“My power is made perfect in weakness”: On institutional breakdown

One point from Hardt and Negri’s Empire has always stood out to me: namely, that institutions typically become more powerful as they break down. The most familiar example is the university, which has in many ways squandered its cultural credibility and has even actively victimized some of its key constituencies (student loans, adjunctification, pervasive rape on campus). Yet the demands we make on the university are ever-increasing. It’s as though the very breakdown of the university highlights the fact that we need “something like” the credentialing role it performs to make modern society manageable — and so we settle for “something like” the university (i.e., the actual-existing university).

One can see the same dynamic at work with contemporary capitalism. Clearly the economy is not working, yet the very injustice and discontent it breeds highlights the benefits of having an apparently impersonal mechanism for distributing economic rewards, lest we degenerate into a post-apocalyptic hellscape of survivalist anarchy. During the government shutdown, I started a series of tweets jokingly predicting absolute social breakdown if the U.S. defaulted, and many of my readers seemed to be deeply disturbed by them — it felt a little too realistic that the social bond in a highly individualistic nation with a lot of guns lying around may turn out to be more fragile than we’d ever imagine. The same holds for the U.S. Constitution. It is widely acknowledged to be highly irrational in its design, and yet the idea of “rebooting” seems unthinkable to most Americans.

If institutions make their demands more strongly felt precisely when they’re failing to deliver on their promises, it seems that the reverse would also hold: we are more able to reform our institutions when their hold feels less urgent. I imagine that much of the strong regulation of capitalism during the Cold War era came from the existence of a living, breathing alternative to the free market — even if the Soviet model did not seem desirable compared to the US model, everyone could tell that the USSR was not a post-apocalyptic hellscape. During the financial crisis, by contrast, it was commonplace to hear people say that if a key financial apparatus broke down, we simply “wouldn’t have an economy anymore.”

Similarly, as I was saying yesterday, in a world where every area of life is increasingly saturated with cutthroat competition, there doesn’t seem to be any alternative to the traditional family as a space of meaningful relationships — and hence people persist in propping up the model and even want to expand it to previously excluded populations, even though it winds up being a costly and painful situation for increasing numbers of people.

Since I can’t figure out how to wrap this post up: “hence the need for full communism is all the more urgent.”