Exhausting Modernity

Grounds for a New Economy

Teresa Brennan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781134560318
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Exhausting Modernity is a bold new work on the exhaustion of our resources, both natural and human. Drawing on the insights of Marx and Freud, it provides a compelling analysis of the exhaustion pervading modern capitalism: environmental collapse, rising poverty levels and increasing global economic disparity. This is essential reading for political and social theorists, philosophers, economists, and all those interested in the environment.

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INTRODUCTION

The real aim of the devil is not the destruction of holiness but of life. So says Goethe’s Mephistopheles, a.k.a. Lucifer, who laments that despite his best endeavours he will not succeed in destroying life’s capacity to reproduce itself endlessly. For Augustine too, the devil hates life because he has nothing of his own, no creative power. He tries to make up by capturing life, by pretending that he is what he can never be by possessing the thing he lacks. Prima facie, life’s opposite of course is not the devil. It is death. But there is a long Christian tradition associating death with diabolic agency. The same tradition holds that death is only overcome at the last judgement, when the devil and death interfere no more with those who share eternal life. Organic decay is at an end. So, apparently, is death.

In fact death can mean more, and worse, than the end of organic decay. In general, after death, an organism re-enters the flow of life, generating other life through its own decomposition. Organic decay is not useless, which is not to say that decay and the smell of corruption are good; just that the force of life is strong enough to gather even these things into itself, so that they re-enter life’s cycles. As with orthodox Judaism, the Christian churches once prohibited cremation, and the faithful believed that this was so their bodies could rise again at judgement.¹ When rationalists gauged that, after all, a buried body was likely to have turned to dust by the time of the last judgement, and that cremation was therefore permissible, they overlooked the immediate and non-metaphorical meaning of burial, which is that it allows dead flesh to participate in the struggle with death on the side of life.²

I will try to show in this book that modernity is producing a more complete and final form of death. Its victorious economy, capitalism, is turning biodegradable life into a form in which it can generate nothing. Once this is plain, it will also be apparent that judgement, in one sense of that term, is anything but metaphorical. One of the most ancient senses we can give to the idea of ‘judgement’ is, ‘that which rights the balance’.³ By binding more and more of life in a form in which it cannot reproduce life, capitalism, and a complicit modernity, disturbs an ecological balance. How that balance is righted remains to be determined. But there are now few on the planet who dispute that the balance needs to be corrected in this beleaguered present.

Capitalism is based on the one process which fails to reproduce, or assist the reproduction, of other forms of life. It is based on money and the process of commodification which money represents. As we will see, this process, which is the key to continued capital accumulation, converts living things into dead ones. Capital is pitched against nature in such a way that the opposition between them becomes absolute. So, accordingly, does that between death and life. This is the material sense we can give to the dictum: ‘No man can serve two masters. It is either God or Mammon.’ The opposition is absolute because Mammon, in the following argument, makes its profit through the steady consumption of nature. Less nature, more Mammon. Less life, more death. In addition, Mammon can only continue to make a profit through the continuous overconsumption of nature; that is to say, capitalism as a system cannot sustain its profit levels and sustain the environment at the same time. By sustaining the environment, I mean allowing nature to replenish at the rate of its depletion for production. Below, I will try to draw out the laws which show that sustaining profit and sustaining the environment are mutually exclusive.

In making this argument I will be relying on Karl Marx. More exactly, I will be applying an argument Marx made about human labour-power to nature. He argued that there was a necessary relation between capitalist profit and the exploitation of labour: because labour gives more than it costs, profit is made. That ‘extra’ from labour is the source of profit and, for Marx, profit comes from this source and this source alone. But this is true only for capitalism; profit was not made this way in other forms of market. (Let us note at the outset that capitalism is not the same thing as the market.) In my argument, capitalism, unlike some other forms of market economy which replenished the natural environment, exploits nature in the same way it exploits labour. As the manner of this exploitation means that capitalism necessarily depletes and degrades nature, conflict between life, or environmental sustainability, and profit is intensified.

The critical opposition between God, as life, and Mammon has been obscured by the growing sympathy of the Christian churches towards money, a sympathy that has increased steadily since the beginnings of capital accumulation in Europe and the consequent rise of capitalism. When the Catholic church, last century, adopted the Protestant revision of St Paul’s dictum that ‘money is the root of all evil’. it made money innocent in itself. The dictum was changed to: ‘the desire for money is the root of all evil’. In other words, money is not the issue. The issue, rather, is human cupidity. But by the following argument, money as such is precisely the problem, together with the process of capital accumulation money represents. The extent of accumulation, and the strength of human cupidity, go hand in hand. The problem here, as with the new interpretation of burial, is that the limits of rational understanding and common sense make certain meanings obscure to the reason of this or that historical period. But while those meanings may be opaque, that does not mean they are beyond logic. The fundamental opposition between God and Mammon has also been obscured by the downgrading of nature in much Christian theology after the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. This downgrading makes it hard to perceive that life, God and regeneration are on one side, while death, the devil and Mammon are on the other. This idea will be plainer if we consider the principal basis for the church’s opposition to usury.

At its simplest, the prohibition on usury (the lending of money for interest) blocked the rise of capitalism, which required substantial accumulations of capital as well as the new industrial technology it acquired centuries later.⁴ I have to say here, before going further, that the arguments on usury had a hypocritical cast in terms of how those arguments functioned institutionally. In particular, usury was prohibited and at the same time made possible by antisemitism and the social exclusion of Jews. Usury was one of a few professions allowed to Jews, who sinned neither in Jewish nor canon law by practising it. But while antisemitism was tied to the struggle against usury, it was not its cause. Before the eleventh century, the prohibition against usury had been absolute. But from the eleventh to the thirteenth centuries, the practice developed while the church struggled to contain it. Hitherto, it had been possible to make a profit on production, say, by loaning agricultural goods, but not by lending money as such.

Following Aristotle, St Thomas Aquinas observed ‘Nummus non parit nummos’ (Money does not reproduce itself).⁵ While money can be used as a medium of exchange, and St Thomas believes it was invented for this purpose, it is against nature for money to propagate of its own accord. In St Bonaventure’s words: ‘In itself and by itself, money does not bear fruit but the fruit comes from elsewhere’.⁶ Usury stole time and attempted to make it into the fruit of money, via the payment of interest. Usury was also associated with death: ‘usurers feed upon cadavers and carcasses when they eat food acquired by usury’.⁷

The battle against usury was lost; capital accumulated. But in between this loss and the rise of modernity, money earned via interest was believed to embody death more than any other thing. After industrial technology is born, this financial form of death is also embodied in commodification. That is to say, my argument on the relation between capitalist profit and its dependence on the exploitation of nature introduces a deathly aspect of the production of commodities on a more widespread level. Compared to the Middle Ages, it is so widespread today that the restrictions against usury read like a forewarning of what is to come. By reworking Marx, we are able to see that the capitalist production of commodities spreads death by turning nature into commodities, without replenishing the life it appropriates in the process. The profit based on this commodification is measured by money: itself, for Marx, the exemplary commodity. As we noted at the outset, the production of commodities binds nature more and more in forms that are not biodegradable, forms incapable of re-entering the lifecycles via the reproduction of their own kind or their organic decay. This argument might re-establish something which was self-evident in the theology of the Middle Ages: namely, that money could not reproduce of itself precisely because its own product was dead rather than living, and only living things could reproduce according to natural law. The understanding of natural law is now too often reduced to human bioethics. In a longer work, I would want to argue that natural law had a much broader compass in the Middle Ages; it was also about nature, and a right relation to nature in which hubris was constrained. But enough for here that in that premodern period the relation between usurious money, death and the devil was clear – as was the opposition of all three to nature. For that matter, the tie between God and nature was also plain. So, accordingly, was the opposition between God and Mammon.

Historically, the devil comes into his own at the time the battle against usury begins in the eleventh century.⁸ Until then, he had been associated with the principle of obstruction, perhaps, by Judaism (although the Fall of the angels is recorded in the Jewish Bible), and it is claimed that the devil had less theological significance in Christianity before the year 1000.⁹ If that interpretation is correct, then the relation between the devil and the initial accumulation of financial capital is even more clear. Chronologically, they coincide.

While the relation between capital, money and the devil is now obscure, I do not want to absolve the desire for money of any responsibility in modernity’s trajectory. Initially, it was a Protestant revision that made ‘the desire for money’ rather than money as such the root of evil. But that does not mean it was wrong. I mentioned earlier that the desire for money is strengthened by the power of capitalism, as the culture of money and commodities. A central argument of this book focuses on the dialectical interaction between desire and the objective existence of a commodified world, which reinforces the desire both for money and for gratifying commodities in general. If I am correct, it should be the case that such desire has increased over time, so much so that it should be anathematized together with interest-bearing money.

To lay the grounds for this argument, we turn now to a fantasy that seems to be inborn in the human psyche, a fantasy which has an antagonism to life at its core. This argument will show that the ingredients of this original fantasy parallel those of St Augustine’s account of the devil’s Fall, as well as his account of original sin. But before proceeding with it, I should offset any impression that this book is conducted throughout in relation to theology as well as social theory. After this introduction, and the next two chapters on the psyche, the argument progresses through a critical political economy. This is not to disavow the links I have been making between the notion of ecological balance and judgement, or (below) between fantasy and an ‘original sin’. On the contrary. As we will see, the facts of a religious fides historica (faith based on history) can refer to the psyche, as well as events, and what the political and economic order needs to avoid being or becoming if it is not to reinforce a fantasy which would fade away if left unbolstered. In explicating this fantasy, I rely on Sigmund Freud and Melanie Klein. But I shall begin this explication by returning to Goethe’s and Augustine’s accounts of the Fall.

In Goethe’s story of Faust, Mephistopheles breaks away from the original source of creation in order to contest it. This original source is maternal. Goethe calls her Mother Night. The devil on the other hand is ‘Haughty Light’. a reference both to his pride and his tie to light, hallucination and deceptive vision. This ‘Haughty Light’. the devil, breaks away from the Mother but he can never break away from Her being. Lucifer must stay ‘tied to bodies’. He can only use his light through the human agency the Mother makes. He is a parasite, dependent on and trapped in the very process of life he seeks to forestall.¹⁰

But life eludes the devil, with a ceaseless creativity that evades complete prediction, and hence control. That the devil desires control is axiomatic, for he feasts on power and the prospect of power. It is this that leads to his famous sin of pride, superbia. The devil’s sin of pride has often been misunderstood as something rather magnificent. ‘I shall not bend the knee’, is his imagined cry.¹¹ Generations of those who have stood on the side of the oppressed have confused their cry with his. But, as we shall see here, according to Augustine, the devil was prompted by something rather different from the drive for equality and the desire to alleviate suffering. He was driven, very simply, by the desire to be boss. From this desire comes a fantasy from which all paranoia and its attendant miseries are born. In this fantasy, the state of being created by another, and dependent on that other, is interpreted as the state of being controlled. The other or others want to keep you in your place. They created you to feel superior. If not for their ignoble ambition, you could be, well, God. This fantasy founds the psyche. In the fullest sense of the word, it is foundational.

The keystone of this book is the analysis of that foundational fantasy. As I have indicated, in that analysis I draw on Augustine, Freud and Melanie Klein. As I have also indicated, there is a parallel between Augustine’s accounts of the Fall and original sin and psychoanalytic, especially Kleinian, accounts of the infant’s early life. Both Augustine and Klein make omnipotence and envy central in the analysis of evil and paranoia respectively. Their accounts are remarkably similar, and by joining them we fill in some of the lacunae in both.¹² In addition, the logic of their arguments, when taken together with Freud’s, yields a theory of the subject/object distinction, and an account of how it is formed, which is the basis of my economic analysis.

The foundational fantasy is the means whereby the human being comes to conceive itself as the source of all intelligence and all agency. It conceives of the other (other people, the world around it) as objects that are there to serve it, to wait upon its needs without making it wait, to gratify it instantly! When the subject makes the other an object, it simultaneously conceives of itself as a subject. Intelligence and agency are what differentiates a subject from an object. This assumption, that an intelligent subject is counterposed to a world of objects, is critical in how the foundational fantasy is globally enacted. By enactment, I mean the process whereby the fantasy is made real in the social order, rather than the psyche. This brings us to the most radical and simple idea in this book.

A process that is studied in microcosm by psychoanalysis is shown in the following argument to be a process at work in the macrocosmic world of commodities. Psychoanalytic insights and theories might be less pertinent to individual processes than they are to social processes. The impulses (and fantasies in the end are only impulses) described in psychoanalysis might not originate in the individual psyche, but in the broader social order. What I mean by this is not simply the truism that the psyche is socialized. I mean that psychoanalysts have observed social dynamics in miniature, that psychoanalytic thinking is premised on looking down a telescope the wrong way. If omnipotent impulses are ‘out there’ in the social, they wash through the psyche, especially the infant psyche, which is unshielded from the impact of affects from without; unprotected against, say, anxiety or other energies and feelings which the infant mistakenly takes to be its own. In other words, the affects and impulses pre-exist the infant. We are born into them. But people then, and this is our tragedy, take these impulses to be our own, filtering them through the ‘I’ or ego developed in the first few months of life. The affect is held in common, but the ego makes up its own story, one which explains why the affects are appropriate to it. Henceforth, the affects become its own. This idea entails that the foundational and omnipotent fantasy I am about to discuss can play itself out at various levels: at the social as well as the individual level, and various gradations in between. At the social level, the omnipotent desire to obliterate creativity and life could be manifest in the process of rendering real others superfluous. At the individual level, the overall omnipotent aim of the foundational fantasy, as it is acted out in the social, might be obscure to individuals but they still partake of it when they are its thoughtless vehicle...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements and note
• 1 Introduction
• Part I Psyche
• Part II Economy
• Part III Polity
• Afterword
• Index