Politics of Divination: Neoliberal Endgame and the Religion of Contingency (Reinventing Critical Theory) - Softcover

Ramey, Joshua

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1783485531 ISBN 13: 9781783485536

Verlag: Rli, 2016

Inhaltsangabe

Offers an interpretation of neoliberal ideology as a political theology of chance that both justifies and dissembles risk-laden market processes as obscure divination tools used both to determine fate and fortune and yet to deny that such determination is taking place by any accountable authority.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Joshua Ramey is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Grinnell College. He is the author of The Hermetic Deleuze (2012), the co-translator of François Laruelle's Non-Philosophical Mysticism for Today (forthcoming), and the author of numerous articles on figures including Adorno, Zizek, Badiou, Deleuze, Bruno, Warhol, Hitchcock and Cronenburg. His work has appeared in Angelaki, Political Theology, Discourse, SubStance, and the Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory.

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Politics of Divination

Neoliberal Endgame and the Religion of Contingency

By Joshua Ramey

Rowman & Littlefield International, Ltd.

Copyright © 2016 Joshua Ramey
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-78348-553-6

Contents

Preface, 
1 Within the Endgame, 
2 We Have Always Been Giants, 
3 Divining Neoliberal Order, 
4 Random Chance Providential, 
5 Risking Derivative Politics, 
6 Decolonizing Divination, 
Bibliography, 
Index, 
About the Author, 

CHAPTER 1

Within the Endgame

Neoliberalism is dead. Long live neoliberalism.

Society has been remade in the image of markets. The promise of this transformation was liberty: the freedom of enterprising, entrepreneurial individuals to do without the encumbrances of policy, planning, and even without the state. The most prominent and influential voices of the neoliberal era all agreed that the unleashing of all-seeing, all-wise market forces everywhere would render traditional forms of politics unnecessary. Individuals who can buy their own education, fund their own health care, and hire private security forces have little need of government, and it seems even voting can be replaced with campaign contributions. But the society that communicates exclusively through money has entered into a curious state of paralysis. Since markets have swallowed up more and more of social life, the sphere of the "the economy" has become increasingly ambiguous. Rather than overcome politics, under neoliberal sway economics has simply become politics by other means.

As the late Randy Martin has argued, at this point economists may no longer have a privileged vantage point on "the economy," or any special expertise as to what counts as a good economic strategy. He writes:

The conceit of economy as claimed thus far [throughout the neoliberal era] is that all can know themselves through the actions of those who know the market. Economy, then, is the successful completion of a syllogism: If economists make economies and others apply their knowledge in the same way, then economy must be what we all make together, which makes us together. The market frees knowledge from the minds of experts to our common expertise. The economy, then, would be the achievement of this singularity, the common sense of purpose that comes when all act as if their calculative agency would indeed redound to their benefit. Without this equilibration of decision, capitalism might just be lived as if it were the "-ism" or society of capital and not a society of producers. If the economy named this particular suspension of disbelief, knowledge is what rendered shared sensibility through participation believable. If all possessed knowledge, could wield it to their benefit or detriment under conditions free of force and coercion or distraction from external consequences or complications, that happy state neoliberals like to refer to as freedom might just be achieved.

What Martin coyly refers to, with his ironic reference to the "happy state" that has not yet arrived, is the growing popular revolt against economic expertise, and increasing tirades by both progressives and demagogues against the wolves of Wall Street. The fact that a common economic purpose has not (yet) arisen is generally written off by neoliberals as the failure to as yet construct perfect markets and the failure of agents to apply economists' knowledge of markets to their own market behavior. But perhaps there is a deeper problem than tinkering with markets. Perhaps the failure of markets may have something to do with the equivocal nature of "knowledge" defined as a function of market participation.

Neoliberals defined freedom as complete economic participation. And they defined full participation, at market equilibrium, as a freedom to know: that is, to adjust adroitly to the changing conditions of the market. But here is a paradox. To be free may be to know, but to know is to find one's worth and place in the unknown, the vast unpredictability of the market. Freedom, linked to knowledge of the unknown, becomes fate: a destiny discovered on, by, and for the market. But in the present gilded age of radical inequality, insurmountable debts, and hollowed-out social welfare, the neoliberal promise seems to be finally losing its luster for almost all outside the tight circles of elite power. And yet, despite the fact that many may no longer believe in markets as conduits to freedom (perhaps having already opted for mere survival), economic activity apparently continues, zombie-like, without any consensus as to what counts as "expertise" in planning or guiding the economy, let alone whether or not anyone can hope for a better life based on "progress," "development," or "economic growth."

As the philosophical father of neoliberalism, Friedrich Hayek was explicit that markets not only contained but were in fact constituted by uncertainty. And yet, appropriately constructed, markets were supposed to be forms of cosmic order so powerful they would overcome the inability of human beings to foresee the future. Aware of the looming contradiction that markets must somehow transcribe knowledge of the unknowable future, Hayek argued that only disciplined market actors could appropriately channel this order. By implication, those who knew the unknowable would prove it through success.

This strange argument, despite how it justifies ruined lives, somehow remains compelling to many. An ideology promising liberty may have failed to produce progressively improved economic prospects, but there seems as yet no other "rational" option than austerity: further adjustment by each isolated economic agent to increasingly volatile market forces, and the identification of the losers as simply the evolutionarily unfit. There seems to remain no other publicly viable option than for each one to identify with the mysterious movements of markets within which life — indeed survival — is simply a platform for further profitable competition. When life becomes an experiment in uncertainty for the sake of further risk, future reward collapses into present risk-worthiness, as such.

What happens when the neoliberal dream of subordinating all social organization to market order finally succeeds, but in a context where only a tiny handful remain successful, unencumbered, and free? What happens when, in a context of austerity, indebtedness, and inequity, economic expertise becomes "democratized" in the very gesture by which it was lauded by neoliberals as a check against the unruly demand of democratic society for security and stability unconstrained by market disciplines? As Martin puts it, when economy becomes coextensive with society, "the economy" is no longer a bounded sphere of law-like operations separable from other social (or natural) processes. Rather than displacing politics, the conversion of all sociality into market-like processes has introduced dispute and judgment everywhere. Where there is disagreement, there is the chance for profit, at least for those who can continue to risk. In converting society into markets, neoliberalism has not led us to a utopia without politics, but has induced the anarchy of a thousand tiny sovereigns, whose judgments are all equally unassailable.

This situation of impasse — a bizarre combination of catatonia and instability in the context of immiseration and inequality, is currently playing into an endgame pitting one arbitrary force against another. As Martin observes, the standoff over the U.S. budget-and-debt ceiling in the summer of 2011 was in part a...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Rli
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2016
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1783485531
• ISBN 13: 9781783485536
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 192
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: gpsr@libri.de; gpsr@libri.de; ; Friedensallee 273; Hamburg; 22763; Deutschland