Describing his first six months with Covey, he writes, “scarce a week passed without his whipping me.  I was seldom free from a sore back.”[1] He then recounts how Covey worked him day and night and in all weather conditions and how at last the brutal, inhumane work schedules and regimented violence broke him.

I was somewhat unmanageable when I first went there, but a few months of this discipline tamed me.  Mr. Covey succeeded in breaking me.  I was broken in body, soul, and spirit. My natural elasticity was crushed, my intellect languished, the disposition to read departed, the cheerful spark that lingered about my eye died; the dark night of slavery closed in upon me; and behold a man transformed into a brute![2]

Although Douglass had attained a level of freedom through literacy—an accomplishment that was itself an “argument” against the white hegemonic discourse pronouncing blacks as subhuman, incapable of “higher” rational reflection, and thus in need of (white) masters—he, as an embodied, incarnate being remained bound and subject to the (irrational) whims of white society.  No matter how literate, educated, and articulate he became, the dominant discourse scripted him as subhuman while the racialized social apparatuses—including Covey’s panoptic plantation—actively sought to suppress his intellectual achievements and to crush his spirit, reducing him to a beast-like existence in order to “prove” the veracity of their narrative.

After one of Covey’s particularly cruel, near-death beatings, Douglass decides to flee. Reluctantly and out of necessity he eventually returns to Covey’s plantation.  His return leads to a physical confrontation with Covey, who, with rope in hand tackles Douglass in a stable and attempts to tie him up.  Rather than remain a docile slave, Douglass decides to defend himself and to fight even if his action results in his own death. “At this moment—from whence came the spirit I don’t know—I resolved to fight; and, suiting my action to the resolution, I seized Covey hard by the throat; and as I did so, I rose.”[3] His resolve took Covey by surprise, and Douglass could see for the first time fear and uncertainty in his master’s eyes.  The two struggled for over two hours until Covey finally gave up.

Frederick Douglass’s Narrative as a Challenge to Hegel’s Master/Slave Dialectic

If we bring Douglass’s narrative into conversation with Hegel’s discussion of what is commonly called the master/slave dialectic, some rather interesting insights as well as challenges surface.  Hegel devotes several paragraphs (178-196) in the Phenomenology of Spirit to the master/slave or, as Miller translates the terms, the “lord” and the “bondsman” relationship. Recognition by the other is central to Hegel’s account of the actualization of self-consciousness.  The self requires the recognition of another “I” which corresponds to itself with respect to equality, freedom and independence, as neither recognition of one’s own existence nor consciousness of a mere independent external object provides the requisite certainty Hegel claims is needed for the full actualization of self-consciousness.  The recognition among the “I’s”, in other words, must be mutual—each self must recognize the other as an independent, equal, free “I.” As the struggle for self-consciousness unfolds, a problem arises because at first each “I” sees the other “I” only as an object, a thing external to itself and to be used for its projects and plans.  As Hegel puts it, at this stage they exist as two conflicting manifestations of consciousness; “one is the independent consciousness whose essential nature is to be for itself, the other is the dependent consciousness whose essential nature is simply to live or to be for another.  The former is lord, the other is bondsman.”[4] According to Hegel’s narrative, in this initial struggle between the two consciousnesses, the bondsman shows his servile nature in that he would rather preserve his life than lose it and thus submits to the lord or master becoming a tool for the latter’s “pure enjoyment.”[5] In such an arrangement, the relationship and recognition involved is clearly asymmetrical, unequal. Ironically, this one-sidedness which seems to benefit the master, according to Hegel’s dialectical logic, turns out as advantageous to the slave.  Because acquiring full selfhood requires the other, if the other is servile, dependent, enslaved, and so forth, then the self who seeks recognition becomes these things as well.  The situation is much better for the bondsman, as his essential reality has been the lord, an “I” existing for-itself not for-an-other.  Keeping with Hegel’s logic, because the slave and master are integrally connected, the truth of the master has been from the beginning implicit in the slave.  As Hegel explains,

It [servitude] does in fact contain within itself this truth of pure negativity and being-for-self, for it has experienced this [in] its own essential nature. For this consciousness has been fearful, not of this or that particular thing or just at odd moments, but its whole being has been seized with dread; for it has experienced the fear of death, the absolute Lord. In that experience it has been quite unmanned, has trembled in every fibre of its being, and everything solid and stable has been shaken to its foundations.[6]

Hegel goes on to state that this radical uprooting and disruption of one’s stability is “absolute negativity, pure being-for-self” and as such is implicit in the bondman’s consciousness.[7] As the dialectic demands, this “moment of pure being-for-self” does not remain implicit but becomes explicit for the slave “for in the lord it exists for him [the slave] as his object.”[8]

Then Hegel begins to focus on the role of labor and how this too sets the slave free. Having achieved self-consciousness through his experience of “the fear of death, the absolute Lord” in which the master’s free, self-consciousness becomes his ideal object, the slave’s relation to labor is transformed. In short, through his labor, the slave “becomes conscious of what he truly is,” another “I” and not a mere thing. The master was moved by desire to gain recognition through an other, the slave, and thus to overpower him.  However, the master’s relationship with the slave was unequal, distorted, and reduced the slave to a mere tool for his enjoyment. Given this arrangement, the master’s relation with the material realm is mediated through the slave. The slave, in contrast, works directly with the material realm, cultivating it and infusing it so to speak with his own creative ideas and mental energy. In so doing, the slave comes to respect the material realm on its own terms, working creatively with it and leaving something of himself in it as a gift to others. Thus, through his labor, the slave, in contrast with his master, experiences nature as having its own independence and integrity, its own permanence and objectivity.  Why? Because the master’s desire compelling him to conquer and treat the slave as a labor-machine operates by way of destruction, negating the other and leaving only lack and unfulfilled desire—an instance of Hegel’s bad infinite.  “[T]hat is the reason why this satisfaction is itself only a fleeting one, for it lacks the side of objectivity and permanence.  Work, on the other hand, is desire held in check, fleetingness staved off; in other words, work forms and shapes the thing.”[9] With the permanence provided intelligent shaping or “formative activity,”[10] the object produced via the slave’s labor acquires a lasting quality, a form or design that is both intelligible and transferrable over time—using Aristotle’s language inflected through a Hegelian grammar—we might say, it has become in-formed matter and possesses its own integrity.  “It is in this way, therefore, that consciousness, qua worker, comes to see in the independent being [of the object] its own independence.”[11] In addition, because he has had to labor neither for himself nor his own projects, the slave has learned to suspend his desires.  Having habituated himself this way, he works creatively with nature, respecting and valuing it rather than seeing it as a means to satisfy his insatiable desires.  What at first seemed to produce only alienation—perpetual labor for an other and never for oneself—ultimately came to be understood as “formative activity,”[12] a distinctively human activity involving cognitive capacities to creatively shape, form and interact with the material world, valuing its integrity, and allowing it to be other. In short, with the triple complex:  fear of the master de-stabilzing the self, service for the master’s sake denying one’s own desires, and labor as “formative activity” resulting in a free relationship with the material realm—together enable the slave to discover himself as an “I” in harmony with the world.  It is not by accident that the next section of the Phenomenology transitions into Stoicism—a view emphasizing inner freedom, a rationally ordered universe, detachment from and indifference to external realities and occurrences outside of one’s control, and an acceptance of one’s place within the larger ordered, rational whole.

Notes

[2] Ibid., 58.

[3] Ibid., 64.

[4] Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 115, paragraph 189.

[5] Ibid., 115–6, paragraph 190.

[6] Ibid., 117, paragraph 194.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Ibid., 118.

[10] Ibid., 119.

[11] Ibid., 118.

[12] Ibid., 119.

*The first image was copied from this website:  http://americanmasterworks.blogspot.com/2010_03_01_archive.html

*The second image was copied from this website:  http://almoscollectibles.com/afroamericanpaintings.html.

by John W. Jones

The other side, so to speak, of the dominant narrative’s construction of the slave’s subjectivity is its active erasing or re-scripting his or her history and culture.  One way to engage in this erasure is to dis-integrate, divide, and ultimately destroy familial bonds.  Douglass’s account of his own experience of forced separation from his mother suggests that the practice was common, and highlights its negative impact.  “My mother and I were separated when I was but an infant—before I knew her as my mother. […] Frequently, before the child has reached its twelfth month, its mother is taken from it.”[5] The child is then moved to a different location, perhaps a different plantation altogether and is placed with an elderly female slave, who, given her frailty and age, is neither profitable to the master nor pleasurable.  As Douglass observes, this practice renders virtually impossible the emotional bonding that ought to occur between mother and child, and resulted in many women suppressing their affections for their children.[6] Although he was able to spend a few hours with his mother in the evenings—after she had worked a full day and walked twelve miles to visit him—Douglass was not allowed to visit her when she fell ill, nor was he permitted to be present when she died and was laid to rest.[7] “Never having enjoyed, to any considerable extent, her soothing presence, her tender and watchful care, I received the tidings of her death with much the same emotions I should have probably felt at the death of a stranger.” Significant temporal markers that most of us take for granted—one’s own birth date—as well as the spatial presence required for familial cohesion to occur, were denied Douglass.  His spatio-temporal existence, like the other beasts of the field, was disciplined, shaped, and determined by the work day and work season—“planting-time, harvest- time, cherry-time, spring-time.”[8]Here we have the forced reduction of man to homo economicus; however, the term is infused with new meaning.  The slave as economic being is in no way motivated by self-interest and is treated as a non-rational animal, a mere means benefitting the master’s self-serving ends.

Notes

[2] Douglass, Narrative of the Life, 15.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Ibid., 15, 16.

[6] Ibid., 16.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Ibid., 15.

* John W. Jones’s  painting, “Slave Mother and Child” was taken from this website: http://www.colorsofmaoney.com/prints_by_john_jones.htm.

The body of the song opens with a six line stanza rhythmically interweaving the numbers one through ten in between concrete, historical particulars (Pete Rose—i.e. “Charlie Hustle”) to more abstract, universal, and religious allusions (e.g., “Seven firmaments of heaven to hell, 8 Million Stories to tell”).  Then in the next stanza, Mos moves away from the abstract and becomes more personal.  In these nine lines, he highlights how the poetics of a socially conscious hip hop—in particular the voice that it gives to the voiceless— lifts the “powerless up” from the social sinkholes of stigmatized spaces (ghettos, prisons, and “streets too loud to ever hear freedom sing”) and, in his case, has allowed him to overcome some of the socio-political obstacles faced by African Americans so that he might speak on behalf of suffering others.  Yet, as the last three lines indicate living in a condition both created and abandoned by the state—not to mention a socially ostracized, stigmatized “space” (projects, no-go zones etc.)—breeds violence, fear, anxiety, and hopelessness among those forced to occupy those infernal spaces.

The body of my text posesses extra strength
Power-liftin powerless up, out of this, towerin’ inferno
My ink so hot it burn through the journal
I’m blacker than midnight on Broadway and Myrtle
Hip-Hop past all your tall social hurdles|
like the nationwide projects, prison-industry complex
Broken glass wall better keep your alarm set
Streets too loud to ever hear freedom sing
Say evacuate your sleep, it’s dangerous to dream

The next section begins to develop and elaborate the kind of “mathematics” Mos has in mind.  Having to live in such inhumane circumstances of course takes its toll on a person’s psychological, emotional, and physical well-being, and often paradoxically, accelerates and intensifies the construction of the subjectivities that the hegemonic class had hoped to eradicate. As Mos explains, those who internalize the stigma and negativity imposed on them by the dominant narrative—the “chain cats”—end up dead, crushed in spirit and ground to dust for the economic gain of the (largely white) elite class.

But you chain cats get they CHA-POW, who dead now
Killin’ fields need blood to graze the cash cow
It’s a number game, but shit don’t add up somehow

When your world—the social space into which you have been thrown by forces outside of your control—is created, founded, and built upon injustice and exploitation, even something as supposedly clear-cut, steady, dispassionate, and uncontroversial as mathematics becomes a site of socio-political polysemous meanings.  So how does the “shit” not add up? Here are a few examples.

Like I got, sixteen to thirty-two bars to rock it
but only 15% of profits, ever see my pockets
like sixty-nine billion in the last twenty years
spent on national defense but folks still live in fear
like nearly half of America’s largest cities is one-quarter black
That’s why they gave Ricky Ross all the crack
Sixteen ounces to a pound, twenty more to a ki
A five minute sentence hearing and you no longer free

First, Mos critiques the music industry whose sights are set not on artistry and beauty but on profits.  Then he highlights the government’s out of control spending on national defense while simultaneously creating an atmosphere of public panic of the socially constructed “terrorist” as the new “other” to fear. Lastly, he offers his interpretation of the Ricky Ross case.  In a series of controversial articles in 1996, Gary Webb argued that the new all-out war on drugs had a disproportionate impact on blacks, particularly young black males on the lower end of the socio-economic and educational spectrum.  In the Ross case, as Webb explains, you have on one side, “Ricky Donnell Ross, a high school dropout, and his suave cocaine supplier, Danilo Blandon, who has a master’s degree in marketing and was one of the top civilian leaders in California of an anti-communist guerrilla army formed by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency.” Both men were arrested for major drug trafficking offenses; however, according to Web’s story, even though Blandon testified in court that “the first kilo of cocaine he sold in California was to raise money for the CIA’s army, which was trying on a shoestring to unseat Nicaragua’s new socialist Sandinista government,” and admitted that his modus operandi was to employ guys like Ross, “a South-Central teen-ager who had the gang connections and street smarts necessary to move the army’s cocaine, a veritable blizzard engulfed the ghettos,” after all the deals were made in the “justice” system, guess which one ends up in the hole after his “five minute hearing”?—Ricky Ross.[1] The section ends with a jab at the new big brother State with its surveillance techniques now legalized and expanded beyond panoptic prisons.

The next seven lines continue to describe life in the urban hellholes, the ghettos and hyper-ghettos where people become hardened and turn to crime and other parallel economic (and often illegal) structures carved out in response to socio-political and economic ostracism and spatial confinement.  Note again the hopelessness and the sense of human potential wasted.

Rock your hardhat black cause you in the Terrordome
full of hard niggaz, large niggaz, dice tumblers
Young teens and prison greens facin’ life numbers
Crack mothers, crack babies and AIDS patients
Young bloods can’t spell but they could rock you in PlayStation
This new math is whippin motherfuckers’ ass
You wanna know how to rhyme you better learn how to add
It’s mathematics

Next we have a structural mirroring of the opening stanza playing off the one through ten number theme and closing with an eleven line description of the “numbers” problem where dead-end low wage (non-salaried and hence no benefits–health insurance, retirement fund, etc.) jobs and poverty-stricken living produce and give rise to drug use, trafficking, and other criminal activities.

Yo, it’s one universal law but two sides to every story
Three strikes and you be in for life, manditory
Four MC’s murdered in the last four years
I ain’t tryin to be the fifth one, the millenium is here
Yo it’s 6 Million Ways to Die, from the seven deadly thrills
Eight-year olds gettin found with 9 mill’s
It’s 10 P.M., where your seeds at? What’s the deal
He on the hill puffin krill [crack cocaine] to keep they belly filled
Light in the ass with heavy steel, sights on the pretty shit in life
Young soldiers tryin’ to earn they next stripe
When the average minimum wage is $5.15
You best believe you gotta find a new ground to get C.R.E.A.M.[2]

The white unemployment rate, is nearly more than triple for black
so frontliners got they gun in your back
Bubblin crack, jewel theft and robbery to combat poverty
and end up in the global jail economy
Stiffer stipulations attached to each sentence
Budget cutbacks but increased police presence

From the hopelessness of the ghetto, you move to the hopelessness of the prison and the cycle continues; however, along the way, should you survive the prison camp, the panoptic gaze makes sure that the negative narrative inscribed in your body and indelibly marking your soul stays with you—no bars needed as confinement, stigmatization, segregated spaces, and negated freedom operate on the outside through a network just as rigidly structured and socially impermeable as the hierarchical social strata of the carceral system. Lastly, Mos doesn’t mince words about the role race plays in this deadly numbers game.  Whether chattel slavery, Jim Crow, the ghetto, or hyper-incarceration, “blackness” continues as the mutable target socially constructed in the past as (subhuman) “thing” and now as the “dangerous other” whom, since we can no longer legally lynch, must be destroyed by more socially acceptable means.

And even if you get out of prison still livin’
join the other five million under state supervision
This is business, no faces just lines and statistics
from your phone, your zip code, to S-S-I digits
The system break man child and women into figures
Two columns for who is, and who ain’t niggaz
Numbers is hardly real and they never have feelings
but you push too hard, even numbers got limits
Why did one straw break the camel’s back? Here’s the secret:
the million other straws underneath it
It’s all mathematics

Notes

[2] I had no idea what C.R.E.A.M. meant, but after a bit of searching here I found out that it is an acronym which stands for “Cash Rules Everything Around Me,” and was made famous “by the Wu-Tang clan […] to describe money. Ever since the Wu-Tang commenced their rap reign in the early 90’s, CREAM has become the universal hip-hop word for money.”

The good news […] is that, despite all its efforts, Empire is never able to control and co-opt subjectivity and desire totally and absolutely. A first sense that subjectivity cannot be co-opted grows entirely out of an observation of the ambivalence of the status quo. The Empire’s power and influence may be substantial and all-encompassing, but are never absolute, never without ambivalence. Even subjectivity that has seemingly been erased by Empire keeps erupting, at times in unexpected places. It is a significant datum of history that even slaves—people who were not supposed to have any subjectivity at all—were able to reassert their subjectivity, rise up, and challenge the Empire. The Judeo-Christian traditions are founded on such a slave uprising in the Exodus and on many other stories of resistance by people who were considered lacking subjectivity in the ancient world.[2]

Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, and countless other “erupting” subjectivities refused the pre-scripted (racialized) narrative of the dominant culture and chose instead various paths of resistance, (re)scripting their identities, (re)asserting their humanity, and gifting us with living memorials of hope to encourage us in times of doubt and despair.  In light of the double construction of subjectivities—that is, our social and self-construction—there are no autonomous self-made subjects; yet, there is no reason to conclude that social construction and agency are mutually exclusive or that the former necessarily eradicates the latter.

Notes

[2] Ibid.

Individualism is the sort of master narrative that those in power who share in the dominant subjectivity tell about themselves in order to cover up and repress the real—that is, all those who have contributed to their success and those on whose backs their success is ultimately built.  This repressed world of the individualist includes teachers, parents, and peers, but also housekeepers, workers who produce at low ages, and all the other service providers and subordinates in the command structure.[1]

Rieger continues, accenting the ways in which the narrative of individualism is intimately connected with the construction of dominant subjectivities.

The seemingly self-made dominant subject must tell realism’s story of individualism and repress the real; this is the only way to avoid being challenged by another kind of subjectivity that is part of the real.  The Lacanian notion of the repressed real helps us see that there is no autonomous subject.  Individualism is merely the myth of the powerful; even the dominant subjectivity cannot exist in isolation.  Oppressors who seek to safeguard their own subjectivity by perpetuating the master narrative of individualism simply fool themselves because their identity is invariably built in relation to others and, more specifically, on the back of others.[2]

Here Rieger highlights the fact that the so-called “self-made dominant subject” is always already in relation to others.  More to the point, such “self-made” individuals—particularly those quite content to live within rather than beyond the “spirit of the Empire”—constitute their subjectivities and identities in relation to those whom they script, oppress, exploit, marginalize, and confine to urban and (to borrow Glenn Loury’s term) other “nether” non-spaces of existence.

In his first autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, Douglass captures our heteronomous (rather than autonomous) way of being in the world in his narration of the reciprocal nature of the master/slave relation.  Covey, a particularly merciless slave owner, was renowned for his “ability” to break slaves, and Douglass, unfortunately, became existentially acquainted with Covey’s “skills” in cruelty on a regular basis.  After one of Covey’s near-death beatings, Douglass decided to flee; however, feeling trapped, hungry, and having no permanent place to reside, he eventually returned to the plantation.  Recognizing that his return will result in some form of violent “discipline” at Covey’s hands, Douglass experiences a “conversion” of sorts.  That is, rather than remain a docile slave, he chooses the (active) path of resistance; when Covey attacked him with rope in hand, Douglass—at that time a teenager—defended himself and took his “master” to task.  “At this moment—from whence came the spirit I don’t know—I resolved to fight; and, suiting my action to the resolution, I seized Covey hard by the throat; and as I did so, I rose.”[3] Douglass’s response caught Covey completely off-guard, and for the first time Douglass saw Covey tremble—the myth of the autonomous “self-made dominant” subject began to unravel.  The two struggled for over two hours until Covey finally gave up.  Rather than hand Douglass over to the authorities or have him severely beaten or hung—all common and accepted practices in that day—Covey does nothing.  For the remainder of his “disciplinary training” on Covey’s plantation, Douglass receives no further violent treatment from his “master.”  How are we to understand Covey’s response?  As Douglass explains,

Mr. Covey enjoyed the most unbounded reputation for being a first-rate overseer and negro-breaker.  It was of considerable importance to him. That reputation was at stake; and had he sent me—a boy about sixteen years old—to the public whipping-post, his reputation would have been lost; so, to save his reputation, he suffered me to go unpunished.[4]

Covey, as a member of the elite slave-owning class, was in fact not an autonomous subject, whose supposed “success” might serve as an exemplar for other aspiring (white, male) members of society.  Instead, Covey’s identity, his sense of self, his subjectivity was deeply connected to those whom he sought to “break.” When the socio-political status of the underclass changes, the mythmakers tend to awaken from their contented slumber and new myths must be crafted to keep the public in a state of alarm and uneasiness, fearing the hegemonic-scripted “other,” who, after all, wants to take what rightfully belongs to them (i.e. the dominant class and those imbibing their myths).  (Does this story sound familiar?)[5] Stay tuned for Part II…

Notes

[2] Ibid., 48.

[3] Frederick Douglass, In Douglass: Autobiographies: Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave/ My Bondage and My Freedom/ Life and Times of Frederick Douglass.  Edited by Henry Louis Gates Jr. (New York: Library of America, 1994), 64.

[4] Ibid., 65-6.

[5] The forced resignation of Shirley Sherrod (July 2010) is one contemporary variation on this rather worn out theme. Consider, for example, the “chapters” in this story— the N.A.A.C.P. challenges the Tea Party leaders to expel the racist elements from among their ranks resulting in Tea Party member Mark Williams’ expulsion; Andrew Breitbart posts a highly edited video clip of Ms. Sherrod’s alleged “reverse racist” speech at a N.A.A.C.P. meeting, which was immediately aired on Fox News and later shown to be an excerpted clip from a speech in which Ms. Sherrod was recounting her own story of racial reconciliation.  These events (not to mention others) suggest that race (and, given the context, race relations in the United States in particular), race-baiting, and the media’s role in constructing racial identities continue as significant socio-political problems that must be engaged.  These issues are in no way resolved or behind us simply because Barack Obama holds the highest public office in America. See, for example, Frank Rich’s assessment of the Sherrod incident in his New York Times editorial, “There’s a Battle Outside and It is Still Ragin’.” The New York Times, July 24, 2010. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/25/opinion/25rich.html?_r=1 (accessed  7/26/10).

* The first image, South Carolina Slaves, by an unknown artist was copied from this website:  http://www.voiceseducation.org/category/tag/fugitive-slave-law.   The second image, Slave Revolt, was published in The Abolitionist in 1802 and was likewise copied from the same website.

Friedrich Hayek, economist, philosopher, self-professed promoter of liberalism even writing an essay to distance himself from conservatism,[1] ardent defender of free-market capitalism, and winner of the 1974 Nobel Prize in economics, though in no way an advocate of Christian Holy Writ, offers a narrative about economics that, as Jung Mo Sung observes, shares certain structural similarities with the Genesis Fall narrative. Though himself an agnostic, Hayek acknowledges rather begrudgingly that beneficial practices have resulted from religious beliefs, in particular, monotheistic religious beliefs, “which are not true—or verifiable or testable in the same sense as are scientific statements and which are certainly not the result of rational argumentation” (The Final Conceit, 136–7).  If Hayek were a Christian, we might interpret this statement as allowing for the possibility of truths that are revealed by faith—suprarational, not irrational truths; however, given Hayek’s rejection of Christianity, this interpretation is not an option.  Interestingly, Hayek’s view of economics has deeply influenced the way that many conservative Christians (as well as others) think about the free market.  (This is not in itself “damning” in my view, as many non-Christian philosophies, insights, etc. have been appropriated by Christians for the furtherance of their tradition and to aid in the explication of their own teachings; however, what would be “damning” is if the teaching or ethos appropriated is fundamentally at odds with the Christian faith, tradition, and teachings of Christ himself).

Upon reception of the Nobel Prize in economics, Hayek presented a lecture entitled, “The Pretence of Knowledge.” In the lecture, he speaks against a “scientist” approach to economics which attempts to apply “habits of thought to fields different from that in which they have been formed.”[2] In other words, according to Hayek, economics does not belong with the “hard” (physical) sciences, as it deals with complex phenomena that are not quantifiable, observable, measurable, etc. in the same way that the phenomena of the physical sciences are.  One might grant this conclusion; yet, Hayek goes further, claiming that because we cannot understand, completely master, etc. a phenomena as complex as the market, attempts to do so are dangerous and harmful.  For Hayek, the great economic crisis of the 1970s was due to Keynesian interventionist policies.  Like Adam and Eve, whose desire to be omniscient overtook them, moving them to partake of the fruit of the forbidden tree and thus created havoc for them and others beyond their wildest dreams, so too, according to Hayek, do those who dare steer the invisible hand of the free market system lead us to our doom.  “To act on the belief that we possess the knowledge and the power which enable us to shape the processes of society entirely to our liking, knowledge which in fact we do not possess, is likely to make us do much harm.”[3] There is no doubt that certain kinds of interventionist policies could be used for tyrannical, totalitarian purposes; however, does it necessarily follow that they must?  One could become very pessimistic about any attempts to regulate or direct the market for purposes of social justice. One could also choose to believe that social and economic problems will somehow solve themselves through the unintended effects of the Smithian benevolent, invisible hand.  (I am not claiming that these are the only possible options). To opt for the second possibility, as Sung highlights, is not only an act of faith, but an (irrational) leap of faith.

[I]f it is true that we cannot sufficiently understand the factors and dynamics of the market so that we can intervene in it, how can we know that the market always produces beneficial effects or that it is essentially a ‘force for good’? Is knowing that the market always produces beneficial effects not a pretension of knowledge of the market? Since one cannot prove this providential character of the market, we have here a ‘leap of faith’ in the affirmation of the essentially beneficent quality of free market.[4]

Hayek, highly influenced by philosopher Karl Popper (and, it seems, Popper’s literal reading of Plato’s Republic as a blueprint for totalitarianism!), held to an (obviously non-theistic) view of evolutionary morality, which as I understand it—and I am open to correction here as I have not read the entire book and am no expert on Hayek’s work—suggests that we move beyond primitive instincts—“rules of solidarity and altruism” (The Fatal Conceit, 13) and “treat[ing] all men as neighbors.”  Why?  “For those now living within the extended order gain from not treating one another as neighbors, and by applying, in their interactions, rules of the extended order [=”free market economy”]—instead of the rules of solidarity and altruism” (Ibid.). Somehow, I just don’t think Jesus would approve.

Notes

[2] “Friedrich August von Hayek – Prize Lecture.” Nobelprize.org. 22 Jul 2010 http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economics/laureates/1974/hayek-lecture.html.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Beyond the Spirit of Empire, p. 82.

* The Invisible Hand Image was created by Mark Bailen and was copied from this website.

Does this not sound like Foucault’s own project? That is, as Foucault’s analyses of delinquents, the insane, and the sick evidence, we must turn our attention to the real, concrete instances of “life on the ground.” For instance, we must look to the various oppressions of the marginalized and exploited, as well as other subjectivities created through the complex interplay of social apparatuses, institutions, discourses etc. In so doing, we see how subjects are in fact not autonomous, exposing what Joerg Rieger calls, “the myth of individualism,”[1] but rather are shaped by the particular practices, institutions, language, and myriad other beyond-our-control  convergences and socio-political relations into which we are born into and live out our existence.  Even so, as Foucault explicitly affirms, particularly in his later essays and interviews,[2] we are nonetheless agents who can in fact resist other-imposed narratives; social construction for Foucault does not go “all the way down.”  Rather, as human free agents, we can transgress self and other imposed limits, narratives etc.  All this highlights Foucault’s attempt to balance and give full weight to both social and self construction, an issue which he believes is thematized in modernity.  On the one hand, we must pay “extreme attention to what is real” (i.e. study and analyze the ways in which disciplinary practices are inscribed upon the bodies of prisoners creating very specific subjectivities). On the other hand, as free agents, we engage these realities—albeit social and not natural realities— “with the practice of a liberty that simultaneously respects and violates [them]” (41).  Resistance, for Foucault, is decidedly, not futile.

Notes

[2] See, for example, Foucault’s essay, “The Subject and Power.”

Mimetic desire helps us to understand some of the deeper levels of human relationships and subjectivity under the current conditions of Empire, Subjectivity itself becomes what we might call ‘mimetic subjectivity’.  Competition is not simply based on the scarcity of desirable objects, as is often assumed, it is based on mimetic desire.  What drives economic progress, consumption, and the progress of the structures of Empire from this point of view, is that others want what the wealthy already have.  The result is the extraordinarily intense competition that has come to be accepted as the essence of free-market economies.  It is not hard to see that there is little room for [… ] an active subject, except at the very top of society.  But even there a constant battle ensues about who tops the lists, who is wealthier and more powerful, […] Mimetic desire can never be satisfied.  The problem is compounded, of course, for those who cannot keep up. When they are drawn into this system, they can only perceive themselves as failures, as theorists from the Southern Hemisphere have pointed out.  What makes this mimetic desire so effective in the pursuit of Empire is that it seems to have a snowball effect, and it seems that we are witnessing this effect in extreme forms today.  Moreover, there is a built-in reciprocity that leads to further escalation, since, in Girard’s words, “the model is likely to be mimetically affected by the desire of its imitator’ [Girard, “Mimesis and Violence,” 12] (48-49).

Notes

[2] Ibid., 147.

[I]n the economic jargon imposed by the businesses of hegemonic communication “the markets”, or even in the singular “the market”, does not refer any more to places for the exchange of goods, where producers and artisans sell and exchange their products.  It does not even refer to the most abstract derivations of the celebration of the buying and selling transaction.  Rather the market now refers to financial games.  The notion that the ‘market formulates prices’ within industrial capitalism has now given way to finances.  The great fortunes of today are not established by the possession of material goods but rather from bank accounts, financial wealth and other forms of “virtual goods” such as trademarks, patents, images, use of business ‘logos’ in the form of merchandizing, and so on.  Things virtual, fantasy or fetish, to use Marxist language, have replaced, scammed, and annulled what is real.  It is just like the story of the witty tailors who scammed the emperor by selling him a robe of non-existent cloth and telling the gullible crowd that only the wise can see it. So everyone refrained from telling the emperor that he did not have any clothes on, for then they would be considered stupid.  Today we all believe that things exist that others say exist, even though personally we do not see them. But in this case we have all been forced to wear these invisible robes and we all fear to discover that we are naked. The only one who is dressed is the emperor (“Empire, Religion, and the Political,” in Beyond the Spirit of Empire:  Theology and Politics in a New Key by Néstor Míguez, Joerg Rieger, Jung Mo Sung, 11–12).