Abstract
Dirk Philipsen suggests that gross domestic product (GDP), designed as a tool, has come to define our sense of success. But GDP is dangerous not just because it has warped our values, but because it has done so without announcement, reigning without pomp. It is, he says, “tyranny by default … an invisible dictator” (Philipsen, 2015: 159). In related steps, Philipsen first uses history to expose the contingency of this ruler; then to replace it, he proposes a Copernican revolution to recenter more human measures of the world. In what follows, I limit my focus to the way GDP is made visible in The Little Big Number and the implications for moving beyond it.
The attempt to bring economic indices into the light of public scrutiny has merit, and let me say straight away that I am sympathetic with the aims of this and similar critiques of GDP, young and old. 1 Yet so far, and perhaps not without irony, these critiques have tended to produce poor representations of how indices work, simultaneously imputing too much power to their formulae, and too little to the systems that give them meaning. In keeping with this trend, Philipsen depicts GDP as “an invention that stands alone:” peerless, authoritative, and largely the product of one man, Simon Kuznets. Overthrowing the hegemony of growth seems fairly easy as a result. There is no need to change modes of production, storm winter palaces, or chop at heads. Instead, we simply need to create better indices to better represent our world, which will then feed back to produce a better world. While this perspective is right to recognize metrics as core elements of social order, it is wrong to treat them in isolation, as if they themselves were sources of power. If GDP were a ruler in this sense, its many able detractors would have retired it long ago, relegating it to share a historical footnote with its one-time Soviet rival, Gross Social Product (see Gorbunov, 1974). This has not happened. Not because GDP is inhumanly strong, but because it is as strong as the people and things lending it force—which is to say very strong indeed. For all the sophisticated alternatives proposed to replace GDP since the early 1970s, in fact, almost none have enjoyed real success, while the “little big number” itself has remained, tenaciously, as the dominant measure of our time.
To explain – and move beyond – this endurance, we need a way of representing GDP without picturing it alone. To work toward that aim, I end by suggesting that we should take seriously GDP’s status as a political index, which we can contrast with the iconic politics of classical sovereignty. Charles Sanders Peirce, in his semiotic writings, distinguishes between icons, indices, and symbols, referring respectively to relations of resemblance, cause, and convention (Peirce, 2011). An index is the link of smoke to fire, of print to foot or finger. An index, for Peirce, is a rap at the door, a shadow on a sundial, a spirit level, a pronoun. These all produce meaning through relation, and so this meaning is highly dependent on context. Icons, by comparison, are relatively stable, representing through similarity or idealization. They have long been the privileged mode of visualizing divine and, in modern times, secular power, and their study is driving some intriguing reinterpretations of political thought (Brubaker and Haldon, 2011; Fleckner et al., 2011; Kristiansson and Tralau, 2014; Skinner, 1999). If icons have long given visual coherence to classical political forms, then a question arises: Is there a way to make the rule of GDP visible, but without just depicting it as an old emperor in new clothes? Is there a way to make indexical representation itself visible? An answer might come from the 1970s. Contemporary with the emergence of social indicators, and apparently by coincidence, cultural critic Rosalind Krauss suggested that indexicality was the hidden logic of modern art, the unity undergirding a superficial eclecticism of style since Marcel Duchamp. I conclude by thinking with and through Krauss, suggesting that Duchamp’s ‘readymade’ might provide a way – an admittedly irreverent, even provocative way – of representing a powerful index such as GDP.
Changing the word
Philipsen’s account of what to do about GDP is drawn from precedent, so that “the history of how GDP came to rule the world suggests a path forward that is, at least theoretically, simple” (Philipsen, 2015: 237). How did GDP come to rule the world? By accident. It was designed as a descriptive measure, for local circumstances, by very few actors. The instrument then slipped out of hand to become a normative goal, defining what it was supposed to merely reflect. To support this view, Philipsen invokes further precedents besides GDP. First, there is the institution of property, presented, as Rousseau did, as a question of putting a fence around a piece of land and declaring it “private.” In a similar way, he suggests, declaring sustainable metrics “will inevitably lead to regulations and then laws and associations and then political parties and entire constitutions that sanctify sustainability (as they once did with private property)” (Philipsen, 2015: 267). The other key precedent is the foundation of the United States, presented as a question of calling a viable nation into being. In a similar way, we need a “Second Constitutional Convention” to “create an economic constitution that will bring forth a viable future” (Philipsen, 2015: 269).
What do these things—the institution of private property and the constitution of the United States—have in common? Both rely on the power of assertion, bringing forth the things that they name. Political change, in Philipsen’s book, takes the form of a speech act. This seems plausible on the face of it. Hasn’t GDP come to define our political vocabulary of success in this very way? The social scientist Donald T. Campbell once proposed a formulation, sometimes known as “Campbell’s Law,” to describe this phenomenon in policy. He held that the more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision making, the more it will be subject to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor. (Campbell, 1976: 34)
Philipsen implies that we can take this “law” and make it work for good, distorting the world to reflect a human face and sustainable future.
Such looping effects may be real, but focusing on utterances or indicators themselves is to miss their conditions of possibility. Speech acts depend on “felicity conditions,” or prior structures of authority and recognition that grant them force. Absent these, we can proclaim as many marriages, metrics, or declarations of independence from GDP as we want, and little is likely to change. Once we realize the role of such authority, messy mixtures of social and technical forces come into view.
GDP has become an attractive target for reformers because it appears to concentrate a range of pressing problems—social, environmental, economic, political—in one place. It becomes an Archimedean point, a number both big (enormously consequential) and little (regulations, easy to change), both strong (dictating the operation of Global Capitalism) and weak (guarded by a few stuffy accountants). The appeal of such a pivot is clear, yet picturing GDP this way makes our contemporary economic system look both more powerful and more vulnerable than it really is. If we tell the story of national accounting standards without the story of how they spread and solidified, then GDP does seem free-standing like a Leviathan, an “undisputed king” (Philipsen, 2015: 143), whose rule can be broken by articulating a well-designed alternative. But by telling the story this way, we risk ignoring the very forces that installed GDP in its position and continue to prop it up. We risk giving GDP magical powers or quasi-divine rights, just as we would if we told the tale of a drill-bit without the motor, electricity cables, ladders, labor, and everything else needed to keep it in place. We risk, as a result, believing that we can make the world spin differently if we just design a sharper device or smarter metric. This perspective is attractive because it implies change is easy, but it sets us up to flop—as, so far, countless well designed social and environmental indices already have.
Metrological systems
The history of how GDP came to span the world belies this view, as the first part of Philipsen’s book ably illustrates. It was not by mere declaration, but through ties to aid funding, economic recovery plans, wars hot and cold, networks of experts, computational machines, and international standards. Similarly, private property is not a product of fence and fiat, à la Rousseau, but of the force needed to expropriate and enclose the land, then to police the boundary flimsily represented by the posts. Starting at the Constitutional Convention in 1787, meanwhile is already to arrive too late and leave too soon, to miss the wars that made such a convention possible, and the logistics that gave the document force. This is not to deny that we should replace GDP, or to claim that doing so would change nothing. It is to remember that alternatives will only achieve change to the extent that they are taken up by others. Their design radically underdetermines their power, which depends instead on later users—on acts of iteration, not foundation (Butler, 1990).
In this sense, alternatives to GDP have always faced an uphill battle. GDP is parasitic, aggregating information already generated through the market. Achieving this was not originally …simple: it involved arbitrary clarifications, imputations, value judgments and disagreements. Surveys were designed and sent, calculations made. Yet fundamentally, GDP traveled light and piggybacked on price, settling the problem of what to count by looking to what had already been counted. Much was excluded as a result, such as unwaged work or unpriced goods, as feminists and ecologists have extensively shown. These omissions limited the metric considerably, and continue to do so. But they also pose a significant challenge to new pretenders, burdened with collecting and aggregating the very information ignored by GDP. Here, the prospect of changing this number looks less like organizing a second Constitutional Convention and more like recreating another revolutionary project, the metric system. From where I write, in the United States, the reach of that system still shows its limits.
The goals for the metric system were grand, and public demand for new measurements strong. The metric system, like some recent challengers to GDP, was to be based on an objective and universal foundation—nature—which would allow universal adoption, independent of social system. Despite such designs, as historian Witold Kula recounts, the legislators, for all that they represented the nation, did not begin to foresee the extent of the difficulties. First of all, there was a major problem for the surveyors [who] desperately searched for a fulcrum that in the ever changing world would furnish a fixed basis for the novel system.
Even then, “it turned out that it was far easier to measure the terrestrial globe than to cope with some major and unforeseen social complications” (Kula, 1986: 243). This social friction plagued the system as it spread in spurts via war and political revolution, following on the heels of Napoleon, then Garibaldi, Bismarck, and Lenin.
Instituting the metric system thus required a massive change in how measurement was achieved, and then ongoing work to extend that achievement and its values. To aggregate existing measures, to turn prices into the income of nations, is relatively easy; to replace or extend entire systems once they have solidified is considerably harder.
My point is not that we must be resigned to the inevitability of GDP – we should not – but rather that we cannot treat it as a mindset or yardstick that can be changed at will, as an icon that can be smashed and replaced. We can indeed think differently, come up with better measures, declare constitutions, imagine new societies. The struggle, though, comes in putting these ideas into practice, and that is not a question of intelligent design. Philipsen seems aware of this, noting at one point that changing the system of national accounts would be a “herculean regulatory task” involving the “implementation of an entirely different structure of incentives and regulations, reconstituted political and legal enforcement agencies” (p. 238). Strangely, when it comes to the “what to do about it” climax of the book, these problems vanish.
Ready-made solutions
In closing, I want to propose a way to keep these difficulties in view by dwelling on the status of the index from a different perspective. Just as political iconology has supplied a vocabulary for thinking about representation and sovereign politics, so too can an awareness of art provide a way of thinking about representation and GDP. I want to take seriously the semiotics of indexicality, treating GDP itself as brittle, but gaining significance through its relationship to other structures of power. The resulting image of GDP looks far less powerful – and less self-sufficient – than that presented in Philipsen’s account. In fact, when Philipsen elsewhere claims that private property without enforcement would be “largely meaningless” (p. 67), he is making a very similar point to the one I want to draw out of indices more broadly. I would only take away the qualifier. Indices without enforcement are indices without force. They are Gross Social Product without the Soviets.
Rosalind Krauss, in her essay, Notes on the Index: Seventies Art in America, argues for a hidden unity underlying formally disparate styles such as photography, ready-mades, and land art, among others. She begins by introducing Roman Jakobson’s theory of the shifter, a category of sign filled with signification only because, paradoxically, it is “empty.” Pronouns and deictic markers are examples of such shifters, changing meaning depending on who says them, what is pointed to, and when they are used. Their semantic choreography is delicate, my “I” becoming your “you,” my “now” your “then,” my “this” your “that,” and so on. These words are radically underdetermined. Their sense depends on their position in a web of spatial or temporal relationships, attributions, and so on. Shifters are, in other words, indexical, like the finger used to point. They gain their power not from within, but from without. As Krauss (1977) puts it, “it is the meaningless meaning that is instituted through the terms of the index” (p. 78).
This logic is at play in the photograph and Marcel Duchamp’s provocative ready-mades. Stylistically dissimilar, both selectively capture the flux of reality, acquiring artistic value not through deep qualities or the prowess of the artist, but through, as Krauss puts it, “a tremendous arbitrariness with regard to meaning”(p. 77). Without context, a ready-made is without anchor, its sense drifting indeterminately like a pronoun without antecedent.
All of this becomes significant for GDP when we realize that it too is an attempt to take a snapshot of reality, fixing incomprehensible magnitudes of dissimilar things into a stable, comparable form, allowing accountants to place the output of entire countries next to each other like artworks at a gallery. Like the photograph or ready-made, GDP purports to allow reality to impress itself without subjective interference. The detail of the result depends on the quality of the signals, of light or price. The selection of what to capture and what to exclude is certainly open to critique here, “production boundary” or limit frame subject to choice and revision. Yet, like Krauss’ indexical art, GDP itself remains radically underdetermined, reliant on the equivalents of captions and critics and guides to give it meaning and articulate its force.
GDP is not a tyrannical ruler, in other words, but a rather fragile measure that, in and of itself, is no more powerful than Duchamp’s infamous urinal. To critique a ready-made by revealing its origins on a production line, to assume that its genesis determines its present, to think we could swap it for something better overnight, all these would misrecognize where its authority comes from, just as it would suggest misleading ways to contest it. We may focus on the object, but the beauty of the ready-made is not found in its splendid isolation, but in its stubborn insistence on its institutional location.
This might be granted for aesthetic matters (but note that these matters are not at all a question of subjective fiat, any more than a grumpy gallery-goer denouncing Dada would magically convert it into rubbish). But what about serious concerns like global warming or the economy? Aren’t these questions of the really real, not semiotic gymnastics? The problem is that reality itself is not so different from art, in the sense that it only comes to count inside particular complexes that circulate and articulate it, or what I would call metrological systems. 2 These systems play important roles in all of our lives, and we should continue to question those that represent the world poorly, and support those that represent it well. But we cannot abolish one or institute the other based on declarations or inherent superior qualities, just as a ready-made does not gain value from its origin or the intelligence of its design. It is Duchamp’s “Fountain” not Hobbes’s sovereign that we should keep in mind when thinking of GDP and what to do about it.