It's hard to pinpoint when philosophy came into my life.  The traditional definition of philosophy--that it begins with the criticism of criticism--would suggest that it belongs more to the reflection of old age, or at least the middle years, than it does to youth.  But I think that I have always been philosophical, or that I have always questioned the critique almost as much as the original object of debate.  Call it mania if you want, but I have never felt satisfied with debating the usual issues.  The rules by which debates occur, even the ideas upon which the whole structure of debate itself rests, have interested me more from the very beginning, or at least as long as I can remember.

Along with the questioning of basic concepts, I can't remember ever not feeling a certain suspicion of many of the assumptions about the world shared by most people.  Corruption, in particular, has always seemed like a hinky category to me.  Whenever it's mentioned as a justification, or an excuse, in arguments about politics or general social issues, and most of the people involved in the debate seem to go along, I find myself speaking up and asking, "What is it?  Who is included, who is not?  And how is it any different from some of the same things we're all engaged in?"

This isn't meant as an excuse for the large-scale robberies by bankers and their political pets that we've all witnessed lately.  But since their philosophies and theories about politics, economy, and how the world works (or should work, if we lived in the kind of world they seem to assume we live in) employ corruption as a central term, I am, shall we say, more than a little curious about it.  In what utopian universe of "free market" theory, for instance, are we justified in preaching to anyone else about the corruption of politics?  We, the American people, along with our politicians (and much of this was a shared enterprise) have perfected corruption to a level previously unseen in history.  Forget about the petty systems of patronage constructed by Third World autocrats, and the oligarchic corruption of economy instituted in the old Soviet Union (or in today's Russia for that matter).  We got a much bigger, meaner, more ruthless system of corruption going right here at home.  And it takes in much of the rest of world in its sway.

Part of the problem, I think, is tied up with the history of the idea of corruption in the West, and its close relationship with Christianity.  The concept, seen through the lens of Christianity, is almost always aimed at the Other.  We never think of ourselves as being corrupt, except in the sense of original sin, which is a little like saying, "Well, whattaya gonna do?"  And then doing nothing.   Or, when we do include ourselves in the critique, it's only in some way that can be erased through one form of penitence or another.  Progressives who rail against corruption in government, and the too close connection between corporations and public officials, often come up with the same dual prescription for the problem: more transparency, and tougher regulations.  But this isn't satisfying to me, either.  For one thing, it doesn't seem to work that well in practice.  Regulators can be bought off.  Transparency is not an end in itself.  There are mountains of data about economic and government activities available, but who makes use of the information besides the paid watchdogs, the think-tank "philosophers" and hack economists, of the corrupt system?  When was the last time you looked at the latest numbers from FRED to see if there really is any kind of recovery going on?  (Note: this doesn't refer to a popular Youtuber; and, if you haven't looked lately and you want to believe in recovery, you probably shouldn't look.)

The more interesting conclusion is that the familiar prescriptions to the problem of corruption are really part of the problem.  And the way in which both the commonly suggested solutions and the original problem are framed, are even thought of to begin with, prevent real solutions and alternatives from emerging.   Let's consider transparency.

What we're really talking about when we discuss the need for more transparency is the old matter of truth-telling.  What good is it to anyone, after all, to provide false data on which to base one's conclusions?  Transparency ultimately rests upon--one could say, in a slightly different vein, that the weak spot of transparency is--the assumption that once more is known about a situation, a more suitable, more effective solution will present itself.  By "more" in this case we almost always mean to imply that what is needed is better, more accurate, sharper information than what is available at present.  

If we want to prevent the corruption of the SEC by big investment banks and major hedge funds, then we'll need to know who is investing in what, and in a timely, full-disclosure manner.  We'll also need to know more about what it is that SEC investigators presently do (not that much), and don't do (almost everything) to prevent fraud, insider trading, improper account keeping, etc.  But this idea of transparency leaves the ultimate uses to which this information will be put off to one side.  That's why there is, in fact, a great deal of support for more transparency in the financial world.  Just so long as the information never gets used to enforce the rules, or, if that fails, just so long as those doing the enforcing understand finance in the same way that those breaking the rules do.  When Tyco, one of the biggest Pentagon contractors, was caught keeping untold millions in debt off the books by buying up smaller firms and creating virtual companies to back up their accounts, their defense was simple: everybody does it at that level, with a little help from high-priced accounting firms.  And this was true, as far as it goes.

So much for transparency.  What corporate leaders and their political allies realize about it is that if it is done just right, it will appear to obviate the need for any enforcement.  Yes, Tyco was fined.  Yes, some of their execs were punished.  But the final result wasn't to stop the same practices from continuing elsewhere (that's a fiction), but rather to require certain information to be made available to investors.  You see, greater transparency.  Problem "solved."  What those in power know is that it's better for them to do too little than it is to do nothing at all.  In fact, some industries get there ahead of the progressives and anticapitalists and lead the charge for greater transparency.  That way they can structure the way in which the new information is understood to be related to industry practices.  Nothing changes, although more information about what is going on in the industry is revealed.  In this sense, once again, power is what happens right out in the open.  No conspiracy, no secrets, are necessary.     

But the problems with the concept of corruption, and the adjacent concepts of transparency and regulation, go even further.  And to investigate them we have to turn to philosophy, to the philosophical history of truth-telling.

The Last Foucault

Near the end of his life, Michel Foucault turned away from his investigations into the social histories of certain institutions and ideas instrumental in maintaining power--the prison, madness, sexuality--and focused his energies on parrhesia, or the practice of truth-telling.  Specifically he became interested in the ways in which the subject constitutes itself in the act of telling the truth, and is seen by others to be doing so.  In a series of lectures he gave at the College de France in 1983 and 1984, Foucault traced back a lineage of what he called ways of "caring for the self" which provide a broader context for the traditional injunction at the heart of practices of truth-telling, to "know thyself."  These ways of caring for the self also predate Christianity and its main technique for structuring truth-telling, the confession.

Foucault points out that truth-telling, long before the Christian institution of it as a relation between the confessor and the congregant, implied the presence of a guide.  This could take the form of a spiritual leader, but it could also be organized around everyday behaviors: a guide for a young man or woman (citizen), for example, who "is not yet full master of him/herself."  In modern society, formal institutions provide this kind of "finishing"--professional, rubric-driven institutions such as universities and the corporation.  But for the vast mass of people, who will never engage in any deep contact with these institutions, it is the media that provides the standardization and guidance for behavior: political, economic, even personal.  What are Dr. Phil and Judge Judy but stand-ins for the psychoanalyst and law professor?  Of course, psychology and jurisprudence for the masses must suffer some reduction, and simplification, even some ideological transformation, if they're to find a wide enough audience to justify their existence in the marketplace.  I've always found the idea that these two characters (and they are characters) are too harsh, to be a little confusing.   Aren't the real justice system, and the legally sanctioned psychology practiced on the "guilty," far more brutal than the mere spectacle of people acting out certain carefully selected aspects of these things?  If anything, the TV versions give bad institutions a softer, gentler, and far more moral-seeming center than they have in reality.

The Althusserians call all these complexes of influence the "ideological apparatuses," the means by which ideologies of social maintenance and control are implanted in the subject from the moment of its arising.  For Foucault, it is these apparatuses, plus a whole series of subterranean and mediating injunctions, that dictate and enforce the episteme, the rules by which order is brought into being, and that generate subjectivity and the subject.  This is a matter of the relationship being the reality--the self is the relationship we have to it.  So when we seek to tell the truth about ourselves, we reflect not upon a singular object wrapped in layers of mystery, but upon a relation that is always perfectly open to discovery.  The self is exterior, and it always has been.

To make the ideological apparatuses and their operation appear on the horizon of the discourse about the self--all these discourses of caring for the self--we need, in Althusser's terms, a theoretical transformation "which establishes a science by detaching it from the ideology of its past and by revealing this past as ideological."  In other words, what we need is a new science of the self, one that is not predicated on the model of guidance, one which rejects pedagogy, psychology, professionalism (law, economics, politics), and the imploring of the media.  And one that no longer sees in the self a readily indentifiable object, a solitary being projected through time, along with all the assumptions about its role as bearer of the truth that this implies.  This new science must help us to turn back some of the crisis trends of late capitalism, and to transform the economic system from a self-serving instrument of consumer demand, into something useful to the vast mass of people.

The worst thing we could do is to give in to the utopian theories that promulgate a global "civil society," which is nothing more than the late-capitalist form of the care of the self, redefined as the application of the "guidance" of the police state over a global citizenry.  Civil society simply globalizes total capitalistic exploitation.  The other trap, located just the other side of a narrow ridge of struggle from the late-capitalist precipice, is a sudden fall back into nationalism and nativism.  Here are where all the false progressivisms of our time are located.  If we can negotiate a way past these two dangers, we might yet end up with a workable system for social needs.

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I want to end this series by reflecting on something that is of great concern to most people today, and that occupies more and more of our time with worry as we grow older: money.

One of the main mental obstacles that prevents people from being able to imagine an alternative economic system to capitalism is what to do about money.  Unlike some localists, and even some communists, I don't think that money would, or should, "go away" under a system dedicated to social needs.  In fact, I don't even think that the basic attitude toward money would have to change all that much, although there would be less worship of it for its own sake, and of course, far less emphasis would be placed on accumulating large sums for one's own use.

But as for what money is, and how it is employed as a means of exchange, I don't think that these things would have to evolve very far beyond where they are today.

Oddly enough, of all the economists and theorists I've read on the subject of money, the thinker that strikes me as most insightful is, once again, Michel Foucault.  Readers of Foucault might not be familiar with his "take" on money, since it comprises only part of a chapter in The Order of Things.  In this book Foucault is concerned with trying to find the different ways in which the empirical is organized in different epochs.  As he puts it:

"...in every culture, between the use of what one might call the ordering codes and reflections upon order itself, there is the pure experience of order and of its modes of being."

In seeking out this intermediary grounding of order, he uses money as an example.  He points out that money took on value according to a standard of equivalences that was an economic rendering of the common "being of order" in the 16th century, that of constituting meaning (signs) "by resemblances which, in turn, necessitated further signs in order to be recognized."  Thus money begins its detachment from actual weights of coinage as a necessity of a series of devaluations in Elizabethan England, and a little later in France, and the adjustments required to restore value to certain currencies.  At the same time, money is reassigned to a secondary order of signs: "values" stamped upon the coins as a "guarantee."  Foucault's point is not that such devaluations (and other fluctuations) and adjustments by decree had not happened before.  They had, many times, going back to ancient society.  Rather it was owing to the increased power of institutions to fix "values" that money acquired its present state.

But this evolution of money required other changes as well.  The idea of "wealth" prevalent before political economy, an idea which rested upon the assumption of money's intrinsic value, had to be abandoned in order to reconstitute it as an object of reflection and critique.  This also meant that a whole series of related signs had to be repositioned--value, rate of exchange, even wages--and placed under a "system of identities and differences," a system that coincided with the dimensions and demands of mercantilism.  Wealth was freed under mercantilism to include all those objects of desire that might be obtained with enough money (accumulation), so that money became a utility.  The amassing of wealth took on the primary meaning of amassing a number of potentialities--whether for luxury, or reinvestment, or the "pure" enjoyment of speculation.  The new attitude could be summed up by one economic writer, Scipion de Grammont, in 1620:

"Money does not draw its value from the material of which it is composed, but rather from its form, which is the image or mark of the Prince."

Again, the point is not whether this was already the case, or had been the case, with money, in this locale or that, well before this time...but rather that this new plateau of meaning, this tranformation of the episteme on which economics was based, represented a concretizing of emerging objective material relations.  To make mercantilist wealth and power more real, money had to become less so.  Still this is not a simple relation.  As Foucault says:

"Just as in the order of representations the signs that replace and analyse them must also be representations themselves, so money cannot signify wealth without itself being wealth. But it becomes wealth because it is a sign; whereas a representation must first be represented in order subsequently to become a sign."

One can think of exceptions (as in the surrealist repetition of signs that never take on any representative function), but they all seem "strange" to everyday life, and money certainly does not.  Instead Foucault's meaning here is that money must be consumed, must be brought into exchange--that is, replace commodities and bring them into relation with each other by purchasing raw materials, remunerating work (production), or some form of speculation (even if it's only as collateral)--for money to "fulfill its representative function."  Otherwise, strictly speaking, it does not exist.  It is a potentiality without any particular potentia, or power-in-the-world.  Less than that.  It rests only in a state of absolute anomie, a condition without even the hint of norms or rules.  This explains the restlessness of money, the demand it imposes upon its bearer to keep itself moving, to keep flowing from place to place, site to site, within the system from which it draws its essence.

Marx expresses approximately the same thing when he addresses the pressures put upon the capitalist to keep accumulating, and expanding, or die, go bust, go out of business, a phrase meaning literally to no longer belong to the regular relations of exchange, at least as an empowered actor that is not dependent upon some other to pay them a wage.  Vertical relationships in complex economies, however, make this way of life--expressed in contemporary theories as the position of the "free agent" or "consumer-producer"--next to impossible.  One is in fact quite dependent on the successful completion of the production process, including the paying of wages and extracting of surplus labor, which goes on in the layers above one's own activity.  Otherwise the manufactured materials on which most businesses rely would not be available, or only at a much greater expense.  What we have here instead of the consumer economies imagined by contemporary theory--and even to some extent by Foucault--is the private utilitization of mass production, including the production of all those goods necessary for the reality-grounding circulation of wealth. 

Predictably, progressives and anticapitalists often become fixated on breaking up monopolies and slowing down speculation, which is seen as taking more and more wealth away from productive activities and reducing wage-earning opportunities overall.  Anti-trust efforts are just fine.  They certainly can't hurt.  But breaking up conglomerates won't address the logic of the system that will cause them to re-form almost immediately, and possibly on some newer, deadlier ground.  Eugenics perhaps?  Or the technologies of state-capitalist terrorism described in Agamben's Homo Sacer?  Driving power to that point should not be our goal--for, after all, isn't that what power wants?

What we need to do instead is to turn back the trend of utilitization of production for private interests, and to transform the system into something useful for the vast mass of people.  This might entail building even bigger organizations, albeit far more radically democratic ones than either the corporation or government are presently able to be.  And obviously this project will require enormous pressure from below in society, here and in other parts of the globe, to come about.  There is no reason why money, as well as other ways of expressing value for exchange, can't be part of that new system.  For that matter, many of the present institutions of capital--transformed for social need--could continue to play some role.  But the basic rules that form the assumptive layer of economics will have to change, and we will have to move beyond neoliberal repetitions.

Finally, on the possibility of any of this actually happening, we'll let Slavoj Zizek, ever the cynic, have the surprising, funny, and very dirty last say...