Daoism and Capitalism
A Workshop
Tuesday, 10 March 2015
11:00 - 20:00
Richard Hoggart Building, Cinema (11:00-16:00)
Whitehead Building, Ian Gulland Lecture Theatre (16:00-20:00) Goldsmiths, University of London
Confirmed participants:
Michael Dutton, Peter Fenves, Colin Gordon, Leigh Jenco, François Jullien, Scott Lash, Julia Ng, Daniel Weiss, Sam Whimster
At a nascent juncture in the critique of political economy in the 20th and 21st centuries, a diverse array of thinkers converged upon a singular topic: Daoism.
Daoism is a philosophical, political and devotional movement that emerged in early China as a critique of Confucian orthodoxy. Sharing an emphasis on paradox, the interconnection of all things, and the dynamic and processual character of the cosmos, the sets of philosophical reflections that accumulated under the name of “Daoism” represented an antiauthoritarian, non coercive, and countergovernmental alternative to Confucianism’s predilection for paternalistic administration and political management.
Versions of Daoism enjoyed something of a renaissance in the Germanspeaking intellectual world during the early twentieth century. Max Weber's The Religion of China: Confucianism and Taoism was written as a sequel to The Protestant Ethic in order to establish that modern industrial capitalism was uniquely facilitated by the religious tradition found in Europe—for which purpose Weber treated Daoism and Confucianism as essentially consistent in their theories of “wu wei” (inactivity, or effortless or noncoercive action) and “dao” (the idea of an order of nature), and similarly devoid of the creative impulse to dominate over nature that he found characteristic of Puritan rationalism. The image conjured by Weber impresses itself upon recent critiques of political economy, as when Michel Foucault notes in The Birth of Biopolitics that the common starting point for both the Ordoliberals and the Frankfurt School was Weber’s displacement of Marx’s concern with the contradictory logic of capital onto the problem of the irrational rationality of capitalism.The obverse of the same image leads towards the problem of how to decipher not only the forms of capitalism that have emerged in contemporary China, but also the mobilization of the Daoist and Confucianist classics—which in nuce outline the resources of political state power—for the articulation and analysis of economic policy in the PRC.
Weber was by no means alone in his interest in Daoist ideas; others, including Benjamin, Bloch, Rosenzweig, Brecht, Scholem and Buber, also found in their nonsystematic study of Chinese thought a critique of the theory of action that developed from the Greeks onward. Benjamin’s theory of the religious character of capitalism—an early fragment indebted to Weber’s study of the Protestant Ethic—and his study of noncoercive force and political state power—Towards the Critique of Violence, which was published in a form he did not find entirely satisfactory in Weber’s journal Archiv für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik—invite reconsideration in light of Benjamin’s extension of “nonactivity” beyond Weber’s usage of the term. In regard to the theory of action and the associated theories of the image and prelinguistic purity that were in circulation, the composite, multiply translative texts, ideas, and practices of European literary modernism and GermanJewish modernity accrue into a “Daoism” of sorts. In their variation and nonsystematicity, these images of China point towards another orientation of critical theory as developed by the Frankfurt School, one that, contra Schmitt, does not regard politics and ethics as distinct or politics as therefore merely ideology, or imagine the emergence of markets as necessarily coterminous with the withdrawal of government, and that situates the composite image of ancient and modern China at the center of understanding contemporary political economy.
This daylong workshop brings together for the first time experts from sociology, political theory, cultural theory, German literary studies, philosophy, and Jewish studies in discussion of Daoism in contemporary political economy.
Jointly sponsored by the Centre for Cultural Studies and the Department of Politics at Goldsmiths, and Max Weber Studies.
Free and open to the public.
Goldsmiths: http://www.gold.ac.uk/calendar/?id=8440
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Contact: j.ng@gold.ac.uk