The purpose-driven life

Every summer, I come down with a case of existential angst. As the immediate demands of the school year slow down and the space for some self-directed work opens up, it seems that broader questions inevitably open up as well — what is the point of all my work? I eventually get over it as I become absorbed in whatever project, but this time around I’ve been reflecting on the claim that religions faith gives people meaning and purpose and that they are somehow to be envied because of that. What strikes me as I look back on my own religious upbringing is that the meaning and purpose provided had no actual content. “God’s plan” or “God’s will” was a purely virtual reference point, which was applied very selectively to what happened to people. Aside from very broad moral guidelines — it was obviously never going to be God’s will that I murder someone, for example — it seemed that the reference to God’s will provided no actual guidance. All it added was the idea of a purpose, a kind of purposefulness without purpose.

It may seem unfair to pick on popular piety like this, but actual theologians aren’t much better.

What St. Paul and the Franciscans can tell us about neoliberalism

Last night, I presented this paper (PDF) to the Paul of Tarsus Interdisciplinary Working Group at Northwestern University. In it, I try to situate The Highest Poverty in relation to Agamben’s work since The Kingdom and the Glory, and at the end, I address the issue of Agamben’s relationship to Marxism.

Our broken market in parenting

Meritocracy has long been one of America’s most cherished principles. It informs the structure of our educational system, which at its best tries to ensure that the most talented students get access to the resources they need to succeed. Yet doesn’t the social mobility provided by education come “too late,” as it were? Before arriving at school, children are exposed to more or less random differences in the distribution of resources, simply by virtue of who their parents are. Talented students may be mired in a stimulus-poor environment, while the mediocre children of the rich receive, by virtue of a kind of genetic affirmative action, a wide range of educational opportunities that will ultimately be wasted on them. This so-called “system” of parenting prevents pure meritocracy from being achieved, meaning that there can appear to be a moral imperative toward market-distorting redistribution of wealth.

To remedy this standing offense against human freedom, I propose that we apply market principles to parenting. While there is currently no getting around the need to be physically born to a particular person, we can minimize the element of randomness by providing infants with parenting vouchers in proportion to their innate talents (as indicated by an appropriate standardized testing regime). Better parents would naturally be able to command higher prices on the parenting market. Thus the more talented children could then be matched up with wealthier and more socially prestigious parents, promoting the deserving child’s life chances and also making sure that the social and economic resources of their parents are not squandered. Children who were never going to contribute significantly to society could be given to less capable parents. If some kind of error occurred in the placement process, the educational system, as the engine of social mobility, would be able to correct for the problem — though presumably the system would improve over time, so that eventually even that correction would no longer be necessary.

Plato already recognized that something like this type of system would be necessary for a truly just society to emerge, namely, one in which each is rewarded for his or her own merits. While there is a considerable sentimental attachment to our current system, I think we all need to recognize that until our broken market for parenting is repaired, we can never be completely sure that those who are rich or poor truly deserve to be in their respective conditions.

Financialization with a human face: On the gift

A gift economy is sometimes put forward as some kind of alternative, or at least a humanizing supplement, to contemporary capitalism, particularly by Christian theologians. Yet anthropological research, going all the way back to Mauss’s classic study, confirms that a gift economy is a debt economy — though normally without precise quantification. Certainly everything is presented as “officially” voluntary, but we maintain the same fiction in our contemporary debt economy insofar as every contract is formally “freely entered into.” Gift economies can easily be deployed to ruin rivals who cannot return the favor, and even enslave them.

What’s more, Christians should be more aware than anyone of the tendency of gift to become debt — all we have to do is read literally one of the most famous and influential texts in the Christian tradition, Cur deus homo. One can perhaps read certain key texts in the Christian tradition as trying to escape the logic of the gift (as I do with Augustine’s De trinitate [PDF]), but the slippage is right there from the very beginning, as Derrida shows in The Gift of Death.

Since Derrida is often evoked in the moralizing appropriations of the gift, it seems fair to point out that Derrida’s goal in Given Time is to demonstrate the rigorous impossibility of the gift — how the gift, when pushed to the extreme, transforms into something else, something no longer recognizable. Think of his standards for the perfect gift: it must be completely gratuituous and completely unconscious, because knowledge of one’s own generosity would also count as a return on one’s investment. Using this concept of the ultra- or arche-gift, I’d venture to say that capitalism occurs between two great “gifts” — the “gift” of primitive accumulation, the pure expenditure of those who don’t even realize they’re giving anything away, and the “gift” of crisis, the pure expenditure of surplus value that one gives precisely to no one.

It is no coincidence that the gift becomes such an important theme precisely under neoliberalism: it holds out the prospect of financialization with a human face.

Neoliberal Church?

I’ve followed Peter Rollins’ work for a couple years now and this weekend I had an epiphany: Are “transformance art collectives,” as he calls his communities (read: churches in a pub), really just a new kind of church for a new kind of capitalism?

Let me preface by saying that I’ve met Pete and his stated goals are admirable, but whether these communities, or other similar “emerging churches” (both of which mostly seem to be a white, middle-class phenomenon), are actually different from traditional church is questionable.

David Harvey continually emphasizes that changes in the deployment of political economy result in changes to the way that subjects experience space and time. Individual behaviors must be brought into a semblance of uniformity in order for particular regimes of capitalism to function. These social rules are internalized by the subjects of that regime, and therefore similarities can be found among the various institutions that thrive in a particular place and time. Simply put, under industrial capitalism, subjects are disciplined to remain passive in school, army, factory, prison, and church. The individual is not required to know how the assembly line works, never questions their superiors, can sit in church and think about where they will go to lunch afterwards, etc etc.

However, under the regime that we have entered and are currently living in, which, following Mauricio Lazzarato, I will call a debt economy, we now embody a new form of subjectivity.

Why did we invade Iraq?

The question continues to baffle me after all these years. (It seems that conventional wisdom is settling on “access to oil,” but we have this brilliant new technology that gives us access to as much oil as we need — it’s called “money.”) David Graeber’s recent piece in The Baffler provided me with fresh insight:

Neoliberalism and Real Socialism

It’s often said that socialism is the arduous path from capitalism back to capitalism, but Blood and Treasure suggests that neoliberalism is the arduous path toward Eastern bloc-style “real socialism.” His focus is on “urban renewal” projects in London, but one can make a similar case for the mantras of deficit-cutting and “education reform” in the U.S.

Eastern bloc socialism had to keep going through the 1970s and 80s, inspite of lagging growth and failed ideological hegemony, because nobody knew what else to do. This is the stage neoliberal policy-making has now reached. The difference is that there is still one area of our economy that is still moving and changing, namely the money economy, with corporate profits high and financial innovation ongoing. What seems to have changed, post-2008, is that the price paid for this monetary dynamism is that the rest of us all have to stand completely still. In order that ‘they’ in the banks can cling on to their modernity of liquidity and ultra-fast turnover, ‘we’ outside have to relinquish our modernity, of a future that is any different from the present. Finance is to our sorry stagnanat societies what the space race and the Cold War were to the Eastern Bloc countries of the 1970s and 80s, the cost that we are offered no choice but to carry collectively, with the result that our cities and economies start to become tedious processions of the same.

The whole piece is well worth reading.

Like a business

Surely we are all tired of the mantra that everything should be “run like a business.” Surely we all realize that the government, or the health care system, or the education system, or your family are not businesses and should work according to their own immanent logic rather than according to the norms of business.

Yet it occurs to me: is anything inherently a business? We normally think of a bakery as a business, for example, but isn’t it actually a place where people bake things? One can imagine a bakery operating under many different economic systems. The examples multiply. A clothing retailer is a place where people come to get their clothes. A convenience store exists to provide people with easy access to frequently used items. A car factory exists to make cars. Even a bank exists primarily to intermediate between people’s different financial priorities (e.g., saving vs. spending), rather than to make money as such. All of those things are typically “run like a business” in Western countries, but that doesn’t mean that they directly “are” businesses.

Only one type of pursuit is inherently a business: hedge funds.

Stalin, CEO

In a public lecture, Zizek once said that it is only under late capitalism that Stalinism has truly come into its own. It was kind of a throw-away remark that I don’t believe he has developed any further, but as I study more about Stalinism and about neoliberalism, I’m increasingly convinced that he’s right and that Stalin, CEO would be an awesome subversive “management theory” book.

Some shared features of Stalinism and our present economic regime:

• A cult of personality surrounding “visionary leaders” (Stalin, contemporary CEOs)
• Continual demand for increased productivity to meet fundamentally arbitrary goals (five-year plans, exceeding analyst expectations of performance)
• Purges (Gulags, mass layoffs)
• Unpredictable micromanagement (Stalin’s unexpected intervention into various controversies, habitual short-circuiting of chain of command in corporate environments)
• Reliance on scapegoating (the leader gets all credit for achievements but underlings always take the blame for failures — “If only comrade Stalin knew!”)
• Rule by slogan (Soviet propaganda, management-speak)
• The demand to control all of life (“totalitarianism,” affective labor)

Am I missing anything, dear readers?

Fear of the state

It has always puzzled me that some people can look at something like public provision of health insurance and see a fateful step toward tyranny and oppression. What this requires is a suspicion of “the state” simply as such, and it seems to me that Foucault was right to say that the greatest achievement of the early neoliberal theorists was to convince seemingly everyone in the world that the lesson to be drawn from the experience of “totalitarianism” is the dangers stemming from excessive state power.

In fact, if there is anything to be gained by placing the Nazi and Soviet experiences under the same conceptual heading, it cannot be a lesson about the dangers of state power — indeed, it has to be just the opposite: the dangers of a weak and impotent state that cannot restrain the power of a para-state movement.