A Political Economy of the Senses

Neoliberalism, Reification, Critique

Anita Chari

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780231540384
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Critical Theory

Anita Chari revives the concept of reification from Marx and the Frankfurt School to spotlight the resistance to neoliberal capitalism now forming at the level of political economy and at the more sensate, experiential level of subjective transformation. Reading art by Oliver Ressler, Zanny Begg, Claire Fontaine, Jason Lazarus, and Mika Rottenberg, as well as the politics of Occupy Wall Street, Chari identifies practices through which artists and activists have challenged neoliberalism's social and political logics, exposing its inherent tensions and contradictions.

PART 1

NEOLIBERAL SYMPTOMS

1

NEOLIBERAL SYMPTOMS

The Impasse Between Economics and Politics in Contemporary Political Theory

IN THE wake of the 2008 economic crisis, the increasing precarity of economic life in the United States has become something of a national obsession. Watching former billionaires go for hysterical shopping sprees at Walmart, as in the documentary The Queen of Versailles, lambasting the annual fiscal cliff and expressing outrage over weekly revelations of the depths of Wall Street corruption are now national pastimes that reflect the growing salience of economics in the contemporary political imaginary. On the heels of President Obama’s ascent to the Oval Office with his message of hope, the political climate, and specifically the emphasis on economic issues in American politics, shifted dramatically.

Ironically enough, since he was elected largely on the strength of voters who were looking for change, Obama has been instrumental in shattering one of the central ideological buttresses of the liberal imaginary, perhaps precisely through his betrayal of the promises of social justice that had gotten him elected in the first place.¹ In the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis and subsequent bank bailout, the government was compelled to demolish even the appearance of separation between Wall Street and the government. That separation was a cornerstone of the liberal normative legitimating structures of contemporary neoliberal politics. Had the political elite not at that moment abandoned the ideology of separation between economics and politics central to the liberal imagination, neoliberalism may well have continued to wear its liberal sheepskin for a while longer.² The Occupy movement, which rode in on a potential that has arguably long been present, may not have manifested soon after in the fall of 2011 to cry foul. Far from ushering in a new era of “postneoliberalism,” as some would have it, the bailout simply made manifest the underlying logic of a neoliberalism that had been in place since the early 1970s.³ That logic entails perpetuating an appearance of separation between the economic and political spheres on the part of the political elite, while eroding that separation in practice. For a moment, postbailout, neoliberalism revealed, transparently, its political logic. The bailout and political responses to it illuminated the contours of the neoliberal relationship between economics and politics in the starkest terms. That relationship, as I will discuss in this chapter, is a fluctuating relationship characterized by a deep ambivalence toward economic issues on the part of the neoliberal state.

In this chapter I argue that an effective analysis of neoliberalism demands an understanding of the ambivalent relationship between the neoliberal state and the economic sphere in contemporary society and of the forms of depoliticization generated by this ambivalence. In subsequent chapters of the book, I will theorize these forms of depoliticization through the concept of reification from the critical theory tradition. While I save a systematic analysis of the concept of reification for subsequent chapters, in this chapter I draw attention to salient features of neoliberalism that complicate existing frameworks in political theory for understanding the nature of neoliberal domination and the contours of political resistance to those forms of domination. First, I argue that the neoliberal state takes an ambivalent role in relation to the economy, which shifts the boundary between economics and politics in neoliberal society in complicated and unstable ways. The ambivalent relationship the neoliberal state takes in relation to the economy results in a depoliticization of economics. This depoliticization takes at least two forms. First, the neoliberal state innovates policies that allow the state to govern the economy at a remove while avoiding responsibility for the distributional outcomes of those policies. Second, such policies produce the increasing inability of the state to direct the economy; thus the economy appears autonomous and immune to state policy and becomes increasingly prone to crisis.

The neoliberal transformation of the relationship between economics and politics, I argue, demands a synthesis of dominant theoretical frameworks for grasping neoliberal forms of depoliticization, namely Marxist critiques on the one hand and radical democratic critiques on the other. There has been a great deal of important work on issues of economics and politics that draws attention to features of political domination that emerge in neoliberalism.⁴ However, I highlight one particular aspect of neoliberalism that impacts the effectiveness of contemporary left critiques of neoliberalism in ways that have been underappreciated in the discipline of political theory. I argue that neoliberalism functions neither through a purely “political” form of domination nor through a purely “economic” one, but rather through shifting the very boundary between economics and politics, while simultaneously obscuring those shifts that it perpetuates.

Neoliberalism as a discourse and set of practices entails an inversion in the relationship between economics and politics inherent in classical liberalism.⁵ The neoliberal inversion of liberalism therefore resignifies dominant paradigms of political theory that base their understandings of contemporary society on a fundamental separation between the economic and political spheres. On the one hand, the neoliberal state increasingly retreats from social welfare functions in the context of low economic growth, in keeping with the neoliberal injunction to minimize state intervention in the economy. On the other hand, the neoliberal state purports to stand back from intervention in markets, while in practice playing a significant role in manipulating economic policy at a remove.⁶ However, the terms that many political theories of the left have used to grasp contemporary forms of depoliticization, I suggest, are inadequate for grasping the fundamental ambivalence of the state’s role in the economy and the political effects of this ambivalence. This problem, I suggest, stems from the formalism of significant strands of political theory. Radical democratic theory, I will show, has eschewed a nuanced critique of political economy in favor of a concept of politics that is conceived as autonomous from the economy.⁷ Yet if neoliberalism legitimates itself politically through a normative framework borrowed from classical liberalism, while eviscerating and transforming fundamental liberal norms such as liberty and equality in practice, radical democratic perspectives that assert the autonomy of the political from the economy actually neglect neoliberalism’s fundamental inversion of liberal normative frameworks and economic practices.

As such, the appeal of radical democratic critique to a separation between the economic and political spheres no longer has the emancipatory effects that it may once have had in an earlier phase of capitalist production. Appealing to the separation between economics and politics in the current political climate overlooks the extent to which economic logics now pervade the public sphere and generate profit through the economization of social life. By contrast, I suggest that contemporary Marxist theories emphasizing the political-economic dimensions of neoliberal domination may pay insufficient attention to the sensate, experiential, and perceptual dimensions of political action that social actors use to transform abstract economic logics into politically actionable form.

Therefore, I suggest that synthesizing the approaches of radical democratic theory and contemporary Marxism is crucial to developing a theoretical framework that effectively critiques neoliberal depoliticization and puts forth alternatives to neoliberal political forms. Such a synthesis forms the basis for what I will theorize in part 3 as “a political economy of the senses.” Synthesizing these approaches could move us beyond impasses in contemporary political theory that reproduce formalist and ahistorical concepts of politics and economy, which tend to reflect neoliberal symptoms at the theoretical level rather than subjecting neoliberal forms of domination to critique.

NEOLIBERALISM AS DISCOURSE AND PRACTICE

There is a now voluminous literature on neoliberalism and its political and economic effects on contemporary society. My objective here is to synthesize some of the main insights of this important scholarship in order to highlight a feature of neoliberalism that I take to be central to formulating an account from the perspective of political theory, in particular. This central feature is the state’s ambivalence toward the economy—which works in tandem with features of neoliberalization, including flexibilization, deregulation, and financialization—and distinguishes the neoliberal relationship between politics and economics from that of earlier phases of capitalism.

Recent scholarship has focused on three facets of neoliberalism. The first is that neoliberalism originated as a set of ideas put forth by a group of economic theorists in the 1930s and 1940s, including economists such as Alexander Rüstow, Walter Eucken, and Friedrich von Hayek.⁸ The term neoliberalism was first used in 1932 by Rüstow, one of the central thinkers of the German Ordoliberal school of economic thought.⁹ Rüstow’s slogan, “Free Economy, Strong State,” encapsulates with admiral brevity the paradox at the heart of neoliberal ideas.¹⁰ Whereas classical liberalism of the eighteenth century might be described by the motto “Free Economy, Minimal State,” Rüstow’s neoliberalism instead endorses a strong, interventionist state that creates the conditions for a “free economy.” This new conjunction of the state and economy theorized by the early neoliberals was one in which the state takes an active role in creating the conditions for free markets to flourish, both through specific kinds of economic policies, as well as through a particular kind of regulation of society and human behavior. The conjunction of a “strong” interventionist state with a “free economy,” distinguishes neoliberal thinking from classical liberalism.

Second, neoliberalism also refers (perhaps retroactively) to a set of policies adopted from the late 1970s by politicians such as Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan who selectively put aspects of neoliberal theory into practice. The foundation of these neoliberal policies was the deregulation and liberalization of economic life. Corresponding to these two facets of economic policy was the imposition of two key values, as Lisa Duggan highlights: privatization and personal responsibility.¹¹ Neoliberal politicians advocated the transfer of the costs of social reproduction, as well as the displacement of the costs of dependency to the realm of civil society and the family, through a language of personal responsibility and entrepreneurship. Thatcher and Reagan, for example, responded to dire unemployment and inflation by reducing the money supply and systematically eradicating the power of unions. They deregulated the economy in numerous areas, for example, the banking, airline, and communications industries, and they privatized and subcontracted public services.¹² Bill Clinton continued the neoliberal trend, illustrating that neoliberalism has no party affiliation, most notably through policies such as welfare reform, which made clear that the economic policies of neoliberalism went hand in hand with a cultural politics that was at its root both racially and sexually coded.¹³ Neoliberal policies varied considerably among various national models in response to the pressures of what Claus Offe has called the “disorganization” of capitalism.¹⁴ Yet, as Albena Azmanova emphasizes, although we cannot speak of a uniform neoliberal model, it is at least possible to identify the pressures of deregulation and liberalization that characterized the metamorphosis of welfare states into their neoliberal form across the board.¹⁵

Third, and relatedly, neoliberalism or, more accurately, neoliberalization also refers to a political-economic process whereby the boundary between economics and politics is transformed in ways that allow for greater intervention of the state in market processes while simultaneously obscuring that role.¹⁶ Neoliberalization entails the retreat of the state from social welfare functions even as the state takes a more interventionist role in market processes. Financialization has been a key dimension of such transformations, which in the account of economists such as John Bellamy Foster and Fred Magdoff, have arisen to counter the stagnation tendencies of capital even while exacerbating those tendencies.¹⁷ The consequence has been an immense proliferation of private and public sector debt, which has also escalated and created biopolitical and disciplinary forms of domination related to debt collection, especially for those individuals rendered most precarious by debt in the context of high unemployment.¹⁸ The predominance of financial capital in neoliberal society is one example of how economic dynamics are shifting the boundary between politics and economics. Financial capital requires political intervention to sustain its conditions, yet it increasingly becomes part of a process that is immune to political control, as the convulsive financial crises of recent years have demonstrated.¹⁹

A NOTE ON NEOLIBERAL DOMINATION

Defining neoliberalism as a particular kind of political discourse and set of economic practices does not yet specify what constitutes a specifically neoliberal form of domination. Here I stress that neoliberal domination is at the most basic level, a form of depoliticization. I see this focus as complementary with, though importantly distinct, from approaches that stress the class character of neoliberal domination, such as work by Gerard Duménil and Dominique Lévy and David Harvey.²⁰ Duménil and Lévy, for example, have argued that financial crisis has been a vehicle for the spread of neoliberal economic policies. The financial classes have responded to crises “according to a double standard, doing everything possible in order to preserve the revenue of the social group, even obtaining revenue through other means when it has declined in its traditional forms—whatever the consequences for other social groups and countries. Managing the crisis according to the interests of finance means being indifferent to unemployment, or even counting on its downward pressures on wage demands, on the level of social protection, on job guarantees—during the crisis and beyond.”²¹

While I agree with accounts such as these that neoliberalism has entailed a massive redistribution of wealth upward, and that neoliberalization has no doubt been a deliberate result of financial policies that benefited the financial/managerial capitalist classes, my conceptual focus is less on the dynamics of class relations and more on the ways in which the neoliberal configuration of the relationship between economics and politics tends to obscure the class dynamics of neoliberal economic policies. While class has long been, for good reason, a central category of progressive, and especially of Marxist, political theories, I argue that part of the insidiousness of neoliberalism as opposed to earlier phases of capitalism is the specific way in which class dynamics are being obscured and depoliticized, mainly through a reorganization of the relationship between the neoliberal state and the economy and through shifts in the relationship between the economic and political spheres more broadly.

As such, I focus on the underlying issues of depoliticization that are generated through the shifting relationship between economics and politics rather than on the category of class itself. Moreover, I resist a singular focus on class dynamics because issues of class can be, and hav...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents 
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Toward the Materialization of Critique
• Part 1: Neoliberal Symptoms
• Part 2: The Critique of Reification
• Part 3: A Political Economy of the Senses
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index