The Fragility of Things: Self-Organizing Processes, Neoliberal Fantasies, and Democratic Activism - Softcover

Connolly, William E.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0822355841 ISBN 13: 9780822355847

Publisher: Duke University Press Books, 2013

Synopsis

In The Fragility of Things, eminent theorist William E. Connolly focuses on several self-organizing ecologies that help to constitute our world. These interacting geological, biological, and climate systems, some of which harbor creative capacities, are depreciated by that brand of neoliberalism that confines self-organization to economic markets and equates the latter with impersonal rationality. Neoliberal practice thus fails to address the fragilities it exacerbates. Engaging a diverse range of thinkers, from Friedrich Hayek, Michel Foucault, Hesiod, and Immanuel Kant to Voltaire, Terrence Deacon, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Alfred North Whitehead, Connolly brings the sense of fragility alive as he rethinks the idea of freedom. Urging the Left not to abandon the state but to reclaim it, he also explores scales of politics below and beyond the state. The contemporary response to fragility requires a militant pluralist assemblage composed of those sharing affinities of spirituality across differences of creed, class, gender, sexual orientation, and ethnicity.

About this title

About the Author

William E. Connolly is Krieger-Eisenhower Professor of Political Science at Johns Hopkins University. His most recent books include A World of Becoming; Capitalism and Christianity, American Style; and Pluralism, all also published by Duke University Press. He is a former editor of Political Theory and a founder of the journal theory & event. His classic study The Terms of Political Discourse won the Benjamin Lippincott Award in 1999.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

THE FRAGILITY OF THINGS

self-organizing processes, neoliberal fantasies, and democratic activism

By WILLIAM E. CONNOLLY

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2013 Duke University Press
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-8223-5584-7

Contents

prelude 1755..............................................................
1
CHAPTER 1 Steps toward an Ecology of Late Capitalism......................
20
first interlude Melancholia and Us........................................
43
CHAPTER 2 Hayek, Neoliberalism, Freedom...................................
52
second interlude Modes of Self-Organization...............................
81
CHAPTER 3 Shock Therapy, Dramatization, and Practical Wisdom..............
98
third interlude Fullness and Vitality.....................................
140
CHAPTER 4 Process Philosophy and Planetary Politics.......................
149
postlude Role Experimentation and Democratic Activism.....................
179
acknowledgments............................................................
197
notes......................................................................
201
bibliography...............................................................
225
index......................................................................
233

CHAPTER 1

steps toward an ecology of late capitalism

Neoliberalism, let us say, is a socioeconomic philosophy embedded to varyingdegrees in Euro-American life. In its media presentations, it expressesinordinate confidence in the unique, self-regulating power of markets asit links the freedom of the individual to markets. At a lower decibel leveland high degree of intensity, it solicits modes of state, corporate, church,and media discipline to organize nature, state policy, workers, consumers,families, schools, investors, and international organizations to maintainconditions for unfettered markets and to clean up financial collapses, eco-messes,and regional conflicts created by that collusion.

Neoliberalism and laissez-faire capitalism are thus not exactly the samething, at least since neoliberalism displaced the latter in Euro-Americanthought between 1935 and 1960. Neoliberals, as Michel Foucault has shown,often do not think that markets are natural; they think markets are delicatemechanisms that require careful protection and nurturance by statesand other organizations. The state does not manage markets much directly,except through monetary policy, but it takes a very active role increating, maintaining, and protecting the preconditions of market self-regulation.The most ambitious supporters want the state to inject marketprocesses into new zones through judicial or legislative action, focusing onsuch areas as academic admissions, schools, prisons, health care, rail service,postal service, retirement, and private military organizations. Notehow such shifts will implicate more and more citizens in the vicissitudes ofnonstate, corporate practices, where the ability to discipline and channelconduct increases.

So neoliberalism solicits an active state to promote, protect, and expandmarket processes. And political leaders espousing neoliberal economicsthe most fervently—such as Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, the twoBushes, and David Cameron—often turn out also to be bellicose defendersof conservative Christianity, moralism, and/or a specific image of the nation.Neoliberalism, a selectively active state, a conservative brand of Christianity,and a nation of regularized individuals surrounded by marginalizedminorities often complement one another, even if periodically they are atodds with one another.

What, then, are some of the political movements and modes of stateactivism supported by neoliberalism? They include, with varying degreesof support from different leaders, laws to restrain labor organization andrestrict consumer movements; corporate participation on school and universityboards; corporate ownership and control of the media; a jurisprudenceand court decisions that treat the corporation as a person with unlimitedrights to lobby and campaign; court policies that treat money as amode of speech to be protected by the state; demands for bankruptcy lawsthat favor corporations at the expense of those working for them; specialcorporate access to state officials to maintain inequality and restrain unemploymentbenefits; extensive discipline of the workforce; legal defense ofcorporate financial power to limit consumer information about the policiesthat affect them; the ear of state officials who regulate credit and the moneysupply; use of the state to enforce debt payments and foreclosures; hugemilitary, police, and prison assemblages to pursue imperial policies abroadand discipline the excluded and disaffected at home; meticulous street andinstitutional security arrangements to regulate those closed out of the neoliberalcalculus; huge state budgets to promote the established infrastructureof consumption in the domains of highway expenditure, the energygrid, health care, and housing codes; state cleanup of disasters created byunderregulated financial and corporate activity; and state or bureaucraticdelays to hold off action on global climate change.

The corporate, media, state, evangelical, and think-tank cheerleaders ofneoliberalism also deflect attention from ways state or neoliberal capitalismstrives to order workers, consumers, localities, and international institutionsto fit the neoliberal dictates of market behavior. It is an effective ideologicalstrategy and a destructive and dangerous organization of privateand public energies. The activist, neoliberal state becomes most transparentduring an emergency or meltdown, but it is always operative.

Perhaps the quickest way, then, to dramatize the difference between classicalmarket liberalism and contemporary neoliberalism is to say that theformer wanted the state to minimize interference with "natural" marketprocesses as it purported to leave other parts of civil society to their owndevices, while the latter campaigns to make the state, the media, schools,families, science, churches, unions, and the corporate estate be orderedaround neoliberal principles of being. This version of state activism providesa brand of statism that helps to draw together into one political assemblage,at least in America, differential priorities among neoliberals,evangelicals, neoconservatives, and the Vatican. There are others.

The Subjective Grip of Neoliberalism

Several angles of criticism have been brought against neoliberalism.Marxists focus on how its celebration of the market covers up exploitationand crisis tendencies internal to capitalism. Keynesians and Social Democratsfocus on how it overplays the self-regulating power of markets andunderplays the recurrent need of states to seed growth after a downturn,to provide unemployment support, and to spur consumer demand by atax system that dampens inequality. Liberal Christians, atheists, Muslims,and Jews berate its heartlessness and readiness to leave those on the bottomout in the cold. Maverick market theorists such as Fred Hirsch focuson how the combination of consumer sovereignty and unconscious marketprocesses regularly generate severe consumer binds, until it becomes moredifficult to make ends meet for people of low and middle income, peoplebecome less satisfied with the products they receive, and the middle classresponds to these pressures by demanding tax reductions and the furthercontraction of social democracy. Hirsch's book, published in 1977, is stillhighly relevant. Deep ecologists focus on how the state-neoliberal combinetreats nature as standing reserve and depreciates the urgent need to adjustmarket blindness to a wholeness of nature that precedes economic life.

Several of these critiques converge on the conclusion that neoliberalcapitalism is the most inegalitarian capitalism of all. To them, and to me, theidentification by Georg Simmel of a general tendency in complex societiesto impose the most severe burdens and sacrifices on those already on thebottom tiers of the order applies in spades to neoliberalism. One need onlythink of the slow fallout from the September 2008 world economic crisiswhen Simmel says, "Every new pressure and imposition moves along theline of least resistance which, though not in its first stage, usually and eventuallyruns in a descending direction. This is the tragedy of whomever islowest.... He not only has to suffer from the deprivations, efforts, and discriminations,which, taken together, characterize his position; in additionevery new pressure on any point whatever in the superordinate layers is, iftechnically possible at all, transmitted downward and stops only at him."

I thus share a thing or two with each of these critiques. But the center ofgravity advanced here may differ from most of theirs. First, most may notcome to terms sharply enough with the subjective grip the state, media, andneoliberal combine exerts on the interpretations and desires of large sectionsof the populace even after it has been rocked by a meltdown, problemsin securing medical care, structural unemployment, a tsunami, an oilspill, or new evidence in favor of climate change. Many white working- andmiddle-class males, amid the decline of social democracy, find themselvespulled in two directions at the same time: they support neoliberal promisesof corporate growth to cope with the squeeze the state-market collusionhas placed them in, and they demand decisive leadership from the state toresolve any fallout created by this legacy.

We need to understand better the pressures on so many constituenciesto reinstate faith in neoliberal ideology a short time after the latest meltdown.These are the pressures that encourage so many to translate experiencesof fragility in a neoliberal world into attacks on state efforts to respondto those very troubles. Of course, many young people of affluenceare pushed in this direction by pressure to believe in the stability of the systemin which they are preparing to forge specific careers. And in the UnitedStates at least, there is a sense among many corporate and financial elites ofspecial world and income entitlements, which can easily be translated intoneoliberal hubris if and when critics make calls for shifts in the ethos andstate regulation of the economy.

But what about others? I have contended in Capitalism and Christianity,American Style that many anxious white males in the working and middleclasses seek models of masculinity with whom to identify in a world of uncertainty.Corporate elites, sports heroes, financial wizards, and militaryleaders project images of independence, mastery, and virility that can makethem attractive models of identification, whereas state welfare programs,market regulations, retirement schemes, and health care, while essentialto life, may remind too many of the very fragilities, vulnerabilities, susceptibilities,and dependencies they strive to deny or forget. This doublelogic of masculinization of market icons and feminization of state supportsand regulatory activities takes a toll on the polity, particularly when it isovercoded with race and immigration issues. Neoliberal heroes, TV talkingheads, and evangelical publicists further incite these very vulnerabilities asthey feed off the struggle of many white males to conceal them from theirfamilies and themselves through hyperidentification. Check out the RushLimbaugh Show sometime. It is difficult to occupy the subject position ofthe white working-class male.

There may be another element here, though its importance is difficultto weigh. And indeed its weight probably varies among different constituencies.If you are stuck in circumstances in which it takes Herculean effortsto get through the day—doing low-income work, obeying an authoritarianboss, buying clothes for the children, dealing with school issues, paying therent or mortgage, fixing the car, negotiating with a spouse, paying taxes,and caring for older parents—it is not easy to pay close attention to largerpolitical issues. Indeed you may wish that these issues would take care ofthemselves. It is not a huge jump from such a wish to become attracted toa public philosophy, spouted regularly at your job and on the media, thateconomic life would regulate itself automatically if only the state did notrepeatedly intervene in it in clumsy ways. Now underfunded practices suchas the license bureau, state welfare, public health insurance, public schools,public retirement plans, and the like begin to appear as awkward, bureaucraticorganizations that could be replaced or eliminated if only the rationalmarket were allowed to take care of things impersonally and quietly, asit were. Certainly such bureaucracies are indeed often clumsy. But morepeople are now attracted to compare that clumsiness to the myth of howan impersonal market would perform if it took on even more assignmentsand if state regulation of it were reduced even further. So a lot of "independents"and "moderates" may become predisposed to the myth of the rationalmarket in part because the pressures of daily life encourage them toseek comfort in ideological formations that promise automatic rationality.

Self-Organizing Processes and Political Economy

I focus here, however, on a related issue. Many critics of neoliberalism criticizeit as they downplay the self-regulatory powers of economic markets.For instance, they may say, correctly in my view, that markets don't workthat way nearly as much as their defenders say they do. I agree that economicmarkets can be very unstable because of, say, elite collusion, self-amplifyingbubbles, actions by other states, a war, and several of these inconjunction. But I further treat economic markets as merely one type ofimperfect self-regulating system in a cosmos composed of innumerable, interactingopen systems with differential capacities of self-organization set on differentscales of time, agency, creativity, viscosity, and speed. These open systemsperiodically interact in ways that support, amplify, or destabilize oneanother. It is partly because economic markets operate in a larger world ofmultiple, self-organizing systems that they are much more volatile than theadvocates of neoliberalism pretend. The theme to be pursued here, then, isnot that markets are always efficient and rational. They are not. It is, however,that they do possess varying degrees of self-organizing power and thata lot of other human and nonhuman processes with which they interact dotoo. Such a combination changes everything.

The theme of a cosmos of open, interacting force fields may press againstsome assumptions in neoliberalism, socialist productivism, Keynesianism,and classical Marxism alike, though there are important variations here. Sowe can speak only of tendencies. Where the latter types may diverge fromthe theory projected here is either in the assumption that cultural theorycan concentrate its attention on the internal dynamics of social, state, andeconomic formations without close reference to movements of natural systemsof multiple sorts, or in a tendency to think that capitalism constitutesan absorbent system that automatically returns the shocks and dissentingpressures applied to it as enhanced drives to its own expansion and intensification,or in a tendency to treat nonhuman force fields as reducible tosimple law-like patterns without significant powers of metamorphosis.

When you come to terms more closely with interacting, nonhuman systemswith differential capacities of metamorphosis you also come to termsmore thoughtfully with the volatile ecology of late modern capitalism andthe contemporary fragility of things. You may thus call into question assumptionsabout temporal progress tied to the ideas of either human masteryor a predesign of being. From the perspective advanced here, thesetwo competing visions are also complementary in that while proponentsof each tend to oppose the other, they both act as though the nonhumanworld were predisposed to us, either in being designed for us or in beinghighly susceptible to mastery by us. Challenging the anthropocentric hubrisin both of these images, you now extend, as the case requires, the reachof politico-economic inquiry to specific noneconomic, nondiscursive systemsthat penetrate and impinge upon econocultural life. You thus allowthe shocks that these impingements periodically pose to open up new patternsof thinking, interpretation, and intervention.

Those theorists who complain repeatedly about the "externalities" thathave messed up their model by fomenting this or that untoward event,before returning to the purity of the model, suffer from a debilitating disease:they act as if the models would work if only the world did not containso many "outside" factors that are, in fact, imbricated and entangled in athousand ways with the practices they study. A subset of theorists on theleft who tend to construe capitalism as a closed system that automaticallyrecaptures and absorbs bumps in its own operations may present a mirrorimage of that picture. Both parties underplay, though in different keys anddegrees, the role of noise and loose remainders within the markets theystudy, the ways capitalism alters nonhuman force fields, and the independentpower of nonhuman forces acting upon capitalism.

Casting to the side these ploys, we may become better equipped to respondsensitively to the fragility of things today, as seen from the broadlydefined interests of the human estate in its complex imbrications with avariety of human and nonhuman systems. We may then embrace the needto infuse a new ethos inside markets, voting, consumption, investment,churches, work, schools, the media, state action, and cross-state citizenmovements as we attend to the resonances back and forth between thesesubsystems. Feedback loops between established schemes of interpretation,new social movements, markets, state and interstate organization,nonhuman force fields, and novel modes of role experimentation all attainsignificant standing in this image of political economy.

Capitalist-Nonhuman Entanglements

Such a theory of political economy, if and when developed, will be as differentfrom the thought of Hayek, Friedman, Greenspan, Summers, Geithner,and Keynes as the cosmo-philosophies of Hesiod and Sophocles werefrom those of Augustine, Kant, Adam Smith, Hegel, and Marx. Hesiod andSophocles indeed grasped how cultural and cosmic (or divine) forces areinterwoven and how the latter can sometimes change in dramatic waysover a short period with profound effects on the human estate. Lift thegods from their stories—no small move, I grant—and the universe becomesconceived as a colossus of highly diverse force fields, each periodicallyflowing over, through, and around others.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from THE FRAGILITY OF THINGS by WILLIAM E. CONNOLLY. Copyright © 2013 Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Duke University Press Books
• Publication date: 2013
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0822355841
• ISBN 13: 9780822355847
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 256