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

Product Information

If maximizing utility leads to the greatest happiness of the greatest number of people, as utilitarianism has always proposed, then why is it that as many of us currently maximize our utility—by working endlessly, undertaking further education and training, relentlessly marketing and selling ourselves—we are met with the steady worsening of collective social and economic conditions? In Futilitarianism, social and political theorist Neil Vallelly eloquently tells the story of how neoliberalism transformed the relationship between utility maximization and the common good. 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.” Futility masked as utility is the essence of neoliberalism’s transformation of everyday life. At every turn, we are encouraged as individuals to take on greater personal responsibility, to invest in ourselves wisely and to wring every last drip of utility from any opportunity. At the same time, the social and economic structures that can facilitate such individual acts of utility maximization are repeatedly dismantled and denigrated. As a result, the futilitarian condition has become the dominant human condition in the early 21st century, where individual pursuits of utility maximization are used as examples to convince us all that we do not need strong social infrastructure or better economic safeguards. 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. 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 Futility

But when the proto-neoliberal Ludwig von Mises wrote to Ayn Rand, who herself dismissed the majority of the human race as mediocre at best and “second handers” at worst, he made no bones about it. Most people were “inferior” and owed any and all improvements in their lot to the “effort of men who are better than you.”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. For centuries, economists and philosophers have theorized the value of utility: how it shapes the division of labor, influences consumer choice, and contributes to conceptions of the good life or common good. Utilitarian philosophers, from Jeremy Bentham to John Stuart Mill, told us that maximizing utility — the usefulness of an object and its capacity to cause pleasure or reduce pain — was the magical ingredient to happiness. Economists, from classical to neoclassical to neoliberal, have conceived of individuals and consumers as rational “utility-maximizers,” and Karl Marx reminded us that “nothing can be a value without first being an object of utility.” But as Vallelly points out, it was not to last.“The neoliberals won the long game,” he writes. “The economic stagnation and political crises of 1970s crippled Keynesian logic. In its place, [Friedrich] Hayek and the neoliberal cabal of the Chicago School of Economics chewed the ear of sympathetic politicians in the US, UK, and further afield.” Neoliberal Futilitarianism 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

Ben Eggleston and Dale E. Miller (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Utilitarianism (Cambridge University Press, 2014) 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. This is an excerpt of Neil Vallely’s “ Futilitarianism: Neoliberalism and the Production of Uselessness.” Out now from Goldsmiths Press. What was left of utilitarianism was a belief that “individual choice and flexibility” were integral features of the market economy. Moreover, linked to this reconsideration of utility was a reconceptualization of freedom as nothing more than these kinds of consumer choices and flexible capitalist conditions. Neoliberals felt that by encasing the market from democratic pressures and disciplining the population by gutting agency-enhancing social programs, the narrow freedoms remaining to individuals — to compete and consume in the market — would lead them to become immeasurably more productive, often by necessity in a sink or swim world.

More episodes

Yet futility has rarely featured in any comprehensive way in the study of capitalism. Perhaps this is because futility appears to be a side-effect of capitalist production and its social relations, something that is not intrinsic to the functionality of capitalism. I argue, on the contrary, that the concept of futility deserves more attention in critical examinations of capitalism, especially because futility is central to the development, implementation and longevity of neoliberal capitalism in the early 21st century. MIT Press Direct is a distinctive collection of influential MIT Press books curated for scholars and libraries worldwide. 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.

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.

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. An extremely lucid, smart analysis of our dilemma. That life in neoliberalism is often futile and nihilistic has been obvious for a long time. That neoliberal politics is covertly pessimistic as to human survival has also been clear. What Vallelly achieves here is a remarkable new theoretical insight into why that is, and why utilitarianism under neoliberal capitalism must mutate into futilitarianism. A thoroughly welcome, timely and profound intervention. Vallelly locates the roots of neoliberalism in the moral and political theory of Utilitarianism, which has long antecedents, but was generally given systematic form by the English polymath Jeremy Bentham in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Neoliberal capitalism feeds on our futility, and at the same time, as a normative governing reason — in the Foucauldian sense of “the conduct of conduct” — neoliberalism pushes us to behave as if our individual acts of utility maximization will secure our well-being, and even at times affect substantive social change. By always translating the social through the lens of the individual, neoliberalism reduces questions of social justice and transformation to little more than forms of marketization and consumer choice. Neoliberal reason manifests itself in a series of futile social and political endeavors, from self-marketing to ethical consumerism, which often see themselves as radical alternatives to the status quo but in practice only reinforce it. Futilitarianism is not Nihilism Peter Singer, The Expanding Circle: Ethics, Evolution, and Moral Progress (Princeton University Press, 2011) 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.” 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. 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.

Cite this Entry

The proceeds from your monthly pledge will go directly towards sustaining ROAR as an independent publication and building our collective power as a movement.