Confronting semantic emptiness – "prosperity" and the power of the "individual" (CR #2)

It is striking to me that Tim Jackson shows no hesitancy interrogating the semantic emptiness of the word prosperity in his article “Prosperity Without Growth?” As an ‘economics commissioner’ for the Sustainable Development Commission, Jackson is unavoidably caught between the perilous crossfires of economic and environmental discourses. Economists and environmentalists alike carry arsenals of loaded and intentionally nuanced words, which bolster and uphold their various systems of meaning and morality. For this reason, economic and environmental jargons can lean towards essentialism and exclusiveness, leaving little room for comprehensive and participatory dialogue.

There is cause for concern when one of these words or phrases becomes entrenched within a much broader ideological landscape, because the word itself is often stripped of it poignancy. For example, the over/misuse of the word “sustainable” has in a way voided the word of its actual meaning through the exploitation and deployment of its considerable discursive affect. Thus, the word “sustainable” has been increasingly used as a pliant prefix, whose meaning and value bends to the will of its user. By depending on stock phrases and words that have become “cliched” through mindless repetition, communication breaks down. A word turned cliche becomes the most reliable safeguard against the significance of words, the presence of others, and hence against reality as such.

I think Jackson’s article in part wrestles with this taken-for-granted ‘discursive affect’ by interrogating popular conceptions of “prosperity.” Even his title, “Prosperity without growth?” is defensively poised in the gesture of a question. And the intent of his article is just that: to question, to challenge, to penetrate and provoke. In doing so, Jackson creates a crucial space for reexamining the fundaments that inform our capitalistic values and principles.

He begins by inquiring into the cause of the 2008 banking crisis. The undoing of the market, he argues, was “not the result of isolated malpractice or simple failures of vigilance” (6). Rather, the crisis was generated by growth itself; or, more acutely, by the systematic sanctioning of economic growth as the paramount socio-political imperative.

Here, what I find particularly interesting is Jackson’s insistence that it was not “individual greed” but a broader “systematic irresponsibility” that eventually led to the 2008 recession. Though I find much of Jackson’s argument invaluable, this kind of assertion and analysis strikes me as being deeply problematic. Most significantly, it underestimates and devalues the agency of the individual. Erasing the “individual” from a narrative of economic growth, or in any socio-political scenario, is an inherently defeatist gesture. It is precisely this gesture – where the “individual” is severed from the broader architecture of “the system” – that sources a whole range of social ills: irresponsible consumption, apathy, nihilistic disregard for the “other,” and alienation—from labour, from things, from the environment, the community and the self. In other words, placing blame on “the system” essentially voids the significance of the individual.

And this is not Jackson’s aim. I would argue, in fact, that Jackson is intent on fostering a trend of re-empowering the individual with agency and with a sense of purpose in a world so fixated with unfettered economic growth. But I think Jackson is perhaps hesitant to expound his argument in a thesis that deals with the intimate and diminutive scale of the “individual.” Investigations that work on this scale are inevitably “complicated” by the daunting messiness of emotions, morals and ethics. But in the same way that Jackson relies on deconstructing the small-scaled single word (prosperity) to summon information about a society-wide consumerist ethos, Jackson cannot avoid tracing the vastness of “systematic irresponsibility” back to the local scale of “individual greed.” “Systematic irresponsibility” and “individual greed” are mutually engaged in a destructive feedback loop, whereby the one evil is justified and bolstered by the other. That is, greed breeds more greed in a system of unchecked credit expansion; and the expansion of an unstable credit system is “justified” and indeed “necessary” to stimulate consumption growth (and the supposed “prosperity” that comes with it).

Jackson knows that the transition to what he calls a “sustainable economy” can only be achieved by addressing social logic and irresponsibility at all different levels of society, from the vast scale of “the system” to the intimate scale of the “individual.” Even though Jackson’s theoretical ambition prompts him to address the over-arching system of macro economics, his genuine hope for change is invested in the small scale of human-to-human interaction. “To do well,” he argues, is about the “ability to give and receive love, to enjoy the respect of your peers, to contribute useful work, and to have a sense of belonging and trust in the community. In short,” he concludes, “an important component of prosperity is the ability to participate meaningfully in the life of society” (7).

As important as it is to be educated and critical of the economic and political systems that we are inextricably bound within, we cannot forget the importance of seeking out and creating meaning in the often overlooked details of our day-to-day. An important part of this process is being critical of the way our words shape our experience of reality and our ambitious pursuits of happiness. It is in the local, intimate gestures of social interaction that we can hope to discover our real potential to flourish and our real capacity for prosperity.

Reference:

Tim Jackson, “Prosperity without growth? The transition to a sustainable economy”