The Impossible Possibility, Capitalism, and the Pentecostal Subject
Introduction
In chapter 4 we examined how the pentecostal theory of sacrality pivots around im/possibility, impossible possibility. This chapter examines how the Pentecostals’ relationship with the sacred conditions their subjectivity. Pentecostal Christians believe they have special access to God or the transcendental thing-in-itself and part of the sphere of impossibility, which will allow them through the grace of God to always carve spaces of possibility from within for their own flourishing. It would not take long for a visitor to a pentecostal church to hear these verses sung or declared: “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me” (Phil. 4:13 NIV). Luke 18:27 also says, “What is impossible with man is possible with God.” In my Nigerian pentecostal church on Victoria Island we used to sing: “He makes impossibility possible (twice). Jehovah Nissi (or Jireh), he makes impossibility possibility.”
The pentecostal subject emerges only through the recognition and acceptance of the realm of impossibility, of the part of the sacred seemingly barred to phenomenal reality. Knowing how to navigate or truck and barter in the realm of impossibility is not an objective knowledge as the acknowledgment of its existence requires the subjective position of being a pentecostal subject; “[the subject] is in this sense self-referential, included in its own object of knowledge.”1 When the pentecostal subject gets behind the phenomenal veil to look at the noumenal, what he discovers is not some hidden substance or something that was there waiting to be discovered, but the form that the realm of impossibility takes as an object of knowledge or phenomenal gaze.2 When he gets behind to look, “he is bringing with him the very thing he will find.”3 He sees what is always already there. So the line between possibility and impossibility in the sacred, instead of being a scission that permanently separates the two opposing realms or subject and substance, is actually what unites them. The scission sutures the cut. The solution is in the problem. The pentecostal subject, therefore, does not view the scission as out there, but inside of him and it is something he must discipline himself to overcome. Internal impossibility marks the pentecostal subject. His impossibility does not preexist him. The reversal in perspective that this simple analysis of pentecostal subjectivity provides enables us to better understand the pentecostal quest for wringing possibility out of impossibility.
In order to compel im/possibility to release possibilities to them, Pentecostals engage in techniques of the self on the self. This exercise of forcing the hands of the sacred, so to speak, involves touching two deep, and apparently contradictory, dimensions within the human psyche. The self is ascetically governed even as the body is prepared as a machine of jouissance. Pain and pleasure are worked out together in the mode of self-governance. The body is seen as an end in itself and yet it is directed as only a means to please. Now there is no contradiction in this. The Pentecostal believer who takes this combined task seriously and disciplines her body to obey divine laws, to live in God’s symbolic order, is the same person who follows the law to maximize the pleasures of the body that supposedly good relationships with the divine provide. Is pentecostal service itself not this coincidence of apparent opposites? There is a tender, warm, intense embrace of the Holy Spirit (the divine other) and the objectification of one’s body for the juices of jouissance.
We could call this self-objectification of the body the gaming of the body or the self in religious practices. The freedom to treat the body as only a means, as a “thing,” as complement of religious jouissance transforms Pentecostalism as joyful, playful relations between believers themselves and between God and believers from an I-Thou into relationships between things (It-It or I-It). The play (gaming) of the self is the opposite itself of Pentecostalism as a religion of play because through the gaming of self (treated as a means and not as an end in itself) a person is not free or is not a person in the full meaning of the word because her activity is not play.4 The treatment of a person as a means in religious services indicates that such a religion is no longer promoting human flourishing in its broadest meaning. Such a religion is following the logic of purpose, instrumentality. Bodies are valued for their products or labor, which can be exchanged for divine or human favors. The gaming of self is the opposite of play, because when it begins religion loses its playful character. The effective result or content of this gaming is the subjugation of religion to social suffering, and the truth of social relations of domination and oppression irrupts in it. We will start first investigating how Pentecostalism forms subjectivity by embalming suffering; that is, preserving systems that generate social suffering or give pleasant fragrance to excessive social suffering. Second, we show that Pentecostalism’s attitude to the sacred and the miraculous produces subjects whose mantra in life is “I can do it” amid virulent capitalism that has rendered increasingly most aspects of economic life fragile; subjects who are making a common cause with late capitalism without realizing that their souls have been captured and reformatted by late capitalism for its profit.
Excessive Social Suffering and Pentecostalism
Social suffering is not the only thing that precedes Pentecostalism as religion as play and its embrace of the logic of exchange. As a religion that started with the poor in the late industrial age, excess social suffering operates both as a desire and drive in the global Pentecostal movement. In the beginning it aimed to ameliorate the suffering and racism faced by its members even as they were prepared for heaven or the eschaton, the period when the rich and the powerful would be brought down from their thrones and be sent away (into existential hell) empty. From the beginning there was joy, enjoyment, rejoicing, and expectation of a good future, which contributed to building up the playful character of pentecostal worship. The body was thrown fully into this adventure of jouissance. This is the founding division, duality (concern for excess weight of suffering and passion for play, enjoyment), that brought Pentecostalism (as a social practice) into being. This duality, which, as we shall learn later, is tearing Pentecostalism apart, is the same set of forces or dynamics that brought the movement into being as a universalist mass religion in the first place.
The prosperity gospel, which focuses on narrow egoism and private welfare, now indicates the gap that separates Pentecostalism from its founding goal. Let us not forget that in Lacan’s terms desire represents the gap between the subject and its object—the person lacks the object. By contrast, drive “takes the lack itself as an object, finding satisfaction in circular movement of the missing satisfaction itself.”5 Prosperity gospel preachers, by the milking of their followers, the fleecing of parishioners to buy multimillion-dollar jets, and the cavorting with anti-poor governments and the rich and powerful, appear to enjoy moving the problem of excessive suffering without solving it. The saintly pastors use the suffering of believers to bring about their own narcissistic satisfaction through their purported mediation of anointing, as the seventeenth/eighteenth-century Nicolas Malebranche would bluntly put the matter if he were alive today. The weight of excessive social suffering is a screen on which they project quick divine help to poverty in order to lure their followers to part with their hard-earned incomes. They say to the poor—Okay, now come to the screen (altar) and exchange your money for prayers and anointing that zap poverty away!
The rise of virulent prosperity gospel is one indication that Pentecostalism has been subjugated to the logic of capitalism. The utopia of Pentecostalism is precisely the belief in a world in which religion as play and as logic of exchange are universalized as we tarry with the negative that is the weight of excessive social suffering. A wise man has said that one might divide Pentecostalism (the religion as play par excellence) into play, exchange, and weight. This remark is profound and it is hard to devise a better classification. The third element (weight of social suffering) disturbs the harmonious relationship between the two. It (particular, contextualized social suffering) disturbs the “perfection” or innocence of universalist pentecostal play and directly gives body to the inconsistent whole of the harmonious couple. It embodies the nonrelationship between them, play and exchange. As if social suffering manages to intrude into the room when the two are making or about to make love.
The weight of social suffering is the “part of no part” in the tripartite whole. This “part of no part” is the highest signifier of Pentecostalism (particularly in its wealth-and-health variant). Pentecostalism wants to see a totally repaired world. It is also Pentecostalism’s lowest signifier. Social suffering is like the embarrassing old demented church founders that preachers hide in the attics of the sanctuaries, hoping they will not come down unexpectedly to ruin the Bacchanalian revel or the mad rush of Jerusalem temple-type bureau de change going on in the nave. In its location as the coincidence of opposites, the weight of social suffering, the “part of no part,” stands for the whole. This is not because it occupies a neutral space between the two, but represents their constitutive antagonism. It represents their difference as such. The third element unsettles the other two and opens them for endless reassessment.
It is a disaster of thought or practice when believers think that the body and its products are actually a means in the network of relationships between the profit-seeking priestly hierarchy and the ordinary subjects. The body (gaming of the self) in this sense thwarts Pentecostalism from within and makes it inconsistent. In the very failure of Pentecostalism to bear witness to the body (to human beings) as an end in itself it becomes a form of subjugation of the body to the capital, which treats everything as a pure means. The very deficiencies of Pentecostalism in dealing with the weight of social suffering or the unreliability of the pentecostal subjectivity in bearing witness to the truthfulness of the trauma of social suffering in late capitalism signals its truthfulness (not factual truth): religion takes the form of social suffering, and not necessarily a projection of the inner turmoil of the masses or social suffering disguising itself in a religious way. Pentecostalism, or religion for that matter, is not just about believers coping with social suffering in society or with alienation from society. It is simultaneously the story of society telling itself about itself. In a limited sense, religion is the active relationship of society to itself. There is only self-reference. Pentecostalism came around as revolt against society—so it appears at the beginning. But then the Master (society, the “Big Other,” late capitalism) appropriated it as its form or one of its new material forms. This reminds me of Kafka’s wit: “revolt is not a cage in search of a bird, but a bird in search of a cage.”6 In the next section, we discuss the kind of story many Pentecostals are telling themselves about capitalism amid the story capitalist society is telling itself about itself.
Fragility of Economic Life and Pentecostal Subjectivity
Late capitalism exacerbates fragilities, delivering shocks and disruptions that unsettle ethos and institutions, and imposing excess sufferings, sacrifices, and burdens on the most vulnerable in society as well as the middle class. The well-being of ordinary citizens is tensively poised, an uncertain and fragile balance, always leaning toward disintegration and vulnerable to an excess of suffering. The market and finance capital have rendered life and livelihood of ordinary citizens fragile, while they (market and finance capital) thrive beyond-robustness. The “antifragility” of late capitalism (new economy) comes at the expense of the fragility of ethical citizens.7 In the words of political theorist William Connolly, “Today we inhabit a world in which the fragility of things—from the perspective of the endurance and quality of life available to the human estate in its entanglements with other force fields—becomes apparent.”8
The response of the Pentecostal, like most of her fellow American citizens, to the fragility of social existence is to do more and do more, and then do more, plunging into more activities as a way of protecting the self and its flourishing against the massive forces of fragility unleashed on society by late capitalism, when the appropriate response should be to do less. As capitalism limits the ability of the Pentecostal to control her life, exacerbates its entanglements in her world, or constrains her courses of action, she strives to be less and less defined by her human limitations. She works more, buys more smart technology, and seeks out miracle medicines so that she will be less bound by limitations. She wants to be seen as capable, more capable than ever, the perfect American with an impeccable “I can do it” attitude. A profound similarity exists between a Pentecostal’s permanent self-revolutionizing, the endless struggle to be flexible and amenable to the inexorable demands of the market as articulated by the formal, enunciated “I can do it,” and the inherent self-propelling power of capitalism to exceed its limits. The echoes of “I can do it” from the objectified speaking mouth of the Pentecostal (American citizen) is the form in which this capitalist something that is in her more than herself survives, sustains itself, and haunts her. This something is like a superego agency generating unbearable guilt within her for not doing enough or not being nimbly adaptive amid the changes and demands around her.
So there is always a pseudo-urgency to act now. She does not step back to perceive the violence inherent in this state of affairs. The urgency to act is often coming from a body and its desires that have been invaded and disciplined by capitalism and its forces. “At the immediate level of addressing individuals, capitalism, of course, interpellates them as consumers, as subjects of desire, soliciting in them ever new perverse and excessive desires (for which it offers products to satisfy them); furthermore, it obviously also manipulates the ‘desire to desire,’ celebrating the very desire to desire ever new objects and modes of pleasure.”9
With this interpellation there is always an urgent injunction to act out her freedom of choice, which ultimately amounts to playing by the rules of the system or self-destruction of her “impotentiality.”10 As Slavoj Žižek puts it, “At its most elementary, freedom is not the freedom to do as you like (that is, to follow your inclinations without any externally imposed constraints), but to do what you do not want to do, to thwart the ‘spontaneous’ realization of an impetus.”11
The overall result of this inclination to do more and more is that Pentecostals seem to have severed themselves from the ability not to be or not to do in the market. Pentecostals appear to enjoy the destruction of their impotentiality as “an aesthetic pleasure of the first order.” Giorgio Agamben laments this outcome of modern democracies and market systems.
Separated from his impotentiality, deprived of the experience of what he can not do, today’s man believes himself capable of everything, and so he repeats his jovial “no problem,” and his irresponsible “I can do it,” precisely when he should instead realize that he has been consigned in unheard of measure to forces and processes over which he has lost all control. He has become blind not to his capacities but to his incapacities, not to what he can do but what he cannot, or can not, do. … Nothing makes us more impoverished and less free than this estrangement from impotentiality.12
To accomplish our task in this chapter, I will proceed by discussing the fragility of life or social existence in the new economy, late capitalism. Next, I will elaborate on the problematic nature of the irresponsible “I can do it” of Pentecostal Citizens in the face of the relentless onslaught of the forces of late capitalism.
The Fragility of Social Existence in the New Economy
From a purely religious point of view, one of the great impacts of late capitalism or new economy on society is the rupture between meaning and truth. Religion strives within the horizon of meaning, to ground truths within a framework of global meaning. But late capitalism and its globalization enact truths outside meaning. What matters for capitalism is its self-revolutionizing movement. The global market mechanism detotalizes meaning insofar as capitalism is at home in different cultures and resists efforts to enframe it within a system of shared values or common “cognitive mapping.” There is no global common substance or worldview that we can say characterizes all communities in which capitalist globalization has penetrated. The truth of capitalism is its self-revolutionizing power (which is under the aegis of global market mechanism) and it operates as truth-without-meaning. Capitalism adapts itself well to all local situations, local and foreign values, and civilizations as a “neutral economic-symbolic machine.” Global capitalism directly posits any cultures, values, and representational frames it encounters as its driving force.13 (One of its faces in America is what William Connolly calls the “evangelical-capitalist resonance machine.”14) Among some religious scholars or believers this character of capitalism engenders a sense of fragility of meaning—meaning is now only about diverse and unstable interplay of multiple meanings—that threatens to completely marginalize the dimension of (noncapitalist/market) truth in public discourse or common social life.
Karl Marx writes about the desacralization of all sacred bonds in capitalism in its self-engendering movement. In the analysis of this self-propelling movement it is easy to make a mistake by insisting on the distinction between the abstraction (the movement of capital) and the real people and things behind the movement, the distinction between the “real” and the “reality” (which “truly exists”). One of such distinctions is financial circulation of money and the industrial circulation of money and thinking that what really matters is the industrial circulation of money that concerns the production and distribution of concrete goods. The endless (speculative) financial circulation of money is seen as an epiphenomenon, a foaming ferment of finite hard transactions, and believing that we can grasp the reality of industrial production (real people and their products) in the economy without comprehending the financial circulation of money, the so-called mad dance of Wall Street. This way of approaching the analysis of capitalism is flawed, as it ignores the effectivity of the Real and, more importantly, downplays the fact that the functions of financial circulation of money must be presupposed if we are to make sense of the dynamics or reality of capitalism as they are.15 The dynamics of the monetary system and finance capital determine the structure of real-life processes. When in 2008 the so-called abstract, speculative, financial movement of stocks, bonds, and futures irrupted into crisis, it adversely affected material social processes.16 Herein is the power of finance capital to impose fragility and excess suffering on average citizens and beyond. The violent convulsions of the financial systems from time to time render all other systems in the socioeconomy vulnerable to loss and instability. And in their destabilized state they exacerbate the fragility of citizens’ lifeworld. Ordinary persons experience the irruptions of the financial system as a negativity. Maurizio Lazzarato noted in his book, The Making of the Indebted Man:
The series of financial crises has violently revealed a subjective figure that, while already present, now occupies the entirety of public space: the “indebted man.” The subjective achievements neoliberalism had promised (“everyone a shareholder, everyone an owner, everyone an entrepreneur”) have plunged us into existential condition of the indebted man, at once responsible and guilty for his particular fate.17
Amid all this excess suffering, destabilization, and variability, finance capital is growing stronger and stronger by the day or, at least, its hold on daily economic life is getting firmer and firmer. Finance capital thrives by endlessly reinventing itself, taking advantage of randomness and variability. Finance capital and by extension the market system of late capitalism have created the environment in which citizens pursue their everyday activities of production and reproduction. While finance capital benefits from randomness (that is, it is antifragile), most citizens avoid or endure the randomness created by it, while some are nonrandom in their ethical practice. The market and finance capital have rendered the life and livelihood of ordinary citizens fragile while they thrive beyond-robustness. The antifragility of late capitalism (finance capital) comes at the expense of the fragility of ethical citizens.
Against the antifragility (creative destruction) of capitalism and against the flood of fragilities unleashed against the socioeconomic fabric, the average Western citizen has only lifted the banner or standard of freedom, the freedom to-do. But the problem is that the freedom that is often celebrated in Western-democratic-market societies amounts to a doctrine of freedom as the democratic citizen’s impotence in the face of threats to his or her well-being, the social fabric, and the commons and its good. According to Giorgio Agamben, modern democratic powers and state structures increasingly prefer to act on the im-potentiality (potential to not-do) of its citizens.
The Citizen’s Boast of “I Can Do It”
In the United States—in the competitive ambience of the new economy—there is a strong attachment to abilities, potentials, and this is taken as a positive and powerful character trait. The majority of American Pentecostals are interested in the potential to-do, but there is also the potential to not-do, what is called impotentiality. There comes a time in life when in order to resist an unjust system or to keep our soul we need to focus on this potential to not-do. Modern democracies or late capitalism separate citizens not only from what they can do, but also, and more importantly, from the power to not do, from what they can not do. Everyone is seduced, cajoled, and driven to offer the flexibility that the market demands. Most of them have lost the capacity not to be flexible, forgotten how not to give their participation to the system to reproduce itself. The eager readiness of today’s woman or Pentecostal to repeat “I can do it” indicates that she has actually been commandeered by the fierce free market system, which does not allow her to preserve any freedom that can undo the prevailing order in her incessant acts of selling her labor power, buying stuff with the proceeds, and guarding her ever-slipping economic security. Today, man’s boastful “I can do it,” that is, his potential to-do in late capitalism, has become an echo chamber of the freedom to do what he pleases with his property in the marketplace, and it resonates with the freedom to recklessly use the earth’s resources for profit. This hubris is the pathetic arrogance of a man whose soul has been captured and reformatted by late capitalism for its profit.
We identify this as hubris because the response is pseudo-activity; the response to take actions, to intervene, is mistakenly considered as courage, as the character of a person who is a captain of his soul or fate, as a conquering spirit charging at his world with the powerful technology of the twenty-first century, when it is actually none of these. The effort is all empty theater, the impotence of man trapped under an unbearable weight of frustration and marked by a deep indifference to the Real and reality of late capitalism. While the all-powerful American (Pentecostal) consumer is boldly declaring, “I can do it,” capital is saying back to him in a harsh voice, “I can do whatever I want with you!” Instead of his kind of pseudo-actions, as Žižek advises, it is
better to do nothing than engage in localized acts whose ultimate function is to make the system run more smoothly (acts like providing space for the multitude of new subjectivities, and so on). The threat today is not passivity but pseudo-activity, the urge to “be active,” to “participate,” to mask the Nothingness of what goes on. People intervene all the time, “do something”; academics participate in meaningless “debates,” and so forth, and the truly difficult thing is to step back, to withdraw from all this. Those in power often prefer even a “critical” participation, a dialogue, to silence—just to engage us in a “dialogue,” to make sure our ominous passivity is broken.18
The clashing of the powerful can-do-ness of capitalism and the feeble can-do-ness of the American Pentecostal reminds me of a joke among immigrant African Pentecostals in New York. A Nigerian pastor was preaching about witches in Africa, how they control or manipulate the lives and behaviors of their neighbors or enemies. He explained that a witch can stop a husband and wife from having children, prevent the man in the city from sending a monthly feeding allowance to his parents in the village, and compel the Christian to skip church on Sunday. He went on and on, emphasizing the magical powers of witches and wizards to manipulate others. After he had finished, a woman stood up and said, “Pastor, in America we do not have that kind of witches. The ones we have here are neither men nor women. They are called Bills. Because of piling bills, a Christian will not pay his tithes or send money home. When he is sleeping with his wife and he wants to ejaculate, he remembers the financial cost of raising children in New York City and he does an onanism. He does not come to church on Sundays because he needs to work on weekends to earn more money to cover his shortfall between income and expenses. The fear of bills is the beginning of economic wisdom in New York, and for many residents of the city it surpasses the fear of God. Bills are the witches we face here in New York City. They come into your house and sit on your tables, countertops, and everywhere in broad daylight. They do not need to visit your homes in the night or appear invisible. The mailman or the email system brings the American witches to your home.”
She continues, “If the power of a witch lies in the ability to manipulate another person’s behavior, then nothing surpasses the American witch. American witches are more powerful than the African ones. In the winter, if you do not offer them part of your paycheck, they can cause you to freeze to death in your own home. Bills can force a loving mother to leave her underage children alone at home and go in search of money. In fact, they can make you do whatever they want and they can do whatever they want with you. Pastor please pray for me. I want deliverance from the American witch!”
This is the power, the can-do-ness of the new economy as seen through the eyes of African immigrants in New York City. Any half-serious critical investigation of the economic conditions in Western democratic societies will reveal that a majority of their citizens and residents are in the strong arms of bills (also known as debt). The people are free, but the corporations who hold their debts manipulate their behaviors and actions. As Lazzarato puts it,
You are free insofar as you assume the way of life (consumption, work …) compatible with reimbursement. The techniques used to condition individuals to live with debt begin very early on, even before entry on the job market. The creditor’s power over the debtor very much resembles Foucault’s last definition of power: an action carried out on another action, an action that keeps the person over which power is exercised “free.” The power of debt leaves you free, and it encourages you and pushes you to act in such a way that you are able to honor your debts [even if, like the proud macho man, you can freely shout in the street “I can do it”].19
The “I can do it” that easily rolls off the tongues of citizens of the United States is really not boldness or freedom. This bravado conceals their unbridled obedience to the capitalist system. It covers their acceptance of the parallelogram of market forces as superior power over them that do not require moral legitimization. This obedience often manifests itself as Christo-marketistic religion among certain segments of Christianity, as the abandonment of any concern with social justice. It also shows itself as the Christo-nationalistic religion of neoconservatives who place their country at the center of divine revelation. This form of obedience reveals itself yet in another way: as the liberal religion among the so-called progressives who want to maximize their enjoyment without any cost or sacrifice. Finally, this kind of obedience displays itself as a consumerist religion of the mall, which could not care less about the world situation. In all these cases, obedience is the main, central, dominant virtue demanded by the modern/postmodern authoritarian religions of fundamentalist Christianity, aggressive nationalism, cost-free political liberalism, and sedative, rapacious consumption.
Everybody is claiming “I-can-do-it” amid a thralldom of obedience to some authority, binding power, ideology, pleasure, or private goal. Obedience is ultimately a command that maintains the established order of the economy, sapping the initiative to resist finance capital or late capitalism. The “I can do it” of the modern democratic citizen is always a form of obedience that aligns with the system and does not try to transform it. The “I” in the “I can do it” is not an “I” without the guarantees, support, backing, and approval of the restrictive regnant nomos of its society. The freedom of the “I” in the “I can do it” is a freedom that is demanded by the capitalo-parliamentary institutions, and it is not an expression of the potentiality to-do that is in harmony with the potentiality to not-do.
Capitalism does not quarrel with the “I can” of the individual. The ideology of capitalism is never about drawing a tight circle around the individual about what is included and prohibited. Its focus is on negotiating the exchange between the included and excluded, the nonclosure of the circle of regulations. Capitalist ideology counteracts its order by making space for inevitable transgression of the order. This is how the order and its hold on the individual are strengthened. The point is to manage the inherent transgressions, admitting its failure of closure while using transgressions to strengthen itself.20 This reminds me of the proverbial mother’s instruction to her daughter. The daughter informed the mother that she suspected that her husband was not virile enough to sire and because of this she wanted to divorce him. The mother said to her, “You can discreetly sleep with a virile man of your choice and get pregnant and then ask God for forgiveness, as long as you do not divorce to bring disgrace to our family name.”
So the ideology of capitalism does not say to the citizen, “You can not!” In fact, it enjoins transgression to smoothen its functioning. The permission to do, to enjoy your “I can do it” easily (imperceptibly, eventually) shifts to an obligation to do, to strive to meet the impossible demands of the system. This permission or injunction is coming from an insatiable agency in whose reckoning the person can never do enough and is therefore guilty of betraying her desire, which in the first place is the constellation of ideals, expectation, and the “desire of the other” that she has internalized in the course of disciplining.
Let us try one more time to dig deeper into the nature of the American Pentecostal’s “I can do it.” This “I can do it” functions as an abstract universal notion and the individual citizen is an embodiment of it. Under the hammer of late capitalism, fierce competition for jobs, and incessant efforts to possess economic security, the boastful “I can do it” is an affirmation of the individual as an abstract universal capacity to do (work and think). This individual or capacity is violently torn out of a particular lifeworld and social roots and thus the actualization or experience of the capacity to-do is dependent on contingent social circumstances and free choice. But this is only half the story. In order to complete the story, we need to ask under what historical circumstances does the abstract (commodified) “I can do it” become the obvious wise response to this massive economic predicament? In what economic constellations do the sheer impotence and unbearable frustration of a great many individuals in society become masked as the free-choice engendered “I can do it”? According to Žižek,
This is the point of Marx’s analysis of commodity fetishism: in a society in which commodity exchange predominates, individuals themselves, in their daily lives, relate to themselves, as well as to the objects they encounter, as to contingent embodiments of abstract-universal notions. What I am, my concrete social or cultural background [or economics surroundings], is experienced as contingent, since what ultimately defines me is the abstract universal capacity to think and/or to work. Any object that can satisfy my desire is experienced as contingent, since my desire is conceived as an abstract formal capacity, indifferent towards the multitude of particular objects that might—but never fully do—satisfy it. … The crucial point here is, again, that in certain specific social conditions of commodity exchange and global market economy, “abstraction” becomes a direct feature of actual social life. It impacts on the way concrete individuals behave and relate to their fate and to their social surroundings.21
It is germane to add that it is not that the democratic American Pentecostal citizen is simply more pragmatic and our critique of her boast is merely pedantic. Rather, it is that the tension between the universal frame of commodity exchange (the abstract universal notion) and the impotence of the particular is inscribed into the very nature of the capitalist social formation. This split is even inscribed into the worker or citizen. Her identity is split between its particular and universal aspects. The gap between the particular (her identity, personality, sense of self) and the universal that perturbs it is within her. Indeed, the universal is exploding from within the particular—almost turning the individual into a universal singularity, a subject able to participate in the universal without the mediation of the particular. Put differently, the universality of “I can do it” (the interpellation of universal capital) is presented in Western societies—with its usual accent on individualism and free choice—as a particular position.22
The programmed response to the “hey you” of universal capital or the commands of the “American witch” is the “I can do it.” This “I can do it,” which is actually an inverted instruction, translates into doing more and more battle against the uncertainty and fragility of lives and social bonds in Western democracies—without sparing a thought on how to transform capitalism. It is easier to fancy how to push the self to work harder, pray a little harder, or more comforting to fancy what more actions he can take in protest within the meaningful framework of democracy than to imagine the end of capitalism. People are running faster and faster only to end up in the same place or even backwards. They are working harder and harder to please universal capital or praying harder and harder to shoo away the American witch—all to no avail.
Working harder and harder appears not to be a “practical” solution or advice. The power of bills or capitalism to condition how persons act in real life needs a moment of critical thinking if the citizens are to extricate themselves from its vicious grip. Both the native-born American Pentecostal and the African-migrant Pentecostal need moments to recognize why the American witch is much more powerful than witches elsewhere. On this point we need to raise the importance of one of Žižek’s insights: “There are situations when the only truly ‘practical’ thing to do is to … ‘wait and see’ by means of patient, critical analysis.”23 We need critical analysis to show us what is happening to our freedom, the exercise of which is not delivering us from acute fragilities of social existence and predicaments of our personal lives.
The distorted freedom that the Westerner celebrates has put human freedom on the path to fast losing its impotentiality. Generally, things move from potentiality to actuality, but potentiality does not exist only in act. When potentiality passes into actuality, does it exhaust itself? Giorgio Agamben, following Aristotle, says “no.”24 Potentiality does not exhaust itself in actualization. A part of it will always remain, that is, the impotentiality (to “be able not to-do,” potentiality to not-be, potentiality that “conserves itself and saves itself in actuality”).
There are two types of potentiality: generic and existing. Generic potentiality is the capacity to do something and when a person exercises this potentiality she is altered. A child learns and in the process of realizing her potential she is changed. On the other hand, a scribe has an existing potentiality to write, but also the choice of whether to bring this potentiality into actuality or not. This is the potentiality to not-do or not-be. The scribe is able not to exercise his own potentiality. Agamben sheds light on this form of potentiality, or as earlier indicated, impotentiality.
This is not to say that human beings are the living beings that, existing in the mode of potentiality, are capable just as much of one thing as its opposite, to do just as to not do. This exposes them, more than any other living being, to the risk of error; but, at the same time, it permits human beings to accumulate and freely master their own capacities, to transform them into “faculties.” It is not the measure of what someone can do, but also and primarily the capacity of maintaining oneself in relation to one’s own possibility to not do, that defines the status of one’s action. While fire can only burn, and other living beings are only capable of their own specific potentialities—they are capable of only this or that behavior inscribed into their biological vocation—human beings are the animals capable of their impotentiality.25
Freedom is defined by the ambivalence in human beings’ potentiality, by their existing potentiality; they always have the power to-do and to not-do, they are capable of their own impotentiality.26 Human freedom is not merely the capacity to actualize, to-be or to-do, but also the potential to not-be or to not-do. Freedom, as Agamben sees it, is primarily in the domain of impotentiality, not in actualization. He maintains that it is possible to see how the root of freedom is in the abyss of potentiality. “To be free is not simply to have the power to do this or that thing, nor is it simply to have the power to refuse to do this or that thing. To be free is, in the sense we have seen, to be capable to one’s own impotentiality, to be in relation to one’s privation.”27
What is happening in the so-called new economy or late capitalism is that the impotentiality that human beings have is being treated as already lost. This is not a mere reframing of freedom or action but the destruction of frame of freedom, the disappearance of the potentiality to not-do or not-be as the support of every potentiality to-do. In terms of political praxis of resistance, the lost represents the vanishing “distance toward the direct hegemonic interpellation—‘involve yourself in the market competition, be active and productive!’ ”28
The reason why many people do not recognize that the freedom of choice they exercise, which limits them to an existing frame of possibilities, is destructive of impotentiality is because the new economy or capitalism acts as a “good” master. A good master does not give you prohibitions or infringe on your freedom; rather, he permits you to be yourself, tells you “you can,” you can do the impossible. He wants you to experience yourself as free. But actually this freedom is only a step to playing on the desires of the citizens as consumers. The customer has the free choice and permissiveness to consume all he or she wants. Besides, the master’s injunction to do is a particular way of exercising freedom that subverts the whole understanding of freedom. The freedom to only do, to only act, is the opposite itself of authentic (full ply of) freedom, because through the severance of impotentiality from potentiality citizens lose their freedom. The effective content of this free and boastful act of “I can do it” is subjugation to capital or market. The utopia of the active Western citizen-consumer is precisely the belief in the possibility of complete permissiveness and free choice, a society in which all citizens are completely flexible to the demands of the market and acting like capitalists in the management of their lives, which is now considered as pools of assets. They forget that potentiality and impotentiality are coupled in every action. It is a dream of “universality without its symptom, without the paradoxical exception that serves the role of its internal negation.”29
In summary, the problem of the modern citizen (American Pentecostal) in the new economy is that she can no longer say no to the demands of the market. She is ever so flexible to meet its demands. She is focused on doing, on commission, and not on inaction, omission, the potentiality to not-do. At this point it might serve us well to recast some of our arguments in the theological language of German feminist theologian Dorothee Sölle. What Agamben calls the “irresponsible ‘I can do it’ ” of democratic citizens,30 their blindness to their incapacities, will be considered in light of Sölle’s theological thinking as a result of their being collectively obedient for too long.31 Following her thought we attribute the estrangement from impotentiality to training in obedience, which is responsible for the good conscience of democratic citizens in their willingness to have only one-armed freedom, the potentiality to-do. This freedom is a consequence of creating societies imbued with religions, creeds, or ethos that accent obedience as the primary virtue of human coexistence rather than Spirit-led/filled creative spontaneity, leavening disobedience, or deliberate potentiality to not-do.
The boastful “I can do it” of the Pentecostal who prides herself as living in a free country like the United States “is in fact a surrender of the sense of possibilities, of that phantasy which bursts all boundaries. As a person limits herself to that which she finds, which she preserves and sets in order, her spontaneity atrophies.”32 According to Sölle, there is something beyond this mere, easygoing obedience and it is resistance, the exercise of spirited, responsible freedom that imaginatively and effectively opposes obedience. I call this freedom the potentiality to not-do, or emancipatory spirituality.
Let me now gather up what we have learned so far. The obvious response to the fragilities inflicted on Pentecostals and all citizens alike by late capitalism or the new economy is the response of the irresponsible “I can do it.” The approach here is to throw oneself into late capitalism. The response is like the movement (venture, an inner drive) of the estranged toward union. The end result is something I will call pentecocapitalism, the alliance between late capitalism and Pentecostalism that creates a Pentecostal-capitalist resonance machine, to adapt the words of William Connolly who charted the path of the evangelical-capitalist resonance machine.33
Pentecocapitalism and God’s Subjects
Pentecocapitalism conditions the pentecostal subjectivity by tapping into two deep nerves within popular culture. Pentecostal preachers are able to depict a believer as a person of consumption, a follower of Christ sanctioned by God to richly enjoy all things (1 Tim. 6:17), and as a person of wonder, in, with, and through whom God’s Spirit permeates everyday life. These two dimensions of the believer are tightly woven. Wonders facilitate access to exotic and out-of-reach goods for consumption. Signs and wonders are items of consumption; they are eventually incorporated into the being (existence) of the person through sensory and nonsensory organs. But too much enjoyment of the good and gifts God richly provides to a person can cause constipation in the flow of anointing, inhibit the believer from being an access to and conduit of wonders. A pentecostal preacher once admonished his congregation with these words: “For the fact that God richly gave us all things to enjoy does not mean we should have sex with our spouses every day. That is to be enjoyed sparingly if you want to grow in the Lord, increase your anointing.” This admonition bears hints of ethics of Pentecocapitalism that resonate with that of capitalism.
Pentecocapitalism has an ethic of production, the production of the anointing or spirituality that gives access to signs and wonders. Pentecostals employ the technique of the self on the self, the technology of the self to discipline their bodies to become God’s subjects, vessels of anointing. There is an appreciable level of internal disciplining peculiar (attributable) to pentecostal spirituality. This disciplining is anchored to and feeds on the belief in “calling” or access to the supernatural. The belief is that all believers can wrestle possibility out of impossibility in the sacred or are at least endowed and empowered (Spirit-baptized) to form a new self to transform his or her personal life and do good works on earth. This internal disciplining may remind some of us of Max Weber’s discussion of the Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism. Weber taught us that workers in nineteenth-century capitalism gave their bodies and souls to the social apparatus that hails them from outside. They responded to the interpellation of capitalism (as per Louis Althusser’s “Hey, you”) by successfully internalizing and incorporating this hailing from outside. The powers of the system worked on them in the most intimate fashion—from within. According to Rey Chow, “What I consider most decisive about [Weber’s] theory is the effective structural collaboration he pinpoints between the power of subjective belief (in salvation) as found in modern, secularized society and the capitalist economism’s ways of hailing, disciplining, and rewarding identities constituted by certain forms of labor.”34 What is the equivalent of work ethic in pentecostal spirituality? In the words of Chow, “What is the phenomenon symptomatic of a ferocious and well-rewarded productionism in contemporary” pentecostal spirituality?35 It is the phenomenon of the massive, proliferating, energetic spiritual (ecclesiastical) entrepreneurship: fast paced growth of church infrastructure (ownership), increasing church attendance, efficient and efficacious tax, tithe profit farming, production of signs and wonders, and the utilitarian razzmatazz (spectacular exhibition) of anointing—all of which have avoided societal transformation like the plague. In order to be, to establish oneself, to be the “authentic” pentecostal self with the valorized anointing, this saved entrepreneur must both be seen to own his profitable anointing and exhibit (sell, franchise, project, globalize) it repeatedly. To put it in different terms, the phenomenon is the feverish, simultaneous pursuit of salvation as an object and of prosperity as an abject.36 The capitalist-spiritual entrepreneurs are haunted and trapped within the given of abject salvation—of calling as abjection.37
Colin Campbell in his 1987 book, The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism, has offered a supplement to Weber’s thesis. Since an economy consists of production and consumption, he argues that some other ethic supplied the impulse that led to increasing consumption that absorbed the ever-growing capitalist production. (Productive capitalism needs a consumptive market to buy all the stuff it is producing.) He traced the impulse to the “Romantic ethic” that stimulates new desires and shapes attitudes toward consumerism. The generation of insatiable wanting (not wants) is based on the emotional experience of imagination—dreams of finer lifestyles and enjoyment of novel goods. This form of imagination he names “imaginative hedonism.” And in naming and calling attention to it he shows how the pursuit of wealth alongside the pursuit of pleasure created the modern capitalist society.38
Pentecostalism is stimulating new desires and wants, shaping forms of consumerism as it creates or awakens inner longings and impulses that (can) feed productive systems when or where ascetic ethics of the production ethic is (necessarily) not enough. A question suggests itself at this juncture: What economic secrets do the combination of pneumatological imagination (à la Amos Yong) and imaginative hedonism hold for an active and creative (or dysfunctional and lethargic) capitalist system?
We have talked about production and consumption and now we need to move on to the third dimension of the Pentecostal ethic. Every economy is a set of productive (and capital formation), consumptive, and distributive (income transfers) activities. But what do we say about distribution? Economists tell us that no capitalist system operates without some mechanism for income transfers from income-surplus sectors (areas or persons) to deficit ones. The ethic of transfer of value or social engagement is very functional in pentecostal churches. It is true that there are some pentecostal churches that are involved in social justice projects, but it is truer to say that income inequalities between many pentecostal preachers (chief executive officers of their churches) and their church members are characteristic of the gap between the worker and the CEO in the corporate world or the huge income inequalities of the early twenty-first-century American society.
Concluding Thoughts
Global capitalism has no doubt shaped the character of Pentecostalism, its ecclesial practices, and its adherents’ subjectivity. Amid all this there is a tilt toward worship as pure means (WPM) or to recover the same as a lost object they never really possessed. In its current form, WPM directs desires away from the instrumental logic of late capitalism and it may well be a call for an exodus from the imperial virtues shaping the global Pentecostal movement. Alas, as we already stated earlier, capitalism itself is a vast apparatus for the production of pure means. So WPM may after all not represent a desertion or exodus from the capitalist logic.
Despite what we might think of the influence of late capitalism on WPM, philosophically the connection must be grounded. WPM captures something of the (fantasmatic) secret ambition of Pentecostals. One becomes a full Pentecostal not only by sharing the movement’s ethical substance and being invested in the exchange logic between believers and God, but also by identifying with this secret ambition. It is pure worship, to desire and attain the virtue of worship as pure means. Worship gives Pentecostalism its unprecedented vitality and WPM haunts every giving, performance, or production of ordinary worship. WPM requires the repeated failures or aborted efforts of ordinary worship to actualize itself fragmentarily. There is a necessity of succession, repetitions, and failures in the relationship between the two forms of worship: Pentecostals have to first choose (or make the “wrong” choice of) ordinary, instrumental, worship before they can reach worship as pure means, the true speculative meaning of worship, or realize the secret ambition. Direct access to WPM is not possible.39
Worship as pure means is an object that Pentecostals long to have and mourn in the precise sense of loss of an object that they never possessed. The secret or the secret ambition erects itself in the very gesture of a withdrawal or loss.40 This is one thing, one orientation, or a call at the heart of pentecostal sensibility that resists the capitalist logic, albeit it is very fragile and has little chance of success. Even if we are tempted to put a fine point on it we can only, with faltering lips, say it is a kind of weak force, a powerless power. Paradoxically, it is strong enough to (occasionally) escape global capital’s power of mediation, to assert its identity and not to allow imperial capital to “sublate” it. WPM flashes forth amid the foaming ferment of the heady brew of Pentecostalism and capitalism. The next chapter presents how we might rightly understand or philosophically ground worship as pure means.