The Split Economy

Saint Paul Goes to Wall Street

Nimi Wariboko

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781438480589, 9781438480596
• eBook ISBN: 9781438480602
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Economic Theory

Draws on philosophy, economics, theology, and psychoanalytic theory to reveal a fundamental dynamic of capitalism.

Starting with Marx and Freud, scholars have attempted to identify the primary ethical challenge of capitalism. They have named injustice, inequality, repression, exploitative empires, and capitalism's psychic hold over all of us, among other ills. Nimi Wariboko instead argues that the core ethical problem of capitalism lies in the split nature of the modern economy, an economy divided against itself. Production is set against finance, consumption against saving, and the future against the present. As the rich enjoy their lifestyle, their fellow citizens live in servitude. The economy mimics the structure of our human subjectivity as Saint Paul theorizes in Romans 7: the law constitutes the subject as split, traversed by negativity. The economy is split, shot through with a fundamental antagonism. This fundamental negativity at the core of the economy disturbs its stability and identity, generating its destructive drive. The Split Economy develops a robust theoretical framework at the intersection of continental philosophy, psychoanalytic theory, theology, and political economy to reveal a fundamental dynamic at the heart of capitalism.

PART I

Ontology. Subject in General

A Theory of Cracks

Chapter 1

Sickness unto Excess

Introduction

In the book’s Introduction we stated multiple times that to properly understand the modern economy we must translate the epistemological obstacle that prevents us from properly understanding an economy as an obstacle within the economy itself, a split inscribed into the core of capitalism. This is to say that our inability to grasp the Thing of capitalism that engenders its most intractable ethical problem is not due to epistemological failure but is an inherent negativity of capitalism. This means that the economy is cracked. Taking this as my point of departure for our analysis is to hold onto a philosophical perspective and a methodological approach that are rooted both in premodern and modern philosophies.

Plato conceptualized being as cracked, split between ideal forms (ideal world) and the external appearance to the world, indicating a division within being. Kant categorized our existence into two distinctions: the phenomenal and noumenal realms: the thing and the thing-in-itself. He proceeded to argue that we can only know a thing as it appears to us (our experiences), which is at the phenomenal level, and not as it is in itself (the reality), at the noumenal level. Here Kant is theorizing an epistemological division of being that explains that our way of knowing or conceiving reality is shot through with an epistemological barrier that we can never overcome. Hegel shifted the focus by saying we have this divided approach to the world because reality itself is ontologically divided. The split between appearance and thing-in-itself is not in the knowing subject, but in things themselves. What creates the stumbling block for the knowing subject is a split, crack, rupture within being. For Hegel, reality is appearance qua appearance. All these insights are also important for understanding how the Hegelian dialectics work. The so-called synthesis of thesis and antithesis is not really a third item from outside of the two opposing positions, not a fusion of the thesis and antithesis; it is only a parallax shift, which reveals that the antithesis is already in the thesis. Take, for instance, law and crime, a thesis and its antithesis; the synthesis is the subject’s realization that law itself is big crime, founded on a criminal, constituting violence. Law is only a universalized crime. In the synthesis, law encounters itself in the form of its opposite, and we realize that the antagonism between thesis and the antithesis is internal to the thesis itself.

Let us return to the crack, the rupture in being. Lacan also conceives being as cracked, with a gap that forever disturbs it. He postulates this gap through his theory of language. Whereas Ferdinand de Saussure analyzes language as a structure of difference put in play by signifiers, Lacan is more interested in understanding the emergence of signifiers from a rupture or gap in being and how the whole signification process circulates or functions around this gap. The signifier that emerged from the division within being repeats the division within being. Furthermore, the signifier separates the knowing subject from the natural world. For Lacan, human beings are subjects of the signifier, which has also introduced a gap between need and desire. The emergence of speaking beings transformed their needs in contrast to animals. For the human subject, according to Lacan, “There is no … state of pure need. From the origin, need is motivated on the plane of desire, that is to say, of something that is destined in man to have a certain relationship with the signifier.”1 In the words of Paul Eisenstein and Todd McGowan, “Lacan identifies the radical kernel of the linguistic turn as the cut in being that the signifier illuminates … The cut gives birth to the subject and the unconscious. The unconscious is the register of the signifier’s rupture. It is what remains of the revolutionary cut that occurs with the emergence of the signifier.”2

Paul theorizes human subjectivity as a crack in the human being; the law divides the self from within through the destructive cycle of law and its transgression (Romans 7). The focus on grace in Pauline theology represses the scandal of the law, covers the scandal of the creation (emergence) of sin through law. So the rescued Christian, the one saved by Christ, is at once the result of the scandal of the law and its repression. Paul here in the fashion of Plato, Kant, Hegel, and Lacan gives us another insight into the cut in being. Paul moves very quickly to heal the gap, the wound through his Christological notion of grace and thus refuses to testify to the perpetual being’s constitutive incompleteness.

Yet it seems Paul could not avoid the language of division in being. His theology of grace or the relationship between Jews and the law under the regime of grace accents endless radical divisions within being, as if he could not stop circulating around the possibility that the rupture of the law inaugurated. Paul in his writing acknowledges several partitions in the law, from the fundamental division of the law as Jews and non-Jews, the law that divides the self from within, the law that divides itself, to the division between circumcision and foreskin. “How does Paul tackle these divisions? … Paul puts another division to work, one that does not coincide with the preceding ones but is not exterior to them either. The messianic aphorism works on the divisions of the law themselves, imposing upon them a further cut. This cut is that of sarx/pneuma, the cut of ‘flesh/breath.’ ”3 Giorgio Agamben goes on to state in another place about Paul’s proclivity toward finding divisions in the law:

Under the effect of the cut of Apelles, the partition of the law (Jew/non-Jew), is no longer clear or exhaustive, for there will be some Jews who are not Jews, and some non-Jews who are not non-Jews. Paul states it clearly: “Not all those of Israel are Israel” (Rom. 9:6); and, further on, citing Hosea, “I will call my own people a non-people” (Rom. 9:25). This means that messianic division introduces a remnant [resto] into the law’s overall division of the people, and Jews and non-Jews are constitutively “not all.”4

Even without going to this length to uncover the imbrication of Paul’s thought in fractured being, we can also see that Paul’s investment in a monotheistic God and his grace signals that humans are not confined to a completed world. God and grace, in the thought-world Paul signifies, marks a break or gap within the signifying chain of existence. God and grace mark a rupture between subjects and their environment (or situation, to use Alain Badiou’s term).

In this chapter, and in the book as a whole, I want to explore how the primordial economy repeated the gesture of rupture in being, how it is carried forward in capitalism, especially finance capital, and how such a gap in the economy is generating an excess that destabilizes and decentralizes social existence. This excess manifests itself in concrete and abstract values, in harvest that is deemed a surplus for investment, as excess orientation to the future, and as excess investment in the psychic appeal of the promise of better and fuller future satisfaction.

Thus, in this text I am not only interested in the emergence of the primordial crack in the economy and the structures it inaugurates, but also how this excess (sometimes concrete, other times as abstract, exuberant content-less forms of financial commodities swaps, and yet at another time as the unmasterable excess of finite content of naked swaps) seeps into our social bodies or into our ethical substance. My interest is to use various philosophical apparatuses to foreground the centrality of the crack (in being and in the economy) in economic ethics and its methodology. All economic experience is preceded by the crack, led by the crack, and made by the crack. Economic acts, like political ones and historical ruptures, “are possible[,] and transformative change can occur because being is always at odds with itself, and this self-division is both destabilizing and productive.”5

The Birth of the Split Economy

The modern economy was born when finance began as a “crack” of the primordial general economy. The beginning is traceable to the generation of the first set of surplus, seed for the future production in the evolutionary process of the primitive economy. This is to say the modern economy emerged when the basic harvest, gathering, or kill was divided between immediate consumption and a surplus to prepare or plan for tomorrow’s kill or production. In neoclassical economic language, we are referring to the beginning of saving geared toward having claims on future resources or output. In psychological terms, it may well refer to the dawn of an insatiable drive for economic security.

When we say that finance split off from the economy it is not meant to convey the sense of fantasy or that the prehistoric economy in the splitting discovered a version of the structure of fantasy as we have it in today’s economy. The pre-split economy was not a period or stage of abundance, which was lost or turned into a time of scarcity with the splitting, only for the subjects to head toward an Eden of overabundance—the recovery of lost original abundance. The setting aside of a portion of today’s consumption for tomorrow’s consumption and the hope of future abundance emerged as a struggle with scarcity. The logic of the split or the whole economy has ever since not approached the access to future abundance apart from scarcity.

The primordial split is also an indication of the division of labor in a double sense. Here we have the product of labor divided along temporal lines: use in the here and now, and use later. We also have the impulse toward the division of labor: somewhere and “elsewhen” society’s members will be divided between those who manage the social product for today’s consumption and those who would convert what is not consumed into capital for future generation and increment of social production.

In the beginning was the split, and the split was with the economy, and the split was the economy. My basic starting point for analyzing or examining today’s economy and the complex relationship between finance capital and the rest of the economy is that in the beginning the split already existed, and what we know as the economy today is the work and working out of the “big bang” of the split. This split is an ambiguous power, a mixture of good and evil. This good that is mixed up with evil cannot simply be extracted or the evil expunged so that we can heal the divisions. The fundamental arguments of this book express the claim that the economy is split, and can never be harmonious; finance is split, not whole, financial commodities are split, not whole, and splitting is the engine, the self-revolutionizing power of the economy, particularly the financial sector. What Wall Street does is to coordinate these split parts into profitable ways of doing business in the face of competition without making them holistically coherent or harmonious, only alive and profitable. This ongoing coordination for profit is subject to ethical evaluation at two distinguishable but related levels.

It is often said that the financial market, like all markets, has no inherent moral character. The advocates of this viewpoint hold that the moral problems of the financial sector arise from greed and failure of governments to properly regulate the players in the markets. This book, however, argues that the financial market, Wall Street, and finance capital have an inherent moral character that precedes, transcends, and interacts with greed and government regulations. Its inherent logic is that of split, division, separation of content from form, timeless drifting from and taking advantage of the general economy. This tendency is profoundly moral. The fundamental character of finance is splitting, to divide and tear apart and celebrate fragments as spectacles. The fundamental character and its engendered practices speak certain values that may or may not resonate with the majority of us. This is the basic primordial (or overarching) context in which actors’ greed is played out and governments’ policies operate for the benefits of special interests. The logic or character of finance capital, the financial market, is not neutral, and it serves a purpose or an interest, so we cannot in all honesty argue that it has no inherent morality. Social processes or institutions, before they are manipulated by or corrupted for special interests, have an inherent logic, purpose, bias, interest, rationality, or directionality, all subject to ethical evaluation.

The work of this book is to enable us to think of the split, understand its logic and dynamics, figure its impact on human lives, and develop the ethical framework to properly address it. The control of Wall Street or finance capital must bet on social justice, democracy, and pluralism without risking killing the self-revolutionizing dynamics (motor of accumulation) of capitalism.6 I must admit that I am not optimistic about how as a society we can efficiently or effectively do this. Though there are enough reasons for despair, I want to believe that if we explore the critical nexus between economics and politics we can discern a way out. Ultimately, controlling Wall Street will boil down to politics—that is, sustained activists’ actions to push the polis toward more democracy, pluralism, social justice, and equalitarian economic opportunities.

The ravenous nature of Wall Street is a predictable consequence of the dynamic of the split in free modern economy. This is so because the event of the primordial split is “demonic.” “To call capitalism [or Wall Street] demonic means that it is a structure of evil characterized by the ambiguous unity of creative and destructive powers. Tillich stresses that the demonic is no individual act of evil based on the free decision of personality. Rather, it is ‘a structure of evil beyond the moral power of good will, which produces social and individual tragedy precisely through the inseparable mixture of good and evil in every human act.’ ”7 All this points to the tragic quality of the primordial split triggered by desire and economic insecurity. “A situation is tragic in which the very elements which are most valuable by their very value drive it to self-destruction.”8 The split as manifested on Wall Street is driving the economy as a whole toward self-destruction. The economy is a “life” in which separation is continuously posited but cannot be overcome by reunion.

I hope to think and theorize all these within the disciplinary location of economic ethics, and not within theology or neoclassical economics. Economic ethics studies rationally, systematically, and methodically the political, normative, and moral purposes of economic institutions, socioeconomic dynamics, and public policies for the ideal organization of society for human flourishing.9 Unlike neoclassical economic analysts, I do not deem the ethical purposes of economic institutions and public policies to be defined, driven, or circumscribed by self-interest (or self-interest properly defined), but by community, stories of living well with others, and what it means to allow all human beings to be the best they can be. Again, unlike neoclassical economists or the run-of-the-mill liberal (conservative) scholars of political theory, I do not think that the quest for the ideal organization of society for human flourishing should be limited to the distribution of power in any given society, but should be expanded to include transformation of the coordinates that organize our existence, eliciting an interruption of the flow of social life. This is to say, in the fashion of Paul Eisenstein and Todd McGowan, economic ethics must become (include) a political theory that is not restricted to the creation and maintenance of “a reasonable, just, and stable social order.”10 It must become a theory of rapture. “Rapture is the occurrence of the impossib...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I Ontology. Subject in General: A Theory of Cracks
• Part II Particular Subject: Logic of the World of Finance
• Part III Singular-Plural Subjects: Deactivation of the Capitalist Future
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index
• Back Cover