Agamben, Hutchinson, Waquant: Human Valuation and Agency in a Neoliberal Economy

The readings from Agamben, Hutchinson, and Waquant address the matter of human value and the constitution of human agency, and its limits, within systems of sovereignty and structures of power.  All of this bears relevance to Graeber’s project concerning the cultural logic of debt and its links to violence and power.

For Agamben, the question of human value and political agency is factored in terms of the distinction between zoe and bios.  Agamben derives these terms from Aristotle (Politics) and draws on Foucault’s work on bio-power.  The key point that Agamben seems to be making is that human agency reduced to the level of “bare life” (as opposed to meaningful political participation) is what characterizes political systems, including modern democracies, that work to exercise power and control over the very conditions of human existence at every level of social and political life.  All politics becomes biopolitics, the politics of bare life (Agamben 1998:3).  Moreover, this “politicization of bare life as such,” Agamben argues, “constitutes the decisive event of modernity and signals a radical transformation of the political-philosophical categories of classical thought” (4).  Agamben advances the idea that “the production of a biopolitical body is the original activity of sovereign power” (6).  It is not difficult to see how these ideas inform the theoretical structure of Graeber’s debt analysis.

Hutchinson observes how “government structures everywhere are… dependent on the enforced ‘forgetting’ of the violence that inevitably upholds them” (69).  I am not sure to what extent such a claim can be applied in any absolute sense to all types and forms of government whether in Sudan or any other nation.  However, it is a pointed observation and very much connects with Graeber’s observations about how structures of power work to foster violence and naturalize assumptions about the proper role of debt in human relations and every level of social life.  Perhaps this could also apply to matters of bio-power and bare life.  I am not entirely sure about the connection, but perhaps it is one worth considering.

Waquant tries to connect the rise of a neoliberal economy with a specific cultural logic (much as in Graeber’s account) that not only disregards but explicitly punishes and disempowers the poor and other marginal groups to a position of perpetual bare life under the administration of techniques of bio-power and economic control.  Her intellectual project in Punishing the Poor is, as she describes it, “intended as a contribution to the historical anthropology of the state and of the transnational transformations of the field of power in the age of ascending neoliberalism” (Wacquant 2009:xviii).  The cultural logic of a neoliberal economy supported by an unregulated penal state, in which poverty is the crime and it is the poor who are punished for being poor, is in Wacquant’s account at root the result of a kind of neo-Darwinian emphasis on competition that valorizes individual acquisition and personal responsibility while it pushes the burdens of the state essentially onto the backs and shoulders of the poor.

Debt in Wacquant’s critique is configured not so much as political punishment (though it is, de facto, that) as it is the abandonment of all sense of social responsibility.  It is on the basis of this critique that bare life is structured as an economically basic and politically enforced state of affairs.  Neoliberalism, Wacquant argues, “is constitutionally corrosive of democracy” (313).  Again, Graeber’s analysis applies in this connection, particularly on the link between debt and violence, and politics and power—the codification of a politics of bare life (in which almost all are mostly barely getting by) and the reduction of the human being to the animal body. Debt is business and business is booming.

References

Agamben, Giorgio. 1998. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

--. State of Exception. 2005. Trans. Kevin Attell. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Graeber, David. 2014. Debt: The First 5,000 Years. Brooklyn: Melville House Publishing.

Hutchinson, Sharon Elaine. 1998. "Death, Memory and the Politics of Legitimation: Nuer Experiences of the Continuing Second Sudanese Civil War." In Richard Werbner, ed. Memory and the Podtcolony: African Anthropology and the Critique of Power. London: Zed Books, pp. 58-70.

Wacquant, Loïc. 2009. Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity. Durham: Duke University Press.

Graeber 'Debt' analysis II (Greiner 2015)

A key part of Graeber’s analysis of debt is the extent to which violence has been linked to debt and effectively encoded at the most basic level of organizational logic that structures and defines the way in which humans live and have lived for most of human history (the past 5,000 years).  Debt is linked to violence due to structural forms of unequal relationships between otherwise at least potentially equal human beings.  Violence works by the exercise of power by one person over another, and it is through networks of exchange, based on structured inequality, that power is formed and violence in turn forced and enforced.  This “legacy of violence,” as Graeber terms it, “has twisted everything around us.”  Violence—epistemic and social violence—due to the logic of debt, as expressed socially in terms of the “language of the business deal” and the culture of calculation, has corroded sociality at every level of human experience.  This violence is pervasive and has in many ways been rendered largely invisible.  The cultural logic of debt and the forms of social violence that enforce it have become normalized and go for the most part unnoticed and unquestioned.  This legacy of violence has come to define social existence in a fundamental way.  Every institution has been affected by and largely organized and defined by the logic of debt and the legacy of violence that supports and is in turn supported by it.  This is central to Graeber’s argument and illustrated in all of his examples.  Graeber writes:

It’s not just that war, conquest, and slavery played such a central role in converting human economies into market ones; there is literally no institution in our society that has not been to some degree affected.  The story told at the end of Chapter Seven, of how even our conceptions of “freedom” itself came to be transformed, through the Roman institution of slavery, from the ability to make friends, to enter into moral relations with others, into incoherent dreams of absolute power, is only perhaps the most dramatic instance—and most insidious, because it leaves it very hard to imagine what meaningful human freedom would even be like. (Graeber 2014:385-86)

This passage may be profitably compared with the following remarks about how slavery works by abstracting people from their social networks and relationships with others—all the organizing factors that define social existence and personal identity for any person as a moral being worthy of rights and respect.   Slavery is in Graeber’s account a process of extracting individuals from meaningful networks of social identity—one term he uses in this connection is human economies (which is in turn contrasted with the marketplace economies that operate according to the logic of calculation and business deal language).  Slavery in whatever form it takes is for Graeber social disempowerment, and it can be understood as “that process that dislodges people from the webs of mutual commitment, shared history, and collective responsibility that make them what they are, so as to make them exchangeable—that is, to make it possible to make them subject to the logic of debt.”  “Slavery,” Graeber continues, “is just the logical end-point, the most extreme form of such disentanglement” (163).  Slavery converts free human beings into indentured servants.  It does this through a structured economy enforced through violence and maintained through war.  Graeber says this is “a practice as old as civilization,” and it is a hard claim to refute.  Yet it is a practice as old as a certain model of civilization, one that has unfortunately come to define human civilizations over such a long and pervasive span of time that one can be excused for thinking that this is the way that humans simply are and that there is no hope for any other possible economic system or sociocultural way of life.  Graeber as an anthropologist, however, knows as well as anyone that this is not the way that all human societies have ordered their existence or structured their affairs.

It is not human nature but rather the perpetuation of certain models of human behavior and certain codes of language and law and institutional enforcement over time that has placed debt and slavery as the seemingly normal and natural definition for what is sadly and not without irony called “the human condition.”  If debt is the perversion of a promise and if slavery is the abstraction of a human being from meaningful networks of exchange, then it certainly stands to reason that these are conditions that can change.  Civilization can in every sense of the word always advance and evolve.  The next 5,000 years need not come to affirm the legacy of violence that has characterized human life on the planet from bad mistakes in the past.  Debt need not be destiny.  And slavery should not in any society or meaningful human culture come to be seen by any thinking person as simply the way that things are.

Review of Graeber: Part I (Greiner 2015)

‘Debt’ as Social Value and Moral Force: An Analysis of Graeber

The social arrangements by which humans organize their lives require common codes—such as language and law—and mechanisms for the preservation of culture and the maintenance of order.  According to David Graeber, the concept of debt as a matter of social morality, by no means limited to the sphere of economics, has for the past 5,000 years served such an organizing function for most societies.  In Debt: The First 5,000 Years (2011; 2014), Graeber presents a sweeping ethno-historical account of the ways in which ‘debt’ has been culturally encoded and socially constructed, that is to say, normalized, as one of the primary means of ordering social relations and the very meaning of morality.  Debt becomes, to borrow a term from Althusser, a kind of ideological state apparatus.  Debt sets the terms and conditions for not only economics but ‘exchange’ at every level of human interaction and sociality.  Debt is, in Graeber’s account, a kind of zero-sum barometer by which all of human social life and cultural existence is measured, counted, and conducted in every sense of the terms.  The language and logic of debt set the standards for the ordering and enforcement of social, political, economic, and cultural organization.  Debt is seen as the logic of social life—period.

Far from a product of amicable cultural consensus, this logic of debt as the main ordering apparatus for the whole of socioeconomic and political life is in Graeber’s book a matter of systematic, achieved social violence.  That is to say, it is by violence and the ongoing and pervasive threat of violence that the apparatus of debt as an ordering force maintains a stranglehold on the rights and dignity of all of humankind.  This is not for Graeber hyperbole: The logic of debt maintains absolute rule by violence and force at every level of social organization—through various forms and formations of slavery, conquest, and war.

This essay examines some of Graeber’s key claims in detail and it especially explores the ways in which a cultural logic of debt maintained by structures of language and morality are in Graeber’s account rendered at once problematic and in fact the source of much social unrest and disorder.  Graeber’s intellectual project depends on a certain conception of violence and power in sustaining systems of subjugation in terms of debt.  Language, morality, and questions of sociality and social contract figure heavily in this account.

The Language of Debt

Language, literally and in almost every other sense, sets the terms and conditions for social interaction and cultural exchange.  Human society is unimaginable without a clear and mutually intelligible means for exchanging ideas and maintaining relationships whether economic or interpersonal.  From this fact it follows that much of the value that a society places on certain activities and the meaning it ascribes to various types and forms of exchange can be seen to be reflected in language use, even if not especially at the basic level of everyday, ‘ordinary’, communication.  Graeber’s book is very much informed by this phenomenological and materialist understanding of language.  Because language is the means of the transmission of cultural values, Graeber argues that it is essential to look at debt primarily as a matter of language, and moreover in terms of its historical use and encoding over time.  Most people, Graeber argues, have a rather ill-defined sense of what debt in fact actually is, what debt is, and what is means to exist in a state and condition of ‘debt’:

The very fact that we don’t know what debt is, the very flexibility of the concept, is the basis of its power.  If history shows anything, it is that there’s no better way to justify relations founded on violence, to make such relations seem moral, than by reframing them in the language of debt—above all, because it immediately makes it seem that it’s the victim who’s doing something wrong. (5)

And the victim, as Graeber’s account makes clear, is more often than not a person who is in some way economically disempowered (e.g., racial or ethnic minorities, women, slaves, etc.) and thus placed on unequal footing in terms of any business arrangement.  For this reason, a considerable portion of Graeber’s analysis deals directly with matters of language—the social construction of debt as a legitimating moral force, a force that lends credence to the notion that all of human economy is a matter of calculation and monetary exchange.  Graeber’s book is in many fundamental ways an elucidation of the concept of debt as a cultural imaginary, a sociohistorical analysis of the construction of the term in the ordering of human affairs.  A debt according to such logic is a matter for marketplace values and precisely quantified accounts.  Human economies become transformed into an economy of the market.  Under social conditions structured and informed by marketplace logic, the primary language becomes not so much the language of human relations but the “language of the business deal” Graeber 2014:13).  Such language leads to all manner of problems in the moral arena.

This, for Graeber, is the central question in the book: “What, precisely, does it mean to say that our sense of morality and justice is reduced to the language of a business deal?  What does it mean when we reduce moral obligations to debts?” (13)  Morality is for Graeber the central matter in understanding human constructions of debt as the force of economic and social organization.  It is not so much the matter of economics as such that Graeber finds problematic.  Economics is a necessary and vital part of any ordered (as opposed to chaotic) human society.  Even capitalism has its redeeming qualities in the critique advanced in the book.  What Graeber is taking issue with is the reduction of all of human social life to a matter of money, “money’s capacity to turn morality into a matter of impersonal arithmetic—and by doing so, to justify things that would otherwise seem outrageous or obscene” (14).  It is not so much money as such that is in Graeber’s view the source of all evil, but rather the reduction of all basic human affairs and social relations to a question of currency values and quantifiable exchange, established by rules and enforced by violence.  Graeber sees a direct link between violence and quantification and he advances this link as the “source of the moral confusion that seems to float around everything surrounding the topic of debt” (14).  Graeber’s analysis of debt is concerned at every level with the matter of morality and why our understanding, or misunderstanding, of the nature of debt and its place in human relations is responsible for so much if not all of the disarray and upheaval that characterizes the state of life now and over the course of the past 5,000 years.  

Marketplace Morality

Graeber’s project, then, is really at root an ethical project.  Graeber writes as an anthropologist and as an historian.  It is not difficult to understand that Graeber’s frame of analysis is concerned with the structures of human economies and the conditions for moral relations, what Graeber and other anthropologists figure in terms of mutuality and sociality.  Chapter five is a core chapter that sets forth Graeber’s moral argument and ties it back to the questions of language and the cultural encoding of debt as an absolute value and ordering mechanism in human relations.  “To tell the history of debt, then,” Graeber explains, “is also necessarily to reconstruct how the language of the marketplace has come to pervade every aspect of human life—even to provide the terminology for the moral and religious voices raised against it” (Graeber 2014:89).  After delineating three systems or modalities of “moral accounting” (communism, exchange, and hierarchy), and the ways in which people order their economic relations differently according to the logic inherent to each modality, Graeber arrives at the core of his analysis which is a definition of debt.  Debt, Graeber writes:

is a very specific thing and it arises from very specific situations.  It first requires a relationship between two people who do not consider each other fundamentally different sorts of being, who are at least potential equals, who are equals in those ways that are really important, and who are not currently in a state of equality—but for whom there is some way to set matters straight. (120)

Key to this description of debt is its conditional nature and the possibility of settling an account, of balancing an otherwise unequal relationship between two or more people.  It is not so much in Graeber’s account that a debt is something that can or should be simply quantified and precisely calculated and that one a debtor should repay a creditor exactly a sum that is owed.  Such logic, again, is the language of the “business deal.”  What makes a debt a divisive and potentially destructive and morally corrosive arrangement is the way in which a debt can be not just maintained but enforced, especially through slavery, conquest, and war.  Debt and obligation are for Graeber two different matters, the first a matter of social violence and the other a potentially productive force in the advancement of sociality and good moral relations.  A society based on debt, as Graeber’s book argues, is a society predicated on the logic of calculation, an all but exclusively impersonal exchange of credits and debits in the interest of honoring that which one owes to another, not so much as a matter of morality and maintaining good relations as a matter of paying that which is due, or paying with one’s life (social violence and social death in one form or another).

So intrinsically interwoven is the language of debt with the logic of our lives that, in Graeber’s view, it has become almost impossible for people to imagine a society based on any other terms.  Graeber argues that the only way to regain a sense of social control and indeed sanity in terms of human relations is to begin to think of other ways of living and connecting to structures and networks of exchange that can foster more balanced and equal partnerships in the interest of individual satisfaction and the integrity of the greater good.  Is his vision for a more human economy perhaps a touch idealistic, even utopian?  Perhaps.  Leaving aside the question of whether idealism or utopian visions are by nature thoughts best forgotten or disregarded as ridiculous, or at best just not worth thinking too seriously about, I would like to observe that Graeber’s book does add value to the matter of advancing serious critical thought about the nature of economics and the cultural force that mediates this reality.  There is certainly nothing absolute about economic orders and it is always possible for humans to decide to arrange their lives and societies differently as interests change and environmental circumstances necessitate intelligent adaptations.

I do not think it is at all reasonable to suppose that any society now or possible world in the future can ever hope to do without debt—or without economics, for that matter.  Who can say what the future might hold for money?  Perhaps one day, on this world or another, humans will manage to do without it.  At this point, it is well to consider seriously what the matter of debt means for humans as a society and as a species that depends on mutual exchange in the interest of personal satisfaction and the maintenance of a greater good—in other words, a commons, however one wishes to conceive the term.  If a debt is truly the “perversion of a promise,” then perhaps the more healthy world of the future that any reasonable human could hope to achieve is one where every person does the best that he or she can, and systematic slavery on the basis of unequal exchange becomes a matter for the history books.  Who knows what kind of world might be written about by historians and anthropologists in the next 5,000 years?  With any luck, it will be a world a little less obsessed with accounts and a little more focused on doing one’s best for the greater good.

Academic politics and savage minds

Have learned of recent scandals that have called attention to the corruption and petty politics that have infected academic anthropology (and further undermined its already faltering credibility). Apparently, self-proclaimed anarchist and activist David Graeber (author of Debt: The First 5,000 Years among other books) has pushed a bit too hard to have colleagues removed with whom he disagrees politically. See the accounting of this in:

How David Graeber Cancelled a Colleague
by Claire Lehmann

https://quillette.com/2019/09/09/the-anarchist-and-the-anthropology-journal/

The scandal centers on the open-access journal HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory

https://www.haujournal.org/index.php/hau

Apparently, the journal has been undergoing some editorial and structural changes, changes which have upset David Graeber and respecting which Graeber has made cause to fabricate all kinds of allegations to destroy the journal's founder's reputation and professional standing. (Graeber, let it be said, knows quite a bit about the old "tit-for-tat" in economic and social relations: i.e., the art, let's say, of paying "debts." He, quite literally, wrote a book on the topic.)

This is all very unfortunate, not least because David Graeber has actually proven himself quite capable of producing meaningful and provocative historical and anthropological analysis. Perhaps he might think about redirecting his energies toward the more profitable ends of legitimate scholarship. Just a thought.

Will return to this matter soon with more detailed commentary. This kind of character assassination is the new norm and its effects on scholarship and scientific credibility have been quite deleterious. It really is a very serious problem.

Has been so for much longer than I had been aware. Its effects are chilling and very reminiscent of Soviet purges in the 1930s and 40s. One does begin to wonder just how bad things might get. Answer: very bad, almost always worse.

To be continued...

Stephen Jay Gould on Humility in Scientific Discovery

Thought for Today (Via Wordsmith):

The most important scientific revolutions all include, as their only common feature, the dethronement of human arrogance from one pedestal after another of previous convictions about our centrality in the cosmos. -Stephen Jay Gould, paleontologist, biologist, author (10 Sep 1941-2002)

A very fine thought for today from Stephen Jay Gould.

Carl Sagan often said very much the same thing.

Any true scientist admits as much eventually.

The Religious Impulse and the Origins of Language

The religious impulse has been with man since at least the beginnings of language. Monotheistic conceptions of the sacred and divine have come to dominate humanity's consciousness and practices at large. Prior to monotheistic and particularly Judeo-Christian hegemony, the diverse cultures and peoples of the human race acknowledged many gods and goddesses and other beings of supernatural power. This is not a revelation, of course, but I think it is not as commonly known or understood as many imagine.

For the overwhelming majority of the history of religion, human conceptions of the sacred have been by all accounts shamanistic, animistic, nature-centered, polytheistic, pantheistic, and quite frankly, in a word, magical. One might look to the ancient Celts, the Germanic and Norse pagans, the Sumerians, the Slavs, or any number of indigenous peoples from the Amazonian rainforest to the wide Siberian tundra--all such peoples venerated nature as a living creative force and all measured their being in relation to the cosmos. The monotheistic notion that sets a single and all-powerful (almost invariably male) God at the crown and source of creation--this was alien to the understanding of most of the peoples on the planet for literally tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of years. To believe their worldview and cosmology to be the naive and misguided product of savage ignorance or pagan superstition was as inconceivable to their minds as the sense and reality of their views have come to be seen by the majority of humans who walk in the world today.

To see this proven relativity of religious conceptions among the diverse peoples of the world both in the current and ancient worlds is the privilege of an anthropologically and historically trained mind. There is in fact nothing at first glance obvious about this relativity of religious perspective. For the mind and view of the monotheistic believer, any alternative religion must seem not only strange and other but wrong and in need of rectification and conversion. Indeed, it is due to the fervent missionary activities of the past two thousand years that such pre-Christian pagan and magical worldviews have been suppressed and silenced when not outright destroyed. Much of what has survived of the worldview and cosmology of the ancient, pre-Christian world has come to us through oral tradition and what scholars have come to call "folklore." In addition, it should be noted that a significant part of this cultural recovery process has the painstaking work of scholars and particularly philologists and literary historians to thank for it.[1] Much as is the case in the matter of anthropologists who have worked to "salvage" what they could of the dying languages and folkways of the Native Americans (and other aboriginal and First-Nations peoples), so too in the realm of folkloric research has much of what otherwise would surely have disappeared forever been preserved and passed on in some (albeit less than culturally pure) capacity. Storytelling traditions, too, have played their part in keeping some meaningful sense of the ancient worldviews, religions, and cosmological conceptions alive.

The origin of language is thus intimately and inextricably tied to the origin of religion, and to any and all conceptions of the sacred and divine. This, in short, is very largely why storytelling is of such ancient and vital and perennial importance, particularly at the level of myth and ritual, which are the most ancient and universal origins for any storytelling tradition proper. Storytelling and religious ritual are and have always been part and parcel of the human experience, and arguably the most sacred and vital of human symbolic expression.

Notes

[1] It is also very much the case that so much of the knowledge that has been preserved over the past two thousand years, both literate and oral traditions, has the painstaking work of scribes and monks, a great many Catholic, to thank for it. The history of religion, and all history, is by no means a simple or uncomplicated, one-dimensional matter. Politics is one thing, scholarship is always tuned to other purposes, particularly when the prime motivation is the search for understanding and the preservation of knowledge, wheresoever discovered.

The Writer's Call and Covenant

A writer, if he has anything of true value to communicate, will write not so much from an act of personal choice (though it is, certainly, a choice). He will write because he must, because he observes and honors a calling.

The writer's calling is nothing less than a covenant of the soul. This is not hyperbole or self-aggrandizement; it is a vital existential and cosmic truth. To ignore the calling or to refuse the charge that is placed upon the writer is simply at the point of true recognition an impossibility. The writer must write. He must find a way to communicate the vision and understanding of the life he has known, the insight earned and entrusted to him. For writing, as any vocation, is indeed a truth and a trust. Perhaps he will speak to the whole of humanity. Perhaps he will speak to an audience of few or of one. But if he is true to his vision and vocation, he will take up the mantle and write.

To write is not simply to exercise the crafting of words (however rhetorically or artistically practiced). Less so is it pure "self-expression." To write, as a writer, is to give truth to the voice and the vision of the soul. So it is with painting. So it is with music. So it is with dance. Writing is a matter of necessity. It is a creative act of acceptance and surrender. It is not conceived in the womb of contingency, governed by the tides of chance.

The recognition of the writer's call and covenant--this, and this alone, is the moment of the birth of the word. The rest is revision, a fine-tuning of the music first heard in the depths of the stillness of the soul.