Wow, how do you sleep with this swirling around your brain. Problem for me I have to condense this into something my non-academic brain can process. Are you saying the world is so complex and interdependent that cause and effect analyses is at best limited and that any economic theory, IR theory, social theory applied on its own will necessarily be defective in its conclusion? If that’s right, what I’m still wrestling with is this: if the roots of any given crisis are so entangled and uncertain, how do we go about building real solutions? Is the takeaway that we need to stay nimble, pragmatic, and in the moment, rather than relying too heavily on rigid analytical frameworks? Anybody able to make this more concise for me?
I know this was a thesis of your majestic book “Crashed”, but no one else – no one – seems to get it.
Please take a look at my Substack post “Basel: Faulty” which proves (to my satisfaction) that the crisis was caused by the Basel Capital Standards – i.e. bad regulation. Its epicenter was Europe.
I would be especially interested in your thoughts about my (rudimentary) use of Judea Pearl’s “causal inference” methods to tease out causality. (It uses a lot of counterfactuals.) I've become a bit obsessed with figuring out how to demonstrate "causality."
Honestly, I had never even heard the word “conjuncture” used in the sense you present. But it sounds fascinating. How would a person get started learning more about it.
I would also welcome any comments you might have about my many other posts.
Reading this chartbook 384 reminds me of two separate items of how wrong knowledge can be asserted till disproved: (a) Panchatantra -- where 5 blind persons each touch one part of an elephant and come to valid conclusions based on his (partial) knowledge; (b) generalisations that are proved contentious when new data arrives -- the current controversy about the Standard Cosmological Model that comes from the DESI observations in April 2024 is another example, where conjectures from theory of Dark Matter does not quite fit.
Thanks for this invigorating essay which made me do one screenshot after the other to take notes!
To comment on the various theoretical approaches (and ideas) I would like to resort to your musical metaphors calling them brilliant "riffs" and improvisations by someone who pushes boundaries because he knows his instrument very well but still loves to create the new - this sounds really good to me 😃!!!
The only difficult thing for me is now to get back down to earth (and do some more boring work 😉 as I sadly don't have the privilege to be a student anymore, let alone a student of yours...) - but "sessions" like this make it so worthwhile to be "onboard" the Chartbook newsletter (of which I personally rather think of as a modern temple to "knowledge, truth and consequences" camouflaged as a daily newsletter 😉👍)
Reminds me of the best thinking I experienced in my otherwise sometimes rather dull "Arbeiter und Bauern"- University Gesamthochschule Essen where the secret scientific treasures were all buried in our Comparative Literature department (i.e. Mr. and Mrs. Buschendorf's Bourdieu-Seminar roundabout 2006 which changed my way of thinking).
I will think about your thoughts and read up on material about the mentioned approaches and it will enrich my thinking.
There is an obvious (to me at least) connection here to yet another paradigm or framework, prefigured by the reference to Tsing: Complexity Theory. Basically everything you are quoting from Hall, Peck and Massey can be restated in terms of strange attractors, phase changes, emergence, path dependency, incompressibility of system descriptions etc. (The list of conjunctural methodologies could probably get a 1:1 mapping to complexity vocabulary and methodologies.)
I always found this framework extremely helpful for making sense of the radically new because it starts from the assumptions that complex systems defy any reductionist modelling (on this see e.g. Paul Cilliers) and that all theorising has to be situated, and because it provides a set of conceptual tools that are at the same time quite abstract (and hence widely applicable) and focused on identifying particular and contingent patterns.
The other reason why it can be useful for current political analysis in particular is that it is completely independent from the dominant traditions in the field (you name idealism, pragmatism, historicism, existentialism), avoiding being trapped in their assumptions, while making many of their insights accessible to an audience not familiar with them.
Others are starting to see this potential as well; to name two examples, Sally Haslanger has been moving towards a complexity framing recently, and Alex Williams has developed a reframing of Hegemony Theory in terms of complex systems (which might make it salvageable for you after all ☺️).
A statistical method of looking to the probable outcomes from inquires situated in space and time is using the Markov chain Monte Carlo for Bayesian inference (MCMC for Bayesian inference). This method requires that conditions required for a Markov chain to have an equilibrium distribution and conditions for convergence. The three steps are (i) a Markov chain is set up which has the posterior distribution as its equilibrium. (ii) Sample from the Markov chain. (iii) Use the sampled values from the equilibrium distribution to make inference about unknown quantities of interest.
Bayesian statistics starts with a prior view of the probability of an outcome; data is then inputted (which is called the likelihood) which has its own probability. The posterior view is the combination of the prior and the likelihood. However, this can be an iterative process—what is my adjusted prior view, input new data, a new posterior probability.
It might be that this approach could rely less on preconceived concepts, ideas and thoughts and gives greater weight to the data ‘the world presents itself in the chaos of appearances.’
This is wonderful, of course. Admittedly, I need to read more of Hall's work but I still wonder if there's not a debt to the anthropologist Jennifer Johnson-Hanks here (cf. Jennifer Johnson-Hanks, “On the limits of life stages in ethnography: Toward a theory of vital conjunctures.” American anthropologist, Vol. 104 (3), 2002, p.865-880: < https://www.jstor.org/stable/3567262 > and Understanding Family Change and Variation: Toward a Theory of Conjunctural Action. NYC, &c.: Spring, 2011: < https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-94-007-1945-3 >). In any case, conjunctures is clearly a wonderful heuristic; it takes nothing from Hall's formulations to ponder a possible interdisciplinary borrowing here; and I would love to see more historians using conjunctures in just such a manner ...!
Ah, I just realized that Hall might have used the term well before Johnson-Hanks .... In any case, I imagine it's still useful to reflect on how a focus on conjunctures works in different disciplines as well.
There is thought, and there is action. You can think about getting out of the bathtub all you want, but actually getting up out of the water occurs in an irrational gap outside of thought. Action is inherently irrational. One contradiction replaces another. Decision.
Wow, how do you sleep with this swirling around your brain. Problem for me I have to condense this into something my non-academic brain can process. Are you saying the world is so complex and interdependent that cause and effect analyses is at best limited and that any economic theory, IR theory, social theory applied on its own will necessarily be defective in its conclusion? If that’s right, what I’m still wrestling with is this: if the roots of any given crisis are so entangled and uncertain, how do we go about building real solutions? Is the takeaway that we need to stay nimble, pragmatic, and in the moment, rather than relying too heavily on rigid analytical frameworks? Anybody able to make this more concise for me?
YES! THE 2008 CRISIS WAS A EUROPEAN CRISIS!
I know this was a thesis of your majestic book “Crashed”, but no one else – no one – seems to get it.
Please take a look at my Substack post “Basel: Faulty” which proves (to my satisfaction) that the crisis was caused by the Basel Capital Standards – i.e. bad regulation. Its epicenter was Europe.
https://charles72f.substack.com/p/basel-faulty-the-financial-crisis
I would be especially interested in your thoughts about my (rudimentary) use of Judea Pearl’s “causal inference” methods to tease out causality. (It uses a lot of counterfactuals.) I've become a bit obsessed with figuring out how to demonstrate "causality."
Honestly, I had never even heard the word “conjuncture” used in the sense you present. But it sounds fascinating. How would a person get started learning more about it.
I would also welcome any comments you might have about my many other posts.
Reading this chartbook 384 reminds me of two separate items of how wrong knowledge can be asserted till disproved: (a) Panchatantra -- where 5 blind persons each touch one part of an elephant and come to valid conclusions based on his (partial) knowledge; (b) generalisations that are proved contentious when new data arrives -- the current controversy about the Standard Cosmological Model that comes from the DESI observations in April 2024 is another example, where conjectures from theory of Dark Matter does not quite fit.
After reading you for years in posts like this, I've managed to form a narrative for the last 50 years. Thank you! 0utcast.substack.com/p/the-tech-industry-saved-neoliberalism
Thanks for this invigorating essay which made me do one screenshot after the other to take notes!
To comment on the various theoretical approaches (and ideas) I would like to resort to your musical metaphors calling them brilliant "riffs" and improvisations by someone who pushes boundaries because he knows his instrument very well but still loves to create the new - this sounds really good to me 😃!!!
The only difficult thing for me is now to get back down to earth (and do some more boring work 😉 as I sadly don't have the privilege to be a student anymore, let alone a student of yours...) - but "sessions" like this make it so worthwhile to be "onboard" the Chartbook newsletter (of which I personally rather think of as a modern temple to "knowledge, truth and consequences" camouflaged as a daily newsletter 😉👍)
Reminds me of the best thinking I experienced in my otherwise sometimes rather dull "Arbeiter und Bauern"- University Gesamthochschule Essen where the secret scientific treasures were all buried in our Comparative Literature department (i.e. Mr. and Mrs. Buschendorf's Bourdieu-Seminar roundabout 2006 which changed my way of thinking).
I will think about your thoughts and read up on material about the mentioned approaches and it will enrich my thinking.
Merci!
It is the 300 series where Adam really shows his mettle as a philosopher -- the 700 series is more fun with his recent observations
Thanks 😃👍
There is an obvious (to me at least) connection here to yet another paradigm or framework, prefigured by the reference to Tsing: Complexity Theory. Basically everything you are quoting from Hall, Peck and Massey can be restated in terms of strange attractors, phase changes, emergence, path dependency, incompressibility of system descriptions etc. (The list of conjunctural methodologies could probably get a 1:1 mapping to complexity vocabulary and methodologies.)
I always found this framework extremely helpful for making sense of the radically new because it starts from the assumptions that complex systems defy any reductionist modelling (on this see e.g. Paul Cilliers) and that all theorising has to be situated, and because it provides a set of conceptual tools that are at the same time quite abstract (and hence widely applicable) and focused on identifying particular and contingent patterns.
The other reason why it can be useful for current political analysis in particular is that it is completely independent from the dominant traditions in the field (you name idealism, pragmatism, historicism, existentialism), avoiding being trapped in their assumptions, while making many of their insights accessible to an audience not familiar with them.
Others are starting to see this potential as well; to name two examples, Sally Haslanger has been moving towards a complexity framing recently, and Alex Williams has developed a reframing of Hegemony Theory in terms of complex systems (which might make it salvageable for you after all ☺️).
the Hall-Massey interview doesn't seem to be at
----
https://www.lwbooks.co.uk/sites/default/files/s44_06hall_massey.pdf
----
(at least my browser in California doesn't find it.)
but, maybe it's here?
----
https://journals.lwbooks.co.uk/soundings/vol-2010-issue-44/article-7260/
And so I ask myself, are we really finding out about the object of study or more about its observers?
And I wonder also about the dangers of solipsism.
could it be that the res we're (always) in the middle of are stonily distinct from theory?
A statistical method of looking to the probable outcomes from inquires situated in space and time is using the Markov chain Monte Carlo for Bayesian inference (MCMC for Bayesian inference). This method requires that conditions required for a Markov chain to have an equilibrium distribution and conditions for convergence. The three steps are (i) a Markov chain is set up which has the posterior distribution as its equilibrium. (ii) Sample from the Markov chain. (iii) Use the sampled values from the equilibrium distribution to make inference about unknown quantities of interest.
Bayesian statistics starts with a prior view of the probability of an outcome; data is then inputted (which is called the likelihood) which has its own probability. The posterior view is the combination of the prior and the likelihood. However, this can be an iterative process—what is my adjusted prior view, input new data, a new posterior probability.
It might be that this approach could rely less on preconceived concepts, ideas and thoughts and gives greater weight to the data ‘the world presents itself in the chaos of appearances.’
you might enjoy wolfgang streecks latest book ''taking back control?' which goes into these sorts of ideas in depth..
This is wonderful, of course. Admittedly, I need to read more of Hall's work but I still wonder if there's not a debt to the anthropologist Jennifer Johnson-Hanks here (cf. Jennifer Johnson-Hanks, “On the limits of life stages in ethnography: Toward a theory of vital conjunctures.” American anthropologist, Vol. 104 (3), 2002, p.865-880: < https://www.jstor.org/stable/3567262 > and Understanding Family Change and Variation: Toward a Theory of Conjunctural Action. NYC, &c.: Spring, 2011: < https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-94-007-1945-3 >). In any case, conjunctures is clearly a wonderful heuristic; it takes nothing from Hall's formulations to ponder a possible interdisciplinary borrowing here; and I would love to see more historians using conjunctures in just such a manner ...!
Ah, I just realized that Hall might have used the term well before Johnson-Hanks .... In any case, I imagine it's still useful to reflect on how a focus on conjunctures works in different disciplines as well.
There is thought, and there is action. You can think about getting out of the bathtub all you want, but actually getting up out of the water occurs in an irrational gap outside of thought. Action is inherently irrational. One contradiction replaces another. Decision.