Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste

by Philip Mirowski

  Antonin Artaud wrote in The Theatre and Its Double,“Without an element of cruelty at the root of every spectacle, the theatre is not possible. In our present state of degeneration it is through the skin that metaphysics must be made to re-enter our minds.” Artaud probably did not mean to preach actual torture or cruel affrontery in his text; but the neoliberals do. Their dramaturgy is that the castaways should not affront us; rather, we should affront them. Staged acts of everyday sadism do not seek to confront the audience with an inconvenient truth they refuse to recognize; rather, they promote the reign of a double truth by appealing to a convenient rationalization that the audience can feel under its skin: If the losers, the poor, the lost, the derelict, and the dissolute would only exit the stage after their fifteen seconds of notoriety, having abjectly accepted their status, never to be heard from again, the world would seem a much better place, wouldn’t it?

  To drive these lessons home, a spectacle must be made out of random outbreaks of misfortune. Thus the erstwhile war on poverty has become a guerrilla war on the poor in the contemporary theater of cruelty. Past standard harassment, there really would otherwise be very little point in subjecting the destitute to further irrational punishment, unless, of course, the purpose of the exercise was instead to exemplify, titillate, and instruct an audience. We need to feel their pain, but only in an abstract vicarious fashion. It is all the more poignant when administered through an absentminded procedure. One index is the willful catch-22 character of the official determinations tendered along with the torment:

  In Colorado, Grand Junction’s city council is considering a ban on begging; Tempe, Arizona, carried out a four-day crackdown on the indigent at the end of June. And how do you know when someone is indigent? As a Las Vegas statute puts it, “an indigent person is a person whom a reasonable ordinary person would believe to be entitled to apply for or receive” public assistance. One person who fits that description is Al Szekeley. A grizzled sixty-two-year-old, he inhabits a wheelchair and is often found on G Street in Washington, D.C.—the city that is ultimately responsible for the bullet he took in the spine in Phu Bai, Vietnam, in 1972. He had been enjoying the luxury of an indoor bed until December 2008, when the police swept through the shelter in the middle of the night looking for men with outstanding warrants. It turned out that Szekeley, who is an ordained minister and does not drink, do drugs, or cuss in front of ladies, did indeed have one—for “criminal trespassing,” as sleeping on the streets is sometimes defined by the law. So he was dragged out of the shelter and put in jail. “Can you imagine?” asked Eric Sheptock, the homeless advocate (himself a shelter resident) who introduced me to Szekeley. “They arrested a homeless man in a shelter for being homeless?”78

  The sheer cantankerousness of the torment of the poor for the edification of the comfortable shows up in a thousand little ordinances and prohibitions found in every small town and suburb across America, like the one in Fresno, California, that specifically prohibits the homeless from panhandling on median strips of roads, while explicitly permitting richer people to solicit contributions for their “good causes” on the very same strips.79 The confrontation with losers in the neoliberal sweepstakes must necessarily be tightly scripted and closely supervised in the neoliberal theater of cruelty; it cannot be left willy-nilly to those spontaneous orders that the NTC loves to extol.

  We would be remiss if we did not point out that the theater of cruelty sometimes is staged in an actual theater. One of the more bizarre developments of the post-2007 crisis is that filmmakers have sought out terminal urban dereliction and poverty to serve as backdrops for their popcorn epics, lending a special frisson of revulsion. Graffitti-defaced walls and garbage-strewn streets are no longer sufficient to signify destitution, since they are literally a dime a dozen, ubiquitous in urban experience. Consequently, some dying cities, such as Detroit and Gary, Indiana, are exhorted to parade their squalid decay and long-abandoned structures to satisfy an aesthetic of grunge porn cultivated among the prosperous in search of an “edgy” experience.80 Locals are employed to offer themselves up for a pittance to lend authenticity to the postapocalyptic landscapes. No film company or photographer thinks to offer to clean up any sites after they have finished their shoot, it seems. And as one now expects, Gary does not even have one functioning movie theater to show the films that have used it as gruesome backdrop.

  One of the most commonplace entryways into the theater of cruelty is the ambuscaded introduction to debt peonage. These days, young people are involuntarily initiated into its mysteries when they are offered student loans to attend university in the U.S. (and increasingly, other countries). The expansion of university attendance for the poor has been inflated in much the same way as the earlier mortgage bubble, but with one big difference. Student loans stipulate posting neoliberal human capital as collateral, and legally define it as something that can never be repudiated, reversing centuries of bankruptcy reform. More astoundingly, in 2005 the provision was extended to for-profit companies who make student loans. Over the last two decades, student loans have been retrofitted to enforce a pitiless twenty-first-century version of indentured servitude. Even if disease strikes you blind after graduation, existing law forces you to run a gauntlet of one degrading court appearance after another, to see if you might possibly qualify for a standard called “certainty of hopelessness”; and even then, there is only a slim chance to have the debt repudiated.81 I cannot think of a more depraved and decadent theater of cruelty than having to repeatedly prove before an audience and some smug judge that your life has become “hopeless.”

  With mortgage defaults, banks seize and resell the home. But if a degree can’t be sold, that doesn’t deter the banks. They essentially wrote the student loan law, in which the fine-print says they aren’t “dischargeable.” So even if you file for bankruptcy, the payments continue due. Hence these stern words from Barmak Nassirian of the American Association of College Registrars and Admissions Officers. “You will be hounded for life,” he warns. “They will garnish your wages. They will intercept your tax refunds. You become ineligible for federal employment.” He adds that any professional license can be revoked and Social Security checks docked when you retire. We can’t think of any other [debtor] statute with such sadistic provisions.82

  What better way to have the university teach the home truths of neoliberal life?

  D) You Can Pay to Feel as Though You Are

  Opting Out. Murketing Is Ubiquitous.

  The lowest common denominator of everyday neoliberalism is the act of being sold on something. It is one index of the blatant irrelevance of neoclassical economic theory that, in general, no one in the model is portrayed as being “sold on something,” because consumers supposedly already know what they desire, and anyway, they are presumed to be “sovereign” in the marketplace. They just go out and buy what they always already want, presuming someone conveniently has it on offer. “Taste changes,” should they exist, sport the divine aspect of being uncaused first causes. Hence, the vast effort dedicated to everything from persuasion to advertising to marketing to con artistry is left out of the account as irrelevant.83 The fact that appreciable sums of money are spent in the pursuit of these activities is left to the purview of the denizens of marketing departments in business schools, exiled beyond the realm of economics proper.

  Once upon a time, this oversight was deemed a devastating criticism of orthodox economics. In a sense, this was the original accusation of the bait-and-switch complaint, now blown up to system level: what goes on in markets is not primarily the conveyance of goods and services to those in need, but rather the conjuring of symbols and the fabrication of felt needs. The market, it was said, is not your humble servant, but rather a Svengali or a Stromboli. This point was popularized by John Kenneth Galbraith in his New Industrial State:

  Most goods serve needs that are discovered to the individual not by the palpable discomfort that accompanies deprivation, but by some psychic response
to their possession. They give him a sense of personal achievement, accord him a feeling of equality with his neighbors, divert his mind from thought, serve sexual aspirations, promise social acceptability, enhance his subjective feeling of health, well-being or orderly peristalsis, contribute by conventional canons to personal beauty, or are otherwise psychologically rewarding.84

  This approach to the economic agent as dupe never caught on, either within economics or in vernacular discourse. Leaving neoclassical economics aside (because it could never condone pervasive massive disconnect between purchases and ends), it is of some interest to explore why average people in pursuit of everyday ends could not be brought to entertain the idea that much of the economy was devoted to the manipulation of their beliefs and actions, in the face of overwhelming empirical evidence. The answer has something to do with another neoliberal technology, this one bound up with the innovation of “murketing.”

  It goes without saying that no one in their right mind would willingly concede that they were a hapless dupe of remote powerful economic interests. It would be a denial of a fundamental sense of autonomy, and abdication of personhood. Even Galbraith acknowledged this: “It is true that the consumer may still respond to his own view of his satisfactions. But this is superficial and proximate, the result of illusions created in connection with the management of his wants.”85 The response of most people (as opposed to economists) to such assertions is twofold: first, I feel free to ignore or otherwise negate any message beamed in my direction, thus my ability to resist is at least as strong as their ability to woo; and second, if Galbraith were right, then no product line would ever fail to find a clientele. I have a mute button on my remote control, and use it. Ad campaigns fail: QED. Latter-day followers of Galbraith bring various counterexamples to the table, such as the recent policy to suppress cigarette advertising in the United States, but to no avail.86 Curiously enough, given that it bulks so large in everyday life, the average person still ardently believes that all that expenditure and all that effort to manage their desires is essentially impotent, and by implication, wasted.

  Neoliberals, as one might expect, have come to concoct a much more plausible justification of the phenomenon. They have carefully read and absorbed their leftist critics, from Thorstein Veblen to Naomi Klein, and far from rejecting them outright, they openly use their ideas to render the process of persuasion both more unconscious and more effective.87 Neoliberals have pioneered the signal innovation of importing the double-truth character of their project into the everyday lives of the common man. The modern hidden persuaders have gladly nurtured the conviction of the average person that he is more clever than those who seek to manipulate him in order to render him all the more open to that manipulation; the set of techniques predicated on this inversion has been dubbed “murketing.” As usual, David Foster Wallace put it best: murketing is “a tongue-in-cheek pseudo-behind-the-scenes Story designed to appeal to urban or younger consumers’ self-imagined savvy about marketing tactics and objective data and to flatter their sense that in this age of metastatic spin and trend and the complete commercialization of every last thing in their world they were unprecedentedly ad-savvy and discerning and canny and well-nigh impossible to manipulate.”88

  The primary technique of murketing is to blur the boundaries between branded entities and the rest of everyday life, and then proceed to engage the frank complicity of the consumer in embracing branded pecuniary culture while believing they are immune to it. It is symptomatic of the dramatic shift in conceptualization of the market away from mere conveyance of commodities and toward the neoliberal framing of the market as uniquely omnipotent information processor. It is intimately conjoined to the neoliberal project of the permanent revolution of the self: by constantly conjuring the magic of self-transformation through purchases, one must understand one’s projects as subverting all external attempts by the powers that be to impose conformity to external manufactured identities. It incites the targets to believe that they can “see through” and comprehend all the brands, the con artistry, the flimflam, the propaganda, the logos, and marketing culture, all the while easing their acquiescence into that very same culture. It is another manifestation of the neoliberal promotion of ignorance, covered in the last chapter.

  Murketing takes on a political dimension because it is always concerned with defining personal activity with regard to rebellion and resistance. Older muckraking work about the nefarious “hidden persuaders” would point toward clumsy techniques of subliminal appeal, like subconscious messages or sex appeal, as though we were still trapped in Orwell’s Ministry of Truth. These techniques existed to get around the fundamental contradiction that some product could help you express your cherished individuality only if the corporation behind it could afford the ads by selling it to millions of people. Of course, those apparati are still in the toolbox, but the modern neoliberal murketer is far more sophisticated, because his major occupation is to replace lived experience with prefabricated “lifestyles,” always seeking to move beyond the intrinsic contradiction between “belonging” and assertion of individuality. What murketing always promises to provide is the experience of thrilling rebellion from conformity, but safely nested within a popular shared script. Apostasy takes on a cozy air; insurrection is hardly distinguished from playtime. It takes what could potentially become the spark of political activity and turns it into another occasion for shopping. Murketing is therefore one of the prime defenses against actual political mobilization in the modern polity.

  Although the topic deserves a tome unto itself, given our current purposes, we shall provide two short examples of the role of neoliberal murketing in everyday life.

  1) Snapprenticeship. One of the most fascinating technologies of faux rebellion in the modern neoliberal murketing toolkit is the construction of situations in which the mark is led to believe she has opted out of the market system altogether. There is no better simulation of contumacy than the belief that you have removed yourself from the sphere of the market, itself then subordinated to the process of market engagement. Rob Walker supplies one of the more stunning versions of murketing, wherein a new breed of ad agency recruited unpaid volunteers to talk up products with which they were unfamiliar among their friends and acquaintances, according to sheets of talking points supplied by the agency. It is essentially the process of astroturfed political mobilizations, pioneered by the NTC, taken to the next higher level of a marketing campaign. From the perspective of standard economic theory, “the number of individuals willing to market products they had previously never heard of, frequently for no money at all, is puzzling to say the least”; but clearly, not to the neoliberals. They know that people might feel more viscerally empowered if they have occasion to project what they conceive to be their own personality onto others, with some help from shadowy murketing agencies. The result nicely combines rebellion and conformity. Ignorance is enabling, or as one ad executive put it, “It doesn’t matter if you know what you’re talking about, as long as you are willing to talk a lot.”89 As the neoliberals have gleaned from the Internet, their media affiliates, and their political mobilizations, a burst of well-placed buzz tends to set the agenda, at least over the short horizon. The important thing is to coordinate the early echolalia, and then come prepared to ride the Gompertz curve. It helps if the initiating guerrilla cadres sport an edgy character, mime disdain for their clients, and wax ironic about their faux rebelliousness, with names like BzzAgent, the Ministry of Information, Bold Mouth, and Girls Intelligence Agency.

  What is striking is the resemblance of such promotional techniques to those of the open-source movement. There also, people are recruited to provide the fruits of their labor gratis in the guise of a rebellion against the market system, which is then reprocessed by other parties into fungible commodities. Although promoted under the banner of “freedom” the process is much more attuned to fostering the self-image of the insolent anarchic hacker culture, while averting participants�
�� gaze from the sheer amount of hierarchical coordination that is required to invest any such project with a modicum of persistence and continuity. Their work is cherished as direct expression of their individuality, but assumes significance only when folded into a well-integrated scheme of insiders and outsiders. The consciousness of participants is so thoroughly socialized that many of them voluntarily become avid acolytes of Hayek and his notions of spontaneous organization, without detecting the possibility of their own personal collapse of kosmos into taxis.

  This strange hybrid of voluntarily unpaid labor and hierarchical control and capitalist appropriation has become so prevalent in the current neoliberal era that some have suggested it actually constitutes a novel form of economic organization, or incipient mode of production, if they indulge in Marxist terminology.90 Perhaps it deserves to be called “unprimitive accumulation,” or better, snapprenticeship. As a snapprentice, you demonstrate your willingness to serve as a neoliberal agent by voluntarily forgoing all recompense while providing something of value to others, unconcerned that they may in turn commodify its consequences or derivatives in pursuit of a profit. Snapprenticeship is very different than charity, which prides itself in bypassing the market nexus in providing eleemosynary benefit. Snapprenticeship also differs from older apprenticeship in that there are absolutely no promises or obligations bequeathed to the recruit. Snapprenticeship seeks to simulate the warm glow from giving in the indigent peon, while making sure it is a corporation that is on the receiving end.