Abstract
Reviewed by Kenneth Surin , Duke University, USA
This intellectually capacious book deals with a pervasive feature of neoliberalism that has been overlooked until fairly recently, namely, the increasing impingement of capitalism, in its quest for ever new forms of primitive accumulation, on spheres of life hitherto isolated from the ostensibly unholy hurly–burly of capitalist formations and social relations. The case in point here, especially in the United States, that quintessential canary in the capitalist mine, is the domain typically assigned to religion or spirituality, with the creation of a “capitalist spirituality” as the apex of this now settled neoliberal formation. The stereotypical image of the American multi-millionaire TV evangelist—cosmetically augmented from head to toe, living in a tastelessly brash Macmansion, driving the newest-model BMW or Mercedes Benz (or both), and flying in a luxurious private jet accompanied by an equally cosmetically contrived “trophy” wife to his adoring audiences (the old-fashioned term “congregation” here lacking saliency in a virtual reality created and sustained in its entirety by media technologies)—is by now something of a cultural commonplace. Such TV preachers are even the stuff of comedy on “Saturday Night Live.” Hand in hand with this visible embodiment of the so-called “gospel of success,” and its accompanying and overarching “happiness industry,” is the increased permeation of the workplace milieu by techniques and methods, already suitably bastardized by American business-management “science,” that have spiritual or quasi-religious practices as their obvious point of origin.
The author takes this fascinating development—capitalism becoming more religious even as religion becomes more capitalistic, as “organizational management” and “spiritual management” coalesce (pp. 239–245)—as his subject. The book has several strands. One is ethnographic, as the author discusses the fieldwork, he did with the business roundtable Seeing Things Whole (STW). This rich and absorbing ethnography could be a book on its own if suitably expanded—one reads it with an unsettling mixture of cynical recognition (Okay, here’s a bastard we all know) and every so often jaw-dropping surprise (why on earth are you doing this to yourself?) as various characters try, sometimes opportunistically and sometimes not, to make their way through this capitalist minefield equipped only with that nebulous “something” derived from spirituality or religion called “values.” The second is metatheoretical, using the ethnographic data gleaned by the author to pose questions regarding our understanding of social change and the narrative transformations which accompany such change. A third strand, and for me the most intriguing and powerful component of González’s argument, is his proposition that the emergence of “workplace spirituality” marks and accompanies a transition, in the countries of the west and north, from capitalism’s previous and now superseded overwhelmingly industrial mode of production and accumulation to one that is largely postindustrial and cybernetically driven (pp. 323–340). González uses Sartre’s late Critique of Dialectical Reason (mistakenly rendered in the bibliography as “Critique of Dialectical Method”), the two volumes of which are greatly under-appreciated in relation to the more celebrated works of Sartre’s earlier “existential” period, as his theoretical lodestone in this undertaking. In a fourth strand, this Sartrean-based approach is used by the author to counter the all too obvious reductionism present in any number of putatively Marxist characterizations, deriving their inspiration from worn-out notions of “false consciousness” and so forth, of the religious or spiritual import of this shift from the previous “material” mode of capitalist accumulation to the “immaterial” one currently deemed to prevail in the countries of the developed west and north. In a fifth strand, the author draws methodological conclusions regarding the way religious studies as an intellectual field will have to expand and alter itself in order to bring these momentous changes within its purview. Each of these strands is very much a small treatise of its own.
It is hard to do justice to so wide-ranging a book in this relatively brief review, so the reviewer has perforce to fasten on a topic or two for further discussion. As mentioned, González argues that the move to a “capitalist spirituality” is to be identified with the shift in the advanced capitalist countries from an industrial mode of production to one that is, in the countries of the west and north, postindustrial and even “immaterial” or “cognitive.” The claim that capitalist social relations entail certain specific forms of intersubjectivity (or lack thereof) is impossible to gainsay—one cannot imagine nomadic herders of a 1000-years ago, or even today, working in a contemporary Microsoft assembly plant since they had have absolutely no inkling of was going on in such a place. With this proviso in mind, González is looking for forms of intersubjectivity that prevail, in however, truncated or nascent a form, in the face of the overweening colonization of the intersubjective by capitalism. Capitalism, now that it has encroached on realms once considered exclusively “religious” or “spiritual,” is in a position to tout itself as the orchestrator of intersubjectivity par excellence. But are there versions of “intersubjectivities against the odds” capable of withstanding the seemingly total colonization of intersubjectivity by contemporary capitalism? González’s wide-ranging ethnography provides examples of “intersubjectivities against the odds,” sometimes indeed radically against the odds (pp. 13–19), the reader can find compelling. Religion, as some Marxists acknowledge, can be both opiate and spur to something different for those who are oppressed. Shape-Shifting Capital, without professing any kind of explicit Marxist affiliation, does this fundamental insight ample intellectual and practical justice (pp. 90–99).
Shape-Shifting Capital originated in a doctoral dissertation, and it certainly bears the traces of its origin. But in the end it is none the worse for this—on the contrary, the occasional longueurs to be encountered as one works through this book’s sometimes clunky prose and prodigality of references is more often than not offset by the riches contained in the extensive footnote apparatus (what a pleasant and productive digressive activity it is to use the Web to pursue lines conveyed by this or that footnote in a hugely productive text such as this), by the sheer abundance of detail in the text, and the intellectual bravura with which this emerging scholar tackles his always copious, and oftentimes over-copious, material.
We live in a time when capitalism is taking forms that in countless ways border on the clearly vaporous. Today colossally lucrative enterprises, making their originators some of the wealthiest people on earth, exist in a realm that can best be described as virtual: Uber owns no taxis, Airbnb owns no rental properties, EBay/Alibaba possess no inventory, Facebook generates no content of its own, and high-speed stock traders sit at desks transmuting algorithms into computer pixels in order to generate obscene returns (“profit” generally being used in economics only to characterize gains that accrue from actual productive investment) in a few clicks of the keyboard. At the same time, as the great crash of 2007–8 and its aftermath revealed, this is also a time when capitalism is a concretely visible racket of the most rapacious proportions—not-so-wealthy families hankering to own “a place we can call ours” are ripped-off on a systematic scale by fraudulent purveyors of subprime mortgages, unregulated pay-day loan sharks charge the desperately poor interest in the hundreds percent for loans that will in all probability not tide them over from one paltry pay check to the next, and so on.
Capitalism in the north and west seems to be melting into this (cybernetic) ether, even as its physical victims are evicted brutally from properties they thought they were paying for, and therefore beginning to own and as its working poor trudge each day from one to two or even three “McJobs” simply in order to pay the rent and feed the family. As it does this, the current mode of capitalist accumulation, in its quest to extract more effort and “productivity” from those who labor on its behalf, is decking itself in accoutrements associated with religion and spirituality (those who meditate and do yoga during work-breaks allegedly perform better at work as a result of their enhanced “mindfulness” and so forth). And of course religion, an American-inspired version of Christianity in this case, is itself being progressively enervated by all-consuming capitalist impulses—many churches would sooner hire someone with an MBA to be their minister than someone with a top-notch divinity degree. How and why this neoliberal “marriage made in heaven” has been enabled, and how it can be opposed or circumvented, is a crucial question for our time. This wonderful and at times frustrating book is up to the task of addressing this most pressing of questions.