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.

Scattered remarks on political theology

From one perspective, it is possible to isolate three types of “political theology.” The first is a liberal one, which seeks to reveal the unconscious theological inheritance in the hopes of purging it and reaching a true secularity. One might include Löwith and Derrida under this heading. The second is a reactionary one, which seeks to preserve whatever homologies are possible with the theological tradition in order to maintain some kind of horizon of meaning over against modernity, which is understood to be a nihilistic mechanism — obviously here one could place Carl Schmitt. Finally, there is the radical leftist approach, which mines the theological tradition for any possible site of radical transformation (and perhaps indulges in the pleasure of “provocatively” needling liberal fussiness about how we must handle the dangerous materials of religion). I would place Zizek in this category.

For all three perspectives, there is a “special relationship” between political theology and eschatology. The reactionary position is basically focused on the katechon, that enigmatic figure from 2 Thessalonians who holds the man of lawlessness at bay and heads off the apocalypse (here one could place Peterson alongside Schmitt). The leftist position is apocalyptic, openly courting the very dissolution that for the reactionary is the worst possible outcome. The liberal position is awkwardly situated in this respect, but I think that we can draw on Dan Barber’s On Diaspora and call liberal political theology basically supercessionistic — a kind of “messianism without messianism” where secularity is continually overcoming religion as such, albeit without any concrete hope of a final consummation.

When it comes to placing a figure like Taubes or Agamben, I think things become more difficult. Bruce Rosenstock has a great essay forthcoming in New German Critique on the Taubes-Schmitt relationship where he argues that while Taubes aligns more closely with the apocalyptic, he also sees the necessity of the reactionary impulse represented by Schmitt in order to keep the apocalyptic impulse from spiralling into sheer nihilism. His exegesis of the final pages of Occidental Eschatology is absolutely essential in this regard — he clarifies that for Taubes, finding humanity’s center in God requires a special kind of balance, because humanity’s orbit is always elliptical rather than spherical and so constantly threatens to go off course. I wonder if one could read Agamben similarly, particularly in light of his recently published lecture The Church and the Kingdom, which in many ways is so difficult to reconcile with his other writings insofar as it seems to call for a kind of “balance” between the messianic impulse and the structure of authority.

This talk of balance seems liberal from a certain perspective, but it is not a secular liberalism — indeed, the question of secularity is simply sidestepped altogether in the meeting of the two extremes. Or is it perhaps instead a question of creating a space for a tenuous secularity, keeping God at a respectable distance without becoming completely untethered from it? Is this elliptical balancing act perhaps the way we render the theological “inoperative” precisely by maintaining the constant reference to it — like the legendary rabbinical school that bases all of life on the divine law while pointedly telling God to shut up when he tries to intrude on the debate?

From this perspective, it appears that we could add a fourth position of Jewish political theology as a distinctive alternative to the liberal model. The question that then arises is whether this kind of political theology can really be practiced by a non-Jew, or whether it will always wind up spiralling into a one-sidedly katechontic or apocalyptic position.

Anger’s Nonidentity / Occasion Against Universality

I recently looked back at Judith Butler’s response to her having been awarded a “prize” for writing in an especially non-commonsensical style. She observes that the recipients—or “targets,” as she aptly redescribes—of such a prize “have been restricted to scholars on the left whose work focuses on topics like sexuality, race, nationalism and the workings of capitalism.” This then raises “a serious question about the relation of language and politics: why are some of the most trenchant social criticisms often expressed through difficult and demanding language?”

Depression and OWS

I am, of course, supportive of the Occupy Wall Street sit-ins. I have had issues relating to some of it, mostly to do with my pre-existing distrust of anarchist style political organization and seeing how little it gets done while protecting the beautiful souls of the leaders who deny their leadership. As Adam has said I think it is very silly to pretend that I, or any of us, know what the hell we are doing (though Adam said it, I am sure, much more eloquently). But this is what has depressed me so much about these sit-ins. First, I think we need to get some assumptions out of the way. I don’t think this is a revolution. It’s a clearly political act, but revolutions, at least real ones that don’t just sink into a form of liberalism, are radical breaks. It seems that they involve violence necessarily. And not the kind of low-scale violence that comes from clashes with police. Revolutions actually involve taking power from those who already hold it (and this, by the way, is why I don’t think Egypt, now under a form of dual power between parliament and the military, has yet been a revolution). But, and this is the second point, just because this is a revolution doesn’t mean it isn’t inspiring or worthwhile in a number of ways. That “revolution or bust” mentality is not the root of my depression and I think it’s at least as puerile, if not more, as the anarchist techniques that bother me about the groups running OWS. So in a very popular post I suggested that if we were not hate the poor we had to refuse to hold one opinion regarding the English riots. I think that holds true in the case of OWS and what follows is more of a confession, perhaps entirely too personal, than it is a work of political criticism.

The Cthulhu Cult of Capital

An apocalyptic mode has descended upon me in recent weeks. The winter is always a difficult time for me, as it is for a lot of people living this far North, but the usual doldrums have been intensified by the depressing social and political situation so many of us are finding ourselves in. The culprit of this situation is clear to me; it is primarily economically determined and its name is capitalism. But understanding the particularity of the crisis had eluded me for some time. After all, for the rich to get richer it would seem that they need people to buy more products so that they can profit and so it would seem like a broadly Keynesian approach would be attractive to THEM (to use the negative name for the ruling class, since it seems more and more difficult to even point them out anymore). Such an approach is attractive to me too! I would prefer to not live under harsh austerity measures, which threaten to turn me and my friends into a permanent debtor class and to increase the suffering of those who were already worse off, or see the profession I’ve been training for disappear in the name of belt-tightening.

Does anyone really believe THEY are worried about inflation? The current “jobless recovery”, a very soft name for a harsh reality, reveals the underlying vindictiveness of the capitalist class towards both the working class and the middle class, who inexplicably buy the austerity line. As they continue to magically make profits they refuse to redistribute that wealth along even the softest Social Democratic means and punish workers and professionals for something the capitalist class themselves caused. It’s a true anti-humanism and I finally gained some understanding of it through reading Alberto Toscano’s “Chronicles of Insurrection: Tronti, Negri, and the Subject of Antagonism” in the edited volume The Italian Difference: Between Nihilism and Biopolitics (available for free through the Open Access publisher Re.Press). In the article he discusses Mario Tronti, the virtually unknown theorist of workerism, and his description of the unilateral relation of capital to the workers. In other words, capitalism is dependent upon workers to function in real terms, but nonetheless “the political history of capital is the history of the successive attempts of the capitalist class to emancipate itself from the working class.” Capitalism, too, has it’s theory of antagonism and utopia: “capital is concerned with the dialectical use of antagonism, whose ultimate if utopian horizon is the withering away of the world class the untrammled self-valorization of capital”.

For some time now my working mythic-model for capitalism, especially through the technology of money, has been the Golem (which Hardt & Negri use in Multitude). However, if Tronti’s description of the separation of workers and capital is true, and it does seem to me to explain the current intentional attempts at a jobless recovery and destruction of any secure, non-precarious career for workers, then this myth doesn’t do it for me. Instead, capital is not a Golem, but Cthulhu and the capitalist class are his priests. It isn’t just the workers anymore, capital wants to be free from all humanity.

“If we don’t get them, they gonna get us all” – Dead Prez

Heresy and the Godhead

I was quite taken with Laruelle’s calling forth of the heretical imperative in the Future Christ but disappointed with the actual heresies that he evoked, and this awakened me once again to the ultimate importance of heresy to which so few of us are open. Despite the fact that Arianism has been the most popular and pervasive of all heresies, it is not really interesting as a heresy except in its most radical expressions such as Milton, leading me to distinguish between a lighter heresy and a heavier heresy, the latter almost invariably a deeply heretical knowing of Godhead itself, such as occurs in Spinoza and Hegel. Now just as Spinoza is a far deeper heretic than is Leibnitz, and Hegel the deepest heretic in his world, Milton and Blake are the deepest heretics in the world of English literature, and yet Hegel, Milton, and Blake are all profoundly Christian. Of course, the theological world doesn’t know what to do with great heretics of this order, but at the very least they are an overwhelming challenge to faith, and to the deepest faith.

Some Thoughts on the Politics of “Suburbs”

The place I grew up was not exactly the suburbs, more like some post-industrial small city out of a Springsteen song.  Nonetheless, there’s something about Arcade Fire’s new album that I find affectively striking.  This is because the titular “suburbs” are not an actual place—though, sadly, they are also that—but something like the condition of possibility for contemporary North American existence.   It is in this sense, I think, that we can speak of the political character of The Suburbs.  They have made an album that is not “realist” so much as an encounter with that which enables what we call reality—the feelings, the patterns of thought, the capacities of sense that one cannot avoid encountering.

A new proof of the existence of God

Proofs of the existence of God have fallen on hard times. We are far from the days when Anselm could berate the Fool for his failure to see that God’s existence was inherent in the very concept of God, and even from the heyday of Aquinas’s “five ways” to prove the existence of a Creator. Anthony and I have, however, devised a new proof of the existence of God that is not only fully rigorous, but also reflects much of the thinking underlying Christian practice today — a stirring example of faith completing reason. It goes as follows:

1. We see all around us that the world is awash in sinful and perverse acts.
2. Now God is the only standard by which we can know these acts as sinful and perverse.
3. If God did not exist, then the sinful and perverse would be completely acceptable.
4. But this is absurd — and therefore God must exist.

All we need now is a catchy name like “the teleological argument” or “the argument from design.” Perhaps the “argument from homophobia”?

Dan Brown the Symptom

Ross Douthat’s column on Dan Brown is getting a decent amount of attention today, with theology blogging mega-star Halden quoting it approvingly. There are some cheap shots — as Yglesias points out, the claim that no one could advance conspiracy theories about Judaism and Islam and get away with it elides the fact that the Roman Catholic Church really is structured in a way that invites conspiracy theories, whereas Judaism and Islam are decentralized — but that’s not what I want to address. The problem with this article is its central premise, which poses cheesy eclectic “religiousness” against presumably more authentic religions:

In the Brownian worldview, all religions — even Roman Catholicism — have the potential to be wonderful, so long as we can get over the idea that any one of them might be particularly true. It’s a message perfectly tailored for 21st-century America, where the most important religious trend is neither swelling unbelief nor rising fundamentalism, but the emergence of a generalized “religiousness” detached from the claims of any specific faith tradition.

I would contend that the problem with “Brownian” religion isn’t a lack of truth claims — instead, the problem is that it’s nothing but truth claims. It’s an overflow of purported knowledge about the real story behind Jesus, or in the case of an eclectic fascination with “world religions,” about the deeper truths expressed by all faith traditions. The distinction between “Brownian” religion and Roman Catholicism, for example, isn’t that the former has no truth claims while the latter offends our postmodern sensitivities by insisting that we take our medicine of truth claims — rather, it’s that the former is made up of truth claims that undermine loyalty to any particular institution (and implicitly reinforce a kind of generic “going with the flow”), while the latter is made up of truth claims that underwrite loyalty to a specific institution.

The accusation that eclectic “religiousness” is uncomfortable with truth claims in general acts as a smokescreen to avoid dealing with the real problem: namely, that religious institutions have consistently betrayed the trust of their constituents, making them open to anti-institutional conspiracy theory literature. What’s more, the people who most loudly claim to be loyal to the institution tend not to be the types of people you want to imitate — for instance, outside of a small hard core group, I doubt anyone found the anti-Obama/anti-abortion protestors at Notre Dame to be an admirable bunch, and I don’t think it was because they were offending postmodern sensibilities by standing up for truth claims.

(And I would add: what is more postmodern than standing up for the idea of strong truth claims in general? To the one who sees nothing but nihilism in the contemporary world, the great temptation is an “at least it’s an ethos” mindset — which is itself the most dangerous form of nihilism.)

I admit that I share Douthat’s distaste for generic “religiousness” or “spirituality,” but for a different reason: fundamentally, it’s not serious. Most of the time, it’s just a kind of vague curiosity that makes people into boring conversation partners full of spiritual platitudes. At its best, it can become a kind of stress-relief technique, which is certainly important and necessary — though perhaps not what the great religious traditions of humankind have been aiming at. But at the end of the day, much of what our great religious institutions are offering us is difficult to take seriously as well.

Theses on The Dark Knight

The following post was co-authored with Kelsey Craven, a PhD student in Comparative Literature at Northwestern University.

1. The Dark Knight is a critique of Batman, and precisely because of this, a critique of the neoliberal order. Here neoliberalism is understood as the combination of authoritarian politics, either the rather clumsy Republican version or the slick managerialism of the Democrats, in the service of the ever-greater concentration of capital by means of primitive accumulation (“privatization”) and financialization.

2. Batman and Harvey Dent are the two sides of neoliberal politics. Both depend on the wealth of Bruce Wayne in order to operate. That wealth is of course inherited, but it is greatly augmented by a stock issue in Batman Begins—surely a strange plot point for a comic book movie. Under Bruce’s father, the Wayne fortune underwrote both the water and transit systems of Gotham, effectively privatizing central government functions. Bruce simply continues this trend by privatizing law-enforcement, driven initially by his thirst for vengeance against the ungrateful “criminal” class.
3. Batman’s alleged project, to wage a war against “criminality,” must necessarily be a war against Gotham’s citizenry within the context of Gotham. This too is a major theme in Batman Begins, wherein the League of Shadows boasts of their capacity to infiltrate every level of government and considers this fact a legitimation of their intent to drug Gotham’s inhabitants, inciting them to destroy their city from within. Gotham is decadent. This theme re-emerges with the Harvey Dent/Two-Face storyline; when the female cop, who seemingly works directly under Commissioner Gordon, is confronted by Two-Face as to her role in the murder of Rachel Dawes, her response is: “They [the mob] got to me early, my mother’s hospital bills!”
4. It follows that:
   • Batman’s fight against “criminals” is a fight against the working class.
   • Within Gotham, a civil servant is incapable of supporting herself and her family without outside financial assistance.
   • All wealth within Gotham is concentrated within one of the following two organizations: the mob or the Wayne Estate. It follows that the citizens must then serve one, the other, or both so as to survive within the existing social structure of Gotham.
   • Should the mob be defeated (criminality), Bruce Wayne will quite literally own Gotham.
   • With regards to this power structure, the citizenry are seemingly complicit.
5. Batman’s elaborate show of keeping his hands clean by refusing to use guns is accompanied by tremendous “collateral damage”—in Batman Begins, the emphasis is on direct property damage, particularly the very water/transit system his father built, while in The Dark Knight, the focus is on “social chaos,” which in practice amounts to the refusal to submit to Batman’s sole authority. In response to the chaos he himself generated, Batman shows a decided willingness to torture, while still maintaining the pose of holier-than-thou pacifism. The most extreme example is when he pushes a mob boss off a roof—when the mob boss points out the fall will not kill him, Batman responds, “I’m counting on it.”
6. Batman’s main tactic in his pet crusade is the inspiration of fear, hence the bat, the animal that frightened him as a child. He learns this tactic from the League of Shadows in Batman Begins and, as an aside, it makes his lamentation to Alfred in The Dark Knight—“This is not what I had in mind when I said I wanted to inspire people”—that much more ironic. Bruce Wayne is truly delusional. Insofar as fear is what he seeks to inspire, he is something of a counterpart to Scarecrow, and both must be considered at once psychopaths and terrorists, with the latter being only more honest with himself concerning his desire for power by way of fear.
7. That “reducing crime” is not Batman’s true goal is clear: the “criminals” he fights early in the film are in fact imitators. One would think that people standing up and defending themselves and others in a situation of social chaos would be positive, but Batman derides their efforts: not only do they forfeit their ethical purity by using guns, but they’re also poor and tacky, running around in hockey pants.
8. The Joker is the protagonist and hero of The Dark Knight. He is the only truly ethical character in the film. As he repeats three times, he is “a man of his word.”
9. The Joker’s response to the neoliberal order of Gotham City is the only human one: he wishes for its destruction, initially symbolized by Batman. He enacts that destruction with joy, taking full responsibility for his actions in a way that Batman never can.
10. In Gotham, just as in our present socio-political context, mental illness might be seen as a legitimate, individual rebellion against patriarchal law and its resulting hierarchy. (What better response to capitalist multi-tasking than autism?) It is thus only fitting that the Joker should seek allies in the mental instituion, that is, the one instiution that effectively falls outside of the mob/Wayne axis.
11. “Terrorism” is not the appropriate description for the Joker’s actions, because terrorism is a strategy used by weak political actors (like the pitiable Batman) to advance their ends. The Joker wants to destroy the entire framework within which ends can be pursued, as shown by the following quote:
    

    I took your little plan and I turned it on itself. Look what I did to this city with a few drops of gas and a couple bullets. You know what, you know what I noticed? Nobody panics when things go according to plan. Even if the plan is horrifying. If tomorrow I tell the press that like a gangbanger will get shot, or a truckload of soldiers will be blown up, nobody panics, because that’s all part of the plan. But when I say that one little old mayor will die, well then everybody loses their minds! Introduce a little anarchy, upset the established order, and everything becomes chaos. I’m an agent of chaos. Oh, and you know the thing about chaos? It’s fair.

12. Yet it’s not a sheer negativity—or better, it’s a negation so thorough-going that it becomes its own kind of positivity. The Joker’s plots require huge amounts of labor and creativity, and he calls forth a community characterized by loyalty and fearlessness. Already in the very attempt to destroy the neoliberal order, an alternative spontaneously begins to take form.
13. Aside from the Joker, Harvey Dent is the only other character who escapes sheer bad faith: he is the “good liberal.” Dent actually believes in the spectacle, as is clear in his participation in and enjoyment of the theatricality of the courtroom scene—and this despite the fact that this very theatricality points up the bankruptcy of the judicial system, including a corruption that extends to allowing a witness to carry a gun into the courtroom. His betrayal by the system he sought to reform was arguably even more painful to Dent than the loss of Rachel.
14. In the end, the Joker succeeds only in forcing a slight reorganization of the power structure—Dent’s murders are covered up and Batman is scapegoated. The symbol of the brave vigilante watching over everyone is replaced by the symbol of the brave martyr to whom society will be forever indebted. In both cases, the people remain passive spectators. However, were the Joker’s project to be comprehended by the populace, a more thoroughgoing destabilization would be achieved by default—for it is the Joker who consistently addresses the populace at large, demanding action and above all the assumption of responsibility. In sharp contrast with the practitioners of the “noble lie,” the Joker is not only a “man of his word” but attempts to drive others to be the same.
15. To allay any suspicion that this interpretation is motivated by a contrarian’s willfulness, we conclude with some words of wisdom from the loyal Alfred. We are referring here not to his oft-quoted characterization of the Joker as a man who “just wants to watch the world burn,” but to his final solution to men who “can’t be bought, bullied, reasoned or negotiated with.” The famous quote occurs in the context of an analogy between the Joker and a Burman jewel thief who steals from the British colonialists and throws his spoils away—a situation that is only revealed when soldiers find a child playing with a ruby the size of a tangerine. Much later in the film, when Bruce Wayne asks how the soldiers finally defeated their foe, Alfred replies: “We burned down the forest.” Who, then, wants to watch the world burn? Alfred himself says it: the lawmen, the money men, the punishers.