against all odds- hope and agency among young entrepreneurs

8/13/2019 Against All Odds- Hope and Agency Among Young Entrepreneurs

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AGAINST ALL ODDS

HOPE AND AGENCY AMONG YOUNGENTREPENEURS IN BRUSSELS

Elena Georgalla

090004349


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University of St Andrews

Department of Social Anthropology

SA4099 - Primary Research-Based Dissertation (2013)

Against All Odds: Hope among young

entrepreneurs in Brussels

ELENA GEORGALLA

I hereby declare that the attached piece of written work is my own work and that I have not

reproduced, without acknowledgement, the work of another.

Word Count: 10,191


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To Alessandro and his generation


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special thanks toDr Stan Frankland for his patience and guidance from the very beginning; Dr Mattia Fumanti for

his invaluable advice; Alessandro, Alex E., Diana, Scarlet, Alice, Maria, Chris, Laura, Alberto,

Andrea, Davide, Alexandros, Simona, Sophia, Alex B., Stephanie, and all of the wonderful

ThinkYoung team of Science 14b; Lazaros and his Parisiangauchistes, ; Madi who put 'no excuses'in

'you can be the change you want to see in the world'; Panos for reminding me that you can

always start anew; Aida, for whom Zizek is 'light reading'; Alexandra, who always makes me

smile; Michael; Mum and Dad. But most of all, to Dad who taught me to hope.


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TABLE OF CONTENTS

PROLOGUE [01]

PART 1| Crisis [04]

i.Mise en scne: [04]

ii. Millennial Capitalism: The times that are(n't) changing [05]

ii. The Entrepreneur aka PPB (Planetary Petty Bourgeoisie)[08]

iii. Youth [11]

PART 2| Charismatic Capitalism [13]

i. Weber [15]

ii. Totemic figures [16]

iii. Pilgrimage to the Valley [17]

iv. The Sermon on Rue Wiertz [18]

PART 3| Hope INC [21]

i.Hope as a technology of governance [22]

ii. Hope and Agency [25]

PART 4| Cruel Optimism : Lessons for Anthropology [28]

BIBLIOGRAPHY [30]


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abstractThe financial crisis of 2008, whose ramifications are still with us, has marked an epoch of

bourgeoning pessimism and dramatic change the world over, but especially in Europe. This

bleak state of affairs affects all levels of society and is reinforced by the pessimism and moral

fatalism with which social sciences, anthropology among them, have responded. Grounded in

fieldwork conducted in Brussels, the generative site of the crisis, this ethnography seeks to move

away from the discourse on trauma and the social pathologies of the crisis, and search for hope

within a declining capitalism. Elaborating hope through an elite culture of youths who arrive in

Brussels to pursue entrepreneurship, Against All Odds examines the ways in which the current

moment's two faces - recession and optimism - inform and feed each other. How is hope

generated and sustained by those who have access to it in this precarious moment? Can hope be

forged in crisis? Entrepreneurship is promoted as hope-through-hardship by the European

political class through a discourse of 'charismatic capitalism' which appeals, in a quasi-religious

manner, to the world-transforming capacities of the charismatic individual, the entrepreneur. By

becoming entrepreneurs young women and men around Europe overcome the liminality of

unemployment and not-yet-adulthood in which society situates them and find hope by

recognising and cultivating joy in individual life. As such, their hope becomes transcendence and

departure. Engaging anthropological themes about uncertainty, capitalism and crisis through the

prism of youth, this text appeals to the responsibility of anthropology to employ its moral

optimism to promote hope and happiness in the world.


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A G A I N S T A L L O D D S

Prologue

'So what do you do for a living'? a thick-moustached security guard asked me. He

worked at the European Parliament in Brussels where I was attending a conference for

the day. 'I'm only an intern in Brussels for the summer', I explained. He seemed puzzled.

'Oh. Then it must be hard to get a job here, no? I hope you get a job'. I replied that I was

still a student and I was graduating in a year. 'Hopefully...', I said, and just before I left he

added 'Well, keep on hoping!'. In retrospect, this encounter embodied what I came to

associate with my fieldwork in Brussels the summer of 2012: uncertainty, impasse, and

hope.

This is an ethnography of hope in a time of crisis at a hinge moment in the history of the

maison Europenneand the global capitalist system. Since 2008 the collapse of the house of

cards that was global finance has initiated - or prolonged - an epoch of dramatic social

tumult: overnight national bailouts, the division of European states into debtors and

creditors, ponderous austerity measures, teargas-contained social unrest, and indignation

movements. It is a moment of burgeoning pessimism and dramatic transformation. As

we stand on the bridge of epochal changes, it becomes evident that the heydays of

neoliberal capitalism are in decline, allowing many, Zlavoj Zizek (2011) among them, to

render capitalism obsolete and warn humanity that we are 'living in the end times'.

This bleak state of being in the present affects all levels of society and is reinforced by thepessimism and moral fatalism with which social sciences, anthropology included, have

responded. Indeed, anthropology has always shown more interest in pessimism,

declinism and alienation than in hope (Thin 2012). Even when hope - or its absence-

becomes object of ethnographic enquiry it is often in relation to marginal and subaltern

populations, disruptive elements or the historical working class.

Grounded in fieldwork conducted in Brussels the summer of 2012, I seek to move away

from the discourse on trauma and the social pathologies of the crisis, and search for


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sources of optimism within capitalism. How is hope conceived by those who have access

to it in this precarious moment? My text attends to the invention of hope under crisis by

the European political class, disguised in the rhetoric of entrepreneurship and directed

predominantly towards youth, those most affected by uncertainty and unemployment.Such hope is deployed as a technology of governance for the reorientation of knowledge

towards an exodus from the crisis while safeguarding capitalism. By looking at a largely

privileged group of young people arriving in Brussels to pursue entrepreneurship, I

examine the ways in which the current moment's two faces, recession and optimism,

inform and feed each other. 'Crisis' literally means crossroads: things could go either of

two ways (Graeber 2011:177). Thus, because hope is embedded in the essence of crisis

the present moment appears ripe for the anthropological study of hope.

Methodology

My thematic organisation counterpoises voices collected in the field with those of theory,

generating a dialogue between the interlocutors involved in my ethnographic experience

of living and hoping at the source of the crisis in Brussels. By overlapping ethnography

with theory, I allow my text to be organised around issues that I encountered in the field

and which may contribute to ongoing scholarly debates on hope and the future of

capitalism. Academic accounts of hope and happiness often fail to acknowledge that

these are emotions lived and experienced by people. Therefore, such methodological

approach appeals to descriptions of the capitalist experience, not as a machine or a self-

regulated system but in terms of real human emotions. Ethnography is saturated in

theory not in consistent descriptions, but in the form of 'snapshots' deliberately used to

create an effect of constant transition and fluidity, because both the people I encountered

and the information I assembled were transient and in constant flux.

The text is organised as follows: First, I situate my field in 'Brussels' and in 'crisis' against

the backdrop of 'millennial capitalism', introducing the elite culture of interns,

entrepreneurs and Eurocrats and I discuss 'youth' as a liminal category in politics and

anthropology. Second, I argue that the present distribution of hope through

entrepreneurship adheres to a quasi-religious mode which I term 'charismatic capitalism'.


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Third, I examine hope as a governance strategy and as a form of individual transcendence

withincapitalism.

My leitmotiv is to situate hope within a self-conscious stand in anthropology. Whatever

the outcome of the present crisis, one certain consequence has been the breakdown of

the economists' intellectual hegemony. This represents a chance for anthropologists to

link our engagement with people's lives into the discipline's original mission: 'to

understand humanity as a whole' (Hart and Oritz 2008:1). I share Thin's (2005:4) anxiety

that failing to use anthropological insights to promote happiness and prevent suffering,

we are being hostile to humanity in general. Thus, the hope I defend is a joyous hope, a

transcendental hope. It is a hope grown within capitalism which however, hopes differently

by recognising and cultivating joy in individual life. By becoming entrepreneurs these

young people I encountered in Brussels transcend the liminal stage in which society

situates them, and by conveying their hopes I am looking at the complexity of being

bound to life. Optimism is 'a scene of negotiated substance that makes life bearable as it

presents itself ambivalently, unevenly, incoherently' (Berlant 2011:24). It is the fuel that

keeps the event going. Such hope is not mere facticity. It is departure. Embracing it

enables my informants to transcend the nature of the homo economicus and become homoviator ; not another link in the production chain but a wayfarer, a pilgrim. In the spirit of

hope in this sense, this text is also an instantiation of my own hope as a response to the

hope of millions of my peers across Europe for better days.


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1 | C R I S I S

Mise en Scne:

I arrived in Brussels for a three-month-long unpaid internship with ThinkYoung, a

European think tank specialising in promoting youth entrepreneurship. I conducted

fieldwork partly at a series of entrepreneurship study sessions organised by ThinkYoung,

where experienced entrepreneurs would teach business skills to young apprentices, and at

numerous conferences on youth enterprise I attended while in Brussels.

Brussels is a city of split personality. To demonstrate this duality, I turn to a useful

semantic scheme: there is /Brussels/, the capital of Belgium and a multicultural equation

with all the related demographics. Then, there is , the generative site of the

crisis, whereby Brussels becomes metonymic to the Troika- the European Central Bank,

the European Commission, and the International Monetary Fund that have the most

power over Europe's financial future - albeit only the Commission is stationed in

Brussels. It is the latter Brussels I am concerned with. This is the Brussels one reads about

in The Financial Times, fresh out of print in the hands of white-collared Eurocrats pacing

towards their respective bureaus early in the morning, hastily glancing at the Rolex

watches around their wrists. They inhabit decision-making amphitheatres and closed-

door meeting chambers, attend conferences and networking events, and have their shiny

black Mercedes parked by their chauffeurs in the high-security garage of the European

Parliament.

They are the European political class; the elite. They are those who mandate the

privatisation of everything and the abolition of all aid for everyone but the Bank. These

are the people Badieu (2010:13) refers to as those 'who tremble at night like

schoolchildren when they learn that representatives of ''the market'' have rated them

AAB rather than AAA'. Hence, he asks: 'is it not barbarous, this consensual hold over

our official masters by unofficial masters, whose whole concern is their current and

future profits in the lottery in which they stake their millions?'. The 'unofficial master' in

Brussels is capitalism per se, personified in the ambitious project of the 'Eurozone'.


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'Rescuing' the Eurozone came to be synonymous with 'resolving the crisis': 'Merkel

pressed on Eurozone rescue policy' (The Financial Times, October 2012) read the

headlines.

My attention to the hope emerging from such a vicious market environment derives

partially from the description of Brussels as the spatiotemporal stage for the latest

chapter of capitalist crisis to unfold. In Brussels, the urgency of the short-term- the future

of the next ten minutes, norm in the world of finance - penetrates all aspects of life. Such

nervousness is felt by everyone in Europe and is generated primarily in the lobbies and

amphitheatres of .

I find this conceptualisation of Brussels to be in line with Bauman's (2004) assertion that

Europe of the 21st century is unsure of itself and its place in a fast changing world; it is

devoid of vision; limited in resources and lacking determination. It is also struggling with

the consequences of a one-sided process of globalisation which is divorcing power from

politics, inciting the shift from the social state to security-focused governance and piling

up the casualties of uncontrolled market expansion. 'Is the centuries-long European

adventure grinding to a halt?', Bauman asks (2004:18), almost rhetorically. The overall

trend leaves little to the imagination. 'We have lost', complains Lepenies (1998), 'the will

and the ability of our long-distance orientation. European elites have ceased to offer an

attractive example to follow'. Such anxieties surrounding the trajectory of Europe and the

present financial misadventures fit into a wider set of narratives about 'millennial

capitalism' circa 2000.

Millennial Capitalism: The times that are(n't) changing

Linear continuity and the certainty of a telos, the notion that history has a direction, are

integral to the neoliberal vocation (Trouillot 2003). Thus, the triumph of capitalism

against communism and the globalist euphoria that claimed the 'end of history' at the end

of the Cold war, devoid capitalism of a purpose and a vision. Postmodernist melancholy

buried utopias. Hitherto, there was never a future: 'the present was the future' (Trouillot,

12). Searching for a new purpose for capitalism proponents of the free market - 'market

extremists', Graeber (2011) calls them - drew attention to a form of messianic, millennial

capitalism: 'a capitalism that presents itself as a gospel of salvation; a capitalism that, if


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rightly harnessed, is invested with the capacity to wholly transform the universe of the

marginalised and disempowered' (Comaroff and Comaroff 1999). Charismatic capitalism

is a perplexing amalgam of hyperrationalisation and market extremism, and 'money

magic' and prosperity gospels. Such is the capitalism that prospered up until the recentcrisis. Or so it seems.

In contemporary Europe, a fear of rupture and collapse is evident in the everyday

turbulences of the market. When Zizek (2011) warns that 'we are living in the end times'

he is saying that the current crisis is portending the upcoming cataclysmic crash of

neoliberal capitalism. Nevertheless, notwithstanding the awesome consequences of the

financial calamity in the 21st century, there is very little novelty in the teleological

prophecies of our times. The truth is that crisis is ingrained in capitalism. Taussig (1992)

deemed capitalism 'a Nervous System', always unsure of its self and constantly in a state

of emergency. Harvey (2000:23) links the teleological inevitability attached to

neoliberalism with the crisis tendencies of capitalism, which 'widen and deepen at every

turn'. Marx himself, analysed the inevitable cyclical character of crisis, as a mechanism

employed by the bourgeoisie to congeal the resilience of the capitalist system. Thus, while

the outbreak of crises will endure, the bourgeoisie has developed ways of overcomingthem: 'On the one hand by enforced destruction of a mass of productive forces; on the

other, by the conquest of new markets, and by the more thorough exploitation of the old

ones. That is, by paving the way for more destructive crises, and by diminishing the

means whereby crises are prevented' (Marx 1967:50).

Such Marxist echoes are alluded in the European Commission's blueprint on fostering

entrepreneurial activity as a panacea to unemployment amidst the crisis: 'Since 2008

Europe has been suffering the effects of the most severe economic crisis it has seen in 50

years. Entrepreneurship is a powerful driver of economic growth: it creates new

companies and jobs, opens us new markets, and nurtures new skills' (European

Commission 2012). In other words, the European technocrats are reluctant to look

outside the short-sighted rubric of the capitalist cosmos to redress yet another crisis,

given the entrepreneur is the archetypical homo economicus, a priori producing and being

produced by capitalism (Bourdieu 1979). In league with Marx, such an approach by the

European bourgeoisie prepares the ground for another crisis to follow. In this manner,


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crisis is being normalised by the same institutions that have produced and sustain it. With

this, I am trying to deny crisis the exceptional capacities attached to it and argue that

crisis is more the pinnacle of the 'Nervous system' that is capitalism than a moment

exceptional to history or consciousness.

Consequently, I am proposing that a spreading precarity provides the dominant structure

and experience of the present moment, cutting across class and localities, which raises

questions about the degree to which precarity, as a political and economic condition, is

suffered by fragmented populations or by the subjects of a 'nervous' capitalism in general.

Precarity refers to the sociopolitical state of uncertainty about the future that leaves

people suspended between poverty and prosperity, deprives them of material security,

and forces them to live with a social status which is constantly under the threat of

collapse (Smoczyski 2011).

Uncertainty in Europe during my fieldwork in the summer of 2012, was increasingly a

given condition for everyone but most of all for the younger generation, most brutally

struck by unemployment and deprivation. This situation is a conundrum for the political

class of the Europe, who for a long time were wary of using the phrase 'lost generation',

until Italy's Mario Monti broke the silence by telling his younger compatriots: 'The truth,

and unfortunately it's not a pleasant one, is that the premise of hope - in terms of

transformation and improvement to the system - will be only for those who will come of

age in a few years' (Makowski, 2012).

Unable to create new jobs (or forge hope) the European decision-makers came up with a

master plan. A reorientation of knowledge towards the future creates new alternatives

and fabricates a rhetoric that channels hope for the future. In this case the alternative issimple: do not wait from the authorities to give you a job. Become an entrepreneur. Make

a job for yourself. 'Start an enterprise. Be creative, disruptive and ground-breaking' (The

Economist 2012). The cause was quickly embraced by foundations, think tanks and

individuals who became apostles for entrepreneurship. No week passed during my stay in

Brussels that I did not attend some very important conference, lecture or symposium on

entrepreneurship, of the hundreds organised each year, hosted in the halls of the

European institutions and 'graced' with the presence of some Member of the European


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Parliament (MEP). In one of those, a Spanish MEP read out the strategic planning for

entrepreneurship to his young audience. Ironically, when it was their turn to make

recommendations, he had a 'very important meeting' to attend.

In this framework, my text attends to the invention of hope under crisis by the political

class and its distribution in the form of newly found knowledge, exploring what the crisis

is producing rather than what it has taken away or what is lost (Weiss 2004). As a

technology entrepreneur said, 'crisis is always connected with opportunity'. While my

informants jettison their past and commit themselves to a future without a telos, I

examine the ways in which the current moment's two faces - recession and optimism -

inform and feed each other. Drawing attention to people's inventiveness, I intend not to

belittle the privation of the contemporary moment or to romaticise what it means to live

under crisis, but rather to acknowledge those worlds that my informants inhabit in the

only way they know how, hoping against all odds, and despite enormous pessimism.

The Entrepreneur aka PPB (Planetary Petty Bourgeoisie)

The entrepreneurial generation of millennials emerging from the crisis is best described in

the context of precarity. The young opportunists I encountered who arrive in Brussels en

massein search of a mentor, venture capital, employment or business partners, constitute

the 'Planetary Petty Bourgeoisie' (PPB) (Berlant 2011), part of the Precariat, the newly

emergent social class of modernity (see Sending 2011). Having come of age in the gloomy

climate of the recession (most of my informants were under 25 years-old), they had come

into terms with the nervousness of the system and were fascinated by risk-taking. Security

becomes less of an aspiration for those who have less access to it (Berlant, 193)

producing a sense of freedom and potential for many precariats. Perceptions of labour

are completely altered and can be gamed on behalf of forging a more satisfying life. No

longer does the PPB work for the benefit of someone else. On the contrary, precariat

entrepreneurs opt out of a live-to-work ideology altogether and become the boss of

themselves.


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Most of my informants were indeed a precariat bourgeoisie. Despite the failure of their

efforts to find a conventional job, they have access to resources that allow them to

pursue entrepreneurship (codeword: money). They are the growing 'intern class' of highly

educated individuals who attended prestigious universities and undertake unpaidpositions, often overqualified for the banal tasks they are assigned; others who live off

temporary jobs while searching for venture capital for their business plans, and many

with graduate and post-graduate qualifications who fled their homes pursuing better jobs,

or to acquire new skills for adjusting to the rapidly growing pressures to secure modes of

living on. Such a skill was entrepreneurship for many of my younger informants like

Panos, a thirty-year-old Greek who worked at the same office complex as me. He held a

degree in economics and having lost his job as an accountant in Athens, he moved to

Brussels to take up an EU-funded traineeship with a company specialising in youth

enterprises. After nine months of 'training' he would have gained all the necessary

experience to start a similar venture himself. Defending his decision to leave Greece, he

told me: 'Why should I stay in Greece? I lost my job there. I came here to try and learn

something new'.

The one thing my informants had in common was a collective nostalgia for a differentfuture motivated by the promise of a 'charismatic capitalism' that evangelises prosperity

through entrepreneurship. The haunting question for them is how, in the nervousness of

this enduring present, one finds footing and hope in new manners of being in it. In

pursuing entrepreneurship, the respective motives of my informants varied from sheer

pursuit of profit to a desire to make a genuine change in their communities.

Becky, a 21 year-old British entrepreneur who came to Brussels to attend a training

session organised by ThinkYoung was very critical of the motives of her fellow

participants. She identified as a social entrepreneur and worked with disadvantaged youth

helping them find employment and complete their education. She told me she was very

displeased with the other participants and their profit-seeking attitude. 'They have

everything and all they want is to make money', she told me, alluding to their advantaged

background. Then she blushed and admitted that it was rather ironic on her behalf to

criticise them as she had also graduated from a very prestigious British university.

However, what upset her is that the opportunity to become an entrepreneur is not open


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to everyone. 'I read that five per cent of youth want to become entrepreneurs. What

about the ninety-five per cent? Who is going to give them opportunities?', she asked

anxiously.

Alessandro, one of my colleagues at ThinkYoung was another PPB archetype. At 25 he

was one of the oldest interns in the office. When he joined the team he already held a

bachelor degree in economics from his native Italy, had been on student exchange

placements in Berlin and had completed a postgraduate degree in International

Management at the University of Lausanne. At ThinkYoung he was assigned the design

and management of an ambitious project mapping the gravity of 'skills mismatch', a

growing phenomenon affecting European youth following the recession. In his final

report, Alessandro defined skills mismatch as 'the gap between an individual's job skills

and the demand of the job market [which] has become a central challenge for Europe,

affecting [...] the current and prospective welfare of youth'. Having received a grant from

a coalition of corporate sponsors of European heavy industry companies, Alessandro

completed his report based on a survey he disseminated online. Ironically, ThinkYoung

received negative criticism from other youth project donors on the grounds that one of

the primary partners of the coalition that funded Alessandro's research, Italianautomobile manufacturer FIAT, had recently closed some of its factories in Italy causing

hundreds of young employees to become redundant. Last I heard from him, Alessandro

went back to Italy and, unable to find a job, he returned to full-time education.

One of my most striking encounters was with a group of three Belgian girls in their early

twenties who had just returned from a year travelling around the world filming a

documentary on young entrepreneurs. They agreed to meet me at Cafe Belga in vibrant

Place Flagey and talk about their project which they called GoYoung1. 'We knew nothing

about entrepreneurship or economics. None of us are entrepreneurs. After graduation we

came across a book called 'Tour du monde en 80 homme' about this guy who travelled around

the world and met social entrepreneurs.... It is a bit dated now so we decided to do

something similar with youth and see how they decide to become social entrepreneurs'.

They maintained that social entrepreneurship is a great model for youth. 'We are young,

1See http://www.goyoung.org/


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we have no kids, no husbands. The moment you settle down and have a family... when

you are forty and you have a mortgage to pay, you are less likely to go for it.'

Youth

When you are young, you 'go for it'. As my informants move around cities, make deals and

build networks they are insisting on their centrality and not marginality to the social,

despite the young of their age. Grasping worlds in which they can be in control, enables

them to embrace the future in a manner that juxtaposes their conception as 'liminal

citizens' by politics and anthropology alike. Certainly, our heuristics of understanding

youth have come a long way from when Margaret Mead (1928) pioneered the earliest

influential study on youth examining what 'coming of age' meant for Samoan girls. Like

Mead, other anthropologists framed youth as a transitional life stage. This created an

analytical blind spot that prevented us from seeing how youth are creative cultural agents

in their own right (Liu, Snellinger, and Lewis, 2011). Insofar as they are unable to get a

'proper paid job', my informants are stuck in this liminality; they are not 'complete adults'.

Becoming entrepreneurs almost instantly alters this situation. Hitherto, they acquire a

transcendental title, they become 'adults'.

There are certain panics projected onto young people which represent a striking

ambivalence associated with youth: the suspicion that young people are not mature

citizens with agential capacities, and simultaneously, the fear that they are actually citizens

with the power to effect change that some may not desire (Shepard and Hayduk 2002).

The specific targeting of youth in policy-making is linked to their representation in the

media in the guise of 'folk devils' (Cohen, 1972): the Greek rock-thrower, the

megaphone-wielding Spaniard anarchist, the student rioter in Oxford street. Youth in

these incarnations personify a given society's deepest anxieties and hopes about its own

transformation (Maira and Soep, xv).

This is not to imply that the young form a 'homogeneous, sociological category of people

which thinks, organises and acts' in coherent ways (Seekings 1993:xiv). I do, however,

embrace the notion that, in many Western contexts, youth, along with other


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disenfranchised persons (notably, the unemployed) constitute a kind of counternation: a

virtual citizenry with its own modalities of politics with which to address the economic

and political conditions that determine its plight (Venkatesh, 1997). The reason youth are

often analysed as being 'freer', more creative or critical of their society, is because they areless invested in or committed to particular social roles (Cole and Durham, 166).

Entrepreneurship fits in this discourse insofar as it is linked with creativity. It is by virtue

of charismatic individuals epitomised by the visionary entrepreneur that capitalism

transforms into a hope-yielding 'charismatic capitalism'. As the girls of GoYoung told me

'entrepreneurs have a mind-set that sees the possibilities rather than the problems created by change'.


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2| CHARISMATIC CAPITALISM

In this section, I analyse the quasi-religious manner of evangelising a prosperous future

via a 'charismatic capitalism' epitomised by the entrepreneur. It is no accident that a form

of 'charismatic capitalism' evangelised in the 'gospel' of entrepreneurship bursts onto the

scene when, once more, neoliberal capitalism appears to be in decline. If situated, as I

argue, in the context of the global rise of evangelicalism in the millennium, the present

instumentalisation of the entrepreneur as a messenger for a mediated (capitalist) future

becomes more coherent. I find the work of Charles Piot (2010) on the dramatic rise of

Charismatic Christianity in Togo at the end of the Cold War, in line with this

interpretation. Piot writes that 'at a time in which the money has dried up, the state has

pulled back from social and developmental fields, Churches have stepped into the void

and begun to reorganise the lives and imaginations of those in city and village' (Piot, 5).

During my own fieldwork in Brussels, in the numerous conferences and lectures I

attended, 'apostles' of entrepreneurship gave sermon on a charismatic capitalism in a

manner which evoked quasi-religious language, imagery and practices. In league with the

Weberian tradition, I use the term 'charismatic capitalism' to describe the messianic

capitalism that evangelises prosperity through the hardships of economic uncertainty,

evoking the world-transforming potential of the entrepreneur's charisma.

In a gathering of a network of entrepreneurs I found myself in a fluorescent-lit room,

listening to a presentation entitled 'Insights from an entrepreneurial journey'given by Ashok, an

Indian Silicon Valley veteran. He described himself as a 'conqueror of the American

Dream' and among others, he spoke of the virtues of entrepreneurship: 'When the world

is in trouble, the entrepreneur comes to the rescue. Unleash the entrepreneurs and they

will get you out of trouble'. The charisma of the entrepreneur, Ashok told his audience,

consisting mostly of students in their twenties, is the catalyst to the exodus from the

financial turmoil. The resemblance of the methods employed to proselytise new

entrepreneurs to the modus operantiof Pentecostalism, the fastest growing religion in the

world (Barker 2005), is striking. Textbook Weber, neoliberal enterprise is cardinal to the

global Pentecostal mood of the moment: 'free-for-service, consumer-cult, prosperity-


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gospel denominations... creeds [which] reform the Protestant ethic with enterprise,

fulsomely embracing the material world.... promising swift payback to those who

embrace Christ' (Comaroff and Comaroff 2000: 314). Pentecostalism meets neoliberal

enterprise when in African churches prayer meetings respond to explicitly mercenarydesires, from remedies to unemployment to pleads to win the lottery, providing a virtual

blueprint for disciplining the believer into the neoliberal economy. 'I want everyone to

pray for success this week- that you will get the job you have been looking for, the money

you need.... This is your reward for living a Christian life', Piot reports of a pastor

sermonising in Togo (Piot, 54). I witnessed similar oracles offered by senior

entrepreneurs on several occasions. Madi, an eminent female entrepreneur employed by

the Commission, whom I saw speaking at three separate events, said of the hardships of

unemployment: 'Young people lack opportunities and purpose. That's what's keeping

them in bed. You need to visualise the final goal... Whatever you can conceive you can

achieve. The universe will conspire to give it to you'.

The religious movements of the late 20th century are largely premised on millennial

narratives about the Christian End of Times, whereby the Second Coming evokes not a

Jesus who saves, but one who pays dividends (Kramer 1999). These fantastical narrativesdenounce the structures of the past - the 'failed' state or traditional religion - to animate a

charismatic moment, and redefine historical agency - less about a relationship with the

past and present and more about nostalgia for the future (Piot, 67). Recall that the

neophyte entrepreneur is trying to escape a past stage of liminality (unemployed, not yet

an adult) enchanted by the promise of a mediated future. This entails an immediate

magical negation of the past and present. 'I was a caged animal until the age of thirty-nine

[when I became an entrepreneur]', Ashok said during his presentation. My younger

informants would most frequently refer to the future when they spoke of their business

aspirations: 'No, I don't have a company yet. But I believe that one day I will', Teuta, an

aspiring entrepreneur in her early twenties told me. She did not know how yet, but she

was doing her best, including spending a fortune to attend conferences and networking

events around Europe. The entrepreneurial gospel is successful when it manages to

refigure temporality away from a past tied to, while sometimes also haunting, the present,


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to a reoccupation of the future. The entrepreneur becomes a hope-monger by virtue of

becoming a medium for an alternative future.

Weber

The notion of charisma in capitalism and the discourse on enterprise are concepts

pioneered by Max Weber, for whom capitalism was based on rational enterprise

undertaken with a view to future profit (Hann and Hart 2011:146). Whole societies would

place their livelihood in the hands of capitalists seeking uncertainfuture profits because of

the twofold form of enterprise. The first is speculative and involves people gambling

based entirely on their 'animal spirits' (Keynes 1936). Charismatic capitalism, however,

transcends mere speculation. The second form of enterprise, the one that most struck

Weber, was one driven by a compulsion to eliminate the risks of relying on uncertain

futures, a vital prerequisite for capitalism to grow. Famously, Weber believed that

capitalism was intertwined with religious developments and wrote of the 'elective affinity'

between protestant religion and rational enterprise. Today this is still evident in the rise of

messianic Christianity and in the religious evocations of campaigns promoting

entrepreneurship.

Parkin's (1972) fieldwork among the Girama of Kenya demonstrates how becoming an

entrepreneur entails a form of (religious) transcendence. Post-independence was marked

by the rise of the coconut export market which attracted a new class of entrepreneurs.

Palm trees were previously used principally to make wine for local ceremonial use, which

burdened the export business. Therefore, the entrepreneurs had to win the support of the

elders and solve the problem that in the community export profits were expected to be

spent on public ceremonies, which of course included the consumption of palm wine. To

escape this conundrum, some entrepreneurs sought to extricate from traditional

institutions by embracing a new religion - Islam - which prohibited ceremonial drinking.

Emancipation from diffuse past ties is compatible with a more reliable calculation of

capitalist profit (Hann and Hart, 148). In this light, Ashok's story of his decision to

abandon his highly-paid job for the Indian government (which involved him having a

private jet), move to the US, and become an entrepreneur, might gain some sense. 'If you


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want to be a free animal, get rid of the jet and fly commercial!', he concluded. In what

follows, I look into other quasi-religious elements I experienced among those business

'missionaries'.

Totemic figures

The mythology attached to entrepreneurship draws on two overarching principles: first,

that entrepreneurs constitute an exceptional 'clan' ('We the entrepreneurs...', they often

say) and second, that the 'animal spirits' of the entrepreneur - their speculative passions

and expectations - have the capacity to make and re-make the world (Harvey, 255). In

this light, it is not an exaggeration to argue that the 'pantheon' of charismatic individuals,

whose innovations have sparked world-transforming effects, acquire totemic status.

'Totem' is here synonymous to the 'animal spirits' of those individuals whose legacy is

emblematic of the entrepreneurial 'clan', reminding their 'heirs' of their legendary past and

the role they can play in its continuation.

In his lecture, Ashok paid honour to the 'forefathers' of entrepreneurship: 'Consider Bell,

Edison, Carnegie. They all started in a garage and have now left a huge legacy. They are

now legends who have changed the world so much we can say that the Arab Spring was a

result of Zuckerman and Twitter'. On another occasion, Andrea, the boss at ThinkYoung,

asked me to visit every single bookstore in the city and buy as many copies of Richard

Branson's best-seller Like a Virgin: Lessons they won't reach you at Business SchoolI could find.

He wanted to give the books to the participants at the study session. 'It has to be

Branson', he emphasised. Branson, founder of Virgin Group of companies along with

other business magnates2, such as Steve Jobs, founder of Apple, Mark Zuckerman who

launched Facebook and Bill Gates owner of Microsoft, , constitute the totemic figures ofentrepreneurship, the legacy of whom has changed the world by pushing capitalism to its

limits, most prominently, in their desire-generating capacities. As Fahrid, an established

entrepreneur said: 'If Steve Jobs asked you whether you wanted an i-pod you wouldn't

know what it was. He made you want it'. Remarkably, the public grief that followed the

death of Jobs in 2011 reinforces his totemic status. 'There will never be anyone as

visionary as him', Fahrid concluded. In the Weberian way the Protestant ethic

2 Magnates is a term used to describe entrepreneurs who have achieved wealth and prominence from a particular

industry.


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transformed the social system in the past, the entrepreneurial ethic gives birth to the new

idealised social forms and desires of our times to the extent that 'our cultural hero is not

the artist or the reformer, not the saint or the scientist, but the entrepreneur' (Deresiwicz

2012).

The search of their own 'hero' drives many aspiring entrepreneurs to Brussels.

Mentorship - becoming the protg of some experienced entrepreneur- is almost

mandatory if you wish to survive in the market. When I met Ashok, I was also

introduced to his protg, a Canadian man, younger than thirty, who claimed that

meeting Ashok on a business trip in Turkey, completely changed his perspective. 'I was

lost', he said. 'Ashok helped me stand back on my feet'. A kind of initiation - finding your

own 'business angel' - entails a negation of previous ties and practices and complete

dedication to becoming an apprentice. As another entrepreneur at the study session told

the young participants: 'Don't dream! Contact me!'

Pilgrimage to the Valley

The Silicon Valley in the San Francisco Bay area in California, a conglomeration of

industries that lead virtually every sector in the global economy, holds a cardinal role in

the entrepreneurial imagination as the ultimate 'City of knowledge' (O'Mara, 2006).

'Silicon Valley is not a geographical region', Martin, a technology entrepreneur, stressed.

'It is a state of mind'. Paying a pilgrimage to the Valley is something 'everyone who is

serious about entrepreneurship must do', one Valley nobleman said at a conference.

During ThinkYoung's study session, the participants would gather around some of their

peers who had been to the Valley and enthusiastically would share their impressions. 'It is

my dream to go there', one of them told me.

Stripped off its mere geography and demographics it is the source of knowledge 'that has

transformed the way we work and live' (Ibid, 5). It is also impossible to replicate. In the

summer of 2012, the proposition to foster 'crisis-proof entrepreneurial' environments in

Europe by mimicking the development of the Silicon Valley sparked the imagination of

journalists, bloggers and politicians. Scenarios about the location that has the potential of


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evolving into a 'European Silicon Valley' were abundant. However, 'the Silicon Valley,

like Rome, was not built in a day', Ashok warned the dreamers.

The Sermon on Rue Wiertz

Piot characterises the new churches in West Africa as 'narrative machines.... [which]

generate stories - often fantastic stories - about the world today.' (Piot, 54). For Piot these

stories appeal to people's exhaustion with the past and thus, have empowering capacities

and sustain a nostalgia for the future. Similarly, when apostles of entrepreneurship give

sermon at policy centres, they denounce the past and call for change through narratives

of the 'rebirth' of the charismatic individual who succeeds in making profit against all

odds. They champion the 'strong individual', who takes risks and responsibility, as the

antidote to a pessimistic market climate and represent the future as juxtaposed to the

weak and frightened person of the past, who grasps opportunities instead of waiting for

economic recovery. Often these narratives evangelise prosperity through hardship and

encourage endurance though suffering. Through them, the entrepreneur becomes a

merchant of hope.

'Teachings' of this kind I heard at a debate on female entrepreneurship (women, like

youth, considered 'marginal') in a room with a view of the Parliament's gardens on Rue

Wiertz. A British woman, introduced as 'the ten million pounds lady' spoke. Her story

was very moving. Without formal education, a single mother and no money in her

pocket, she started a business selling cosmetics on behalf of a direct selling company.

Despite the difficulties, not only did she produce the most profit for the company, she

received a university degree at the age of forty and made a fortune for herself. 'I was

reborn. Now I drive around in a very posh Mercedes. I never thought this could happen

ten years ago', she said and concluded in a motivational manner: 'The economy and the

media are against you. You have to tell yourself not to listen. Keep on keeping on!'

Madi, another eminent entrepreneur who often appears in conferences, shared a similar

story. From a humble background in Nottingham, she now gives lectures on behalf of

the Commission to promote entrepreneurship in Europe. 'I had fifty cents in my pocket.


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If I hadn't become an entrepreneur back then, I would have died. Entrepreneurship gave me the

opportunity to change my life', she recalls. 'I want to be synonymous with someone who

makes a change. That's why I want to be synonymous with entrepreneurship.. I don't

have time to change the world myself. That is why I need to pass this on to you [theyouth]'. Madi gave the floor to Isabella, prominent advocate of entrepreneurship in the

Bruxellois cycles. She spoke fast, no pauses, confident and enthusiastic: 'An entrepreneur

is someone who wants to change the world. I am a change-maker... We need so much

courage and so much optimism. If you are not convinced you can make a change in this

bad environment, you are never going to make it'. Emphasis on the change-making

capacities of the entrepreneur allude to the hallmark of charismatic capitalism: a project

of personal transformation, in lieu of the conventional market strategies, which

charismatics view as having world-transforming potential. The 'augmented' futurity

evoked in the narratives of entrepreneurship is what constitutes the entrepreneur a hope-

monger.

Two questions linger in my thinking about the charismatic moment in European

capitalism. The first concerns the issue of 'hope', so central to the appeal of the

entrepreneurial path - that wealth, prosperity and success will accrue to the 'believer'. Thisis the 'hope gospel' delivered consistently from business apostles and promised in the

newly introduced enterprise-fostering policies. But how in an environment of ongoing

crisis does such a message retain its traction, considering the cyclical nature of crisis or

even more alarmingly, the possibility that, 'in a generation or so, capitalism will no longer

exist, most obviously, because it is impossible to maintain an engine of perpetual growth

on a finite planet' (Graeber, 382)? The second question that lingers in my thinking relates

to the alternative futures advocated. Despite the 'world-transforming' rhetoric, when

faced with the prospect of capitalism simply ending, the most common reaction - even

among 'progressives' - is simply fear. 'We cling to what exists, because we can no longer

imagine an alternative that wouldn't be even worse' (ibid). Can hope even operate if

devoid of the prospect of a 'telos'? Will capitalism ever reach a point when it can no

longer take root because it fails to eliminate an uncertain future?

Entrepreneurship is deployed at this historical juncture to keep the capitalist psyche alive

through the latest chapter of turmoil while ensuring that 'alternative futures' remain


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within the context of neoliberal capitalism. But if we look closely at the assumptions

behind neoliberal extremism, we discover that what we are being sold is not just an

economic program (Trouillot, 56). We are being asked to take as religious tenet the

proposition that there can be no vision for humanity outside capitalism. Despite therhetoric on the entrepreneur as a 'charismatic' individual by virtue of change-making,

there is nothing creative about contemporary capitalism. In this context, are the 'sparks of

hope' my young informants experienced any real at all?


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3 | HOPE Inc.

This section aims first, to communicate the methods in which the charismaticphenomenon imposes hope upon my informants as a technology of governance and

second, to argue for a transcendental hope generated by my informants in response.

Anthropologists, like most social scientists, have always shown more interest in fatalism,

pessimism and alienation than in hope (Thin 2012:13). The Anthropological Index

Online3, a virtual library of hundreds of articles from 1957 to present, has 430 entries on

'suffering' and 535 on 'illness', as opposed to 33 on 'happiness' and just 19 on 'optimism'

(Thin 2005). Similarly, Rapport and Overing's (2000) collection of 'The Key Concepts' in

anthropology includes, among the sixty concepts explored, none on well-being, happiness

or emotion, while notions such as 'gossip' are seen as more important. My investigation is

as much a study of hope in a precarious moment as it is an effort to recapture hope as a

method for anthropology.

Often seen as a source of private strength, little intellectual attention is given to collectiveand public hope - ways in which our aspirations are moulded and sustained through

political processes and collective activities (Marmarosh et al, 2005) - and how such

developments affect individual hope. To this end, I discuss hope as a technology of

governance to unveil the methods employed to contain the social pathologies resulting

from the crisis.

Nevertheless, what do we make of a hope that is fabricated and externally imposed for

the sole purpose of maintaining trust in capitalism? As Zournazi (2002:18) warns 'without

a deeper understanding of its meaning, hope can only masquerade as some essential truth

for capitalism'. Using fieldwork insights, I wish to move outside the despair ingrained in

capitalism and investigate how people reinvent ordinariness and keep on in this current

moment. The hope I discover escapes the deferral of capitalism and thus overcomes the

bleakness sustained by those, like Zizek (2011), who offer oracles of doom but fail to

provide alternatives outside utopias. Such hope is not mere facticity. It is transcendence

3See http://aio.anthropology.org.uk/aiosearch/


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and departure, a source of agency and emancipation by embracing joyas another kind of

contentment and affirming life as it emerges. The ethic of joy is the basis of a far more

radical critique of capitalism and I find comfort in the idea that such hope comes from

within capitalism, which is constantly in crisis but also constantly contested and opposed.

Hope as a technology of governance

Liberal governments are consistently engaged in constituting sensibilities in their citizens

that will enable them to govern with efficiency and a light touch (Shearing and Kempa

2004). Hope as a method is deployed across a wide spectrum of knowledge practices,

including political persuasions. Ghassan Hage appeals to the conceptualisation of

societies as 'mechanisms for the distribution of hope', arguing that 'the kind of affective

attachment (worrying or caring) that a society creates among its citizens is intimately

connected to its capacity to distribute hope', and that 'neoliberal regimes have

contributed to the shrinking of this capacity' (Hage 2003:3). I disagree with the final part

of Hage's argument. Neoliberal governments have not diminished their capacity to

deliver hope. Having mastered the ability to manipulate hope as a device for exercising

power over others (Shearing and Kempa, 63), what they have done is to rework hope in

a negative frame, whereby

'hope masquerades as a vision, where the passion and insecurity felt by the people

become part of a call for national unity and identity, part of a future ideal of what we

imagine ourselves to be. It is a kind of future nostalgia, a ''fantastic hope'' charged by a

static vision of life and the exclusion of difference. When, for the benefit of our security

and belonging, we evoke a hope that ignores the suffering of others, we can only create a

hope based on fear'. (Zournazi 2002:15).

Should we accept the premise that hope is vital for the underclass that seeks to throw off

the shackles that keep them in poverty and unemployment (Braithwaite 2004), then,

indeed, the hope the political bourgeoisie evokes in Europe today, of which the rhetoric

on entrepreneurship is a principal manifestation, is an exclusive hope, an elite hope based

on fear, unavailable to the underprivileged and the sans-papiers. Recall Becky's anxiety over


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the 95 per cent of youth who have the capacity to become entrepreneurs but lack the

opportunity, because they are 'second-class citizens'. Hope is a powerful tool which can

help the individual overcome seemingly impossible odds. But hope has its hazards.

Intense hope carries the danger of intense disappointment (Drahos 2004:31). Even thoseprivileged enough to chase the entrepreneurial dream, are constantly faced with the fear

of slipping back to the past. Nataliya, a 25-year-old novice entrepreneur from Ukraine,

admitted: 'Of course, I'm afraid. I'm afraid I will go back to the routine. I used to have a

nine-to-five job and I wouldn't take any risks back then...'.

Related to Nataliya's fear is Drahos's analysis of the dangers of public hope. He

acknowledges that the private hopes of an individual can be facilitated by the institutions

of which the individual is a part. However, if those institutions (health, education,

employment, and financial security) collapse, they cease to be seen as sources of hope. As

the private hopes of individuals become cut off from state institutions, the prospects of a

society maintaining well-functioning utilities weaken, whereas when social institutions

remain open to private hopes, they also allow for the possibility of a bottom-up process

in which they help to fulfil the goals and plans of individuals (Ibid, 32). In the current

predicament, the EU political class is indeed allowing individuals to pursue their goalsthrough entrepreneurship, but is doing so having left them with no other choice but to

base their hopes on their own initiatives. Over time it became evident that, had the have

the option, (i.e. if the economic climate was better), my informants would not migrate to

pursue a future outside their home countries. When I met her, Natalyia explained that she

was living in Italy where she was trying to establish a new business with a group of

friends. However, she only saw Italy as a temporary terminal. 'I don't want this to be my

project forever. When the situation in Ukraine changes, I want to move back...'. Could it

be then that, instead of the institutionalisation of hope, we should be speaking of the

institutionalisation of hopelessness through hope?

Graeber certainly thinks so. 'The last thirty years have seen the construction of a vast

bureaucratic apparatus for the creation and maintenance of hopelessness, a grant machine

designed to destroy any sense of possible alternative futures' (Graeber, 383). Maintaining

an apparatus that suppresses any movement that challenges power arrangement seems

more important to exponents of the 'free market', even more than maintaining any sort


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of viable market economy. Therefore, there are only very few 'alternative futures'

available to the capitalist subject where anything 'non-capitalist' needs to be annihilated.

Once the capitalist machine is in place, we are devoid of even the possibility to imagine a

different arrangement. Outside capitalism, the only thing we can see is catastrophe.

It is therefore, very tempting to claim that the way structural forces operate locally often

turn 'neoliberalism' into a world-homogenising sovereign, such that the actions of the

individual appear as the product of free will, while in reality, they are being directed by

powerful, impersonal forces (Berlant, 15). Nevertheless, this very simplistic dialectical

description fails to account for the messy and complex dynamics of being in the present

and hope as a conscious state of mind. 'Only those who have not lost faith and hope can

see the horrors of the world with genuine clarity', Vaclav Havel wrote. Now is a critical

juncture in world history, when it is becoming increasingly clear that the current

arrangements are not viable, that 'our collective imagination has hit a wall' (Graeber, 381).

Hopelessness is highly contagious. Pessimism in the ruling class and the media generates

a similar culture of gloom among the citizenry. 'Look at those headlines! Why are they painting

everything black?', Alessandro broke out one morning at the office in response to the

European media reporting on the shadowy future of youth unemployment and theinadequate government measures undertaken. 'What the hell is this trend in the papers to ask

for schools to fully adapt to the labour market, to shape workers before citizens, doers before thinkers, yes-

men before innovators? Reading this stuff makes me sick... '. I had to agree with him. However,

hope is equally contagious, and sometimes the generation of hope in others can operate

recursively, resulting in virtuous spirals (Weingarten 2010).

Is this hope in my informants (who are also my peers, and thus, in extension, the hope in

me) true hope? What is the possibility of authenticity where sensibilities are deliberately

constituted through governmental and corporate programs? Is it possible to constitute a

sensibility that strives for a public hope, without diminishing the autonomy and freedom

of those whose sensibility is being shaped? In the next section, I wish to write in defence

of the hope generated in and by my informants. In league with Miyazaki (2004:25), I

consider the real challenge posed by moments of hope to be 'not so much the

impossibility of achieving the temporal congruity between knowledge and its object, as

the immediacy of hope thus engendered - hope's demand for its own fulfilment'. Hope


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has a wide range of meanings but its core meaning is optimism regarding the future.

When self-directed, hope overlaps a great deal with self-esteem (Clark et al, 2011). In this

light, I argue for a transcendental hope generated by my informants in response to the

hope(lessness) imposed upon them, a joyous hope that constitutes them not mere homoeconomicus but homo viator, pilgrims in the pursuit of joy and happiness.

Hope and Agency: Emancipation through hope

Most scholars on hope acknowledge a salient and positive connection between hope and

agency. Hope is a cognitive activity that involves setting concrete goals, finding ways to

achieve these goals and tapping one's willpower to move towards them (McGeer 2004).

The act of hope is more than focusing on hoped-for ends. It is to take a reflective and

developmental stance towards our own agential capacities, to experience ourselves as

agents of potential. Appadurai (2003) argues that the 'capacity to aspire' is a valuable

capacity that tends to be weak among poor and marginalised populations, but which can

be collectively nurtured as part of an active process of empowerment. The reciprocal

building of emancipation from hope and hope from emancipation is something any

society must invest in (Braithwaite 2004).

I am moved by the extraordinary energy I have seen in these young women and men in

Brussels. Against all odds of being deemed a 'lost generation', they are filled with a sense

of agency and possibility. They walk with their heads held high, proudly taking control of

their own futures. They live lives of purpose and find pleasure in what they do.

Moreover, the initiative comes not from without or above, but seems entirely theirs. As

for the authenticity of their hope, Foucault (1997) reminds us that the degree to which

hopes generated by governing institutions constitute 'authentic' identities is always an

open question. Contra Foucault's pessimism, many of my informants were after selfless

goals and had long-term plans towards which they were investing their profits. Teuta, a

twenty-one year old participant at ThinkYoung'sstudy session from Kosovo, told me that

the reason why she was trying to start a business is to help relief the high unemployment

rate in her country. 'My goal is to create more jobs to contribute something to my

country'. The quintessence of her hope does not lie in the final goal but in the process,


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the journey. Authentic hope in Drahos's sense is hope that 'leads into a cycle of

expectation, planning, and actions that sees the agent explore the power of her agency'.

This 'enabling function of hope is key to the success of many individual projects and can

be key to the survival of the individual' (Drahos, 23).

Above all the youths I met in Brussels, nobody was as optimistic as Alessandro. 'There is

no sadder sight than a young pessimist', he would often say in response to his peers'

pessimism. 'I'm optimistic because I don't know what I would do without optimism'.

Albeit working unpaid, Alessandro was very dedicated to his job at ThinkYoungwhich he

believed helped him send a positive message about the future of the EU. When his

project on the skills mismatch was completed successfully he updated his facebook status

duly: 'After seven months of work, I have the feeling I contributed to move Europe

closer to young people. Even if it had been only a millimetre'. For the opening lines to

his report, he translated into English a quote by Italian artist Fabrizio De Andr. It reads:

'Man without Utopia, Dreams and Ideals,

so without passions and irrational impetus,

would be just an animal made of instinct and pure rationality,

something like a boar graduated in pure mathematics.'

My informants were faced with an endless flow of nervous stimulations. Yet this is not

limited to the current predicament but fits into the Nervous System, a 'cosmos' of global

concerns - economic, political, social, ecological. Perhaps in virtue of their young age,

their hope was primarily a hope for joy, happiness and optimism. 'I left Greece/Spain

because I couldn't stand seeing everyone so depressed all the time' often came up. This

finding falsifies, for me, the position that, in capitalism, we are all homo economicus,

narrowly self-interested actors who attempt to maximise their utility as consumers and

economic profit as producers. I believe that my informants are principally homo viator, in

Marcel's (1962) sense of 'pilgrim men', in search of a hope that does not narrow their

visions of the world. It is a hope within capitalism, one that recognises cultivating joy in

individual life, for without the experience of joy we cannot move through the desperation

that frames contemporary living. A 'joyful hope', Zournazi asserts, 'is about recognising


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our hopes in daily ways - the suffering and pain we encounter - and about the ways we

can experience 'happiness' outside of the spirit of capitalism' (Zournazi, 19).

When the girls from GoYoung set out for their world tour, they were looking for

happiness. 'Considering what we saw in the media, we expected to find suffering and

despair. We didn't. People find ways to be happy'. Indeed, 'even those you would think of

as defeated are living beings, figuring out how to stay attached to life from within it, and

protect what optimism they have for that' (Berlant,10). The young entrepreneurs I

encountered in Brussels were pursuing joy in the sense of the existence of something to

live for. Self-delusional or not, it is an accumulation of a raison d'etrein affirming life as it

emerges. 'Joy involves the capacity to experience life as transition and movement in one's

own state of being... It is an affirmative state of existence' (Zournazi, 153). Transcending

the past and grasping worlds in which they are in control, enables my informants to

embrace the future in a manner that juxtaposes the capitalist Nervous System as they find

ease in the pursuit of happiness.


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4| Cruel Optimism: Lessons for Anthropology

On my way to the office every morning, a writing on a wall across from the European

Parliament always caught my attention. It read 'toute vrit est ngociable'. All truth is

negotiable. For a very long time, the intellectual consensus in anthropology was that we

cannot ask Great Questions about where the world is heading to in capitalism and why.

Increasingly, it's looking like we have no choice (Graeber, 19).

My leitmotiv in this text has been to situate hope within a self-conscious stand in

anthropology - to advocate for a hope enchiridion for the discipline. Engaging

anthropological themes about precarity, capitalism, and crisis through the prism of youth,I wish to invite new interlocutors in the conversation on anthropology's role in helping to

make the emergent world society more meaningful. It is time to rethink anthropological

methods in terms of the relationship between ethnography, hope, happiness, and the

future, to save the economy from the economists, and to prepare the ground for a

'human economy', one that refers to the well-being and the satisfaction of all human

needs, not just those met through market transactions, but also those that cannot be

reduced to money spent per capita (Hart, Laville, and Cattani, 2010).

Indeed, the contemporary silencing of happiness in anthropology is all the more

surprising given the discipline's evolution from earlier interests in the possibilities of

progress and in the comparative happiness of 'primitive' and modern societies (Thin

2005:5). In the 1866 edition of the Popular Magazine of Anthropology the purpose of

anthropology was said to be to 'assist all races of man to material prosperity and happiness'

(Reining, 1962). Beyond being just an intellectual puzzle, this situation should worry all ofthose who care about anthropology's relevance to real-world concerns and its influence in

policy and practice. As Harvey writes (2000:254): 'until we insurgent architects know the

courage of our minds and are prepared to take an equally speculative plunge into some

unknown, we too will continue to be the objects of historical geography...rather than

active subjects, consciously pushing human possibilities to their limits'. I share Thin's

(2005:45) hope that 'anthropologists will soon become much more interested in the

analysis of happiness. I trust that in doing so they will come closer to meeting their


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evaluative responsibilities. They will become morally better, because they will make better

contributions to the understanding and promotion of happiness and, in doing so, they

may even become happier themselves'.

Now is the ripe time to begin our reengagement with happiness. Since the outbreak of

the crisis in 2008, it has become more commonplace to read attacks on the hegemony of

market economics. This is not to argue for the defeat of neoliberalism. However,

opposing it with alternative approaches to the economy and the world in general, is now

more favourable than before. Already, several initiatives within anthropology are leading

the way to how the moral optimism of anthropology can help change the world.

Anthropologist David Graeber has been a major figure behind the 'Occupy Wall Street'

movement in the United States and is credited the originator of the motto 'We are the

99%'. Other remarkable initiatives include online communities such as the Centre for a

Public Anthropology4(supported by anthropologists such as Rob Borosky, Paul Farmer, and

Aiwa Ong) and Living Anthropologically5, both of which aim to turn the tide in the

proposition that 'anthropology should have changed the world, yet the subject is almost

invisible in the public sphere outside the academy' (Hylland Eriksen 2006:1). Responding

to Florida Governor Rick Scott's 'we don't need anthropologists' declaration, Paul Stoller(2011) wrote: 'If we eliminate the liberal arts and humanities from public university

curricula, we will produce a generation of uncritical technocrats who will have lost their

sense of wonder, their feeling of intellectual passion and their capacity to dream about

life beyond the boundaries of the limited good. In such a passionless and unimaginative

space, we will lose our capacity to think, grow, and reconfigure a rapidly changing world'.

Why the sad topics in anthropology? Anthropology knows that what currently exists does

not have to be. Anthropology knows more about capitalism than any other academic

discipline. This is why it has an obligation to make 'an explicit claim to the moral

optimism that may be this discipline's greatest appeal and yet its most guarded secret'

(Trouilot 2003:136).

4See http://www.publicanthropology.org/

5See http://www.livinganthropologically.com/


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against all odds- hope and agency among young entrepreneurs

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