Disaggregate theories
Nozick first raised this issue in his 1974 book Anarchy, State, and Utopia, where among other scenarios he imagined the emergence of a loosely organized mutual protection agency through a series of related and perhaps partly modeled or influenced but nonetheless at least in part independent decisions, people agreeing officially and unofficially to protect each other's interests and assets, firms offering protective services, etc. This agency, which could be called a kind of "ultra-minimal state" ("Explanations" 314), would not need to have been intended or planned by any one of the agents whose actions helped to create it. It could exist without any official, legislated or licensed, status. The process by which this sort of "unintended" economic entity arises Nozick called an invisible-hand process; the theory that explains its formation he called an invisible-hand explanation. As he later summarized that argument:
Two types of processes seemed important: filtering processes wherein some filter eliminates all entities not fitting a certain pattern, and equilibrium processes wherein each component part adjusts to local conditions, changing the local environments of others close by, so the sum of the local adjustments realizes a pattern. The pattern produced by the adjustments of some entities might itself constitute a filter another faces. The opposite kind of explanation, wherein an apparently unintended, accidental, or unrelated set of events is shown to result from intentional design, I termed a hidden-hand explanation. The notion of invisible-hand explanation is descriptive, not normative. Not every pattern that arises by an invisible-hand process is desirable, and something that can arise by an invisible-hand process might better arise or be maintained through conscious intervention. ("Explanations" 314)
The question still remained, however: what powers those "filtering" and "equilibrium" processes? What forces lie behind them? A hidden-hand explanation presumes rational agency: someone somewhere intended for this or that event-structure to emerge; and it did. An invisible-hand explanation by definition remains in what Friedrich Schleiermacher called der unerfreuliche Mitte, the unpleasant middle ground, between randomness, chaos, sheer accident, on the one hand, and rational planning on the other. Something drives these event-structures; but what?
In his later exfoliations of invisible-hand theories Nozick has attempted to answer this question by drawing on Daniel Dennett's theories of the disaggregated self in Consciousness Explained (1991). Economic theorists typically attempt to explain event-structures by reference to the decisions and other actions of rational agents, agents conceived in terms of God's singularity, control, and knowledge: each agent is a single unified being, organized and directed by reason and utterly lacking in conflicting or other centrifugal agentive forces or impulses; each agent is in control of its actions; each agent possesses the knowledge it needs to plan and execute a well-informed course of action. The difficulty faced by such explanations lies in the plurality of agents: obviously an economy is more polytheistic, more like the squabblings of the ancient Greek or Roman gods and goddesses, than like the monotheistic model of a single all-powerful God in perfect control of all his actions. No economic agent can ever control his or her actions perfectly, because there are too many other such agents also striving to maximize their own action-control. Hence the importance of hidden-hand and other power-group theories, which would see (certain) economic agents as the secularized equivalents of gods and goddesses, angels and demons: the ruling class, those who control the means of production, etc. But such theories still idealize the possibility of rational control, ignoring the modern and postmodern fragmentation of the self postulated by Freud and others; these point us to invisible-hand explanations, which move us to the third level of a logological [see side bar] hierarchy of economic agents:
1. Rational-agent explanations, Smith's liberal ideal: each agent is master of his or her actional realm, and possesses sufficient knowledge of other such realms to make and carry out decisions for the adequate control of his or her own. Larger event-structures are the product of collective decision-making, which entails rational conversation among individual rational agents, moving eventually toward consensus or majority rule. Wherever rational agents are outvoted by their peers, they are not to be thought of as "surrendering" their will to the collective; rather, they make a rational decision to go along with the majority, because they have determined that it is in their best interests to do so. There is never, in other words, a surrender of will or intentionality to external forces. There are only different fully sovereign expressions of rational intentionality.
2. Conspiracy and ruling-class theories, including hidden-hand explanations: each agent is rational and strives for knowledge-based control, but the plurality of such agents makes total control impossible. More powerful agents, those with better social, financial, and intellectual backing, will therefore tend to rule over less powerful ones. Social Darwinism: the socioeconomic survival of the fittest. Powerful cliques too will conflict, generating a constant jockeying and intriguing for control. When power is wielded overtly, various despotic formations result. When power is wielded covertly, hidden-hand theories come into play.
3. Invisible-hand theories: agents are disaggregated, fragmentary, self-divided. Each agent may see itself as functioning rationally, but in fact is constantly being surprised by ideas and impulses arising out of its own unconscious or semiconscious thought processes and behavior chains. Sometimes the best solutions to difficult problems emerge from a prolonged state of confusion, from stumbling and groping about. Opposed forces within the agent will vie for control over an action, and sometimes the force that sees itself in control will be forced to yield to other internal forces. This model applies both to individual humans and to groups: the decision-making process that leads to the creation of a single translation, for example, will be divided and conflicted whether the translating agent is a single individual or a group of individuals (translator(s), expert helper(s) [see side bar], editor(s), project manager(s), end-user(s) [see side bar], etc.). Neither the individual nor the group should be imagined as any more rationally organized or directed than the other. To the extent that rationalist models remain dominant in such a process, any potential awareness of the disaggregated nature of decision-making must be repressed and reexplained as the product of rationalist consensus or the like. Indeed rationalist and other ideologies should be regarded as disaggregated forces at work within the agent.
4. Posthumanist death-of-the-self theories: any talk of agency or selfhood is a mere semantic echo of once-dominant but now phantomatic ideologies. Agents, in the sense of subjective forces (individuals or groups) that perform actions with intentionality, do not exist; we merely act as if they did.
The advantage of such a schematization is that it helps us sort out the differences among levels 2, 3, and 4, which are often lumped together in dismissive ways by rationalist thinkers for whom there is only rationalism and everything else:
2. If you resist the liberal-humanist conception of the social contract, the idea that nothing is done in a liberal or democratic society without every individual's implicit or explicit consent, if you insist that there are forces and power conglomerations that work very effectively to bypass and overcome such liberal procedures, you're talking about conspiracies, cabals, secret plots. In a word, you're paranoid.
3. If you resist the liberal-humanist conception of the unified subject, if you insist that no one ever quite knows what s/he is doing or why, if you invoke Freud's theories of libido and the unconscious, if you speak of the many layers of somatic programming (The Translator's Turn) or the infinite displacements of taboo (Translation and Taboo), you think everybody is sick, crazy, everyone has Multiple Personality Disorder. You think translators aren't professionals self-governed by knowledge, training, craft, and ethics, they're out-of-control intuitives, empaths, spirit-channelers. You're a mystic, a dreamer, a flake.
4. And if you resist the liberal-humanist conception of the individual will or intentionality, if you suggest that selfhood (including your own) is an illusion, you're completely cut off from reality, you're delusional.
Except that, insofar as all these forms of "insanity" blur together in the rationalist mind, it's never this clear. If you invoke Freud's or Dennett's theory of the disaggregated self, you're as likely to be called paranoid or delusional as morbidly flaky. If you invoke poststructuralist theories of the death of the self, you may well be accused of seeing conspiracies everywhere. By night all irrationalities are gray.
