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theologies is addressed by their acknowledgement that theirs is not the denitive theology of
the multitude (133). In doing so, they recognize the necessarily uid nature of its transmission. While it may be possible for forms such as those discussed in this book to be transmitted over time, this will also lead the forms to mutate and change. Whether that will
constitute a process of fragmenting decline or one of dynamic adaptation is, again, an
open question.
To conclude, not only does this book provide important contributions to the study of the
Occupy movement and intersections of religion and political dissent, it also opens out wider
sociological questions about religion, organization and transmission, and religion and modernity. Its contribution to theology is beyond the expertise of this review. However, its
contribution to religion and social theory is certain.
Author biographies
Paul-Francois Tremlett is a senior lecturer in Religious Studies at the Open University. He is
currently working on political movements, religion and social change.
Claire Wanless is studying for a PhD in the Religious Studies Department at the Open
University. Her research is focusing on modes of transmission of individualized religion.

George Gonzalez, Shape-Shifting Capital: Spiritual Management, Critical Theory, and the
Ethnographic Project, Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2015, ISNB 9780739180853, 390 pp.
Reviewed by Kenneth Surin, Duke University, USA

This intellectually capacious book deals with a pervasive feature of neoliberalism that has
been overlooked until fairly recently, namely, the increasing impingement of capitalism, in
its quest for ever new forms of primitive accumulation, on spheres of life hitherto isolated
from the ostensibly unholy hurlyburly of capitalist formations and social relations. The
case in point here, especially in the United States, that quintessential canary in the capitalist
mine, is the domain typically assigned to religion or spirituality, with the creation of a
capitalist spirituality as the apex of this now settled neoliberal formation. The stereotypical image of the American multi-millionaire TV evangelistcosmetically augmented from
head to toe, living in a tastelessly brash Macmansion, driving the newest-model BMW or
Mercedes Benz (or both), and ying in a luxurious private jet accompanied by an equally
cosmetically contrived trophy wife to his adoring audiences (the old-fashioned term congregation here lacking saliency in a virtual reality created and sustained in its entirety by
media technologies)is by now something of a cultural commonplace. Such TV preachers
are even the stu of comedy on Saturday Night Live. Hand in hand with this visible
embodiment of the so-called gospel of success, and its accompanying and overarching
happiness industry, is the increased permeation of the workplace milieu by techniques and
methods, already suitably bastardized by American business-management science, that
have spiritual or quasi-religious practices as their obvious point of origin.
The author takes this fascinating developmentcapitalism becoming more religious even
as religion becomes more capitalistic, as organizational management and spiritual management coalesce (pp. 239245)as his subject. The book has several strands. One is

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ethnographic, as the author discusses the eldwork, he did with the business roundtable
Seeing Things Whole (STW). This rich and absorbing ethnography could be a book on its
own if suitably expandedone reads it with an unsettling mixture of cynical recognition
(Okay, heres a bastard we all know) and every so often jaw-dropping surprise (why on earth
are you doing this to yourself?) as various characters try, sometimes opportunistically and
sometimes not, to make their way through this capitalist mineeld equipped only with that
nebulous something derived from spirituality or religion called values. The second is
metatheoretical, using the ethnographic data gleaned by the author to pose questions regarding our understanding of social change and the narrative transformations which accompany
such change. A third strand, and for me the most intriguing and powerful component of
Gonzalezs argument, is his proposition that the emergence of workplace spirituality
marks and accompanies a transition, in the countries of the west and north, from capitalisms previous and now superseded overwhelmingly industrial mode of production and
accumulation to one that is largely postindustrial and cybernetically driven (pp. 323340).
Gonzalez uses Sartres late Critique of Dialectical Reason (mistakenly rendered in the bibliography as Critique of Dialectical Method), the two volumes of which are greatly underappreciated in relation to the more celebrated works of Sartres earlier existential period,
as his theoretical lodestone in this undertaking. In a fourth strand, this Sartrean-based
approach is used by the author to counter the all too obvious reductionism present in any
number of putatively Marxist characterizations, deriving their inspiration from worn-out
notions of false consciousness and so forth, of the religious or spiritual import of this shift
from the previous material mode of capitalist accumulation to the immaterial one
currently deemed to prevail in the countries of the developed west and north. In a fth
strand, the author draws methodological conclusions regarding the way religious studies as
an intellectual eld will have to expand and alter itself in order to bring these momentous
changes within its purview. Each of these strands is very much a small treatise of its own.
It is hard to do justice to so wide-ranging a book in this relatively brief review, so the
reviewer has perforce to fasten on a topic or two for further discussion. As mentioned,
Gonzalez argues that the move to a capitalist spirituality is to be identied with the
shift in the advanced capitalist countries from an industrial mode of production to one
that is, in the countries of the west and north, postindustrial and even immaterial or
cognitive. The claim that capitalist social relations entail certain specic forms of intersubjectivity (or lack thereof) is impossible to gainsayone cannot imagine nomadic herders
of a 1000-years ago, or even today, working in a contemporary Microsoft assembly plant
since they had have absolutely no inkling of was going on in such a place. With this proviso
in mind, Gonzalez is looking for forms of intersubjectivity that prevail, in however, truncated or nascent a form, in the face of the overweening colonization of the intersubjective by
capitalism. Capitalism, now that it has encroached on realms once considered exclusively
religious or spiritual, is in a position to tout itself as the orchestrator of intersubjectivity
par excellence. But are there versions of intersubjectivities against the odds capable of
withstanding the seemingly total colonization of intersubjectivity by contemporary capitalism? Gonzalezs wide-ranging ethnography provides examples of intersubjectivities against
the odds, sometimes indeed radically against the odds (pp. 1319), the reader can nd
compelling. Religion, as some Marxists acknowledge, can be both opiate and spur to something dierent for those who are oppressed. Shape-Shifting Capital, without professing any
kind of explicit Marxist aliation, does this fundamental insight ample intellectual and
practical justice (pp. 9099).

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Shape-Shifting Capital originated in a doctoral dissertation, and it certainly bears the

traces of its origin. But in the end it is none the worse for thison the contrary, the occasional longueurs to be encountered as one works through this books sometimes clunky
prose and prodigality of references is more often than not oset by the riches contained
in the extensive footnote apparatus (what a pleasant and productive digressive activity it is to
use the Web to pursue lines conveyed by this or that footnote in a hugely productive text
such as this), by the sheer abundance of detail in the text, and the intellectual bravura with
which this emerging scholar tackles his always copious, and oftentimes over-copious,
material.
We live in a time when capitalism is taking forms that in countless ways border on the
clearly vaporous. Today colossally lucrative enterprises, making their originators some of
the wealthiest people on earth, exist in a realm that can best be described as virtual: Uber
owns no taxis, Airbnb owns no rental properties, EBay/Alibaba possess no inventory,
Facebook generates no content of its own, and high-speed stock traders sit at desks transmuting algorithms into computer pixels in order to generate obscene returns (prot generally being used in economics only to characterize gains that accrue from actual productive
investment) in a few clicks of the keyboard. At the same time, as the great crash of 20078
and its aftermath revealed, this is also a time when capitalism is a concretely visible racket of
the most rapacious proportionsnot-so-wealthy families hankering to own a place we can
call ours are ripped-o on a systematic scale by fraudulent purveyors of subprime mortgages, unregulated pay-day loan sharks charge the desperately poor interest in the hundreds
percent for loans that will in all probability not tide them over from one paltry pay check to
the next, and so on.
Capitalism in the north and west seems to be melting into this (cybernetic) ether, even as
its physical victims are evicted brutally from properties they thought they were paying for,
and therefore beginning to own and as its working poor trudge each day from one to two or
even three McJobs simply in order to pay the rent and feed the family. As it does this, the
current mode of capitalist accumulation, in its quest to extract more eort and productivity from those who labor on its behalf, is decking itself in accoutrements associated with
religion and spirituality (those who meditate and do yoga during work-breaks allegedly
perform better at work as a result of their enhanced mindfulness and so forth). And of
course religion, an American-inspired version of Christianity in this case, is itself being
progressively enervated by all-consuming capitalist impulsesmany churches would
sooner hire someone with an MBA to be their minister than someone with a top-notch
divinity degree. How and why this neoliberal marriage made in heaven has been enabled,
and how it can be opposed or circumvented, is a crucial question for our time. This wonderful and at times frustrating book is up to the task of addressing this most pressing of
questions.
Author biography
Kenneth Surin is professor of literature and critical theory at Duke University. In addition to
books and articles in theology and the philosophy of religion, he has published articles on
political economy, political philosophy, French and German philosophy, the philosophy of
art, the philosophy of education, sports and philosophy, the philosophy of literature, and
cultural anthropology. His latest book is Freedom Not Yet: Liberation and the Next World
Order.

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