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Putting Neo-Liberalism in Its Place(S) Living With/In and Without Neo-Liberalism

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Putting Neo-Liberalism in Its Place(S) Living With/In and Without Neo-Liberalism FORUM Putting neo-liberalism in its place(s) Living with/in and without neo-liberalism John Clarke Abstract: This article explores some concerns about the concept of neo-liberalism, suggesting that it has been stretched too far to be productive as a critical analytical tool. Neo-liberalism suffers from promiscuity (hanging out with various theoret- ical perspectives), omnipresence (treated as a universal or global phenomenon), and omnipotence (identified as the cause of a wide variety of social, political and economic changes). Alternative ways of treating neo-liberalism as more contin- gent and contested are considered. These emphasize its mobile and flexible char- acter, stressing processes of contextual assemblage, articulation, and translation. The article concludes by wondering whether the concept of neo-liberalism is now so overused that it should be retired. Keywords: assemblage, articulation, authority, globalization, neo-liberalism Neoliberalism seems to be everywhere. —Jamie Peck and Adam Tickell Neoliberalism seems to mean many different things depending on one’s vantage point. — Aihwa Ong This article starts from the puzzles identified by think of the relationship between neo-liberalism these quotations. They point to what I think of and space. For Ong (2006), it creates the condi- as the core problems of neo-liberalism as a con- tion for critical reflection on how to think—or cept: it is omnipresent and it is promiscuous. rethink—neoliberalism as an analytic category. There may be a third: that neo-liberalism is om- In the course of the article, I will take up these nipotent, but we will come to questions of power as central issues for considering the “transla- later. I am intrigued by the two quotations in tion” of neo-liberalism. But first, let me offer a part because of what work the word “seems” to word of warning about the article. It is deliber- be doing in each of them. It opens up a moment ately conversational in approach. It forms part of critical distance. For Peck and Tickell (2002), of a long-running conversation centered on the the critical distance concerns precisely how to question of neo-liberalism. This is sometimes a Focaal—European Journal of Anthropology 51 (2008): 135–47 doi:10.3167/fcl.2008.510110 136 | John Clarke conversation with myself, sometimes with mulation directly or being more connected to friends, and sometimes with people with whom what Jessop might call their “societalization” in I feel less comfortable. It represents one more different regimes that attempt to organize and attempt to wrestle with puzzles that continue to reorganize time and space. It is this analytic fo- trouble me in analytical and political ways (e.g., cus that marks their difference from a set of Clarke 1991, 2004a, 2004b). approaches to neo-liberalism that views the con- cept through a Foucauldian analytic of govern- mentality. Here neo-liberalism marks the rise of Promiscuous neo-liberalism technologies of governing populations that con- struct “economic” logics of calculation and in- The question of what we might mean by neo- vite people to become “self-governing” (e.g., Ong liberalism is a difficult one. The answers to this 2006; Rose 1999). Such conceptions of neo- question are various, divergent, and overlapping. liberalism as governmentality link sites and tech- The simplest answer is, perhaps, David Harvey’s nologies as diverse as the management of security view of neo-liberalism as the political/ideologi- or the constitution/regulation of a global space, cal project of a class seeking to change the bal- the rise of NGOs (non-governmental organiza- ance of power in global capitalism and create new tions) as a mode of governance in and of civil means of capital accumulation (Harvey 2005). society, through the economization of the cal- The attraction of this answer is that it is simple, culating self (as entrepreneur, as consumer, as it is evident everywhere, and applies to a variety prudential risk taker, etc.), to the rise of thera- of economic and social phenomena, from ex- peutic technologies of the self.1 tensive land dispossession through to the new Although I have sketched these as three differ- flexibilities of capital or to the dismantling of ent answers (see also Barnett 2005; Larner 2000), the social state (in societies of the North/West). the boundaries between them blur and are tra- A related answer would perhaps stress the versed, as is usually the case with boundaries. political–ideological dimensions more emphat- From all three perspectives, some of the same ically, pointing to the dismantling of earlier po- trends or tendencies are visible, even if they are litical settlements and their forms of institu- made to mean slightly different things. For ex- tionalization (welfare states, forms of citizenship, ample, the much-cited renaming of an unem- corporatist settlements between capital and labor, ployed person claiming unemployment benefit Atlantic Fordism, etc.). These changes create as a “job seeker” by the UK’s Conservative gov- new ways of thinking, new political formations, ernment can be read as (a) evidence of the sub- and new institutional forms that can be charac- ordination of social policy to the power of terized as neo-liberal because they involve both capital and the liberation of the market; (b) evi- the direct expansion of the scope and reach of dence of trying to create a new “economized” or corporate capital, and the indirect “economiza- “market centric” rhetoric in displacing social tion” of areas of social and political life (public democratic, welfarist, or citizen-centered institu- functions to be either privatized or “run like a tions; or (c) an instance of a governmental tech- business,” for example). This view would focus nology for producing subjects who understand rather more attention on the political and ideo- themselves as “entrepreneurial” or “willing selves” logical levels of analysis, and would be especially (Maasen and Sutter 2007). concerned with processes of state reform or trans- It might be that these boundaries are both formation, and about the spatial and scalar re- blurred and traversed by the question of eco- structurings with which it is associated (e.g., nomics. Although the economic is clearly at the Hartmann 2005; Jessop 2002; Peck 2004). centre of political economic analyses of the ref- Despite their different emphases, these two ormation of capital, it mutates in the second ver- views are linked by a foundation in political econ- sion to include questions of neo-liberalism as omy, whether addressing forms of capital accu- “economic discourse” (Peck 2004: 394), whereas Living with/in and without neo-liberalism | 137 some Foucauldian work locates the discursive we might remember the difficult work that was and governmental “economization” of social and needed to “unlock” the oppressive and over- political life as a key feature of neo-liberalism whelming weight that the concept of globaliza- (Brown 2005; Rose 1999). There are two points tion carried—and the sense of inevitability that to be made here. On the one hand, these are was associated with it (Massey 2004a; see also not exactly the same “economic”: one refers to a Barnett 2005). But if it is not everywhere, is neo- material substructure of forces, relations, and liberalism merely the new colonialism, articulat- interests (which may be more or less directly ex- ing metropolises and peripheries in new forms pressed in political and ideological forms); the of ruling at a distance? How to understand the other refers to a view of the “economic” as those complicated spaces of neo-liberalism has been practices, relationships, and forms of organiza- the subject of much critical discussion in geog- tion that are discursively constituted as eco- raphy that has explored its uneven expansion, nomic through governmental work. This issue its variegated “local forms,” and its hybridity. is both a focus of coincidence and analytical For example, Peck argues that: frustration. On the other hand, we might take this coincidence not as the effect of bad theoret- “While neoliberalism may have begun life as a ical work, but as indicating something trou- North Atlantic intellectual movement, its muta- bling about both the central and problematic tion into a variegated and internationalized state character of “the economic” in contemporary project over the past thirty years has been asso- transformations. I realize this is a rather weak ciated with a profoundly transnational process formulation—but I am not sure I can reconcile of ‘social learning’ which has established new the epistemological, theoretical, and political circuits of neoliberal economic and legal exper- divergences between Marxism and Foucauldian tise, new material connections between finan- analysis here (if ever…). They will, however, con- cializing and globalizing economies and new tinue to haunt the concept of neo-liberalism. forms of connection around neoliberal norms” (2004: 402). Omnipresent neo-liberalism I have argued elsewhere that neo-liberalism is a political–cultural project that aims at transna- “There has everywhere been an emphatic turn tional hegemony, in which different places are towards neo-liberalism in political-economic invited, seduced, and compelled to join (Clarke practices and thinking since the 1970s. Deregu- 2004a). Peck points to the strange “doubling” of lation, privatization and withdrawal of the state general and particular in this process: “Each from many areas of social provision have been and every neoliberal transition, in this sense, is all too common. Almost all states, from those distinctive though each also remakes the relation- newly minted after the collapse of the Soviet ship between the part (an actually existing neo- Union to old-style social democracies and wel- liberal case) and the whole (the abstraction that fare states such as New Zealand and Sweden we might provisionally term neoliberalism-in- have embraced, sometimes voluntarily and in general)” (2004: 395).
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