Into the Epistemological Wilderness
The characterization, or, the conceptual framing of the contemporary environments resulting from several decades of financialization and pro-market policies, wars, unprecedented inequalities and rising climate urgencies, appear to have been particularly elusive to analysts of all definition. Why is the contemporary experience (transitional moment? new period?) of global capital so difficult to name? Does generic âneoliberalismâ still offer a valid framework of presuppositions, or could it have itself become a lingering hindrance to the necessary search for renewed conceptual coinages? Ultimately, what do terminological hesitations say about present conditions but alsoâand most crucially hereâabout the tools and assumptions commonly relied upon to address them?
The first section of this chapter offers to register various signals of an ongoing deep analytical and conceptual unease with the contemporary conjuncture generated by approximately forty years of policies commonly associated with âneoliberalismâ. For sometime now, a number of social scientists have expressed something like dismay in their attempts to name and conceptually capture the historical sequence specific to the ongoing experience of global capital. In this intellectual environment, marked by confusion and hesitation as well as inventiveness and experimentation, âneoliberalismâ appears to have increasingly functioned as a last resort umbrella-term. The conceptual big tent of âneoliberalismâ has come to accommodate a considerable diversity of heterogeneous phenomena, trends and policies. As such, âneoliberalismâ has been of critical assistance to the cause of totalization in an age of continued and deepening fragmentations, be they territorial (national, urban) or across labour markets or political spheres.
But as the world drifts further and further away from neoliberalismâs inaugural experiences (at some distance from the inaugural Thatcher-Reagan late cold-war romance and its Pinochetist prelude), questioning the relevance and usefulness of âneoliberalismâ may have acquired some urgency: is âneoliberalismâ of any actual help in a moment of resurrecting nationalisms, fascism and protectionist tariff wars as well as renewed projects of democratic socialism and multiplying experiments in alternative, non-capitalist models of organization and ownership?1 Does the word still name any identifiable set of relations and expectations fundamentally driving processes of change, while further entrenching their competitive and individualistic coordinates as perennial anthropological norms? Or is âneoliberalismâ a mere place-holder, itself bound to be replaced by the more successful abstractions that will eventually consign it to the cares of the historian of ideas and concepts (now possibly busy with already fossilized âpostmodernismâ).
The second section aims to explore at least some of the sources of the persisting epistemological difficulties so typical of our moment. The main argument will be that if there are unquestionably resistant dimensions of the realities created by the contemporary world of capital, complicating problems may still have resulted from the equipment itself with which historical transitions have been expected, imagined and conceptualized and interpreted. This has required a detour through earlier intellectual conjunctures in which the âtransitionalâ imagination thought it could afford to contemplate the clearer, more straightforward scenarios that precisely come to appear so elusive in this moment of our own.
My final contention will be the following: the rise of global capital, by transforming earlier national conditions of capitalism and their respective systems of labour relations, has brought into viewâwith unprecedented clarityâthe diversity of forms of exploitation to which capitalism has always and commonly resorted. In the process, it has run against ordinary assumptions about âtransitionsâ and simplified historical equations between capital and free wage-labour. Historian Jairus Banaji has offered probably the most effective critique of the âtransitionalâ imagination whose persisting formalisms have become terminally incapable of making sense of the ruptured landscape of labour exploitation under the rule of ubiquitous, high-frequency global capital.
The period beginning in the late 1970s and commonly identified with neoliberalism has generated a whole array of lasting challenges, in the face of which a number of social scientists have acknowledged the inadequacy of their own analytical tools. To take a few examples only, attempts to address dominant forms of global power and influence, or modes and scales of accumulation, or the forces of financialization and the debt economy, or the types of political intervention that may be relevant to the general shape of power relations, or the direction and possible next stage of the ongoing âtransitionââshould the present condition be âtransitional at allâhave all been met with terminal perplexity. According to Peter Gowan, writing in the late 1990s, âwe do not have ready to hand a language for describing this pattern of global social powerâ (Gowan 2010, p. 13).2 Twenty years later, reflecting on the dynamics of capital on a global scale and what he sees as their exemplary manifestation in China, historian Jairus Banaji (2015) considered that âwe simply do not dispose of the categories that could match capitalism on such a scale!â. In the face of the unprecedented forces of finance capital, Maurizio Lazzarato (2011) considered that âwe lack the necessary theoretical instruments, the concepts and the articulations to analyse, not only finance, but the debt economy as a whole which both comprises it without restricting itself to it, and its politics of enslavementâ. Wondering with his interviewer, Eric Hazan, âdans quelle Ă©poque vivons-nous?â, philosopher Jacques RanciĂšre partly diagnosed the sense of impasse haunting much of left politics, through the complete disconnect between the political literacies still available and the sciences of society that warrant them: âTaking power, nobody knows what that means nowadays, and the whole of the strategic outlook and the interactions between ends and means have become an empty scholasticismâ (2017, p. 37 and pp. 30â31).
Other discussions have reflected on the transitional nature itself of our early twenty-first century. Do the rise of giant data-centric complexes, climate urgencies, profound regional disorders and mass migrations resulting from war, as well as deepening structural debt signal a possible moment of juncture leading to some more stable and perennial social forms and configuration of power? Or, is this it, and states of exception and entropy have already come to rule the day in many parts of the world? Naomi Klein (2008) has drawn the striking portrait of a historical stage of capitalism in which âdisastersâ currently drive its necessary reconfigurations through traumatic, hardly intelligible moments of exception, allowing complete suspension and subsequent rehauls of existing regulations and norms. But for sociologist, Wolfgang Streeck, the âdisastrousâ logic now appears to imply that âwhile we see [capitalism] disintegrating before our eyes, we see no successor approaching. [âŠ] By disintegration I mean an already far advanced decline of the capacity of capitalism as an economic regime to underwrite a stable societyâ (2016, p. 35). âDisaster capitalismâ, in other words, could now be reaching the ultimate stage of the capitalist disaster tout court. From a somewhat less somberly catastrophist perspectiveâalthough not devoid of its own crepuscular notationsâJacques Bidet believes the âregime- of neoliberal hypercapitalism has entered a new epoch altogether of âultimodernityâ; i.e. a last stage of capitalist expansion ineluctably contained by the geographical limits of the planet itself (2016, pp. 146â147. See also p. 157).3 In a similar fashion, in response to Immanuel Wallersteinâs anticipation of a new systemic stasis that contemporary political power relations between global right and left have yet to determine, Etienne Balibar (2017) considers that we have already reached a stage terminal enough to be conceptualized as âcapitalisme absoluâ, itself a reminder of economist Michel Hussonâs (2008) earlier idea that capitalist relations may have merely become thoroughly âpurifiedâ.
This sense of impasse itself reflects then a certain obscuring of political perspectives and failing abilities (both theoretical and political) to anticipate the advent of a superior stage beyond the conditions of the age. But there have also been notable counterpoints to the general spirit of perplexity. âDeclinismââa literary genre in itselfâhas been a rather successful alternative, if only measured in terms of its editorial successes. According to that constituency, âcultureâ, ânational identitiesâ and âcivilizationâ itself have been steadily falling to ruin. Only a resurgence of nativist and authoritarian common sense will save a restricted and exclusive âusâ from a variety of perils, among which immigration and Islam have become favourites. The melancholies of declinism have offered imagined restorations of cultural sovereignty, where economic sovereignties (Appadurai 2017) have been undermined by ubiquitous financialization and subsequent indifference to notions of place, community and the complex fabric of personal and collective loyalties that had reproduced them for generations. In stark contrast to the critical hesitations about the possible grammar of contemporary capitalist accumulation, the identitarian substitutions of declinism have achieved spectacular ideological advances, soon followed by the electoral victories and political entrenchments that have so marked the second decade of the twenty-first century (from Brazil to India via the United States, France, Hungary or Israel). But in this case, for all the certainties dispensed about the present state of things, the paranoid mobilizations of beleaguered âwhitenessâ mostly aim to renew the lease of market deregulation and anti-union agendas.
On another more polemic front, one concept has circulated widely, i.e.: âneofeudalismâ, with this idea that rather than living in an age of unprecedented innovations (be they technological, social or political), we have been trapped under the sway of some dystopian time-loop only leading to the archaic restoration of the worst forms of premodern tyranny (see Labica 2016). Now, I have to restrict myself to a couple of observations about this. First, we must note the at least apparent theoretical weakness of this characterization, which will trigger suspicions of general illiteracy on the part of anyone articulating their critique of contemporary capitalism in such unsophisticated language. I believe such suspicions to be misled on a number of fronts. One reason for this is that the theoretical weakness itself precisely needs to be taken to both signal and respond to the wider conceptual failings of the moment. Something to which I will be returning shortly. Secondly, âneofeudalismâ offers an alternative periodization of the contemporary age through a strict polemical reversal of âneoliberalismâ, invalidating the latter in its initial slogans and propagandistic pretensions to have heralded a new, post-ideological phase of social and economic modernization and liberal democracy, notably after the collapse of the Eastern bloc. The critique conveyed by âneofeudalismâ has a number of merits and inconveniences. But in any case, the polemic counter-periodization which it invites is very much in tune with the more general sense that historical time has been feeling its way down some epistemological dark alley. If neoliberalism ever was the name of an agenda for transition away from post-war compromises, it has not inaugurated any credible and sustainable social form and project, promo...
