Involutions (and Ledgers and Demons)
bare acknowledgment of a social fact, and the role of the ledger in a 'meritocracy'
“The bad news is we’re falling through space forever.
The good news is: there is no ground.”
– Chögyam Trungpa
“Our societies have proved to be really demonic since they happen to combine those two games—the city-citizen game and the shepherd-flock game—in what we call modern states”.
– Michel Foucault
~
Last week I distilled involutions to the societal ‘rolling curling inward’ induced by a dynamic of diminishing returns and ramping costs in which more people make do with less, are forced to do more with less.
In the snatched examples from contemporary China, where involution (neijuan) became a catch-all buzzword, I notice the additional critique of compulsory participation in ruthless futilities: a ‘fuck this’ to clocking a pointless game without ‘winners’, realising and rejecting a savage social sorting where the recursions of each ‘play’ produce eigenvalues whose variants are only the constrained extent of loss and degree of exhaustion one faces vis a vis everyone else ‘in the same society’. It’s bad for everyone, but it could be worse for anyone. It sucks in Beijing and Shanghai on a 996, but at least you’re not stuck on the outskirts of Chengdu without a job, at least you’re not a Uighur. And at the other end, as the lesson of lessons about how far anyone can fall, the fate of Bo Xilai (and see this piece), a lesson to all.
(Sidebar to another future post: this raises profound questions of family and trust networks in-and-for China in the coming decades. If not China qua Xina, if not one Party to rule them all, if no one can win under Party-gripped surveillance capitalism, then a preponderance of the fate of the 21C rests in how family diasporas, associations, trust relations, and bonded commitments of love, ‘love’ and duty, above all, might interact, overcoded by filial piety… for these are really strong ties)
Among the things that appeals to me about neijuan is the way in which it names and begins to describe the complex senses in which a society can be subject to social dynamics that are of ‘its’ own making, where the ‘its’ is us, yet in ways that frustrate and perhaps transcend human agency. There is a bare acknowledgement of how things may unfortunately be right now, a 'facing' of the social fact without recourse to the varying styles of normative overloading I’m more used to in my privileged little spot in the Anglocapitalist world, where bad things are always unfair and someone’s fault, and usually blaming is transformed into the punishing shunning of ‘wrongful’ individuals1.
This is the first of two senses where I disagree with Yi-Ling Liu. She writes, “involution is presented as part of the natural order of things—like bad weather. You can’t point fingers at an abstraction or rally against a fusty term from an anthropology text”. On the contrary, it seems to me that, even in the tiny scrape of examples I have access to as a societal-cultural outsider who does not speak Chinese, that there is a popular theoretical sociology at work here: involution is naming a dynamic transpiring in the social order of things – ‘like bad identity politics’ (here). Moreover, neijuan gives a way to name a dynamic without trying to redress it by pointing fingers at individuals, which, aside from the pragmatic safety value of avoiding doing that in a party state autocracy, keeps things in the ambiguity of our invested implication in things we also continue to do (and wish for), which we also know are fucked and not working out for anyone. But no – usually in the West, ‘we’ usually think it will work out for us2.
I think a part of this is due to a widespread cultural belief in the ledger.
(sidebar: the second of Broch’s Sleepwalkers, and the world of Esch, my favourite of his characters, captures this… for another post… )
As a person who has lived through a time of extraordinary unearned privilege through their allotted position in the global birthright lottery, an acknowledgment of societal involution is deeply galling to my own not quite conscious senses of amour propre, the return or accord I expect to be ‘coming back my way’. Perhaps you feel this ledger at work in your life, somehow. Rationally, you know the world is unjust, no one owes you shit, there is no ledger* – and things might not be working out so well right now. Things might not work out at all.
Or, as Kafka quipped: there is hope – just not for us.
Who’s the tally-man here though; who keeps this ledger? Either we really believe in the death of God (har har), or in some sense, meritocracy is still tied to Judeo-Christian ideas of an ever-vigilant Watcher who is accurately keeping score. Tabs on everyone; score for everyone; and justice for all. This is the second point where I disagree with Yi-Ling Liu, where she describes American society as a ‘cut-throat meritocracy’. We have been so seduced by this fantasy of meritocracy: we believe it, contrary to all evidence to the contrary. We see the throats being cut, then still want to talk about meritocracy3….
We believe it like we believe in God or the death of God, and a part of the reason we do is because of a belief in the ledger and how this conjures up justice from the dice roll of Fortuna. Bentham (and Spencer and Freud), Santa Klaus and the huge popularity of Elf on the Shelf show us that, actually, many Westerners do want to believe something like this is operating in their lives. Moreover, like Slavoj Zizek’s quip from Neils Bohr: we believe that it works, even if you don’t believe it.
You better watch out
You better not cry
You better not pout
– I’m telling you why
He knows when you’ve been sleeping
He knows if you’re awake
He knows if you’ve been bad or good
– so be good, for goodness sake
For those in China rightfully expressing their profound frustration at how it’s shaken down for the strivers under Xi who seemed like they might have had a chance of making it, one sense of involution is about the continuing, coercive, compulsory involvement in a game sorting out bad/worse among a collective set of ‘losers’. You ‘win’ and there are no medals on the cushion by the podium; you make it to the podium and the medals are clearly fakes; you get there, and the medal clinks with the weight of real gold, but is given to the guy who’s dad rolls deep with someone high up; you walk forward, and there’s no podium, just a trap door, maybe. You dream of snakes and ladders, and wake to the sound of all the ladders falling down an emptied corridor.
In the West, there is the sense I find that involution shouldn’t be happening to us, because we deserve something different and better ‘somehow’. Hochuli’s ‘Brazilianisation’ essay is asking its (imputed) American audience to open their thinking to this. But it can’t happen here; the ledger is operating.
I wrote a critical note to self on ledgers a year or two ago, borrowing from Pema Chödron’s teaching on ‘The Eight Worldly Winds’:
“I need to keep seeing the other side of the ledger, daily; it is always inherent, yet we always direct thinking to our preferred side of the ledger. All of us.
Victory, defeat
Praise, blame
Pleasure, pain
Gain, loss”
Thus: we get involved in competitions, demanding only victory;
seek recognition from fickle others, expecting only praise;
go dancing and stay up all weekend, seeking only pleasure;
play the real estate, stock or crypto markets on our phone, anticipating only gain.
The first moment here is to notice that, if it is a ledger, then there is always the other side to it. In the game logic of the ledger, the coin can also-always come up ‘tails’: defeat, blame, pain, loss. This is the stochastic truth… if there is a ledger.
The second moment is to notice – there is no ledger.
There is no ledger, yet we impute there is one, and many of us share this with our children as a cultural value, including the notion of a ledger adjudged by a Watcher, like the Elf.
However, to notice and recognise any-and-all this is to acknowledge, all at once, the social fact of involution alongside the nonexistence of the normative Excel spreadsheet we have been using to tally things up as we go along, get what’s ours for ourselves – if later, with the interest we’re also ‘owed’.
Yet really, involution is transpiring, and there is no ledger – the curling rolling in rolls on.
This is of course not ‘bad’ or ‘not all bad’, insofar as claims of injustice can also involve us in the contentions of politics, a seeking toward justice… surely this opens onto a set of normative values (fairness, responsibility, the good) in our lives and our traditions that’s worth fighting for and saving. At the same time, our societies’ punitive urges, alongside the continual wish to polarise, shun and shame groups and individuals who don’t share our ‘justice’ and sense of the good… this is not all good… is it?
And moreover, ‘if only’ we have the optimal norm set and group who shares it, if only we shop organic and eat biodynamic, we are freed from or above or anyway ‘acquitting’ a ledger elsewhere: cf carbon offset and so on. So we can fly from Auckland to New Zealand, excoriate our brother in law for eating steak (because we’re Vegan), then fly long haul for a conference on art in the Anthropocene.
somehow this links in my mind to Frank Ocean’s lyrics in ‘Pyramids’, as what America is more like… again, this is the fantasy of an outsider who has lived ‘inside’ the projections of the US, but never lived an American life… a very strange immersion in the symbolic, a colonisation of my lifeworld.