Name that collapse

I don't know if I over-dosed on financial disaster porn before the bailout (an enormous money shot if there ever was one; I can't help but wonder whether part of the effort was to get as much money as possible before "this sucker" went down; who really are the suckers and what exactly were we going down on?) and just lost interest, whether everyday life and the election has diverted me, or whether we are actually in a situation of such global volatility that there isn't a cohesive locus for thinking about it. Prior to the bailout, there was talk of the credit crisis. This is still present, obviously, but the massive impact of the credit freeze (or, as I like to call it, the massive over-production of debt) across the globe seems to have exceeded the boundaries of this framing.

Should we speak of the collapse of the financial sector? Of global banking? Of stock markets? Of neoliberalism as an ideology? Of capitalism itself?

Some suggest that the collapse definitively proves that neoliberalism is ideologically bankrupt (not just financially strapped or momentarily ill-liquid). Such a claim could well be performative, calling into being or helping produce a better post-neoliberal future. Yet, this will depend on the elements to which the claim is articulated. I read somewhere today something that suggested a change has thorough as 1989, as if all of a sudden everyone just stopped believing the lie and stopped going through the motions (not a bad way to think about banks that refuse to lend).

But I don't think this rings true quite yet--although it can be made to ring true. I still hear ideologues like McCain preaching tax cuts and deregulation. I still hear them looking out for banks and the rich. I still hear a deep, constitutive, belief in free markets that flies in the face of what the state is doing.

For some, the answer is locality and flexibility. I think this is deeply anti-socialist, anti-collectivist, and anti-cooperative. It's another version of every man for himself, in effect, a deeper, more estranged distillation of neoliberalism.

If this is the collapse of neoliberalism, we have to push a positive, affirmative view of state action. But it can't be a kind of apologia for the wrong sort of state action.

I hope we are adequate to the task.

Comments

[Joe]

"If this is the collapse of neoliberalism, we have to push a positive, affirmative view of state action. But it can't be a kind of apologia for the wrong sort of state action."

I think this is going to be a lot harder than it sounds. For all the positive reception of the House's initial defeat of the bailout, much in the MSM and politicians were deriding them as irresponsible. Likewise, lots of middle-class Americans with homes or stocks or 401k plans in danger want to see the State step in and "do something," but not as a matter of renewing collectivity so much as to secure for them their private security. People may stop "going through the motions," but they're further off from having a positive grasp of why than I think we can assume right now.

[Bob Allen]

Very good analogy to the collapse of Communism, except this crowd loves the system; this God that failed's trappings were actually manifest, not mere imaginings of a distant after;life, you could SEE the wealth and bling, and now what will the suburban cowboys do with their anger and dillusionment? Go to a neo fascist Palin rally or a college football game (events of about the same order)? They just don't train and indoctrinate fascists like they used to, there's too many darkies runnin' around and nobody believes in much of anything anymore. Schadenfruede at its finest, it is almost fun to watch...

[chakira]

Jodi, I am glad that you are overdosed on the porn and now ready to get working on the crisis of imagination. I believe we need to set the stage for this new drama as sparsely as possible. We must get down to the essential phenomena and address those, since we are in the midst of a referendum on these essential phenomena and phenomenology-- the making conscious of these phenomena and ipso facto of this referendum, must have a vote. This means questioning ideas like those of money. Money, recognized by Hegel as mutual recognition, and extended by Lacan into mutual titillation, has always held wide disseminatory potentials which cannot be controlled. The question of when our desire for regulated jouissance will emerge, is thus the most important one on everyone's minds. How much porn can we take?
What we do not need is more theorizing in a Habermasian vein; thinking of the stilling of reason via the proliferation of communicative alternatives. As we have seen, State Regulation of capitalism, like state regulation of jouissance, can never cover the unthematizable or within that jouissance. Thus we do not need more EU style structures where the government intervenes. What we need is rethinking of that space between the unnamablity and unregulatability of jouissance and the paradoxical, violent and ultimately connected DESIRE to regulate it. The impossibility of sinning must be thought in conjuction with the inevitability of sinning, and from there we can create some kind of metaphilosophy: one that takes into account this perspective of the world.

[Joe]

[...In a similar vein Jodi Dean concludes...]