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Futilitarianism: On Neoliberalism and the Production of Uselessness (Goldsmiths Press / PERC Papers)

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Since then, for all his insistence on its rationalistic simplicity, many have complained about deep tensions in Bentham’s position. Was he making a psychological claim about the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain simply being fundamental human motivations, a moral claim about how they should be the fundamental human motivations, or both? But Bentham was convinced of the power of his argument, and claimed that the best moral and political system would be one dedicated to achieving the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people, as determined through a kind of felicific calculus. MIT Press began publishing journals in 1970 with the first volumes of Linguistic Inquiry and the Journal of Interdisciplinary History. Today we publish over 30 titles in the arts and humanities, social sciences, and science and technology. By focusing on futility rather than nihilism, the theory of futilitarianism extrapolates not only the experience of meaninglessness that comes with neoliberalism, but the construction of that meaninglessness in contemporary social and political practices. Futilitarianism brings the futility of everyday life in the neoliberal period to the fore, with the hope of generating ideas of how to counter meaninglessness that do not end up in nihilism. Nihilism is an end-in-itself; an increased awareness and understanding of futility can be the starting point of something meaningful. But utility is not something that naturally exists; it is not a neutral or objective concept. Utility is always an effect of social relationships, constructed politically, and deeply enmeshed in the power structures of a society. The question, then, is not so much “what is useful?” Rather, it is “how does something become defined as useful and who gets to judge it as such?” Money and Utility Despite the appeal of this synthesis of utilitarianism and capitalism, it was never uncontroversial. In the twentieth century, Vallelly observes, there was a climatic struggle between socially minded utilitarians, mostly inspired by J. M. Keynes, and the increasingly strident neoliberal economists. For a while, the socially minded utilitarians were successful, and largely justified the creation of extensive welfare states on the grounds that a more even distribution of goods and services would make people happier and prevent needless suffering.

To develop the theory of futilitarianism, and its relationship to neoliberalism, I use the first part of the book to situate neoliberalism within the intellectual history of utilitarianism. I examine Jeremy Bentham’s writings on political economy, and, in particular, his association of money with the principle of utility. In an essay from the 1770s, “The Philosophy of Economic Science,” Bentham wrote that “the thermometer is the instrument for measuring the heat of weather, the Barometer the instrument for measuring the pressure of the Air… Money is the instrument for measuring the quantity of pleasure and pain.” This association of money with utility runs throughout Benthamite utilitarianism, leading Will Davies to conclude in his book The Happiness Industry (2015), that “by putting out there the idea that money might have some privileged relationship to our inner experience, Bentham set the stage for the entangling of psychological research and capitalism that would shape the business practices of the twentieth century.” Review of Futilitarianism: Neoliberalism and the Production of Uselessness by Neil Vallelly (Goldsmiths Press, 2021) Think 30,000+ words of revolutionary brainfood. A dozen or more thought-provoking essays from some of the leading thinkers and most inspiring activists out there. Global challenges, grassroots perspectives, revolutionary horizons. Edited and illustrated to perfection by the ROAR collective. Futilitarianism is one of those strong books which excels in outlining a birds-eye view of society and the world we inhabit. Rather than analysing neoliberalism from one limited vantage point, Vallelly draws together perspectives from different disciplines – sociological, political-economic, psychological and philosophical – to contribute a holistic account to the canon on neoliberalism. Vallelly concludes that the way to overcome futility is through a ‘becoming-common of the futilitariat’ (173). If we recognize that we are all subject to futility, though to unequal degrees, then we can begin to imagine a world in which utility is reclaimed by the people and for the common good. Without imagining a world aiming towards the common good, we will hitherto be trapped in the futilitarian condition.The rest of the book explores how the logic of futilitarianism and the futilitarian condition manifest themselves in everyday life in the twenty-first century by focusing on several examples of the ways individuals are encouraged, or even forced, to maximise utility. Chapters examine the relationship between human capital theory and the rise of self-branding as a form of utility maximisation; the rhetoric of personal responsibility and the escalation of both precarity and, to quote the late David Graeber, “bullshit jobs”; the relationship between social media, language production, and anxiety; the depoliticising effects of futilitarianism, especially for the Left; and, finally, the crisis of utilitarian thinking in the grim reality of the COVID-19 pandemic, where cost-benefit calculations had to contend directly with quantifying acceptable numbers of deaths. Ben Eggleston and Dale E. Miller (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Utilitarianism (Cambridge University Press, 2014) Neil Vallelly’s superb new book Futilitarianism: Neoliberalism and the Production of Uselessness is a polemic against the emptiness of the neoliberal era. It examines both its ideological roots, history, and political culture. Drawing on a vast array of contemporary examples, from self-help literature and marketing jargon to political speeches and governmental responses to the COVID-19 pandemic, Vallelly coins several terms--including "the futilitarian condition," "homo futilitus," and "semio-futility"--to demonstrate that in the neoliberal decades, the practice of utility maximization traps us in useless and repetitive behaviors that foreclose the possibility of collective happiness. A proposal for countering the futility of neoliberal existence to build an egalitarian, sustainable, and hopeful future.

Neil Vallelly offers a rich tour of what he calls the futilitarian condition brought about by neoliberalization. Systemic and ubiquitous, this condition deprives us of meaningful lives and robs the world of a future. With an elegant pen, reader-friendly philosophical thoughtfulness, and scores of examples, Vallelly explains that gnawing feeling: "isn't what I'm doing--in my job, ecological practices, ethical consumerism and more--really futile?" Becoming-common, he argues, is our only way out. ROAR is published by the Foundation for Autonomous Media and Research, an independent non-profit organization registered in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. All editors and board members are volunteers. This allows us to spend all income from our Patreon account on sustaining and expanding our publishing project. Once we have paid for basic running costs like web hosting, the remaining proceeds will be invested in high-quality content and illustrations for future issues. What we are witnessing is an important inter-generational divide between the old and the young, the baby-boomers and the millennials. The nay-sayers, dissenters and anti-capitalists across the globe are increasingly emerging from the younger generations, the very ones who were born into neoliberalism and have known nothing else. The genesis of the futilitarian condition emerged precisely at the point where utility became sanctified under capitalism, because at that moment, the possibility of futilitarianism also came into existence. Under the conditions of capitalism, the greatest happiness principle cannot be realized, or, at least, only a perverted version of it can exist. The working class have always carried the burden of the labor of utility maximization — of producing the things that are useful and, ultimately, the money associated with utility. For many capitalists of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the solution lay not in moral or political philosophy but economic theory — which nonetheless had a quasi-utilitarian ethos. Importing the evolutionary idea of the market as a mechanism that had emerged over time to maximize utility, figures like Francis Edgeworth argued that a society where individuals competed with one another in the production and sale of goods would maximize utility over time. This is because capitalist firms would be incentivized to gratify the greatest number of human needs, while individual consumers would be free to consume whatever goods gave them the highest levels of pleasure.Futility is not just a natural consequence of neoliberal capitalism. The futility that pervades contemporary society is also implanted by politicians and media elites who promote the idea that little, if anything, can be done to aim towards the common good, a notion examined by Vallely in the fifth chapter. Austerity has no sound economic basis. It extends recession by further contracting the economy. But with some media spin, the blame for financial crises can be shifted onto those least responsible who suffer the consequences of austerity the most, claiming it is ‘the only fair response’ (152). Through utilitarian tools such as cost-benefit analysis neoliberals can attempt to use the cheapest means to keep a system just about functioning. This financialization of public services cuts hospitals, care work, welfare and education to the bare bone, leaving it unable to cope when a crisis like Covid-19 hits. Even during the pandemic, the costs to the economy are weighed up against the benefit of saving human lives. There is a clear sense in which neoliberalism constitutes a continuation of this utilitarian tradition, for instance by retaining an emphasis on utility maximization. But Vallelly rightly points out that neoliberal theory and practice stripped utilitarianism of whatever social conscience it had, and refocused its energies entirely on remaking the individual into a form of social capital totally beholden to market forces and increasingly denied even a minimally responsive state for protection.

Utilitarianism and its implications, however, were not, in Bentham’s view, strictly limited to moral philosophy or conceptual analysis in a more abstract sense. Rather, Bentham wanted governments to adopt utilitarianism as a guiding principle of governance that might motivate politicians to strive toward the pursuit of collective wellbeing for the wider public. Though Bentham’s intended scope for the actualisation of his theory did not fully transpire in his own life, utilitarianism would go on to indirectly influence politics in complex, profound and material ways, not least in its outsized influence as a foundational cornerstone of neoclassical economics. As a result, utilitarianism has penetrated deep into the shape of our capitalist world we live in today, with the logic of utility and, specifically, its salient normativity, infusing aspects of work practices and shaping the dynamics of social interactions. Deeply inspired by the similarly grim Mark Fisher (of Capitalist Realism fame), the book is often sobering and even melancholic. Indeed in some of its more scathing passages, Futilitarianism reads like the academic equivalent of a primal scream against the injustice and alienation of the futilitarian era. But this passion drives and deepens Vallelly’s analysis, and the book will no doubt be welcomed by all of us who seek a better alternative to the despair of neoliberalism in the age of COVID-19. Utilitarianism and Capitalism What Vallelly achieves here is a remarkable new theoretical insight into why… utilitarianism under neoliberal capitalism must mutate into futilitarianism. A thoroughly welcome, timely and profound intervention.” For this reason, utility can never be conceived exclusively as an economic or philosophical concept. Instead, utility is always representative of a certain understanding of political economy, of the relationships between forms of production, labor and trade and the mechanisms of government, power and, ultimately, capitalism. This fact is most evident in the work of Jeremy Bentham, a late 18th- and early 19th-century philosopher and social reformer. Bentham was the founder of modern utilitarianism and he could find only one credible measure for utility: money. In an essay titled “The Philosophy of Economic Science,” he wrote: “The Thermometer is the instrument for measuring the heat of the weather, the Barometer the instrument for measuring the pressure of the Air…. Money is the instrument for measuring the quantity of pain and pleasure.” Bentham began his intellectual career with a scathing denunciation of English common law, which he saw as irredeemably traditionalist and littered with irrational prejudices. While in hindsight progressives should actually agree with many of his criticisms, Bentham already displayed a worrying tendency to boil things down to a very basic set of moral and psychological principles, that struggled to account for historical and human complexities. This was best reflected in An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation when Bentham proclaimed, “Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure. It is for them alone to point out what we ought to do, as well as to determine what we shall do.”

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The example of the contemporary university can help contextualize the concept of the futilitarian condition. The university is now dependent on a vast army of casual and adjunct teaching staff, mostly postgraduate students or post-PhD gig workers, without whom the university would collapse. Yet these staff are routinely treated with contempt by university hierarchies, and exploited on short-term contracts that rarely cover the entirety of the hours they actually work.

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