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

Ramey, Joshua

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1783485531 ISBN 13: 9781783485536

Publisher: Rli, 2016

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author

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.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

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 function of a total lack of consensus about economic theory, both within the economics profession and within Congress. "If economists could not fix the economy any longer, if their rules and devices seemed unreasonable and dysfunctional; if the restoration of profitability and bonuses, the repayment of credit and accelerated productivity did not convince people that health for anyone but financiers had been restored, what would count as evidence that the economists were no longer capable of working their magic?" When the economy has become coeval with life itself, and the economy is driven not by knowledge but by nonknowledge, politics as debate or deliberation becomes a nonstarter. How did we get here?

THE NONKNOWLEDGE OF UNCERTAINTY

In Knowledge, Ltd., Randy Martin describes the neoliberal era as a transition from a knowledge-based to a nonknowledge-based economy, from an economy based on prediction and control to one based on the exploitation of uncertainty, as such. The term "nonknowledge" was developed in the work of George Bataille. What Bataille meant by nonknowledge was not ignorance, but the uncanny presence of forces, potentials, and realities that solicit responses prior to both knowledge and ignorance. Nonknowledge is not unreasonableness, but is arguably the intuitive, empathic consciousness required for creative improvisation, manifested in laughter and tears, and signified in otherwise unaccountable sorrow, joy, longing, hope, despair and inspiration. Perhaps nonknowledge is also the basis of what Keynes called those "animal spirits" that drive speculation, that drive risk taking and entrepreneurial exploit.

Hayek argued that the "man on the spot" making day-to-day business decisions cannot know the vast array of changing forces that may affect his fate and the fortunes of his enterprise. Market expertise is a kind of "nonknowledge," an intuitive, visceral sense of the presence and potentials of the uncertain at a given "spot" of decision in the market. Thus neoliberalism attempted to conflate "expert knowledge of markets" with knowledge of the unknown. On this point, neoliberalism is grounded on Hayek's idea that marketplace success depends on the cultivation of "learned ignorance." That is, experts in the economy — paradigmatically entrepreneurs and arbitrageurs — cannot really know anything except how not to interfere with the complexity of magical market "meta-information processing."

In the neoliberal era of hyper-financialized capital, the unknown and unknowable have not really been "managed" at all, let alone understood. Rather, the uncertain has been systematically exploited. And effectively, the future for most of us has been canceled. This has been done through what Martin calls a "derivative politics," a preemptive strike on the future that operates through a disaggregation of the present and speculation on how certain quantifiable and fungible traits of individuals will fare in an uncertain future, all the while discounting the unprofitable, in the here and now. When certain traits are marked as profitable for the future, other affordances that are not yet clearly valuable (and thus not quantified) are foreclosed, in advance. Neoliberalism is a massive foreclosure of the future in the name of the present, to the benefit of the status quo ante of extant state, corporate, and finance interests. As Naomi Klein has argued, the most expedient way to foreclose the future is to shock the present into conformity to market demands for immediately profitable investment. And this is done through the destruction of networks of trust, solidarity, and sustainability that exist outside the reach of market forces, beyond the need for major capital investment.

Thus we have seen the rise of both the security state and derivatives trading as twin modes of governing without knowledge, through nonknowledge. The deliberate exploitation of uncertainty and instability in situations whose settled risk profile is seen as unprofitable, is a major source of both security and profit. What is crucial to comprehend about the neoliberal era is not so much that its financial crises are unprecedented (they are not), or that its imperial bids for domination are new (they are not), but that neoliberal governance strategies are imbued with a particular logic relating the known to the unknowable, and that these strategies have become generic in social life, as such. Economy (and society) has shifted from being based on rational planning for uncertainty to the systematic exploitation of risk through the strategic production of uncertainty and instability. Profitable nonknowledge has eclipsed all other modes of relating to the uncertain.

In short, neoliberal doctrines prevailed, and have now become more or less common sense, in part because of how neoliberals insisted that markets could be used to manage the problem of the relation of social life to uncertainty and the unaccountable. It has tried, anyway, to capture nonknowledge. Neoliberalism has argued that the problem of real uncertainty, of unforeseeable change, could be solved once and for all by markets. After the Fordist era of rational planning, and the Keynesian era of state-sponsored capitalism, the problem of deep uncertainty and radical contingency is no longer met by planning, but risk is preempted, through strategic and contingent claims made by those with least to lose. During the neoliberal era, we have seen an eclipse of knowledge by nonknowledge.

But here lies a potency neoliberalism can exacerbate but never fully capture. Market expertise — whether as the knowledge of economics held by PhDs or the economics of knowledge managed by entrepreneurs and traders — has come to occupy an ancient and perennial place in human culture, the site where human cultures have, from time immemorial, practiced many forms of divination: procedures by which human beings attempt to access knowledge of the unknown. As a major form of ritual practice, divination is systematic solicitation, generally on the basis of chance, of more-than-human wisdom. These rites are time-honored practices of conjecture and systematic inquiry into genuine uncertainty. They are perennial and global in human culture.

The entrepreneur and the financial arbitrageur are those whose role has become that of our master diviners: our seers, oracles, and keepers of the keys to nonknowledge. These figures both perform and exemplify the truths that nonknowledge alone can produce — the truths of feeling one's way through uncertainty to competitive viability, and, in the last instance, to domination. As diviners, market-makers of all types thus perform a crucial and disavowed ritual role in the rites of unfolding the secrets of uncertain capital times. But divinatory nonknowledge is the basis of more than mere profit, and its purview extends to more than market forces. Neoliberal market apologetics has overreached, and bitten off more of life (and death) than it can chew.

DISAVOWED DIVINATIONS

Emile Durkheim argued that the primary function of ritual was to enable a community to deal with uncertainty by subsuming disruptive events — illness, death, natural disasters — within mythical patterns, orders that attuned the community to a harmonics within which it might find reassurance against pain, misfortune, and catastrophe, and in terms of which such events might be rendered meaningful. Put somewhat abstractly, ritual practices instantiate a basic religiosity necessary to society. What is sacred is some basic or minimal attitude that takes the unforeseeable and the unpredictable not as cause for despair but as occasions for making or continuing to try to make meaning. Divination is first among these practices.

In this book, I examine how neoliberal authoritarianism dominates the space of divination in contemporary culture. At the heart of neoliberalism is a divinatory practice, a political theology that identifies arbitrary, unforeseeable changes in market conditions with divinely ordained order. This ideology justifies austerity, the maintenance of debts, and even ecological devastation, reading them as cosmic inevitabilities it is irrational to question. The reading of markets as destiny is a form of divination, one that trades on a deep equivocation between knowledge and ignorance, where knowledge of market forces has become identical to effective surrender (through strategic nonknowledge) to the unknowable and unpredictable movements of markets.

But the hypothesis here is that neoliberal ideology has been successful not so much because charismatic individuals function as oracles, but because secular, modern cultures of rational deliberation have difficulty acknowledging, (when they are not busy denying) that disenchanted, anti-oracular, rationalistic societies must continue to do what, as Evan Heimlich puts it, cultures more sanguine about divination acknowledge the need to do: to "read chance aloud." It is the cultural disavowal of the role of divination that allows for the authoritarianism of certain forms of supposed expertise on risk — certain forms of nonknowledge and not others — to govern the genuinely unknowable.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Politics of Divination by Joshua Ramey. Copyright © 2016 Joshua Ramey. Excerpted by permission of Rowman & Littlefield International, Ltd..
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Edition details

• Publisher: Rli
• Publication date: 2016
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1783485531
• ISBN 13: 9781783485536
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 192