The historical logic of late capitalism

Critique of Big History in Harari’s “Sapiens,” Part 3.4

[Painting by

April Burke

]

Part 3.4 in my critique of Harari’s Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. See the full series to date.

How do we account for the widespread popularity of a book like Harari’s Sapiens? As I’ve been demonstrating throughout this series, the book is packed with flawed arguments and inconsistencies, and yet over 21 million copies have been sold in 65 languages.

What about it resonates with people? Or rather, how does Harari’s telling of history resonate with our own historical moment?

A kind of mental infection or parasite

In an earlier part of this series, I introduced a strawman Harari makes of what “Marxists tend to think” about culture, that “cultures are […] conspiracies concocted by some people in order to take advantage of others.”

This strawman of Marxian theory of culture is introduced by Harari as he counterposes it against the theory he sees as representing the dynamics of history, memetics, an idea that culture is essentially a randomly evolving mind virus, a “mental infection or parasite,” an idea which he arbitrarily and authoritatively presents as if it’s becoming or already standard (“Ever more scholars see…”):

Ever more scholars see cultures as a kind of mental infection or parasite, with humans as its unwitting host. […] According to this approach, cultures are not conspiracies concocted by some people in order to take advantage of others (as Marxists tend to think). Rather, cultures are mental parasites that emerge accidentally, and thereafter take advantage of all people infected by them. This approach is sometimes called memetics. […] Most scholars in the humanities disdain memetics, seeing it as an amateurish attempt to explain cultural processes with crude biological analogies. But many of these same scholars adhere to memetics’ twin sister – postmodernism. Postmodernist thinkers speak about discourses rather than memes as the building blocks of culture. […] No matter what you call it – game theory, postmodernism or memetics – the dynamics of history are not directed towards enhancing human well-being.[i]

Here, Harari counterposes the mysterious, accidental “dynamics of history” as understood from the theory of memetics—not against the social theory of Marx, but rather—against the vaguest possible notion of some conspiracy theory he misattributes to Marxist theorists, despite Marx being one of the most referenced historical figures in Sapiens.

To be sure, Marxists broadly speaking would not deny the existence of conspiracy. Even Harari describes the ways in which capitalists will often conspire against labor, to keep wages relatively low, for example. However, this has virtually nothing to do with culture or the various ways in which Marxist theorists typically think about culture.

What we commonly think of as culture is usually thought of in Marxist theory as a reproductive or superstructural phenomenon. Thus, literature scholars writing about Marxian theory have conceived of literature, for example, as “a constitutive social process” (See Raymond Williams), an activity which operates within social production.

I'm not aware of any Marxist who thinks culture is the product of conspiracy: from the Surrealist movement to the Frankfurt School; to Gramsci and the theory of hegemony; to Althusser on ideology; to more recent historical materialist theories relevant to questions of culture. To the extent that there's any tendency, none of the ideas are about conspiracy.

Marx's theory is one of political economy, of social relations or compositions, which involves formulation of dynamical laws unique to capitalist production. Marx considers appearances of wealth in society and the characters representing it—in capitalism, the worker, the capitalist, the landowner; in feudalism, the serf or peasant, the lord, the king—and works to analyze their functions within the economy, as well as the material conditions of their existence.

Memetics’ twin sister, or, the cultural logic of late capitalism

Not only do Marxists tend not to think of culture as conspiracy but some Marxist theorists have things to say about the types of social theory Harari holds up in favor, namely, what Harari describes as “memetics’ twin sister:” postmodernism.

For example, in his famous 1991 book Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism—far from theorizing about a conspiracy of the few—Fredric Jameson describes postmodernism as a broad cultural phenomenon, as part of the latest development of the global capitalist system (“late capitalism”):

the forms of transnational business […] the new international division of labor, a vertiginous new dynamic in international banking and the stock exchanges (including the enormous Second and Third World debt), new forms of media interrelationship (very much including transportation systems such as containerization), computers and automation, the flight of production to advanced Third World areas, along with all the more familiar social consequences, including the crisis of traditional labor, the emergence of yuppies, and gentrification on a now-global scale.[ii]

Some of the key features of this cultural phenomenon as Jameson describes it are an “absence of any discussion of ‘agency,’” a “seemingly disembodied cultural logic,” and a crisis of historicity, that is, a lack of any organic correspondence between the history we discover in school textbooks and the reality of the world as we experience it.[iii]

I think these are all features of Harari’s historical logic. What cultural logic is more disembodied than the idea that culture is a parasite which infects the mind? What’s more lacking in historical context than the idea that the course of history is directed by a disembodied mind virus?

Harari’s case for “game theory, postmodernism or memetics” constitutes what we might rather call the historical logic of late capitalism, to borrow Jameson’s phrase. Not only does Harari’s historical logic represent the sort of postmodern cultural logic which Jameson historicizes within the context of late capitalism but also—unlike the philosophers most associated with postmodernism, who explicitly intended to challenge power—Harari directs blame away from the powerful and outright naturalizes things like unjust social structures. As I’ve quoted previously, Harari writes, “Unfortunately, complex human societies seem to require imagined hierarchies and unjust discrimination.”[iv]

Like postmodernism as a cultural logic, Harari’s historical logic—with its absence of a discussion of agency, its lack of an historicity by which we could understand the reality we experience—ought to be understood in the late capitalist context of a world economy defined by things like automation, the flights of production to the “Third World,” and the new international division of labor which emerged from it.

This kind of cultural logic is realized every time Elon Musk and his ghoulish billionaire friends spout terms like “woke mind virus” while actively plotting a way forward for the domination of capital over labor. However, this logic is not concocted by the conspiring of those billionaires. Quite the contrary, their adoption and public expression of such logic is best understood in light of the radical political economic agendas they wield in the wake of the many crises late capitalism has brought.

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Notes

[i]. Harari, Sapiens (New York: HarperCollins, 2015), 238-9.

Harari, Sapiens, 242-3.

[ii]. Fredric Jameson (1991) Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press): xix.

[iii]. Ibid, xviii, 22.

[iv]. Harari, 136.