The Wire and philosophy

Having wrecked many, many people's heads by lavishly praising The Wire I recently decided to actually try and write down the reasons why it appealed to me so much. A problem immediately presented itself though: I didn't know why I liked it. To be sure, its uniquely satisfying blend of long character arcs, labyrinthine complexity, brilliant acting, and outstanding writing all contributed to its appeal. Beyond this, I struggled to account for my proselytising zeal (I reckon I've now watched it six times). Its obvious pre-occupations with corruption being the root of all evil and men having to do what men have to do both struck me as being, well, kind of lame. I wondered if the show's mechanics of plot, character and style (dialogue, cinematography, etc.) were really the main reasons why I loved it so much, while simultaneously recognising that excellence in these areas are seen frequently enough in TV nowadays.

It was at this time that a strange irony struck me: despite the narrative conservatism of The Wire (unlike The Sopranos it has no surrealist reveries, unlike Mad Men it has no explanatory childhood flashbacks, and unlike Breaking Bad it has no madcap Top Gear-esque adventures), it seems to me to be the most philosophically literate of all these brilliantly made programmes. Without ever mentioning any thinker by name or explicitly expounding an argument it explores many issues that are familiar to any philosophy student: problems raised by thinkers like Marx, Weber, Nietzsche and Freud.

One of the most obvious thematic concerns of The Wire is its pre-occupation with surveillance. The title alone, in its allusion to wire tapping, makes this clear. Beyond this, nearly every episode features a scene in which someone is either being recorded or filmed for a purpose prejudicial to their own interests. Elsewhere, senior cops compile incriminating files on their subordinates to better manipulate them while one section of the FBI secretly keeps track of another section's investigation in order to undermine it. Reminiscent of the Danish court's obsession with monitoring Hamlet, something is clearly rotten in the state of Maryland.

Despite the prevalence of surveillance-based imagery the connection between the brutal and widespread violence on display and these monitoring techniques is never really made clear until season 4 when we encounter poor Namond Bryce, a teenager terrified by the environment in which he's forced to live. And this is the point at which The Wire and Freud intersect with the show's writers making it clear that a consequence of surveillance is that it ensures that those monitored are denied the chance to change as individuals. Where the motivation to monitor is due to atavistic impulses and drives in Freud  The Wire shows that this impulse to observe is tied to the far more prosaic need of ensuring that those watched don't change, lest they should no longer fulfil their assigned role in the system in which they've been reared to serve. Indeed, just to highlight their debt of gratitude to Freud, the show's writers show Namond being terrified of his “dragon lady” mother (who, in fairness to the lad, resembles Livia Soprano in her desire to seemingly want her son killed) before being able to flourish by identifying with the father figure of Bunny Colvin. The Freudian loop is even nicely closed off by the revelation that Namond's actual father is instrumental in creating the chaos on the streets that so terrifies him: his mother may be the proximate cause of his deep distress but his father is the ultimate cause. Namond's familial predicament is the same as society's predicament, whose members are constantly monitored by a brutally degrading system that ensures they can't exit.

Talk of degrading systems brings us nicely to Marx. With characters frequently echoing the line “business, just business” (usually just before perpetrating some betrayal or horrific act of violence) it's clear that the creators of The Wire are very unhappy about capitalism indeed. Where it actually succeeds in providing insight into the nature of capitalism though is in its relentless depiction of money's awesome, protean force. In The Wire (as in The Communist Manifesto) money talks, incessantly and seductively. Thus, we have the despairing cycle of one generation following their antecedents into more or less identical roles (peaceful Dookie becomes Bubbles with his need to get money but not hurt anyone, Michael becomes Omar taxing the supra normal profits of the drug dealers, Carver becomes the responsible yet compromised middle manager like Daniels, while Sydnor follows McNulty's lead by giving valuable gossip to a judge) as the system determines which economic roles they'll fulfil. Similarly, we have the transition of authority from one drug running operation to another where, despite the violence involved in the handover of power, its clear that the only thing that is certain is that one group will ultimately end up victorious: markets, like drug addicts, abhor vacuums in supply.

Cyclical views of history and a keen appreciation for the potency of money aside, one element of The Wire that would surely have won the admiration of Marx is the former's treatment of “public opinion”. Here, the basic message is that “news” addresses only the concerns of the more prosperous elements of society while those in the socio-economic doldrums are rarely discussed. This is seen most clearly in those scenes where Tommy Carcetti is informed that his priorities as mayor are to get notional increases in certain key statistics and also ensure that he manges to organise construction of a landmark building. Discussions of the actual issues plaguing the city never really seem to take place and when these problems actually do break onto the news agenda there's only ever a battle to influence perception of how these issues are portrayed rather than actually addressed. The effect of all this is that participants within the brutalising system are completely disaffected from the media, correctly recognising that the media's interest really lies elsewhere regardless of whatever conceits it may have about its own crusading role in righting social wrongs. The author of The 18^th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte would undoubtedly have understood this point.

Max Weber too. His analysis of rationalisation and disenchantment with the bureaucratic world-view is closely linked to Marx's treatment of alienation. The Wire honours this intellectual affinity by highlighting how the obsession with reducing costs (“more, with less”) is now a major a feature in institutions that in the past weren't seen as needing to be profitable: the police and school boards juke the stats while the local paper self destructively seeks to replace valuable older reporters with younger, inexperienced newcomers. Similarly, the police headquarters is indistinguishable from any contemporary corporate office block. The result of this drive to homogenise all social institutions by denying their unique functions is that fantastical and illusory pre-occupations replace the real, more lethal concerns that ought to be addressed in public discourse (and which would be far more obvious if these institutions were honourably run). Public opinion thus shows itself to be outraged when drugs are tacitly legalised and also when an imaginary serial killer stalks the land, doing work more accurately attributable to combatants in a gang war. The fact that both of these phenomena were accomplished facts (drugs were freely available before the decriminalisation zones and murder was already a terrifyingly widespread instrument of conflict resolution before the advent of the fictional serial killer) didn't matter: public opinion had seen something it didn't like and was determined to console itself with futile displays of outrage that did nothing to address the underlying problems.

These two plot threads bring us nicely to Nietzsche and his notion of transvaluation: that the professed morality of a given society can be so corrupt that only its opposite values can possibly redeem it. In this light Bunny Colvin's decriminalisation of drugs (an object of fetishistic and irrational hatred rather than a catch-all term for substances that include alcohol) and McNulty's invention of a serial killer make more sense when its born in mind that the professed morality is what's being targeted. While the basic intent of having a police force is benign the ways in which this motivation manifests itself in Baltimore are deeply damaging and wasteful, being more closely related to the conceits of the more prosperous classes than to any realistic assessment of the needs of society as a whole. This, the gulf in understanding between those fully engaged with the murderous trauma of inner city life and those in the comfortable suburbs, leads to an alienation and despair so deep that it can only be manifested by audacious stunts that attempt to spotlight the grotesque ugliness of society's self-image. The conceits of society's more prosperous citizens were as morally repugnant for Nietzsche as they are for The Wire's creators.

So, Baltimore seems to be a society where an abyss of communication (and, consequently, despair) exists between people who live and work only miles away from each other. Having drawn heavily on German philosophers to indict the place it thus seems strangely appropriate that the only vaguely positive philosophical insight (as opposed to bitter insights concerning the ultimate cruelty of the universe) offered is a quote attributed to “Fonzie” Kafka: “You can hold back from the suffering of the world, you have free permission to do so and it is in accordance with your nature. But perhaps this very holding back is the one suffering you could have avoided.” To people trapped in a nearly inescapable cycle of grinding degradation this may be about the only consolation that can be offered: that despite the entirely understandable urge to retreat into defensive individualism this may yet intensify the pain you feel by further isolating and alienating you from others.

In a world that daily becomes more and more obsessed with surveillance, nebulous notions of economic growth, the commodification of personal identity and with placating the wealthy The Wire seems to have an almost Cassandra-like relevance. It may not be perfect (season 2 has its longueurs, the villains in the newsroom are denied the sort of nuanced treatment the drug dealers are afforded, and it strikes me that there's something unsatisfactory about its treatment of women in general) but through its exploration of the above themes it is far superior to the glibly episodic “quality” TV shows it's frequently compared with.

The Wire is brilliantly made, relevant in a way fiction or drama normally doesn't seem able to achieve anymore, and humane. From the outset it's just not that obvious that a cop show could be all these things. 

Alone Again (Technologically)

Although it may be about as insightful as Homer Simpson's surprised remark that “they have the internet on computers now”, I still feel that it's sometimes worth pointing out that the world has become a bewilderingly abstract place. A moment's reflection on the significance of your mobile phone should suffice to illustrate the truth of this: in many regards it's a more effective representation of you than your own body is.

Hearteningly however (or traumatically, depending on your perspective), those instances where it's been unable to completely replace your flesh and bone you do still seem to be the most important: that varied grouping of experiences euphemistically referred to as intimacy. Despite the best efforts of robotics engineers, computer programmers and pornographers alike attempts at producing a computerised boy-, girl- or non-gender alignedfriend don't seem to have gained traction with the general public, yet.

On the other hand though, the algorithm producing sectors have seemingly enjoyed great success with the next best thing to intimacy: the practice formerly known as courtship. Indeed, it may simply be another sign of my advancing years but from discussions with friends and through the media in general it does seem as if internet dating is now a stronger presence in people's lives than it has ever been in the past. Certainly, dating or matchmaking services as institutions have a long history behind them but they've never before been advertised as heavily as they are now, which is just another way of saying that it's undoubtedly big business these days.

Having been single for a while some of the ad campaigns and my discussions with friends impressed me. I wondered if maybe Janis Iain was wrong and love wasn't just meant for beauty queens and high school girls with clear skin smiles.

Reader, I set up a profile. For one as verbose as I am I found this part oddly challenging. Unlike in person, you're obviously never quite sure just who you're addressing on the internet: a miserable situation (and the basic condition of all mass participation online) only made worse by the sense of vulnerability most people inevitably feel when hoping for intimacy. I must have been more lonely that I initially thought though as I persevered, eventually settling on a nice line in ironically self-aware nerdiness to describe myself. Let the truth set you free!

I waited for a while, unsure of the etiquette, before plunging in. Having overcome the trauma of making my own profile and trying to second guess my unknown, prospective companion this part was only slightly less strange. I filtered through the female profiles, aware of the fact that these avatars may have been only tangenitally related to the truth and that women viewing my own profile must have felt something similar. It's a weird and giddy feeling, knowing that people may fully doubt the truth of your existence when you're being sincere.

Banishing this feeling, I ploughed ahead. One girl, about whom I'd had a pretty good feeling based on our complimentary music tastes, replied showing some interest in meeting up. After some mildly flirtatious e-mail exchanges we agreed on a date. My fear that this might all have been some elaborate set up and that the ghost of Jeremy Beadle might appear as one of my dates had calmed during the e-mail exchanges but came back strongly in the days and hours before our agreed meet up in a city centre bar one evening.

She showed up.

I relaxed, seeing that she was as described, and I expect she felt the same. Aside from a brief awkward moment at the start when I dithered over whether to offer to get her a drink and a few brief lulls in the conversation I enjoyed the evening. Truth be told, I would have liked to have seen her again but it never happened: my hopes of a second meeting died in a flurry of apologetic text messages.

For a while afterwards I once again found myself feeling confused. Mulling over my sorry predicament I wondered if I was upset with the girl for not being interested or with myself for bothering with the enterprise in the first place. Or, indeed, was I annoyed at the dating service itself? Something about the notion of meeting someone and finding them to be “as described” rankled with me, as if we were both some kind of commodity with the potential to provide spiritual fulfilment. The fact that our introduction was mediated through a numerical code rather than a human (as an old dating service would have worked) also irritated me.Surely, it would make just as much sense to go to a nightclub and flip a coin and allow that to decide whether or not I approached a seemingly unattached girl?

Such frustrated musings borne of confusion are undignified (as well as being unappealing to prospective partners. Ladies, I am still single you know) though so I'll leave it there.

The world is indeed a bewilderingly abstract place.

Soccernomics: a dull book that's not really worth reading

Ah football, that relentless generator of guff. As I get older I'm struck by the growth in the number of journalists willing to pretend that there's something high minded about it all though. Perhaps this dawning awareness of tasteful anorakdom is all a part of the ageing process, like experiencing awful hangovers and feeling profoundly alienated by ads for certain mobile phone networks. Or perhaps its one of those singular facts of the Age, a consequence of the potential extension of adolescence until one is well into one's thirties (at least). Did our fathers really spend hours analysing the merits of pundits? Did their fathers spend significant chunks of their weekly income on replica jerseys?

Regardless, the reach of the football “experience” extends ever more deeply into pockets of our lives that had previously been untroubled by its clammy grasp. One of the undoubted high priests of its hermeneutics is Simon Kuper, football correspondant for the FT and the co-author (alongside economist Stefan Szymanski) of the book under review today: Soccernomics. Channelling the spirit of a zany management consultant watching Sky Sports News they've set out to uncover the key determining statistics and economic trends that lie at the heart of the modern game.

The first thing to note about this irritatingly absorbing collection of expanded newspaper articles (sample chapter title: “Why Poor Countries are Poor at Sport”) is that the authors themselves seem deeply confused about the merits of their approach: “Football is neither big business nor good business. It arguably isn't even business at all.” Economics, however, is primarily concerned with the most efficient means by which goods and services are delivered to the public. But if football clubs don't really make sense as a business then they are presumably not run with the intent of maximising the return on investment for their owners. As a result, all attempts to analyse how they can be best run from an economic perspective will collapse into a confused pile of sentimental opinions. To put it another way, one could well imagine a scenario where K & S present their findings to an assembly of chairmen, and the chairmen simply reply: “Well, d'uh!”

Unfortunately, this section appearing near the start is probably the most interesting in the book. Having apparently not noticed that they've seriously damaged the underlying premise of the whole enterprise they blithely carry on with rapidly diminishing returns. Their answers to questions like “are black managers discriminated against?” (yes, managers have so little influence that the market can't punish discriminatory hiring behaviour) and “what countries in the west care most about football?” (Norway ad Iceland, who knew?) are interesting enough but the exhaustive description of the statistical analyses involved are eye wateringly tedious.

Beyond the “football isn't really business” point highlights are hard to identify. The discussion of re-location consultants and the refusal by clubs to appoint them is instructive though as it actually shows the authors getting excited about something. Regardless of the frequently obscene sums of money involved in player transfers many of these deals fail because the purchasing club refuses to spend a franction more in attempting to reduce the unease inevitably felt by what are usually heavily sheltered young men in alien environments. Yet Kuper & Szymanski's estimable anger at clubs refusing to pay a relatively small amount of good money after wasting huge amounts of bad money is all too rare.

The absence of this vaguely ethical sense is also evident in their discussion of the shrewdest operators in the transfer market as great play is made of the “regression to the mean”. Despite the authors' insistance on how significant this tool is much of the insights advanced are most vividly explained through references to Peter Taylor's memoir of his time with Brian Clough. As other names like Wenger, Ferguson and Moyes frequently appear with disconcerting regularity the feeling that this whole section would work better simply as a description of their transfer policies only grows. Contrary to their assertion that managers don't really matter it would appear that they actually do have a fair amount of influence. Indeed, any self respecting economist would point out that it could hardly be otherwise in any well developed capitalist economy, obsessed as they are with marginal returns. Personality, or the ethical business of getting the most out of people, is all important when other resources are more or less equal.

Ultimately this obsession with the median seems to be a failing common to many of these “stats will change your life” books (and one hardly discernible at all in Kuper's “Football Men”). Rather than focusing on those who do well and considering the reasons for their success they emphasise life's dutiful trudgers. The effect of this is that they create a sort of mystery gap between the good and the middling and the only way to bridge this gap is to BUY THIS BOOK AND YOU WILL UNDERSTAND! In truth though the basic point seems to be that there's little to understand, generally the fields of endeavour in question aren't profoundly difficult and those under observation simply need to pay more attention to what their betters are already doing.

So, to recap before I sign off: the joy of stats - a fairly thin conceit for an entire book.