Rhet/math and the Financial Crisis: General statements and a first crack at David Li

Is it possible to gain a rhetorical understanding of the financial crisis? Is it possible that what went wrong, or more realistically, one part of what went wrong was a rhetorical error, a failure of discourse?  Was there a problem in the way persuasion operated? We look at things from a rhetorical perspective in order to improve the world by changing communication, changing the ways we are persuaded, by focusing closely on communication and persuasion. Was part of what went wrong in the financial collapse a failure or shortcoming in communication or persuasion. You might think I mean something like, “were borrowers lied to by lenders?” or “were investors lied to by bankers?” But leaving aside lies and dishonesty, what if there was something wrong with the communication or persuasion in the heart of the financial world, something that went wrong not by anyones choice but by the rgular operation of the language of finance. And I don’t mean the potentially obfuscating jargon like ‘sub-prime loans’ or ‘credit default swaps’, those things being too close to the lies mentioned above.

The language of finance is mathematics, or rather mathematics is one of its languages, an Other language, which supplements the jargony discipline-specific uses of English that include ‘sub-prime loans’ or ‘credit default swaps.’ There may be something going on in the regular operation of the language of mathematics that makes finance itself possible. This operation of mathematics-as-language can be addressed by those familiar with mathematics, but if it is indeed language, rhetoricians should also have some insight into it.

A very normal thing happened in the mathematics that supported the finance that “went wrong” in the recent crisis. That very normal thing was that David X. Li constructed, performed into existence, a tentative mathematical structure that gave value to assets… He constructed mathematical entity on top of mathematical entity and in the end, there came to (economic) life an entity that… there emerged a conviction that a numerical valuation of a contract was accurate.

The things he constructed:

1. A random variable: In the situation we’re concerned with, we have a bunch of loans that are paying interest. These will stop paying eventually, either because the term expires (and all is well), or because they default. The time each loan takes to stop paying is a random variable. Assuming, for the sake of simplicity that each loan has a term of tf, the time it takes for payments to stop on a loan, Ti, is a random variable with values in (0, tf]. Li calls this random variable for a given loan (asset) its survival time.
2. A distribution function for this random variable: The variable itself seems innocuous enough, but since the survival time is a random variable, it has, by mathematical necessity, a distribution function. The distribution function is a curve that tells the probability (y-axis) of payment ending at a given time (x-axis). According to Li, the curve can be constructed using “the market-agreed perception today about the future default tendency of the underlying credit” (10). This is a controversial construction, as indicated by later commentators, e.g. Janet Tavakoli.
3. A copula function that gives the joint distribution of several random variables (each related to a defaultable asset/loan) on the basis of their each random variable’s marginal distribution.
4. A correlation between the multiple survival time random variables, which is needed for the copula fuction, based on a correlation between the assets/loans in question.

I need to spend more time with 3 and 4 and, likely 2.

Of course, the crucial thing might be that when I say there’s a failure of discourse, it’s not like anyone did anything “wrong.” It’s that this normal operation of mathematical language, the performative construction of some mathematical entities, 1) failed to do what it was intended to do and/or 2) had crazy/destructive effects in spite and in addition to doing what it was intended to do. It isn’t just about lies and deception and greed and bad people. It’s also about uncontrollable math-language.

Lines of flight and what’s the other thing?

I want words to cary me away. Or rather, that ’s what I think they’re for, what they do. How they do. The numbers can peg me in place. Peg me? REally? Is that inappropriate? because that’s what I think numbers do. They take a step, or make a step. They stand, freeze, lock. Words run. They run awway with you and/or they run you off. Like runoff and like a copy machine. Run off some copies of you.

I sit here with the numbers, but I run way with or after the words. But it’s about words and numbers for sure. My boss told me the same thing the other day. actually my boss’s boss. He loves “words (and numbers!)” he said.

And because of what numbers do, because of how they do, they perform truth procedures. Not that I even know what that means, but it sounds good. It sounds right. I’ll run after it, striate my space or whatever.

I imagine this all has to do with kung fu movies I never watch.

What is keeping me awake tonight 1: Adam Sternbergh

A few weeks back, on a listserv that I currently have no good reason to subscribe to, let alone read, someone posted a link to the Stuff White People Like blog. As a response, today someone posted a link to Adam Sternbergh’s recent critique of that blog. A link in that article led me to Sternbergh’s March 2006 piece about 30-somethings who have only sort of grown up. This eventually led me to look into the archive of his work at NY magazine, where I found a few articles about gentrification in New York and the weirdness of the whole “neighborhood X is the new neighborhood Y,” especially now that it’s been going on for over a decade.

Now I’m awake partly because 1) Although I’m glad to see a thoughtful contribution to a conversation outlining the distinctions between good and bad “edgy” comedy, I think he’s missing something about SWPL: He only glosses the fact that many people, including several that have posted comments on the blog, have pointed out that the people that actually like the things listed are “a very specific demographic sliver of left-leaning, city-dwelling white folk–in other words, people like me,” who “have previously been trapped and tagged alternately as yuppies, or Bobos, or (by yours truly in New York magazine) grups.” He sort of brushes this critique aside and adds his own, which is that nothing that is a truly cutting satire is ever accepted by the satirized as great entertainment; rather, white people laugh at SWPL only because it makes them “feel superior” (to?).

Aside from the fact that I might disagree that no true satire is acceptable to the satirized (I think Slavoj Zizek’s Welcome to the Desert of the Real! has an example of a rock band who became very popular in ethnic-conflict-torn Yugoslavia by enacting negative stereotypes about their own people), I do agree that SWPL doesn’t feel the least bit offensive, and is rarely funny. (I wonder how the laughter in response to SWPL would land on the coordinates of Diane Davis’s taxonomy?)

But I think that there’s something else going on besides a feeling of superiority. And it’s related to the simpler critique about the inaccuracy of the “White People” in the title. Basically, it seems like SWPL also allows this “very specific demographic sliver of left-leaning, city-dwelling white folk,” Bobos, grups, whatever, to be thought of as the group that defines whiteness…. This, of course, adds to… or maybe even accounts for the feeling of superiority… possibly even answering my asswholly-parenthesized question above. The “White People” described on the blog can feel superior to other people who happen to share the former’s skin tone and possibly ethnic roots because the latter are “not really white.”

partly because 2) Ugh… all I can think about lately is growing up and growing up too late and not really ever growing up.

partly because 3) Reading about the socio-economic-cultural-lifestyle-realestate dynamics of the NY metro area makes me totally anxious, in both the giddy/excited sense and the puke-y/run-for-your-life sense. Sternbergh has one article about Jersey City and one about Red Hook, a “remote” part of Brooklyn; both of these are places we’ve talked about moving. In those two articles he seems to be developing this argument about how gentrification has gotten ahead of itself (post-gentrification, obviously) and now no longer happens in stages (artsies with cheap cafes and bars-> hipsters with boutiques and fancier restaurants-> investors with developers’ plans and construction equipment-> totally rich people). Now, since the boom-to-come is so expected, the artsies and the developers land at the same time… Why do I care? I guess I’m trying to figure out at what point I’m supposed to be the one to move into the neighborhood….

partly because 4) My blog is now not only not-posted-to; it is also about neither math nor rhetoric.

What I’ve been thinking about lately: Universals

It’s been a long time since I posted here. During that time, somethings have come and gone. Some of these things came  from very different places but wanted to be together. They float around the universal.

Last week, Theresa and I went to Miami for the art fairs (Basel, Scope, Pulse, Aqua, Nada, etc.). Our first stop was Scope. One of the first things I noticed there, in several galleries, I think, were animals made out of car tires.  They were rather realistic/representational sculptures.  Over the four days we were there, I noticed several other sculptures involving animals that were in some ways realistic, but also either very rough or else somehow fantastic/scary (e.g. realistic Siamese twin  jackals). Unfortunately, I can’t be more specific than this because given how “busy” our days in Miami were, my memory is a bit muddled.

These sculptures stuck with me primarily because on the plane on the way down there, I was reading over a debate about  “Primitivism in Modern Art” that happened in Artforum in the mid-80s. The debate began after the then-editor of Artforum reviewed a recent MOMA exhibition that interspersed a collection of Modernist paintings and sculpture with a collection of objects made in “primitive” tribal cultures.  I’m going to breeze past most of the details and most of the generalities, to focus on this point: the editor criticized the exhibition curators from a now-familiar cultural relativist point of view, arguing that they completely ignored the cultural specificity and irreducible difference of the “primitive” “tribes,” in order to prove the Western imperialist claim that beauty is universally recognizable.  Though the curators challenged the accuracy and relevance of the claim in public letters to the editor, the main criticism was that the exhibit and subsequently published catalog presented “primitive” works that happened to be formally similar to Modernist without adequately contextualizing them and highlighting differences in driving intention and cultural use. This debate took place when postmodernism was coming to dominate in intellectual and critical circles, and it is a great example of basic pomo relativism.

This debate caught my attention because a few days before we left, I finished reading Alain Badiou’s book on St. Paul and Universalism. Badiou is engaged in a very ambitious project of resuscitating concepts like “Truth,” “Universal,” and “Infinity,” that have become more or less taboo thanks to almost 40 years of post-thought criticism. The more I learn about this project, the more excited I get. I still don’t know much about it, but it seems to be just what I’ve been hoping for: it “brings back” concepts that certainly haven’t really gone away, but does so in a way that affirms and builds on post-thought, rather than dismissing it.  All I have to say at this point is that one of types of truth Badiou theorizes is “art.” Whether or not that’s the same as beauty, I don’t know.

About a week before we left for Miami, Theresa and I went to a gallery talk at which the artist explained his former devotion to breaking the conventions and rules of painting, his move to collecting objects when that got tiresome, and his recent return to painting with a newfound acceptance of all its humble conventions. He seemed completely unaware that a devotion to breaking conventions (in the pursuit of some absolute-perfection) is, itself, a classic modernist convention and that, by accepting the more humble conventions of painting–for instance, putting attractive colors on rectangular stretched canvases and hanging them at eye-level in a comfortable white-walled room–he had, in a sense, simply become a post-modern relativist who accepts the contingency and limitations of his specific cultural practices.

Before the plane landed, Theresa and I started talking about some of these things (those that had happened) and she brought up this question: Can the conventions of painting serve as something Universal in Badiou’s sense? Could they be something event-like, to which a Truth procedure could apply and a subject could be committed and constituted?

She also asked if the Universal is just an individual, personal thing or if it is “for everyone” or something…

Naming things 2: Loving Words and Numbers

Ok. I’m about to change the name of the blog again.

As I do so, I am letting go of the current name, Loving Words and Numbers: Forget(s) Eats Shoots and Leaves. I don’t know what exactly the book (is that what it was) Eats Shoots and Leaves was about, but I have the general idea that it has something to do with the ambiguity in the meaning of the title phrase. So, what was in a name:

1. I like ambiguities like that but recognize that this is lame, so I wanted to imitate and outdo that title with the title of my blog.
2. I also haven’t read Baudrillard’s Forget Foucault, but have thought that was a great title for a number of years. This was another imitation but not really intended to outdo.
3. Ok, I have to face the fact that I can support the claim that I “outdid” Eats Shoots and Leaves.
4. I apparently have love on the brain, since this was the second title involving love.
5. Ir-regardless, I do love words and numbers.

Naming things: make it/love work

When I first started thinking that I should start blogging, I got excited about coming up with a name for the blog. This is just the most recent instance of a constant stupidity.

When was in middle school and high school and I wanted to be in a band, my favorite thing to do was to think of band names. I think I mistook this for an interest in music… or, worse, I mis-equated my ability to come up with band names and my actual musical ability. Similarly, when I was in college and grad school and wanted to be an academic, my favorite thing to do was think of names for articles, conference papers, and other pieces of academic writing. At least for a time, I DEFINITELY confused thinking of titles with actually doing research and writing.

A few weeks ago, when I decided to start this blog, I came up with what I thought were a few good names. Then, by the time I got around to actually getting a wordpress account, I couldn’t remember any of the names I thought of.

The current title, “Bleep,” is a word with a history that I hope to post about some other time. It is meant to be a sort of non-commitment and a sort of onomatopoeia related to the internet and digital technology generally. For now, I’ll just leave it at that.

The current tagline, “Making love work,” was something I had considered making the title. I like this phrase because (no surprise) of its double meaning. This phrase has run through my mind again and again over the past several months, as I prepared to get married, got married, and am now being recently married. I have been thinking that you make love work by making love work, as in, you make it function by turning it into work, a project.

And this phrase and it’s two inter-related meanings have also been resonating with another phrase, popularized, in my sphere, by Bravo star Tim Gunn: “Make it work.” He frequently says this to contestants on Project Runway. I love the relationship he has with these contestants and I love the role this phrase plays in that relationship. Tim Gunn is one of the main reasons PR is so far superior to the next-best reality contest show, Top Chef. There is no intermediary, non-judging expert on Top Chef. There, everyone who’s not a competitor is a judge. Tim Gunn is always interested, always serious and critical, always faithful and encouraging, and always opinionated but nonpartisan. He’s a teacher, father figure, psychotherapist, secular priest.

Anyway, “make it work” is the slogan for the role he plays. He gives advice to each contestant and his advice always seems based in his vast knowledge and well-founded taste, but it always meets the contestant where they’re at. It doesn’t much matter what “it” is, as long as it “works,” as long as it goes somewhere good. Even if it’s fairly clear that he doesn’t really like the outfit and thinks it’s probably doomed, he talks it through with the designer and in the end, tells them to “make it work.” This means, as far as I can tell, both “make it work out” and “work at it.” Crucially, it doesn’t mean, “it will work out” or “just give it your best shot.” It means “this is work and you’ve got to go through with it and it might not be that great but it will be work.” It’s like “just do it” without the assumption that “doing it” will really be “fun.”

after not sleeping

I couldn’t sleep the other night and tried to post this then, but my hijacked internet connection wasn’t working. I have mixed feelings about posting it now. The reason I do is that I want to write things here. If this is only a place for good things or things I really like, it will be really empty and pointless. If it is a place for things, it might work.

At any rate, I’m interested in particulars, but in a general sort of way. For instance, I’m interested in myself, my experience or something, but really only as it relates to or is the general. The General, I suppose, is what I mean.
For instance, I was just lying awake thinking about math, reading Brian Rotman. I was thinking with him and realizing that I’ve thought with him for a while.

What am I doing? I feel like I’m back at stage one with this thing. Stage one as in middle school or something.

Or maybe I’ve just come to the point in the narrative of a young blogger where I question the purpose of my blogging. My friend Jim Brown will question it, in a different way, in the general case, at some point, possibly already past.

But what I thought was keeping me up or what was keeping me up initially was a question about math and finitude and the world-of-(human-)experience. I can’t think of a better way to put it. I was thinking of the discreteness that Rotman was talking about in Chapter 3 of Mathematics as Sign. I couldn’t stop reading it. It was the best reading I’ve ever done, both because it was good and because it was good for me. I mean, my major problem in grad school was reading too slow and too long. This happened fast or seemed to. At least it was painless. That’s probably because it is all I was thinking about doing.

So the talk of discreteness got me thinking about the little I’ve heard about finitude. I need to read more. That’s probably the bottom line.

But what I want to say is that the world is finite, bounded. It’s as big as this: _______. And all those spaces in between… Are they visible? They are gaps, nothings. They depict nothing. They are as much ends as the ends on the ends. It’s all compact, impacted, fractal. But Derrida knew this a long time ago. But it’s moving. He knew this too.

Does the performative give us a way “out” of this? A way to work out (of) the fractal? This is what I want to ask. But I might also… I might just want to know: Does the performative give me something more to say about this? That also connects my particular life with the world-of-(all-)experience(s)…. That makes me feel better about it. I like it better than the other thing. What’s the other thing? What am I scared of? It’s something Theresa hates. It’s the one-man-as-universal thing. Or so it seems. But it makes sense or it’s ok if it’s just about wanting to say something.

These things… They’re comin full circle

It’s the act that counts (bland)

Well, it’s almost Halloween, which means that the Christmas season has just about begun.  Sometime during this season of giving, you will probably hear the following wonderful cliche, especially if you are as bad at giving gifts as I am: “It’s the thought that counts.”

I love cliches of all kinds, but over the past few years, this one has come to bother me because, I think, unlike most cliches, this one is not true.  Not only is it not true, the (false) claim it makes masks an important theoretical insight: It’s the act that counts.

I often think about gifts to get people.  I spend as much time thinking about it as I spend thinking about a lot of less important things.  Often, I can’t think of something good enough, but the thought is there, nonetheless.  Other times I do think of something really good, but I don’t get it because of cost, circumstances, the fact that the potential recipient is not a very close friend of mine, etc.  If it were the thought that counts, then I’d have a high score indeed.  But I know, and people who know me would surely agree, that I am a big loser at the an-economic competition of gift-giving.

People only say “It’s the thought that counts” when a gift has been given.  The gift can be bad.  In fact, it usually is bad when the phrase is called for.  And the point of the utterance is to de-emphasize the badness of the gift.  The point is that something good or positive has taken place between the gift giver and receiver, even though the gift sucks.  For some odd reason, we feel it necessary to move from the bad gift to the purity and goodness of the thought.  The intention, I suppose, is what we’re trying to get at and approve of.

But let’s face it, despite all the “best intentions,” when I (or anyone in a similar situation) neglect to actually give a gift, it does not “count.”  In the situation of gift giving, you thoughts or intentions, though maybe meaningful on some level, do not count.  This is also the only way to explain why people (my spouse, et. al.) constantly advise me to stop obsessing over the perfect gift and just give something–it doesn’t matter what.  You can give a bad gift and something will be counted.

But what is counted?  It’s clearly not the object.  The object is overlooked and often gotten rid of–in the trash, the back of the closet, the Goodwill donation dumpster, or re-wrapped to continue its life as a bad gift.  It’s not the intention/thought since, as I said, the thought is often there but goes uncounted in the absence of an actual gift.  It doesn’t seem to have anything to do with the origin of the gift or how it was obtained; bad gifts, in this way, cut across all the assorted/sordid alienations of capitalism, alternately being expensive and gaudy, cheap and chintzy, lovingly but poorly baked, and assiduously knitted in horrendous colors.  It doesn’t seem to be about the source of the gift at all, since a bad gift that counts can come from a family member, a friend or lover, a social service organization, Santa or any other mythical being.

The only thing left, as far as I can tell, is the act, the empty form and content-less ritual of giving.

Probably Probabble

One thing I’m doing while I’m not quite in school is studying probability. To be more specific, I am learning “the mathematics of probability [and] the many possible applications of this subject” by reading and exercising with Sheldon Ross’s A First Course in Probability, 6th ed. By “exercising with,” I mean attempting the examples, as well as the problems, exercises, and self-tests listed at the end of each chapter. At least… so far.

Chapter 1 is about “Combinatorial Analysis,” a subject I took a class or two on in college. It was mostly review, but for a number of reasons, it took me quite some time to finish. So, after spending several months, off-and-on, reading and exercising with the first chapter, I’ve just started reading chapter 2, on the “Axioms of Probability.” I’ve just started reading it; haven’t even really warmed up yet. But despite my lack of direct exposure to this material, I’ve been having a thought… a premature, unsubstantiated thought:

Probability theory is about experiments, possible outcomes, and events that have and have not occurred. This is obviously why it’s rhetorical. This is why so many rhetoricians have done said so many times that rhetoric is so probabilistic. But probability is math, dam-nit. And, more importantly… maybe… probability is… maybe… Deluzean.

What I am doing?

I’m currently on break from grad school. But I’m not spring break or winter break. This break is longer. It will last at least a year. At least. It is marriage break. Or maybe life break. I am not in school right now because of marriage, because of life.

In a sense, this is the first time in my life I have not really been in school or headed to school. I am still teaching at schools, though. So I am still in school in that way. At least, I’m becoming less and less in school.

Once in a while I have ideas, even when I’m not in school. (When I’m less in school. When I’m not so in school.) For a while at the beginning of this semester… (See: “semester”: that means I’m still in school. Or in school-time.) At the beginning of this semester, I was driving very long distances several times a week to go teach at different schools. Often, usually in the nervous adrenaline rush I get after teaching, I would have ideas. Some of these ideas were about teaching. Some were about writing: teaching writing or writing as a thing… an activity, I guess I mean… maybe an institution…? Some of these ideas were about other things. This is my attempt to have ideas and keep them somewhere.