Saturday, February 15, 2020

Excess and Institution, further thoughts on the religious forms of our institutes







This is Prof Friedland's follow up essay to the one HERE he wrote engaging with Dotan Leshems work of tracing the theological sources of our economic conceptions, but he expands this to say the model of the Christian Godhead, a ‘community’ of divine personas, a ‘self-sufficient excess’ reflected in the ecclesia, is….THE general form and mode of operation of *all* institutions.


Excess and Institution


I want to push back on excess and institution. Whether I agree or not, Leshem is good to think with, in part because he is a fellow institutionalist, somebody who argues comparatively in terms of spheres and fields, and their relationships. There are so many things to talk about; I will just mark a few. Leshem suggests that I think we can be done with the “haunting question” of secularization. I am, in fact, obsessed with the problem. Issues of transposition, its mechanisms and its evidence become even more vexed and indeterminate. It is both a question, as he notes, “how Christian models migrated” from ecclesia to market, but also, which he does not, whether and why they migrated, and how we would know. Nor is it the collision of the genealogical and the social structural that is at stake; at issue is their alignment and the kind of social theory embedded in Leshem’s genealogical approach. Leshem’s genealogy requires not only an identification of what actually moves from the religious sphere, but the conditions and consequences of its movement.



For Agamben, secularization is a signature, not a concept (Agamben, 2011:4). “Signatures move and displace concepts and signs from one field to another (in this case, from sacred to profane, and vice versa) without redefining them semantically.” Leshem, speaking of Foucault’s approach to the pastoral origins of multiple forms of governmentality, suggests that we should rather speak of secularizations, each with its “own particular way of generating growth by accommodating itself to the way of the governed” (Leshem, 2016: 167). It is the idealized micro and macroeconomics of Christomimesis that migrates from ecclesia to market as a result of which there are genealogical lineaments that connect Gary Becker and Gregory of Nyssa. Leshem insists that we locate the origins of all expansionary models of economic growth in Christianity’s divine excess. There may be multiple forms of reference of the economy back to the original denotation in 4th century Christianity, but they all do refer back. Today that “divine quality of excess…is now present in (nearly) all institutions.”


What is at issue is the institutional location and nature, the institutional generality and specificity, of this excess. The divine quality of excess, in Leshem’s casting, is both transposed and refracted (“tweaking,” he calls it), through “the marketization of the economy.” He characterizes me as following in the tracks Agamben’s mapping, in which meanings of concepts do not change in migration, unlike his own multivariate Foucauldianism in which they do. While I really appreciate Leshem’s comparative institutionalism, both its cartography, its specification of boundary conditions and the ideal relation between spheres, I don’t accept his characterization of my project.


Leshem is certainly correct that I seek to posit a singular model of an institutional logic. He Christianizes the sources of a general institutional excess, while I would suggest we entertain that Christianity theorized – theory originally understood by Christians as a vision of God – a generalized institutional excess. We agree that it is excess, while not necessarily that excess, that animates the formation and hence growth of the market or any institution for that matter. And we agree that it is excess that affords the contingency of its reference, the changing territorialization of its practices, its variable inclusions and exclusions, its giving and taking of institutional life (Friedland, 2017).


It is its Christian specificity that makes me pause. Indeed beyond the nominal identity of economy, the inclusiveness of the pastoral economic art, its ability to suspend canon law and admit aberrant rite and creed in order to expand the boundaries of the church points to the contingency of reference on the one side and excess of divine substance on the other. I am not yet convinced of what of the specifically divine is actually transposed to the market economy. The inclusionary accommodations that he relies on as examples and evidence of the Christian governmentality revolve around questions of reference, driven by cost-benefit calculations as to their impact on the growth, or reach, of the ecclesia. I am not convinced there is something particularly, or essentially, Christian here. Indeed one could argue that Christianity itself first emerged through the Israelites’ inclusionary accommodations. Inclusive purification, the neutralization of heterogeneous and potentially polluting properties, is, it seems to me, a trans-institutional practice as the ontologies of bodies, practices, objects and constellations of words are regularly incorporated into or expelled from one domain or another, a sexual body becoming an individual property right, clean air a citizenship right, a corporation a citizen with rights to free political speech. The introduction of a new international accountability regime in 2008 to purify sovereign wealth funds of their political charge, to align them with market criteria alone, in order to grow the American financial market is a pertinent example (Mehrpouya, 2015).[1] Leshem suggests that my approach marginalizes human agency and choice. Quite the contrary: Institutional excess not only affords, but demands and depends on human agency, in part because both reference is always necessarily open, because authority and law can never be reduced to each other.


So how to decide whether Christianity first specified something general, my position, or the modern world generalized this Christian specificity, his position? I do not know, but it remains a vexing problem.


In her Syndicate commentary Rust returns us to Weber’s Protestant “spirit of capitalism,” suggesting that the collapse of the incarnational economy, the absolutization of divine will and the insufficiency of human will, the primacy of election, the transformation of works from a means into signs of salvation, blocks the inclusive purification central in Leshem’s model of growth. For Rust it is either the emptying out of the incarnational economy attendant upon the Reformation that opens a space for the capitalist market to appropriate or which affords a new space from which the transposition of Protestant “testing” practices and its Christian economy of excessive desires would be conduits by which Christianity came to inform mundane market conduct. Rust puts it this way: “Do the doctrinal shifts wrought by the Reformation constitute an actual “stripping away” of the incarnational economy and its society—or simply an effective and momentous recalibration of it into a new ethic, that of the “ascetic conduct of life” that Weber claims inadvertently contributes to a vast wave of capitalist expansion?” If we follow Foucault, the transom between God and market is not a secularization, but a migration of practices, or as he is cited here, a “proliferation… of these techniques of conduct.” In Foucault’s theorizing of modern governmentality and disciplinarity, techniques migrate from asylum to prison to industrial floor to produce useful bodies, and power is capillary and diffuse. It is an institutionally flat account; it is not good or God-dependent.


Mechanism aside, does anything migrate, transpose or relocate? And if it does, could the ground of the genealogy be located not just in the causal force of the exterior logic of the religious sphere, but in its inner consonance with that of its destination? This possibility is implicit in Leshem’s responsive appropriation of Rust’s hypothesis that the collapse of the incarnational economy cleared a space, as he writes, leaving “it empty to be taken over by the moderns for their own purposes.”


In this context it is germane to invoke the analysis of Noam Yuran, an economic philosopher, who points to the ways in which Protestantism anticipated the symbolic logic of money which depends on a metaphysical market value in which money stands in for what money cannot buy (Yuran, 2014). For Leshem it is human desire, the number who desire and the intensity of their desire, including the desire to desire, and not its object, that is the primary axis of his comparative economics. Neo-liberalism, which represents a “radicalization” of that Christian model, holds “that each and every object (and no longer the Divine One) possessed the ability to generate in humans an unlimited, unsaturated desire” and the “divinization of each and every object of desire,” an anarchic pantheism (Leshem, 2016: 168).


In Yuran’s approach the unsaturated desire derives not from the relationships of subjects and objects, as in Leshem’s account, but from the material symbolism of money. Yuran retrospectively re-reads Max Weber’s understanding of the Protestant spirit of capitalism, not as an external cause of capitalist practice of “the incessant, calculated pursuit of gain for its own sake,” inexplicable from the point of view of individual utility, but as anticipating it, as the moment in which the nature of capitalist money becomes “explicit” (Yuran, 2014: 183-185). Ascetic Protestantism’s moral and salvific reading of economic action already contains the secret of capitalist money. Yuran writes:


What needs to be asked is: What exactly is the economic function of factors like God, heaven, and salvation? What function in the economy do divine beings have? Why is it necessary or appropriate at some stage to relate certain economic behavior to God?” (Yuran, 2014: 189).


For Yuran the answer has to do with the religious nature of money, not the economic nature of God, with the ways in which ascetic Protestantism understands and expresses “the unspeakable voice of money” (Yuran, 2014: 189). Money not only speaks; it sees. In a manner parallel to a Christian icon, Yuran conveys the “social gaze inherent in money,” where its expansive potential is experienced as a demand on one’s person, as the omniscient and omnipresent eye of God, internalized as “religious conscience” (Yuran, 2014: 190). It is the modern capitalist who teleologically reveals the secret of Protestant asceticism. Money’s demanding call to fulfill its potential for expansion, its omnipresent gaze, its totalizing reach and precise accounting, are refracted as if they were the demands of a divine being, specifically a God whose grace cannot be earned through good works and whose presence is manifested by a ceaseless disciplining of a life. Modern capitalism is not a secularization of Protestantism; Calvinist Protestantism is an anticipatory expression of the religious nature of capitalism.


Seeking to read Leshem’s Christian genealogy of the economy I, too, understand the course of incarnational theology as the outworking of a model of collective practice, but that its secularization may be the signature of institution, not just a divine Christian economy. Every institution has its god; each is an immanent excessive, incarnational and transcribed economy. The production of desire depends on a god who can take human form, who can be incarnated and materialized, such that we can mirror it, that we become more than human. The Christians exquisitely theorized the incarnational mystery that inhabits and animates every institutional domain. Christ, a particular bodily form, is an exemplar of an institutional object with an afterlife that depends on the unmade, the unbegotten, the good which is the ground and source of unsaturable desire, of that which can never be possessed, the irrationality that inhabits our every rationality, the good whose reality is evidenced by but can never be reduced to our desire for more of it.


Analyses of institutional logics center on historically specific constellations of practices and goods, non-phenomenal institutional substances in the Aristotelian sense, in which subjects and objects are understood as their effects, not their causes. Giving primacy to practices requires a suspicion of the notion of self-contained and purified spheres or domains. The practices of an institutional logic are good dependent; goods that are actionable because of their materialization in institutional objects. This is the case in both the ecclesia and the capitalist market, salvation and market value, Christ and coin and property.


In an institutional logical approach formal accounts of an institutional logic need not accord with its practical regularities. Leshem centers his genealogy not in practice, but in formal models, not in economy, but economics, specifically the abstracted dynamics and domains of divine incarnation affording the expansive inscription of this excess in the economic life of the trinity into a distinct, exterior domain, delimited by divine nature on the one side and human sin on the other. He writes: “All the changes in relations of economy to philosophy, as well as politics and the legal framework, were initiated by the redesign of the economic models discussed in this chapter” (Leshem, 2016: 55). It is the models that afford and inform the practices. Although we now better understand, a la MacKenzie, the ways in which models can produce the economy they supposedly represent – as engines, not cameras as he titles his book, an historical philology does not broach the problematic relationship between the language of power and the power of language, between elite members’ accounts of their economy and ways in which that language is constitutive, as opposed to a mediation, of the material practices by which it grows.


From my vantage point, the abstraction of economization as the conversion of excess into surplus through the conduct of desire and ascesis leads to the evacuation of the institutional specificity of the market economy. He writes: “we should consider the hypothesis that instead of the exclusion of God from the economy what we are really confronted with is the divinization of each and every object of desire; if we unmasked the a-theistic persona that contemporary economy has taken on, we would come face to face with is an anarchic pan-theism (anarchic because it excludes Christ as the economic arche of The Father). If so, it would be more accurate to describe this as a double-edged displacement of Christ’s excessive quality to the interplay between a desiring subject on the one hand and each and every object of desire on the other.” (Leshem, 2016: 168).


Leshem seeks to cleave the economy from the market, locating divine excess grounding growth in the former and divine providence in the latter. “Attributing the origin of this inclusiveness to ‘economy’, by revealing its origins in fourth century Christianity, clearly suggests that the well-recorded tendency of market economy to grow by inclusion is a quality of the economy rather than of the market. It also suggests that the marketization of Christ economy ought to be understood as the transposition of the excess found in the economy from Christ to the desiring subject and desired object” (Leshem, 2016: 168).


I do not agree that the economy is anarchized in the liberal world because it is no longer rooted in Christ, the Arche. Leshem’s analysis can posit the transposition of the excess of the Christian triune God to the market only by bracketing the institutional good or substance, and the institutional objects – market value and property and money, upon which it is grounded. These institutional objects are not just media; they “incarnate” what cannot be seen or touched, or ever had. Market value is only revealed in price, but can never be reduced to it, thus affording the suspension of the laws of property and contract, as we saw most recently in 2008. Their authority both authorizes and can suspend the laws meant to effect them, not unlike the suspensions of canon law as part of pastoral governmentality. I do not understand how it is possible to parse economy and market in the way that Leshem proposes. It is only according to the orthodox model that the excess is located in humans, the unfalisifiable premise of neo-classical economics. I would argue that the excess is located in market value, in what cannot be bought, what exceeds any object at any price. Market objects and subjects only exist as effects of particular institutional goods and the institutional object-dependent practices through which they are effected.


[1] Afshin Mehrpouya, “Instituting a transnational accountability regime: The case of Sovereign Wealth Funds and ‘GAPP,’” Accounting, Organizations and Society, 44 (2015), pp. 15-36.

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