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The Neoliberal Subject
Resilience, Adaptation and Vulnerability
By David Chandler, Julian Reid Rowman & Littlefield International, Ltd.
Copyright © 2016 David Chandler and Julian Reid
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-78348-773-8
CHAPTER 1
Debating Neoliberalism
The Exhaustion of the Liberal Problematic
David Chandler
Neoliberalism became hegemonic in the late 1970s as part of a project of social contestation involving the curbing of trade union power and the rolling back of the state, pushing responsibility for social welfare onto society rather than the state. As many theorists and commentators have powerfully described, neoliberalism's shift of emphasis from the state to society has taken a variety of forms in different national and international contexts, but all have appealed to calls for human freedom, dignity, and independence and all have been hostile to big government provision of services and of top-down interventionist policy-provision (see, for example, Harvey 2005). In exploring the shift of policy emphasis from state to society, analysts of neoliberalism often emphasize the agency of neoliberal policy-making, the needs of capitalism and big business, and neglect the ways in which the neoliberal subject — the subject at the heart of the shift to the social or the societal understanding of the modern world — is constructed and interpellated.
For many Marx-inspired theorists, such as David Harvey, neoliberalism is mainly seen as an economic phenomenon, driven by the needs of capital accumulation. In which case, the shift to societal understandings, of social or individualized security, is a straightforward one, depending on the traditional or classical liberal understanding of the subject as universally rational and autonomous. In fact, these assumptions are the source of Harvey's critique: that precisely because of the false subject of liberalism, the freedoms of the market clash with the demands of social justice (and that the left has failed to critique neoliberalism on these grounds):
Asymmetric power relations tend ... to increase rather than diminish over time unless the state steps in to counteract them. The neoliberal presupposition of perfect information and a level playing field for competition appears as either innocently Utopian or a deliberate obfuscation of processes that will lead to the concentration of wealth and, therefore, the restoration of class power. (Harvey 2005: 68)
Harvey's left critique of neoliberalism is therefore based upon the clash between the subject as interpellated in and through neoliberal discourses as rational and autonomous and the real, sociological, socially embedded subject, which lacks the capacities and capabilities and rationalities required to compete under capitalism as if it was a 'level playing field'. Once neoliberal discourse is recognised as a 'failed Utopian rhetoric masking a successful project for the restoration of ruling-class power' then 'mass movements voicing egalitarian political demands and seeking economic justice, fair trade, and greater economic security' can reemerge (Harvey 2005: 203-4). Here, the subject being interpellated through neoliberal discourses is the classical liberal subject and it is through the critique of this 'utopian' subject that neoliberal discourse can be exposed as the ideological expression of ruling-class hegemony.
Other theorists, often taking their inspiration from Michel Foucault, rather than Karl Marx, have also staked out highly influential interpretations of the neoliberal subject at the heart of the shift from state to societal provision of security. For these commentators, neoliberalism is not understood to be driven primarily by economic needs but by the crisis of liberal authority in a complex and globalizing world where traditional forms of authority can no longer operate with fixed understandings of state, nation, and community. These framings understand state-society relations as being transformed not by the withdrawal or the rolling back of the state but through its very different framework of intervention, which reconstructs state-society relations in ways which dissolve classical liberal understandings of this discursive divide.
The neoliberal problematic is then understood not so much through the economic determinants required for the restoration of capitalist social power but as a framework in which the state can restore its authority over society through new mechanisms of intervention and regulation. In this framing, the subject is interpellated differently: without the assumptions of universality, rationality, and autonomy presumed in the discourses of classical liberalism. Rather than the autonomous free play of the market under conditions of universal rationality, state intervention is understood as the precondition for both the construction of the market and the liberal political subject. As Foucault-inspired writers, such as Graham Burchell (1991; 1996), Mitchell Dean (2010), Colin Gordon (1991), Peter Miller and Nikolas Rose (2008), Pat
O'Malley (2004; 2010) have noted, the neoliberal shift from emphasis on the centrality of the state to the importance of society has involved the hands-on project of the active making of the liberal subject through societal intervention, rather than the classical liberal 'utopian' assumption of the 'naturalness' of the liberal subject.
Miller and Rose articulate the neoliberal problematic, with regard to the 'new specification of the subject of government' (2008: 213), thus:
Within this new regime of the actively responsible self, individuals are to fulfil their national obligations not through their relations of dependency and obligation to one another, but through seeking to fulfil themselves within a variety of micro-moral domains or 'communities'— families, workplaces, schools, leisure associations, neighbourhoods. Hence the problem is to find the means by which individuals may be made responsible through their individual choices for themselves and those to whom they owe allegiance, through the shaping of a lifestyle according to grammars of living that are widely disseminated, yet do not depend upon political calculations and strategies for their rationales or for their techniques. (2008: 214)
Governing authority no longer becomes exercised in the old way, as intervention and regulation from above society, in the form of liberal government on behalf of, or over, the social whole. Rather, new forms of neoliberal governance appear as ways of 'empowering', 'capability-building', or 'freeing' the citizen, enabling neoliberal subjects to take societal responsibility upon themselves and their communities. Miller and Rose are surely correct in noting that this 'ethical a priori of active citizens in an active society is perhaps the most fundamental, and most generalizable, characteristic of these new rationalities of government' (2008: 215). Dean concurs that the task of neoliberal government lies precisely in the management and regulation of, or inculcation of, the agency of the governed. The solution to problems of societal security, whether in the form of welfare, crime, or conflict becomes that of the development of societal agency:
Victims of crime, smokers, abused children, gay men, intravenous drug users, the unemployed, indigenous people and so on are all subject to these technologies of agency, the object being to transform their status, to make them active citizens capable, as individuals and communities, of managing their own risk. (Dean 2010: 196-97)
The neoliberal state does not withdraw from society and leave rational and autonomous subjects to bear responsibility for securing themselves, rather it is an active and interventionist state, which assumes that societal insecurity is the result of the incapacity of the subject. The neoliberal subject is therefore one which is problematized and it is this problematization that is at the heart of neoliberal interventions within the social sphere. As Dean states, once problematized: 'individuals are required to agree to a range of normalizing, therapeutic and training measures designed to empower them, enhance their self-esteem, optimize their skills and entrepreneurship and so on' (2010: 197).
In my contributions to this book on the neoliberal subject, I seek to develop and expand upon the direction taken by these Foucault-inspired theorists. I particularly wish to focus upon the shifts and transformations in our understanding of the liberal subject and how these are articulated within the broader discursive shift from the emphasis on the state as the key agent within liberal modernity to the emphasis on societal agency in discourses of neoliberalism. Where I seek to differ in emphasis, vis-à-vis the theorists briefly referred to above, is that I plan to sketch out the broader cultural and societal sensibilities and understandings underpinning the construction or interpellation of the neoliberal subject, rather than narrowly understanding neoliberalism as a set of instrumental governing technologies. Following the work of Alison Howell and Andrew Neal (2012) and others (Lamer 2000), I suggest a much looser understanding of the dispositif of neoliberalism, highlighting cultural sensibilities rather than governmental or instrumental uses in terms of techniques and practices.
In fact, I will go further to argue that neoliberalism is less a programme for governing society for specific goals or ends, than the systematic retreat from such a programme. While it is clear that neoliberal sensibilities lack the view that the state should just withdraw from society and 'let freedom reign', it seems equally clear that discourses of actively creating citizens, of empowering and capacity-building individuals and communities, are more concerned with the limits to societal change than with social transformation. Neoliberalism, in fact, marks an historic withdrawal from the project of 'rule', which, thus far, has been captured neither by the Marxist focus on capitalist accumulation nor by the Foucauldian governmentality theorists.
Liberalism articulated a very clear project of rule, of social direction through a clear separation between the state and society — between the legal and political realm and the social and economic realm — and was therefore a suitable subject for governmentality analysis, reflecting upon the self-understanding of the processes, mechanisms, and limits to rule. The project of constructing or interpellating the neoliberal subject is less a concrete programme of rule and regulation than a declaration of the impossibility or attenuation of governmental agency in the current age. The problematization of the classical rights- and interests-bearing liberal subject serves to shift governing responsibility to society rather than the state. As the state is increasingly submerged within society and within social processes, it loses its rule in terms of any clear demarcation or separation of government from governed. In effect, politics becomes reduced to the administration of societal processes. Neoliberalism, in this sense, offers no positive programme for governing. In its continual effacing of the separation between state and society and reduction of politics to administration it resembles the Marxist or socialist project (which sought similarly to do away with the rule of government) rather than the liberal project which was focused on precisely the problematic of limiting and thereby reproducing state power through its suspension and distinctness vis-à-vis economic and social processes.
I will argue that the neoliberal project is more accurately understood as the exhaustion of the liberal project of modernity or the exhaustion of the progressive impulse within liberalism. Rather than understanding neoliberalism as implicit within liberal understandings or somehow a natural or organic extension of liberalism, I wish to argue that neoliberalism — as we consider it in this book and as I analyse these trends under the term 'postliberalism' elsewhere (Chandler 2010) — is parasitical on the demise of liberalism. This parasitical nature is clear in its dynamic, which challenges and dismantles classical liberal political categories and conceptual binaries: in international relations, the focus is on the inside or the internal management of the state; in normative political theory, the focus is upon the 'inside' of the social sphere and the embedded and differentiated nature of the subject rather than the formal realm of legal and political equality; in the understanding of the individual subject, the focus is on the private cognitive realm of the thought processes — the realm of psychology — rather than action in the public sphere. I will be arguing that the internalization of the liberal problematic signifies the end of liberalism as a potentially progressive outlook, capable of framing a left-right contestation over the future direction of society.
Neoliberal understandings, which operate in ways that dismantle or bypass the classical liberal conceptual categories, upon which the formal politics of representation and government depend, and reduce politics to the governance or management of social processes, are reflected in the shift in international relations theorizing from formal concerns of international politics to the informal intersubjective processes of global sociology. Increasingly, attention is drawn to the social processes constructed and reproduced through self-organizing, emergent, and complex processes of societal and networked interactions. Such a 'globalized' world of complex and overlapping social processes appears as a product of human agency but not one which is amenable to conscious political or institutional regulation and control through the mediation of the political, the construction of sovereign political institutions. As will be discussed in my chapters which follow, the globalized world of human agency appears to be one in which we have little control over the results of our own agency: without the fixity of communities and structures and traditional or established frameworks of political meaning, human agency seems to be leading to a constant flux of unexpected change and potential catastrophe.
Neoliberalism thus operates with the problematic of change rather than the liberal teleology of progress. Whereas the discourses of progress presupposed a knowable external world open to human exploration and understanding, and to control and direction by governments, the discourse of change involves no future-orientated goals on behalf of the human subject. Change is not something that occurs under the control or direction of human agency and implies no telos of progress or increase in the bounds of human freedom. Change is something that happens independently of human planning or direction, but is understood to be an emergent product of human interaction and agential choices and behaviour. In a neoliberal world, change is something that governments and communities can only adapt to. In a world, understood as one of complex, globalized, and interconnected social processes, we are confronted with a world of our creation but not one in which we can ever live as human subjects.
In constructing our social world in these ways, neoliberal discourse interpellates the human subject as one increasingly divested of the powers and capacities through which, from the Enlightenment onward, human collectivities sought to demarcate a sphere of human freedom and progress. In this way, the subject is responsible for the world in which it lives, but this responsibility is not articulated in terms of capacities for self-determination, freedom, or political autonomy. The sphere in which liberal subjectivity was expressed, through the reasoning and contestation of the political process and struggle to determine or control the goals and direction of society is increasingly seen to be of little consequence once policy concerns shift to societal processes, practices and behavioural choices. Neoliberal discourse operates not at the level of rights and representation but at the level of societal processes in the private and informal sphere, the practices and cognitive frameworks through which we relate to others and to the external environment.
In the chapters that follow, I will draw out further the relationships between the understanding of change as the product of emergent, self-organising, or path-dependent social processes and interactions, without a telos or direction, and the shift from classical liberal understandings of the rational and transformative subject to neoliberal frames of understanding, which reduce politics to work on the construction of the subject itself. I particularly wish to do this through the analytical exposition of the three concepts flagged in the subtitle of this book: resilience, adaptation, and vulnerability.
Resilience is a key concept within neoliberal discourse, denoting a positive internal attribute of being able to positively adapt to change. The resilient subject (at both individual and collective levels) is not passive in the face of change and does not seek to resist change, but rather is active, understanding change as a necessary facilitator of self-knowledge, self-growth, and self-transformation. I will argue that resilience is used here as a normative concept, or an ideal type. There is no such thing as a fully resilient subject: resilience is the product of a process that is ongoing and has no end as such. Resilience has to be continually produced and can only be measured or calculated as a comparative or relative quality. Some individuals or communities may be understood to be capable of adapting to change more than others but none can be understood to be fully resilient. While we are aware that our fixed understandings, derived from the past, are a barrier to resilience we are also aware that our thought-processes and cultural and social values continue to bind or limit our openness to change. We can only ever be somewhere along the continuum of resilience and therefore ultimately all are in need of enabling to become more resilient.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Neoliberal Subject by David Chandler, Julian Reid. Copyright © 2016 David Chandler and Julian Reid. Excerpted by permission of Rowman & Littlefield International, Ltd..
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