The Fragility of Things: Self-Organizing Processes, Neoliberal Fantasies, and Democratic Activism
256
The Fragility of Things: Self-Organizing Processes, Neoliberal Fantasies, and Democratic Activism
256eBook
Available on Compatible NOOK devices, the free NOOK App and in My Digital Library.
Related collections and offers
Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780822377160 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Duke University Press |
| Publication date: | 09/02/2013 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 256 |
| File size: | 914 KB |
About the Author
William E. Connolly is Krieger-Eisenhower Professor of Political Science at Johns Hopkins University. His most recent books include A World of Becoming; Capitalism and Christianity, American Style; and Pluralism, all also published by Duke University Press. He is a former editor of Political Theory and a founder of the journal theory & event. His classic study The Terms of Political Discourse won the Benjamin Lippincott Award in 1999.
Read an Excerpt
THE FRAGILITY OF THINGS
self-organizing processes, neoliberal fantasies, and democratic activism
By WILLIAM E. CONNOLLY
Duke University Press
Copyright © 2013 Duke University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-5584-7
CHAPTER 1
steps toward an ecology of late capitalism
Neoliberalism, let us say, is a socioeconomic philosophy embedded to varying degrees in Euro-American life. In its media presentations, it expresses inordinate confidence in the unique, self-regulating power of markets as it links the freedom of the individual to markets. At a lower decibel level and high degree of intensity, it solicits modes of state, corporate, church, and media discipline to organize nature, state policy, workers, consumers, families, schools, investors, and international organizations to maintain conditions for unfettered markets and to clean up financial collapses, eco-messes, and regional conflicts created by that collusion.
Neoliberalism and laissez-faire capitalism are thus not exactly the same thing, at least since neoliberalism displaced the latter in Euro-American thought between 1935 and 1960. Neoliberals, as Michel Foucault has shown, often do not think that markets are natural; they think markets are delicate mechanisms that require careful protection and nurturance by states and other organizations. The state does not manage markets much directly, except through monetary policy, but it takes a very active role in creating, maintaining, and protecting the preconditions of market self-regulation. The most ambitious supporters want the state to inject market processes into new zones through judicial or legislative action, focusing on such areas as academic admissions, schools, prisons, health care, rail service, postal service, retirement, and private military organizations. Note how such shifts will implicate more and more citizens in the vicissitudes of nonstate, corporate practices, where the ability to discipline and channel conduct increases.
So neoliberalism solicits an active state to promote, protect, and expand market processes. And political leaders espousing neoliberal economics the most fervently—such as Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, the two Bushes, and David Cameron—often turn out also to be bellicose defenders of conservative Christianity, moralism, and/or a specific image of the nation. Neoliberalism, a selectively active state, a conservative brand of Christianity, and a nation of regularized individuals surrounded by marginalized minorities often complement one another, even if periodically they are at odds with one another.
What, then, are some of the political movements and modes of state activism supported by neoliberalism? They include, with varying degrees of support from different leaders, laws to restrain labor organization and restrict consumer movements; corporate participation on school and university boards; corporate ownership and control of the media; a jurisprudence and court decisions that treat the corporation as a person with unlimited rights to lobby and campaign; court policies that treat money as a mode of speech to be protected by the state; demands for bankruptcy laws that favor corporations at the expense of those working for them; special corporate access to state officials to maintain inequality and restrain unemployment benefits; extensive discipline of the workforce; legal defense of corporate financial power to limit consumer information about the policies that affect them; the ear of state officials who regulate credit and the money supply; use of the state to enforce debt payments and foreclosures; huge military, police, and prison assemblages to pursue imperial policies abroad and discipline the excluded and disaffected at home; meticulous street and institutional security arrangements to regulate those closed out of the neoliberal calculus; huge state budgets to promote the established infrastructure of consumption in the domains of highway expenditure, the energy grid, health care, and housing codes; state cleanup of disasters created by underregulated financial and corporate activity; and state or bureaucratic delays to hold off action on global climate change.
The corporate, media, state, evangelical, and think-tank cheerleaders of neoliberalism also deflect attention from ways state or neoliberal capitalism strives to order workers, consumers, localities, and international institutions to fit the neoliberal dictates of market behavior. It is an effective ideological strategy and a destructive and dangerous organization of private and public energies. The activist, neoliberal state becomes most transparent during an emergency or meltdown, but it is always operative.
Perhaps the quickest way, then, to dramatize the difference between classical market liberalism and contemporary neoliberalism is to say that the former wanted the state to minimize interference with "natural" market processes as it purported to leave other parts of civil society to their own devices, while the latter campaigns to make the state, the media, schools, families, science, churches, unions, and the corporate estate be ordered around neoliberal principles of being. This version of state activism provides a brand of statism that helps to draw together into one political assemblage, at least in America, differential priorities among neoliberals, evangelicals, neoconservatives, and the Vatican. There are others.
The Subjective Grip of Neoliberalism
Several angles of criticism have been brought against neoliberalism. Marxists focus on how its celebration of the market covers up exploitation and crisis tendencies internal to capitalism. Keynesians and Social Democrats focus on how it overplays the self-regulating power of markets and underplays the recurrent need of states to seed growth after a downturn, to provide unemployment support, and to spur consumer demand by a tax system that dampens inequality. Liberal Christians, atheists, Muslims, and Jews berate its heartlessness and readiness to leave those on the bottom out in the cold. Maverick market theorists such as Fred Hirsch focus on how the combination of consumer sovereignty and unconscious market processes regularly generate severe consumer binds, until it becomes more difficult to make ends meet for people of low and middle income, people become less satisfied with the products they receive, and the middle class responds to these pressures by demanding tax reductions and the further contraction of social democracy. Hirsch's book, published in 1977, is still highly relevant. Deep ecologists focus on how the state-neoliberal combine treats nature as standing reserve and depreciates the urgent need to adjust market blindness to a wholeness of nature that precedes economic life.
Several of these critiques converge on the conclusion that neoliberal capitalism is the most inegalitarian capitalism of all. To them, and to me, the identification by Georg Simmel of a general tendency in complex societies to impose the most severe burdens and sacrifices on those already on the bottom tiers of the order applies in spades to neoliberalism. One need only think of the slow fallout from the September 2008 world economic crisis when Simmel says, "Every new pressure and imposition moves along the line of least resistance which, though not in its first stage, usually and eventually runs in a descending direction. This is the tragedy of whomever is lowest.... He not only has to suffer from the deprivations, efforts, and discriminations, which, taken together, characterize his position; in addition every new pressure on any point whatever in the superordinate layers is, if technically possible at all, transmitted downward and stops only at him."
I thus share a thing or two with each of these critiques. But the center of gravity advanced here may differ from most of theirs. First, most may not come to terms sharply enough with the subjective grip the state, media, and neoliberal combine exerts on the interpretations and desires of large sections of the populace even after it has been rocked by a meltdown, problems in securing medical care, structural unemployment, a tsunami, an oil spill, or new evidence in favor of climate change. Many white working- and middle-class males, amid the decline of social democracy, find themselves pulled in two directions at the same time: they support neoliberal promises of corporate growth to cope with the squeeze the state-market collusion has placed them in, and they demand decisive leadership from the state to resolve any fallout created by this legacy.
We need to understand better the pressures on so many constituencies to reinstate faith in neoliberal ideology a short time after the latest meltdown. These are the pressures that encourage so many to translate experiences of fragility in a neoliberal world into attacks on state efforts to respond to those very troubles. Of course, many young people of affluence are pushed in this direction by pressure to believe in the stability of the system in which they are preparing to forge specific careers. And in the United States at least, there is a sense among many corporate and financial elites of special world and income entitlements, which can easily be translated into neoliberal hubris if and when critics make calls for shifts in the ethos and state regulation of the economy.
But what about others? I have contended in Capitalism and Christianity, American Style that many anxious white males in the working and middle classes seek models of masculinity with whom to identify in a world of uncertainty. Corporate elites, sports heroes, financial wizards, and military leaders project images of independence, mastery, and virility that can make them attractive models of identification, whereas state welfare programs, market regulations, retirement schemes, and health care, while essential to life, may remind too many of the very fragilities, vulnerabilities, susceptibilities, and dependencies they strive to deny or forget. This double logic of masculinization of market icons and feminization of state supports and regulatory activities takes a toll on the polity, particularly when it is overcoded with race and immigration issues. Neoliberal heroes, TV talking heads, and evangelical publicists further incite these very vulnerabilities as they feed off the struggle of many white males to conceal them from their families and themselves through hyperidentification. Check out the Rush Limbaugh Show sometime. It is difficult to occupy the subject position of the white working-class male.
There may be another element here, though its importance is difficult to weigh. And indeed its weight probably varies among different constituencies. If you are stuck in circumstances in which it takes Herculean efforts to get through the day—doing low-income work, obeying an authoritarian boss, buying clothes for the children, dealing with school issues, paying the rent or mortgage, fixing the car, negotiating with a spouse, paying taxes, and caring for older parents—it is not easy to pay close attention to larger political issues. Indeed you may wish that these issues would take care of themselves. It is not a huge jump from such a wish to become attracted to a public philosophy, spouted regularly at your job and on the media, that economic life would regulate itself automatically if only the state did not repeatedly intervene in it in clumsy ways. Now underfunded practices such as the license bureau, state welfare, public health insurance, public schools, public retirement plans, and the like begin to appear as awkward, bureaucratic organizations that could be replaced or eliminated if only the rational market were allowed to take care of things impersonally and quietly, as it were. Certainly such bureaucracies are indeed often clumsy. But more people are now attracted to compare that clumsiness to the myth of how an impersonal market would perform if it took on even more assignments and if state regulation of it were reduced even further. So a lot of "independents" and "moderates" may become predisposed to the myth of the rational market in part because the pressures of daily life encourage them to seek comfort in ideological formations that promise automatic rationality.
Self-Organizing Processes and Political Economy
I focus here, however, on a related issue. Many critics of neoliberalism criticize it as they downplay the self-regulatory powers of economic markets. For instance, they may say, correctly in my view, that markets don't work that way nearly as much as their defenders say they do. I agree that economic markets can be very unstable because of, say, elite collusion, self-amplifying bubbles, actions by other states, a war, and several of these in conjunction. But I further treat economic markets as merely one type of imperfect self-regulating system in a cosmos composed of innumerable, interacting open systems with differential capacities of self-organization set on different scales of time, agency, creativity, viscosity, and speed. These open systems periodically interact in ways that support, amplify, or destabilize one another. It is partly because economic markets operate in a larger world of multiple, self-organizing systems that they are much more volatile than the advocates of neoliberalism pretend. The theme to be pursued here, then, is not that markets are always efficient and rational. They are not. It is, however, that they do possess varying degrees of self-organizing power and that a lot of other human and nonhuman processes with which they interact do too. Such a combination changes everything.
The theme of a cosmos of open, interacting force fields may press against some assumptions in neoliberalism, socialist productivism, Keynesianism, and classical Marxism alike, though there are important variations here. So we can speak only of tendencies. Where the latter types may diverge from the theory projected here is either in the assumption that cultural theory can concentrate its attention on the internal dynamics of social, state, and economic formations without close reference to movements of natural systems of multiple sorts, or in a tendency to think that capitalism constitutes an absorbent system that automatically returns the shocks and dissenting pressures applied to it as enhanced drives to its own expansion and intensification, or in a tendency to treat nonhuman force fields as reducible to simple law-like patterns without significant powers of metamorphosis.
When you come to terms more closely with interacting, nonhuman systems with differential capacities of metamorphosis you also come to terms more thoughtfully with the volatile ecology of late modern capitalism and the contemporary fragility of things. You may thus call into question assumptions about temporal progress tied to the ideas of either human mastery or a predesign of being. From the perspective advanced here, these two competing visions are also complementary in that while proponents of each tend to oppose the other, they both act as though the nonhuman world were predisposed to us, either in being designed for us or in being highly susceptible to mastery by us. Challenging the anthropocentric hubris in both of these images, you now extend, as the case requires, the reach of politico-economic inquiry to specific noneconomic, nondiscursive systems that penetrate and impinge upon econocultural life. You thus allow the shocks that these impingements periodically pose to open up new patterns of thinking, interpretation, and intervention.
Those theorists who complain repeatedly about the "externalities" that have messed up their model by fomenting this or that untoward event, before returning to the purity of the model, suffer from a debilitating disease: they act as if the models would work if only the world did not contain so many "outside" factors that are, in fact, imbricated and entangled in a thousand ways with the practices they study. A subset of theorists on the left who tend to construe capitalism as a closed system that automatically recaptures and absorbs bumps in its own operations may present a mirror image of that picture. Both parties underplay, though in different keys and degrees, the role of noise and loose remainders within the markets they study, the ways capitalism alters nonhuman force fields, and the independent power of nonhuman forces acting upon capitalism.
Casting to the side these ploys, we may become better equipped to respond sensitively to the fragility of things today, as seen from the broadly defined interests of the human estate in its complex imbrications with a variety of human and nonhuman systems. We may then embrace the need to infuse a new ethos inside markets, voting, consumption, investment, churches, work, schools, the media, state action, and cross-state citizen movements as we attend to the resonances back and forth between these subsystems. Feedback loops between established schemes of interpretation, new social movements, markets, state and interstate organization, nonhuman force fields, and novel modes of role experimentation all attain significant standing in this image of political economy.
Capitalist-Nonhuman Entanglements
Such a theory of political economy, if and when developed, will be as different from the thought of Hayek, Friedman, Greenspan, Summers, Geithner, and Keynes as the cosmo-philosophies of Hesiod and Sophocles were from those of Augustine, Kant, Adam Smith, Hegel, and Marx. Hesiod and Sophocles indeed grasped how cultural and cosmic (or divine) forces are interwoven and how the latter can sometimes change in dramatic ways over a short period with profound effects on the human estate. Lift the gods from their stories—no small move, I grant—and the universe becomes conceived as a colossus of highly diverse force fields, each periodically flowing over, through, and around others.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from THE FRAGILITY OF THINGS by WILLIAM E. CONNOLLY. Copyright © 2013 Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Prelude. 1775 11. Steps toward an Ecology of Late Capitalism 20
first interlude: Melancholia and Us 43
2. Hayek, Neoliberalism, and Freedom 52
second interlude: Modes of Self-Organization 81
3. Shock Therapy, Dramatization, and Practical Wisdom 98
third interlude: Fullness and Vitality 140
4. Process Philosophy and Planetary Politics 149
postlude: Role Experimentation and Democratic Activism 179
Acknowledgments 197
Notes 201
Bibliography 225
Index 233