Featured in Belonging Again II.3
Reflections on a Conversation at Voicecraft with Matthew Segall
A tremendous scholar of Whitehead, Bergson, Steiner, Schelling, and others, Matthew Segall of Footnotes2Plato was a joy to speak with at Voicecraft. In my opinion, there is reason to think the metaphysics we see reflected in Whitehead could have significant economic ramifications, inviting us not to just think Supply and Demand but also Creativity.
Segall also shared reflections on the conversation here, which made an excellent read:
In another conversation with Segall titled “Reflections on ‘Naturalizing Relevance Realization,’ ” Tim Jackson noted that C.S. Peirce defends an act of “abduction” as being pre-rational or what I call “nonrational” and necessary as such for the beginning of rationality and logic in the first place. Without what could be called a first “arbitrary move,” no rationality could begin, and as a child develops the child engages in many acts of tinkering, experimentation, and “abduction” (perhaps from places of intuition) to experiment and figure out how best to go about reasoning and employing logic. We could associate this “prerational” state, and the “nonrational” acts which follow, as spaces in which the capital-C-Creativity of Whitehead and even Deleuze might be employed and manifest, and without this “prerational first mover,” we can find ourselves stuck in epistemology with an unsolvable “grounding problem” that brings thought and development to a halt (a point Hume also noted, as argued in “Deconstructing Common Life’). This in mind, Segall and Jackson suggest that through and in the very “unfolding” of thought, seeing as thought arrives at a “grounding problem” (a point which suggests Hegel), we can find a basis for considering a Creative or Vitalist project. In thought itself, we can find reason to consider an alternative to “hard materialism,” as I think similarly there is reason to consider economics beyond “supply and demand.”
In my view, what Segall and Jackson point to is a similar to what Lord Keynes ultimately suggests in arguing that Capitalism is fundamentally dependent on Demand (which I will capitalize with “Supply” to draw attention to their economic meaning here), and yet Demand is not something we can forever stimulate without dwindling returns and eventual stagnation (as I so argue). If this is so, this means Capitalism is dependent on a relationship between Supply and Demand, and yet the State or some other institution ultimately cannot provide means to create Demand versus just stimulate it. As we have argued in II.1, there is a difference between “stimulating demand” and “creating demand,” and so we need in economics to speak of Supply, Demand, and Creativity, which suggests the possibility of considering the “abductive” and thinkers like Whitehead in economic terms. We could say that Creativity is the pre-economic activity that makes economic possibility, as Creativity is the pre-rationality activity that makes rationality possible. Without Creativity, there is no Supply to coordinate; without Creativity, there is only Demand for what “is” (Supply) until that Demand is met or people grow bored with what “is” and what they Demand. Then, the only way to keep stimulating the economy is through government programs, increasing liquidity, algorithmic “nudging,” conflict, and the like. And if these means prove increasingly unreliable, or if we reach a place where the only way to respond to some “Fourth Turning” is through conflict and devastation — Nick Land might prove right.
As discussed in II.2, we learn in Benjamin Studebaker’s work, considering Walter Scheidel, that ‘once extraordinary inequalities of wealth and power take hold in a society, they are only very rarely disrupted.’¹ Studebaker expands on this point brilliantly in The Chronic Crisis of American Democracy and argues that ‘Scheidel identifies four forces that have shown a real capacity to substantially weaken or displace entrenched oligarchs — war, revolution, state collapse, and pandemic.’² More can be said, but what Scheidel argues is that periods of a “growing middleclass” or an economy not based on oligarchs is very rare and might only define limited periods of history: there is seemingly no economic system which successfully avoids oligarchs forever, and by extension that avoids radical inequality which threatens the whole social order. I believe this point is suggested by Keynes in realizing that there was something about Capitalism which headed toward stagnation and a dwindling of Demand, which by extension could lead to a monopoly or “limited range” of Demand for a few goods and services owned by a limited number of people (Tyler Cowen might suggest something similar). A diversity of Demand could be lost, meaning a few corporations could rise to the top and suck up all the Demand in favor of their Supply. This could generate oligarchs and the problems identified by Keynes and Scheidel, a story which might happen on repeat regardless the economic system, time and time again. No repetition of this process will look exactly the same, but regardless the system some Stagnation of Demand seems to eventually set in. Is this what “The Historic Turnings Theory” of William Strauss and Neil Howe suggest? That it’s inevitable that we eventually need a “Fourth Turning” to create Demand again? Does “The Fourth Turning” theory align with Scheidel? Perhaps.
The “Fourth Turning” could be seen as a historic period in which Demand is created again in time for the new “First Turning,” but it is done so not because we consciously realize a need for Creativity or difference between “creating demand” or “stimulating demand,” but because we are compelled by necessity to engage in Creativity if we are to survive. But here’s the problem: that means in Fourth Turnings we are “stimulated to create” Demand, which is not the same as “creating Demand” more directly, without such stimulation. Yes, sure, if we are “stimulated into Creativity,” that’s better than nothing, but this suggests that if we can only be “stimulated into Creativity,” we require historic processes and cycles to unintentionally and unconsciously tap into the Creativity we also require to make Supply and Demand possible — historic cycles in themselves might suggest the possibility of a “Whiteheadian Economics” without us even realizing it. Civilizational cycles more generally might also suggest this, as I’ve discussed with Michel Bauwens about, though that requires elaboration at another time.
II
Bringing to mind Peter Pogany, Matt Segall reviews the work of Alf Hornberg and reminds us that ‘machines do not magically create ‘growth,’ ‘progress,’ and ‘development’ at the industrial centers out of nothing’: they require environments, people, and other things that exceed what machines provide.³ Segall warns us to consider the environmental impacts of our machines, and in a similar way we might consider the impacts of our “market rationality” beyond markets. If it is true that all rationality requires something “nonrational” to organize itself, then markets as oscillating processes of Demand and Supply also require something “beyond markets” for the possibility of “market rationality,” and here we have described that as Creativity. ‘Efficient mentality, first exemplified by the thought of Aristotle,’ Segall notes,’ was a momentous achievement of the human spirit,’ but now that “efficient spirit” manifest in the market is trying to deny its own possibility and be its own “grounding,” denying its “grounding problem” and risking autocannibalism, suggesting a need to consider and embrace Creativity.⁴ But how do we incubate Creativity? That seems impossible, admittedly, and so it’s arguably reasonable for economics to only concern itself with Demand and Supply. But if that is so and Capitalism tends toward Stagnation and the problems described by Studebaker, Cowen, Keynes, and others, then economics might not be readily positioned to address its own unraveling. Then again, perhaps today economics at least “pointing to” its own “grounding problem” is enough for us to think what needs to be thought? Indeed, perhaps so.
Referencing Hornborg, Segall notes that ‘[the] materialistic obsession [leads to a world where] thought begins to obediently kneel before the power of the machine […] helpless to avert its thermodynamic trajectory toward ever more efficient conversation of exergy into entropy for the sake of disproportionate monetary accumulation.’⁵ Perhaps it is this “bowing” and accepting of the inevitably of entropy that has partly led to us forgoing the question of Creativity in favor of Supply and Demand? If there is no possibility of avoiding a loss of “useless energy,” then it seems irrational to devote infrastructure to seemingly denying the inevitable. Whatever Creativity emerges is luck and a “bug in the system,” we might say, which means it happens but it cannot be planned or cultivated. Economics and society must accept the inability to plan and cultivate these things; what is practical and reasonable is focusing on a management of the descent. Creativity cannot radically change anything. We are at “the end of history”…
Segall writes powerfully on the trouble with overly-generalizing entropy, and this thinking might have contributed to an economics that emphasizes Supply, Demand, and even notions like “scarcity” (which Ivan Illich critiques). This mistake is worsened by ‘[the] collapse of time into a spatial sequence, each snap shot externally and accidentally related to the next, [which] vanquished the concrete temporal intensity required to understand how formal and final causes participate in living organization.’⁶ Economics does not think “formal and final causes,” for this is left to people to decide, but as Marx shows us (discussed in II.2), Capitalism partly works because we metajudge an “equal sign” (“=”) into reality that cannot be found in facticity or materiality, meaning that economics does habituate us into certain “formal and final causes” compared to others, while at the same time denying the role (as Segall notes, a recipe for pathology). And problematically, the “=” makes us “toward” a Stagnation and away from Creativity (for “the equal sign” is almost the opposite of Creativity, and in fact what else is Stagnation but an “=” which cannot escape itself). “Fungible” and “Creativity” seem similar, but actually fungibility suggests nothing can be Created, for everything is already “the same.” What is Created is metaphysically similar to what already exists, for it is “=” to what is, and so all we need to worry about is Supply and Demand: we do not need so readily to make “space” for “radical otherness” or “radical newness” — a consequential mistake.
“Fungibility,” as Marx describes, is a kind of relationship, and in a sense the creation of “fungibility” as a mode of exchange was originally a creative advance in history, but “fungibility” and “creativity” are not similes, and in fact fungibility seems like it must only be used temporarily to help facilitate an “exchange” — but unfortunately we can get into a habit of treating things as “fungible” and “equal,” which leads to compression and a “reductionism” which can cause “bad nihilism.” Where there is Fungibility, it is hard to have “encounter” (with limitation, alluding to Alex Ebert’s work), and so there is little emergence and hence Creativity. Fungibility might help facilitate Creativity, but only if it is in service of Creativity and not that which replaces it. Likewise, technology could be good to the degree it helps extend humanity, but it is hard to use technology and not let it replace us (as we discussed with Ivan Illich). This fate must be avoided, but how do we “formulate” ourselves so that we do not fall into habits which make us “toward” this fate? “The Liminal Web” is an example of how this might happen, as discussed at the end of II.2, suggesting that the role of the Liminal Web in society might need to be expanded.
Anyway, Segall reflects on Darwin and tells us that we mustn’t think of ‘living organization [as] just an anomaly in nature,’ a notion of hard materialism which might spread into our thinking about Capitalism.⁷ Complexity and Creativity are not mistakes but features of nature, which suggests that an economics which doesn’t align with Creativity might not align with “actuality” (which in classical philosophy and theology could lead to privations and pathologies — or stagnation). With implications for economics, Segall writes:
‘Matter, similarly, is intimately related to the development of space and time — not in space-time as a kind of inert ‘stuff,’ but integrally woven with it into a physio-psycho-spiritual process of inconscient yearning gradually flowering into luminous awareness, compassion, and bliss.’⁸
Economics which suggest matter is “inert stuff” will be very different from economics which takes seriously what Segall proposes here, which I do think could ultimately lead to an economics which deeply considers Creativity not as an anomaly but as essential and even “the point.” Such a Capitalism is argued for throughout O.G. Rose, and we will note here Robert Solow as an economist who argues that “technological process” is a key factor of growth beyond labor and capital. We noted Solow in “The Creative Concord,” but what Solow gives us is an analysis that leaves us with “The Solow Residual,” which we can think of as growth which cannot be easily explained through classical economic metrics. We might think of “The Solow Residual” as a “Gödel Point” in economics, which is to say a point which cannot be explained by modeling or traditional explanations. This doesn’t mean models of capital or labor are wrong or of no use, but it is to say there is a “residual” that seems difficult to explain except by considering more “fuzzy” variables like technological progress which seem beyond our control.
In my opinion, as II.2 and II.3 elaborate on (aligning with the “Rhetoric” of Deidre McCloskey), Voicecraft could suggest what we need to infrastructurally spread to cultivate and address “The Solow Residual,” which is the act of “spreading Childhood” and Creativity. In the Solow-Swan Growth Model, it is argued that long-term growth requires capital, labor, and technology working and rising together, but of course “technology” is a problematic factor, both in that it seems unplannable and something that could lead to “The Singularity.” Not all technology is the same, and if we require technology for economic growth, as Solow shows, that means we must risk what Nick Land describes and also the disablement described by Ivan Illich. Risk is unavoidable, but fortunately what Solow focuses on as “technology” could be seen as Creativity. What we have discussed as Demand, Supply, and Creativity could be considered with capital, labor, and technology, and though we need some kind of triplex for growth, “technology” is a product of a Creativity that could manifest in many different ways. We need technology, yes, but technology doesn’t have to replace us.
I would consider Deirdre McCloskey as possibly helping us understand the condition in which “technological advancement” occurs, as described by Solow, and that is “Rhetoric” and/or what we call Voicecraft. Why this is so is easily because reality is precisely metaphysically like Matthew Segall describes alongside Whitehead, Schelling, Bergson, and the like (which we might describe as vegetative, a metaphor Matt Segall often employs). Ultimately, technology is a product of Creativity and imagination, which is hard for us today after what Segall calls “imagincide,” which is “the murder of imagination,” as his book Crossing the Threshold discusses.
As ‘[a]n ever-new Nature cannot be captured once and for all by any fixed verbal statement or logical formula, no matter how dialectically sophisticated’ (as Segall notes), so an economics based ultimately on Creativity and imagination can never be “completely modeled,” no matter how well we might understanding Supply and Demand.⁹ Segall discusses a ‘radical panexperientalism’ with Whitehead, and perhaps this is what we need to think Capitalism and to keep it from devolving into stagnation?¹⁰ Perhaps.
Segall describes Whitehead’s thinking:
‘The topology of space-time is an emergent product of the collective character of the individual drops of experience making up our cosmic neighborhood. The mathematical structure of the space-time continuum known to physics is not an a prior imposition of the mind nor a necessary law imposed upon Nature from beyond, but an emergent pattern of mutual relations achieved by the most widespread society of occasions pervading this cosmic epoch.¹¹
Economics would shift if it thought of itself in light of this, wouldn’t it? And perhaps the reason McCloskey’s “Rhetoric” leads to the Great Enrichment is precisely because conversation, “encountering,” networking (Randall Collins), and the like is a human reality and experience that best aligns most meaningfully, emotionally, psychologically, and physically with this metaphysical reality Segall has described. Demand and Supply are “conditions of economics” not the whole of economics (like ‘[s]pace, time, and causality’ for experience), but so too is Creativity such a condition.¹² If we do not recover Creativity, we do not recover the conditions needed for a Creative Economy, which is to say one that does not fall into a Great Stagnation and through which a Second Great Enrichment that extended humanity versus replace it might be possible.
III
We have discussed throughout O.G. Rose the importance of Beauty, Lack, and River-Holes for the recovery of something negentropic, meaningful, and “belonging,” and Segall draws attention to Kant’s Third Critique to explore this topic and how a recovery of Beauty could help us recover Creativity metaphysically, which could furthermore help us in economics. Segall notes that Kant ‘denied knowledge of Nature in order to make room for freedom,’ but ultimately failed ‘to acknowledge the ontological significance of our imaginational experience of natural Beauty’ (which we shouldn’t be too hard on Kant for, seeing as taking this seriously requires us to face “The Real” and plunge into ‘the abyssal root of mind and Nature’).¹³ ‘Fearful of the sublime power of imagination, Kant restricts the mind to representations of a dead Nature manufactured by fixed categories of the understanding’; likewise, perhaps fearful of the breaking of our economic models, economists might restrict markets to considering Supply and Demand and ignore Creativity, which could threaten to ruin everything…¹⁴
An economics based only on Supply and Demand will likely be one primarily focused on extrinsic motivations and incentives in the society, and if those begin to fail or unintentionally lead us into some “Meaning Crisis,” there will be little economics will be able to do to address the problem. If economics leads to a loss of timenergy because the incentives must work against timenergy (alluding to McKerracher’s excellent work), then again there is little we can do, and worse yet if timenergy is needed for Creativity (for example), then economics could lead to the conditions of its own autocannibalism. To avoid this fate though, economics seems like it must acknowledge the role of “something beyond” what it can readily calculate or understand, such as Creativity — which seems central to me for “The Solow Residual.” Generally, the Residual represents anything which cannot be explained through fluctuations of Capital or Labor, and some models suggest the Residual makes up between 20% to 50% of growth and productivity (though this is debated). If this is so, this is extraordinary, but arguably it is a flaw that the Residual consists of such a wide percent. Regardless, there is reason to think that some significant percent of growth and productivity change is thanks to something we don’t really understand and that economics can only model “negatively” and/or “apophatically” (like walking around the crater of a meteorite), and the best we seem capable of doing is “stimulating demand” through investment, increasing liquidity, lower interest rates, etc. But if it is true that the effectiveness of these methods gradually weakens and dwindles or causes terrible unintentional consequences, then we will need to consider Creativity closely. But how do we “incubate Creativity,” which is to say intentionally address the Solow Residual? That seems contradictory. Indeed, it does, which is perhaps why we need thinkers like Hegel (A/B)…
I do not think it is unreasonable to suppose that creating conditions of Rhetoric and Voicecraft could help us address the Residual, and if Rhetoric does in fact defines the conditions in which the Solow Residual develops productively, then this is how we will “create Demand.” There are many discusses on the Liminal Web about the mysterious, negentropic, and generative functions of Dialogos, Circling, etc., and all of this could be taken as evidence that McCloskey is right to say Rhetoric is at the heart of Enrichment (and hence the Residual).
If this is valid, we might say that addressing the Solow Residual through Rhetoric could lead to a Second Great Enrichment, and that Rhetoric with Creativity are strongly tied and incubated through “network effects” like described by Randall Collins, as architecturally and aesthetically incubated and trained (as discussed in II.2). If that is so, we might say the whole Liminal Web is possibly one great infrastructure of addressing the Solow Residual, which if we don’t address, the “Creator Class” (Artifex) will dwindle, Non-Zero Sumness will likely become Zero Sumness, and the Great Stagnation will ever-worsen through Minskey business-cycles and Great Levelings…
‘For Schelling […] philosophy is principally an endeavor to remember in full consciousness what at first unfolded unconsciously’ — as Segall writes, should we think of economics today similarly?¹⁵ Economics is unconsciously developing through Demand and Supply and has seemed to forgotten Creativity. Segall notes how ‘Nietzsche’s valorization of becoming and musings on an ontology of power resonate with Schelling and Whitehead’s process-relational aesthetic ontology,’ and I think similarly Nietzsche can help us approach and think the economics we need today, hence our emphasis on Childhood in Belonging Again.¹⁶ In Nietzsche, we learn that ‘[p]ower is not the capacity of a subject, but the capacity productive of a subject’; likewise, so it goes with the relation between Creativity and economics.¹⁷ Economics don’t give us Creativity; Creativity gives us economics, and if economics forsakes Creativity in favor of Supply and Demand, economics is only able to do this thanks to Creativity. ‘Mind […] becomes a more complexly folded Nature,’ and so it can think otherwise; if it makes this mistake, “reflexivity” (Soros) and self-reference are needed for us to set things right (discussed in II.1).¹⁸ ‘ ‘We must be systematic,’ Whitehead [tells us], ‘ but we should keep our systems open [and remain] sensitive to their limitations’ ’ — so it goes with economics.¹⁹
And so a great work is set before us, one we must take on, and we better can equipped with the work of Matt Segall, Voicecraft, and others of the Liminal Web. Be sure to subscribe and follow them today:
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Notes
¹Studebaker, Benjamin. The Chronic Crisis of American Democracy. Switzerland. Palgrave MacMillan (Springer Nature Switzerland), 2003: 15.
²Studebaker, Benjamin. The Chronic Crisis of American Democracy. Switzerland. Palgrave MacMillan (Springer Nature Switzerland), 2003: 15.
³Segall, Mathew. On the Matter of Life: Toward an Integral Biology of Economics, 2010: 71–72.
⁴Segall, Mathew. On the Matter of Life: Toward an Integral Biology of Economics, 2010: 73.
⁵Segall, Mathew. On the Matter of Life: Toward an Integral Biology of Economics, 2010: 79.
⁶Segall, Mathew. On the Matter of Life: Toward an Integral Biology of Economics, 2010: 81.
⁷Segall, Mathew. On the Matter of Life: Toward an Integral Biology of Economics, 2010: 85.
⁸Segall, Mathew. On the Matter of Life: Toward an Integral Biology of Economics, 2010: 86.
⁹Segall, Matthew David. Crossing the Threshold. Olympia, WA: Integral Imprint, 2023: 205.
¹⁰Segall, Matthew David. Crossing the Threshold. Olympia, WA: Integral Imprint, 2023: 28.
¹¹Segall, Matthew David. Crossing the Threshold. Olympia, WA: Integral Imprint, 2023: 116–117.
¹²Segall, Matthew David. Crossing the Threshold. Olympia, WA: Integral Imprint, 2023: 118.
¹³Segall, Matthew David. Crossing the Threshold. Olympia, WA: Integral Imprint, 2023: 124.
¹⁴Segall, Matthew David. Crossing the Threshold. Olympia, WA: Integral Imprint, 2023: 124.
¹⁵Segall, Matthew David. Crossing the Threshold. Olympia, WA: Integral Imprint, 2023: 129.
¹⁶Segall, Matthew David. Crossing the Threshold. Olympia, WA: Integral Imprint, 2023: 139.
¹⁷Segall, Matthew David. Crossing the Threshold. Olympia, WA: Integral Imprint, 2023: 143–144.
¹⁸Segall, Matthew David. Crossing the Threshold. Olympia, WA: Integral Imprint, 2023: 167.
¹⁹Segall, Matthew David. Crossing the Threshold. Olympia, WA: Integral Imprint, 2023: 175.
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