter.

This is the most controversial and “hard hitting” story the BDH has run all semester. The paper must stand behind this story enough to print Evan’s response this week. That is a standard of the responsible journalism to which the BDH aspires.

Though in context it might have been justifiable to mention Kennedy’s relationship with Dan Danielsen, the implication is unseemly. International Relations Program Director Peter Andreas explained in Tuesday’s paper that their relationship is several decades old and not out of the ordinary at Brown, facts that were not clear from Monday’s BDH story: “Danielsen is in a romantic relationship with Kennedy.”

Andreas also explained that the article’s claims about possible elimination of the IR and Development Studies concentrations were factually incorrect. From what I’ve heard, the issue with DS in particular is not precisely a funding cut, but rather the end of grants that supported the interdisciplinary research and teaching initiatives that are the essential cores of the program.

I covered Internationalization for the BDH during the fall of 2008, so I’m familiar with David Kennedy and some aspects of the Internationalization initiative. Everyone from the Provost to Ruth’s office to members of the Internationalization Committee knew the value David Kennedy brings to the job. They hired him for his experience and his connections. (And it was expensive, don’t forget that Harvard Law School professors don’t come cheap. Just look at the number of positions listed behind his name on CNN.com) When I interviewed him for the BDH in October, 2007, the global governance initiative was the fous of our conversation. If the University didn’t want to start studying law, they shouldn’t have hired a highly respected lawyer.

Finally, I think Kennedy deserves the benefit of the doubt here. When I interviewed him, I was struck by his emotional connection to Brown (class of ’76). He emphasized how much he valued the uniqueness of Brown and its focus on undergraduate eduation. Though I am dubious of the University’s Internationalization agenda being an example of Brown trying to be Harvard, my conversation with Kennedy reassured me that even after spending many years in Cambridge he still understands the culture of College Hill.

Google Maps was the first one on the scene of yesterday's plane crash in Buffalo, NY

Of course, the Times had a slideshow of original flames and smoke photography. But I think this illustrates the cultural relevance of Google Maps insofar as it has become the record of the way the world looks (referenced by the Newspaper of Record). We usually think about the new/old media relationship as websites linking to original reporting of established news organizations; this inverts the relationship. It shows that the Times’ news judgement is adapting to the new environment of Internet truth.