A Sketch of the Present
I began to write this as part of a reply to someone (@fdrake!), but it took on a life of its own so I'm posting it here. It's a kind of diagnosis of the contemporary situation, whose contours I'm just trying to sketch out. It's by no means comprehensive, or necessarily entirely correct, and there are steps of argument missing, but I thought it might be worth posting for some discussion. Anyway, have at it:
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Something I'm beginning to explore is a strange but emerging link between life (in the biological sense), debt, risk, financialization, precarity, and neoliberalism. I think that it's increasingly clear that one of the chief political issues of our time is debt and precarity: the collapse of interest rates and the correlative expansion of credit markets has driven the rise of asset ownership among the aspiring classes, and has put people - along with states - into massive debt (which has the related effect of massive de-politicization - no money, no control, no politics). This has been coupled with the gutting of the social state (welfare, housing, health, etc), and the explosion of fictionalization which has, in combination, massively skewed the distribution of wealth, which itself is becoming concentrated in tiny sectors of the economy, and in the hands of very few monopolist actors (with feedback loops that keep the accumulation of wealth there).
Apart from the rather devastating effect this has had on democracies, sovereignty, and politics more generally (the experience of Greece is exemplary here), it also fundamentally alters our relationship to time. We are increasingly 'at risk of default', and our collective indebtedness is coupled with a discourse of 'responsibilization' and an uncertain future (not to mention the almost non-existent increases in real incomes around the world), which means that we are - with devastating irony - increasingly responsible for a future that we can't even control.
Where things really become interesting though is in the way these developments dovetail with discourses regarding our biological life. Essentially, the increased 'biologicalization' of our existence (increased discourses on the body, tech to manipulate and develop biological beings) has made us - in parallel with economic/social/political precarcity - almost permanently at risk of biological pathology (think of how we have to manage genetic pre-dispositions to certain disease, consistanly survey the state of our health, etc). This means we are permanently 'at risk' both at an political level and an 'existential' one: in fact, at some point, these things become practically indistinguishable.
The ultimate effect of all this is a massive disorientation of what I might call existential intelligibility. Permanently poised to fall off the wagon - socially, economically, biologically - the categories we use to make sense of things are themselves permanently rendered precarious and thus not very useful. At any point, we are prone to the threat of catastrophe (even if it doesn't eventuate), along all the various axes outlined above, and their convergence into an locus of indistinction. This indistinciton, this loss of existential intelligibility, functions as a licence for the worst possible atrocities and our inability to deal with them. Hence the devastation wrought upon the poor, migrants, the environment, the climate, and more.
Of importance here is that fact that these developments have been politically mandated, as it were. That is, this kind of precarcity, in distinction to, say, the precacity of the the peasant in the middle ages, isn't a function of 'the state of nature', so much as developments in the political sphere. One line of interest here is in treating this in Marxist terms as well: for Marx, capital mandates the abolition of all mediation to capital, and draws ever widening circuits of life into its ambit. This explanation very nicely accounts for the long-term trend of the convergence of social/economic/biological spheres into loci of indistinction and unintelligibly, which enables rising violence, as a result of this tendency of capital.
That's it.
--
Something I'm beginning to explore is a strange but emerging link between life (in the biological sense), debt, risk, financialization, precarity, and neoliberalism. I think that it's increasingly clear that one of the chief political issues of our time is debt and precarity: the collapse of interest rates and the correlative expansion of credit markets has driven the rise of asset ownership among the aspiring classes, and has put people - along with states - into massive debt (which has the related effect of massive de-politicization - no money, no control, no politics). This has been coupled with the gutting of the social state (welfare, housing, health, etc), and the explosion of fictionalization which has, in combination, massively skewed the distribution of wealth, which itself is becoming concentrated in tiny sectors of the economy, and in the hands of very few monopolist actors (with feedback loops that keep the accumulation of wealth there).
Apart from the rather devastating effect this has had on democracies, sovereignty, and politics more generally (the experience of Greece is exemplary here), it also fundamentally alters our relationship to time. We are increasingly 'at risk of default', and our collective indebtedness is coupled with a discourse of 'responsibilization' and an uncertain future (not to mention the almost non-existent increases in real incomes around the world), which means that we are - with devastating irony - increasingly responsible for a future that we can't even control.
Where things really become interesting though is in the way these developments dovetail with discourses regarding our biological life. Essentially, the increased 'biologicalization' of our existence (increased discourses on the body, tech to manipulate and develop biological beings) has made us - in parallel with economic/social/political precarcity - almost permanently at risk of biological pathology (think of how we have to manage genetic pre-dispositions to certain disease, consistanly survey the state of our health, etc). This means we are permanently 'at risk' both at an political level and an 'existential' one: in fact, at some point, these things become practically indistinguishable.
The ultimate effect of all this is a massive disorientation of what I might call existential intelligibility. Permanently poised to fall off the wagon - socially, economically, biologically - the categories we use to make sense of things are themselves permanently rendered precarious and thus not very useful. At any point, we are prone to the threat of catastrophe (even if it doesn't eventuate), along all the various axes outlined above, and their convergence into an locus of indistinction. This indistinciton, this loss of existential intelligibility, functions as a licence for the worst possible atrocities and our inability to deal with them. Hence the devastation wrought upon the poor, migrants, the environment, the climate, and more.
Of importance here is that fact that these developments have been politically mandated, as it were. That is, this kind of precarcity, in distinction to, say, the precacity of the the peasant in the middle ages, isn't a function of 'the state of nature', so much as developments in the political sphere. One line of interest here is in treating this in Marxist terms as well: for Marx, capital mandates the abolition of all mediation to capital, and draws ever widening circuits of life into its ambit. This explanation very nicely accounts for the long-term trend of the convergence of social/economic/biological spheres into loci of indistinction and unintelligibly, which enables rising violence, as a result of this tendency of capital.
That's it.
Comments (89)
I see. But that does mean that you will, at the minimum, be slow to take positions and act towards bringing them about no? I think we should always strive for a balance of action/contemplation given our limited/finite time in life.
Not at all. Which is not to say I'm ruling 'slow' action out. I'm just not ruling radical action out either. One imagines it depends on the situation and strategy goals pursued.
Hi Streetlight X. Not exactly sure what you mean by that statement.
I think its a good insight. There's a lot of detail, and I was reading quickly so I may have missed the upshot but...
It may represent the signalling of the next barrier breach. If we think of life in the continuum from atoms to molecules blah blah to people, then society is the next manifestation beyond that. It is built by people, just like people are built by cells. This unaccounted for 'negentropy' that defines life flows from bucket to bucket to bucket getting more complex each time and taking a new reading (semiotics or explicate order) each time. Our society may be breaching its boundaries and spilling into the next realm.
Or else its just a modified re-run of feudal England and we'll await the next equivalent of industrialisation.
The rich get richer and the poor get richer. Where is the argument against economic inequality or is it just assumed to be the worst case scenario. Maybe there a nationalistic sentiment implied in the suggestion that economic inequality is some how less moral, perhaps trending towards political inequality.
Also around 90% of philanthropic organization were formed after 1950.
Thomas Piketty argues that Wikipedia But he does not support the thesis that economic inequality is bad in itself.
The computer, the internet, and the other advances in science will present many challenges but also many solutions. Even Donald tweets, albeit batshit.
These developments are financially mandated and a function of human nature.
Fair question, I was a pretty brisk there. Basically I mean that there's been a change such that health is less and less understood in terms of the binary healthy-sick, but more in terms of a continuum such that we are always, as it were, 'proto-sick' or 'presymptomatic'. This is due to a convergence of reasons, three among them being the rise of genetic discourse (according to which we are or can be predisposed to such and such diseases), the ubiquity of health insurance, which places us all in differing risk categories, etc, etc, and the proliferation of discourses about health and hygiene, such that we keep track of our blood pressure, track out fitness (think Fitbits), take supplements, etc. Basically, health is no longer, as Rene Leriche once put it, "life lived in the silence of the organs".
Or put differently, we have a continuous active realtion to our biology, instead of the relative passive relation that we once did. The point, in the larger scheme of things, is that this development tracks those which occur in the realm of the economic and the social: just as we are always at-risk from disease, we are also always at-risk of loan default, of attack by forces unseen, of losing job stability, of environmental catastrophe, all while the resources that allow us to deal with these issues are wound down. Our bio-pathological risk profiles (susceptibility to disease) are mirrored by our credit risk profiles, such that many of us become, in the words of Guy Standing, a new social class composed of the 'Precariat'.
And this in turn feeds into the bigger story regarding our existential disorientation and loss of temporal markers (what Fredric Jameson called our inability to undertake cognitive mapping). But hopefully that helps answer your question.
Nope. If you study the sociology of the changes, they are most certainly not a 'function of human nature'. they are the result of very specific policy decisions, confluences of power, and historical accident, all of which can be tracked in detail. They are a matter of statecraft, in other words. for the kind of sociology I have in mind, see Melinda Cooper's Family Values, Loic Wacquant's Punishing the Poor, or Wendy Brown's Undoing the Demos.
What is more terrifying as well is that many of the prevailing economic policies meant to encourage growth - 'quantitative easing' chief among them - have the effect of perpetuating and even entrenching this differential distribution of growth (see: https://ftalphaville.ft.com/2017/09/19/2193960/guest-post-central-bank-quantitative-easing-as-an-emerging-political-liability/). My own worry is less moral than it is political: these trends have knock-on depoliticizing effects; mired in astronomically increased burdens of debt, while at the same time seeing incredibly low rates of income growth (zero in the case of African-Americans across the period mentioned above), and coupled with the withering of social safety nets and the growth of social costs (health, transport, etc), is that political participation literally becomes impossible because, well, one is struggling to make ends meet. It basically ends up leading to the destruction of the civitas, and with it, democracy.
What an absurd statement, given that social change is the statistical product of the behaviour of large numbers of individual human beings.
The molecules that had independently catalysed reactions were now constrained in the cycle and fed the reactants. The speed of their processing was now regulated. A higher order had moved in above it, first to stabilise and then to control. The molecules had breached their boundary and in poured the fire of regulation, and as the higher order developed it refined its control and maximised the potential of the system in a way that suited its own direction, until the next barrier was ready to be breached.
We have a layer above us that has gone from a passive agent of our own construction to a very active, regulatory agent that we increasingly have less control over. The new layer is not merely concerned with the macroeconomics of economic survival, but the microregulation and evaluation of you and I as part of that system.
At least that's the theme I'm running with for now.
The 1950s were rich for the US because oil could be extracted and delivered with an EROEI (energy returned on energy invested) of 100 to 1. The fuel creating the economy was basically free. Nowadays the ratio is down to 10 to 1. So no boom for average America.
So yes. Owning the resources is key. But there was more entropy going spare back then - as can be told by the gas guzzler 1950s cars.
There is more to modern economics than just having cheap fossil fuel to burn. But also, the correlations with GDP say it is the dominant factor. Hence fracking and its short lived sugar rush that let the US stagger on without real reform post GFC.
There are a lot of things to respond to in your post, but I can give you two immediate thoughts that I had.
[quote=SLX]The ultimate effect of all this is a massive disorientation of what I might call existential intelligibility. Permanently poised to fall off the wagon - socially, economically, biologically - the categories we use to make sense of things are themselves permanently rendered precarious and thus not very useful. At any point, we are prone to the threat of catastrophe (even if it doesn't eventuate), along all the various axes outlined above, and their convergence into an locus of indistinction. This indistinciton, this loss of existential intelligibility, functions as a licence for the worst possible atrocities and our inability to deal with them. Hence the devastation wrought upon the poor, migrants, the environment, the climate, and more.[/quote]
The disorientation you describe I think is present, but not 'new', Rick Roderick noticed in the 1990's:
[quote=Rick Roderick, Self Under Seige]How [does a way of life] break down? Well, here there is an analogy – for me – between the social and the self under siege, in many ways. In many ways, not in a few, and some of the symptoms we see around us that our own lives are breaking down and the lives of our society is a generalised cynicism and scepticism about everything. I don’t know how to characterise this situation, I find no parallel to it in human history. The scepticism and cynicism about everything is so general, and I think it’s partly due to this thing I call banalisation, and it’s partly due to the refusal and the fear of dealing with complexity. Much easier to be a cynic than to deal with complexity. Better to say everything is bullshit than to try to look into enough things to know where you are. Better to say everything is just… silly, or pointless, than to try to look into systems of this kind of complexity and into situations of the kind of complexity and ambiguity that we have to deal with now.[/quote]
And on banalisation:
[quote=Rick Roderick, Self Under Seige]Anyway, that’s rationalisation, and then the third – and this is sort of one of my own if you will forgive me – is what I’ll call banalization. And it’s always a danger when you do lectures like the ones I am doing now, and that’s to take these fundamentally important things like what does my life mean, and surely there must be a better way to organise the world than the way it is organised now, surely my life could have more meaning in a different situation. Maybe my life’s meaning might be to change it or whatever, but to take any one of these criticisms and treat them as banalities. This is the great – to me – ideological function of television and the movies. However extreme the situation, TV can find a way to turn it into a banality.[/quote]
Blaming TV is a bit out dated. We should probably blame the internet in its place at this point. Regardless, the thrust of the comments implicate a generalised breakdown of people's engagement with life-planning or 'bigger than ourselves' ideals. The collapse of this mythopoetic structure can probably partly explain the rise of public intellectual Jordan Peterson, whose main goal is to 'shove the meaning back into life' at the level of myths (even if he blames postmodernism, whatever that is, for the collapse of these mythopoetic structures rather than diagnosing in the wake of their collapse).
Perhaps we should tolerate a thematic reliance on the death of God, in a generalised form. The generalisation would be that not only is the divine no longer an organising principle of life, neither is an individual's commitment to their own goals and self narrative (the smallest form of a mythopoetic structure). Perhaps we are dead and we have killed us.
Though, I don't think prescribing any agency to people at large for the death of our mythopoetic structures is particularly appropriate, given the [in my view commonplace] self reports of reducing control over our day to day lives [precarity]. I believe precarity and the collapse of our mythopoetic structures are two sides of the same coin. The observed incredible complexity and ever-present tragedy, the 9-5 sword of Damocles, we are embroiled in leaves us only one response. Believe nothing, hope for nothing, nothing is right.
This ravaging of our goal orientation temporalises humans in strange way - we no longer have hopes for the future on the large scale. Occupy Wall Street was an excellent example of this, a movement without long term plans, a quiet 'No' to whatever annoyed them, and a [predictably] unceremonious dissipation. This was summarized in 2012 by Marxist blogger Ross Wolfe:
[quote=Ross Wolfe, The Charnel House, Memories of the Future]Gone are the days when humanity dreamt of a different tomorrow. All that remains of that hope is a distant memory. Indeed, most of what is hoped for these days is no more than some slightly modified version of the present, if not simply the return to a status quo ante — i.e., to a present that only recently became deceased. This is the utopia of normality, evinced by the drive to “get everything running back to normal” (back to the prosperity of the Clinton years, etc.). In this heroically banal vision of the world, all the upheaval and instability of the last few years must necessarily appear as just a fluke or bizarre aberration. A minor hiccup, that’s all. Once society gets itself back on track, the argument goes, it’ll be safe to resume the usual routine.[/quote]
It's a small leap to relate this to the state of exception, which can perhaps be identified as a generating mechanism of precarity.
He talks about the loss of control of sovereignty. How the nation was forced to bow to the dictates of the European Union. How the nation, against the explicit mandate from the people were forced to impose harsh economic terms.
The fall of nations in submission to a larger entity. The loss of power of the people in the system. The rise of positive feedback loops in the system that keep the rich, rich. The gutting of the welfare state to streamline the efficiency of the system.
I think we are witnessing the birth of new order, and I think we all know it. We've breached the barrier and control is reigning down us. It is the system now, not the molecules.
The precariousness in regard to health or the body is tied to the increasingly impossible notions of physical, intellectual, and emotional perfection that folk are taught to aspire to. I only wish that there was more evidence of a biological motif to be seen in the current world system.
I can see people might be worried about disease and ill health. But that seems more due to modern life at least being pretty disease free due to medicine. It is when you have a lot to lose that a sense of precariousness sets in. It is when you expect perfectibility that imperfections get magnified.
So I would diagnose the central ill as the romantic notion of the self-made individual. Community has been eroded so as to make life a solitary contest. We have a politics of de-socialisation rather than any biological existential crisis. It is mental ill health rather than bodily failings that are the generalised issue.
To understand the modern situation, I instead always stress the thermodynamic level of analysis that underlies the biological. And from this point of view, our behaviour then seems perfectly natural and not at all indistinct in its origins.
Politics and economics are self organising dissipative structures. As Adrian Bejan argues with his constructal theory, everything we see is a system predicated on fossil fuels. It is just a great heat producing organism rearranging its parts to maximise its entropy flows.
Us individual humans are caught up in forces beyond our control and simply have to hang on for the ride as best we can. Society is being organised to maximise dissipative activity. Biology and culture are stretched to their limits to allow that to happen. And that pretty well covers everything you mention.
I would say rather that neoliberalism has been running things for 40 years and we are all waiting to discover exactly what form its collapse takes. But it is proving a remarkably resilient beast. So far it has avoided an actual energy crisis and so revolution in the streets.
In regard to health: there is no problem if people eat healthy foods without chemicals, drink clean water, move frequently, and about creating unnecessary stress in their lives. Good advice for health is not easy to come by, but it is available. The body is very resilient, because it is intelligent and continuously adapting, but it cannot overcome and overabundance of junk foods or harmful drugs/chemicals. It will break if oversaturated with toxins.
It's much more difficult to create a middle class living nowadays than when I was growing up. I don't think it will get better much soon since historically this kind of wealth concentration we are experiencing everywhere in the world does not end comfortably.
Part of what's at stake in my post is the attempt to move away from 'psycologizing' explanations: things like saying 'ah, if only people would change their attitudes, think differently, engage with the world in a more productive way', etc. To pin the blame on these sorts of things - 'skepticism', 'cynicism', etc mistakes a symptom for a cause. In this regard, I'm an old school historical materialist: look at the conditions - the political economy and beyond - which give rise to such attitudes, and direct change at that level. The modern obsession with self-help, motivational and inspirational books and speakers and so on are basically signs of resignation, another emblem of depoliticization which aims to change individual to fit structure, rather than structure to fit individual, as it were.
This is why I'm so keen to focus on institutions and policy; in a word - look at where the money is going. This is why I think the debt relation is so fascinating: it provides a concrete mechanism by which to explain the shortened temporal horizon of contemporary life - exactly how can one act politically when when one has to pay off a lifetime of debt? And again, this can be traced to concrete policy decisions: 'asset based welfare' - i.e. the deliberate depression of interest rates and the expansion of credit markets - in the US was occasioned by specific policy initiatives under the Clinton administration with Greenspan alongside, in response, no less, to the destruction of the welfare state carried out by Reagan (coupled with the absolutely bonkers idea, again taken up Reagan and formulated by the Chicago school, that lower taxes for the rich benefits society on the whole).
And things take off when debt, in turn, is securitized (turned into a secondary market which incentivises the creation of even more bad debt - basically the root of the GFC), which in turns fucks over the already poor/the vulnerable and ensnares even more into vortex of poverty. I mean, if you actaully follow the history, the frikkin cynicism of everyday life is anything but a kind of causa sui. It has real roots. And this is to say nothing of the differential ethical and gender effects of all these policies. And this also doesn't yet begin to touch on the geopolitical dimensions of the debt relation, where the IMF and World Bank, and the Eurozone (in the case of Greece), can essentially override sovereignty and democratic will in order to impose what amounts to debt imperialism on already-shattered economies.
So it's true that we can't dream of a 'different tomorrow', but a big reason for this is that we are quite literally institutionally bound to the past in the form of debt, which has the effect of massive depressing any futural orientation that we might want to make. And that's not even the end of the story: the debt relation doesn't just obviate the future, but basically appropriates it in the form of aspiration under the veil of credit: the widespread availability of credit essentially places the asset-poor on the side of the asset-rich by allowing them to reconceive themselves as the potential rich. This translates to support for causes which more or less are entirely against their own current interests for the sake of a promissory future, which of course is largely illusory for most (writes Melinda Cooper of the GFC: "Once the mitigating effects of credit expansion were removed, it was inevitable that the actual polarization of American wages and wealth would reassert itself in the crudest of forms" - which she goes on to document).
Human nature is not a variable, it's a constant. It is also not a cause or symptom of "these developments"; it is a necessary condition for them.
[quote=SLX]Part of what's at stake in my post is the attempt to move away from 'psycologizing' explanations: things like saying 'ah, if only people would change their attitudes, think differently, engage with the world in a more productive way', etc.[/quote]
I didn't mean to suggest that this surface level observation of a current cultural malaise sufficed for an analysis. You're right in suggesting that there are causal or mechanism of enabling questions for any cultural observation. The purpose I had in mind in mentioning the degradation of mythopoesis on the societal and individual level was to provide a category or summary of the phenomenon - a generalisation on the same level of abstraction (so to speak) as what was generalised. This was purely descriptive, the purpose being to enable questions such as: 'What historico-economic conditions have enabled the widespread degradation of mythopoetic structures?': and also locate a temporalising element (denying futurity) which is fundamental to this degradation. Methodologically, this was meant to instantiate these questions in terms of their effect in a generalised human; the kind of human that reacts in the predictable way to zero hours contracts, wages lagging inflation, the destruction of career choices and the widespread privatisation of common goods.
[quote=SLX] I'm an old school historical materialist: look at the conditions - the political economy and beyond - which give rise to such attitudes, and direct change at that level. The modern obsession with self-help, motivational and inspirational books and speakers and so on are basically signs of resignation, another emblem of depoliticization which aims to change individual to fit structure, rather than structure to fit individual, as it were.[/quote]
While I think it's true that advocating a solution in terms of re-training individuals to have mythopoetic structures is a band-aid on a gangrenous limb, I think you've elided the question: what would motivate such a depoliticised and fragmented individual to collectively organise with other depoliticised and fragmented individuals? Especially when a thorough analysis of economic power structures (such as the enabling conditions for the TTIP) renders action on the level of the country too small to effect change in any predictable manner? Perhaps this is unfair, a deeper and more appropriate question would be: what are the enabling conditions for collective organisation to address the historico-political structures that are screwing us over?
I don't understand, though, whether this is an actual increase in indebtedness per capita, or a change in attitude towards indebtedness. What does the data say? One reaction to the crisis of 2008, for example, has been (in my opinion) for right-wing public discourse to problematise levels of public debt that are not at all dangerous. This is a neo-liberal attack on the State, procaliming the need for 'austerity', not an increasing problem of debt.
If you look at countries across the world, the two sorts of countries that have low indebtedness are petro-chemical-rich countries, and poor countries. Globally the poor would be better off with more access to debt on reasonable terms, wouldn't they? And one socialist response to low interest rates would be to invest more heavily at the cost of more debt.
I don't disagree at all about precariousness or precarity, but that's a separate though parallel issue for me: medium-term attrition at labour laws and union rights and a policy of 'flexible workforces' is how much of that operates at the national level, before we look at the international situation a\nd the way capital moves its resources around.
The money is going to buy things (as always).
First, to buy things that control people. So, forget about trying to pin blame on politicians, social institutions, public policy, etc. They have been bought. Your narrative is naïve in most respects.
But this is exactly where indistinction matters: because health is no longer conceived in a purely negative sense - the absence of disease, or as "the silence of the organs" as René Leriche put it - health becomes an active, positive relation of oneself to one's body such that it is continually 'in focus', as it were. One is always a potential sick-person, a possible epidemiological vector, someone always on the edge of obesity if not for exercise, predisposed due to family history, etc. In essence, the default variable is swapped: one is not a healthy person who is currently not-sick: one is a always-potentially-sick person, who, at this point time, happens to be healthy (were it not for the continual self-intervention into the state of one's salubrity). One is essentially ones' biological risk profile.
And neoliberalism basically does the same thing in terms of one's credit risk profile. Again, the terms are swapped: one isn't a 'person' who may or may not take risk upon oneself in the course of living; one is a walking walking risk profile who just so happens to have not yet encountered the danger that will, inevitably, befall him or her. One enters into a risk relation not as one action in life among others, but by virtue of being alive at all. And in parallel, health is seen as a kind of 'vital' credit itself, which one has to actively managed least one go into 'default' -i.e. die.
In both cases what is at stake is a kind of massive intensification of individuation: there's nothing about you, even right down to your biosusbtance itself, that escapes the circuits of potential risk (sickness, debt). The precacity is built-in, as it were, right from the beginning of life itself. And again, this has the profound effect of basically completely altering the temporal order: because risk is the default orientation, the mitigation of risk no longer becomes the management of the possible but the management of the inevitable. Here is Cooper describing this change: "What it provokes is not so much fear (of an identifiable threat) as a state of alertness, without foreseeable end. It exhorts us to respond to what we suspect without being able to discern; to prepare for the emergent, long before we can predict how and when it will be actualized; to counter the unknowable, before it is even realized. In short ... [it] suggest that our only possible response to the emergent crisis (of whatever kind—biomedical, environmental, economic) is one of speculative preemption."
This kind of massive temporal disorientation - in which the future becomes both incalculable and certain, collapsed into each ohter - basically scrambles every category of intelligibility we have. This in turn licences all and any kinds of 'preventative' measures, from the massive 'preemptive strikes' against other countries in the American case - as if the future were taking place in the present - as well as the insane excesses of speculative finance, which began, as you might remember, as simple attempts to hedge against future changes in price, but which have now mutated into making bets on incalculable futures based on literal borrowed time. Present and future collapse in on each other - paralying calculated action in the present, or, what amounts to the same thing, enabling any action whatsoever - while the weight of past pins them both down together. Again Cooper captures this strange temporality in the best way I know:
"The promise of capital in its present form—which after all is still irresistibly tied to oil—now so far outweighs the earth's geological reserves that we are already living on borrowed time, beyond the limits. U.S. debt imperialism is currently reproducing itself with an utter obliviousness to the imminent depletion of oil reserves. Fueling this apparently precarious situation is the delirium of the debt form, which in effect enables capital to reproduce itself in a realm of pure promise, in excess of the earth's actual limits, at least for a while. This is a delirium that operates between the poles of utter exhaustion and manic overproduction, premature obsolescence and the promise of surplus. In the sense that the debt can never be redeemed once and for all and must be perpetually renewed, it reduces the inhabitable present to a bare minimum, a point of bifurcation, strung out between a future that is about to be and a past that will have been. It thus confronts the present as the ultimate limit, to be deflected at all costs." (Cooper, Life as Surplus)
Man, if we could answer this...; in truth I have no idea. Again, I'm very much in 'diagnosis' mode right now, trying to tease out the effects these developments have on our modes of temporarily, intelligibility and the type(s) of practicable politics in today's day and age. I need to sleep now, but lemmie get back to you later : )
Solutions? Well, sure -- we could have a revolution of just the right kind, perfectly targeted, splendidly executed, and then eased to an end before it ran amok. Fat chance. Fat chance of gradualist solutions too. Are we at an End Game--not where the world comes to an end, but where the world order can not be extended further; gradually decays; power systems (of all sorts) fall apart, and then... we can start over (and maybe end up where we are now, only 500 - 1500 years hence)?
I thought your OP also elicited some very thoughtful responses too.
From my personal perspective, 1973 (the year of the Arab oil boycott) was the year the economic season turned from summer to autumn. For most of the 1970s and early 1980s I, single and frugal, was able to afford a modest standard of living, and save money. Over the years since, it has taken more income to produce the same, or somewhat reduced, effect. Thirty years of two incomes helped us a great deal. Without pooling resources in a relationship, neither of us would have been able to prevent a steeper decline in what were modest expectations.
I see the same situation in many, many other working class people. They have worked steadily; they raised families; they led sober lives. As they now reach their 60s, they find themselves in a quite worrisome situation where retirement is in sight (say, in a decade) but they do not have sufficient resources to quit working. They didn't gamble, drink, drug, or piss away their security. They simply never made enough income.
Their parents were luckier. They were able to save, pay off their mortgages, and as they die off, can leave some resources for their children, but not enough to grant them security in their old age. The grandchildren of the lucky generation are probably going to be in debt for the rest of their lives.
Granted, there are working class people who are better off, will get a pension -- especially if they worked for government agencies at everything from teaching to road maintenance -- but they are nothing close to a majority.
If you mean breaching a variety of planetary ecosystem boundaries - not just global temperature, but biodiversity - then yes, that is an important point. But then the fact we are remaking nature can be understood two ways. It could be disaster. It could be the dawn of the new nature.
To honestly assess the situation, one would have to accept the possibility that it may all be "all right". It could be for instance that we are merely being sentimental about the virgin forest of the world, the tigers and elephants, all the evidence of the biosphere as it was. It is natural all that is being replaced by this new thing of the anthropocene.
I still vote for disaster - now on the grounds that our lifestyle doesn't look sustainable. And then in a secondary judgement, it doesn't even make us that happy.
However the counter to that is we may still be in the transition phase and we will come out the other side with a green sustainable economy within a now anthropomorphised biosphere.
So the general story is that we are transforming the planetary conditions of life at breakneck speed. This requires us to judge the future outcome and tell whether it is desirable. And the honest answer is that it is really hard to call.
I mean I grew up with the Cold War and the Limits to Growth. I've followed Peak Oil and the Anthropocene very closely. Logic always predicts disaster. And yet here we all still are.
The situation isn't terribly healthy. Zero interest rates, low oil prices and climate denial are all symptoms of free market failure. It feels exactly like the pregnant pause ahead of social collapse.
But I do remember it feeling much the same in the 1970s when the symptoms were rocketing interest rates, galloping inflation, soaring oil prices, the inevitability of WW3. :)
That is why I say step back and consider the larger picture, the thermodynamic view - the hidden hand of nature's imperative to entropify. You can't understand what we are doing unless you can see what is really driving us.
Here is how I summed it up a few years back, noting the numbers that tell the story.
Please provide reference. I looked but did not see this information. I have no way to compare it, it may be that these are excellent results compared to other countries, or dismal, without reference it is impossible to know. Also the time period referenced included the largest depression since the Great Depression of 1930. You are talking about an 18 trillion dollar GDP economy, which can yield unexpected numbers especially when you are talking about average per capita information.
The article you reference explains the effects of Quantitative Easing with the Central Bank initialed in response to the sharp down turn that was experienced between 2009 and 2012. The author states:
As far as Black, and other minority attendance in college. The following from Pew Research
This information does not jive with your worry. What I find disturbing is how expensive college, medical and other assets such as homes, autos and the rest have become. The amount of debt many have to incur to live the "American Dream', is obscene. At the same time the United States is spending more on defense that all other countries combined.
Why? We could have free medical and more for all with a third this money, instead we use it to protect our self from what? It is a great country that is all screwed up because the majority of its politicians are power hungry idiots, who are more interested in getting reelected then governing wisely . I also worry about the military, I simply do not trust them, how can two battle ships costing around a billion dollars each run into tankers which are several times their size...something is really very fucked up with the military.
We've seen what socialism and communism have resulted in, poverty for the masses. Should we try and revert to the gold standard and disregard the fiat system? I don't think so. Debt is a moral neutral. It doesn't enslave as people can default.
Regarding health, we do take a proactive measure to ensure it is in good standing, what's wrong with that?
I'm not buying this as a central issue. Our biological risk profile feels very secondary to our true modern concern, which is for "the self" - the Romantic agent expressing every variety of power.
So sure, our bodies are part of that. Beauty and muscles and vigour are all potencies that concern us. And the modern world does promise us their availability in abundance or surplus. For a while - ever since Victorian notions of physical culture and self-improvement - the way to achieve that kind of perfection as a physical agent was to really work at it. A lot of sweat produced the results. Now the promise is that money can buy you the steroids, the plastic surgery, the personal trainer to provide the motivation. Or actually, have enough money - be a billionaire - and everyone will treat you as the most georgeous stud.
But again, this is one facet of the larger concern. It is worth exploring as a theme, however it is not central.
Think again about Romanticism as the response to the Enlightenment. Newtonian mechanics, and then Darwinism, painted a new vision of the human condition. We were reduced to meat machines. That was an actual biologicalisation of humanity - a change wrought by new science.
Humans really are more than biology in being fundamentally socio-linguistic beings. We do represent something new on Earth in being formed by a further grade of semiosis, a further step in the evolutionary story. After genes and neurons came the new code of words. And so H Sapiens became the symbolic species, regulated by a new realm of conceptual abstractions.
We are cultural beings - as well as biological ones. And then along comes the Enlightenment that both recognised this clearly - the moral philosophy of Hobbes, Locke and others got the fact of the social contract - and yet also, the more telling lesson of science seemed to be how much we were actually just "smart apes", and "meat machines", driven by the "survival of the fittest".
So the Enlightenment saw us as socialised animals - and a lot of good moral, political and economic theory flowed from understanding that individual human agency is essentially a culturally forged phenomenon. But then the emphasis fell more on the scientific shock of discovering we were really "just animals" at base.
Romanticism was the confused reaction to that shock. But at the core of Romanticism was the dualistic repost that human agency was sacrosanct. It stemmed not from biology, or even sociology - all that mundane materialistic machinery - but from another dimension to existence, the mind, the spirit, the will, the Platonic Good. The true answers lay within the self - its feelings, its values, its striving.
So when it comes to any modern obsession with "biological risk profiles", it is dream bodies we are talking about, not real ones. Our actual physical health is quantifiably better. At least for the baby boom generation - not so much for the junk food and couch potato generation perhaps. But modern life - driven by Romanticism and its dreams of unbound selfhood, limitless personal agency - does ask us to judge our bodies by the impossible standards of new cultural mythologies.
Shit. Just watch a youtube clip of dudes doing parkour and feel your self-esteem plumet. What they can do is physically inhuman. And you can't unsee it. It is always going to be a benchmark lurking in the back of your thoughts. Multiply that by n other examples of bodily prowess or agency and it is easy to see why you wind up in a state of generalised disatisfaction.
The variety of the modern world - its surplus of personal opportunities - means that in fact everyone can be good at something. We can all train and excel in some way. Yet if everyone is indeed doing that, then we also wind up enveloped by the knowledge of all the million other skills we never personally mastered. We end up both with high self esteem with what we have achieved - perhaps a six-pack or being great at salsa - and low self esteem because the number of things we didn't and never will achieve is inevitably far greater.
Quoting StreetlightX
Again, I would now go back to the bigger picture of nature at the thermodynamic level. The real story of humanity - post the Industrial Revolution - is how we in fact evolved yet a further semiotic step. We invented mathematical language. Ordinary language was about cultural organisation, social interaction. Then it actually became talk about abstraction. This enabled agency - formal and final cause - at a pure technological level.
It seemed that by discovering nature's laws, that put us humans in control of nature. But nature got the last laugh there. It led to the forming of a new system of control that was supra-human. We did become enslaved to a new thermodynamic imperative. Neoliberalism, globalisation and financialisation are just now the symptoms of our having uncovered the possibilities of technology, and those possibilities then flowering as a new level of semiosis/dissipative structure. A new planetary super-organism.
The key is entropy. Until the industrial age, humanity lived of the daily solar flux. We survived on what sunshine had to give. Well, that was also an already mechanised and industrialised existence of a kind. Agriculture had already been through its technological revolution. But it's precarioiusness was tied very tightly to the environment. The rains, the pests, the soil fertility. And then the accompanying social perils of raiding tribes, feuding neighbours, tyrant kings.
But with the Industrial Revolution, humanity plugged itself into the new energy dense fossil fuels that could be dug out of the ground. That completely changed the course of history. Entropically, we were no longer constrained by the daily solar flux. We became politically and economically enslaved to the new globalised mission of "drill, baby, drill".
The financialisation of the world economy was just part of removing the final social barriers to our alignment to that thermodynamic imperative. As you say, derivatives seemed a rational mechanism for producing safe liquidity. They allowed the risks of capital investment to be socialised - spread over the whole of society ... the society which was then meant to benefit.
So what went wrong? Mostly that folk just haven't realised that we are not in control of our own desires. Romanticism misled us about the true nature of being human. We bought into the mythology of being self-actualising agents rather than culturally-evolved creatures. And so because we fundamentally have rejected "society" as the source of our being, we completely fail to recognise the super-societal emergence of a new world order - the one founded on the wants of fossil fuel ... its very natural desire to be combusted as fast as humanly possible.
Our era is the great conflagration. And we are looking the other way. We think it needs to be all about the dawn of H.Romanticus. We are looking forward to achieving the ultimate self-actualised agency where we can all be the best we can be. It is all self, self, self. And mostly that is great fun.
And philosophy is not immune to this distracting vision. Just like science, or politics, or economics, it has become thoroughly aligned with the secret entropic project of fossil fuel. In talking about the need for romantic re-enchantment - the human project where everyone achieves full agency - it is just playing into the great conflagration. Modern society, as a dissipative structure, depends on that "self-making" mythology as the way to ensure it does it best to remove each and every obstacle standing in the way of accelerating "production".
You can look at Dubai and see amazing skyscrapers erupting out of bare desert. Just add dollars and watch it all grow. But eyes properly atuned can see oil speaking directly about its desires. Dubai represents a safe haven for capital in the world's most precarious setting - the oil rich Middle East. It is the symbol that says everything is just fine. The machine is still running even as all the surrounding nations with their installed dictatorships start to burn their societies to the ground.
So the question is what is really going on and where does it lead?
I say we have to first understand this is all about nature - and the entropic imperative is what is natural. Philosophers especially have the least excuse to be fooled by the thought that neoliberalism/financialisation/etc are unnatural responses. We can't get caught up in the Romantic analysis of the human condition. We have to start with the blunt truth the Enlightenment was right about our biological and social being. From there we can examine our current story with accuracy.
And so what is that story? It is that a super-social level of organism has formed - the one busy burning its way through a finite glut of cheap fuel. The future of this super-organism is either catastrophic collapse or a managed transition to some replacement entropic environment. Maybe our inventiveness can keep the game going by green tech, fusion reactors, solar panels, etc. The physics at least tells us this is a possibility.
But the fact that a cartoon character like Trump now leads the free world (no worse, a reality show character) shows how dismal the prospects of being the ones to effect the change really are.
Trump resonates because he is saying the illusion of control and potency is enough. We can take our hands off the wheel and let events whisk us along while we posture and pout, play our little charades of being in charge of where the entropic imperative of fossil fuel wants to take us.
Quoting StreetlightX
This is what I object to. It is both right, but also missing the bigger point.
Putting a finger on it, you are speaking to what is right for the individual. It is all about the injustices and foolishness of modern life from the personal viewpoint. And my response is that there really is no such thing as the individual as imagined by Romanticism. We are always going to be formed as conscious agents by the semiotic systems of which we must partake.
Remember how you were taken by the enactive or ecological turn in psychology and cognitive neuroscience. It is all about being embodied in a real lived relationship with a world. This is a continuation of the same understanding.
There is no choice but to be entropic beings. That starts with being biological. And socially it continues. We can never transcend that materiality. But what we have lost sight of - through being caught up in the mythology of personal agency - is that there is a debate to be had, a practical one, about what control over Homo entropicus would look like.
What would it be like to be self-aware humanity able to formulate public policy that best befits our actual entropic situation?
Everyone is certainly moaning about the state of things. But few people are really asking the right kind of questions.
Just wanted to pick back up on this comment as well. I agree that this much of what is described here is not necessarily new - one thinks of Marx's comment, in 1848, regarding 'all that is solid melting into air' (a reference, again, to capital's ability to abolish all mediations bar it's own need to accumulate) - but this is why I think (following Melinda Cooper), that something has changed with the birth of biopolitics. Basically, there was a point at least in which the body itself could be relied upon as a kind of fall-back in the face of any socio-political tumult: the body at least offered a kind of refuge or shelter from the devastation wrought 'out there' ("whatever happens, I least I have my health").
With the birth of biopolitics however, not even the body is exempt form the circuits of built-in precarity: what you essentially get is a kind of collapse of one of the central orienting distinctions of intelligible life, which is that between the 'inside' and the 'outside' of one's self, which enters into - to use Agamben's favoured phrase - a zone of indistinction. This is what's at stake in the medicalization of life. And once this happens, the categories that once used to exempt the body from it's circuits now begin to capture it: beyond the much mentioned 'commodification' of the body (in terms of say, stem cells, DNA sequences, and other, now 'patentable' biological 'innovations'), you also get - as again charted by Cooper - the militarization of biology, where the body itself becomes a site of security concern -
Cooper: "The domains of life that neoliberalism has sought to incorporate into commercial and trade law over the past two decades are now being forcibly recruited into an expansive politics of military security. Increasingly, then, any counterpolitics of health, ecology, and life will need to engage with the pervasive reach of the war on terror; to contest, in other words, the growing collusion between neoliberalism's politics of life and the imposition of a permanent state of warfare." This is also why, for someone like Agamben, the state of civil war counts as the dominant paradigm of our age: not international war but civil war, in which the boundaries again between the enemy 'out there' and the enemy' in here' are left indistinct, thus again licensing the most awful of atrocities. Roberto Esposito has in turn characterized our present condition as one of a generalized 'auto-immunity', where the body - whose distinction between the biological and the civic has been rendered inoperative - now attacks itself.
Beyond commodification and warfare, one can imagine other places in which categories once applicable to non-humans gradually shade into human considerations - I have in mind Agamben's other studies on the growing indistinction between animal and human, law and life, the sacred and the profane, etc.
So again, while it's true that this represents a culmination of long-term trends, what's changed is the specificity of that movement which has now increasingly encircled even the body, which at least at one point could be left out of it. In Marxist parlance, capital has set it's sights not only on the means of production, but on the means of (biological) reproduction as well. This change needs also to be tracked in tandem with the temporal shift in which capital, generalizing the debt form, now beings to place more and more importance on not just the mode of production, but on the speculative mode of prediction which underlies it's upheaval of temporal categories as well (cf. the work of Ivan Ascher on the 'portfolio society' which we now inhabit). But this last is a larger point that needs elaboration.
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Replies to others later, when I have the time.
Why all this defense spending? Obviously, there is the self-perpetuating military-industrial complex which lobbies hard to keep all sorts of contracts flowing. Then there is the money we spend to do something on behalf of other people. What we do for the Europeans is presumably clear, what we are doing for the Iraqis and Afghanis is exceedingly unclear (at least to me). Plus there is the task of patrolling the open seas so that wicked nations like China or Russia don't decide to assert their self-interests. Then we need to be ready to totally destroy either the armed might of, or the mere existence of the North Korean state.
This from 1953
Yeah, this is very true: debt isn't in and of itself a problem, but it matters when placed in the context of a whole host of other developments. Specifically, the expansion of credit and debt needs to be balanced out by expanded capacity for income growth. But this is exactly what isn't happening. In fact, the expansion of credit was proposed precisely as a solution to stagnating wage increases for the low and middle classes. Couple this with the divestment in public goods, the dismantling of the welfare state, and the slow death of labor law, and you have recipe in which debt becomes dangerous.
And again, the other dimension here is the securitization of debt by banks enabled by the deregulation of financial markets: this basically means that debt now becomes a source of income which is used in turn to fund projects such that it becomes a structural part of the market; the creation of debt is both incentivized and necessary. And because banks - the very institutions that supply credit - are one and the same institutions that make tremendous amounts of money on this securitization, a market failure translates not merely to the crippling of this or that industry, but the very banking system itself. In essence what this means is that any shock to the system can no longer be localized, but ramifies throughout the economy, which has become more and more fragile. It's this interlocking system - of which debt is a part - that makes it so dangerous. The stakes of default are higher.
Otherwise I think you're right that the focus on public debt, and the almost total eclipse of any focus on private debt is, in fact, an utterly skewed approach to things. And again at stake is at kind of self-fulfilling prophecy that neoliberalism sets into motion: the demand for privatization and tax cuts is incoherently coupled with a demand for keeping public debt low at all costs: the very avenues of revenue raising are forcelosed at the exact same time as the state is asked lower it's debts. It's madness. And where this leads is by now well known - the cruelty of austerity which further entrenches states into cycles of debt, while at the same time destroying the state's capacity to encourage economic growth and placing them into what effectively amounts to a relation of debt imperalism. Greece is a well known case, but this is happening too in other places like - most recently, Sri Lanka. So again it's not debt as such that's the issue, but the economic complexes in which it functions to make it problematic.
So again: debt is OK if coupled with the ability to raise revenue/incomes. But in absence of the latter, it becomes fatal. And neoliberalism does exactly this.
People paint things as socio-economic because they think that they're poor if people have more than them. Homicides rates are extremely highly predicted by social inequality (not poverty). It isn't that people are poor, it's that some people have way too much, and that makes everyone feel like they don't have enough. This is a problem with status. Because we paint it as a money and stuff problem just shows how much we equate status with money and stuff. There are shit-ass wastes of space that are highly respected because they have so much stuff.
It wouldn't matter at all what it was that signified status, as long as it existed, and could be accumulated and displayed, there would be the haves and the have nots.
I don't see a solution, all I see in these discussions is Cain, plotting.
On middle class income growth:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/us-middle-class-incomes-reached-highest-ever-level-in-2016-census-bureau-says/2017/09/12/7226905e-97de-11e7-b569-3360011663b4_story.html?utm_term=.bf4157d9abbf
On black American median wealth:
https://www.theguardian.com/inequality/2017/sep/13/median-wealth-of-black-americans-will-fall-to-zero-by-2053-warns-new-report
Re: the Wapo article, I was actually directed to it by a political scientist who noted that the celebratory tone of the title actually betrays the facts I listed above Re: the 'highest ever level' is a tiny increase in when measured against the 1999 high.
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And for Australia - which I don't imagine too many people care about but which matters to me!:
http://www.smh.com.au/business/the-economy/a-coffee-a-year-how-much-australian-incomes-have-grown-since-2008-20170919-gyk983.html
"Australian weekly household incomes have grown by less than the price of a coffee a year since 2008" - i.e. AUD $3 over 9 years. coupled with: "At the same time, house prices in Sydney and Melbourne have risen by 100 per cent to reach medians of up to $1 million". One can only imagine the abysmal debt to income growth ratio.
You misunderstand: it's not so much that this this is a 'central issue' so much as that it marks the crossing of a threshold that was previously uncrossed, and indeed, uncrossable. And this crossing relieves us of the last bastion we had of excluding ourselves from the immediacy of risk that has always marked the 'cultural' realm. See my reply to fdrake above on what I mean. If you follow it, I'm entirely on board with the fact that we are more than our biology: in fact, it was this 'more than' that was co-opted into the circuits of risk long before the body. What is new is the introduction of the body into those circuits in the form of biopolitics. So you're preaching to the choir here in insisting that we're socio-cultural beings no less than biological ones. I not only agree, but the entirely line of reasoning presupposes it.
So I appreciate your entropic perspective which I think quite nicely compliments much of what I wrote here. As I said, this is a relatively new area of exploration for me, so I'm very much open to these ideas. I've had Robert Biel's the Entropy of Capitalism on my reading list for a few months now since discovering it's existence, which I'm hoping will fill out some of the pieces here. But as it stands my interest is in the confounding of categories of the intelligible, the collapse of temporal distinctions and the kinds of actions they licence. I'm interested in tracing the specific modulations of 'the human' which require a closer attention to sociology and historical ontology (in the vein of Foucault) - changes in our understanding of risk, of time, etc, and the specific, concrete mechanisms which enable them - than it does entropy, even as they (can) compliment each other.
And I'm an old school spiritualist :P - look at the spiritual climate of the times and try to adjust to it, for you can certainly not change it by yourself. In my view, material circumstances - what you call political economy and beyond - are driven by spirit. Thus, to really succeed with any significant change, one needs the help of the gods as the Ancients would say. If they are on your side, nothing can stop you, and if they're not, then nothing can help you.
But of course, propagandists will never look at the facts as they really are. Just put a nice graph showing total value, and show how the US eclipses everyone else put together.
The real question though should be, if the US spends so much on military, why doesn't it completely dominate the world? Its military should be many tens of years ahead of everyone else. But I don't think this is actually the case.
It is definitely a noble mission to feed the starving, and cloth the naked, as it were, but beyond those bare minimums, nothing that doesn't become terrible, and destructive is foreseeable to me. People cannot be made equal in any way that matters significantly.
And China? It is close to USA in GDP, but no where near US in defense spending. It has maintained it at 1.3% of GDP for last several years. Less than half USA defense spnding, so much for your argument (N)
As stated, USA does not get what it pays for in defense spending.
Yes, the US could possibly reduce defense budget to 2-2.5%. My only question is why US military is not tens of years ahead of everyone else already...
Sorry but I'm still not seeing any clear issue of concern. Let's look at the examples you offer:
Quoting StreetlightX
So I take it the argument is the body used to be your own property - some kind of refuge. But now that aspects of human biology are now ownable as intellectual property somehow that becomes a new source of unease for ordinary individuals?
I'm not getting the ring of truth.
If you could claim patents on my genetics and go clone a whole bunch of me's, making profits and not needing my permission, then maybe I would freak out. Or maybe I might be so narcissistic as to think great, those guys will be good company.
But anyway, the point is that biotech can't do that. In the real world of today, it is commodifying stuff I would regard as generic and not personal. It wouldn't feel like an existential threat unless I start to feel left out in some fashion. Like maybe when I can't afford the vast benefits of stem cell injections into my brain that are making everyone else so much smarter (like next step Gattaca).
But knowing biology is being exploited commercially on a generic way does't sound like something that would make folk feel insecure within their own bodies. I don't see a connection.
Quoting StreetlightX
OK, to take this quote, the suggestion here is that there is a health-affirming politics that is in a tussle with some neoliberal need for permanent destabilisation of the otherwise self-actualising individual. Pretty classic Romantic guff I would reply. Already we are expected to side with the good guys who stand for true individualism vs the always oppressive constraints of society,
Yes, the war on drugs and the war on terror are familiar scare tactics. Orwell predicted them. But they seem more inspired by the personal political insecurities of presidents - the need to bind a nation like the US by presenting a "visible enemy", a collective existential threat. Why would we think they advance the agenda of neoliberalism? At best, they a justification to mask a grab for control over resources. So an economic (and existential) agenda perhaps. But not one that is actually neoliberal in philosophy, more old fashioned colonialism.
Again, I see some extreme language but little to justify that rhetoric. And no link back from any general eco-fuzzy counterpolitics vs Kleinian shock doctrine arm-wrestle to your thesis about a resulting personal sense of biological precariousness.
Quoting StreetlightX
What does this mean? If capital is doing anything, isn't it just suppressing reproduction - as no one can afford time off for having kids? Reproduction seems only something capital hasn't thought through very well. So what do you have in mind here?
Quoting StreetlightX
Yep. It is true that quite a few countries are run by former financial market whizzes now, and literally economies are being run along portfolio investment lines. Derivatives are used to create nation-level liquidity. The theory is then that money will flow freely into the best national investment opportunities. A nation can then choose its own appetite for risk. Does it want to run a conservative or an aggressive fund.
So that is an important new development arising out of neoliberal thinking - the financialisation of national balance sheets.
But it seems way distance from any biopolitics or bodily precariousness. You haven't actually drawn a connection I can see.
I'm not getting any reason to see some link between the logic of neoliberalism and a new bodily sense of individual precariousness. And it is not because I don't want to see.
I agree that neoliberalism is about turning everything that composes life into a tradable commodity. That sounds a good idea, but then always results in an opaque and weakly regulated system that is easy to game. So that is a huge source of psychic instability. It erodes personal or community level control. The economy becomes as impersonal and capricious as the weather. We become helpless in its tides.
But where is the overt risk of your biology being monetised by impersonal forces? So far, there is not a single example of what this might mean in a way that is a notable fact.
Yeah, it's an interesting question. When you consider that the US has spent more than the rest of the world combined on its military year after year after year, and yet its observable military is only fractionally larger than other militaries, it makes me think secrete weapons (although not so secret now that I've told everyone).
Quoting apokrisis
I think these two ideas are related. Let's put ourselves in the shoes of the individual. Let's say he's educated, thoughtful, but not rich. He has one vote in a democracy. He is politically negligible. Maybe he's charismatic. But unless he's famous, this charism is also negligible. His voice is a voice lost among millions of voices.
Our individual is faced with a choice. Should he spend his free time away from work reading and thinking about how his nation or even global civilization could and should be improved or even saved from collapse? If he expects no power, than such knowledge is of little value for him. It's not only arguably of little value, the attainment of such knowledge is highly uncertain in the first place. What he is educated enough to know is that the intellectuals do not agree. Those who specialize either can't come to a consensus or cannot be sorted out by the non-specialist.
Do you see where I'm going with this? He can justify a selfish "Romanticism." He can embrace something akin to stoicism, skepticism, hedonism --attempt an individual solution. He can view his actions in the world as a stupidity to be endured. He can climb the career ladder by playing along with structures he doesn't believe in. He can pay his bills, hide in his little house, and pursue his idiosyncratic notion of happiness. Perhaps for you this is the opposite of Romanticism, since it is cynical. But abandoning the folly of the world aligns with the Christian component in Romanticism.
In short, I think you're saying that Romantics resist admitting things are out of their control. If so, I disagree. Or at least there is a "fuck the world" component to some Romanticism.
I agree. Freedom leads to economic inequality. If we could somehow start everyone with the same property and offer them the same education, tiny differences in genetics and the evolutions of their personality (in which chance will play) a role will "snowball" into bigger personality differences. Grasshoppers and ants. Most significant perhaps is the inequality (lack of sameness) of the hierarchies these individuals use to evaluate self and others. This factor is probably how massive economic inequality is possible in a democracy. Why doesn't the poor majority just tax the rich and take it wants legally? Because they identify themselves and their position in their private hierarchies in terms of culture, religion, race, etc., as much as they do via class.
I complete agree. But "obsession" is slightly pejorative. It's easier to put a coat on than the heat the entire building, especially if we share the building with strangers with different notions of cold/hot. Depoliticization can also stem from the perception of a stalemate. In the US, for instance, there just is not a dominant vision of how the world should be in the first place. Maybe I'm sick of wearing my coat in the building but see the futility in trying to build a consensus.
Perhaps I see others arguing about the thermostat to no great effect. I certainly agree that the problem relative to any image of the way things should be is going to be systematic. But the problem itself can be described as a function of an idiosyncratic notion of cold/hot.
I agree with you there. We do wind up having to make personal meaning of our own existence. But then the general political issue becomes how much of a burden that is for "ordinary folk".
This is the real question we would be asking of neoliberalism (if we can just set aside for the moment that larger question of whether it should be allowed to rape the Earth the way it is doing).
We all want to live lives that are meaningful. And our social system should deliver us that. Neoliberalism's promise on that score is we are given an unlimited possibility of the self-actualisation of our choice. It sounds just like the Romantic dream of being allowed to express our own personal potential to its fullest extreme.
But just as obviously, that neoliberal promise is pretty hollow and burdensome in practice. Who really needs its version of self-actualisation which is mostly about extreme consumption or extreme capital accumulation (power now being monetised via the new economics)?
So then the question becomes what should the average person do to construct personal meaning within a world that basically looks to be going mad (or as I put it, developing its own supra-human identity)?
Stoicism and cynicism seem like a response. But I would say that is retreating inwards and living in sufferance.
It does have some advantages so is not completely wrong. But there is the alternative of reaching out consciously to reforge local community. That is a positive response which would then collectively start to become an actual counterpolitical movement to roll back neoliberalism.
And indeed re-localisation has been a major theme among political activist for a decade now. If the problem is that globalisation has resulted in a life denominated in US dollars, then you can grab back power by creating local community time-banks and local community currencies.
The theory is just obvious. And you will find people trying to do that in every smart town or city now. But of course it does seem like a token scale effort for the most part. Neoliberalism still holds sway over the majority of lives. It is the way ordinary folk think. They have internalised the oppressor if you like (although, as I say, neoliberal theory itself is more neutral, less black and white, than its practice). So the current counter-politics is trialling change in small fashion. But it is also pretty vocal and clear about its approach.
And in fact - manifesting as the social enterprise approach beloved of Millenials - it is itself quite neoliberal in philosophy. So the economic model isn't really so much the problem. It is the lack of a place for social values and green values within a "market" approach to living life that creates a systemic ill.
This is why the kinds of authors cited in the OP make me despair. It's retreaded Marxism. And Marxism was retreaded Romanticism. We already know that model of socio-politics to be a dismal failure, consigned to the dustbin of history.
The way forward is to use neoliberalism against itself by building back in the local social and green values that the globalised version has managed to strip out. There is an actual pragmatic philosophical discussion going on out there in the real world, within every town and city with any intellectual capital, that goes right over the OP's head.
Of course then I have to go back to the larger fossil fuels story. We are still screwed unless a localised neoliberalism can connect us financially to a post-fossil fuel productive economy.
Again, that is why the OP prompts hair-pulling. We really don't need Marxist theorists fighting the same old class wars when they are dealing with things - like debt and entropy - about which they are philosophically clueless. They only muddy the water with their meandering musings at a time when utter clarity of thought is what's required.
Actually, they did do that. While the US, like every other society, has always had hierarchies and inequality of wealth, there were two episodes of extreme inequality -- the Gilded Age (so named by Mark Twain) anding in the early 20th century, and the person time, which started around 1975 (give or take a few years). What was it that allowed these things to happen?
Mostly governmental policy. A huge amount of money was made in the dominate industry of the 19th century -- railroads -- and it was mostly made by government grants to the railroads, which were then milked for cash. Plus, there was no income tax at the time. That came about in 1920. By then a reform period had cooled off the railroad/iron/steel industries.
What triggered the second, current feeding frenzy by the rich (making them super richer) were changes in tax law, allowing them to keep and shelter much more wealth. (There were also some new digital industries which made a lot of people quite rich).
Outside of these two episodes, the ratio between the highest paid executive and the average worker in a company was stable and not absurdly exaggerated.
But what triggered or allowed these changes in tax law? I'm not trying to imply that there is a simple answer. I doubt there is.
Because defense spending has followed a pattern first pioneered by the railroads back in the late 19th century. A handful of extremely avaricious railroad entrepreneurs (aka thieves) lobbied congress to build, and over build, railroads through the largely empty great plains to the economically small west coast -- the "transcontinental railroads". They were mostly a complete economic failure.
The failed because there was little demand for the transportation the several transcontinental roads offered. Once the railroads imported a few million European settlers into North Dakota to Kansas, the Missouri river to the Rockies, they produced a glut of agricultural products that exceeded the demand, depressing the ag market they depending on. Similarly, the silver mines opened near the railroads in the SW exceeded the demand for silver. The real purpose of the railroads was to get cash from the government for the "entrepreneurs".
Transcontinental railroads would have been needed anyway, just 30 to 50 years later.
President Eisenhower warned the American people of the Military Industrial Complex in his farewell address. His advice was ignored. Industry would use the military to milk procurement budgets, and the military would use industry to accumulate cargo that enhanced their sense of power, but generally didn't work all that well.
We have had repeated rounds of procurement in major weapons systems that just didn't deliver performance. Compare the B52 with numerous high tech bomber and fighter systems. The B52 has been flying for 60 years and still works well. The fighters sometimes show up dead on arrival. Too complicated, not reliable, waaaay too expensive, difficult to repair and service, crash-prone, etc.
Granted, not everything the military and industry work together on turns to shit. The nuclear arsenal seems to be very reliable. The AWACS have turned out well. We have a number of systems that are quite good, and quite a few that are so-so.
The corporations and military leaders got what they wanted the same way the railroad thieves got what they wanted. They descended on congressmen en masse, out maneuvered the objectors, a bribe or two here, a very generous donation there, maybe a junket onboard a bomber or submarine... you get the picture. Heavy duty lobbying.
Two things. #1, pressure from wealthy individuals and businesses. How do wealthy people pressure congress? They underwrite their campaign costs, they give them gifts (under the table), they supply congressmen's staff with texts for tax bills with all the details worked out, and so forth. They also threaten congressmen with a loss of the goodies, or that they will move a plant out of their district, or will invest somewhere else--and that they will make it clear the congressman was responsible.
#2. Political parties are sometimes swayed by seductive economic theory, like supply-side economics, and trickle down economics. Lowering taxes on the rich will produce a wave of new investment which will benefit everyone. The economic benefits given to the rich trickle down to everyone. Win win. The trouble is that these schemes do not always work. Once in a while they do, but lower taxes on the rich too much while increasing spending is a sure-fire way to increase the annual deficit and the national debt.
Look, the masses only need to be appeased enough to keep them from rioting. The rich have to be pleased and be given plenty of real treasure, not just bread crumbs which the poor get. Since the wealthiest 1% control so much of the wealth, they are in a very real position to punish congressmen who get in the way.
I take it that you don't fear the heat death. Neither do I.
I will be dead long before then. I'm just making a point of the gulf between private and public concern. Why do some work toward changes that they will not live to see? Perhaps for their descendants. Perhaps for other humans in general. Perhaps because it is "the" great outstanding problem. It's public intellectual's Mount Everest. Of course it's fascinating, too. Like picking a scab.
I don't know whether I am proud or ashamed to say that I feel pretty adapted to this mad world. I treat the madness I see lurking on the edges of my daily life as I might see a snake under a rock in the woods on the way to the well. I run my calculated risks, take pleasure in thinking my situation (writing this sort of thing) along with the normal pleasures, and hope the system doesn't disintegrate completely on my watch.
Truth be told, I worry more about lower back pain and skin cancer than global warming.
I have listened to the cacophony of voices for many years. Differing diagnoses, differing cures. If I am choose among Hellenistic descriptors for myself, I should probably go with skepticism. They enjoy serious conversation with a certain detachment --or "selfish" attachment to the local and private.
Where are you in this? Are you passionate about local communities? Or are you more of a Zizek? The world exist, messy as hell, as an opportunity to theorize about it?
Good point, this contrast between appeasing and pleasing. Still, one might think that a political party (after a rough start) could actually swell by delivering on its promises to tax the rich. The novel 1984 comes to mind. Winston sneaks off to talk to a "prole" about history and the prole blathers on about how his local bar used to serve a much bigger or better beer (something like that.) But that's not quite right for today. Some are completely tuned out, but others quite tuned in --except to the culture war and not the class war.
My thesis would be that the rich can only buy the government by dividing the poor. The poor are not innocent victims here, though. They just find alternative measures of human worth. Piety/religion on the one hand, perhaps, and a progressive humanism on the other hand. Part of my thesis is that this culture war is made possible by its participants actually having enough for the most part. A well-fed human (or even a stuffed-with-Cheetoes human) shifts quite naturally to symbolic hierarchy.
If we were truly as materialist (obsessed precisely with possessing enviable property) as some insist, the culture war would be dwarfed by pure economic envy. A grassroots party would explode and there would be a (perhaps permanent) bloodless revolution. Of course this would be a disaster. We would be machines utterly absorbed in a point system.
Well I have certainly lived a life of wealth and selfish privilege. I have been doing my own thing from an early age. :)
So yes, I don't get my hands dirty much in actual community practice. Partly because the theoretical value of that is a recently recognised thing, but mostly because I'm too lazy to spend evenings on committees or weekends on working bees.
Yet then I am recognised and even earn a living from offering what enough people find to be useful analysis. And selfishly that feels like a reasonable contribution.
So the honest answer would be that I started out in cynical mode and turned that into a paying gig. And I'm still a disengaged cynic at heart. Or at least by long habit. But that is also a good basis for understanding the world as it is and as it could or should be.
Thanks for a well-written, honest answer. That you make a living offering your analyses is enviable! I continue to indefinitely postpone writing "my book" (without expectation of pay). My career is intellectual but not philosophical. So it's one kind of thinking at work and another at play (the detached and form-fascinated contemplation of "terrible" ideas). But, anyway, lots of thinking. So small-talk, however friendly, moves a little slow for my taste. Hence no longing for lost community, but only a desire for rich, "serious" or intense conversation as is sometimes found on forums like this and among good friends.
I can't say that I envy the rich much. If I have health, quiet, some food, and an internet connection...then I'm OK. Happier than most.
They did in the early 1900s -- the Progressives were fed up with graft and corruption. They elected reformers to the presidency (Theadore Roosevelt), progressives to congress, governorships, and the state legislatures. Milwaukee had 3 socialist mayors, one serving from 1916 to 1940. That one, Daniel Hoan, was considered the best, most effective mayor Milwaukee had. Farmers formed the Nonpartisan League in the upper midwest to fight for a fairer deal for agriculture; women won the vote, prohibition was instituted, and an income tax was instituted, to replace the revenue the government had received from taxes on alcohol. The trusts were attacked; Standard Oil was was broken up; so were the railroad trusts, and some others.
WWII happened in the middle of all this, as did the Russian Revolution in 1917. The RR of 1917 started a "red scare" which along with the KKK set back some reform elements, such as labor and civil rights reformers.
The Great Depression decade saw a resurgence of labor organizing, communist agitation in many social justice areas, and of course things like Social Security, Unemployment Insurance, and other New Deal programs. Then WWII, and an economic boom which benefitted many working class people. But, the good times couldn't last, and Republican--who by Reagan had migrated considerably towards a more extreme conservative position--started lowering tax rates on the rich while wasting a lot of money on the fucking Star Wars Initiative -- a trillion dollar boondoggle. (Before Vietnam, the US was pretty much out of debt.) Now were in very deep doo doo.
The socialist mayors of Milwaukee. See, no horns!
Thanks for the info. I don't read about this stuff often, but I was under the impression that class-consciousness was stronger once than it is now. I've watched some Chomsky documentaries, etc. It is indeed quite fascinating, but (for reasons sketched above) I never waded in that deeply.
As no one from nowhere special with no connections, I grew up experiencing the economy as another layer of nature. I adapted to it as individual. Give me just "enough" though and I'll immerse myself in the matrix of abstract non-revolutionary thought. Or maybe it's revolutionary, but it's a private revolution --a leaning in to the atomization that capitalism arguably encourages.
But the argument is not so much that life itself becomes a commodity but that it has been co-opted into circuits of speculative finance. It's the form of commodification that matters - in this case a matter of financialization and not 'merely' commodification. The key distinction is that of temporal orientation: unlike a commodity, the value of a patented cell line (for example) is not so much it's exchange value - what it can be bought and sold for according to the law of supply and demand - but the promise it holds for future innovation. Life itself attracts finance and becomes generative of surplus by it's mere fact of existence. And while life becomes financialized, what is commodified is not life, but it's promise. What is traded are promises.
The crux of it is that this is exactly the same commodity form as debt. Debt too is now available for financialization in the form of the promise, and in both cases, the promise is self-generative of surplus. Here's Cooper: "What comes to light here is the violence of the debt form and the flipside of the promise—if it is to actualize at all, capital's future embryoid body will need to draw on a continuous "gifting" of reproductive labor and tissues. In this way capital's dream of promissory self-regeneration finds its counterpart in a form of directly embodied debt peonage.... Wealth creation in the pure debt form—the regeneration of money from money and life from life, without final redemption."
In other words this cooption of life into the circuits of speculative finance converges with debt as the high-point of capitalist accumulation - a fantasy realized of money and life that generates more money, indefinitely, by, again, the sheer fact of their existence. The Marxist point - which I only mentioned really more as an aside - is that this fantasy is just that, a fantasy insofar as this self-generativity is bound to encounter limits of the real, whence the GFC - in which the pure promise of the debt form was no longer sustainable re: 'toxic' mortgages in the US housing market - or the popping of the biotech bubble which happened last year (when investors finally gave up waiting on the unrealized promises of patented cell lines and so on).
(The perfect coincidence of life and debt surplus is probably nowhere better exhibited than in the destruction of the centuries old Iraqi agricultural sector: after the toppling of Saddam and the destruction of the Iraqi seed bank, Iraqi farmers were prohibited from using any other seed than Monsanto's particular patented GM ones, which, because of other orders that further made it impossible for them to recycle seeds, meant they had to buy new seed each crop cycle (further, they could only use Monsanto patented herbicides, which kill all other crops than Monsanto's own). And of course, the seed purchases where financed by generous loan offers placing the farmers into a situation of more or less forced indebtedness: the loans could only be used for Monsanto's seed, which basically locked them in. The result, in Wendy Brown's words, were that: "Organic, diversified, low-cost, ecologically sustainable wheat production in Iraq is finished." See the account in Brown, Undoing the Demos).
But even this is not what I'm super concerned with. My real interest lies in the collapse of temporal categories occasioned by such developments: by tethering calculations of risk in the present to the quite literally incalculable speculative promises/fears of the future, almost every and any 'preventative' action is licenced. Essentially what is at stake is a temporal 'state of exception' in which the boundaries between the calculable and the incalculable are effaced such that there is cartre blanche to do anything whatsoever in the name of the incalculable. Hence the widespread 'need' to enact legislation - all around the Western world - that violates fundamental rights in order to protect us from Godknowswhat impending, immanent, but incalculable risk of.... ???. A kind of permanent state of emergency, licenced by temporal collapse. The ubiquitous threat of 'terrorism', unsurprisingly finds a perfectly receptive audience in neoliberal societies.
One consequence of this is that society can no longer be made to bear the costs of well, anything: "Contrary to the philosophy of the social state, [neoliberalism] teaches that the collective risks gathered under the banner of the nation can no longer be (profitably) collectivized, normalized, or insured against. Henceforth, risk will have to be individualized while social mediations of all kinds will disappear" (Cooper) - note that this rounds out what you say about the valorizaion of individual self-actualization against society. What I'm interested in, again, is the mechanisms that underlie this shift. So while I agree with you that of course neoliberalism militates against society and the romanticzes of the individual, this is so obvious a point that it's been made by every critic of neoliberalism since basically time immemorial. But these myths don't just spring up out of nowhere - the point is the chart the mechanisms that have brought it into being, and have allowed it to catch on.
How doesn't the biotech bubble impact in a way that makes me feel precarious about myself. Ditto GM crops? Ditto the financial games played on third world farmers?
If this wasn't written in such tortured prose, it would be clear that it is nothing more than a list of concerns with no logical connection.
Fostering a sense of crisis to be able to push through a political agenda is quite the opposite of creating the false market optimism on which speculative bubbles depend. That is just one example of how none of the dots connect here.
So sure, biotech is another bubble asset. But that isn't a "debt" issue.
The GFC was about turning debt into a tradable asset class. The claim was risk could be packaged to create financial instruments that performed like good old unexciting bonds (plus a percent). Biotech is a risky stock, an upfront gamble. You might be buying a future promise, but a naked risk one, not a financialised one that claims to remove the uncertainty in the return.
To confuse the two is financial illiteracy.
I think you need better examples of how biology is being financialised rather than just commodified. And then any actual example of that making folk feel a bodily precariousness of some personal form.
Except at no point did I suggest anything about 'fostering a sense of crisis'. So just one example of how you're a bit slow on the dot connecting front to begin with.
Anyway, as usual you're singularly incapable of holding a discussion without turning it into some sort of dick measuring competition. I almost forgot why you're an awful person to discuss anything with. Thanks for the provocations anyway I guess.
So at no point did you suggest anything about the fostering of a sense of crisis? Hmm.
Quoting StreetlightX
Perhaps if you posted a coherent argument it would go better for you. Have a go at writing out your OP in plain language without all the fancy words. And with proper examples to support your point at each turn. See how much sense you think it makes then.
Yep, I wrote that in a paragraph about the changing temporal relations of risk, and how that legitimises legislation like that. But sure, yeah, read the word that doesn't appear it in once into it. And then complain I'm using big words. What a joke.
Quoting apokrisis
Big scary words hurt po po? Streetlight type slow for po po now? Don't scared okay po po?
This is wrong on so many accounts. It doesn't mention the fact that there are automatic stabilizer built into the economy that prevents excessive debt from happening. Such as inflation. But, so what; that's a dream when you're in debt.
Furthermore, debt does not equal economic fallibility. For example, it took a lot of debt to make the Manhattan Project happen; but, then look at the results of that investment. Similarly, the technological revolution was largely made possible by military elements originating from the government (DARPA, etc.), a la Keynesian economics (which seems to be criticised and ridiculed here). Obviously, the military doesn't have a media outlet of their own; but, it doesn't take a genius to realize how much that America has produced from investigations and analysis done by the military.
@'StreetlightX'
I read this and the developments in the thread a few times, there's something I'd quite like to highlight with regard to the generalisation of the debt form, in particular sketching a way how 'categories once applicable to non-humans gradually shade into human considerations' in this manner from a roughly Marxist perspective - or one way this may've happened at least.
Speculative ability has always been a feature of the expansion of accumulation, in particular businesses expand typically through a loan in their initial stages. Attaining such a thing is classically based on estimates of the profitability of the businesses' endeavours. In essence, this is taking labour and attaching an exchange value to it in the future. Implicit in this is the quantification and operationalisation (numerical representation) of the accumulation of capital itself. I think the way you usually denote this procedure is intensification. This description raises the question: how do we get from the intensification of a business' future to the intensification of the individual? This is an essentially historical question, but I would like to say that a reasonable amount of the blame can be stuck on health insurance.
Health insurance in its earliest form (in America) popped up during the Great Depression in America. [An aside: maybe this is a historical predecessor of precarity] This was typically to ensure that if an individual suffered an accident, then they would be compensated. If you attempt to do a profit maximisation on this, it encourages speculative activity from insurance and an evaluation of how likely and how soon an individual is to receive a payment from it. This would then not just be a quantification of an individual's current health, but on their future health prospects - conceiving of the individual as a risk profile to be hedged and managed. If an individual is deemed an acceptable risk (+expected money) then their money will be used in speculation to get more money. Thus the individual's body is intensified through their predicted value.
It would then be a question of how the intensification of the body spread to the level of ideology rather than as part of business practice. I imagine the growth of group awareness of experimental science, and the development of quantitative rather than qualitative methods in those fields (especially medicine) would play a role.
For instance here, if you weren't suggesting the deliberate fostering of a sense of crisis, then why would tying current investments to future returns be automatically a bad thing? Especially when the argument you want to make is that it is merely a vague or indistinct thing.
As I point out, the biotech bubble would be the product of investor optimism. It has nothing to do with debt economics or financialised balance sheets as such. So why - even inadvertently - would it create some dramatic sense of precariousness?
If you tried to write out your clever musings in plain language, they would just fall apart as there is nothing substantive by way of logical links to hold them together. Sorry if it upsets you to have it pointed out.
Yes, but one of the foundations upon which the USA is a vigilant and informed public. That the Republicans keep the population vigilant with invisible enemies from within and outside the borders, then that's a political issue, not an economic one.
So, why didn't QE lead to much higher inflation rates? Or more simply, why is inflation so low in the US? Because most of the money is invested or held in offshore havens. If that money entered the money stream in terms of investments and loans, then what would that result in? Revenue and growth, I suppose.
When Mr. Apo - "symmetry" "constraint" "triadic" - Krisis accuses you of jargon mongering. You couldn't make this up if you tried.
Such forces can be manipulated, worked with, though perhaps not controlled. The problem is that our standard means of understanding and working with things are the result of a culture that takes natural science as paradigmatic for, uh, pretty much everything. Thing is, you can't render things like market forces or technological change intelligible using methods analogous to the study of chemical reactions or whatever. Or if you can, you can only do so using very, very loose analogies, to the point where it becomes more art than science.
I don't think that the answer is a post-capitalist society, per Zizek's haunting aphorism that it's easier to imagine the apocalypse than the end of capitalism. At least, that's not a workable next step, or even end goal, given that it's not even visible at this point.
In the end, I have to question whether a strictly economic analysis is appropriate here. I understand that this is all very political, of course, but so much of it is enabled/dictated by technological change that I don't think we can analyze it like Marxist historians looking for contradictions in the system or some such. You need to bring in a wider conceptual context to get out of your "mapping" phase, methinks.
It is not the individual words so much - although plenty of them are way more obscure than talk of symmetry or constraints. It is the dense thickets of abstractions with no pauses for illustrative supporting examples.
And on top of that, the overall hesitant tone where a concern is introduced in one paragraph, only for us to be told that wasn't really it, here is the new real concern. Your posts unfold as a series of self-corrections arriving at no resolved point. Clearly you want to make some thread of an idea come out right, but all you can do is point off in a variety of directions as you meander in a maze of PoMo mutterings.
You see my problem:
Quoting StreetlightX
Quoting StreetlightX
Quoting StreetlightX
Quoting StreetlightX
Quoting StreetlightX
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Quoting StreetlightX
In this tangle of words, what you seem to be trying to argue is that there is this thing called speculative finance. And "human biology" is being sucked into its voracious maw as another asset to be monetised. Neoliberalism is a mechanism that allows every aspect of life to made tradable - and thus to be traded away in a fashion that inevitably favours the few, disadvantages the many, even though the political promise is that a free market floats all boats.
So on neoliberalism and why it is a danger, I'm sure we agree. It is a routine analysis as you say.
And on making human biology a tradable asset, well yes I guess so if you mean medical biotechnology and gene engineering. But I asked how does that add a specific form or precariousness to our individual lives (as you seemed to be suggesting in your tortured prose)?
Why would ordinary folk find that an existential threat? Instead, surely new medicines are a bright promise. Start-up companies generally excite the imagination. A generalised use of biological information has no obvious personal implications.
So in regards to the Precariat - the modern world of uncertain employment - you have made no logical connection here.
Then working back to your notion of speculative finance, this looks to conflate blind risk taking and complex risk-removing behaviour.
As you also acknowledge, financial instruments like derivatives are designed simply to amplify economic actions. So they can work in both directions. They can allow economic actors to take bigger leveraged risks. Or they can be used to insure a future outcome against risk.
Of course again there are the large and now painfully obvious shortcomings of permitting financial complexity. It creates a system that is easy to game - especially if you get the politicians to take away the market regulators.
So the economic system in theory might aim to be just - neoliberalism is not intrinsically malign as your argument appears to demand - but the Wall St elite got the safeguards removed so they could screw over nations of home buyers and even whole small nations like Greece and Iceland.
So when it comes to "speculative finance", this becomes just a pejorative term in your hands - a way to win the argument without clearly making one. It is easy to read your uncertainty in applying it. Sometimes you are talking about malign neoliberalism, sometimes about an elite of individual economic actors. Sometimes you are talking about risk-avoidance that went wrong (like CDOs), sometimes about speculative asset bubbles - overly-optimistic risk taking.
You seem aware of the variety of economic and political issues you are trying to shoehorn into a single bogeyman term - speculative finance - but when called on it, you get pissy rather than attempting to mount some further justification or clarification.
So these things need tying together properly:
1) speculative finance as one unitary force.
2) human biology as a new tradable asset class.
3) neoliberalism being inherently a social evil rather than simply a neutral mechanism.
4) the above adding up to an actual source of existential precariousness in the Precariat.
The minimum wage is a poor measure to assess economic prosperity due to never being adjusted for inflation. But, that is an issue for a worker who is stuck in the minimum wage group. You won't be able to ever buy a house on minimum wage even if it was back in 2008 and maintain your standard of living, at least in places with notoriously high mortgage costs like California or New York.
The US story is about how rage at the consequences of neoliberalism - especially the way liquidity paves the way for globalisation - needs to be re-directed against other targets.
So the middleclass majority, and well-paid blue collar worker, are still befuddled as to why the economic world is running against them when clearly the US is growing ever richer.
The war on drugs, the war on weapons of mass destruction, the war on terror - these are all geopolitical moves. Excuses for the assertion of US hegemony and the side-lining of proper international political institutions like the UN. They are the public excuses for private political agendas. They are only economic moves in the sense that it feels good to the US to be in tight control of basic resources like oil.
Yes, they also serve a US desire to impose moral hegemony as well. The American Way still matters at some level of US politics. Institutions like the State Department feel missionary about these things.
But check Trump and you can see how rage is being redirected in a very anti-neoliberal theory fashion. It's plain old gut-reaction xenophobia and other-bashing.
One of the funny things about SX's PoMo Marxism is that he doesn't see how neoliberalism - as theory - advocates open borders and multiculturalism. A free market lets all ideas have a go. A pluralist competition is what is healthy.
Yet Trump harnesses the attack on this social and economic globalism. Build a wall to keep out the Mexican rapists. Every open trade deal ever done was unfair to the US. Get rid of weird folk from our military - or weird and un-american folk in general.
So we have a number of forces in play.
There is "geopolitical chessboards" - maintaining a position of US hegemony. This is about the general benefits of power, not some piffling theoretical debate about particular economic mechanisms. The politicians need to divert the populace to be free to pursue that most critical of national agendas.
Then there is neoliberalism. This is a nice theory of dissipative structure. You maximise system throughput by taking away any barriers to growth. Access to speculative capital being a key one.
In theory, for a while, broken down welfare hicks in US hicksville could be property speculators and mint a fortune. That is what equality of opportunity meant. The convenient lie told the public was that it was perfectly safe even though the US system of market oversight had been systematically deconstructed, and in the case of the credit rating agencies, plain corrupted.
Then the third sweeping force is the usual human reaction of turning inwards when feeling under attack. Rally the village, get out the pitchforks, and apply a little mob justice to anything that smacks of "other".
Here the deception of the people is simply a President agreeing it is the proper thing to do. "You want to burn the world down, sure that's a great idea. Hey maybe I'll join in and do that to North Korea."
Stale PoMo Marxism is just so inadequate as a frame of analysis. Time to speak the truth in plain language. :)
Although the US could sure do with a good dose of Scandinavian social democracy and a radical overhaul of its broken political structures. Unfortunately world governance - the UN - has been so undermined that the US can't just step away from its dreams of empire. Russia and China are just two itching to take its place.
(Well China not so much as its main existential concern is forever going to be preventing the peasants revolting against the centre. It doesn't aspire to a new colonialism, just security and stability within the traditional boundaries of its Imperial Empire.)
And that's something I admire about China. They treat colonialism be it financial or military as a repugnant ideology. I still remember their nuclear tests being demonstrated on the backdrop of an anti-imperialist slogan on a train, which then got obliterated by the nuclear blast.
I've somewhat come to terms with the fact that the US rewards the richest above others than say valuing worker's unions and a thriving middle class. It really is a plutocracy as anyone who reads Chomsky would know. Welfare for the rich as well and thriving along with the board of the FED consisting of most major banking firms that want to keep inflation low while milking the government for more money to keep in reserves. Most people think this is a bad situation; but, where else will these people go to? China is as much as a closed-loop financial market as is the US is. So, even though their large hoards of reserves are held without entering the money stream, that money is still best secured by investment back to the FED.
I have no issues with neo-liberalism, and even have less resentment towards conservative free-market ideology even to the detriment of the population at hand if that means open markets and free trade. The invisible hand might not be infallible (climate change and tragedy of the commons) but it's the best system we've got and the Marxists are limited only to criticising the current system instead of providing a viable alternative.
Hence the argument for a carbon tax and a national future fund.
It is just plain obvious that the active subsidising of Big Oil (which includes the massive US military spend) ought to stop. It is a market distortion proper free marketeers would abhor. Then a carbon tax is needed on top of that to pave the way to greener energy. Future generations demand it.
And why not be like Norway and actually ring-fence that income to start to pay back the damage done by galloping financial speculation?
Market principles work just fine so long as the markets are transparent enough to look sufficiently far into the future.
Another flaw in the OP is the complaint that neoliberal liquidity makes the future "a zone of indistinction".
What is actually the problem is the future is being rendered deliberately opaque by privileged interests who want to capitalise tomorrow's profits on their balance sheets today. The elite not only steal the present from the average Joe, they steal the future too.
In principle, a free market takes into account all information or self-interest. And most folk are at least modestly concerned at least a generation or two into the future.
So yes, the future has been made opaque for most people with climate denial and the lobbies against green technology or sustainable economics. But that is a product of having allowed wealth inequality develop to the point billionaires can buy administrations. It is not directly the fault of an economic theory about how best to unblock the barriers to free growth.
(Though the theory is also reckless in not clearly recognising its own downside, its need for strong regulation at government level.)
That also depends on how informed the rational agent is. I fear, and see, that the population of the US is hopelessly misinformed about current affairs. Again, there's nothing wrong with neoliberalism as long as there aren't artificial constraints imposed on the market to balance out the workings of the economy. There's Adam Smith coming out of me.
And not that the population is simply hopelessly irrational these days? ;)
But speaking realistically, there are always going to be artificial constraints - state intervention - in any market system. States can't in practice stand back and let themselves collapse as good market practice demands.
Sure, plenty of people would have loved Greece or Morgan Stanley to take their medicine properly. But in the end, theoretical purity is going to run into self-preservation instinct.
That is the reality the GFC should have rammed home. In the end, at some level, an economic actor becomes too big to fail.
So given that, market intervention should be something that kicks in over all scales in fair fashion. That is what bankruptcy laws were for, for example. Or monopoly laws.
If you are building a car with an accelerator, you also want to remember to build in some brakes. It's just commonsense.
That's one of the dangers of the Republican laissez-faire economy. That things will take care of themselves despite leveraging the economy for persistent growth.
On a more general note, I believe in Keynesian economics; but, the efforts by the FED to increase growth by pumping money into the money stream and reaping rewards from multiplier effect will increase growth, has become largely ineffective due to keeping those funds in excess reserve funds by major institutions. What's more is that credit seems to have saturated the economy. You can get credit for anything nowadays. Sure, an individual can default due to their own mistakes; but, an entire economy of a state can't really do that. That's a real issue that's being exploited to the detriment of the entire economy from major institutions and banks.
Yep. The economy goes sideways as it needs a good dose of inflation to wash away the debt. But it is so in debt that it can't jolt the patient to life by cutting interest rates and giving it more spending cash in its pocket. It all has to go into servicing existing debt as real production shrinks.
Next step, the deflation where the debt burden grows rather than shrinks. Whoops, apocalypse.
Health insurance is an interesting site of analysis because while it definitely contributes to the intensification of the individual, as you put it, insurance still makes it's bed on the mattress of the calculable. That's the whole model after all: get a bunch of subscribers, calculate the risks, and charge accordingly. But the temporal shift I'm interested in consists of two things: (1) a focus on incalculable risk in the future - what might be called catastrophe risk - and (2) the correlative demand that we address such risks now precisely on account of their incalculability. Cooper quotes Stephen Haller's book on environmental catastrophe in a way that nicely captures these two dimensions:
"Some global hazards might, in their very nature, be such that they cannot be prevented unless preemptive action is taken immediately—that is, before we have evidence sufficient to convince ourselves of the reality of the threat. Unless we act now on uncertain claims, catastrophic and irreversible results might unfold beyond human control ... We must face squarely the problem of making momentous decisions under uncertainty." - but once this train of thought takes hold, action in the present becomes impossible to temporally orient. Because actions cannot be measured according to any calculable risk assessment, the borders between norm and exception break down, placing us under the 'state of exception' conditions as specified the Agamben and the like.
One consequence of this is a shift in the means of dealing with risk: no longer subject to calculability, and beset with the demand that one act now, not insurance but security becomes the focal point of action. In turn and with respect to life, the issue shifts from the insurance of life to the securitization or militerization of life in its biological register. Cooper documents a few exemplary instances of this - the treatment of the AIDS crisis in South Africa, the emergence of biosecurity discourse among the US intelligence apparatus, while Agamben has focused more on the ways in which biometric data is being increasingly employed as a vector of state security.
At the widest angle however, the biggest and most consequent danger that securitziation heralds is that of depoliticization: essentially, there is an inverse relationship between security and politics - the need to address security - now no longer reserved for exceptional situations but now immanent and incalculably of the present - displaces the space of politics. It's Agamben again who has perhaps better than most charted this shift, noting how this move to securitization is inescapably bound up with the kind of beings we are: because of the expanding sphere of biopolitics, we can be understood less and less as political actors, and more in terms of our 'bare life':
"If my identity is now determined by biological facts that in no way depend on my will and over which I have no control, then the construction of something like a political and ethical identity becomes problematic. What relationship can I establish with my fingerprints or my genetic code? The new identity is an identity without the person, as it were, in which the space of politics and ethics loses its sense and must be thought again from the ground up" And consequence of this is drawn out explicitly: "Placing itself under the sign of security, modern state has left the domain of politics." In fact it's worth reading Agamben's lecture on these themes, which ranges over this in a better way than I can given the space constraints here.
Ahh, yes, I do now: It's that you're unfamiliar with the grade school rhetorical trope of topic sentences. Here is a guide from grammar girl that will get you up to speed:
http://www.quickanddirtytips.com/education/writing/how-to-write-a-good-topic-sentence
One step at time, we'll get you over your fear of big, scary words. And now elementary paragraph structure too. I got your back, po po.
To be clear, if I focus on economic considerations it's because it's just so happened to be that the changes I'm trying to track (Re: risk, time, and biological life) have been largely driven by them. Had it been the case that, say, wars between nations-states had been the primary drivers of such changes, then that's where I would have focused my attention. That is to say, the focus on economics is a matter of 'following where the history takes me', rather than any essentialist conception of history that places economics at the heart of social change. It's to that extent that I find certain Marxist analyticial tools useful for this situation, specifically the thesis regarding capital's ability to liberate itself from all mediation. One can accept this without subscribing to the many other tenets which compose the Marxist edifice.
Can any odds be incalculable? I think the more unexpected an event is (which is required for it to be more difficult to calculate), the smaller are its chances, and with those two factors combined, I think the combined effect of all unexpected things is a rather small one.
Heh, this is the $64 million (trillion?) dollar question isn't it? As far as I know, there's no real consensus on this, but I'm very partial to the views laid out by Claudio Borio, as detailed in this FT article [possible paywall]. A snippet:
My bolding.
One factor gets's underappreciated, IMO. Such as women entering the workforce in the US more and more. It sounds far-fetched on face value; but, should be a strong contributing factor to, again, inflation. I guess technology really has brought down prices that much.