Magical Voluntarism.

You can achieve anything if you try hard enough. Anything. 

- Capitalist platitude. 

I just came across a wonderful term on Jodi Dean's blog to describe the place of the individual from the perspective of capitalist realism. Magical voluntarism. Anything can be achieved by the Herculean effort of the individual will. Anything at all. This in contrast to the fatalist doctrine of a politics which will never change. Here is an excerpt of that post, which is in fact taken from another blogger. Recycle Recycle: 

What characterises capitalist realism is fatalism at the level of politics (where nothing much can ever change, except to move further in the direction of neoliberalisation) and magical voluntarism at the level of the individual: you can achieve anything, if you only you do more training courses, listen to Mary Portas or Kirsty Alsop, try harder. Magical voluntarism, naturally, also drives the tabloid culture of individual blame (resign, resign!) in which the tabloids themselves are now caught up, although, as Zone Styx noted, News International clearly expects far more from public service managers like Sharon Shoemith than it does from its own executives.) Individualise, individualise, insists capitalist ideology. Note the way in which the media sought to reduce the Lulsec story to Ryan Cleary, or the way in which the clueless Peter Preston finds the idea of a collective entity such as DSG unfathomable. - k-punk cited on

http://jdeanicite.typepad.com/i_cite/2011/07/k-punk-reality-management.html

Magical voluntarism. I think this really captures the spirit of our times, if it can be called a spirit. The global paralysis of politics and collective action coupled with an absurd pressure on the individual to perform, to succeed. Competition drags on, pressure builds and the world becomes more and more incoherent as humanity is shuffled into atomized parcels and pitted against itself.

One last note, as I read this I was reminded of a scene in China Mieville's Perdido Street Station where Yagharek the geruda explains the nature of a crime he has committed to the book's protagonist Isaac. Yagharek comes from a society which emphasizes individual choice as the highest good. The society is, therefore, a communist one because this allows for the greatest possibility of individual choice. Yagharek, whose crime is described as choice-theft has been cast out from the group as an abstract individual, as opposed to a concrete individual.
To be abstract is to ignore context, to ignore the reality of relationship as formative of individuality. Inseperable from it. Human reality, at base, is formed not by an aggregate of self-contained I's but is always embedded in an I-you relationship. To treat the individual as an abstract entity is, therefore, a violence upon reality a de-realization. There is no individual as such, only individuals who are in constant relationship with others. Who become individuals only in and through their particular relationships and responsibilities. I bring this up only to point out that one of the important failings of capitalism, and particulary of the neoliberal agenda, is not an overemphasis on individuality. It is actually a failure to coherently articulate a notion of the individual at all. 

The Hiddenness of Time

The time golem stood and was, ignored the linearity around it, only was.

It was a violence, a terrible intrusion in the succession of moments, a clot 

in diachrony, and with the dumb arrogance of its existence it 

paid the outrage of ontology no mind. 

- China Mieville Iron Council 

By some strange happenstance or mystic wisdom I had the pleasure of reading China Mieville's Iron Council, while I was enrolled in a course on Dietrich Bonhoeffer. More specifically I read Iron Council as I was working through Bonhoeffer's The Cost of Discipleship. The effect was electric and unsettling, particularly in the way both these authors engaged with themes of time,existence, and hiddenness. 

Everpresent in Bonhoeffer's theological project is the underlying theme of an "epistemology yielded on the basis of revelation," an idea he discusses explicitly in his post-doctoral work Act and Being. The world is known, in other words, not through empirical observation nor through a process of ratiocination, rather it is known only as it is revealed. In The Cost of Discipleship Bonhoeffer addresses this theme around the binary of revelation/hiddenness. The true disciple of Christ knows only what is revealed to her or him through Jesus Christ, there is no unmediated relationship with the world, with others, or even with oneself. The reverse of this, therefore, is that much is left hidden. Revelation has its own rhythm, its own timing, over which the subject of knowledge has no control. It is given, by the spirit, in the moment it is needed. 

This is a mystery, yet not a mystical fusion of the I with the Oneness of Being. Precisely in its momentous character revelation is a matter of existence, and in existence there are always others. Indeed, for Bonhoeffer becoming a person is only possible through the other. He writes, "the individual becomes a person ever and again through the other, in the moment." (Sanctorum Communio). 

In Mieville's story there is a monk who, out of the pantheon of gods in the world of Iron Council, worships the God of the Moment. This God reveals knowledge to the monk at the necessary times. Yet the discipleship of the monk is not without cost, indeed it is at the cost of the monk's very self-knowledge that the revealing comes. Without giving too much away, as the tale progresses the monk, who has joined with a band of rebels and political outcasts in search of their comrades, loses more and more of her (or his) self-knowing as she seeks the revelation needed to make important decisions. 

Bonhoeffer and Mieville inhabit very different worlds. One a theologian, the other a writer of science fiction. Yet the mysteries of existence, and of time are strongly present. Discipleship, for both, is a costly endeavour, and yet in the end proves the very grace of life. 

It is grace, it is violence, it is passion. The Christian sense of time is not one of linear accumulation. Nor yet of circulation within an ontologically fixed field. The event of Christ is singularity, forever affixed existence within which existence can take place. 

This too is the mystery of the church, the presence of Christ on earth, already fulfilled and yet waiting. Hidden yet revealed. Perhaps the Church too, like Mieville's time golem" is a clot in diachrony, who with the dumb arrogance of its existence pays the outrage of ontology no mind. 

Or perhaps it should be so.