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

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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. The book examines and theorizes futilitarianism as an ever-deepening process of individual entrapment, which occurs both despite and because of individuals' efforts to improve their own conditions. We inhabit a system that simultaneously prescribes and prevents individual "well-being." As we pursue our individual (and often even collective) goals, we paradoxically become less happy, more anxious, more indebted, more exploitable.

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 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. My recent book Futilitarianism: Neoliberalism and the Production of Uselessness, which is published as part of the Political Economy Research Centre (PERC) Series with Goldsmiths Press, is an attempt to articulate a particular form of existential entrapment within contemporary capitalism. I call this entrapment “the futilitarian condition,” which emerges when individuals are forced to maximise utility—which, under neoliberalism, effectively requires enhancing the myriad conditions to accumulate human capital—but in doing so, this leads to the worsening of our collective social and economic conditions. Through developing the concept “futilitarianism,” I aim to lay the theoretical foundations to both understand this entrapment and to imagine ways of thinking and organising that can help us overcome the futilitarian condition.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. The MIT Press has been a leader in open access book publishing for over two decades, beginning in 1995 with the publication of William Mitchell’s City of Bits, which appeared simultaneously in print and in a dynamic, open web edition. Ben Eggleston and Dale E. Miller (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Utilitarianism (Cambridge University Press, 2014) Jessica Whyte and Wendy Brown are two of the most important theoretical influences on Futilitarianism, and rightly so. They warn us to avoid understanding this turn along purely economistic lines. This has long been a favored rhetorical trope of neoliberal politicians, who often insisted they were operating beyond ideology, or simply letting the natural “laws” of the market run their course. In fact, neoliberalism from the beginning was conceived as a fundamentally moral project to make the world safer for property while fashioning individuals into entrepreneurs of the self. Patreon will charge your card monthly for the amount you pledged. You can cancel this pledge anytime.

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.” The book concludes with a chapter titled “The Becoming-Common of the Futilitariat.” The goal here is imagine political organisation around the idea of futility, much in the same way that precarity has been used to organise seemingly disparate labour experiences of in the neoliberal decades. I argue that the term futility can reach even further than precarity, because even those who exist in more secure economic, social, and political situations can still be trapped in the futilitarian condition. What needs to occur, I suggest is a process of “becoming-common”—an understanding of which I adapt form the German political theorist Isabell Lorey—which, in short, entails a process of mutual recognition of the shared experience of futility. These experiences are of course not equivalent—some people experience much more extreme and violent forms of futility—but they do attest to a social relationality that can form the basis of political organisation. Where classical Marxists once believed in the inexorable historical arrival of a better tomorrow, one of the most alienating features of neoliberalism is how it naturalizes history out of existence. Since there is “no alternative” to the world as it is, aesthetics becomes the endless recycling of cultural images and symbols from the past, a pastiche of postmodern nostalgia for a time where people could actually make a difference. Even language becomes increasingly incapable of bearing the gravitas of meaning we need it to, as communication is flattened by digital discourse and the rich texture of the world becomes liquidated into two hundred eighty digestible characters. Politics Against FutilityBentham 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.” 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 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. A proposal for countering the futility of neoliberal existence to build a egalitarian, sustainable, and hopeful future.

What makes this particular brand of aristocratic disdain so inherently nihilistic and ugly is precisely that sentiment that most people don’t lead lives that are worth much of anything. We serve as replaceable forms of human capital, put to work by the handful of exceptional individuals who actually know what we should doing with our lives, before we die and the next generation takes our place. Peter Singer, The Expanding Circle: Ethics, Evolution, and Moral Progress (Princeton University Press, 2011) Few, these days, hold utilitarianism in high regard, as it relies on the calculation of utility and reduces the richness of life into pleasure and pain. As an ethical framework, it advocates the course of action determined by what decision maximizes ‘utility’, i.e., pleasure, happiness, or wellbeing for the most people. Jeremy Bentham coined the theory in 1789 and John Stuart Mill then built upon it, and in its day utilitarianism was a revolutionary turn in moral philosophy. Challenging the religion-based codes of ethics of the day, utilitarianism was rational, radical, and refreshing to the late Enlightenment thinkers it inspired. When Joseph De Maistre described the French Revolutionaries as satanic and destructive, he at least granted them the dignity of making an impact. José Gasset might have been wary of the “revolt of the masses” of mediocre people against the aristocracy, but occasionally expressed admiration for the permanence and sweep of their uprising. 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.”

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. 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. To Vallely, capitalism has always been undergirded by the idea of utility maximization as an intellectual crutch. By linking endless capital accumulation with the purported attainment of utility, the historical and ongoing injustices of colonialism have been justified on the basis of the supposed longterm interest of the colonized people. Similarly, ever-widening inequality is justified as part and parcel of ‘human progress’, a view well-lodged in the writings of establishment thinkers like Harvard’s Steven Pinker. But whereas Keynesian capitalism advocated a more ‘majoritarian’ variant of utility, the Hayekian push towards neoliberalism put the onus on the individual, thus leading to the current futilitarian condition. The university knows that this intellectual precariat has little choice but to maximize utility, so it can exploit their acts by paying less and less for the labor of teaching, while still maintaining the influx of students and fees. It is clear, therefore, that the practice of utility maximization on the part of this intellectual precariat might on a few occasions lead to individual well-being in the form of a permanent position, but it also entrenches the conditions that make the well-being of the vast majority of the precariat impossible. Neoliberalism Needs Futility 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.

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. 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. 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.”

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It is certainly true, however, that many people do not care about whether utilitarianism has flipped into futilitarianism, or whether their acts of utility maximization are exploited by neoliberalism to dismantle common bonds and mutual interest. In fact, in the Global North, lots of people are relatively secure and settled, especially if they are white, middle-aged to elderly, and have citizenship, a house — or several — a regular income or pension and access to decent — increasingly private — health care. They might not care that the income gap between the Global North and the Global South has nearly quadrupled since the 1960s, or that economic and social inequalities have sharply risen since the 1980s, because everyone on their street seems to be doing fine. And even some of those who are not secure are rarely directly angry with capitalism, but rather with urban elites, immigrants, or benefit-cheats. Countering Futilitarianism The university is not the only example of the logic of the futilitarian condition. In fact, neoliberal capitalism seems to work better when many of our actions are rendered futile, not only because we are incapable of challenging its hegemony, but also because in our desperation to maximize utility to improve our individual social and economic conditions, we simultaneously internalize the rationalities of self-sufficiency, personal responsibility and competition that dismantle social solidarities. This original and compelling tour de force is essential reading for anyone who thinks that there must be more to life than this.” This is an excerpt of Neil Vallely’s “ Futilitarianism: Neoliberalism and the Production of Uselessness.” Out now from Goldsmiths Press.