AGAINST ALL ODDS

HOPE AND AGENCY AMONG YOUNG ENTREPENEURS IN BRUSSELS

Elena Georgalla 090004349

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

To Alessandro and his generation

special thanks to
Dr 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 Parisian gauchistes, ; 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.

TABLE OF CONTENTS
PROLOGUE [01]

PART 1| Crisis
i. Mise en scne : <<Brussels>> ii. Millennial Capitalism: The times that are(n't) changing

[04] [04] [05]

ii. The Entrepreneur aka PPB (Planetary Petty Bourgeoisie)[08] iii. Youth [11] [13] [15] [16] [17] [18]

PART 2| Charismatic Capitalism

i. Weber ii. Totemic figures iii. Pilgrimage to the Valley iv. The Sermon on Rue Wiertz

PART 3| Hope INC

i. Hope as a technology of governance ii. Hope and Agency

[21]
[22] [25]

PART 4| Cruel Optimism : Lessons for Anthropology BIBLIOGRAPHY

[28] [30]

abstract
The 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.

AGAINST ALL ODDS

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 Europenne and 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 the pessimism 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 absencebecomes 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

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 selfregulated 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'.

Third, I examine hope as a governance strategy and as a form of individual transcendence within capitalism. 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 homo viator ; 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.

1|CRISIS
Mise en Scne : <<Brussels>>

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 <<Brussels>>, 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 closeddoor 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'.

'Rescuing' the Eurozone came to be synonymous with 'resolving the crisis': 'Merkel pressed on Eurozone rescue policy' (The Financial Times, 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 <<Brussels>>. 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 October 2012) read the

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 recent crisis. 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 overcoming them: '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,

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 is simple: 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

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 masse in 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.

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 unpaid positions, 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 different future 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, Italian automobile 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,

See 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 are less 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 operanti of 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 mercenary desires, 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 narratives denounce 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 uncertain future 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 School I 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 of entrepreneurship, 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.

17

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

18

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.

19

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 [the youth]'. 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 hopemonger. 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'. This is 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

20

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 the rhetoric 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?

21

3 | HOPE Inc.
This
section aims first, to communicate the methods in which the charismatic phenomenon 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 collective and 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
3

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

22

and departure, a source of agency and emancipation by embracing joy as 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

23

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 those privileged 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 goals through 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

24

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 the inadequate 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, yesmen 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

25

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 homo economicus 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's study 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,

26

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 ThinkYoung which 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

27

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'etre in 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 of those 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

29

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).

4 5

See http://www.publicanthropology.org/ See http://www.livinganthropologically.com/

30

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