The following is a draft of the introductory chapter for a book I am writing that proposes a “General Theory of Attrition,” which can be used to explain specific elements of ordinary life under the conditions of late-stage neoliberalism within the social sciences.
“To define this general theory, I would like to first lay out the foundational elements and talk a little about the overarching parts of the theory. For example, how do I define the word “attrition” and why is a general (rather than a specific) theory necessary? However, I will start with the total definition of The General Theory of Attrition and work backwards in order to offer transparency to the reader.
The General Theory of Attrition: An addendum to the theory of late-stage capitalism that assert that neoliberal economic rationalities have pervaded and subsumed ever-increasing spheres of human thought, emotions, and relations to the world in such a way as to displace the historical human attributions of values, social norms, and the legal, moral, and structural edifices upon which the Western liberal post-enlightenment tradition was conceptually based.
Before diving into the specifics of this definition, I would like to next define the word “attrition” and discuss why I have chosen this word to explain the effects of what I have just defined. The dictionary offers the following six definitions:
- The process of gradually wearing down or weakening something, such as a material or a person’s resolve.
- The reduction in the number of employees or participants in an organization or activity, typically through natural wastage or voluntary resignation.
- The act of gradually reducing the strength or effectiveness of an enemy force through sustained attack or pressure.
- The wearing away of rock or soil by the action of water, wind, or ice.
- The process of gradually losing customers or supporters, often due to dissatisfaction or lack of interest.
- The gradual decline or reduction in size, importance, or quality of something over time.
Thematically the word “attrition” refers to a gradual process whereby a once obdurate element in the world is worn down over time by forms of slow erosion, depletion, exhaustion, or loss of whatever fundamental quality made such an element obdurate in the first place. Thus, in broad strokes, attrition requires three things – the obdurate element and whatever constitutes this element as a solidity in the world, the second is the mechanism by which this solidity is worn down, and the third element, most importantly, is the dimension of time. Attrition is also unlike upheaval, or revolution, or cataclysm in that it occurs over a length of time that is generally considered to be beyond the temporal bandwidth of human attention.
In psychometrics, for example, attrition refers to the wearing down of interest by the subjects who may be subjected to multiple waves of the same psychological test. There is a reason why a given sample of study respondents fades over time. Whatever initial motivation the study participant had in the beginning agreeing to participate tends to wane over weeks, months, years. Thus one might start with several thousand study participants and end with only a fraction of them responding to the study after a period of time. It is important to note that when I speak of time here, I am speaking of the length of time by which humans remain interested and aware of something.
Attrition occurs gradually along a timeline that is greater than this capacity for human focus and awareness. In fact, it is the inability for human consciousness to effectively experience the larger timescale which allows attrition to occur precisely because if we were aware of some of the negative alterations to human social life which I will discuss, then they would have been addressed, corrected, and the basic wearing down of these elements would have likely been corrected.
What is this process of wearing down?
What I mean is, what are the mechanics of erosion? In geologic study, for example, centuries of wind, rain, and freezing gradually erode mountains, beaches, and land. What is it that erodes elements of liberal democratic society over time? This is fundamentally what this book is about- discussing precisely how and through what means neoliberalism has eroded human relations and social systems through a slow and relatively monotonous process that is altogether the opposite of revolutionary or dramatic collapse and upheaval.
Finally what is the obdurate object and the element of its solidity of this work? I have already mentioned human relations and systems in the post-enlightenment as my focus, which I will speak about more in the next chapter. However, to offer a brief summary, I am speaking about the taken-for-granted assumptions, beliefs, senses, laws, and exchanges of value and meaning which underpin what we believe to be our normal everyday life. For example, the belief that democratic forms of government are both ideal, and that in places like the United States, that democracy is protected, enshrined, and fundamentally guaranteed as a system of governance. Or consider certain institution we deem to be universal, such as the guarantee of rights, marriage and family, or public education. Or consider how, more broadly, virtually all humans accept the notion of legal tender and currency as a legitimate and “real” object in the world.
For the latter, we see the nature, quality, and longevity of most human lives today are determined by the capacity to generate and accumulate currency and transform said currency into the accumulation of social and actual capital. We readily accept this, and even embrace it as a fundamental “truth” about “the way things are.” There are thousands of these taken for granted abstractions which rule the everyday lives of human beings, from the edifice of the nuclear family to the acceptance of class hierarchy, and the promotion of work as a source of identity and self-worth. The list of taken-for-granted “realities” by which humans abide and live are virtually endless, and yet, the “realities of life” which humans accept today are a product of historical forces which culminate into new forms of truth in an ever evolving and shifting interlocking webs of human relations, discourses, and associations.
Today what humans value is different than what they may have valued in the past, while at the same time, some core elements of human relations remain ever-present and inescapable due to our biological natures. But it is the “why” of human relations which interest me.
For example, the necessary and constant human relationship to food drove our ancestors to hunt, and the hunt as a productive activity became the central feature of these cultures, determining their nomadic nature, their geographic movement, and their use of nature is a specific way to meet their needs. When we add agriculture and animal husbandry to the mix, we see the human necessity and relationship to food remains stable, but the means by which the relationship is actively engaged is altered in such a way as to radically shift how humans lived, moved, and supported one another. The “work” of feeding oneself and one’s group has continued to change and become multilayered through economic and productive systems of farming, production, and distribution, while the necessity to work in order to eat has largely remained stable – whether one wears a tie at the office or grows their own vegetables in their garden.
What do I mean by Human Relations?
When I speak about human relations to the world, this is what I mean – the interactivity between human beings to one another and the world around them in ways that then define human social and cultural reality and activities. I’ll offer one final example, consider that a group of humans exists in some geographic location that is officially bounded by certain statutes, spatial boundaries, and governmental forces which we might call a nation-state.
In the abstract, the reality here involves humans, and their geographic location only. Those are the only parts of a nation that tangibly exist initially in material terms. Borders, for example, are imaginary. They are as imaginary as the government ruling over this geographic area in that they exist only because humans create them out of thin air, for a variety of reasons, but that they are not “natural” in a sense that they cannot exist without human beings agreeing they exist. Now consider one born into this particular geographic space. As a subject of geography and government of the nation-state, individuals are given an identity as a member of this particular nation, in this particular region of the world, and the society, government, and people of that area see themselves as specific subjects of that region and nation, with a unique culture, ways of life, unique languages, heritages, traditions, as well as sociopolitical, economic, and legal systems of rights and laws to which they adhere, not as a human, but as a subject of that nation and culture.
In turn these elements define the relationship between people and place which then defines the very reality in which the humans of that area live, all the while being contained within imaginary borders and governed by imaginary forces of government which exist precisely because the subject upholds them and adheres to them in the aggregate. Thus the “reality” in which we all live is “real” only insofar as the viability of the relational tissue out of which it is constructed can remain solid or obdurate.
Between the solid and ethereal duality of human reality, certain systems interact, such as systems of meaning, or systems of exchange, which, for the purposes of this book, are the two central systems I will utilize for my analysis. So we have the process of attrition, as a process and not as a set event or cataclysm, and we have attrition occurring over a range of time that is just slightly longer and less noticeable that the general span of our day to day attention, but which ultimately shape and define both the solid and ethereal conditions of our day to day reality by altering the cultural, affective, and meaningful systems which define that day to day life.
I define this theory as an addendum to late-stage capitalism, as defined by the common use of the term today, which comes from various political-economists and theorists, but which originates with Warner Sombart in 1918, who defined late-stage capitalism as a monopolistic concentration of capital into a handful of the few. Sombart felt that this stage of capitalism would be a stage of deep social upheaval and unrest due to the deprivations caused by capital concentration.
I offer an addendum to this definition which I term “late-stage neoliberalism,” which I define as the final stages of the neoliberal ordering of capital evolution. And of course, neoliberalism is defined by what it does, in accordance with Wendy Brown and others, who note that neoliberalism arose as a response to the question posed in the 20th century as to what specific role the government should play in the economy. While neoliberalism is often touted as a reduction in government regulation, the privatizing of the public good, dismantling the welfare state, and so on;[ii] this is not what neoliberalism actually does in practice. In reality, neoliberalism subsumes the power of the government to shift the balance of who benefits from the economy, and the government becomes the main tool by which the economy is facilitated, and market conditions are protected.[iii] This facilitation occurs when the government becomes the chief organizing or policing force to create and enforce the fundamental conditions of radical individual competition – inequity and redistribution of capital.[iv]
Thus, a neoliberal government shifts from a government “by and for” the citizen, and instead becomes a government whose main goal is creating the conditions that necessitate competition between all citizens, while regulating the outcomes of the market to benefit those who influence government the most – largely the donor or oligarchic class, along with a handful of the large shareholder class who own large minority or majority stakes in various corporations. Rest assured, a more complex definition of neoliberal activities will follow in future chapters, but in regards to a general theory of attrition, this should suffice, for what I am proposing is that the current state of affairs in the late-stage of neoliberalism, whereby the citizen as a political actor, who maintains certain rights and privileges, are all but dissolved into the governmental discourse of the neoliberal economy, and the democratic institutions which govern the nation state are no longer a “rights based” society, but instead have become subservient to the needs of the neoliberal market in virtually all affairs.[v]
The main effect of course is that the needs, rights, wishes, and aspirations of the citizen have become secondary to the capacity of a small group of capitalists to make astronomical profits.
In summary, this work will examine the mechanisms of neoliberalism in the present late-stage manifestation that has come to define the realities of the day to day relational sphere between humans, institutions, objects, ideas, and affects by positing a general theory of attrition which has worn down the qualitative nature of these relations as it has transformed such relations into economic rubrics in both nature and content.
In general this is a movement from the human-themed qualities of relationships to the world, to an economized ordering of value that has displaced the human qualitative elements with quantitative calculations of cost-benefit in any and all things.
Further, this theory posits that the temporaneous element of change over time has been gradual enough to escape the general perception of this change for the average individual. The nature of their relations to the world have become economized slowly, and almost imperceptibly through the shift of the borderline between financialized, and non-financialized areas of life which have reappropriated our collective capacity to understand the world in non-economic terms.[vi]
The result is that in the daily life of the average person, whether they are choosing a mate, deciding to have children, engaging in art, or making friends, there is a imperious intrusion of economic valuation that begs questions of value, time, and energy spent in non-market activity and the value of such things if they are not profitable to one’s social capital. The qualitative elements of love, beauty, spontaneity, laughter, and companionship come to be seen as “things which cost” some amount of human time, emotion, and energy, which is then weighed against their productive activities in the financialized world.
The result of attrition is that human qualities of commitment, finding joy, or experiencing and maintaining love, all come to be seen as possible risks which offer little social capital return if they are not “the right kind” of relationships. Ultimately this subsumption de-values the human qualities of relations to the world, while increasing the sensitivity to quantitatively understood gains and losses to time, energy, activities, or emotions. In short, human relations, through this general theory of attrition, are reduced down to a mathematical column of plusses and minuses.
Finally, it is not just our relationships between ourselves and other humans – this attrition promotes a reduction of all relations and intrudes on our relationship to institutions, government, ideas, objects and even decides which knowledge we deem are valuable and which are not. In short, this reduction has redefined how we see and interact which the world by cheapening our relational ties to an economized “reality” through which we are bound to the world around us.”
[i] Various
[ii] See: A Brief History of Neoliberalism, Harvey, D. (2008) p. 5-38.
[iii] Brown, W., In the Ruins of Neoliberalism, (2019). New York.
[iv] Davies, W., 2014. “Neoliberalism; a Bibliographic Review.” Theory, Culture, and Society 43-54.
[v] Brown, W (2015) Undoing the Demos; Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution. Cambridge
[vi] Ibid
Social Science & Our Critical Times 