Millennial Capitalism

Occult Economies and New Religious Movements: Privatizing the Millennium A striking corollary of the dawning Age of Millennial Capitalism has been the global proliferation of “occult economies.”21 These economies have two dimen- sions: a material aspect founded on the effort to conjure wealth—or to account for its accumulation—by appeal to techniques that defy explanation in the con- ventional terms of practical reason; and an ethical aspect grounded in the moral discourses and (re)actions sparked by the (real or imagined) production of value through such “magical” means. It is difficult, of course, to quantify the presence of the occult—and, therefore, to make any claim to its increase. As we note above, finance capital has always had its spectral enchantments, its modes of speculation based on less than rational connections between means and ends. Both its underside (the pariah forms of gambling of which we spoke a moment ago) and its upper side (a fiscal industry, embracing everything from insurance to stock markets) have been rooted, from the first, in two inscrutables: a faith in probability (itself a notoriously poor way of predicting the future from the past) and a monetary system that depends for its existence on “confidence,” a chimera knowable, tautologically, only by its effects. Wherein, then, lies the claim that occult economies are presently on the rise?

In the specific context of South Africa, we have demonstrated (1999b, 1999c) that there has been an explosion of occult-related activity—much of it violent, arising out of accusations of ritual killing, witchcraft, and zombie conjuring— since the late apartheid years. These also include fantastic Ponzi schemes, the sale of body parts for “magical” purposes, satanic practices, tourism based on the sighting of fabulous monsters, and the like. Here middle-class magazines run “dial-a-diviner” advertisements, national papers carry headline articles on medi- cine murders, prime-time television broadcasts dramas of sorcery, and more than one “witchcraft summit” has been held. Patently, even here we cannot be sure that the brute quantum of occult activity exceeds that of times past. But what is clear is that their reported incidence, written about by the mainstream press in more prosaic, less exoticizing terms than ever before (Fordred 1999), has forced itself upon the public sphere, rupturing the flow of mediated “news.” It is this rup- ture—this focus of popular attention on the place of the arcane in the everyday production of value—to which we refer when we speak of a global proliferation of occult economies.

It is not difficult to catalogue the presence of occult economies in different parts of the world. In West Africa, for example, Peter Geschiere (1997), among others, has shown how zombie conjuring is becoming an endemic feature of everyday life, how sorcery and witchcraft have entered into the postcolonial political economy as an integral element of a thriving alternative modernity, how magic has become as much an aspect of mundane survival strategies as it is indis- pensable to the ambitions of the powerful (see also Bastian 1993). Nor is all of this based in rural situations or among poor people. In South Africa a recent case involved a well-known physician: she was “turned into a zombie” by a “Nigerian devil-worshipper,” who, having rendered her insensate, took a large sum of money from her bank account.22 By labeling the accused a Nigerian devil wor- shipper, the report ties the menace of the satanic to the flow of immigrants across national borders.

Nor is this only an African phenomenon. In various parts of Asia occult economies thrive, often taking surprising turns (see Morris, in this issue). In Thai- land—where fortune-telling has been transformed by global technology and e- mail divination has taken off—one “traditional” seer, auspiciously named Madam Luk, reports that her clients nowadays ask three questions to the exclu- sion of all others: “‘Is my company going broke?’ ‘Am I going to lose my job?’ and ‘Will I find another job?’ ”23 In the United States, too, the fallout of neolib- eral capitalism is having its impact on magical practice. There is, for instance, a growing use (“seeping into the grassroots” of the U.S. heartland and taking its place beside other millennial pursuits) of tarot readings as a respectable form of therapy—described by the director of the Trends Research Institute as a low- cost “shrink in the box.”24 By these means are psychology, spirituality, and for- tune-telling fused.

Sometimes dealings in the occult take on a more visceral, darker form. Throughout Latin America in the 1990s, as in Africa and Asia, there have been mass panics about the clandestine theft and sale of the organs of young people, usually by unscrupulous expatriates (Scheper-Hughes 1996). Violence against children has become metonymic of threats to social reproduction in many ethnic and national contexts, the dead (or missing) child having emerged as the stan- dardized nightmare of a world out of control (Jean Comaroff 1997a). There, and in other parts of the globe, this commerce—like international adoptions, mail- order marriage, and indentured domestic labor—is seen as a new form of impe- rialism, the affluent North siphoning off the essence of poorer “others” by mys- terious means for nefarious ends. All of which gives evidence, to those at the nether end of the global distribution of wealth, of the workings of insidious forces, of potent magical technologies and modes of accumulation.

That evidence reaches into the heart of Europe itself. Hence the recent scares, in several countries, about the sexual and satanic abuse of children (La Fontaine 1997); about the kidnapping and murder of street “urchins,” most recently in Ger- many by “Russian gangs,” for purposes of organ harvest and export; about the alleged “trafficking in women [especially] from . . . nations of the former Soviet bloc” for prostitution, labor, and other “personal services” in Western Europe, the Americas, Japan, and China.25 Again, the United States is not exempt from anxi- eties over the pilfering of human bodies and body parts for profit. Note, for just one extreme instance, the urban myth that traversed the Internet in 1997 about the secret excision of kidneys, by apparently incredible means, from business travelers.26

In other contexts, the occult concentrates itself in purely financial dealings. Thus there seems to have been an extraordinary intensification of pyramid schemes lately, many of them tied to the electronic media. These schemes, and a host of scams allied with them—a few legal, many illegal, some alegal—are hardly new. But their recent mushrooming across the world has drawn a great deal of attention—partly because of their sheer scale and partly because, by crossing national borders and/or registering at addresses far from the site of their local operation, they insinuate themselves into the slipstream of the global econ- omy, thereby escaping control. Recall the ten or so whose crash sparked the Albanian revolution early in 1997, several of which took on almost miraculous dimensions for poor investors. One pyramid manager in Albania, according to the New York Times, was “a gypsy fortune teller, complete with crystal ball, who claimed to know the future.”27 Even in the tightly regulated stock markets of the United States there has been a rise in illegal operations that owe their logic, if not their precise operation, to pyramids: another New York Times report attributes this to the fact that investors are presently “predisposed to throw dollars at get- rich-quick schemes.” Six billion dollars were lost to scams on the New York Stock Exchange in 1996.28 These scams also bring to mind others that arise from a promiscuous mix of scarcity and deregulation, among them, the notorious Nigerian-based “419,” a truly transnational con that regularly traps foreign busi- nessmen into signing over major assets and may actually have fabricated a national election at home (Apter 1999); also the Foundation for New Era Philan- thropy, a U.S. pyramid created “to change the world for the glory of God.” On the basis of a promise to double their money in six months, its founder, John Benett, persuaded five hundred nonprofit organizations, Christian colleges, and Ivy League universities to invest $354 million.29 The line between Ponzi schemes and evangelical prosperity gospels is very thin indeed.30

All of these things have a single common denominator: the allure of accruing wealth from nothing. In this respect, they are born of the same animating spirit as casino capitalism; indeed, perhaps they are casino capitalism for those who lack the fiscal or cultural capital—or who, for one or another reason, are reluctant— to gamble on more conventional markets. Like the cunning that made straw into gold (Schneider 1989), these alchemic techniques defy reason in promising unnaturally large profits—to yield wealth without production, value without effort. Here, again, is the specter, the distinctive spirit, of neoliberal capitalism in its triumphal hour. So much for the demise of disenchantment.

Speaking of the neoliberal spirit, occult economies have close parallels in the spread of new religious movements across the planet. To wit, the latter may be seen as holy-owned subsidiaries of the former. These movements take on a wide variety of guises. In the case of the Vissariontsi, “disenchanted Soviet intellectu- als” who follow a traffic warden-turned-messiah, members renounce their earthly wealth for life in the City of Sun, a congregation in Siberia that recalls a commu- nist farm. The Second Coming here, led by a man with a sense of both history and irony—a City of Sun, in Siberia? A career in Russian traffic management for the Son of God?—envisages a future in the past, a hereafter (or therebefore?) that recaptures the glories of a socialist commune.31 But the renunciatory orien- tation of the Vissariontsi is not usual among new religious movements at the mil- lennium. Much closer to the global mood of the moment are fee-for-service, con- sumer-cult, prosperity-gospel denominations. These creeds are well exemplified by any number of neo-Pentecostal sects; best perhaps by the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God (Igreja Universal do Reino de Deus), a denomination of Brazilian origin which, true to its name, has opened up outposts in many parts of the world (Kramer 1999).

The Universal Church reforms the Protestant ethic with enterprise and urban- ity, fulsomely embracing the material world. It owns a major television network in Brazil, has an elaborate web site, and, above all, promises swift payback to those who embrace Christ, denounce Satan, and “make their faith practical” by “sacrificing” all they can to the movement.32 Here Pentecostalism meets neolib- eral enterprise. In its African churches, most of them (literally) storefronts, prayer meetings respond to frankly mercenary desires, offering everything from cures for depression through financial advice to remedies for unemployment; casual passersby, clients really, select the services they require. Bold color adver- tisements for BMWs and lottery winnings adorn altars; tabloids pasted to walls and windows carry testimonials by followers whose membership was rewarded by a rush of wealth and/or an astonishing recovery of health. The ability to deliver in the here and now, itself a potent form of space-time compression, is offered as the measure of a genuinely global God, just as it is taken to explain the power of satanism (Comaroff and Comaroff 1999b); both have the instant efficacy of the magical and the millennial. As Kramer (1999: 35) says of Brazilian neo-Pentecostals, “Inner-worldly asceticism has been replaced with a concern for the pragmatics of material gain and the immediacy of desire. . . . The return on capital has suddenly become more spiritually compelling and imminent . . . than the return of Christ.” This shift is endemic to the new religious movements of the late twentieth century. For them, and for their many millions of members, the Second Coming evokes not a Jesus who saves, but one who pays dividends. Or, more accurately, one who promises a miraculous return on a limited spiritual investment.

Why? How—to put the matter more generally—are we to account for the current spread of occult economies and prosperity cults?

To the degree that millennial capitalism fuses the modern and the postmod- ern, hope and hopelessness, utility and futility, the world created in its image presents itself as a mass of contradictions: as a world, simultaneously, of possi- bility and impossibility. This is precisely the juxtaposition associated with cargo cults and chiliastic movements in other times and places (Worsley 1957; Cohn 1957). But, as the growth of prosperity gospels and fee-for-service movements illustrates, in a neoliberal age the chiliastic urge emphasizes a privatized millen- nium, a personalized rather than a communal sense of rebirth; in this, the mes- sianic meets the magical. At the end of the twentieth century, the cargo, glimpsed in large part through television, takes the form of huge concentrations of wealth that accrue, legitimately or otherwise, to the rich of the global economy—espe- cially the enigmatic new wealth derived from financial investment and manage- ment, from intellectual property and other rights, from cyberspace, from trans- port and its cognate operations, and from the supply of various post-Fordist services. All of which points to the fact that the mysterious mechanisms of a changing market, not to mention abstruse technological and informational expertise, hold the key to hitherto unimaginable fortunes amassed by the ever more rapid flow of value, across time and space, into the fluid coordinates of the local and the global; to the much mass-mediated mantra that the gap between the affluent and the indigent is growing at an exponential rate; and to the strange convolutions in the structural conditions of labor, discussed above, that seem at once to reduce and produce joblessness by altering conventional terms of employment, by feminizing the workforce, and by deterritorializing proletariats.

This, of course, is the flip side of the coin: the sense of impossibility, even despair, that comes from being left out of the promise of prosperity, from having to look in on the global economy of desire from its immiserated exteriors. Whether it be in post-Soviet Central Europe or postcolonial Africa, in Thatcherite Britain or the neoliberal United States, in a China edging toward capitalism or neo-Pentecostal Latin America, the world-historical process that came to be symbolized by the events of 1989 held out the prospect that everyone would be set free to accumulate and speculate, to consume, and to indulge repressed crav- ings in a universe of less government, greater privatization, more opulence, infi- nite enterprise. For the vast majority, however, the millennial moment passed without visible enrichment.

The implication? That, in these times—the late modernist age when, accord- ing to Weber and Marx, enchantment would wither away—more and more ordi- nary people see arcane forces intervening in the production of value, diverting its flow toward a new elect: those masters of the market who comprehend and control the production of wealth under contemporary conditions. They also attribute to these arcane forces their feelings of erasure and loss: an erasure in many places of community and family, exacerbated by the destabilization of labor, the translocal- ization of management, and the death of retail trade; a loss of human integrity, experienced in the spreading commodification of persons, bodies, cultures, and histories, in the substitution of quantity for quality, abstraction for substance.33 None of these perceptions is new, as we have said. Balzac (1965: 418, 117) described them for France in the 1840s, as did Conrad (1957) for prerevolutionary Russia; Gluckman (1959), moreover, spoke of the “magic of despair” that arose in similarly dislocated colonial situations in Africa. Nonetheless, to reiterate, such disruptions are widely experienced throughout the world as intensifying at a frightening rate at present. Which is why the ethical dimensions of occult economies are so prominent; why the mass panics of our times tend to be moral in tone; why these panics so often express themselves in religious movements that pursue instant material returns and yet condemn those who enrich themselves in nontraditional ways. To be sure, occult economies frequently have this bipolar character: At one level, they consist in the constant quest for new, magical means for otherwise unattainable ends; at another, they vocalize a desire to sanction, even eradicate, people held to have accumulated assets by those very means.

Occult economies, then, are a response to a world gone awry, yet again: a world in which the only way to create real wealth seems to lie in forms of power/knowledge that transgress the conventional, the rational, the moral—thus to multiply available techniques of producing value, fair or foul. In their cultural aspect, they bespeak a resolute effort to come to terms with that power/knowl- edge, to account for the inexplicable phenomena to which it gives rise, and to plumb its secrets. The unprecedented manifestation of zombies in the South African countryside, for instance, has grown in direct proportion to the shrinking labor market for young men. The former provides a partial explanation for the latter: the living dead are commonly said to be killed and raised up by older peo- ple, witches of wealth, to toil for them (Comaroff and Comaroff 1999b), thereby rendering rural youth jobless. There are, in this era of flexitime employment, even part-time zombies, a virtual working class—of pure, abstract labor power—that slaves away at night for its masters. In this context, furthermore, the angry dramas during which ritual murderers are identified often become sites of public divination. As they unfold, the accusers discuss, attribute cause, and give voice to their understanding of the forces that make the postcolony such an inhospitable place for them. This is an extreme situation, obviously. But in less stark circumstances, too, these economies tend to spawn simultaneous strivings to garner wealth and to put a stop to those who do so by allegedly misbegotten means.

As all this suggests, appeals to the occult in pursuit of the secrets of capital generally rely on local cultural technologies: on vernacular modes of divination or oracular consultation, spirit possession or ancestral invocation, sorcery bust- ing or forensic legal procedures, witch beliefs or prayer. But the use of these technologies does not imply an iteration of, a retreat into, “tradition.” On the con- trary, their deployment in such circumstances is frequently a means of fashioning new techniques to preserve older values by retooling culturally familiar signs and practices. As in cargo cults of old, this typically involves the mimicking of pow- erful new means of producing wealth (Comaroff and Comaroff 1993: xv–xvi).

In short, the rise of occult economies—amidst and alongside more conven- tional modes of economic practice that shade into the murky domains of crime and corruption—seems overdetermined. This, after all, is an age in which the extravagant promises of millennial capitalism run up against an increasingly nihilistic, thoroughly postmodern pessimism; in which the will to consume out- strips the opportunity to earn; in which, relatively speaking, there is a much higher velocity of exchange than there is of production. As the connections between means and ends become more opaque, more distended, more mysteri- ous, the occult becomes an ever more appropriate, semantically saturated metaphor for our times. Not only has it become commonplace to pepper media parlance, science-speak, psychobabble, and technologese with the language of enchantment; even the drear argot of the law is showing signs of the same thing.34 And we all remember voodoo economics, that Reagan-era insult to the rationality of Caribbean ritual practice. But, we insist, occult economies are not reducible to the symbolic, the figurative, or the allegorical. Magic is, everywhere, the science of the concrete, aimed at making sense of and acting upon the world—especially, but not only, among those who feel themselves disempow- ered, emasculated, disadvantaged. The fact that the turn to enchantment is not unprecedented, that it has precursors in earlier times, makes it no less significant to those for whom it has become an integral part of everyday reality. Maybe, too, all this describes a fleeting phase in the long, unfinished history of capitalism. But that makes it no less momentous.

Of all the enchantments that accompanied the First Coming of Capitalism, perhaps the most perduring was nationalism. And the nation-state, a political community—conjured always out of difference, often against indifference— that gave the Durkheimean conscience collective a distinctive, effervescent twist. Recently, as everyone knows, there has been much talk of its death, especially with the end of the Age of Empire, the close of the Cold War, and the onset of the postcolonial era; it is as if the Treaty of Westphalia has finally given way to the Failure of the West. We shall consider this view, and the articulate dissent it has provoked, in a moment. What is beyond question, however, is that the Second Coming, the dawning Age of Millennial Capitalism, has had complex, controver- sial effects on the present and future of the nation-state.

Alien-Nation, Hyphen-Nation, Desti-Nation: The Future of the Nation-State and the Fetishism of Law In its broad outlines, the scholarly debate over the current condition of the nation-state — the definite, singular article — has become something of a cliché. The thesis that the hyphenated modernist polity is being dramatically subverted, doomed even, has been rehearsed ad infinitum, with varying degrees of nuance; aspects of it have been foreshadowed in what we have already said.

Nation-states, from this vantage, have been rendered irrelevant by world mar- ket forces (1) because capital has become uncontrollable and keeps moving, at its own velocity, to sites of optimum advantage; (2) because the global workforce has become ever more mobile as job seekers, increasingly managed by private agen- cies, migrate ever further in pursuit of even the most menial of jobs, under even the most feudal of conditions;35 and (3) because these human flows seem, in vary- ing proportions, to elude surveillance, despite the highly repressive mechanisms often put into place to monitor national frontiers. Under such conditions, it is said, state regulation of both capital and labor becomes obsolete, impossible; so, too, do fiscal designs that run counter to the mechanisms of global markets and/or the imperatives of global corporations. As Paul Hirst and Grahame Thompson (1996: 175–76), who argue the antithesis, put it, “[States] can no longer independently affect the levels of economic activity or employment within their territories. . . . [Their] job is to provide the infrastructure and public goods needed at the lowest possible cost.”

In its historical framing, this thesis sees the leitmotif of the twentieth century as the “battle between government and the marketplace” (Yergin and Stanislaw 1998), the latter winning out to the point that “public sectors are shrinking, deregulation is everyone’s priority, state companies are being auctioned off to private investors, and Wall Street is the most powerful influence on economies everywhere” (Garten 1998: 7). As Sassen (n.d.: 4–5) notes, this perspective casts the strength of the nation-state in a zero-sum opposition to the global economy —note, not to neoliberal capitalism, nor globalization tout court, but to the global economy. Where one gains, the other must lose. Thus, says Robert Ross (1990: 206–7, 218), until recently the regulatory role of national governments expanded progressively. Now, however, corporations are able to prevail on states “to restrain regulations, cut taxes, and allocate more public funds toward subsidizing production costs,” which puts “global capital in a position to demand changes in state policy” (211, emphasis ours). Taken together, this adds up to the prognosis that, “in the long run, the power of the state, of centralized government, will weaken everywhere, an inevitability which will change profoundly the very tex- ture of history” (Lukacs 1993: 157).

In all this, as will be clear, it is the workings of transnational corporations, and especially the mobility of their productive operations, that are held account- able for the imminent demise of the nation-state. Others have also laid causal stress on the fiscal mechanics of the world economy, in particular on their tech- nological transformations. Joel Kurtzman (1993), for example, holds that the growth of a global electronic economy—based on an “electronic commons” in which virtual money and commodities may be exchanged instantly via an unreg- ulated world network of computers—has shattered the integrity of sovereign polities (85–86, 214–15): it has eroded their monopolistic control over the money supply, their capacity to contain wealth within borders, and even their ability to tax citizens or corporations. From this perspective, the emergence of a global economy is said to be undermining the nation-state by deconstructing currency, credit, and customs boundaries—which formerly gave governments a major means of control over the wealth of their nations—by creating mobile markets across the planet, thus dispersing the production and circulation of value. Which is why, it is so commonly said, many states are finding it impossible to meet the material demands placed upon them by their citizenry or to carry out effective economic development policies; why few can adequately house, feed, school, and ensure the health of their populations; why even fewer can see their way clear to settling their national debt or reducing their deficits; why only a handful can be confident about the replacement of infrastructure over the medium term; why almost none have the capacity to control their money supply, let alone flows of goods and people; and why a growing number have shown a startling inability to regulate violence.

The thesis has also been argued in terms other than the simply economic, of course. The eroding boundedness of the nation-state, its loss of sovereignty as a commonwealth of signs, has been variously attributed, not least on the pages of this journal, to the impact of planetary cultural flows and electronic media (see e.g., Appadurai 1990; Hannerz 1989: 69–70; Moore 1989; Foster 1991); to the assertive spread of transnational communities, social movements, and identities; to the universalization of many aspects of the law (if not of justice; Silbey 1997: 209), the expansion of tribunals that subject national jurisdictions to supranational ones (Darian-Smith 1995, 1999), and the rise of an intercontinental commercial arbitra- tion establishment (Garth and Dezalay 1996); to “worldkill,” the commodification of violence that makes it possible for corporations, political blocs, shadow states, or nations to rent soldiers on the Internet, to arrange for the application of force in breach of sovereign borders, even to buy a coup from a multinational company (John L. Comaroff 1996);36 to the shift in dominant patterns of warfare from confrontations between countries to civil conflicts that tend to trans-localize themselves, to kill higher proportions of civilians than ever before, and to feed an arms industry that has metamorphosed from a highly regulated import-export business to a global trade in illicit gun-running;37 to the assimilation of many of the traditional functions of government either into the private sector or into supranational combinations.

As Peregrine Worsthorne recently noted, in an essay tellingly entitled “Farewell to England’s Nation State,” the “only area where [the country] remains independent and sovereign is sport.” On which Patriotic Front, he adds laconi- cally, “miserable results say all that needs to be said.” Even here, labor has become a mobile commodity as citizens of convenience take the field in acquired (“naturalized”) colors; although it is true that this is perhaps the most significant, sentiment-inspiring, trauma-inducing site of national effervescence in many parts of the world.38 In every other domain, Worsthorne continues, English institu- tions, all of them dysfunctional, have been replaced by more effective interna- tional or global ones. “But who cares?” he asks. “It is time to change our think- ing.”39 This from a notable public intellectual, in Britain’s most widely read conservative newspaper, about England, self-appointed cradle of modernity, democracy, and the state—not some struggling postcolony still trying to throw off the effects of the Age of Empire.

Some do care—and are not prepared to give up so easily on the salience of the nation-state. It is not yet time, says Khachig Tölölyan (1991: 5), “to write [its] . . . obituary.” Turner (n.d.: 25), for one, argues that the “development of the global capitalist system” has “not led to any withering away of the state” at all. Quite the opposite, the relevance of “[nation-]state boundaries” has been height- ened; contemporary states, especially successful ones, still “attempt to regulate, encourage or obstruct flows of workers, capital and commodities across their bor- ders” (25). In stark contrast to the likes of Kurtzman, Turner also speaks of the perceived “need for national economies to remain competitive under global con- ditions” (23–24); a far cry, this, from the notion that there no longer is any such thing. Similarly Hirst and Thompson (1996: 17): “The globalization of produc- tion,” they hold, “has been exaggerated.” Companies, of which few are truly to remain so” (2). Also overstated are claims for “the dominance of world mar- kets and their ungovernability” (6); in point of fact, financial flows and trade are concentrated in the “triad” of North America, Europe, and Japan (2). Here, in a nutshell, is the countercase.

This antithetical position has a nontrivial political dimension for its advocates, especially those on the left. To the degree that globalization dissolves the sover- eign nation-state into a sea of planetary economic forces and legal jurisdictions, it would appear to negate any real prospect of progressive or proletarian politics— be they international or intranational—as they would have no terrain on which to occur, no concrete object in terms of which to frame itself, no obvious target against which to act (cf. Hirst and Thompson 1996: 1; Ahmad 1992: 317).40 We share the concern. As it is, there is a strong argument to be made that neoliberal capitalism, in its millennial moment, portends the death of politics by hiding its own ideological underpinnings in the dictates of economic efficiency: in the fetishism of the free market, in the inexorable, expanding “needs” of business, in the imperatives of science and technology. Or, if it does not conduce to the death of politics, it tends to reduce them to the pursuit of pure interest, individual or collective—or to struggles over issues (the environment, abortion, health care, child welfare, human rights) that, important though they may be, are often, pace Jameson (1999: 47), dissociated from anything beyond themselves. It is here that the analytic case for the sustained salience of the modernist polity merges into the normative case for its desirability.

A parenthetic comment here. There are those who would muddy the argument by pointing out that the notion of a strong nation-state has always been some- thing of a fantasy. This on three grounds: the state, the nation, and the hyphen. Recall, in respect of the first, Philip Abrams (1988: 75–77), for whom the state was always “the distinctive collective misrepresentation of capitalist societies”: an “essentially imaginative construction,” it was, at once, a “triumph of conceal- ment” and an ongoing “ideological project.” Even more extreme is Ralph Miliband’s (1969: 49) famous claim that “the ‘state’ . . . does not, as such, exist.” Shades here of things written long ago. Philip Corrigan and Derek Sayer (1985: 7) remind us that Marx (1967) believed the state to be “in an important sense an illusion . . . : [it] is at most a message of domination—an ideological artifact attributing unity, structure and independence to the disunited, structureless and dependent workings of the practice of government.” For Weber (1946: 78), too, it was “a claim to legitimacy, a means by which politically organized subjection is simultaneously accomplished and concealed, and it is constituted in large part by the activities of institutions of government themselves” (Corrigan and Sayer, 1985: 7). A truly curious force of history, this: at once an illusion, a potent claim to authority, a cultural artifact, a present absence and an absent presence, a prin- ciple of unity masking institutional disarticulation. But nothing like the kind of essentialized “thing” that much of the current debate treats either as alive or dead. Likewise the nation: the enormous literature on the topic—both before and after Imagined Communities (Anderson 1983)—makes it abundantly clear that neither at its dawn nor in its high modernist phase was this polity homogeneous, that even its European exemplars were as different as they were alike. What is more, their capacity to regulate boundaries and to control flows—of capital and cultural property, communications and currencies, persons and information— was invariably incomplete in the face of transnational pressures and incentives. So, too, was their hold over the loyalty of their citizens and subjects. Indeed, the nation-state has always and everywhere been a work in progress, nowhere a fully realized accomplishment. The same may be said, by extension, of its hyphen- nation: of the articulation of state to nation. Polities across the planet vary hugely in both the extent to which, and the manner in which, nation and state are con- joined in them, of which more shortly.

In part, it is just such complexities that have led to reformulations of the argu- ment from both sides—and to the opening up of a middle ground. Even those who have made the case most forcibly for the continuing relevance of the nation- state do not deny that it is undergoing transformation or that it has been weak- ened in some respects in the face of global capitalism (see, e.g., Hirst and Thomp- son 1996: 170–71). The problem, of course, is to specify how it has changed. For some, its metamorphosis is captured in an aphoristic shift, an apt metaphor for the millennial moment: Philip McMichael (1998: 113), for one, speaks of the sub- stitution of the “citizen state” for the “consumer state.” This is a polity, adds Susan Hegeman (1991: 72–73), in which identity, at all levels, is defined not merely by the consumption of objects, but also by the consumption of the past (89–91). Echoes, here, of Jean Baudrillard (1998); also of the language of national charters, in which the protection of consumers takes precedence over the protection of workers and citizens are redefined as “stakeholders.”

More substantively, synthetic positions typically begin by deconstructing the zero-sum opposition between globalization and the autonomous functioning of nation-states. Few would continue to deny that the sovereign independence of the latter has contracted, not least in the realms of economic management, defense, and communications; that, for all their efforts to regulate the flow of labor, their hold over the mobility of people, inward or outward, has been more or less undermined; that their parliamentary politics are devoted, in increasing proportion, to safeguarding the operations of the market, to providing stable and secure environments for transnational corporations, and to attracting overseas invest- ment. In this respect, add Hirst and Thompson (1996: 179), it is also true that, without international warfare and conventional enemies, the state does become less immediately significant to its citizens; “national efficiency” (in such things as industrial growth, education, health care, welfare, and the provision of infra- structure) does diminish; and solidarity, save for sporting allegiances, does pale. At the same time and in counterpoint, Sassen (n.d.: 6–9) observes, “most global processes materialize in national territories, [largely] through national institu- tional arrangements, from legislative acts to firms.” These may be transformed in the process, but they remain perceptibly national in their location and operation. To be sure, Sassen continues, states often participate actively in setting up those fiscal and legal frameworks through which the global economy works, and with- out whose specialized instruments it could not exist—they are not just inert objects on which that economy impacts. Nor are they inert objects in the face of the emergence of regional economic spheres that breach their frontiers— whether these be officially constituted, like the Oresund Region in Scandinavia (Peebles n.d.), or spaces of unregulated activity dominated by armed factions, like the Chad Basin in West Africa. With regard to the latter, in fact, Janet Roiman (1998) demonstrates that, far from proclaiming the demise of the nation- state, these transnational networks exist in complicated, mutually perpetuating, often complicitous relations with it; this notwithstanding the fact that those who control the networks—often very powerful armed factions—compete with gov- ernment for financial and regulatory ascendancy. In doing so, they depend on the very national frontiers they transgress and the institutions of the state in order to produce wealth; conversely, the state establishes its own legitimacy, and justifies its own existence, by doing battle with these armed factions.

It is also the case, as we have intimated, that not all nation-states submit to the demands of the global economy without some mediation or intervention; few administrations would survive if they did. Take postcolonial South Africa again: while the African National Congress (ANC) government is unreservedly commit- ted to participating in the global capitalist economy, its new labor laws seek to protect workers in ways that do not simply serve the interests of transnational business; quite the opposite, employers have protested these laws for that very reason. Whether or not they will survive, and what their effects will be over the long run, is still very much in question. But the general point of which this is an exemplary instance—that nation-states do seek to hold a measure of control over the terms on which their citizens engage with the market—will be clear. So too will the fact that the processes by which millennial capitalism is taking shape do not reduce to a simple narrative according to which the nation-state either lives or dies, ebbs or flourishes. Its impact is much more complicated, more polyphonous and dispersed, and most immediately felt in the everyday contexts of work and labor, of domesticity and consumption, of street life and media-gazing.

This brings us back full circle to the relationship between the nation-state and millennial capitalism—which, we reiterate, is not synonymous with globalism, although globalization is an inherent part of it. Rounding off the dialectics of the argument we have just outlined, we would like to make a few points about this relationship. All flow from things already said.

Let us begin with the most basic. There is an antinomy at the heart of the con- temporary history of the modernist polity. On one hand, there is no such thing, save at very high levels of abstraction, as “the nation-state.” Self-evidently, the sociology of the polities that exist under its sign varies dramatically. It is difficult to establish any terms in which, say, Germany and Guinea, Bhutan and Belgium, Uganda and the United States, England and Eritrea may be held to belong to any- thing but the most polythetic of categories. Nor are the substantive differences among them—differences that are growing as a result of their engagement with global capitalism—satisfactorily captured by resort to vapid oppositions, to con- ventional contrasts like rich versus poor, North versus South, successful versus unsuccessful countries. In some places, as we all know, the state can hardly be said to perdure at all, or to perdure purely as a private resource, a family busi- ness, a convenient fiction; in others, the nation, as imagined community, is little more than a rhetorical figure of speech, the color of a soccer stripe, an airline without aircraft, a university rarely open. More complicatedly, there are many postcolonial, postrevolutionary polities, not least but not only in Africa and the former Soviet Union, in which there have developed deep fissures between state and government, this being a corollary of the transition from old to new regimes, in which, as often as not, the power brokers, bureaucrats, and administrative per- sonnel of the past are either left in situ—typically to ensure the confidence of foreign investors—or succeed in finding less visible ways to keep their hands on the levers of authority. Almost invariably, this sets in motion a struggle into which neoliberal capitalist enterprise inserts itself, often with decisive effects. On occasion, too, as in Russia (Ries 1999), organized crime seizes on that struggle to fashion itself into a spectral, underground para-state, providing civic amenities and policing on a fee-for-service basis (cf. Derrida 1994: 83). This, in turn, leads to the popular impression that government has retreated, that order has evapo- rated, that the nation-state is no longer.

On the other hand, despite this variability in their political sociology, nation- states appear, at least in their exterior forms, to be more similar than ever before, converging on the same notions of the rule of law, enacting similar constitutions, speaking more and more English, borrowing from a single stock of signs and symbols, worshipping together at the altar of Adam Smith, and, yes, all alike dealing with the impact of the global economy—as well as the sense of crisis, real or imagined, to which its implosion has given rise. Even the strongest, for reasons we have spelled out, find themselves hard put to sustain past levels of public expenditure and/or the costs of infrastructural reproduction. Many of them, moreover, have been witness both to calls for “less government” and to a widening rupture in their hyphen-nation; in the disarticulation, that is, between nation and state. Indeed, the assertion of civil society against the state, itself a burgeoning global phenomenon, is just one symptom of that disarticulation. Of, so to speak, alien-nation. Again, none of this is unprecedented. Throughout their history, states have suffered legitimation crises, been held to account for exces- sive public spending, and had to deal with threats to the integrity of the political community. That, however, does not diminish their significance in the white heat of the millennial moment.

The millennial moment.

As the term suggests, it is out of the current sense of change and crisis, especially in its impact on the hyphen-nation of the modernist polity, that the millennial dimensions of millennial capitalism reenter our narrative in two ways.

First, it is striking that almost everywhere that occult economies have arisen, the perceived need to resort to magical means of producing wealth is blamed, in one way or another, on the inability of the state to assure its national citizens a regular income: to protect them from destitution as productive employment migrates away across its borders; to stop the inflow of immigrants and others who divert the commonweal away from autochthons; to incarcerate criminals, witches, and other nefarious characters who spoil the world for upright, hard- working people. The state is also held culpable for failing to safeguard those upright people from violence. To wit, when communal action is taken—in the name of informal justice, cultural policing, or whatever—against those who ply the immoral economy, it is often in the millennial hope of restoring coherence and control in a world run amok, of filling the void left by the withdrawal of the state and making good on its sundered obligation to the nation (Comaroff and Comaroff 1999d).

Second, in the face of the same rupture, there is a strong tendency for states to appeal to new or intensified magicalities and fetishes in order to heal fissures and breaches in the fabric of the polity. Here, again, an interpolation: recall our com- ments on the question of identity. For reasons alluded to earlier (and explored in extenso elsewhere; John L. Comaroff 1996) one of the most notable corollaries of the changing face of nationhood in the neoliberal age, and especially after 1989, has been an explosion of identity politics. Under these conditions, imagining the nation rarely presumes a “deep horizontal fraternity” any longer, not even in what once regarded themselves as the most undifferentiated of polities. While the vast major- ity continue to live as citizens in nation-states, they tend to be only conditionally, partially, and situationally citizens of nation-states. Ethnic struggles, ranging from polite altercations over resources to genocidal combat, seem immanent almost everywhere as membership is claimed on the double front of innate substance and primordial sentiment, as culture becomes intellectual property (Coombe 1998), as indigenous knowledge becomes an object of commerce, as aboriginal spirituality becomes the site of a consumerist quest (Povinelli, in this issue), as self-imagin- ings, visual representations, even genes become copyright incarnate.41 In the event, homogeneity—as “national fantasy” (Berlant 1991), national aspiration (Anderson 1983), national imperative—is giving way rapidly to a recognition of the irre- ducibility of difference. All of which puts even greater stress on hyphen-nation; all of which presses even more the necessity of finding its millennial key. The more diverse nation-states become in their political sociology, the higher the level of abstraction at which “the nation-state” exists, the greater the imperative to find that key. By their very nature, as David Harvey (1989: 108) notes, modernist states had always “to construct a . . . sense of community . . . based on [more than] money,” and, hence, to conjure up “a definition of public interests over and above the [bour- geois] class and sectarian interests” they served. They still have to fabricate that sense of community. But, with the displacement of class, the interests that they have now to encompass lie in cultural and other forms of identity.

That states rely on magical means to succeed in the work of hyphen-nation, of articulating nationhood, is a point recently made by Michael Taussig (1997) and Fernando Coronil (1997), each in his own way. A resort to mass-mediated ritual both to produce state power and national unity and to persuade citizens of their reality is epidemic in the age of millennial capitalism—in rough proportion, per- haps, to populist perceptions of crisis, to the inability of governments to sustain their monopoly over the means of violence and the flow of wealth, and to the alien-nation of their subjects. Thus, suggests Eric Worby (1998: 560), in those parts of Africa where the hold of ruling cadres is tenuous at best, executive authority has become dependent on the performance of quotidian ceremonial, extravagant in its dramaturgy and improvisational content alike, to ensure the collusion of citizen-subjects. The latter, he goes on (562; after Mbembe 1992a: 3–4), live with the state in a promiscuous hybrid of accommodation and refusal, power and parody, embodiment and detachment. This, in turn, tends to rob “the public” of its vitality and, reciprocally, vulgarizes the political—with it, nation- hood as well—reducing it to a chimera, which creates the need for yet more magic.

Here, it seems, lies the key to the magicality of the state in the age of millen- nial capitalism. It is not just that ruling regimes resort to theatrical display or to illusion to conjure up the present and future of the political community, its desti- nation; this has always been true, from Elizabethan royal progresses (cf. Geertz 1977) to the trumped-up rites of colonial regimes (cf. Fields 1985). It is, rather, that they become caught up in cycles of ritual excess in which ceremonial enact- ments of hyphen-nation, alike in electronic space and real time, stand as alibis for realpolitik—which recedes ever further as its surfaces are visible primarily through the glassy essence of television, the tidal swirl of radio waves, the fine print of the press. By constantly narrating hyphen-nation, moreover, these cere- monial enactments tend to draw attention to its fragility, to the ineluctable differ- ences on which the body politic is built, to the divergence of interests that it must embrace. State ritual itself, then, becomes something of a pyramid scheme: the more it is indulged, the more it is required. Hence its cyclicity, its excess, its mil- lennial qualities.

But it is not only in the register of ritual that nation-states engage with the millennial. Another crucial dimension is the fetishism of the law, of the capacity of constitutionalism and contract, rights and legal remedies, to accomplish order, civility, justice, empowerment. Like all fetishes, the chimerical quality of this one lies in an enchanted displacement, in the notion that legal instruments have the capacity to orchestrate social harmony. This misses a point once cogently made, in prose fiction, by Carlos Fuentes (1992), namely that power produces rights, not rights power; that law in practice, by extension, is a social product, not a prime mover in constructing social worlds. Still, like many fetishes—including the “free” market itself—this one continues to survive its repeated demystification. The modernist nation-state has, from the first, been grounded in a culture of legality. Its spirit, with a nod to Montesquieu, has always been the spirit of the law. Globalization and the growth of neoliberal capitalism intensify this by an order of magnitude. The latter, because of its contractarian conception of human relations, property relations, and exchange relations, its commodification of almost everything, and its celebration of deregulated private exchange, all of which are heavily invested in a culture of legality.42 The former, because of the way in which it demands new institutional modes of regulation and arbitration to deal with new forms of property, practice, and possession—as well as with the abrogation of old jurisdictional lines and limits (cf. Jacobson 1996; Salacuse 1991; Shapiro 1993). But the fetishism of the law goes way beyond this.
In situations of ruptured hyphen-nation, situations in which the world is con- structed out of apparently irreducible difference, the language of the law affords an ostensibly neutral medium for people of difference—different cultural worlds, different social endowments, different material circumstances, differ- ently constructed identities—to make claims on each other and the polity, to enter into contractual relations, to transact unlike values, and to deal with their conflicts. In so doing, it forges the impression of consonance amidst contrast, of the existence of universal standards that, like money, facilitate the negotiation of incommensurables across otherwise intransitive boundaries.43 Hence its capacity, especially under conditions of moral and cultural disarticulation, to make one thing out of many, illocutionary force out of illusion, concrete realities out of often fragile fictions. Hence, too, its hegemony, despite the fact that it is hardly a guarantor of equity. As an instrument of governance, it allows the state to repre- sent itself as the custodian of civility against disorder: as having a mandate to conjure moral community by exercising the monopoly of which Harvey (1989: 108) spoke—a monopoly over the construction of a commonweal out of inimi- cal, immanently fractious diversities of interest. This, in large part, is reflected in the rash of new constitutions written since the late 1980s. If law underpins the langue of neoliberalism, constitutionalism has become the parole of universal human rights, a global argot that individuates the citizen and, by making cultural identity a private asset rather than a collective claim, transmutes difference into likeness. It is an open question whether or not these constitutions yield any empowerment at all. (Interestingly, the celebrated South African one has recently been dubbed a Tower of Babel: it is utterly incomprehensible in the vernaculars of those whom it was supposed to enfranchise.44) After all, as we have said, not one of them actually speaks of an entitlement to the means of survival. They do not guarantee the right to earn or to produce, only to possess, to signify, to consume, to choose. This is consistent not only with the neoliberal mood of the millennium but also with another of its panaceas: the renaissance of procedural democracy, a “universal human right” that transposes freedom into choice by offering empowerment through the ballot—the black box that reduces politics to the rough equivalent of a quinquennial shopping spree (Comaroff and Comaroff 1997)—all in the name of the rule of law, of its magical capacity to promise new beginnings.

But cultures of legality, constitutionality, right, and democracy speak primar- ily to the question of hyphen-nation, to moral community and citizenship, from the discursive vantage of the state and its functionaries. From the other side of the hyphen, from the side of “society against the state,” there has emerged another, complementary discourse of populist, millennial optimism: civil society.

Postnative, Posthuman, Postscript: Civil Society in Pursuit of the Millennium

More than any other sign, perhaps, civil society has surfaced as the Big Idea of the Millennial Moment;45 indeed, as an all-purpose panacea for the postmodern, postpolitical, postnative, even “posthuman” condition.46 Its recent genealogy, before and after 1989, is too well known to detain us here (see, e.g., Walzer 1992; Cohen and Arato 1994; Krygier 1997), save to say that the more of a global obsession it has become, the less clear it is what the term might actually mean— as a concrete object(ive), as an abstract concept, or as a political practice. Civil society, it seems, is known primarily by its absence, its elusiveness, its incom- pleteness, from the traces left by struggles conducted in its name. More aspira- tion than achievement, it retreats before the scrutinizing gaze. For all those, like Václav Havel (n.d.), who seek a way Toward a Civil Society, there are others who deny the point of so doing. Why? Some, like Michael Hardt (1995: 27), argue that we are already in the “postcivil society” era, an era incapable of producing the conditions of its possibility. Others simply dismiss it as an inherently polymor- phous, inchoate, unspecifiable signifier. Worse yet, it is said to conflate an ana- lytic construct with an ideological trope, thus rendering the former promiscuous and the latter vacuous (Comaroff and Comaroff 1999a).

In spite of this, civil society has served as a remarkably potent battle cry across the world. During inhospitable times, it reanimates the optimistic spirit of modernity, providing scholars, public figures, poets, and ordinary people alike a language with which to talk about democracy, moral community, justice, and populist politics; with which, furthermore, to breathe life back into “soci- ety,” declared dead almost twenty years ago by the powerful magi of the Sec- ond Coming, especially Maggie Thatcher. Amidst fin de siècle cynicism and retrospection, protagonists of civil society look bravely toward a new world. True, their idyll has been disparaged for its excessive Eurocentrism, for its naive liberalism, for re-presenting old-style imperialism in a seductive new garb, and for the manner of its export by such latter-day evangelists as non- governmental organizations. True, too, it has been downsized, localized, tailored to the neoliberal age; purged, in short, of global historical visions and grand emancipatory dreams (cf. Cohen and Arato 1994: xii). But, notwithstanding the skepticism, the Idea—the fetish—has worked its magic, kindling a reformist spirit all over the place as it promises rescue from the political vacuum of postmodern nihilism.

What is it, then, about civil society that so fires the moral imagination? What makes it such a trenchant trope for these millennial times? An answer is to be found in the parallels between the history of the here and now and the history of the First Coming of the Idea in the late eighteenth century; the post-Enlightenment age in Europe, that is, that spawned the hyphenated nation-state, the concepts of political economy, culture, the civil, civility, civilization—and the distinction between “the state” and something that came to know itself as “society” (cf. Keane 1988a: 15).

It is common cause that the world-historical conditions of the late eighteenth century embraced philosophers and everypersons alike in a phenomenology of uncertainty (Becker 1994: xii–xiv); a sense of unease occasioned by the intersec- tion of epochs, at which time the generic nature of humanity, of sociality, of self- hood and its abstraction in labor, property, and rights, of the value of things, of received means and ends was under ontological reconstruction. Though they could not have known it, they were living at the front end of an Age of Revolu- tion (Hobsbawm 1962), an age that posed profound issues of practical epistemol- ogy. Those issues were formulated, in the first instance, in political terms: they grew out of a malaise of governance, of populist opposition to absolutist rule and monarchial despotism (see, e.g., Woods 1992: 79; Keane 1988b: 65).

But behind the surfaces of the political were working much more fundamen- tal processes of reconstruction: those attendant upon the advance of capitalism and commodity relations; upon the birth of the right-bearing citizen-subject; upon the empowerment of the bourgeoisie and the emergence of a public “with its own opinion[s]” and “interests” (Taylor 1990: 108; cf. Habermas 1989); upon the dawn of modernist nationhood; upon the rise of what Crawford Macpherson (1962) was famously to dub “possessive individualism.” In light of these processes, the problem of “the social” presented itself with particular force. How, given the erosion of old ways of being and knowing—not to mention the expand- ing scale and cumulative abstraction of human relations—was the present and future of “society” to be grasped? Wherein lay its moral, material, and regulatory moorings? It became imperative, says Tester (1992: 7), to “explain how society was [even] possible” in a world in which “time-honoured answers were collaps- ing through mixtures of political crisis, intellectual enlightenment, technological development and the . . . rapid urbanization of social life”; in which new, national divisions of labor were taking root amidst the encroachment on everything of finance; in which the sanctity of the family was seen to be at risk; in which peo- ple, things, and nature (cf. Coronil, in this issue) were being objectified in an altogether unprecedented manner. In which the prospect of Adam Smith’s face- less “society of strangers” stalked disturbingly close to hand—novel specters of a haunted gothic fiction dramatized the strangeness of what had become real (Clery 1995: 174).

It is not hard to see why, at the time, discourses of civil society, in both their analytic and utopic registers, should have focused on the issues that they did: on the relationship between state (or, more generally, political authority) and soci- ety; on the posited existence, in the space between the citizen and the sovereign polity, of an interpolated public with its own will; on the role of voluntary asso- ciations in providing alternative loci for the achievement of the commonweal; on a democratizing image of self-generating moral community, whose elemental atom was the Christian family; on the significance of the free market in under- writing the prosperity of that community; on the capacity of commerce to inscribe civility in a new civics. Foreshadowing here of Hegel, Simmel, Durkheim and Habermas.

The parallels with the present are more than obvious; indeed, they knit together all the various strands of our portrait of the Age of Millennial Capital- ism. Now, as then, the call for civil society typically presents itself as an emanci- patory reaction to a familiar doubling: on one hand, to the greater opacity, intrusive- ness, and monopolistic tendencies of government; on the other, to its diminishing capacity “to satisfy even minimally the political and economic aspirations” of its component publics (Haynes 1997: 16), to guarantee the commonweal, or to meet the needs of its citizenry. Thus, for example, in Central Europe the pursuit of the Idea, which took on millennial features from the first, is said to have arisen in response to increasingly repressive communist rule—and in postcolonial times, to have been sustained by the memory of Soviet excesses (see, e.g., Rupnik 1988; Krygier 1997). In the West, a cause for it has been found in burgeoning corpo- ratism of the state (Taylor 1990: 95–96) and a disenchantment with politics tout court. And in Africa it is ascribed to the rise of antistatist, promarket populism occasioned by the collapse of totalitarian regimes (Young 1994: 36), whose “pol- itics of the belly” (Bayart 1993) and vulgar spectacles of power (Mbembe 1992b) persuaded citizens that governments no longer “champion society’s collective interests” (Haynes 1997: 2).

But this, too, speaks purely to surfaces. Now, as then, the roots of the process lie deeper: in the interiors, and the animating forces, of the Age of Millennial Capitalism—in particular, in its impulse to displace political sovereignty with the sovereignty of “the market,” as if the latter had a mind and a morality of its own; to reorder the ontology of production and consumption; to reconstruct the essence of labor, identity, and subjectivity; to disarticulate the nation from the state; to reduce difference to sameness by recourse to the language of legality; to elevate to first causes “value-free” technological necessity and the ostensibly neutral demands of economy; to treat government as immanently undesirable, except insofar as it deregulates or protects “market forces”; to fetishize “the law” as a universal standard in terms of which incommensurable sorts of value—of relationship, rights, and claims — may be mediated; to encourage the rapid move- ment of persons and goods, and sites of fabrication, thus calling into question existing forms of community; to equate freedom with choice, especially to con- sume, to fashion the self, to conjure with identities; to give free reign to the “forces” of hyperrationalization; to parse human beings into free-floating labor units, commodities, clients, stakeholders, strangers, their subjectivity distilled into ever more objectified ensembles of interests, entitlements, appetites, desires, purchasing “power.” And so to raise the most fundamental question of all: In what consists the social? Society? Moral community?

Here, then, is our point. As in the late eighteenth century, and in strikingly similar fashion, the Idea of Civil Society makes its appearance just as the fabric of the social, the possibility of society, the ontological core of humanity, the nature of social distinction, and the essence of identity are being dramatically challenged; just as we experience an epochal metamorphosis in the organization of production, labor, and the market, in technology and its sociocultural implica- tions, in the constitutive connections between economy and polity, nation and state, culture and place, person, family, and community; just as we find it impos- sible to sustain the dominant terms of modernist sociology-as-lived, of received anthropologies of knowledge, of our geographical grasp of an increasingly four- dimensional world (Harvey, in this issue). Amidst populist moral panics, mass- mediated alienation, crises of representation, and scholarly perplexity, Civil Society, in its Second Coming, once more becomes especially “good to think,” to signify with, to act upon. The less substance it has, the emptier its referents, the more this is so; which is why its very polyvalence, its ineluctable unfixability, is intrinsic to its power as panacea. It is the ultimate magic bullet in the Age of Mil- lennial Capitalism. For it promises to conjure up the most fundamental thing of all: a meaningful social existence. And, thereby, to lay to rest—for now at least — Adam Smith’s ghostly phantasm: the Society of Strangers.

✦✦✦

We have argued that many of the enigmatic features of economy and society circa 2000—be they the allegorical transfiguration of the nation-state, the assertive stridency of racinated adolescence, the crisis of masculinity, the apoth- eosis of consumption, the fetishism of civil society, the enchantments of everyday life—are concrete, historically specific outworkings of millennial capitalism and the culture of neoliberalism. For all their apparent polysemy and disarticulation, these things are closely interrelated, all at once rooted in the past and new in the present. Together, they point to the fact that we inhabit an age that is both revo- lutionary and yet is also an ongoing chapter in the story of capital, a story that, in Theodor Adorno’s (1981: 96) phrase, “sound[s] so old, and yet [is] so new.” Despite the proclamations of neoliberal prophets, history has not come to an end. Nor will it soon. As Felipe Fernandez-Armesto (1999) puts it, “Millenarianism will survive the millennium.” Today’s apocalypse will become tomorrow’s mun- dane reality, laying down the terms of a dialectic out of which human beings will struggle to make sense of the world, to make livelihoods, politics, communities.

Already there are signs of altered configurations, of fresh efforts to challenge the triumphal reign of the market, to turn aside the sweeping consequences of transnational economic pressures. In the wake of fragmenting national identities, Turner (n.d.) observes, newly assertive social movements have begun to pursue common cause on a world scale, forging an alternative, critical “global civil soci- ety.” It is too early, patently, to take the measure of their success. But their “pas- sionate intensity,” to invoke the spirit of Yeats one last time, might yet kindle the mature politics of a new age; “the worst” might yet become the best. There are also signs that organized labor is seeking expansive ways and means to deal with the emergent economic order. Thus a leading unionist: “The end of the century is the starting point of . . . an international labor fightback. . . . Global unionism is born.”47

We can only hope. History, of course, will determine the substance of the poli- tics of the twenty-first century. For our part, we find it unimaginable that innovative forms of emancipatory practice will not emerge to address the excesses of neolib- eral capitalism. But that is in the future. For now, in introducing this special issue of Public Culture—a rich array of analyses of, among other things, economy and society, the production of knowledge, the fashioning of public spheres and popular discourses, the nature of nature, citizenship, subjectivity, and identity—we seek to stress the epistemic importance of critical distance. Of a refusal, that is, to be seduced into treating the ideological tropes and surface forms of the culture of neoliberalism—its self-representations and subjective practices, identities and utilities—as analytic constructs. Life, under millennial capitalism, is neither a game nor a repertoire of rational choices. It is irreducible to the utilitarian prag- matics of law and economy or to methodological individualisms of one kind or another. Indeed, these and other theoretical discourses are part of the problem. Critical disbelief, in pursuit of a reinvigorated praxis, is the beginning of a solution.