Extending the Ecology: Writing Theory & Neoliberal Rationality
Item Type text; Electronic Dissertation
Authors Kraus, Shane Michael
Publisher The University of Arizona.
Rights Copyright © is held by the author. Digital access to this material is made possible by the University Libraries, University of Arizona. Further transmission, reproduction, presentation (such as public display or performance) of protected items is prohibited except with permission of the author.
Download date 27/09/2021 21:22:43
Link to Item http://hdl.handle.net/10150/642054 EXTENDING THE ECOLOGY: WRITING THEORY & NEOLIBERAL RATIONALITY
By
Shane Kraus
______Copyright © Shane Kraus 2020
A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the
DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH
In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements
For the Degree of
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
In the Graduate College
THE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA
2020 2
THE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA GRADUATE COLLEGE
As members of the Dissertation Committee, we certify that we have read the dissertation ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
In the spirit of a dissertation that insists we never quite act or write independently, this project is far from mine alone—it’s the product of multiple contributors, blinding generosities, and genuine sacrifices. First among them, Dr. Matthew Abraham, my dissertation chair and Dr. Thomas Miller, a genuine mentor and human of the highest order. The influence you’ve both had on my work is incalculable. When activism, human rights and dissent reverberate across my pages in sprawling, paragraph-traversing sentences, I’m hoping you might be proud, Matt—even as in these exact moments I’m hearing you, Tom, suggesting I settle down into clarity, and know you're right. Thank you both for the ridiculous generosity, time and energy you’ve shown in becoming the imagined audience in my composing brain—I’m a better person and writer for it. For your willingness to take a shot on me without much reason to, thank you Dr. Marcia Klotz; your critical input late in the game brought a level of precision I'd otherwise missed. Tight, compressed prose, refined points, crisp, clean argumentation, multiply-interrogated assertions—when I manage any of the above, your impact and soaring intelligence is working through me. Emphatic, enduring and sincere gratitude to each of the three of you as committee members; the patience you’ve shown has been the stuff of awe. To the hundreds of student writers who have inspired my research into student debt and the student protest movements from 2014 to 2016, thank you so deeply for teaching me how to think on a daily basis. Gigantic thanks also to everyone in the English Department and writing program at UA, those sainted individuals who endured my titanic administrative deficiencies—Sharonne Meyerson, Marcia Simon, Dr. Susan Miller-Cochran, and Dr.
Shelly Rodrigo—without ever pointing them out, and thanks also to you Director Cristina 4
Ramirez, for never hesitating to bring them to my attention; our talks were humbling, challenging, and inspiring; they woke me up. And to Jessica, thank you for teaching me who I am throughout this work.
Above all, this dissertation is dedicated to my father, David Paul Kraus. Dad, your unshakable conviction and faith in me didn’t make this dissertation possible; it did far more than that. When things fell apart in the last stretch, we put it back together; gratitude, then, doesn’t really get close to what I owe you for your help. To think about your contribution in good faith alongside the claims to fundamental interdependence that anchor this dissertation is to recognize you as a coauthor, and nothing less. Love for miles to you,
Dad. Onward. 5
TABLE OF CONTENTS
ABSTRACT ...... 7
INTRODUCTION ...... 9 PART I
CHAPTER 1: NEOLIBERALISM & DEBT: A HISTORY ...... 13 I. Academic Approaches ...... 16 II. Intellectual Origins ...... 20 III. Mont Pèlerin Society ...... 24 IV. International Debt Production ...... 26 V. Writing & Materiality ...... 29
CHAPTER 2: EXTENDING THE WRITING ECOLOGY ...... 33 I. From Dialogic to Ecological ...... 34 II. Postprocess ...... 37 III. Externalization of Cognition & Complexity Theory ...... 39 IV. Politics ...... 47
CHAPTER 3: WRITING SUBJECTS & CIRCULATING AFFECT ...... 53 I. Circulation & Motion: Features of the Writing System ...... 54 II. Ecological Theories of The Writing Subject ...... 57 III... Forming The New Subject: Affective Circulation ...... 60 IV. Neo-subjects ...... 69 V. Affective Literacy ...... 71 CHAPTER 4: AGENCY, WRITING AS CAPACITY & CHANGING ECOLOGIES ...... 75 I. Writing in Networks ...... 77 II. Writing & Rhetorical Agency ...... 80 III. Writing as Capacity ...... 85 PART II.
CHAPTER 5: “FREE” SPEECH, NEOLIBERAL ANTI-POLITICS, & DISRUPTION ...... 89 I. Rancière ...... 92 II. Repressive Tolerance ...... 97 III. The Marketplace of Ideas...... 99 6
IV. Truly Free Speech ...... 106 V. Changing the Conversation ...... 110
CHAPTER 6: HAYEK & THE ORIGINS OF NEOLIBERAL RHETORIC ...... 114 I. Aristotelian Freedom ...... 115 II. Spontaneous Order...... 117 III. A New Social Contract & State...... 124 IV. Identification: Neoliberal Rhetoric ...... 134 CHAPTER 7: NEOLIBERALISM, WRITING & STUDENT DEBT ...... 139 I. Networked Consensus ...... 140 II. Indebted Writers ...... 144 III. University of California: A Material Context ...... 146 IV. Debt & Discipline ...... 148 V. Inverting Debt ...... 153
REFERENCES ...... 158 7
ABSTRACT
Combining historiographic, rhetorical/analytical and hermeneutic research methodologies, this project takes as its grounding premise that neoliberal rationality is fundamentally reshaping writing and speech practices in the postsecondary higher education setting and beyond; and doing by ordering the ecology of writing at virtually every level of scale. Although ecologically-oriented writing research has thoroughly excavated and theorized writing’s environmental production, and demonstrated that its emergent properties comport with the laws governing complex systems, research focusing acutely on the political materiality of writing alongside writing theory has not been so thorough; nor has theory attended to how the neoliberal transformation bears on writing.
This project moves to fill that gap by investigating the specific rhetorical-affective dimensions through which this reconstitution has occurred. How does neoliberalism— understood as a normative order of reason and a political rationality—intervene and order writing at the level of the subject? How do student indebtedness and other epiphenomenal developments with the ascent of neoliberalism allow for its ethos to infiltrate and inform what we write and how we represent the self in writing?
These inquires turn the dissertation toward the constitution of the modern writing
(neoliberal) subject. Against the movement in ecological writing research away from the study of subjectivity (Sánchez 2007; Hawk 2007; Dobrin 2011; Whicker 2013), this project situates the writing subject at the nexus of this project; I argue that the writer as critical to understanding how writing is moved by neoliberal affect in circulation—a third key research question. Taking a discursive approach to the study of neoliberal rationality, the chapters are loosely structured to comport with Jean-Jacques Lecercle’s model for 8 interpreting discourse from historical, social, material and political perspectives, along with its faculty for producing subjectivity (Lecercle 2009). The chapters offer a history of neoliberalism and the rise of student debt as parallel, epiphenomenal and interdependent occurrences; a genealogy of important developments in ecologically-oriented writing research; and take up the University of California system as a case study—spanning two chapters—in how debt and neoliberal rationality shape institutional politics and policies.
Blending qualitative and hermeneutic research into campus activism from 2014 to 2016,
UC has also been ground zero for a clash between neoliberalism’s anti-political, counter- public ethos and the emergence of new—and deeply maligned—forms of disruptive writing and dissenting speech. Part work of political theory and part work of rhetorical/writing theory, the project brings together ecologically-based writing research and the emergence of neoliberalism to argue these research vectors are deeply interdetermining and inextricable, both with critical import for what writing is (its ontology) and how it works.
9
INTRODUCTION (HIGHLY ABRIDGED): ECOLOGY & NEOLIBERALISM
Writing is a material practice, an embodied behavior, creating cognitive ecologies through the intra-action of entangled parts of the world that reciprocally create them anew.
~Marilyn Cooper, The Animal Who Writes: A Posthumanist Composition
To approach writing as an ecology—following developments in writing theory since the social turn—is to see every facet of the composing act as interconnected, interanimating and both defined by and defining of all other writing and writers within an enfolding network of relations. Subjects, agencies, bodies, machines, technologies, settings, interfaces, conventions, discourses, writers and writing all mutually form and condition each other in ongoing interdependent becoming. Today, this theoretical orientation overlaps at virtually every level of scale with neoliberalism—a sprawling and spatiotemporal normative order of reason (Foucault 2008) that transects the geopolitical and the personal, along with every human domain and endeavor through which they overlap. Nation-states, universities, graduate programs, dissertation writers, classrooms, students, subjects, identities, everyday rituals, our most basic habituated ways of seeing, knowing and orienting to others—these are among the spheres and projects undergoing transmogrification to the model of the market. Neoliberal modes of appropriation and incursion vary. Through both official abrogation and subtle, routine recalibrations, neoliberalism works to replace concern with rights, democratic practices, public purposes, collective imaginaries, and liberalism’s axiomatic gestures toward tolerance, inclusion, diversity and social justice, with concern for markets, competition and freedom conceived 10 as a private protected sphere. As these shifting ontological coordinates “profoundly alter” the “phenomenology of being and political life” (Comaroff and Comaroff 14-15) and furnish “new frameworks of meaning with which to make sense of the world” (Hall and
O’Shea 8) neoliberal rationality renders precarious many longstanding commitments—to social justice, political dissent, and critical pedagogy, among others—through which rhetoric and composition has historically concerned itself as a field, and inexorably shapes writing, writing subjects and the ecologies in which both unfold. This project investigates how it exacts these transformations by considering the political materiality of writing.
Building from advancements initiated by ecological writing theorists since the social turn, this project works to inflect, extend and supplement this work through concentrated attention to writing’s political materiality, which pertains to how writing is mediated by institutional, structural, cultural, and environmental exigencies that sponsor and give rise to its conditions of possibility. Where chapters 1 and 3 respectively explicate a history of the discourse and its production of neoliberal subjectivity, chapter 7, on student debt and chapter 6 takes up its political genesis. In The Falling Rate of Learning and the Neoliberal Endgame, David Blacker suggests that the objectives of neoliberal governmentality align under the ambitions of “educational eliminationism”—a full-scale eradication of education as a public good. This entails the elimination of political engagement with the silencing of student voices in educational settings, and the deletion of student autonomy through the normalization of indentured servitude under the burden of student debt, a thesis I test in chapters 5 and 7. Chapters 2 and 4 respectively consider the political implications of neoliberalism for writing and rhetorical theory.
In Terms of Work For Composition: A Materialist Critique, Bruce Horner explains 11 that investigating the materiality of composition entails a broad spectrum of considerations. Writing’s materiality may be understood
... to refer to a host of socioeconomic conditions contributing to writing production,
such as the availability of certain kinds of schooling, number of students in writing
classes, student financial aid (and the need for it), public health, access to time and
quiet. ... Yet more broadly the materiality of writing might be understood to refer to
networks for the distribution of writing controls over publishing (in whatever
forms), and global relations of power articulated through these. And it may be
understood to include the particular subjectivities—the consciousness produced—
by the conditions of “postmodern,” “post-Fordist,” and other socioeconomic
conditions. (xvii-xix)
In the current political moment, such questions constellate around neoliberalism.
Whether vis-à-vis the imposition of student debt’s precarity, through antipolitical clampdowns on public speech, by mediating the bodies included and excluded from ecological-institutional spaces, or through constituting writing subjects as intensely self- disciplining entrepreneurs of self, through the contingent, increasingly flexibilized labor pool tasked with writing instruction, or the mandated self-reporting/surveillance protocols that track productivity, neoliberal rationality monopolizes the material conditions of writing production. If by regulating the material conditions of writing production neoliberal discourses in circulation bear substantively on what is acceptable, debatable and thinkable, hence what writers can conceivably invent, create or compose—achieving most of this under both the banner of “inevitability” and the bandwidth of conscious attention— this work situates neoliberalism firmly within its historical moorings, mutability, 12 contradictions and contingencies in an effort to demystify its standing as commonsense.
13
CHAPTER ONE: NEOLIBERALISM & DEBT: A HISTORY
Debt bondage, that is to say the status or condition arising from a pledge by a debtor of his personal services or of those of a person under his control as security for a debt, if the value of those services as reasonably assessed is not applied toward the liquidation of the debt or the length and nature of those services are not respectively limited or defined.
~United Nations’ Supplemental Convention on the Abolition of Slavery, Section 1 (1956)
On May 12th 2014, Chilean artist Francisco Tapia circulated a video on social media in which he claimed to have stolen and burned roughly $500 million in promissory notes, installment contracts and student debt papers held by the University del Mar in what he described as an “act of love.”1 The act was intended to publicize the national movement for education reform amid ever-escalating tuition costs and student debt across the nation’s colleges. That debt had led to a popular uprising on May 8th of that year that saw thousands march on the capital streets of Santiago. Directed at Chilean Education Minister Nicolas
Eyzaguirre, the protesters demanded that sanctions be issued on for-profit educational institutions that are illegal by Chilean law, but that roughly half of the nations’ students pay significant sums to attend—including many who officially held ‘illegal’ citizenship status. Addressing those students in debt to the Del Mar University system, Tapia declares the end of all of it: “It’s over. You’re free of debt. You don’t have to pay another peso.”
1 See Rene Luis. “Chilean Artist Claims To Steal, Burn $500m Worth Of Student Debt Papers.” Al Jazeera, May 19, 2914. http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2014/5/19/chile- student-debt.html. 14
Tapia rejects the stigma of criminality that the Chilean government has imposed on its poor: “[w]e have to lose the fear. . . that we are criminals for being poor.” The burned documents represented hundreds of millions in debt from Universidad del Mar students, many of whom reported participating in the march because university officials had directed them to transfer to neighboring institutions even as DMU continued to collect on debts.
Reporting on the events, Chilean alternative news website “The Clinic” indicated, perhaps not surprisingly, that the University del Mar owners had defrauded thousands of students using fraudulent loan contracts drawn up with assistance from the state itself, “which gave legal status [and] authorized its operation” (Daza 2014).
Though there has been a growing academic move away from the idea that neoliberalism has a unitary set of origins, intellectual or ideological flashpoints, Chile holds relatively unanimous recognition as especially significant to the genesis of neoliberalism. As the first point at which neoliberal economic theory became neoliberalism as social theory, Chile witnessed the first iteration of the neoliberal “shock doctrine,” and prefigures current transformations in public higher education in the U.S. (Klein 2007).
After the U.S.-facilitated, C.I.A. backed coup d’état that led to Salvador Allende’s assassination in 1973, Augusto Pinochet began dismantling public education as part of the comprehensive privatization of Chile’s public institutions with the direct support and counsel of Friedrich von Hayek, Milton Friedman, and other notable economists from the
Chicago School of Economics. While principally tasked with renegotiating loans with the
International Monetary Fund (IMF), in Chile the “Chicago Boys” helped test and implement the first iterations of neoliberal rationality in practice, and the permanent austerity rhetorics that were adopted by the World Bank from early in the 1970s and since. 15
As the IMF imposed ‘structural adjustments’—the now famous euphemism for the neoliberal overhaul—on the developing south over these decades, the Chicago School’s representatives collaborated directly with the IMF to restructure the Chilean economy according to the neoliberal doctrine.2This meant privatizing public assets, social security, natural resources, and securing foreign direct investment by guaranteeing the right to repatriate profits from their Chilean operations as a condition of the investment. Though it wasn’t until 1979 that Pinochet effectively withdrew governmental support for public education, Pinochet’s plan began with the appointment of Admiral Hugo Castro Jimenez as
Minister of Education in 1973. Jimenez’s explicit mandate was to implement a fully privatized model of education.3 While transferring the cost for education to student debtors began with Pinochet’s collaboration with the Chicago School economists, Jimenez’s tenure saddled millions of Chilean students with unpayable debt, implementing a policy platform that would later be termed the “Washington Consensus.” In the 1979 Presidential Directive on National Education, Pinochet laid out the implicit contract that education would entail for U.S. students thereafter: “those who enjoy [secondary or higher education] must earn it with effort and pay for it” or otherwise reimburse the “national community” (Harvey
2006). Transferring the cost for public provisions such as education from institutions to individuals, particularly to indebted students, and privatizing public assets have since become defining features of the neoliberal turn in U.S. postsecondary education.
2 See J. Valdez, Pinochet’s Economists: The Chicago School in Chile, Cambridge University Press, 1995; see also P. Winn Victims of the Chilean Miracle: Workers and Neoliberalism in the Pinochet Era 1973 – 2002. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004. 3 See Luis Hidalgo Para and Lili Loofbourow, “No to Profit: Fighting Privitization in Chile” The Boston Review, May 16th 2013. 16
I. Academic Approaches
To use the word ‘neoliberal’ at the current academic moment is to confront the problem of the referent’s ever-widening sphere of signification, to encounter the increasing elasticity and thus decreasing explanatory utility of the sign.4 In John Clarke's estimation, neoliberalism’s “adjectival promiscuity” ranges into at least the following contexts, categories, descriptions and designations: “states, spaces, logics, techniques, technologies, discourses, discursive frameworks, ideologies, ways of thinking, projects, agendas, programs, governmentality, measures, regimes ...” (Clarke 15; cited in Peck 2013). As a theoretical, economic and political enterprise, neoliberalism, in scholarship and beyond, is most often associated with a set of economic and social policies that arise in reaction and rebuttal to welfare-state Keynesian economics and that proposes to maximize human wellbeing by modeling society around the principles, metrics, idioms and logics of the
“free” market. As a term in academic discourse, neoliberalism refers to a guiding orientation to critical analysis that helps us to distinguish the various features of contemporary capitalism that set it apart from previous eras. This is especially important to writers and to theorizing the writing act within the public university, as terms like financialization, efficiency, best practices, assessment, among others, order the systems that structure the ecology of composition. From a discursive approach I take throughout this project, neoliberalism can be defined following Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval as a
“set of discourses, practices and apparatuses that determine a new mode of government of
4 According to Stuart Hall in “The Neoliberal Revolution,” (Soundings, Issue 48, 2012), and to the position of this dissertation, the term “neoliberal is an unsatisfactory” one (10). For many theorists, the term has become a “rascal concept” that is “promiscuously pervasive yet inconsistently defined” (Brenner et al. 2010: 183-184). 17 human beings in accordance with the universal principle of competition.”5 Acknowledging multiplicity, variegation, mutation and contextual interactivity (England and Ward 2007;
Springer 2011; Brenner & Theodore 2010; Ong 2006; Ong 2007), discursive approaches identify the interaction between rhetorics as the loci of neoliberal power; each of its discourses are continually converging with other social formations or discourses
(Catherine Kingfisher, 2002: 165). Stuart Hall notes that from its earliest, neoliberalism has promoted two discursive figures,
the ‘taxpayer’ (hardworking man, overtaxed to fund the welfare ‘scrounger’), and
the ‘customer’ (fortunate housewife, ‘free’ to exercise limited choice in the market-
place, for whom the ‘choice agenda’ and personalized delivery were specifically
designed,” the unity of which is the impossibility that either could ever become a
drain on social resource. (2013, 21)
The rise of “neoliberal” as a term for conceptualizing this particular political economic formation doesn’t come from those who are reliably associated with the regime; rather, the term comes from those attempting to describe a style of thinking, a manner of orientation, and an approach to social and economic organization. At a time when other academics were not seriously investigating neoliberal thinkers, Michel Foucault was all but alone as an early reader of the Ordo School. In his 1978-79 lectures on neoliberal reason at the
Collège de France and in later explication, Foucault read neoliberalism not simply as an ideological orientation particular to late capitalism or economic liberalism but as a
5 Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval. 2013. The New Way of The World: The Neo-Liberal Society. Trans. George Elliot. London: Verso. (digital edition/no pagination). Introduction, section 1; location 114; all further references to this text—and to all other digital texts cited within this dissertation that do not have pagination—are cited only by numeric location abbreviation (loc.#). 18 normative order of reason and a governing rationality. Irreducible to mere ideology in
Foucault’s work, a political rationality constitutes a normative and governing order of reason that configures a consequential arrangement of the social, the subject and the state.
Among the first to tie neoliberal economic thought to the rejection of laissez-faire economic principles of the 19th-century, and to differentiate it from earlier forms of economic and embedded liberalism, Foucault highlighted a reconceived role of the state and a decisive departure from the classical liberal subject as depicted in the work of
Thomas Hobbes or John Stuart Mill. In particular, the new liberal project features “an articulation of state, market and citizenship that harness the first to impose the stamp of the second on the third” (Waquant 2012, 66).
Where the autonomous, sovereign liberal subject is the state’s foundation in the classic liberal account, neo-liberalism introduces an alternative paradigm in which supporting the economy has become the state’s central role. Not simply managing the market, in the neoliberal schema the state functions as the economy’s safeguard, and the success of the economy is its source of legitimation. This means the state not only recalibrates itself according to market logic, but also that it fosters a socio-political culture that exhaustively figures citizens as “rational economic actors in every sphere of life”
(Brown 2006, 94). Governmental discursive practices shift accordingly from encouraging political activity to promoting market conduct and coordinating the system of incentives and disincentives for cultivating subjects with the requisite orientation to achieve the state’s economic obligations. Far from the “minarchist,” impotent ‘night-watchmen’ state to which neoclassical economics aspired, the state under neoliberalism has been empowered as the “core agency that actively fabricates the subjectivities suited to making 19 the fiction of the markets real and consequential” (Peck 12, 68). Concerned in the main with calibrating a subject disposed to conduct conducive to supporting market vitality that appears as self-interest, neoliberal strategy “consists in creating the maximum number of market situations—that is, in organizing by various means (privatization, creating competition between public services, marketization of schools or hospitals, making money available through private debt) the ‘obligation to choose’” (Dardot and Laval, loc. 4016).
Citizenship and moral substance are measured by gauging the cost / benefit differentials across consumption habits and actions to assess how well individuals provide for their own needs, and the extent to which the subject maximizes the injunction to freedom. In The
Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978—1979, Foucault observes that through biopolitics, the new governmental reason entails a totalizing form of the production of subjectivity. Biopolitics, the primary mechanism of neoliberal governmentality, because it resides within individuals and leverages the subject’s autonomy, forms “an omnipresent government, a government which nothing escapes”
(Foucault 2008, 296).
In the classical-liberal formulation, the freedom of the individual is the “technical precondition for rational government, and government may not constrain such freedom if it does not wish to endanger its own foundations” (Lemke 1997, 10). This is why in Kant the freedom of the rational individual is the state’s foundation and why protecting it is the state’s remit. The state in Kant’s treatment does not impose an artificial restriction on liberty but is a naturally emerging institution that furnishes the means for its attainment.
Neoliberalism reverses this dynamic. Although the neoliberal contract does anchor the rationality of government to the rational actions of individuals, the state’s specific focus 20 shifts from the presupposition and protection of innate freedom to the production and promotion of an artificial form of autonomy, that of entrepreneurial initiative (see Lemke
1997, 239-256). To achieve this end and to synthesize freedom in the form of entrepreneurialism, the state has altered its mode of intervention from force to facilitation and restaged its nexus of authority from without to within individual subjects through the
“deployment of the logic of the market as a generalized normative logic from the state to innermost subjectivity” (Dardot and Laval, loc.425). With this transition to facilitating entrepreneurial initiative and to a forced market sensibility, neoliberalism inverts the proto- liberal (Aristotelian) binary whereby the fact of rational choice presupposes individual freedom into an artificial (market) freedom that mandates rational choice: from ‘because individuals make rational choices, they are free,’ we get, ‘because individuals are free, they must make rational choices.’
II. Intellectual Origins
Though the Chicago School contributed decisively to the development of neoliberalism as economic policy and political rationality in Chile, the anti-statist, anti- collectivist, market fundamentalism it valorized and disseminated was already well articulated in France and Switzerland before the Chicago School’s prominence in the
1950s. If the Chicago School’s footprint in Chile marks the site of its first policy application, neoliberalism as a theoretical enterprise originates at the Walter Lippmann
Colloquium in Paris in 1938. Arranged by then preeminent advocate for economic liberalism Louis Rougier, the Colloque de Lippmann (CWL) convened a group of 26 participants—including French corporate managers, (Auguste Detoeuf, Louis Marlio,
Ernest Mercier), senior civil servants (Jacques Rueff, Roger Auboin), up-and-coming 21 liberal economists Friedrich Hayek, Wilhelm Röpke, Alexander Rüstow, and sociologists
Michael Polanyi and Karl Popper—to consider the French translation of Walter Lippman’s
1938 book, An Inquiry into the Principles of a Good Society. The goal was to design a
“new” liberalism in response to the crises of laissez-faire capitalism. In a letter to William
Rappard, Rougier described the effort as “an international crusade in favor of constructive liberalism” (Denord 47). Though collectively the group agreed that a restoration of liberalism should necessarily emphasize individual economic freedoms, the members were sharply divided over its appropriate formulation. Two schools of liberal thought converged at the CWL: German Ordo-liberalism and Austro-American liberalism. Instrumental in laying the framework for German post-war liberalism, the Ordo-liberal contingency was largely part of Germany’s “Freiburg School” between 1928 and 1930. Their work was chronicled in the publication Ordo, which published the economists and jurists Wilhelm
Röpke, Walter Eucken, Franz Böhm, Alexander Rüstow, and Alfred Müller-Armack.
These thinkers helped architect the “social market economy” that was implemented in postwar West Germany. Ordo-liberals advocated for an economic and social politics whose main objective was the “deproletarianization of the population through the creation of small production units, property ownership assistance, worker shareholders, etc.”
(Lazzarato 2011, 92). Ordo-liberals thus sought a fundamental renewal of liberalism that would later become radicalized and realized in its development at the Chicago School of
Economics. Represented by Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich A. Hayek, among others, the
Austro-American interpretation conversely favored a reinvigoration of old liberalism rather than a top-down reconfiguration. Key referents were also contested. Attendees disagreed on the meaning of freedom, liberalism and the name that should identify the doctrine they 22 were developing. Rougier preferred “positive liberalism,” Louis Baudin favored
“individualism,” and Jacques Rueff favored “left-wing liberalism” (Denord 2009, 56). It is only after the CWL had concluded that “neoliberalism” would be the strategic term for the group’s work: to be a ‘neoliberal’ was to hold that laissez-faire economics was insufficient as a safeguard for individual market autonomy, and that, in the name of liberalism a new economic policy was necessary (Denord 2009, 48). What ultimately unified these ideological factions was a shared commitment to reinvigorating the economic autonomy of the individual and determining both an appropriate role for state economic intervention and the most effective relationship between market economics and democracy to meet this end.
Despite or because of the discord among participants in making these determinations,
CWL marks the emergence of neoliberalism as a set of postulates and a policy template that designed around the belief that the price mechanism was ideal for (a) maximizing the widest subset of human expectations; (b) the maximum satisfaction of widely disparate human expectations; (c) instituting a juridical framework adjusted to the order defined by the market; and (d) guiding state intervention if it seeks to act upon the cause of economic difficulties.
Among the most influential works that developed from the CWL, Fredrick Hayek’s
The Road to Serfdom (1944) inaugurated a canon of work that conflated neoliberal objectives with the moral imperatives of common sense. While peripheral figures like
Wilhelm Röpke were more decisive in developing neoliberal economic theory, what materializes in Hayek’s nascent formulation is an outline of a market fundamentalist doctrine of individualism that reduces institutional responsibility, collective risk, and 23 structural causation to category errors.6 The text valorizes individual economic freedom, property rights, and liberty achieved through competition as part of its anti-collectivist, anti-socialist and counter-political stance. This framework appealed to ‘personal responsibility’ to make the supremacy of the individual into a Judeo-Christian ethical imperative that was tethered to Western civilization: “[t]he essential features of that individualism” were elements of “Christianity and the philosophy of classical antiquity” that was “developed during the Renaissance and has since grown and spread into what we know as Western European civilisation—the respect for the individual man qua man …”
(Hayek 2001, 14). Neoliberal discourses derive much of their affective-rhetorical energy by repurposing tropes central to the U.S. national mythology—the self-made man, rugged individualism and enterprise, the supremacy of individual will, and a providentially ordained private destiny all appear throughout neoliberalism’s ascendency. Opposing “the contempt for intellectual liberty” among those who have “embraced a collectivist faith” to
6 As a technical concern, offloading risks to individuals’ offsets “the danger in confusing, diffusing, equalizing, concealing, shuffling, smoothing, evading, relegating, and collectivizing, the real risks” as “with more of the risks borne of individual citizens … the system may be more stable” (George Gilder, 1993. Wealth and Poverty, Ithaca, N.Y.: ICS Press, 11). As this logic has proliferated into all spheres of daily life and consumer-capital protocols, institutions, collectives, and businesses offload full responsibility, risk, accountability, and cost fully onto individuals. Over time this narrows the attention, receptivity and ultimately inquiry into collective, institutional, or structural causation altogether: personal responsibility flows from collective irresponsibility and disavowal. This applies also to the daily transfer of labor cost from private institutions to customers: a call to Wells Fargo, AT&T or the Pima Country Justice Court, for instance, will first reach a computer, not a person, will then be routed to another prompt, any of several locations in a grid, and to another program, etc. ad nauseam. A parking garage in Tucson collects $10 from customers for a lost ticket after they have paid to enter: this isn’t negotiable because it’s policy and not the responsibility of the company but of the individual consumer. In both cases—and the innumerable cases these represent—these arrangements transfer the responsibility and the labor necessary to complete these tasks from the network to the individual. 24 the virtues in which “Anglo-Saxons” have traditionally excelled—“independence and self- reliance, individual initiative and local responsibility” (2001, 56)—Hayek invokes
Emerson directly to connect collectivism and social planning to totalitarian intolerance.
The critical neoliberal formulation in which safeguarding individual freedom necessarily amounts to inequality and requires unimpeded competition, appears as follows: “If we are not to destroy individual freedom, competition must be left to function unobstructed”
(Hayek, 2001, 137). From the neoliberal perspective that The Road to Serfdom represents, calls to equalize the uneven socio-economic playing field, calls for diversity, affirmative action, and other energy dedicated to ameliorating inequity are not to be seen as demands for impartiality or justice, but as revolts against the impartial justice of the market. Though the text represents a developmental phase in articulating the neoliberal vision, its pages contain, compressed into palatable simplicity, the basic but fully-realized pretext for a series of policy directives under which entire populations, from the 1970s to date, have been “expelled from the index of moral concern” (Giroux 2007, 29).
III. Mont Pèlerin’s Society
It was after 1944, however, that this individualist precept evolved into a concrete doctrine. In 1947, fifteen of the twenty-six participants from CWL—among them,
Friedrich Hayek, Ludwig Von Mises, Wilhelm Röpke, Frank Knight, Milton Friedman,
George J. Stigler, James M. Buchannan, and Gary Becker, together with sociologists Karl
Popper and Michael Polanyi—and nine others, convened in Mont Pèlerin, Switzerland for the founding of the Mont Pèlerin Society. Comprised of thirty-nine members, the Mont
Pèlerin Society initially sought to enlist French and German intellectuals, but recruitment trended thereafter toward businessmen, who subsequently recommended other managers 25 and academics (Denord 2009, 56). What brought the group together was a shared sense of crisis and the moral obligation to protect freedom from the precarity of a resurgent socialist authoritarianism.7 But the members were again divided over both that response’s appropriate formulation and course of action. The effort to arrive at any set of unifying claims was marked by discord and division. In a first pass at producing a coherent set of shared objectives, Mont Pèlerin’s members produced a “Draft Statement of Aims” on April
7th, 1947 that only minimally differed from the vision of individual freedom qua market conduct, property rights and competition that Hayek explicated three years earlier. Point 1 restates key points from that text, but also articulates them in the form of a call to action:
“Individual freedom can be preserved only in a society in which an effective competitive market is the main agency for the direction of economic activity. Only the decentralization of control through private property in the means of production can prevent those concentrations of power which threaten individual freedom” (Plehwe 2009, 22-23). A redraft titled the “Statement of Aims of the Mont Pèlerin Society” was composed and considered the next day, and all but one member agreed to this abbreviated, comparatively informal revision. Though it does not define neoliberalism, the revised draft contains the essential components to formulate such a definition and remains the only official statement from Mont Pèlerin’s members. Although the statement did not reflect a new consensus, what does emerge from the composition is a set of tasks under which the neoliberal thought collective mobilized. In the aggregate these tasks index a general philosophical position based on individualism, economic freedom, an affirmation of moral standards, the
7 See Ronald Max Hartwell, A History of the Mont. Pèlerin Society, Indianapolis: Liberty Fund Inc., 1995, pp. 61 – 78. 26 state’s economic reorientation, and the importance of legal order. While the Statement of
Aims reflects the absence of any real collective sense of direction as of 1947, what emerges from the tension that animated the meetings at CWL and Mont Pèlerin is a new liberalism in which the neo signaled a reprioritization of the state in service to the market economy and a reinterpretation of liberalism that recoded freedom to mean exclusively the right to self-actualization through consumer autonomy. Tracing the inception points of the
Chicago School of Economics to the discourses of freedom and autonomy as they emerged from the CWL and Mont Pèlerin, Rob Van Horn and Philip Mirowski mark Chicago
School neoliberalism as the point at which the work of the CWL and Mont Pèlerin converged to critical shift away from the classic liberal account of freedom. It is at this point that freedom “was recoded to mean only the capacity for self-realization attained through individual striving for a set of necessarily unexplained (and usually interpersonally ineffable) prior wants and desires” (2009, 161). At the solidification of this lexicon that it
“became impossible within this discourse to regard any economic transaction whatsoever as coercive” (162).
IV. International Debt Production
Mapping the vectors of the intellectual legacy of the neoliberal “thought collective”8 as it informs monetary policy throughout the 1970s and early 1980s suggests that debt-creation had, from the start, been fundamental to the neoliberal project. From
1973 – 1979, as global oil prices soared, the industrialized west descended into recession, and the developing south collapsed into debt-crisis, the U.S. was positioned to impose
8 See Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown, London: Verso, 2014, where he argues that the neoliberal “thought collective” accounts for the success of its effort to disseminate neoliberal knowledge. 27 austerity politics on an international scale. Officially an effort to counter inflation—the persistent “enemy of finance capital”—in 1979, then chair of the Federal Reserve Bank
Paul Volcker initiated a series of increases to nominal interest rates on debt repayment that increased rates from 9% to nearly 21% by 1981 (Mahmud 2012, 472). In what Harvard economists Gérard Duménil and Dominique Lévy have called the neoliberal coup d’état, raising nominal interest rates by nearly 12% and the corresponding spike in the value of the U.S. dollar worldwide had global implications (2011, 10-14). As investment in the financial sector ballooned, as global investment in U.S. government securities surged, and as the “U.S. dollar again became secure as the global currency” (Mahmud 2012, 472), mounting public debts led to an explosive diversification of financial markets, through the financialization of the economy.9 This placed bondholders in a position to dictate monetary policy to U.S. policy makers, an inversion of authority that defines the neoliberal reconstitution of the state. Whatever the stated objectives, Volcker’s tenure induced recession effectively undermined organized labor. Interest rate hikes were calculated to precede national negotiations over union contracts, slowing or halting wage increases altogether.10 The Federal Reserve, in order to establish credibility with finance capital,
“had to spill blood, other people’s blood” (Mahmud 2012, 472). Undermining labor appears to have been part of a broader U.S. project to institute a globalized discipline under neoliberal capitalism vis-à-vis monetary policy and global debt. As the “attraction of
9 The financialization of the economy refers to “the extension and intensification of the social relations entailed by the creation, exchange, and management of financial instruments” (Joseph 2014, 2). 10 See Edwin Dickens, “The Federal Reserve’s Tight Monetary Policy During the 1973- 1975 Recession: A Survey of Possible Interpretations,” Review of Radical Political Economics, vol. 29. no. 3, 1997. 28 highly liquid U.S. treasury bills induced a massive secondary market in bonds, it “allowed the U.S. to rely on global savings to run up deficits” (Mahmud 2012, 472). Countries from the developing south were compelled to disinvest in public provisions and open their markets to multinational corporations. Because loan adjustment agreements were contingent on these nations adopting neoliberal social policies, the escalating debt crisis presented an opportunity for the U.S. to cultivate neocolonial relationships with indebted nations by exercising control over multilateral monetary agencies like the IMF and the
World Bank to foreclose on viable alternatives. After 1982, a year in which the Reagan administration instrumentalized the roles of the IMF and the U.S. treasury, the “IMF and the World Bank thereafter became centres for the propagation and enforcement of ‘free market fundamentalism’” (Harvey 2006, 29). In these agencies’ published works from the
80s up to today, “market civilization” codes for U.S. expansionism under neoliberalism and forms a discourse within which capital accumulation has become inseparable from a
“legitimating neoliberal discourse of progress and development”; in its differential application across the developing south market civilization has modeled Orientalist discourses in presuming to bestow “reason on ‘barbarians’ who dwell ‘out there’, beyond the gates of ‘Western civilization’” (Springer 2016, 25; 17). Those states that resisted falling into line with the “neoliberal democratic status quo were quickly regarded as
‘rogue’, ‘failed’” or were “condemned to economic backwardness” that would require sanctions or military means to return them to the logic of the Washington Consensus
(Springer, 19, 21; 23). An IMF official deeply involved in structural adjustment went on record in 1991 with the following: “everything we did from 1983 on was based on our new sense of mission to have the south ‘privatized’ or die” (Canterbury 2005, 2). Historically, 29 credit has facilitated the circulation of capital and provided liquidity to the economy.
Beginning ostensibly with the U.S. manipulation of monetary policy under Volcker and with the financialization of the economy, the basis for aggregate demand shifted from full employment to consumer debt, resulting in an economy of debt and credit. Volcker’s tenure marks a flashpoint in the evolution of neoliberal discourses as mechanisms for the mass transfer of wealth from debtors to creditors central to what David Harvey has termed
“accumulation by dispossession” (Harvey 2006) and based on the idea of transferring responsibility from institutions to individuals.
V. Writing & Materiality
Though particular to a new mode of capital appropriation in Harvey’s usage, the phrase accumulation by dispossession offers in compressed simplicity the basic principal underwriting a set of policy transformations under neoliberalism through which a growing number of people, places, ideas, and expressions are “expelled from the core social and economic orders of our time” (Sassen 2). Linking he sprawling geopolitical complex of neoliberal globalism and the local materiality of writing, dispossession establishes a critical link for writing theory. As Nancy Welch argues, neoliberalism demands attention for both the impotence it engenders (falsely) in writers and for the constraint that dispossession initiates: “[p]rospects for teaching public writing can’t ignore the regulation and repression used to tamp out the ideas and aspirations of much of the population” (3-4).
Along these lines, prospects for theorizing writing necessarily encounter such neoliberal modes of regulation—including the mediation of writing time, space, quiet, resources and attention, even when they do not address this power explicitly. With respect to its productivity, neoliberal power rests primarily in its capacity to produce particular subjects, 30 to install relations between individuals (Brown 2015; Dardot and Laval 2013; Mirowski
2013) and to reliably shape the relationships that subjects have with themselves (Foucault
1978; Frasier 2014). Particularly at the current totals it has reached in U.S. postsecondary education, student debt represents a primary mechanism of neoliberal subjectification
Disposing individuals to self-discipline, self-containment and docility, student debt is among the most potent phenomena acting on the materiality of writing in the current political moment—for its capacity to deprioritize writing to immediate economic exigency, for its capacity to overwhelm the writing process with economic anxiety and to function within writing as a mechanism as such for recirculating neoliberal ideas, logics and modes of identification.
In Writing Neoliberal Values, Rhetorical Connectivities and Globalized
Capitalism, Rachel Reidner indicates accordingly that neoliberalism “circulates affective fictions in which the activities of self-reliant individuals are correlated with neoliberal economic aims” (xii). The content of this fiction in total offers a profoundly attractive narrative of inclusion and possibility: To the individual subject, neoliberal discourses indeed promise a fantasy of incorporation and enfranchisement; together these discourses promise inclusion in a new global-international community “peacefully united by a common code of conduct featuring deregulated markets” and “shared legal norms”
(Springer 155) offers unprecedented and limitless opportunity for growth, wealth and upward mobility—but requires the individual commit to ongoing, competition, entrepreneurial initiative, unfettered “free” trade, the dismantling of state bureaucracy,
‘unaffordable’ welfare programs, and the adoption of flexibility, hyper-visibility, responsibility, resilience and adaptability as the appropriate orientation of the modern 31 subject. Indicating that neoliberal discourses orient “our affective energies toward the authority of institutions” (xii), Reidner alerts us to how neoliberal rhetoric in circulation inclines us toward particular ways of seeing, thinking and knowing and, hence toward particular orientations to expressing the world. Examining human-interest stories as a
“genre of affect,” Reidner finds evidence in these narratives of writers who unintentionally circulate neoliberal values; in both these stories’ formulaic depictions of individual resourcefulness, self-responsibility, and entrepreneurialism that triumphs over a lack of education and poverty, and in their affectively-charged melodramatic celebration of tenacious individuals who lift themselves from marginality into the light of modernity.
Such accounts afford a dual sense of how we are written by neoliberal rhetoric and how we reinscribe its logic back into the world through writing. It is, to be sure, through writing and participating in the circulation of these neoliberal narratives, by reading and circulating responses, Riedner indicates, that audiences align themselves with the values of global neoliberalism. Writing in this sense interpellates authors into neoliberal values as they participate, comment, and recirculate narratives in online writing communities.
Ecologically speaking, writing never happens in isolation from the world that gives rise to its conditions of possibility or the communities that give it meaning. As Marilyn Cooper has indicated “writing is not a matter of autonomously intended action on the world, but more like monitoring, nudging, adapting, adjusting—in short, responding to the world”
(2011, 18). If neoliberalism as a normative order of reason shapes the world in tandem with our ways of knowing, perceiving and responding to it, then writing is shaped in part by neoliberal values in circulation and recirculation.
In order to “shift public writing away from embracing and recirculating neoliberal 32 forms of agency” entails understanding “how we are being moved by neoliberal values” as
Rebecca Dingo has indicated (2018, 148) but learning from examples of those who have not been moved by the neoliberal rhetoric of inevitability or the institutional logics solidify it. What was distinctive to Francisco Tapia’s act in 2014 was that it demonstrated a relative immunity to the logic of austerity that governed the context of University del Mar and briefly disturbed the even, unimpeded circulation of neoliberal rhetoric and rationality. By insisting that poverty and debt were societal conditions irreducible to student subjects and indivisible from the structural orders that produce them, Tapia achieved a kind of ecological superimposition over the order of neoliberal commonsense and its mechanics of individuation. Turning hereafter to writing theory and rhetorical theory, in what follows I take Tapia’s lead, working to expand ecological writing theory into the political ecology of neoliberalism.
33
CHAPTER TWO: EXPANDING THE WRITING ECOLOGY
When life, when writing, has begun, we find ourselves unable to draw a thin, rigid line around it. Ecology thinks a limitless system with no center or edge, devoid of intrinsic essence ...
~Timothy Morton, “Ecology as Text,, Text as Ecology”
To write is not only to know that through writing, through the extremities of style, the best will not necessarily transpire, as Leibniz thought it did in divine creation, nor will the transition to what transpires always be willful, nor will that which is noted down will always infinitely express the universe, resembling it and reassembling it.
~Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference
In “Ecology as Text, Text as Ecology,” Timothy Morton asks us to consider the spaces between the inscriptive marks on paper. No less than with the caesuras, the stops in musical composition, tempo halts, timing shifts, etc.—the “silence within sound”—these vacancies are structurally inseparable from the poem itself (2010, 11). When we extend outward from the page, we see that all poems are environmental. The space
(absence/silence) of a page or screen then, like a wall on which art is hung, becomes aesthetically indissoluble from the text (presence/noise) of inscription. What follows is an infinite regress: there can be no marking off of the borders between texts without cutting into that textual content; it’s not just that texts refer to other texts, texts are other texts. At 34 the outer limits of the ecological, the language of individuation collapses into totality as
“[e]cology thinks a limitless system with no center or edge” (2010, 15).
Since the social turn in composition studies, writing theorists have proceeded in stride with this tendency toward expansion in ecological thought, progressively widening the net of the writing ecology well beyond the process paradigm’s emphasis on the actions of a conscious, willing writing agent. In this expansion, writing theorists have posited that cognition extends beyond the body of the writer to an externalized field of cognition with which writers are always engaged, that writing is an autopoietic event that exceeds the writer altogether and that nonhuman agencies and actants are involved in the writing process. The sections that follow track key points in the genesis of this expansion; they work to inflect, supplement and continue this natural expansion by arguing for a greater attention to how ecologies are mediated by the politics of neoliberal rationality.
I. From Dialogic to Ecologic
In The Dialogic Imagination, Mikhail Bakhtin was among the first of many to assert that writers actively appropriate linguistic forms and content for writing and speech practices. The speech experience, both written and oral, was shaped and developed in constant interaction with other voices, what he termed the dialogic. In his dialogic, writing involves a structured/structuring, where the indispensability of the Other demonstrated that writing rests tout court on a certain reactivity and response. Language, writing and enunciation for the individual consciousness emerge through intertextuality which, in effect, establishes writing’s condition of possibility: “the word is born in a dialogue as a living rejoinder with it” (Bakhtin 1981, 279-280). This for Bakhtin is effectively where writing begins: “Prior to this moment of appropriation, the word does not exist in a neutral 35 and impersonal language” but exists for others and to serve their intentions, and “it is from there that one must take the word, and make it one’s own” (1981, 293-294). This move to locate the origin of writing outside the writer in dialogue is at once a step toward ecological writing theory and one which many of its proponents find inadequate.
From the time ecology entered the lexicon of writing studies in the early 1980s as a viable model for thinking about the writing process after Richard M. Coe’s “Eco-Logic for the Composition Classroom” (1974), Bakhtin’s dialogic perspective has been extended, complicated and problematized. A basic objection to Bakhtin holds that communicative meaning is never only, or reducible to, dialogic because these dialogues cannot occur in a vacuum, outside context, and because dialogue is always in reference to some object that cannot exist outside the limits of perception that these contexts establish. Establishing the ecological principle—that perception and meaning are always contextually determined— was one of Coe’s primary concerns in his 1974 essay. According to Coe, human communication is a highly open system characterized by overdetermination and nonsummativity in which there can be no isolation of independent variables. While “linear causality can be handled by the cartesian principle of independent variables”—the nonlinear, open-ended dynamics of communication exceeded its explanatory scope (10).
On this basis, he concludes that it is a “fallacy to discuss a subsystem without considering the whole system or to discuss anything out of context” (233). Louise Weatherbee Phelps
(1988) fortified this ecologically oriented approach to writing by attuning it to psychological divergence among student learners and the variability of real-world practice in literacy. Following Coe, Phelps anticipated the emergence of complexity theory when she critiqued the “implicit arrogance of trying to create a perfect, controlled environment 36 that excludes or ignores the negatives and complexities of literacy learning” (119). While indebted to Coe and Phelps, it was Marilyn Cooper’s “The Ecology of Writing,” (1986) that marked the transitional moment for writing studies, a point at which ecology supplanted cognitive processes as the social epistemic model’s newly dominant paradigm for conceiving its proper form. There, Cooper specified that the term ‘ecology’ was not just a new euphemism for context, but instead signaled a systemically bound interaction among writers across multiple contexts and whose interrelation formed an expansive ecosystem of composing practices and compositions. To Cooper, writers and writing are reciprocally informing and informed, where “all the characteristics of any individual writer or piece of writing both constitute and are constituted by the characteristics of all the other writers and writings in the system,” an interrelation that occurs within ceaselessly changing environments (368).
Though The Wealth of Reality: An Ecology of Composition came more than a decade later, Margaret Syverson’s (1999) text is perhaps the first to characterize the collaborative role writers play within writing ecologies. Syverson built a framework for writing as a negotiated, co-adaptive phenomenon that was an effect of a coordination between multiple systems in which writers participate. By and through the interplay between distribution, emergence, embodiment and enaction, communication emerged as a mediation across these forces through an embodied communicator. Against the conclusions of the cognitive process model of composition, Syverson posited that order doesn’t appear through solo, executive control over writing tasks but as an emergent effect of multifarious, co-evolving influences. Grounded in the view that knowledge arises from an ongoing interpretation that emerges from activities and experiences situated in particular 37 contexts, enaction is a pivotal term for Syverson because it describes the ways in which knowledge emerges collaboratively within and from the complexity of an individual’s learning processes as they interact with the particularities of the moment. Resisting the representational paradigm in which writing encodes a pregiven world, Syverson concluded alternatively the writer collaborates with the environment to “bring forth a textual world as they are writing it” (16). What is significant here, and what differentiates this position from many earlier theorists is the sense of the world as involved and determining what crystallizes through writing.
II. Postprocess
With the emergence of the Post-process paradigm in composition, the emphasis on shifting ecological contexts leads to a rejection of any totalizing framework for encapsulating the writing process. The ephemeral, transitory scenes where writing happens, and that now include an infinite domain of digital composing space, preclude any totalizing theory of writing practice. Though Thomas Kent himself does not use the term postprocess, according to the paralogic hermeneutics he develops from Lyotard and
Derrida, and from which postprocess has derived much of its energy, there is always a gap between the sign and its effect on the world. Because each individual communicating subject operates from a distinct linguistic code and because there is no key or a metalanguage that allows us to link meaning across individual subjects, we are always adjusting our codes to try to make what we intend comprehensible to those we communicate with. Writing and speaking, all communication then, is both always para-
(beside) and hermeneutic (interpretive) as we labor—without ever fully succeeding—to calibrate our codes to the codes of others. To Kent, paralogic hermeneutics names a kind of 38 guesswork that inevitably obtains between sender and receiver; his theory of writing hence emphasizes the dialogic element of action / and reaction, interpretation and reinterpretation. Writing is a “hermeneutic dance that moves to the music of our situatedness and cannot be fully choreographed in any meaningful way, for in this dance our ability to improvise, to react on the spot to our partners matters most” (Kent 1989, 5).
What postprocess takes most eagerly from this insight, and what posthumanism takes still further, is the impossibility of codification. Kent offers the postprocess bottom line:
[W]riting constitutes a specific communicative interaction occurring among
individuals at specific historical moments and in specific relations with others and
with the world and because these moments and relations change, no process can
capture what writers do during these changing moments within these changing
relations. (1989, 1-2)
From this perspective, the writing process exceeds encapsulation; it is irreducible to any specific systematization.
Although in his own estimation, Sidney Dobrin’s effort in Ecocomposition (2001) failed to achieve a genuinely ecological sensibility to writing, his later work
Postcomposition (2011) offers a protracted, more fully-realized theory of writing than any to emerge from ecological writing research.11 Appearing (initially) to work backward from writing’s effects to its ontological mechanics, Dobrin employs the metaphoric lens of hydrodynamics to explicate a writing theory that unfolds as follows: Space and place
11 More environmental activism than writing research, Ecocomposition Dobrin explains in Postcomposition, devolved into “an attempt to reinvigorate subject formation of student subjects ... with environmental political positions, positions designed to spark ‘thinking’ about environmental or ecological ‘crisis’”(2011, 124). 39 achieve intelligibility through the saturation of social networks with writing and text, and as the production of their meaning is negotiated; writing/text produce networks as they carve out the complex its components and relationships. An intricate, fluid, continually moving complex of interacting flows—the movement of text among the bodies, places and ecologies—friction, excess, disruption, appropriation (absorption) and propagation (the production of new textual currents), writing for Dobrin operates, per complexity theory, at the “edge of chaos” (2011, 183-186). Following Dobrin, ecological thought shifts the analysis of phenomena like writing out of the language of fixity and stasis and into the logic of continual motion and indeterminacy. Continual motion is a function of the principle of emergence—that writing emerges as an orchestrated effect of multiple interactive systems in which the writer is situated. Thinking of writing as an ecology or system operating within a metasystem foregrounds the rippling effect of causation that occurs between symbiotic webs where changes in one system invariably brings about changes in the others, though these changes are not proportional and are unpredictable. If we conceive of the writing agent in these terms, we can conceive of the writer as enmeshed and think about writing as a happening catalyzed by and within a matrix of relationality.
These frames can help us to rethink rhetoric as continually on the move.
III. Externalization of Cognition & Complexity Theory
As ecological models have developed and grown, they have proven continuous with the basic assumptions of the externalization of cognition—the notion that thought is always intertextual, that it always charts linguistic pathways stamped out by prior language users, linguistic habits, colloquialisms and conventions. Emerging variously in Maurice
Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception, in Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time, 40 and Jacques Derrida’s Limited Inc. and Of Grammatology, the basic thesis of the externalization of cognition as it has come to inform ecological theory in writing proposes that mental processes extend beyond the brain into the environments in which they operate.
With “Externalism and the Production of Discourse,” Kent drew a distinction between internalism, the tendency to recognize a strict division of mental states and material activities, and externalism, which collapses these divisions. Kent explains externalism as follows:
Broadly speaking, the externalist takes the position that no split exists between an
inner and outer world and claims that our sense of an inner world actually derives
from our rapport with other language users, people we interpret during the give and
take of communicative interaction. Because language requires the existence of
others, the public nature of language-in-use presupposes knowledge of other minds
and of the world in which we operate. (1992 62-63)
In other words, cognition and writing are in-the-world events, for which biological brains cannot be fully credited with composing decisions or with rhetorical authority, as cognition extends outward from the writing body to scrabble the inside/outside distinction.
For Andy Clark, a leading theorist on the externalization of cognition, we have to consider the possibility that “The brain is simply part of a spatially and temporally extended process, involving lots of extra-neural operations, whose joint action creates the intellectual product” (12-13). The externalization of cognition involves a slide outward from the interiority of isolated cognition to the anteriority of extended cognition. In
Syverson’s account of cognition, we have one of few accounts that takes stock of how cognition operates through a coordination between external and internal neural operations. 41
Syverson observes that while situated cognition—determines “not only how cognitive processes unfold, but also the meaning they have for participants”—distributed cognition refers to the fact that the “distribution of cognition “(or text composing) [occurs] across physical, social, psychological, spatial, and temporal dimensions” (9). More than cognition alone, as writing has become a digitally-mediated, technologically-entangled act, writing and screening—the use of this ensemble of screening devices to screen in (desired knowledge) and screen out (what one is and is not)—have scrambled clear distinctions between technologies, writing, bodies, and text. In “Screening Information: Bodies and
Writing in Network Culture,” Jennifer Bay connects modern technologies of inscription to the body of the student writer herself. Whereas the “student body and the computer form a complex co-adaptive writing system,” networked writing, she argues, involves
“determining, filtering and forging connections between information and bodies” (930;
935). Considering our growing technological integration and dependence on digital interfaces for writing and day-to-day life, Clark has suggested that our brains may be running on a mass paracognitive processing system, “a self-organizing unfolding that makes each of us the thinking beings we are” (131-132). When we consider writing within distributed cognitive systems, writing is always a collective, macro-social and partly obscured act of engagement. As N. Katherine Hayles indicates in her analysis of digital hypertext narratives, by considering distributed cognition, “we create these narratives not by ourselves, but as a part of a dynamic evolutionary process in which we are coadapting together with actors in the system, including pixilated images on a CRT screen and voltages flickering beyond the scale of human perception” (2005, 197). If we concede this cognitive integration following Rickert, Hayles and Clark, that a shared externalized 42 cognition forms the background of intelligibility out of which values, judgments and modes of expression arise. What follows, then, given the tight coordination between neoliberalism and networked information systems (as I consider in chapter 3) and the ubiquity of neoliberal rationality is that it mediates what and how we describe the world— points I return to below.
Postprocess, posthuman, and new materialist writing theorists have tended to disseminate the origin of the creative act throughout the environment. Thomas Rickert, for example, takes Brian Eno’s composing process as a case-in-point suggests that in Eno’s work we see that the “locus of creation is dispersed to include the environment,” evidencing in one sense how individual cognition collectively forms a “tacit post consciousness” disseminated across the environment as a whole (110). From Rickert’s perspective in Ambient Rhetoric: The Attunements of Rhetorical Being, machines, bodies, sonic, subsonic and nonhuman agencies converge to generate writing as phenomenon occasioned and conditioned by interactive dynamics of ambience—the auditory, affective, sonic, subsonic and spatial dimensions that interact with written production. With ambience, Rickert hopes to add dimension, spatiality, and body to ecology as a metaphor for composing. Emphasizing writers and writing environments as both part of an extended cognitive environment in which symbolic activity develops coadaptively, writing emerges through our “involvement in the movement of language itself, the form it evolves and our affective investment in the pursuit and accomplishment of that form, [which] brings the suasive force into being” (Rickert 2013, 164). In terms of emergence, origins and textual production, Rickert’s ambient composing event exemplifies the shifting coordinates of invention that ecological writing research tends to identify; in Rickert, though not 43 exclusively, what finally arrives though the act of externalization is a self-generated textual phenomenon. It is not just that environmental variables alter and shape writing, but that externalization itself directs how the work should proceed without any prior or synchronous conscious deliberation or intent. Thought and writing, in this view, can never occur concurrently. Right now, for instance, if I move recursively between altering syntax, diction or sentence variation, etc. I’m no longer writing, but thinking about writing, and so have stepped from a process that can only unfold en media res into a kind of reflection.12
The notion of text as self-generating, we should recall, surfaces well-before ecologically-grounded writing theory, appearing (for one) in Peter Elbow (1970), who spoke of text as a near-autotelic agency arriving to being from non-being vis-à-vis a non- sequential pattern of fragmentation and recombination.13 The origin of self-generation marks the distinction. In Lingua Fracta: Toward a Rhetoric of New Media, Collin Brooke juxtaposes hermeneutic and proairetic models of invention. Whereas hermeneutic invention stresses the singularity of text, author, and instrument, placing a structural emphasis on textual closure and fixity, proairetic invention stresses collaboration, authorial pluralism, integrated modes of composition, nonlinearity and resists textual closure. If the tendency in more traditional compositional paradigms was to locate the source of (self- generated) invention within the single authorial agent, networked, proairetic invention
12 See Rickert 2013, pp. 72, 123-126. 13 Elbow explained the process of self-generation this way: “The words come together into one pile and interact with each other in that mess; then they come apart into small piles according to some emerging pattern. ... Then together again into a big pile where everything interacts and bounces off everything else till a different pattern emerges. ... And so forth, and so on till it’s “over”—till a pattern or configuration is attained that pleases you or that ‘it was trying to get to’” (Elbow 24-25). 44 flows from a multiplicity of mobile connections anterior to the agent (or node, as we’ll see), a distinction that places compositionists like Elbow into the former category and quite clearly postprocess, posthuman hybrid composing process like Rickert’s the latter. Against the notion that writers draw on a mythical wellspring of aesthetic inspiration from within, proairetic invention represents the ecological shift to locate the origin of writing without— to regard invention as taking its bearing from the environment.
Taking invention as irreducible to any one set of techniques, processes or procedures and instead maintaining that invention requires continual adjustment and recalibration with every new situation, Byron Hawk’s model is an exemplar of postprocess
(ecological) invention. Invention entails refashioning new approaches appropriate for each new writing event: “If one could articulate a postprocess model for invention, it would be this: new each time, constantly evolving in response to situational constraints” (2004, 388-
399). Hawk draws students’ attention to ecological contexts with the express objective of catalyzing innovations in inventional techniques alongside rhetorical invention itself, on both fronts with an eye to inventions that can catalyze modes of action for those that populate these sites: “Invention starts with the structure of particular constellations and the invention of techniques for and out of those specific occasions; it is thus more attuned to co-responsibility, kairos, emergence, and ambience” (2007, 206).
This deprioritization of the internal creative capacities of the writer is continuous with the ecological disavowal of the subject. In ecological writing theory, writing is not produced by autonomous agents but by a coordination among an ensemble of agencies— human and nonhuman—distributed across a given ecology. As Sidney Dobrin, J. A. Rice, and Michael Vastola, argue “What we conventionally call the writer—the individualized, 45 transcendent agent—cannot actively interpret a writing scene so much as merely participate in the fluid, temporary occurrences between various writing instances” (12).
Less an author or a willing agent, the writer is configured as a collaborator, operating more or less as part of a choreography of interacting elements and actants, often subsumed within larger systems or the chaotic flux of ecological systems. Byron Hawk, for instance, working through Mark Taylor, Gregory Ulmer, Victor Vitanza, among others, argues that writing—like all forms of action—cannot be extricated from the systems that precede and produce it. Writing “cannot be seen as separate from [the] larger material ecology” (Hawk
2007, 165). As writing arises from systemic interactions as “it feeds information and motion back into the system,” in Hawk’s neo-vitalism “The subject of writing is the network that inscribes the subject as the subject scribes the network” (Hawk 2007, 158;
2004, 832). According to Hawk’s theory, writers not only participate in a system of continuous circulation and recirculation of texts, functioning as relays, nodes or conduits, participating more of less equally with the rest of the elements within a system, they’re inseparable from the system itself: the writer is the system; the system is the writer. This move to subsume the writer is coincident with a general impulse in ecological writing theory toward a posthumanist perspective, which considers writing and rhetoric beyond the humanist orientation typical of institutionalized conventions in writing theory and composition studies.
Hawk is among many ecological writing researchers who has sought to explain writing by drawing on complexity theory (Bay, 2004; Dobrin 2011, 2015; Rickert, 2013;
Hayles, 1999; Taylor 2001; Mays 2015). A process-model for tracking nonlinear dynamics and fluctuation, complexity theory examines the recursive transitions between chaos/order 46 and order/chaos that occur within self-organizing systems. It offers an account of writing’s emergence by considering the productive dimensions of interacting systems, where “self- organizing systems emerge to create new patterns of coherence and structures of relations”
(Taylor 2001, 24). Virtually anything can be understood as a complex system. A text, for instance, consists of interacting components: chapters, paragraphs, sentences, clauses, etc., that interact at macro and microscopic levels of scale. These interactive components and involving multiple random variables only achieve sensibility when considered as a whole.
The utility of complexity theory as it has been applied to writing studies—despite its deliberate inclination toward complication—is that it reveals the stratified ontology of writing at micro- and macroscopic levels of scale. Chris Mays makes the point in “Writing
Complexity, One Stability at a Time: Teaching Writing as a Complex System” that
Thinking of writing in terms of complexity theory reveals its radical
interconnectedness at multiple levels of scale. Foregrounding this interconnectivity
shows us the expansiveness of what is involved in how we write and what we write
with and shows us how diverse assemblages of writing circulate and interact in a
multitude of cultural, social, technological, disciplinary, and material networks.
(2015, 560)
Through the lens of complexity theory, writing emerges from the productive dynamics of interacting systems, a position that further complicates the sovereign, autonomous writing agent. When we think in terms of ecology, per Morton, everything becomes integrated and autonomy becomes illusory altogether. Insofar as writers are
“caught in a network of complex, coadaptive threads that disrupt any sense of autonomy or boundary” (Rickert, 231), we can’t claim control over writing. When we write, we are 47 never separate, never solely responsible. Not in charge. This dissertation isn’t entirely mine.
IV. Politics
Though this body of postprocess, ecological theory has drawn liberally on Mark Taylor— who is cognizant of the functional interlock between the writing networks we traverse and the information-driven ambitions of global capitalism, stating that “information and telematic technologies are recasting the very social, political, economic and cultural fabric of everyday life” (4)—the canon I have covered thus far can be productively supplemented through an examination of the political mechanisms that have authored that recasting.
Although Hawk’s neo-vitalist mode of inhabiting the world gestures toward the efficacy of building alternative configurations within ecological assemblages, and though Rickert suggests politics can be oriented through attunement to ambient rhetoric, neither Hawk’s neo-vitalism nor Rickert’s investigation of ambience engages the political arbitration of ecologies, or the neoliberal mediation of writing spaces. Tony Scott highlights this blind spot in suggesting that in Hawk’s history “the materiality of composition’s work, its development and continuance as economically shaped and constrained practice within the context of institutions and organized programs, is largely elided from his historical map”
(2016, 23). In this regard, both Hawk and Rickert follow the general trajectory: to this point, ecological and systems-based writing theory has in general posited a generic system of interacting subjects and objects, and hence omitted how these interactions are mediated and made possible through specific political determinations. With “Systems Rhetoric,” working through Sara Ahmed, Julie Jung clarifies the need for experiential specificity by considering the dynamics between perceiving subjects, objects and orientations. Ahmed 48 notes that the act of perceiving, to state the obvious, “depends on the arrival of the body that perceives,” arrivals that form orientations from which “the world unfolds” (Ahmed
2010, 240; 237). But bodies don’t arbitrarily populate ecological systems or spaces: the spaces of these interactions are mediated and made possible through the asymmetrical flux of political power that determines what bodies are included and what bodies don’t belong.
(As I will note in the following chapter, these designations under neoliberalism establish
“rules of belonging”). Jung explains this in terms of barriers. For Jung, systems-based
(ecological) accounts of writing do not take into consideration the experience of
“institutional barriers [that] cannot be described in terms of generic human interactions with other objects on a level playing field” (“Systems”). For those who don’t inhabit the norm, these barriers become visible through encounters with them, though remain
“invisible to those who can flow into the spaces created by institutions” (“Systems”). That is, politics determine which bodies belong and which bodies don’t and thereby order the ecologies that then act on and through writers to catalyze textual emergence.
As a political rationality and not merely an ideology, neoliberalism isn’t something that we hold or defend against other ideological stances but something that might more accurately be understood to hold us—a grip that is enacted through a soft-power recalibration of our dispositions, inclinations and habitual ways of seeing and knowing.
Insinuating itself ubiquitously into everyday life (Fraser 2015; Read 2009; Blyth 2013;
Brown 2015) neoliberalism forms a diffuse and dispersed web of interactive governing structures of rule (Brenner, Peck & Theodore 2010; Chaput 2010; Ong 2007). For
Catherine Chaput, neoliberalism “governs our everyday activities through embodied habituation” —a way of thinking and acting that stems from discrete but interconnected 49 technologies (2010, 4). To her mind, these technological innovations, along with the circulatory dynamics of neoliberal discourses, call for a new orientation to rhetoric that shifts us from thinking in terms of the mechanics of situations to thinking in terms of a milieu of dispersed transhistorical and transsituational instances. This new orchestration of power “requires that we reshape the internal dynamics of rhetoric,” to account for the ontological shift from fixed sites, places, speakers and audiences, to liquidity, circulation, and to the “fluidity of everyday practices” (Chaput 2010, 8).
If, following recent developments in ecological writing research, writing happens as much through the body—as writers are moved affectively by the spaces they occupy— as it does through discourse and language, and politics orients which bodies occupy which spaces, then writing is a function of the neoliberal political reorganization of social space.
Theorizing the writing ecology and theorizing political ecology, then, are effectively one and the same. Differing minimally from political economy, political ecology concerns the inquiry into the “production of socio-environments and their co- constitution by many kinds of humans and nonhuman agents” (Robbins, 5). To think in terms of a political ecology is to consider the relationship between existing resources, theories, affect, capital, ideas and conduct as reflections of global systems. It means thinking that the global leaves traces in all that writing is and does. Jodi Dean, for instance, identifies the (global) effect of the circulatory capacities of neoliberal networks on (local) networked writing practices as one wherein the former proportionally decreases the communicative potential of the latter; the confluence of networked communication systems with the financialization of the economy has facilitated the onset of “communicative 50 capitalism”—"a political-economic formation in which there is talk without response.”14
Fetishizing speech, opinion and participation at the expense of substance, within communicative capitalism “communication functions synoptically to produce its own negation” (Dean loc. 533). Aided by technological resources, the global reach of local writing practices has amounted to Slavoj Žižek’s prognosis of a “decline in symbolic efficiency” (Dean, loc. 221).
Speaking to this point in terms of our networked connectivities, Steven Shaviro indicates in Connected, or, What It Means To Live In A Network Society, that all writing is framed by the economic / political world in which it occurs. As his work shows, the networks in which writing circulates are themselves wholly political, their vectors of connection shaped by historical-material, financial, rent-seeking, and economic prerogatives:
[T]he network is not a disembodied information pattern nor a system of frictionless
pathways over which any message whatsoever can be neutrally conveyed. Rather,
the force of all messages, as they accrete over time, determines the very shape of
the network. The message cannot be isolated from its mode of propagation.
(Shaviro 2003, 24)
Far from neutrally accommodating all messages, information networks and ecological systems change according to the currents and ideas that dominate them.15
14 Jodi Dean. 2009. Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies, Durham and London: Duke University Press.(digital edition/no pagination). Chapter 1, section 4; location 533; all further references to this text—and to all other digital texts cited within this dissertation that do not have pagination—are cited only by numeric location abbreviation (loc.#). 15 As the founder of the Institute for Economic Affairs Antony Fischer concluded in 1975, installing free-market common sense required volume more than substance: “proliferation 51
Connecting the global political ecology to the local materiality of composition, and calling for student writers and instructors to consciously assess the connections they forge and maintain with global financial institutions, Bruce Horner et. al remind us that
“rhetoric, stylistics, language, cognition and teaching methods are always and inevitably participants in, shaping and shaped by, political economies,” particularly “in their concern with the circulation of knowledge, labor and capital” (8). They highlight the need to revise students’ “understanding(s) of the meaning of their career concerns and desires, and the global-local contexts within which these arise” (Horner et. al, 17). That is, writers and their desires are shaped by political ecologies whose connections shape their dispositions and orientations, which are in turn shaped by neoliberal discourses. In other words, to consider the ecologies that shape writing as an emergent effect of the integration of the writer within
is required because it is vitally necessary that common sense should be made available from as many directions as possible, particularly not just from one source in one place.” Emphasizing the importance of reverberating the neoliberal message over the cogency or coherency of its particular content , Fischer frequently throughout 1975 and 1976 offered the aphoristic credo that “the echo is more important than the message” (Peck 2013, np). CWL and Mont Pèlerin Society were instrumental in creating the international network of neoliberal articulation centers, policy commissions, research initiatives, and think tanks from which to author and substitute neoliberal common sense for Keynesian orthodoxy through a multiplicity of articulation points. These conferences produced a system of international institutes, policy commissions, think tanks, foundations, and research initiatives that included, throughout the decades that followed, the Trilateral Commission on Democracy, and the World Economic Forum at Davos, and whose intellectual conclusions anchor the missions of plurality of think tanks that include the Institute of Economic Affairs in London, the Heritage Foundation in Washington, the Cato Institute, and the Bilderbig Group. Building the “society of individual risk” and the figure of “personal enterprise,” moreover, required “remolding the “social bond as a ‘network,’” and the formation of an information society—a culture where public officials share information on labor markets, the education system, and other information for population management (Dardot and Laval, loc. 612.) To “bring all human action into the domain of the market,” David Harvey has noted required “technologies of information creation and capacities to accumulate store, transfer analyze and use massive databases to guide decisions in the global marketplace” (4). 52 an ecology, we need to account for the circulation of neoliberal rhetorics, affective triggers, and arguments as they manifest in our habits and bodies and expressions; this means looking to how rhetorical ecologies—at once local and global, epistemological and ontological—are shaped by political currents that order individual experiences in writing, and hence bear on what possibilities writers can imagine and what limits they can exceed.
53
CHAPTER THREE: WRITING SUBJECTS, NEOLIBERAL SUBJECTS & AFFECTIVE CIRCULATION
We have not emerged from the “iron cage” of the capitalist economy to which Weber referred. Rather, in some respects, it would have to be said that everyone is enjoined to construct their own. ~Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval, The New Way of the World
Communication does not take place through subjects but through affects. ~Slavoj Žižek, Tarrying With the Negative
As writing theory moves beyond postprocess into a revived acclimation to posthumanism and to new materialist concerns with culture/complexity and object-oriented ontology, the will-to evacuate the subject and subjectivity as objects of study has amplified. Throughout Postcomposition and punctuated throughout his canon, Sidney
Dobrin, for one, has called for evacuating the subject from the field’s theoretical attention.
A field-wide fixation on the administration of subjects, Dobrin claims, and on theorizing subjectivity has directed writing theory away from its proper attention to “writing qua writing” (123). In The Function of Theory in Composition Studies, Raúl Sánchez maintains that writing theory has achieved little but to reify writing as a technology of representation, a vehicle for conveying something else—ideology, culture, thought, identity, and critically, subjectivity and the subject. By focusing on agents, subjects, on identity and consciousness, “our descriptions of writing will only present [writing] as an instrument, as a means by which something else is arrived at” (94). Tracking Sánchez’s assertion here, 54
Dobrin argues that “In order to develop more accurate ways of describing what writing is and what it does, the subject must be removed not just from the center of the stage but from the theater and perhaps the entire theater district” (2011, 76). Although I follow the refusal to confer autonomy on the writing subject, because the writer does, at minimum, inflect writing’s emergence—like all the subjects/objects in a given ecology—the following sections attend to the constitution and construction of the modern writing-subject within the dynamics of motion, and the circulation of neoliberal affective energy Chaput
(2010). In doing so, I take Sánchez’s lead, who also maintains that the function of theory in composition studies is to provide generalized accounts of what writing is (its ontology) and how it works. In the context of networked ecological systems, he argues that the task of theory is “to describe and explain all the features of [this] general system” (4). This focus on affect, circulation and movement already begins to answer the chapter’s more primary interest with what sets writing in motion and how that pertains to the writing subject.
Ecological theory to this point has figured the writing subject as a node, conduit or mediation point through whom writing flows—the writer is “node in a complex network, one through whom ideas pass, and one that alters or enhances many of them and who both draws from and contributes to the overall ecology” (Lotier, 378); this chapter looks to how affect in circulation informs the those contributions.
I. Motion & Circulation: Properties of The Writing System
From an ecological perspective on writing, especially one grounded in complexity science, writing satisfies the two key conditions to qualify as a complex system: open-ended structure, and multiple interacting components. Grammars, vocabularies, colloquialisms, dictions, neologisms—the routine and ongoing changes with each of these make writing a 55 diachronic, highly open, evolving and fluid system of circulation/recirculation, one in an ongoing process of becoming. Writing understood as emergence—the core term in complexity science lifted by ecological writing theory—presupposes dynamic flux, unrest, and excess as the ongoing state of the system from which it (writing) arises. Taken as objects among objects, writing and texts, to object-oriented ontological thought, have their own faculty to act and conjoin with other objects into new configurations of unity through both physicality and intertextuality. Writing as intertextual and reflexive are part of an evolving kinetic system “in motion, gathering texts around them, responding to their environments in ways both simple and complex, making connections that their authors or readers are participants in, rather than simple agents of—intertextuality with teeth”
(Johnson-Eilola 37; cited in Whicker 224). Writing and text in a rhetorical ecology in this regard are part of an ensemble of diachronic transactions between subjects and the values they circulate. Ecological thought in this way shifts the analysis of phenomena like writing out of the language of fixity and stasis and into the logic of continual motion and circulation. Professor of psychology and theorist of complex adaptive systems, John
Holland explains that the continual fluctuation of the dynamics of complex phenomena move the study of writing to “the process of becoming, rather than the never-reached endpoints,” to the dynamics of mobility and flux (1992, 17). At a more primal discursive level, movement and process pertain to an unremitting, perennial flow of writing and enunciation. As Bakhtin maintains, because the “process of speech goes on continuously.
It knows neither beginning nor end” neither speech nor writing can be linked to an origin as such, because neither can be abstracted or “isolated from the historical stream of utterances,” that compose inner speech, the profound social conversion of our thinking” 56
(Bakhtin 1990, 940). Writing and speech are both only moments “in a continuous process of verbal communication” (Bakhtin 1990, 940), and can be tracked by their gestation, progress, passage, erosion, but not to a genesis. And in the context of hypermedia, this continuous process includes the movement of digitality—a term Boyle et. al coin for the body of electric movements that surround us in networks. Digitality, they note, exceeds conscious awareness and resonates “through us as the environments from which we emerge (257).16 Circulating discourse, code, and signal—transductive and otherwise—are continual features of the general system of modern writing.
For Dobrin, hyper-circulation affords an occasion to initiate the shift away from the subject that he prescribes: “Circulation, particularly in a new-media, computer mediated advanced systems of circulation, shifts the focus away from the producer of writing to the writing itself and the systems in which it circulates” (2011, 58). Whereas he takes this as an occasion to “... theorize writing neither as process nor product but as occupying circulating spaces within space” (2011, 58) this context is also an occasion to consider how writers inhabit and mediate circulating spaces to produce writing, and the phenomenology of writing in fully digitized domains. When situated within these ongoing processural dimensions of motion—conscious and otherwise—the event of writing replaces constructing with merging, a linking or logging-on—in the dual sense this invokes; and
16 Boyle et. al specify that this movement is transductive, a definition drawn from the quality of movement the authors assign to signals: a “signal moves across disparate registers of relations: neural firings move to fingers to perform keystrokes that then transform into electrical changes that then become digital bits and are delivered to a screen by software or saved to a hard drive that becomes transcoded again whenever someone opens a file” (258).
57 this context means theorizing a radically inundated writing subject who is shaped by circulation.
II. Ecological Theories of the Writing Subject
In Derrida, the writing subject is animated by and through active systems, subordinated wholly to writing. Through a kind of reciprocal productivity, in Derrida, writing brings forth a writer through a deliverance, “a slow gestation of the poet by the poem” (65). In this deliverance, the writer doesn’t originate textual content but receives it; as “words choose the poet,” the poet emerges and together with the text, “the writer is himself a kind of new idiom, constructing itself” (65, emphasis in original). Like Derrida’s writing subject, Victor Vitanza’s formulation of the writer is one of a mediator, channel, or conduit who is called to write by writing: “What writing wants ... is a writer! ... a body filled with tics that cannot but not write!” (4). Also pace Derrida, Sánchez proposes writing-subjects not as the origin but as the function of textual activity who represent “organizations of writing” (145). For writing theorists like Vitanza, Davis and Sánchez, to be written is the precondition for writing; the activity of inscription cannot avoid disclosure, a kind of announcement of the self that accompanies symbolic production, often an immediate objectification of the subject. As Davis argues, because there is no way to write without being written, “writing is an I-dentity buster, an exposure” (2000, 138).
We see a move in more recent ecologically-oriented writing theory to scramble the fundamental Cartesian subject/object binary and the interior/exterior, agent/network binaries that extend from it, often by regarding writing as the originary nexus of these distinctions. For Debra Hawhee, as the writer authors the kairotic moment within what she terms “invention-in-the-middle”—a spatio-temporal nexus that mediates inside/outside— 58 the writer’s subjectivity makes a transitory appearance vis-à-vis the encounter; this nexus enables a “pro-visional ‘subject’’’ to manifest (18). Like Hawhee, whose pro-visional subject has no subject/object specificity prior to the moment/site that crystallizes these distinctions, new materialism figures a transitory, emergent subject brought to fruition through relationality. Quantum physicist Neil Bohr’s concept of “intra-action” is a critical tool in Karen Barad’s work, for one, who marks a contradistinction in articulating her framework for “agential realism” between interaction—which presumes the prior existence of independent entities—and intra-action—which presumes that entities, boundaries, properties, and components parts achieve existence (proper) only at or after convergences that occur between relational phenomena. The existence of individual subjects in Barad’s work, and for the writing theorists who draw from it, is not an individual affair (Barad
2007). To Marilyn Cooper, for example, little exists outside relationality. Cooper makes a new materialist, Baradian move when she argues that “Subjects (like objects) emerge in a transient fashion through ... intra-action. ”and extends it to claim that “All writing begins from intra-action” (2019 156; 33). Subjects, writing, agents, power, being—all of these crystallize in an ongoing process of becoming along with “writers [who] emerge as new entities along with their writing” (26).17
To orient to the kind of immersion of the subject imagined by this move in writing theory, many turn to—or directly model—Deleuze and Guattari’s understanding of assemblages. They approach assemblages as comprised primarily of semiotic and social flows circulating simultaneously to form a “connected collection of animate and inanimate
17 Stating the case directly, Paul Lynch and Nathaniel Rivers hold that, “Like the subject/object and science/politics binaries, this dichotomy is a distinction that rhetoric should no longer recognize” (5). 59 bodies, actions and passions, and enunciations and statements constantly in motion” (Hawk
2011, 78). Assemblages collapse inside/outside and subject/object into a totalizing integration; the subject within an assemblage isn’t a fixed, calcified, closed system, but an open, indeterminate, wholly contingent arrangements:
An assemblage in its multiplicity, necessarily acts on semiotic social flows
simultaneously. ... There is no longer a tripartite division between a field of reality
(the world) and a field of representation (the book) and a field of subjectivity (the
author). Rather, an assemblage establishes connections between certain
multiplicities drawn from each of these orders, so that a book has no sequel nor the
world as its object nor one or several authors as its subject. In short, we think that
one cannot write sufficiently in the name of an outside. The outside has no image,
no signification, no subjectivity. (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 22-23)
Whereas an intersectional model of subjectivity—which takes the categories race, class, gender, sexuality, religion, nation as distinct categories of analysis—an assemblage model takes these as inextricably suffused in the subject along with any designation between interior/exterior that could mark out its boundaries.
Christian Lundberg and Loshua Gunn attend to how it is that collectivities, systems, networks, technologies, discursive forms, and non-human agencies exceeding or anterior to an independent human subject generate persuasion. Lundberg and Gunn endorse a “negative theology of the subject,” which isn’t the subject’s negation, but instead “strips away all of the discursive attributes of qualities and possessions to the subject with the hope of liberating subjectivity from the ossified bonds of the agent as a technology for organizing the experiences of subjectivity” (98). In object-oriented ontology, the subject 60 and the psyche are objects among others, having the power to act and be acted upon, though neither are granted autonomy. Defending his theory of writing based on the agency of all (human/nonhuman) objects, John Whicker argues that the disavowal of the concept of a subject beyond its grammatical function is essential to theorize writing as itself an object. Whicker turns to Levi Bryant to make the point that “Humans, far from constituting a category called ‘subject’ that is opposed to ‘object’ are themselves one type of object among many” (Bryant 2011, 249; cited in Whicker, 150).
Driving and driven-by the posthuman turn from epistemology to ontology these approaches align in their move to prioritize affect and embodiment. Representative here,
Byron Hawk argues that bodies enter into the space of flows and movement to “interpret those flows through bodily knowledge and expression as much as language, and contribute to those assemblages by participating in their public gathering” (2011, 77). The subject is here seen as engaged in embodied writing through which she enters into a process of mutual becoming with other objects in the world. Along these lines, posthumanism figures a subject that is “materialist and vitalist, embedded and embodied, firmly planted somewhere” (Braidotti 51; cited in Cooper 2019, 31). Writing, expression, and knowing— all of these are embodied affective practices. Barad argues “knowing is not a play of ideas within a mind of a Cartesian subject that stands outside the physical world the subject seeks to know ... knowing is a physical practice of engagement” (342).
III. Forming The New Subject: Affective Circulation
Affect—while offering a conceptual tool that can partially account for the activity of the writing subject’s participation without recourse to an individualized, transcendent writing agent—also represents a neoliberalism’s mechanism of subjectification. Affect can be 61 defined, following Brian Massumi, as “a physical energy transferred between individuals through communicative processes” (Chaput 2010, 23), and the “technologically communicated/activated response to images and ideas shared by social media” (Gunner,
157). Affect encodes subjectivity not with discursive content but through the webs of associative links that discourse activates, making its uptake routinely irrational and reliably visceral: “One does not so much read the encoded information so much as sense and embody the pattern of the pulsion ... Affect is an experience of intensity ... that changes the state of the body, that has concrete effects on individual and social practice” (Thoburn
2007, 84). Positively or negatively charged, affect can calcify existing beliefs; and it can erode them. Continuously circulating in communicative exchanges, affect travels discursively but acts corporally, moving and molding us through the body and through embodied impulses to which we are continually and unconsciously subject. As Thomas
Rickert explains, “Affective subjects” are “constituted and threaded through language and social systems” (2007, 34). Affect overrides facts and reason to bind us to ideas, images, routines and political orientations that we often haven’t interrogated or tested, and operates—like the will-to identification—as a linking mechanism between subjects, groups, images, and expressions, one that acts below the bandwidth of our conscious attention. If identification is the ground that subtends all rhetoric, affect grounds the possibility for identification, as to identify presupposes a capacity for being moved by the determinations of common substance that is logically prior to the possibility to rouse it through an appeal. A prior affectability must already be operative. This is among Diane
Davis’s critical points in Inessential Solidarity and the phenomenon the title names. Davis explains that, 62
for there to be any sharing of symbolic meaning, any construction of common
enemy or collective goal, any effective use of persuasive discourse at all, a more
originary rhetoricity must already be operating, a constitutive persuadability and
responsivity that testifies, first of all, to a fundamental structure of exposure.18
Rhetorical sensitivity as the ongoing state-of-being and becoming is itself a form—the form—of subjectification; vulnerability/responsibility to others is the very condition for the subject itself to Davis. Discourse, then, neither works-over and on the subject exclusively or even primarily but instead activates a pre-symbolic nexus of rhetoricity with which it acts in tandem. For Davis, prior affective vulnerability works recursively with responsibility to others and this same exposure—acute and unceasing—is both what conditions and compels symbolic exchange. Writing is set in motion by a subject who does not so much respond to alterity but rather is the response to alterity: compelled to answer
“s/he is not a free agent but an assigned agent, an agent on assignment” an aftereffect of an always prior assignment or “a pre-originary rhetorical imperative” (Davis 2010, loc.154).
The act of writing attests to this vulnerability: “Writing, no matter what it says, testifies to exposedness, to vulnerability—to responsivity” for “An encapsulated interiority would have no need or desire to write” (Davis 2010, loc.151). The suggestion here is that part of both what shapes subjectivity and what prompts writers to produce discourse is the will to reconcile a primary desire to identify; affective vulnerability helps to clarify that “Writing and speaking are functions of [an] inessential solidarity” (Davis 2010, loc. 260).
18 Diane Davis. 2010. Inessential Solidarity. Pittsburg PA. University of Pittsburg Press, (digital edition/no pagination): Introduction, section 1; location 35; all further references to this text are cited by numeric location abbreviation (loc.#). 63
When in “Unframing Models of Public Distribution: From Rhetorical Situation to
Rhetorical Ecologies,” Jennifer Edbauer directs attention away from the differentiated sites, speakers and situations of the sender-receiver model of communication and toward the integrated, transsituational model of rhetorical circulation, she gives a kind of access to the circulation of neoliberal discourses and to how affect functions within them. A rhetorical situation indeed occurs at a social site, but that site is itself a “networked space of flows and connections,” that spill over and bleed into and across sites, speakers and kairotic moments in a “circulating ecology of effects, enactments and events” (Edbauer
2005, 9). This fluidity and flux makes the elements of the standard rhetorical situation ill- equipped to account for the mobility and velocity of rhetorical circulation, or for the concatenation of texts, whose effects exceed the boundaries of specific rhetorical ecologies. Textual concatenation layers every past structure of feeling diachronically into the present, creating an intertextual reverberation with existing beliefs, linkages, rhetorics and affects (synchronically), and because these connections are always emerging/withdrawing, none can be determined as primary. This is what makes the nature of affective energy overdetermined.
Suffusing everyday practices, situating bodies and dispositions, overdetermined affective energy in circulation assures our continual exposure. Edbauer specifies that circulation and concatenation together mean “We are never outside the networked interconnection of forces, energies, rhetorics, modes and experiences. In other words, our practical consciousness is never outside the prior and ongoing structures of feeling that shape the social field” (2005, 20). Because rhetorical ecologies are co-coordinating processes—"moving across the same social field, and within shared structures of feeling” 64
(Edbauer 2005, 20)—structures of affect flow into and across rhetorical ecologies, whether digital or material. For this reason, the circulation of rhetorical affect doesn’t comport to a linear causal model where discourse structures the exigence of the material world, instead flows instead across multidirectional vectors of causation and infusion. These properties for Catherine Chaput are what make neoliberal affective circulation illegible and inapprehensible vis-à-vis analysis of situational exigencies, speakers, and audience expectations. As liquidity, circulation, and motion take over for writer/speaker, situs, place, we undergo an ontological shift into the “fluidity of everyday practices, affects, and uncertainties” (Chaput 2010, 8). To calibrate to the changes that characterize the neoliberal milieu, Chaput proposes a rhetorical model attentive to the “circulation of affective energy” (2010, 18). Rhetorical circulation, she notes, “gives up the causal relationship between rhetoric and materiality” instead positing that “rhetoric circulates through our everyday, situated activities and does not exist in one place: it is always passing through, but is never located” (2010, 20).
Circulation helps to expedite the economization of the social 19—the ways in which economic terms, metrics, values and behaviors originating in or appropriate to the economy migrate to other social domains. ‘Efficiency,’ ‘transparency,’ ‘flexibility,’
‘facilitation,’ ‘accountability,’ ‘responsibility,’ and ‘human capital’—these terms, ubiquitous on university documents, in syllabi, assessment guidelines, on departmental websites, infuse economic principals into subjects’ lives more and more as they appear in new domains of social practice. As they circulate, signs enter into relations, connect with
19 See Koray Caliskan and Michel Callon. 2009. “Economization Part 1: Shifting Attention from the economy towards processes of economization” Economy and Society 38.3: 86-98. 65 new material conditions, become sedimented and layered and so increase in affective resonance as they burrow into the taken-for-granted of daily routine. As Sarah Ahmed indicates, “signs increase in affective value as an effect of the movement between signs:
The more signs circulate, the more affective they become” (Ahmed 2004, 45; quoted in
Chaput 2010) and the more effectively they orient bodies, and dispositions.
Through what we might call the economization of information—the virtual interlock between social networks and the mechanisms of neoliberal marketization—the same systems that offer global connectivity assure continual surveillance and exposure.
With financialization, the predominant mode of neoliberal capital, the “accumulation of profit proceeds by capturing what is otherwise a continuous flow of information” (Rossiter
2003, 122), the effective merger of information networking platforms and advertising systems plays a decisive part in restructuring affective orientations. Social networks/advertising systems capture information and profit by leveraging the “social work of users to subsume them into a means of piggybacking the circulatory requirements of capital onto the social relationships … of communicating subjects” (Manzerolle and
Kjosen 2012, 224).20 As Dardot and Laval indicate “identification with posts, functions and skills peculiar to the enterprise, like identification with consumer groups, and the signs and brands of advertising function as substitute subjections for roles in kinship or status in a polity” (2013, loc. 6995). Through digital mediation, student writers, like all writers and all modern subjects, are inundated in and saturated by the celebratory injunction to self-
20 For Jean Baudrillard, just as “prostitution and pornography are ecstatic forms of the circulation of sex,” the “market is an ecstatic form of the circulation of goods,” both of which are concomitant “with the emergence of an imminent promiscuity and the perpetual interconnection of all information and communication networks” (30). 66 commodification; as writers, we are immersed in modes of regulation and economization across all of our digital environments; we are encouraged to collect and amass likes, re- tweets, re-posts, and shares, to accumulate followers, friends and attention; not only encouraged, but gradually persuaded and recalibrated to regard these forms of affirmation as the appropriate index of self-worth, personal value and validation; and these become constitutive of expression, of how and what to circulate, enunciate, and write and how to represent the self in writing.
As audiences, when we write and respond to social media posts, on Twitter,
Facebook, or elsewhere, we are routinely “being moved by neoliberal values” (Dingo
2020, 148) and assimilated into discourse communities through what Sara Ahmed calls
“affective economies” (Ahmed 2004). In her analysis of the Let Girl Lean campaign—an initiative meant to foster girl empowerment through global education—Rebecca Dingo shows how the initiative invites audience participation—through tweets, hashtags,
Facebook commentary and online meetings on Google circles. This participation fosters online communities comprised of those interested in “saving girls” by recirculating responses. The figure and narrative of the third world girl who can be empowered by writing from western audiences creates a clear—quite formulaic—us/them demarcation between Western benevolence and developing world’s impoverishment in which the
(written) celebration of individual initiative, enterprise, ambition, and resilience of empowered girls shores up the seeming wisdom neoliberalism as the antidote to poverty and illiteracy.21 As Western writers are drawn in by the affective allure of narratives of
21 Dingo points to the story of “Wadley” as an example: “Wadley is a girl from Haiti who, despite not having tuition for schooling, arrives to her makeshift school each day until her teacher allows her to stay. Wadley’s character represents the values of both liberal 67 tenacity and triumph and participate by writing responses to these stories on social media, third world girls “become persuasive symbols of neoliberalism’s presumed ability to bring the value of freedom to marginalized people” (141). As writers recirculate these third- world-girl stories of success in the language of “self-determination,” and “personal agency” they circulate and solidify neoliberalism’s theoretical power to liberate individual subjects and allows these writers to feel already in alignment with the values that achieved it.
To accept any of these positions—that writing can be moved by an injunction to respond, or by neoliberal affective energy in circulation—just as to accept Rachel
Reidner’s assertion that writers of human-interest stories are often moved to write by neoliberal moralization—is to accept that writing is driven by something other than writing itself, and by extension, that such social forces can precede it. This stands in tension—if not mutual exclusion—with Derrida, Sánchez and Dobrin’s position that writing is logically prior to constructs like ideology, subjectivity or rationality, which only achieve sensibility through writing that precedes it. In Derrida, arche-writing specifies this foundational character. From archē (in Greek: ‘origin’ or ‘principle’), arche-writing functions interchangeably with the trace in Derrida. Together with différance, trace and arche-writing represent first principles, a priori to all thought, speech and language, since at minimum language has to comprise repeatable forms. Writing, to be written must be iterable, citational, or repeatable, and hence always defers presence to its trace, a memory that haunts the present but remains elusive to it. The trace is always a non-present
feminism and neoliberalism: personal responsibility, tenacity, focus, and self- determination” (142). 68 remainder infinitely deferred; this is the essence of différance, whose movement for
Derrida is the activity of arche-writing. As the precondition for all meaning, the very condition of sense, writing is what renders thought, speech and perception intelligible and is therefore inaugural, logically prior to the concepts that emerge through such ancillary functions. Derrida explains the proto-linguisticality of arche-writing in Of Grammatology:
It is because arche-writing, the movement of différance, irreducible arch-synthesis,
opening in one and the same possibility temporalization as well as relationship with
the other and language, cannot, as the condition of all linguistic systems, form part
of that language system itself and be situated as an object within its field”
(1998, 60).
Tracking Derridian arche-writing in The Function of Theory in Composition Studies,
Sánchez suggests that concepts like ideology are the result of writing and only come to be retrospectively assigned their referents by writing. By theorizing writing not as a representational technology conveying meaning but “on the connections (re)made among and endlessly across the (f)acts of writing” Sánchez maintains “the idea that there is something else, apart from writing, driving writing, becomes suspect” (96). Although a posteriori to arche-writing, neoliberal affective energy in circulation does represent
“something else” driving writing, though in a mode of complementarity and constitutive reciprocity. As writing produces neoliberalism conceptually and literally, neoliberal discourses nonetheless loop back into ecological systems to shape future emergent production, the two functioning in ongoing productive, dialectical tension. In this, I follow
Pierre Bourdieu’s assertion that the range of possibility for writing is implicitly constrained 69 by language, by dominant linguistic codes, those most pervasive rhetorics in circulation arbitrate how we describe and experience reality. Writing so theorized locates constructs like ideology in the doing rather than in knowing, on the surface and within the writing act, but also regards constructs like rationalities productive agencies that shape writing.
Affect—as a phenomenon that moves writing without presupposing or requiring prior intentionality—allows us to see how discourse can circulate through and from writing subjects who are written by affective circulation and who, though not autonomous actors, also circulate writing with a prior bearing on writing to come.
IV. Neo-subjects
Contrary to the classical-liberal subject, who’s responsibilities included holding government accountable, the modern neoliberal subject, inundated by the circulation of commodification amid the technologies of financialized capitalism, have as their moral obligation under neoliberalism to hold themselves accountable, and to do so by remaking the self and one’s order of motivations around the model of a contemporary firm.
The compulsion to build, curate, expand, monitor and leverage “her competitive positioning” and to “enhance [her] (monetary and nonmonetary) portfolio value across all of [her] endeavors and venues” (Brown 2015 60) follows the precarity of the individual, who now bears (ostensibly) the full risk offloaded to subjects from institutions (See chapter
1). Given that the subject’s viability on this front rests significantly on honing her capacity to choose across multiple domains, roles, and exigencies while always at risk and fully responsible for the consequences of poor calculation. This creates fragmentation.
The fragmentation of the neoliberal self begins when the agent is brought face-to-
face with the realization that she is not just an employee or student but also 70
simultaneously a product to be sold a walking advertisement a manager of her
resume about referring to rationales and entrepreneur of her possibilities. She is
perforce not learning about who she is but rather provisionally finding the person
she must become (Mirowski 2013, 108).
The pursuit of self-actualization ends up displaced by the mandate to self-optimization.
With the “increasingly heavy surveillance of public and private space; the increasingly precise traceability of individuals’ movements in networks; [and] the increasingly punctilious and petty evaluation of individuals’ activity” (Dardot and Laval, loc. 7101), the neo-subject is defined by hypervisibility and exposure. Whether through smartphone use, by foregoing digital privacy, self-promotion through business marketing platforms, through expanding one’s social media profile, compliance with external audit, or through standardizing techniques of evaluation and performance, hypervisibility alters how subjects write the self and where that self is validated. Ubiquitous exposure in modern universities has made these externalization platforms critical mediums through which to perform, express and advertise a marketable, public, optimized, and “professional” self.
Among university personally , for instance, the entrepreneurial ethos in circulation helps build a new form of what Aimee Carrillo Rowe has aptly deemed “conditions of belonging”—an implicit set of relations, values and assumptions that determine one’s value and inclusion within a given context (Rowe 2005; cited in Stenberg). These conditions tacitly prescribe and proscribe what it means to belong, which modes of self are viable and invalid, homogenizing subjects into a single construct. As economization bundles a wider range of activities within the same logic, “differences are effaced as one relation; that of economic self-interest, or competition, replaces the multiple spaces and 71 relations of worker, citizen, and economic subject of consumption” (Read 35). This constricting of subject positions, as Shari Stenberg shows, resolves itself in a scarcity of
“‘appropriate’ identities” through a “value-laden” neoliberal process of selection “marking anything other than “neutral”” as a detriment (191). To belong in the academic setting is to perform the self as a “good investment,” and a good investment is a ““neutral,” competitive, masculine subject who can acclimate, compete and win within established power structures” (Stenberg 191). Stenberg points to interactions with new graduate- student teachers, who, she notes, express concerns “that they will be read as too political, too female, too queer, etc., with “too” marking an excessive subjectivity in need of discipline” (191). These new teachers arrive at their positions “already fluent in [the] neoliberal values” according to which there is no alternative to the rational, competitive, autonomous and neutral, “‘standard’ neoliberal subject” (16).
V. Affective Literacy In Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattarri writer that allows herself to be moved, to be written by movement; out-of-control, and drifting, this writer reaches transcendence at the point when,
he [sic] cannot prevent himself from tracing flows and causing them to circulate;
for this is what style is, or rather the absence of style - asyntactic, agrammatical: the
moment when language is no longer defined by what it says, even less by what
makes it a signifying thing, but by what causes it to move, to flow, and to explode –
desire” (133)
To allow writing to move through the self and taken in the service to language, is to allow writing to respond to its own call—that of “Being-incommon” (2000, 246). As the 72 analysis of the discourse communities that formed around the third world girl movement, and Girl Empowerment, under the neoliberal template of values, this view has traction, as it does when we think of writing and affect reflexively. As Edbauer suggests, “[affect] is the experience generated by relations—by your body-in-relation” (142). Affective literacy, which she proposes as a conversance with the reciprocity in which writing consists, shows us that when we write, and “when we encounter writing, it not only signifies something to us, but it also combines with us in a degree of affectivity” (Edbauer 2005, 142). That is, writing mediates an exchange of affective energy through a convergence that “involves a mutuality between sensual and signifying effects” (Edbauer 2005, 151). In light of a priori affectability, affective literacy entails understanding how the will-to write—itself arising from an originary susceptibility and persuadability that activates responsibility—in part emerges in continuity with the will-to identify and to forge community. Following Davis,
“the one who writes is first of all called to write ... so that the one is always writing in response to others and because there are others” (2010, loc.151). Coextending from the subject’s ongoing vulnerability at a prelinguistic, pre-rhetorical affective level is the desire for transcendence that through writing, an impulse that itself attests to exposure; after all,
“An encapsulated interiority would have no need or desire to write. Writing, no matter what it says, testifies to exposedness, to vulnerability—to responsivity” (Davis 2010, loc.151). From this perspective, writing is moved by both (anterior) ecological phenomena and the (interior) will-to integrate into the ecology. Writing so conceived provides traction for understanding how we are “being moved” by neoliberal values as a function of the desire to connect with communities that—for better or worse—often come together around core neoliberal values. If, as Davis suggests, writing responds to “the call of community, 73
Being-incommon” (2000, 146) and online writing communities form in part through participation in neoliberal narratives of global liberation, the impulse to common-being that drives writing in these cases can also retrench neoliberal morality. To begin to
“understand why audiences seek participation in an affective economy through circulation”
(Dingo 148), we can look to how inclusion and federation move writing, to the ways writing and speaking are “expositions not of who one is (identity), but of the fact that we are” (Davis 2010, loc. 260; emphasis in original). Identity gives way to community.
As a composite, the contemporary writing subject can be understood within at least three intersecting dimensions. This subject is (1) constituted by circulation. The novelty of the neoliberal subject consists in her function as node and a “visual commodity circulating in a global media circuit” of profit (Braidotti 119). She is (2) constituted in part by hyper- visibility, exposure and the injunction to perform which is a function of the former conditions. And (3) constituted by a multiplicity of mobile, fluid processes of becoming that make this constitution indeterminate. At a time when, as I have been suggesting and
Rosi Braidotti maintains in The Posthuman, “we need a vision of the subject worthy of the present,” she describes the makeup of the contemporary subject as an ever-latent potential who, while presently “represented as a self-replicating system caught in a visual economy of endless circulation” (119) is not defined by this representation because the intrinsic malleability that makes the neoliberal subject possible also makes her indeterminate.
What we are as subjects from the point of view of affect is irreducible to a social classification or political construct, but by an open-ended field of possibilities, “a set of potential connections and movements that [we] have” and which is actualized by
“connectedness, the way [we’re] connected and how intensely” (Massumi 2002, 238). 74
Rhetorical circulation, which presupposes an ongoing flux of evolution/devolution through which the neoliberal subject is formed, translates into a subjectivity that is not only impermanent by virtue of its incapacity to sustain active connections, impermanence is a structural feature of the system that creates them. Within such a mobile space of continual circulation and affective potential, one in which identity is always in a process of becoming and always moving into and out of transitory emergence/divergence, subjects can be moved to circulate value but can’t be anchored to them, fixed by rationalities or circumscribed by generalized accounts of the condition of the modern subject. That neoliberal subjects are formed in part through active, participation in writing and
(re)circulation is both what makes them inherently unstable rhetorical constructions and what involves them in authoring subjectivity. Writing involves individuals, as Manuel
Castells indicates, in “constructing themselves as the subjects of a new history in the making” (228). Thinking in terms of constant fluctuation among continually reconfiguring elements within a rhetorical ecology figures a mobile writing-agent, a phantasm of sorts, infinitely writable and rewritable, always and only defined by its contingency and mutability
75
CHAPTER FOUR: AGENCY, WRITING-AS-CAPACITY, & CHANGING ECOLOGIES
Ecologies are vast hybrid systems of intertwined elements, systems where small changes can have unforeseen consequences that ripple far beyond their immediate implications.
~Colin Gifford Brooke, Lingua Fracta: Toward a Rhetoric of New Media
In 2004, Ronald Walter Greene observed that an anxiety over rhetorical agency has been
“lodged in the critical imagination” of the field (188)22. That anxiety has been activated by the ‘death of the author’ and compounded steadily ever since with ecological models of writing. According to the classical rhetorical tradition, rhetorical agency refers to the capacity to write or enunciate—mobilizing the resources or oration, eloquence, style, etc.—in a manner that induces others to respond and (ideally) to act. Since this capacity has historically been understood as an individual property, the argument goes, the death of the author—the decentralization and deprioritizing of the subject—installs a condition of
22 Ronald Walter Greene. 2004. “Rhetoric and Capitalism: Rhetorical Agency as Communicative Labor.” 76 anxiety for rhetoric, because this discipline loses intelligibility and intellectual viability when the suasive power of an individual agent is called into question. To Green the “root cause” of the anxiety over agency is its “attachment to a [particular] vision of political change” (189). Binding rhetorical and writing agency to political action creates a double- bind, one in which agency suspends dialectically between criticality and complicity with existing power dynamics. Whether it
imagines rhetorical agency in terms of reinventing cultural traditions
(hermeneutics), or in terms of collective action (social movements), the emphasis
on rhetorical agency as a model of political communication prefigures the
significance of rhetorical agency as always already in support of, or opposition to,
the institutional structures of power. Thus, a permanent anxiety about the character
of rhetorical agency is made inevitable, because it suspends dialectically between
structures of power … and the possibility for social change. (Greene 198)
Since Greene’s 2004 article the tension over rhetorical agency and over related questions of individual responsibility and student empowerment has taken on greater complexity with the field’s general pivot from epistemology to ontology, along with the growing influence of new materialism, a reinvigoration of posthuman thought, and the transformational implications of mass connectivity and hyper-circulation. When writing enters digital ecologies we confront a totally new set of dynamics for considering how writing works—but these (new) digital infrastructural dimensions comport to immutable dynamics of power transferrable and applicable to what writing is. Rhetorical ecologies— digital and otherwise—shift the calculus for initiating change—and hence for mobilizing power—to a facility for ordering ecological relations to maximize writing as an immanent 77 and ongoing capacitation.
I. Writing in Networks
Once writing enters into the complexity of digital writing ecologies, traversing the multiple enunciative systems through which it passes, the prospect of authorial singularity rapidly dissolves. Through the design of digital interfaces and the writing practices they usher in, networked writing fortifies Derrida’s position that all writing is only ever re-text, reinscription, remix, re-iteration and reproduction, an extraction and recombination of existing discourses. Throughout her exploration of Shelly Jackson’s hypertext, electronic fiction Patchwork Girl, N. Katherine Hayles takes the self-reflexive, self-conscious style of the narrative as a paradigm example of a networked writing process, in part because appropriation is an explicit, deliberate, and essential element within. Hayles writes that
“instead of valorizing originality, [the text] produces itself and its characters through acts of appropriation” and “self-consciously insists on the collaborative nature of its productions” (2005, 161). To Hayles, the inexorability of appropriation in writing undermines claims to textual novelty or possession: “The author creates his literary property through his exercise of original genius, yet it is clear that writing is always a process of remixing and transformation, from syntax to literary allusions and the structure of tropes” (2005, 146). Literary conventions bring the point into sharp focus: “a literary tradition must precede and author’s inscriptions for literature to be possible as such, yet this same appropriation and reworking of an existing tradition is said to produce ‘original’ work” (2005, 146). Casey Boyle et. al note that the movement of digital circulation fosters
“creative repetitions,” even “repetitions without an essence” as “newness seems less and less relevant with each passing day,” and “fragmentation” and “arrangement”—that is, 78
“tearing apart and putting back together”—are becoming increasingly viable forms of creativity” (257). By their function and design, databases, search engines, blogs, wikis, and discussion forums, among other digitally networked writing forms, presuppose collaborative productions and foster open-ended writing structures. Functionality in such writing interfaces rests on multiple participants, each of whom modify the architecture of the mediums as they compose. To compose in these mediums is also to build and continually alter what is produced and to alter the system that produces it, as “each user rewrites and reinvents the instrument as she or he selects between available options or fills in text” (Lotier 376).
Although writing and rhetorical agency in such mediums can’t be understood as singular, the will-to retain an individual model of agency in rhetorical theory flows from a number of investments and sources. investments. For one, this model is tied to a deeply entrenched Western tradition traceable to Isocrates and Cicero and to what Michael Leff has identified as a “performative bias.” Behind what Leff calls the “homage to the rhetor” paid by much of the classical tradition of rhetoric (137), the performative bias is an inclination to regard “the performing subject as the seat of rhetorical origin” (145-146).
This view rests in part on prior intentionality—the forethought to design and execute intent through to a desired end. Carolyn R. Miller indicates that “the bias of the speaking situation is to foreground the agent, the performing subject as the seat of rhetorical origin, seizing the kairos (capacity) to instigate change” (145-146). For Christian Lundberg and
Loshua Gunn, the will to retain a possessing agent to a legacy of ontotheological rhetoric according to which agency cannot viably link to responsibility without a singular, willing subject. This legacy manifests in a rhetorical ontotheology that demands a human seat of 79 agency to stabilize the “gospel of civic responsibility” (Lundberg and Gunn, 94). For
Miller, illusions of individual agency—not illusions in the sense of being a theoretical fiction but in that agency rests within and hence requires another who confers it—are necessary insofar as they make symbolic action possible.
Following Crowley (2003), Condit (2003), and Miller (2007) in “Composition is the Negotiation of Fantastical Selves,” Ira J. Allen argues that illusions of individual agency serve a stabilizing function for the discipline of rhetoric and composition. He argues for a redoubled commitment to will, consciousness and agency as necessary for the work of composition, accounting for them in terms of a creative singularity with what he calls a “chastened humanism” that, even when disavowed, he argues, remains operative.
Will, agency and individuation are necessary fantasies to Allen, distinct from illusions insofar as they are complementary to reality, whereas illusion is opposed to it, and fundamental to the work of composition so cannot be discarded. While an ethic of responsibility according to Allen cannot be individuated, the fantasy of individuation serves an instrumental purpose to writing studies more broadly, one that he suggests requires fostering an ethic attuned to the “fantasies at stake in our sense of ourselves as distinct” (182). Urging writing studies to accept that some notion of Will, real or fictive, is among the “indispensable elements of the fantasies of self and agency we need,” Allen names agency as just this fantastical cluster: “a nexus of constraint, capacity, consciousness and will from which selves emerge” (190).
Although a fantasy of self may perform an instrumental function for composition as a field, such fantasies of individuated agents need to be challenged, I submit, to clear the way for writing theory to conceptualize a model of agency that more closely approximates 80 the relationship between agency and writing in its ecological form. Going further, Rickert maintains that conceiving of kairos not as the opportune moment but as enacting what could not be otherwise “threatens rhetorical theory’s profound investment in human will, an investment frequently coded as questions of agency” (Rickert 2013, 116-117).
According to Hayles, a fantasy of self and a confusion about the systems that mediate it animate much of the general disaffection with insights that posthumanism has offered. She maintains that “When the self is envisioned as grounded in presence, identified by originary guarantees and teleological trajectories, associated with solid foundations and logical coherence, the posthuman is likely to be seen as antihuman because it envisions the conscious mind as a small subsystem running its program of self-construction and self- assurance while remaining ignorant of the dynamics of complex systems” (Hayles 1999,
286). The dynamics of complex systems—ecological systems—destabilize the image of the singular agent. When conceived as the faculty to plan, execute, anticipate and carry out a particular ideological objective from writing or enunciation through to a projected rhetorical effect, rhetorical agency has perhaps always been analytically untenable. That is, the agent of Western liberal humanism, endowed and unified bearer of conscious will and intention has never been feasible because it abstracts the agent from the system that conditions action itself. As Jane Bennett observes, “There was never a time when human agency was not an interfolding network of humanity and nonhumanity” only a period when these dynamics were concealed; “today, this mingling has become harder to ignore” (31).
II. Writing & Rhetorical Agency
Working outside the writer/speaker/rhetoric triad, alternative models within feminist studies, new materialism and ecological theory have reconfigured agency from an 81 individual possession to an event that in some sense possesses the agent. Agency in such models arises through an intersection with social contexts in an opportune and transitory alignment of the semiotic and material to clear an enunciative opportunity for action
(Licona and Herndl); in a transactional attribution conferred on a speaker, rhetor, writer and best conceptualized as “the kinetic energy of rhetorical performance” (Miller 147); or inheres through processural “reconfigurations of the world” (Barad 818). Within such formulations, agency is ongoing, and the default is to relationality, without which there is no subject, no agent, and no materiality. To recall the prior chapter, according to Barad, entities like brains, bodies, and texts, demarcate borders between things through relationalities that develop over time and within acting phenomena; environmental ensembles and settings hence “intra-ract” to materialize and confer agency through ongoing reconfigurations of relationality forged through the convergences of phenomena.
For Marilyn Cooper, agency is also an ongoing achievement, always reformulating through action and interrelation. With “Rhetorical Agency as Emergent and Enacted”
Marilyn Cooper begins by arguing that because writers cause effects, whether intentional or otherwise, makes us perforce agented actors. Rhetorical agency is emergent and enacted—emergent—arising within embodied, habitual, everyday acts—and enacted
“nonconsciously” as individuals respond to daily exigencies through these habituated responses set and kept in motion through circular causation. While individuals do have conscious intentions, plan and set goals, reflect on their actions, the conscious will we assign to these acts is an illusion. When we write, Marylin Cooper explains, “We experience ourselves as causal agents, and any theory of agency [or writing] needs somehow to account for that experience” (2011, 437). Though we experience ourselves as 82 causal agents, our actions are not intentional but reactive. Agency is not, however, anchored in such conscious mental activities, but in the alignment of individualized neural patterning with an individual’s goals and the lived knowledge that out actions are our own
(Cooper 2011, 420). This, she notes, is the basic property of intentionality, following neuroscientist Walter Freeman, who indicates that, “This dynamic system is the self in each of us. Is the agency in charge not our awareness which is constantly trying to catch up with what we do” (Freeman 139; cited in Cooper 2011, 428). To decouple agency from the agent neutralizes moral accountability in her view, for “thinking of agency as an amorphous force like kinetic energy leaves us no basis for assigning responsibility for actions” (Cooper 2011, 438). Agents do act, in her view, and they are responsible for those actions.
At the same time that writing ecologies destabilize the autonomous writer and singularity itself, however, they trouble the notion of a singular locus of responsibility.
Along this track, Bennett turns to the assemblage to counter the notion of an isolated, localized responsibility. Comprised of the energies, agencies, machines and matter co- adapt with humans in a collaboration of “confederate agencies”—“living, throbbing, confederations, that are able to function despite the persistent presence of energies that confound them” (Bennett, 2010, 23-24)—assemblages are not governed by a singular or central head. Agency within the assemblage thus figures as distributed—across bodies, machines, and affects and across writing ecologies. As Bennett argues, and I suggest,
“individuals [are] simply incapable of bearing full responsibility for their effects” and yet, far from negating the assignment of blame, assemblages (or ecological systems) “broaden the range of places to look for sources” (37). This dispersion of responsibility implies a 83 concomitant dispersion of agency. Laura Greis explains that distributed cognition—as it intersects with distributed agency—“challenges us to not so much to divorce humans from agency altogether, but instead to recognize that agency does not always stem from prior intentionality” (71). Where prior intention refers to premeditated action generated in advance of action, distributed agencies and cognitive processes like writing involve extended intentional states, in which emergent production is a coadaptive, co-constitutive coming-to-be between author(s) and text. Posthumanism envisions a comparable dispersion of writing agency. Aligned with the new materialist orientation to being as a co- coordinating among bodies, the posthuman can be defined as “an attempt to engage humans as distributed processes rather than as discrete entities” (Hawhee and
Muckelbauer, 770). Within a posthuman sensibility, writing materializes via the interactions between machines, bodies, humans, and nonhuman actants, each with their own agency, who partake in written production. Figuring a representatively posthuman dispersion of agency, Lundberg and Gunn suggest a “decisive analytical cut between agency, understood as the production of effect or action, and the agent, understood as the presumed origin of effect or action” (Lundberg and Gunn 88).
Like postprocess eco-theorists, who similarly distribute agency into ecologies
(Cooper, Dobrin), assemblages (Hayles, Haynes, Deleuze and Guattari), networks (Latour,
Rice), and ambience (Boyd et al; Rickert), posthumanism figures “moral and political agency” as convening possible futures through “daily practices of interconnection with others” (Braidotti 191). Writing and rhetorical agency have been reimagined within posthuman thought in ways that extend our sense of what both should and can mean.
Replacing agency with capacity, per Nathan Stormer and Bridie McGreavy’s proposal, 84 subtly recalibrates singularity into relationality, and hence accounts for a dispersion of agential energy. Whereas “Agency identifies force by its application, capacity imagines force in its relations,” and hence takes us from a model of rhetoric as in instrumental power applied by an individual to rhetoric as an ongoing, ecological capacitation with which the individual engages (5). Questioning not just the practical but also the ethical tenability of the individual writing agent, Casey Boyle challenges the moral acumen of treating the student as a mere repository for power, advocating as an alternative, “rhetorical training as an orchestration of ecological relations and not simply as a method for increasing an individual’s agency” (Boyle 2016, 539). Approaching agency in this way counterbalances the pedagogical absolutism of training students to locate agential power within by encouraging them to look without—to the environmental and ambient structural dynamics of the ecologies—digital and otherwise—in which they write. Encouraging writers to think about capacity and change as something that happens less through an individual writer acting on an individual audience, and more as a collective endeavor, in posthumanism,
“rhetoric becomes an art of connectivity” (Hawhee and Muckelbauer 770; cited in Boyle
2016, 540). Pointing out that writing cannot fail to be an ontological act, Robert Yagelski alerts us to the fact that “when we write we enact a sense of ourselves as beings in the world” (24) and, by extension, to the fact that enacting the self in writing is to enact a self with-others. Arguing for pedagogies that “foster a sense of self as fundamentally interconnected to all other selves and the landscape they inhabit” follows from Yagelski’s understanding of “writing as an art of being connected” (Yagelski 20; cited in Boyle 2017)
538). By definition, networked writing presupposes engagement with digital communities.
Networked writing includes, among other iterations, synchronous forms: instant 85 messaging, internet chat; asynchronous forms: email, web-based bulletin boards, and hypermedia, (multimedia, hypertextual) such as web pages; socially-grounded forms:
Facebook, blogs, vlogs, Wikis, Twitter, podcasting, Google apps., Dropbox, Icloud, browser-based programming and mobile apps.—each of these examples converge in the immediate and mobile connections they facilitate and enable. Such connections have the
(theoretical) potential for cross-cultural intermediation, solidarity and coalition-building, as these writing forms (theoretically) transcend the center/periphery and us/them binaries. For their contribution to Naming What We Know: Threshold Concepts of Writing Studies,
Collin Brooke and Jeffry T. Grabill offer the disciplinary consensus within rhetoric and composition when they argue that the power of the network can be understood in terms of
“connectivity,” which “allows writers to access and participate more seamlessly and quickly with others” and to “large and widely dispersed audiences”; by and through the
“ability to connect readers to writers, to turn anyone with a network connection into a publisher,” connectivity distributes agency across digital ecologies (33). With distribution, we shift from singularity to a plurality of agencies, transforming the singularity of the I- agent into the collective We-agency that constitutes “the collaborative and interdependent nature of human agency” (Jung 2014). Agency inheres relationally.
III. Writing as an Immanent-Capacity
Writing is already empowered. Writing exists; new writing adds to what exists; writing then is always resistance and change. As a tension against what is, or an addition—and hence an alteration—to the existing pool of discourse; as a phenomenon that resists presence (Derrida); and as disturbance the grid of meaning and intelligibility, writing is an ongoing capacitation that initiates a rupture in our familiar order of sensations. Thought in 86 this way, writing doesn’t function as a means for indexing the power to induce others to act, but already inheres in its aesthetic capacity to destabilize and frustrate predictability.
When forego its instrumental or representational utility, writing’s capacity ends up operating inversely to disturb, revise, superimpose, and unsettle; in its capacity to
“[s]ubtract the familiarity and alreadiness of what has been said” Lynn Worsham observes, and “to defamiliarize and denaturalize. Its task is to make strange and uncanny what is familiar and comfortable” (“Question” 233). This dissensual property to writing for
Worsham is what makes all writing intrinsically poetic. So conceived, writing functions less as an “agency in the articulation of knowledge and the redistribution of power” and more as an “indispensable agency for making the world strange and infinitely various”
(Worsham 1991, 102). Along with its practical communicative use-value, the ontology of writing also and equally obtains in disturbance or fissure—and hence in intervention, interruption, discontinuity and dissensus.
To write following a posthuman sensibility is to adopt an orientation continuous with this internal quality of dissensus, crack or rupture, to take disruption as one’s only directive; and it is to refuse writing as a means for conferring or carrying meaning, referentiality or grammatical substance; these are anathema to the purpose. A. Rice explains that, stylistically speaking, posthuman writing enacts disruptions as occasions for exploring how writing happens (131 or 171). Offering a paradigmatic statement of the posthuman perspective on writing’s value, Mark Taylor explains that,
If writing does not push the tipping point, it is simply not worth the effort. The
writing that matters disturbs more than it reassures; it drives authors as well as 87
readers to the edge of chaos and abandons them. Writers realize that the pleasure of
the text is not the satisfaction it provides but the dissatisfaction it engenders.
(2002, 198)
This approach to writing entails a willful subversion of consensus in order to confound rather than communicate. This writing, Diane Davis says, “works at the weave, yanking, pulling, ripping” … and “exposing the “finitude” “that rhetorics” of “the “individual” attempt to cover over” (238). Ostensibly answering to Greene’s concern, “This writing will not have been at the service of any regime of power” (Davis 1999, 238), because it isn’t bound to the coherency or consistency that would aid the maintenance of any particular power block. This writing moves unencumbered by the task of intelligibility on its own nebulous route offering little representational utility or sense of stability. To be sure, “[w]hen writing operates representationally ... ” Davis suggests, “...when writing can be viewed as making reality manifest, it is believed to produce ‘safe text’ and to operate on the side of ‘truth’”; yet “[w]hen representation is suspended, reality is at risk” “writing is at its most threatening ... when it disrupts the meaning-making machine” (Davis 1999,
233-234). Writing is disjunction; it is always disruption; it is counter—regardless of authorial intent—by its very structural properties.
Within ecological systems, these properties suggest an alternative calculus for initiating and effectuating change that doesn’t rely on political calculation. Thinking of writing as an ecology or system operating within a metasystem brings attention to the ripple-effect of causation that occurs between symbiotic webs, where changes in one system invariably bring about changes in the others, shifts that, within the logic of complex systems, will be unpredictably disproportionate to the originating event. Ecologies host 88 perpetual tension between antagonistic flows. Writing ecologies, like those that circulate the figure of the third world girl stripped of the context that fleshes out her actual story, to take one example, host a tension between the volume of circulation supporting competing narratives. John H. Whicker explains that “Writing ecologies are always areas of struggle between those textual currents that work to maintain the current stability of the system and those that offer alternatives that work to change and adapt the system to the needs of parts and changing circumstances” (Whicker 2015, 262). Order and continuity sustain through power, an imbalance in agency between elements within a system within an eco-system.
Systems sustain relative equilibrium through the normalization of the activities of the parts essential to their structural character as rational, necessary, neutral. But when the parts within an ecology shift, the ecology transforms; structural configurations are contingent and continually reconstituted. Altering political conditions then is less about “overthrowing dominant culture and more about coalition building, gathering bodies, producing more and more texts, and so changing the ecology” (Whicker 2015, 265-266). Thinking in these terms transforms questions about how to affect change independently to collaborations alter the conditions for possible solutions. Change within systems, then, Whicker indicates,
“is matter of producing alternative textual currents that gain enough mass and velocity to substantially alter the culture that is maintained by the ongoing interaction of its parts”
(2015, 265). In other words, change happens through the volume of discourse on the move and through the mobilization of writing to resist and counter the flow of constancy.
Writing exists; new writing adds to what exists; writing is always resistance.
89
PART II
CHAPTER FIVE “FREE” SPEECH, NEOLIBERAL ANTI-POLITICS & DISRUPTION ON CAMPUS
Formal freedom is the freedom of choice within the coordinates of the existing power relations, while actual freedom designates the site of an intervention that undermines these very coordinates. ~Slavoj Žižek, “A Plea for Leninist Intolerance”
... In the name of socialism, intolerance of opposing ideas is openly extolled.
~Fredrick von Hayek (1944)
In 2013, the University of Kansas offered an example of how universities are responding to pressure to restrict speech to accommodate conservative critics. Offering an instruction in how neoliberal common sense performs pedagogically to secure consent for its agenda, in December of that year KU’s regents empowered the CEO of a state university to “suspend, dismiss or terminate from employment any faculty or staff member who makes improper use of social media.” Section IV of the regents’ policy outlines specifics for determining instances of improper use of social media: the CEO “shall balance the interest of the university in promoting the efficiency of the public services it performs through its employees against the employee’s right as a citizen to speak on matters of public concern,” but the provost is ultimately authorized to level these punitive 90 actions for any speech deemed “contrary to the best interests of the University.”23 This is a paradigmatic instance of how faculty and staff rights to speech are being limited by efforts to advance an increasingly restricted vision of the mission of universities by conservative legislators and donors along neoliberal lines, specifically in that KU’s regents defended the act as necessary to protect the university’s [free] transactions with the state legislature.
Effectively privatizing personal conduct, the policy defers to the market to allocate civil liberties and communicates that decisions regarding acceptable speech are judgments for which CEOs appropriately stand as executors.
The institutional impulses behind the Kansas policy resurfaced nationally in criticisms of campus activism from 2014 to 2016 with a particular contempt that has carried to the present. Collectively, these critics wove a narrative that read as follows: an epidemic of sensitivity, ignorance and intolerance to “opposing ideas,” represented by
“anti-intellectual,” “authoritarian,” and “intolerant” student activists imperils the 1st amendment on campuses. From its ostensible beginnings with demonstrations at the
University of Missouri in October 2014, to the anarchic image of the masked Black Bloc protester at the University of California, Berkeley of 2016, to the ‘shut it down’ counter- speech protests at Middlebury College in March 2017 to the speech/counter speech battle that Charles Murray’s presentation in 2018 devolved into, critics have ruled these activists and their demands out of bounds. The prevailing charges deem them “anti-intellectual,”
“authoritarian,” and “intolerant.” Consensus appears to exist on the following: an epidemic of sensitivity, ignorance and intolerance to “opposing ideas” on the part of student
23 By Scott Jaschik, “Fireable Tweets,” Inside Higher Ed., December 19, 2013. https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2013/12/19/kansas-regents-adopt-policy-when- social-media-use-can-get-faculty-fired. 91
“authoritarians” imperils First amendment ideals on campuses. Freedom and how it is defined is at the heart of these struggles.
Throughout this chapter, I’ll submit that these critiques are animated by the neoliberal reflex to abstract individuals from their structural circumstances—material, historical, and institutional; and that only by situating these activists squarely within them are the arguments on either side legible. When the Right contends that these activists are a threat to free speech, it’s not taking seriously what free speech means, that it is by definition the right to disrupt meaning; when the Right and Left deploy the metaphor of the
‘marketplace of ideas’ as a model for free expression, both disacknowledge the material- structural hierarchies that invalidate it; and when student activists disrupt both of these neoliberally-inflected forms of commonsense, they’re not repressing the free-flow of ideas but rather catalyzing it. The overarching point of the chapter is to demonstrate that, across the board, the neoliberalization of the academy calls for disruption—disruptive writing praxes and disruptive speech practices to disturb neoliberalism’s standing as common sense. What the confrontations at UC Berkeley, Middlebury College, Auburn and elsewhere since 2014 reflect is a fight over what counts as protected expression and legitimate political conduct. On one level, this is a rhetorical determination. M. Karen
Powers and Catherine Chaput for one have shown how a continually negotiated sphere of acceptability regulates the limits of ‘permissible’ expression in academic settings. Seeking to historicize the political unconscious ala Frederic Jameson of higher education, they demonstrate how practices of bifurcation, appeals to balance and competing notions of academic freedom represent three modes of “confining discourse” that reveal and emerge from a “pre-established and unconscious set of parameters that frame discursive 92 possibilities for democratic debate in higher education (651). At another level, this is entirely material. Conservatives have attempted to frame the conduct of these activists within a broader, systemic threat to free expression posed by liberal orthodoxy on campuses and to manipulate state legislation accordingly.
On the basis of these incidents, a concurrent effort to influence state legislators has gained significant ground. Marshaling extraordinary economic, social, material and legal resources to exert influence on state legislators, the effort had achieved substantial progress through the middle of 2017. In late July of that year North Carolina joined Arizona,
Colorado, and a growing collective of states that have limited speech to designated “free speech zones” on campuses and mandated punitive action against students who encroach on the speech rights of others. These are materially constituted terms, as Christian Weisser explains, articulating the basic flux of these forces in a simple pedagogical proposal:
“What I’m suggesting is that we help them [students] to recognize that culture, politics and ideology shape public conversations. We should highlight the ways in which material forces shape what gets said, who gets heard and how these forces have shaped public discourse throughout history” (98). According to the basic logic of neoliberalism, he’s wrong—there is no structural or material stratification in access to speech practices, or differential access to the infrastructure, instruments, agents or education conducive to lateral/vertical social movement. Free speech, as a political instrument for sustaining the public interest, is anathema to its logic, a threat.
I. Rancière
When in Dissensus, Jacques Rancière suggests that speech practices are the arena in which political struggles play out, he’s hinting at more than a formality in this political climate. 93
Today neoliberal rationality has a monopoly on what Rancière terms consensus. That
“process underlying today’s continual shrinkage of political space,” consensus, for
Rancière, determines the very contours and qualities of sensibility itself, what is visible, invisible, audible, inaudible, who may speak, and whose speech is consigned to noise
(Rancière 2010, 72). But this is arbitrary. And for Rancière those with the resources to decide inclusion and exclusion are well-aware of the arbitrarity of this control. If consensus structures” configurations of the political community,” the concrete, material arrangements dictating who is included and excluded from political activity, dissensus—or politics itself—assumes the form of action. Acts of “taking part,” dissensus concerns acts of rupture in continuity, “intervention[s] on the doable and the sayable” that occur when “the part that have no part,” those excluded from the consensus count defy its governing logic.
(Rancière 2010, 37). Political conflict consists here “primarily in the struggle to have one’s voice heard” and to have “oneself recognized as a legitimate partner in debate”
(Rancière 2010, 9), and thus entailing a judgment about the quality of the person or speaker more than the content or value of her speech. Who has the right to speak in short is about who demands it by subverting the arbitrarity of the logic through which it’s denied.
Rancière draws attention away from the complexity of formal, rational, and deliberative mechanics of public discord and disagreement, instead pinpointing the simple antagonisms at the heart of political transformations and the centrality of derision as a rhetorical tactic. Though Rancière’s political model can’t be applied to the dynamics this conflict on a one-to-one basis, the frame is instructive for considering the negotiated nature of political speech as it plays out in these critiques. That stated, his claim that “genuine political speech entails a dispute over the very quality of those who speak” appears in the 94 language of ‘welfare queen’ in the late 70s, ‘victims’ on campuses in the 1990s, and it appears here with the rhetoric of coddling and hypersensitivity (Rancière 8-9). We find origins for these tropes in Richard Arum and Josipa Roska’s formulation of current students in “Academically Adrift;’ and its cues from the American Counsel of Trustees and
Alumni (ACTA), among others. In attempting to affirm Allan Bloom’s requiem for The
Closing of the American Mind, these arguments follow the basic theses of 2015’s “The
Coddling of the American Mind.” J. Haidt and G Lukianoff argue that a university culture of “vindictive protectiveness” has engendered a crippling inclination to comfort and to requiring “protection from ideas” (Haidt & Lukianoff np). The discourse that has developed from these basic arguments argues that, (1) students are inordinately sensitive; they therefore need (2) to be protected with trigger warnings, safe spaces, etc., and thus (3) represent a threat to free expression on campuses. Newsweek’s Nina Burleigh argues that students’ “aggrieved fragility” has been “normalized” on campuses. (Burleigh 2016).
Forbes’s Tom Lindsay bemoans a university culture that elevates “feeling over rational argument,” (2018), and Professor Charles Lisbon describes students who “seek shelter from intellectual challenges” (2018). What broadly accounts for these qualities according to Professor John McWhorter is that students are “not learning how to think” (Friedersdorf
2017). These critics have reliably framed students’ challenges to existing institutional order, to propriety, to normative speech codes as anathema to free speech itself and to democracy itself, while presenting themselves as its champions. The ACTA, for instance, claims that “if there is any indication of the lack of civic knowledge and empowerment in today’s undergraduates, it is the assault on the First Amendment that has only become more vehement over the past year” and for which the “danger to democracy is self- 95 evident” (2016). Such claims have persistently invoked rationality, weakness, and consensus political activity, locating the impetus to dissent itself in intellectual frailty, cognitive deficiency and pathology. As The New York Time’s Frank Bruni explained in
March 2017, distilling the “moral” of the incident at Middlebury College to the basic lesson and terms of the hermeneutic, what’s at work here is not political assertion. These protests are not, the argument goes, engaging with the limits of the prevailing understanding of what counts as speech, but rather: “It’s about emotional coddling. It’s about intellectual impoverishment” (Bruni 2017). Although the instances where protesters are damaging property does much to detract from the substance of the arguments made by nonviolent activists, the problem with these sorts of critiques is there tendency to devolve into ad hominem and to disavow the structural circumstances in which speech occurs. To challenge the metaphoric accuracy of “coddled” as a label, we only have to point to statistics on student debt from chapter 6 of this dissertation. 71% of students assumed debt to finance college in 2016 and were therefore confronted with the predatory financial markets on which higher education now ostensibly depends. And this concern for coddled students also ignores the political context. To arrive at the charge that students are coddled requires extracting them from the material conditions of indebtedness that refutes it, to remove them from the material-political conditions of institutions that increasingly rely on debt for financing. And hence it is to abstract them from their structural position of exploitation. This is a standard residual effect of the hyper localization of responsibility with individuals: structural causation vanishes as a determinate factor. Students are indulged and “coddled” only when extricated from the historical material ecology of the privatized academy. When we consider the whole ecology in which these students are 96 situated, when we consider that predatory lending practices makes them the most exploited, indebted generation of students in the history of higher education, coddled becomes absurd as a descriptor, applicable only through a neoliberal frame of individualism, according to which each and all should ‘pick themselves up’ and demonstrate appropriate initiative. In short, one cannot be in debt to a predatory and corrupt university lending arrangement and also be coddled.
The Atlantic’s 2016 publication “The Glaring Evidence that Free Speech Is
Threatened on Campus” offers a template for the tenor these critiques have taken, and the arguments they make. Drawing on a poll of eight-hundred college students that was conducted by the Wall Street Journal, Conor Friedersdorf would appear to have solid ground from which to claim that free speech is threatened by “students who are intolerant of dissent,” people who “push to disinvite speakers because of their viewpoints,” and
“those who shut down events to prevent people from speaking” (2017). In this,
Friedersdorf marks the foundational claims from which this discourse of threat proceeds.
No doubt, the position articulated broadly in this body of criticism has merit on its own terms: students have shut down more than the speakers; they’ve shut down dialogue surrounding the validity of their speech content. When these critics deride practices of dissent itself, however, they enact the depoliticizing reflexes immanent to the neoliberal program, and often devolve into hyperbole. For instance, The Atlantic’s Peter Beinart argues in March 2017 that the counter-speech that drowned out Charles Murray’s presentation at Middlebury College was a “violent attack on free speech,” one consonant with the threat to speech rights immanent in protests over figures like Condoleezza Rice and International Monetary fund head Christine Lagarde (Beinart 2017). 97
II. Repressive Tolerance
Among the more trenchant observations made by these critics, Yale Law Professor Steven
L. Carter connects the theoretical-ideological thrust of this activism to Herbert Marcuse’s
1969 essay “Repressive Tolerance.” In doing so, he affords an opportunity to consider the two perspectives at work here. Where One Dimensional Man provides a thoroughgoing explication its theses and ultimately questions the tenability of human liberation itself within the (then) new regime of technical control, in “Repressive Tolerance” Marcuse highlights the terms of liberal debate as themselves limiting progress under liberal democracies. Where tolerance was intended to safeguard the social contract, it now undermines it. Marcuse asserts that “in advanced democratic societies, which have undermined the basis of economic and political liberalism, have also altered the liberal function of tolerance. … And on the firm foundations of a coordinated society all but closed against qualitative change, tolerance itself serves to contain such change rather than to promote it” (14). Upholding the principle of tolerance in such circumstances thus requires intolerance, a selective suspension of the right to free expression. When what is at stake is existence, freedom and possibility itself, society cannot be indiscriminate: “certain things cannot be said, certain ideas cannot be expressed, certain policies cannot be proposed, certain behavior cannot be permitted without making tolerance an instrument for the continuation of servitude” (3). In its more militant manifestations, this activism has indeed ordered itself around such complex and problematic principles, exemplified by the shouting down of Charles Murray’s speaking engagement on March 2, 2016 at Middlebury
College. Rejecting Marcuse’s logic on this point, and these activists for ordering 98 themselves to it, Carter asserts that “the true harbinger of an authoritarian future lives not in the White House but in the groves of academe” (Carter 2017).
One protester, Sarah Asch, a Middlebury student who participated in Murray’s disruption, offers a counterpoint: “If Middlebury had invited Paul Ryan or John Kasich, I would have sat and listened. But they invited Charles Murray, a pseudoscientist whom the
Southern Poverty Law Center classified as a “white nationalist” and a widely discredited eugenicist who claimed in his 1994 book The Bell Curve that people of color, women, and the poor are genetically inferior to white men.” These claims are consistent, if not exactly aligned, with those in Murray’s landmark text The Bell Curve. In “Inequality by Design:
Cracking the Bell Curve Myth,” Claude Fisher and five other sociologists at UC Berkeley determined that among other core claims within the text, that “Inequality is not fated by nature, nor even by the ‘invisible hand’ of the market; it is a social construction, a result of our historical acts. Americans have created the extent and type of inequality we have, and
Americans maintain it” (Fisher et al. 7; emphasis in original).
Asch continues: “The incident begs the question: At what point are we asking the same people to be uncomfortable over and over again for the sake of rhetorical resilience?
How many times will racist ideologies be given a platform denied to those on the margins whose voices are most often silenced?” From Carter’s perspective, “truth that cannot argue is truth that deserves to lose.”
From the perspective of the protesters who shouted down Murray’s speaking engagement at Middlebury, this isn’t about truth at all: Murrays ideas have been tested and failed, again and again. If the university represents an “experiment station” (57) for testing the durability of ideas, as Matthew Abraham has aptly suggested, then from the perspective 99 of this protester and the position she represents, when those ideas have received their airing and failed to withstand intellectual pressure, then insisting that they continually be heard isn’t supporting free speech. It’s something else entirely; it’s repressive tolerance.
As a graduate student at UC Davis in 2011, while participating in the Occupy protest that terminated with the now infamous ‘pepper-spray’ police response, I was reminded first-hand of the illusion freedom represents within the theoretical ideal of free speech. In this case, students had not, as they have in many cases, been destructive to property, or engaged in disrupting speech; they simply refused to leave their position on the paved path of the campus quad. This kind of response has, admittedly, been more the exception than the rule; establishing safe spaces for student expression, “free speech zones” and other measures have more routinely been the recourse. More than anything, this militarized counter to innocuous symbolic speech alerts us that the freedom in free speech only exists relative to a position on a continuum. Throughout his canon, Stanley Fish has taken this claim to its logical limit: constrained by the language (convention, custom, dialects), speakers (their indispensability to speech), the inescapably politicized nature of speech practices (to speak is to spin), and by the consequences speech solicits (myriad), free speech is never free. Fish explains: “The act of speech, unless it is understood as the production of mere noise, is always at once constrained and constraining” (The Trouble with Principle 93). But these critiques presume otherwise.
III. Marketplace of Ideas: A “Legitimizing Myth”
Both in substance and sentiment, these critiques track evenly with assumptions inherent to the ‘marketplace of ideas’ metaphor for freedom of expression. In his 1919 dissent to Abrams v. United States, Justice Holmes framed the prevailing notion that “… 100 the ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas—that the best test of truth is the power of thought to get itself accepted into the market.”24 Taking the market a metaphor for equalization, the marketplace of ideas as a model for adjudicating free speech is based on the presumption that truth will emerge through the competitive interplay that the free market of ideas brings into tension through robust debate. First Amendment scholar Joseph Blocher indicates that the metaphor envisions in theoretical terms an
“idealized view of an uninhibited, costless, and perfectly efficient free market” that regulates the circulation and the value assigned to free speech and expression (2007-2008,
831). As a metaphor for the public sphere on campus, the ‘marketplace’ metaphor strains against its own assumptions. Epistemologically speaking, the marketplace metaphor rests entirely on a model of truth as knowable and objective. According to the model, to defeat falsity, truth must be discernable and susceptible to substantiation; truth must therefore be objective in a Platonic sense. If truth cannot be discovered or substantiated as objective terms, then the market cannot deliver truth. Practically speaking, the marketplace metaphor assumes that all ideas have access to and will reach the whole of the market’s public participants; in this, it favors established ideas. To the extent that dissenting speech by definition runs counter to accepted, sanctioned ideas, the process of airing these ideas takes different forms and venues. For example, because protests rely more directly on street demonstrations that sanctioned ideological expressions, local police regulations interfere with the communication of ideas to the public that counter the status quo. The marketplace metaphor presumes universal accessibility to speech practices and to the resources of its expression; in step with this logic, this body of critique ostensibly evacuates the social and
24 Abrams v. United States, 250 U.S. 616 (1919), Dissenting Opinion by Justice Holmes. 101 structural as bearing practically on speech practice. While we can reasonably differentiate between a university president, for instance—with a structurally appointed position and built-in forum for amplifying her speech content that assures a wide dissemination of sanctioned views to the public—and a dissident speaker—whose ideas are less likely to circulate to the public because she lacks the resources for amplification, the marketplace metaphor doesn’t differentiate between these speakers.
When filtered through the neoliberal rhetorical-evaluative schema within which
‘variable’ access to speech or other political conduct equalize on the mythical level playing field of the market, these disparities are flattened. As Citizens United v. Federal Election
Commission made clear, neoliberal logic effaces critical distinctions in access to speech and speakers. Wendy Brown’s assessment of Justice Kennedy’s majority opinion on
Citizens United highlights that with neoliberal reason and rhetoric “whether the speaker is a homeless woman or Exxon, speech is just speech, just as capital is capital” (2015, 161).
The “disavowal of stratification and power differentials in the field of analysis and action is crucial feature of neoliberal rationality” (Brown 2015, 161). Injunctions against disruption follow naturally from this disavowal of structural stratification: if everyone is equipped with the same resources for expression, there is no justification for uncivil, offensive counter-speech or disruption, often precisely those forms of speech necessary for those in subordinate social positions to be heard. What follows is that the marketplace metaphor is not likely to disrupt the status quo but is rather “likely to reflect and justify the positions of powerful speakers, rather than the merit or truth of the ideas they express”
(Blocher 831-832). More to the point, we can subject the metaphor to a simple test: if the marketplace of ideas is the impenetrable safeguard of speech and ideas, one that reliably 102 delivers truth, fairness, and equitable outcomes regardless of its particular application, then universal freedom of speech and ideas already prevail and no degree of idiocy, ignorance, confusion, disrespect, or coddling is a threat to its inviolability.
Marcuse points out the operative myth to this model: “The underlying assumption is that the established society is free, and that any improvement, even a change in the socially structured social values, would come about in the normal course of events, prepared, defined, and tested in free and equal discussion, on the open marketplace of ideas” (965, 5). After participating in the disruption of Richard Spenser’s speaking engagement at Auburn University in 2015, one protester’s comments reflected Marcuse’s position directly. Noting it has little to do with freedom persevered or protected: “People talk a lot about ‘freedom of speech’ and I think this fetish of speech misses the larger point. It is about ideas of freedom itself. Who has it, and who is denied it.”25 Student protesters who employ disruptive tactics are calling attention to the structural inequalities that the myth of the marketplace elides and helps to assure that “those who control the university’s purse strings are the ones with access to speech” and those who do not are
“structurally encouraged to remain silent” (Smeltzer and Hearn 2015, 356). More poignantly to the point, the marketplace metaphor encourages us to challenge it. As he considers the particular civic conduct the marketplace metaphor solicits in The First
Amendment, Democracy and Romance, Steven Shiffrin highlights the paradox into which the concept devolves:
If the marketplace metaphor encourages the view than an invisible hand or
voluntaristic arrangements have guided us patiently, but slowly, to Burkean
25 Anonymous 103
harmony, the commitment to sponsoring dissent encourages us to believe that the
cozy arrangements of the status quo have settled on something less than the true or
the just.26
That is, if the marketplace of ideas is the impenetrable meritocratic arbiter, one that reliably delivers truth, fairness, and equitable outcomes, regardless of its particular application, then universal freedom of speech and ideas already prevail and no quantity of idiocy, ignorance, confusion, disrespect, or coddled students is a threat to it.
Nina Burleigh, in Newsweek, reiterates this truth in her critique of students at
Haverford College who effectively lobbied the administration to rescind former UC
Chancellor Robert Birgeneau’s 2014 speaking engagement merely because they “didn’t like the way his campus police had handled Occupy Wall street protesters 3 years earlier”(Burleigh, 2016). That Birgeneau had in 2011 tapped UC’s increasingly militarized police force to disperse and silence the symbolic speech of a peaceful encampment on the campus shouldn’t factor in students’ decision to amplify this speech, or in Birgeneau’s right to unmitigated, unconditional freedom of expression. In this she demonstrates how appeals to deference and to the injunctions and equity of the marketplace of ideas labor in service to sanctioned institutional authority. Burleigh stands as a representative for this set of critiques in suggesting that the threat to which our attention should be directed is the nascent political energies of students, and not to the capricious, administrative power to determine what counts as speech and what doesn’t to accommodate external pressure from conservative donors, and the capacity to do so with militarized police force.27 While we
26 Steven Shiffrin. First Amendment: Cases, Comments, Questions, 3rd ed. pp. 15-16; cited in Brown 2015, 256. 27 Thomas Harnisch, director of state relations and policy analysis at the American 104 can recognize that speech can be threatened on both fronts and support additional dialogue as the best tactical response, this alarmist sense of threat distorts the severity that student protesters represent.
Such a misguided sense of threat has also contributed to the systematic privatization of the University of California system since 2009. Speech practices perceived as encroaching on university security or posing a “threat” to “public safety” have been met by a militarized police presence on certain occasions. This is part of a “growing curtailment of freedom of expression under the aegis of securitization’” (Smeltzer and
Hearn 2015, 353). There, students’ peaceful but loud, vocal, often belligerent objection to
Association of State Colleges and Universities, explains to US News and World Report that “Every year there seems to be one higher education policy issue that spreads rapidly throughout the states," and “[t]his year it's campus free speech legislation” (Date, time, etc.) Wisconsin State’s Assembly in 2015 passed a free speech bill that would require public colleges and universities to punish students who disrupt campus speakers; North Carolina, Michigan, Texas, and Louisiana are considering comparable measures. Harnisch notes further that “The campus free speech legislation has largely, if not exclusively, been introduced by conservative state lawmakers who have argued that campuses are not doing enough to ensure that all viewpoints are welcome on campuses.” Democratic Governor John Bel Edwards has suggested that these proposals “are more about the restriction to demonstrate than the right to speak" (See Lauren Camera “Campus Free Speech Laws Ignite the Country,” US NEWS and World Report, July 31, 2017, https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/articles/2017-07-31/campus-free-speech-laws- ignite-the-country). The Berkeley-based, conservative group Young America Foundation has spent over $8 million financing speakers since 2015 (see Ashley Wong “Young America’s Foundation: Who is funding UC Berkeley’s Ben Shapiro Event?” The Daily Californian, Wednesday, October 25, 2017, http://www.dailycal.org/2017/09/14/young- americas-foundation-who-is-funding-uc-berkeleys-ben-shapiro-event/. Inside Higher Education reports that “virtually everyday Fox News, Breitbart and other conservative outlets run critical articles about free speech disputes on college campuses, typically with coverage focused on the perceived liberal orthodoxy and political correctness in higher education” (John K. Wilson, “The Myth of Political Correctness: The Conservative Attack On Higher Education.”)
105 their rapidly declining access to public education has been deemed a threat to the public itself and volatile enough to merit a militarized police response. Farah Godrej points out that the UC leadership’s ability to justifiably criminalize nonviolent dissenters has depended on convincing the public that “dissenting loudly and collectively about the erosion of one’s access to affordable public education makes one a threat to public safety,” one meriting a “heavily weaponized response in the name of the so-called public” (Godrej
2014, 136). Yet as Godrej indicates, any explicit account of who specifically represents this public, “whose safety is ostensibly at risk in such situations,” hasn’t been clarified or even articulated. (136). In the broader context that UC represents, the rhetoric of threat rests on its capacity to persuade audiences that demonstrating aggressively to bring the university into parity with the public interests it serves threatens this institution. By extension it suggests that these critics and journalists truly have these students’ best interests in mind when censuring their speech, and not precisely that reigning idea of the institution this activism seeks to unseat. 28 The tropes of hypersensitivity and threat
28 The lack of parity between this frame and student activists’ actual demands over this period is somewhat telling. Across the 80 institutions in which student groups have issued demands to university governing bodies, their aims converge on unambiguous overall objectives: 86% demand increases in faculty diversity and minority representation; 71% demand that faculty, police, administration, and students receive training in cultural competency; 68% demand curricular diversification and “inclusive pedagogies”; 61% call for institutional support services for marginalized students; and 47% include calls for accountability to institutional legacies of racism. Far from an authoritarian set of declarations to restructure the university as a home then, what obtains is an effort to diversify and alter the minority profile of institutions that still disproportionately employ, admit and cultivate non-diverse populations. Many of the critiques that make up the set nonetheless indict the entirety of this activism on the basis of demands that represent a mere fraction of those in circulation. Although only 9% propose removing officials, 6% call for the construction of designated “safe spaces” on campus, and only 7% of the demands include calls to institutionalize practices to police hate speech, these categories— the facile retreat to safety, the will to dictate what can be said—largely define this activism in the public imaginary and inform the rhetorical work responsible for installing this view 106 ultimately turn on persuading audiences that testing the limits of civility and permissible dissent have a greater “chilling effect” on open discourse than a critical campaign to conflate the speech practices of these student activists with psychic deficit and pathology.
If, as Rancière has contended, the first steps in refusing to recognize someone as a political being are “not seeing him as the bearer of signs of politicity,” and “not hearing what issues from his mouth as discourse,” then the rhetoric of hypersensitivity has served the former and the discourse of threat the latter (Rancière 2010, 38).
IV. Truly Free Speech
In Writing and Difference, Derrida takes an ontological position on free speech, situating it within the writer or speaker rather than in an institutional structure. To him, just as the power of true literary language as poetry consists in its revelatory function, access to free speech obtains in the release of language from its signalizing function. Like writing, speech obtains to freedom with the speaker’s total detachment from the meaning it may transmit, and from the transformative shape it may incite: “By enregistering speech,
(See “The Demands.org”/University of Michigan, https://www.scribd.com/doc/200999679/Transcription-of-the-speech-given-at-the-steps-of- Hill-Auditorium-BBUM). The move to extrapolate universality (a universal student) from particularities on a collection of campuses is even more explicit in titles like “The Battle Against ‘Hate Speech’ On College Campuses Gives Rise to a Generation that Hates Speech,” where anecdotal evidence from less than twenty campuses is the basis to define and indict a generation of students totaling nearly 51 million. The implied universal in titles like Atlantic’s “The New Intolerance of Student Activism,” and the monolithic figure in the litany it represents achieve ostensibly parallel effects. What unifies postmodern, poststructural, feminist, post-colonial analysis, and critical pedagogical inquiry, critical race theory is the search for universality, universal representations of people, bodies, colors, genders, the effort in short in textual production to isolate and depict what is about groups, colors, etc., to speak a truth rather than a contingency, to isolate one among many and to speak then of an essence instead of an example. This is the mode by which a student in Wisconsin or Alaska is defined by conduct at Evergreen, UC Berkeley, or Auburn.
107 inscription has as its essential objective, and indeed takes this fatal risk, the emancipation of meaning” (Derrida 1978, 12). If writing entails an irremediable ennui, “It is because writing is inaugural, in the [primal] sense of the word, that it is dangerous and anguishing”
(Derrida 1978, 11). Accepting that writing, like poetry, is risk, for Derrida, grants access to genuine free speech: ‘writing is a risk, with no guarantees; poetry always runs the risk of being meaningless and would be nothing without this risk of being meaningless” (1978,
74). Whereas “writing crystallizes the necessity of writing functioning as public property,” speech, like poetry can only be free by embracing the risk of its unintelligibility (Derrida
1978, 11). The freedom in free speech obtains at the point of release: by allowing it to circulate with unpredictable consequences. Like speech, if writing is dangerous, this is because it “does not know where it is going, and no knowledge can keep it from the essential precipitation toward the meaning that it constitutes” (Derrida 1978, 11). The problem with dismissing speech that appears gratuitously void of purpose or meaning is very much alive within this debate: speech that is as yet unintelligible passes easily for gratuitous ignorance. That is, the right- and left-leading attacks on “coddled” students doesn’t seriously acknowledge what free speech really means: the freedom, indeed, to be impolitic, to express ignorance, confusion, thoughtlessness, to offend and violate, to disrupt meaning. In 2010, Judge Alex Kozinski addressed provisions for offensive counter- speech in Rodriguez v. Maricopa College Community College District, indicating that
“The right to provoke, shock and offend lies at the core of the First Amendment,” and adding “[t]his is particularly so on college campuses.”29
29 Rodriguez v. Maricopa County Community College Dist., 605 F. 3d. 703, 708 (9th Cir. 2010). 108
As Rei Terada contends, the ‘freedom’ in free speech itself “inheres in its impropriety” (2011, 254). Speech only earns the descriptor free when it confronts its limiting principles—civility, propriety, appropriateness, decorum etc., and when it transcends them. Taken as such, free speech can only ever be a revolutionary energy, unless it has failed to meet the (above) criterion. In that case, it’s disqualified. Free speech cannot, and “it does not perform coexistence, unlike civil speech, or necessarily equality,” and thus it holds within the ability to “perform the possibility of the public space’s transformation by the speaker(s) to the point of unrecognizability” (Terada 2011, 253). For example, on September 28, 2017 a group of students at Harvard engaged in speech that transformed as it blurred the boundaries between speech and writing, speech and counter speech. As secretary of education Betsy DeVoss began her presentation on school choice, students slowly began holding signs aloft that read WHITE SUPREMACIST, STUDENTS
ARE NOT FOR SALE and THIS IS WHAT WHITE SUPREMACY LOOKS LIKE. Each time DeVos began speaking, another silent student and sign emerged. Working through and past Foucault, Terada draws distinctions between “fearless speech” (parrhesia) and negative parrhesia, what Foucault marks as “ignorant outspokenness” (264). The latter is not easily discounted as may seem intuitive.
What the collective effort to rule student activists out of bounds finally reflects is a fight over freedom’s meaning and what counts as protected expression. And what qualifies as protected expression is finally a matter of human judgment, choice and interpretation, faculties vulnerable to a confusion between ignorance with illegibility. The critical posture that students are never themselves engaged in the protected practices on which they purportedly encroach is an error of application. First Amendment lawyer Floyd Abrams 109 claims that disinviting speakers, denying speakers’ a platform and guaranteeing them audience, constitutes an encroachment on these speakers’ right to free expression. (2017).
Abrams speaks for these critics in that he does not recognize that acts of disinvitation, counter-speech and public ridicule are themselves forms of speech, albeit in stigmatized, inadmissible symbolic forms. One could certainly counter with the argument that such an understanding of speech is so elastic that it offers no reasonable parameters for making these determinations. Yet as Fish points out in his analysis of hate speech, because there is no position of universal arbitration from which to make these determinations, what qualifies as hate speech as hate speech is finally a subjective, politically-partial decision:
“The determination of what is or is not hate speech can never be independent of the commitments and values of the person who is making the determination” (Think Again, xv). The same truth applies to protected speech itself: what counts and what doesn’t is a function of who we’re asking, where, and when. Though in their material effects the forms of speech these student activists have practiced can function as censorship, the four areas of conduct for which these activists have been most widely criticized do not meet the legal standard for censorship. Disinvitation (1) doesn’t qualify as censorship because it is obviously not the responsibility of any student or other university group to host, platform or finance a speaker’s expression or to amplify his or her speech content. Because counter- speech (2) is protected speech under the law, it would be inaccurate to characterize it as censorship without subordinating it to the speech it counters. Public ridicule (3) is not censorship in any sense; free speech does not guarantee freedom from consequences.
Disruptions (4) moreover, do not qualify under the legal designation of the “Heckler’s
Veto” as such under First Amendment Law. While the courts have indeed ruled that the 110
Heckler’s Veto is contrary to free speech, the Heckler’s Veto can only be executed by police or other public officials on behalf of the government to preempt the anticipated hostility of a group in response to a speaker; to apply this to disruptive protest runs counter to the legal definition. Yet the point that matters most, I submit, is not what does or does not qualify in any of these categories but that these are finally politically-arbitrated decisions made by politically-invested individuals.
V. Changing The Conversation
In January 2015, Amherst Uprising demonstrators released a statement on their website demanding Amherst College president Carolyn A. Martin issue an apology to marginalized individuals who have been victims of an “institutional legacy of white supremacy, colonialism” and “anti-black racism.” President Martin responded that while
“eager to listen to and work with the protesters, I am not in a position to apologize for the sins of history ( Hartocollis 2015). Though I don’t wish to scapegoat Martin, and recognize that an apology would admittedly absolutely nothing in an apology could do to reconcile the history of institutional racism, much less slavery, her statement exemplifies the problematic core of this debate: the refusal to acknowledge the institutional-material setting of the university, or the differential positions it assigns to speakers and speech.
President of Wesleyan University, Michael S. Roth provided a context for such intransigence in a candid account that shows how deflection and disavowal have factored in the dominant frames. Roth argues that what we are witnessing is not an authoritarian state of exception but a collective recoil from the latent tensions students have made manifest: “What we are experiencing today on college campuses” is an “extraordinary pressure from points of view that have been excluded at the university. It has happened 111 with women. It has happened with low-income students. It has happened on the basis of race and ethnicity. At present, this dynamic is replaying as students are “raising issues that we are less comfortable talking about,” scenarios in which “some of us retreat to questions of free speech to limit the speech of students.” Apart from flatly naming the pretext under which the rhetorical work of this discourse gets done, and highlighting the fact that a will- to-denial underwrites the very construction of the student as threat, Roth concedes that the ideals of free speech have not amounted to the just purposes that it is designed to achieve:
“there are some times when students rightly say, you've been erring on the side of speech for 60 years. And we are noticing that the same thing happened to you, the same thing is happening again, and what you want to do is talk about it”—that logic simply doesn’t resonate with the ascendant ethos in campus activism, one the University of Alabama’s
Coalition of Concerned Students encapsulates aptly with their title: “WE-ARE-DONE.”
In Vernacular Insurrections, Carmen Kynard offers a nearly perfect summary of how student activists are subjected to proprietary standards. She notes that the “very nature of the most radical of those 1960s social movements” was not limited to protesting
“existing conditions”; activists were compelled “to imagine something radically different”
(98). Contemporary student activism has also dilated and altered the range of possibility, to compel its targets to imagine a radically altered self-reflective university. For students such as Destiny Crocket, a Princeton senior in 2015, and others who have grown tired of “sitting in meetings” with administration only to see “nothing happening and no processes even beginning,” deliberation efforts have been exhausted.30 Apathy has been a constant.
30 “Daily Clips Packet,” Mizzou News, November 24, 2015; http://munews.missouri.edu/daily-clip-packets/2015/11-24-15.pdf. 112
Throughout 2014-2016, students from the coalition Being Black at the University of
Michigan #BBUM have voiced similar impatience, writing that they “have heard the
University say the phrase ‘We’re listening’ since 1970 and we are tired of waiting for a response,” and of “waiting for 44-year-old promises from BAM 1 to be fulfilled.”31 USC’s
2020 Vision states similarly that “[t]he demands that follow are not new” and emerge amid a climate where, despite their efforts to facilitate dialogue “we have seen few substantial changes in university policy or practices.”32 UNC-Chapel Hill’s demands indicate that despite pledges to meet the 23 demands issued by the 1968 Black Student Movement on the campus, nearly “50 years have passed” since those demands were issued and “we are still dealing with exactly the same issues” because there “is no institutional will to address them.”33 More recently, “this year will be the 51st year the Afrikan Student Union is on campus,” ASU’s activist coalition wrote in a statement, “50 years later we are struggling with many of the same issues as our ancestors and elders dealt with in 1966.” For these and other activists during this period, institutional apathy, incapacity, and inaction logically call for speech practices meant to forcibly manufacture that institutional will through disruption. Insofar as fidelity to the principles of orderly protest and ‘admissible’ dissent foster institutional stasis, respecting its injunctions supports a politics of accommodation and acquiescence. As Roth has it, in these circumstances, students are entirely reasonable
31 The Demands.org/University of Michigan, https://www.scribd.com/doc/200999679/Transcription-of-the-speech-given-at-the-steps-of- Hill-Auditorium-BBUM. 32 Ben Crawford and Patrick Ingraham, “Student group USC 2020 Vision plans walk-out, issues list of demands,” November 17, 2015, The Daily Gamecock, http://www.dailygamecock.com/article/2015/11/student-group-plans-walkout. 33 Thedemands.org/University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, https://docs.google.com/document/d/1r1Rp3Tn8sPlfbn_bO3vQXOVRnDpaDvB_ctaBKX vbpNU/edit. 113 in “taking action that will change the nature of the conversation.”
114
CHAPTER SIX: HAYEK & THE ORIGINS OF NEOLIBERAL RHETORIC
At its heart, neoliberalism is opposed to the field of rhetoric and composition’s longstanding commitment to social justice and to its support for collaborative rhetorical praxes. More broadly it stands opposed to collective political expressions, to the idea of freedom as the voice of a unified polis, and to education conceived as a “public good.”
How can we account for the recalcitrance of the neoliberal argument? By what means does freedom become compatible with requirements under neoliberalism? What are the fundamental elements of the neoliberal argument? And how is it within this regime that
“freedom can constitute a form of subjection?” (Read, 25). To answer these questions and to explicate the collisions between the neoliberal political program and classic liberalism, this chapter looks to Fredrick von Hayek’s canon as a core basis for the neoliberal argument and the dramatically reconstituted social contract it proposes. By triangulating
Aristotle, Immanuel Kant, and Hayek’s respective approaches to freedom, law and politics, the following sections first map out the neoliberal argument by tracking its essential points in Hayek’s canon. In Hayek’s corpus we have the normative elements of contemporary neoliberal rationality—ubiquitous in statecraft, public policy, university governance, and in orchestrating the conduct of market-interpellated modern subjects. Working through
Aristotle to substantiate his account of freedom and extrapolating from Kantian contractualism—and from a strong Kantian influence34—to develop his account of law,
34 Conceding the influence, Hayek notes that he “became aware of how closely [his] conclusions agree with Kant’s philosophy of law”—this paper challenges that consonance—and applauds Kant’s “treatment of the ideal of the rule of law with its stress 115 liberty and restricted state intervention, Hayek’s argument for individual freedom develops in three key moves that integrate an articulation of the supposed “spontaneous order of the market,” a critique of Cartesian rationalism in order to propose a juridical order based on individual freedom, and a private protected sphere. Throughout this analysis, the sacrifices necessary to safeguard individual freedom highlight how the discourse of freedom operates as a mode of subjectification.
I. Aristotelian Freedom
In The Politics and Nichomachean Ethics, freedom for Aristotle is bound up in intellectual- rational capacities and the ethical implications of their exercise. Aristotle identified humans as ‘fundamentally political animals.’ This identification presupposed their rational faculty and individual freedom. Freedom in this sense is a right derived from the moral obligation associated with the capacity to choose among a field of sensible representations, to intervene, and impose one’s will on the natural order. Developed later in Kantian
Enlightenment thought, Aristotle’s presupposition of the right to freedom is grounded in the “metaphysico-ethical capacity of autonomous rational agents to transcend the motivational force of sensible appearances” (Long 1996, 792). If rationality is the technical precondition for the capacity to choose, the moral weight it carries anchors the individual’s right to self-rule. Freedom as such for Aristotle is the condition of existing for one’s own sake rather than for another. This definition resonates with later liberal theorists in the tradition of Isaiah Berlin, as well as in Kant and Hayek for whom the only acceptable definition of freedom takes negative form. Where Kant defines freedom as “independence
on the negative and end independent character of legal rules” (Hayek 1976, Ch. 8, En. 24, S. 3318). 116 from constraint by another’s choice” (1999, 237), Hayek defines it as “the absence of a particular obstacle—coercion by other men” (2011, 69).
As the right to exist for one’s own ends, individual autonomy was not an end in itself for Aristotle but was instrumental to the pursuit of a higher good, as freedom shorn of its capacity to realize a greater objective was void of meaning. In Nichomachean Ethics,
Aristotle specifies that the good must be something final and self-sufficient; that self- sufficiency is indispensable to securing the supreme good; and that the science of human good is politics. Engaging in that science entails action that in turn defines what it is to be a citizen subject. In that citizens (polītēs) are defined by “partaking” (metexis) in the form of action (árkhein) that is appropriate to partaking in political community, árkhein and freedom are interchangeable. Aristotle’s position as to the interrelation between legitimate political rule and the rule of law is explicit in Politics 3.16. It is
no more just for equal persons to rule than to be ruled, and it is therefore just that
they rule and be ruled by turns. But this is already law; for the arrangement of
ruling and being ruled is law. Accordingly, to have law rule is to be chosen in
preference to having the citizens do so, according to this same argument, … and if
it should be better to have some of them rule, these must be established as law-
guardians and as servants of the laws; for there must necessarily exist certain
offices [by which persons rule and not law]. (92-93)
Designating both ruling and being ruled as identical with law (above) creates a natural corollary between law and freedom, that “aspect of freedom [that] is being ruled and ruling in turn” (172). This reflexive rule forms the basis for political legitimacy.
Political legitimacy—or just rule—for Aristotle entails a willing, free subject on three 117 fronts: citizens must be ruled by their own interests, must be ruled by their consent, and subject only to rule that cultivates their right to express freedom collectively. Collective political expressions, what arises from the unified will of a polity, are essential manifestations of freedom, a natural correlate to that freedom which Aristotle designates a precondition for democratic regimes. That which is resolved by the majority Aristotle insists, if the polis is to be regarded appropriately as individuals unified under equality, must be final and authoritative justice: “This, then, is one mark of freedom,” and it lines up with the reciprocity of legitimate rule into “the freedom that is based in equality” (173).
Generated and affirmed through politics, deliberation, and rational choice, Aristotelian freedom entailed political action and interaction with the community of citizens about the representatives, character, and trajectory of rule. To express politically was to express rationality. As an authority that found singular expression within the multitude, and couldn’t subsist in the individual, in law, or in aristocracy, the expression of shared freedom and authority of the polis represents an Athenian incarnation of what assumes full form in Rousseau and Kant as the ‘general will.’ And under neoliberalism that general will undergoes an effective deletion. Each of these aspects of freedom undergoes significant interpretative alteration in Hayek, and the way he uses the term shows his attitudes and normative judgments. If freedom and rights function as master signifiers of liberal discourse under neoliberalism that role continues and amplifies, with significant shifts in semiotic function and resonance. Hayek’s liberalism situates freedom as a complex onto- epistemological principle that is tied up the market order, the limits of rationalism, and the distinction between public and private law.
II. Spontaneous Market Order 118
Although traces of the self-correcting, internally stabilizing market order that Hayek envisions has surfaced incrementally in the history of liberalism, and was first coined by
Michael Polanyi, Adam Smith’s notion of a rational individual in pursuit self-interest as the engine of such an order anchors Hayek’s understanding of the spontaneous market order, and his argument for individual freedom. Contra the basic Keynesian economic planning model, which asserted that state intervention was needed to stabilize the immanent volatility of free markets, Hayek introduced an alternative economic paradigm, one that rejected economic planning altogether, and instead counted on the extant market order. Hayek maintained that the existing order of the market, because it theoretically represented a neutral arbiter of social destiny, could bring about a “more effective allocation of resources than any design could” (Petsoulas 12). This order answered for both an epistemological and an ethical dilemma. According to Hayek, because knowledge was/is structurally dispersed across individuals in society, no one individual had access to the aggregate of knowledge necessary to solve society’s problems. Therefore, “civilization rests on the fact that we all benefit from knowledge which we do not possess” (1973, 15).
Ignorance, then, is the presupposition for Hayek that makes freedom possible—“liberty of the individual would, of course, make complete foresight impossible”—and epistemologically necessary: “the case for freedom rests chiefly on the inevitable ignorance of all of us concerning a great many of the factors on which the achievement of our ends and welfare depends” (2011, 81; 80). But the case for freedom is also a case for the market order and its utopian potential. Insofar as the spontaneous order could “be used for, and will assist in the pursuit of, a great many different, divergent, and even conflicting purposes,” Hayek maintains that the spontaneous order of the market maximizes personal 119 freedom at the same time that it harmonizes the invariably conflicting interests that free people will pursue (1966, 603). Insofar as it can maximally accommodate the disparate objectives that freedom avails, to Hayek it is the “market order which [both] makes peaceful reconciliation and the divergent purposes possible” (1973, 272). For this reason,
Hayek maintains that the “only ties which hold the whole of a ‘Great Society’ together are purely economic” (1973, 272), and for this and related reasons that Hayek’s preferred term for this economic order—catallaxy—retains a certain utopian resonance. “Catallaxy,” he notes, “in Greek meant ‘to exchange,’ or ‘to barter,’ but also “to admit into the community and to turn from enemy into friend” (1967, 164).
Rationalism
So defined, the market-as-catallaxy isn’t to be understood as end-driven
(teleocratic), natural (phusei), or artificial (thesei), but as the law-bound (nomocratic) aggregate of all human activities that do not result from human design. The sheer abstraction this order represents—its quasi-naturalistic, dialectically-emergent character— is the reason Hayek maintains that it, like other spontaneous systems, is illegible to various forms of rationalism. To Hayek, Cartesian rationalism had fostered the delusion that all order must derive from human construction. Hayek leans heavily on 18th century Scottish liberalism and Hume in particular to make the point. On Hume’s account, human rationality has limited utility. Properly applied, reason can discern relations between ideas, certain orders of causation, but cannot make determinate claims of contingent judgment or set an appropriate course of future action that isn’t derived from –and imperiled by—its own premises. These limitations led Hume to (famously) deem rationality a “slave to the passions.” From Descartes, Hayek’s argument goes, we inherited the legacy of logical 120 deduction, from which reason derives conclusions from explicit premises. That which was
“rational action was linked to known and demonstrable proof;” this tied all human progress to Cartesian insight, and so wedded civilization to what it already knew (Hayek 1973, 9-
10). Making inferences about the unknown and determining the appropriate course for future actions then were both impossible through rationalism. Each owing their predominance to the Cartesian tradition, ‘intentionalism,’ ‘artificialism,’ ‘constructivism rationalism,’ and other variations on scientific positivism proceed according to empirically established representations of truth; yet because rationalism cannot determine anything that hadn’t been derived from its own premises, Hayek maintains that its proponents overstate the scope of its utility. Even if it proceeded from some form of absolute truth (which it cannot), rationality was still useless in forecasting what future conditions would require.
Per the Humean axiom, from an ‘is’ we can’t derive an ‘ought.’
Law
Rationalism, in short, cannot discern abstract rules—and so it cannot discern the operations of the spontaneous systems of society, those true laws which were abstract in nature. Laws that issue from humans were disqualified from this category. Those laws that flow through judicial and legislative decree to police and administrative application; laws administered by judiciaries, parliaments, and assemblies—these emerge from human reason, so could not by logical extension discern the laws that governed it. Hayek looks to
Aristotle to legitimate the claim:
In The Politics, Aristotle stresses that ‘It is more proper that law should govern than
any one of its citizens’ that persons holding supreme power ‘should be appointed to
be only guardians and servants of law’ and that ‘he who would place the supreme 121
power in mind would place it in God and in the laws.’ He condemns the kind of
government in which ‘the people govern and not the law’ and in which ‘everything
is determined by a majority vote and not by a law.’ Such a government is to him
not that of a free state, ‘for when government is not in the laws, then there is no
free state, for the law ought to be supreme over all things. (2011, 241–242)
What Hobbes defined as “non veritas sed auctoritas facit legem” or, “the law of him that hath the legislative power” Hayek deems “unreal, not really existing, imaginary, fictitious, spurious, judge-made law” (1976, 62). Legislated or public laws (thesis) of this kind conceal their grounding in the same, a priori set of rules of just conduct that form and govern extended orders, and through which freedom has emerged as an inviolable principle. Whereas freedom, resting between a state of nature, and human design, is an
“artifact of civilization,” rationality for Hayek is the seat of coercion, which he defines as
“control of the environment or circumstances of a person by another that, in order to avoid greater evil, he is forced not to act according to a coherent plan of his own, but to serve the ends of another” (2011, 107). If naïve rationalism is the source of coercion, freedom is the universal principle underwriting and mandating private law (nomos).
Kant’s ‘categorical imperative’ entails that one act according to the maxim whereby the individual would simultaneously will that it should become universal law.
Narrowing that universality, Kant’s Doctrine of Right confers ‘right’ only on those acts capable of coexisting with every other’s freedom in accordance with universal law. If Kant draws the implied conclusion from these axioms that individual freedom is the only legitimate basis for state power, Hayek exceeds it altogether, insisting that the a priori
‘rules of justice’—revealed by the “practical experiences of mankind”—must demarcate a 122 private, protected sphere (1967, 111). To assign individuals rights at all is already to recognize the universal right to this protected sphere: “legitimacy of one’s expectations or rights of the individual are the result of the recognition of such a private sphere” (Hayek
2011, 206). To be just, then, laws must protect property as “law, the rules of justice, and the institution of property are inseparable” (Hayek 1967, 167). By extending the domain of protected, private freedom to establish the limiting principle for state and governmental intervention, Hayek distances himself from the liberal tradition. Starting with Kant and from “what has historically been termed Rechtsstaat in Germany” that stripped
“administrative authorities” of “discretionary powers in a citizens’ private sphere,” Hayek extends the Kantian principle of universality to disqualify any law or state action based in expediency— end-driven, targeted objectives, designed to assist particular groups (1967,
167). The reasoning here is this: To the extent that expediency cannot but conscript individuals to serve ends which they have not chosen, marshalling legal or state authority to realize expedient ends represents a coercive drift into state authoritarianism, for we cannot improve social conditions by depriving individuals’ the freedom to use knowledge selfishly without also undermining our collective interests. Laws must be general; they must apply equally or not at all.
So generality sets a limit to law. But the real work done here is in the correlative limit this imposes on ameliorating specific social conditions. By defining expediency as coercion, Hayek’s formula logically places ‘social justice’ and ‘distributive justice’ in mutually exclusive relation to freedom, what he describes as a “conflict between the ideal of freedom and the desire to ‘correct’ the distribution of incomes” or material resources”
(2011, 341). Extrapolating from Kant’s position that even the welfare of citizens cannot be 123 the basis for state intervention, Hayek designates the pursuit of social and distributive justice—invariably geared toward particular groups and ends—as irreconcilable with legal consistency. For “those who pursue distributive justice will in practice find themselves at every move constrained by the rule of law” and hence the principle of isonomia—equality under law—that Hayek takes as inviolable (2011, 341). By contravening the principle of isonomia, the pursuit of ‘justice’ through centralized state, legal authority for Hayek is effectively and unavoidably totalitarian because it subverts moral equality under the law in the pursuit of material equality through distribution, And these ends, for Hayek, are mutually exclusive. Although “The equality before the law which freedom requires leads to material inequality,” this cannot sanction impositions on personal freedom, for in a free society, “The desire of making people more alike in their condition” cannot be accepted as
“justification for further and discriminatory coercion” (Hayek 2011, 149-150).
For Hayek, it has principally been in the pursuit of so-called social and distributive justice that legislative assemblies have devolved into pseudo-autocratic regimes. That
Athenian assemblies often refused to be bound by universal law was the basis for
Aristotle’s disaffection with this form of democracy Hayek contends. Where rule by assembly had from the early calculus of democracy been designed to check power, in modern liberal democracies, where laws are invariably applied to expedite particular ends, the gradual conversion of universal rules into public laws has sanctioned the unchecked authority of legislators to encroach on individual freedoms and hence licensed the exercise of absolute power. If there is a particular indication of the rhetorical labor that freedom performs throughout Hayek’s argument, it consists in the sacrifices that safeguarding individual freedom demands. As it develops in Hayek, the mandate to protect individual 124 freedom has no limiting principle: there can be no fidelity to reason, no calculus for planning social order, no material equality, no distribution of resources, and no true power invested in the juridical authority vested in democratic assemblies—protecting individual freedom compels all of these sacrifices. For Hayek, when we agree to obey laws in the sense of abstract rules derived not from juridical authority but from universal rules and obey regardless of their application to our own circumstances, we are free because we are not subject to the coercive will of others. This is not altogether different from the social contract theory of Rousseau, Kant, or Aristotle. But, as we’ve seen, from the perspective of neoliberalism, calls to equalize the uneven socio-economic playing field, calls for diversity, affirmative action, and other energy dedicated to ameliorating inequity are not to be seen as demands for impartiality or justice, but as revolts against the impartial justice of the market. With this simple, innocuous appeal to long-haul justice over the easy resort to short-term gains, we have the operable logic for a decade long Thatcherian assault on organized labor in the 1980s. This appeal establishes the theoretical groundwork for claiming the ‘mirage of social justice’ across his entire corpus, and the basis for present day efforts to repeal welfare protections, health care, funding for education, and beyond.
Although the ‘social’ as it pertains to justice loses intelligibility with the particular innovations of neoliberalism under Hayek, what appears in its place is a viable social contract whose revisions parallel the neoliberal revisions to Aristotelian freedom and classic liberalism.
III. A New State & Social Contract
Far from the “minarchist,” impotent ‘night-watchmen’ state to which neoclassical economics aspired, the state under neoliberalism has been empowered as the “core agency 125 that actively fabricates the subjectivities suited to making the fiction of the markets real and consequential” in Jaime Peck’s estimation (12, 68). Contra the putative view that the state in the new liberal posture tends toward retraction, limitation, and disintegration, an assumption consistent with the antigovernmental rhetoric saturating the neoliberal doctrine, the state hasn’t withdrawn under neoliberalism. Its first obligation is the economy. That obligation involves coordinating the system of incentives and disincentives that synthesize freedom, and coordinating the web of incentives and disincentives necessary to cultivate subjects with the requisite orientation to achieve desired economic ends.
The particular generic subject imagined by this regime updates the ‘neoliberal subject’ of Foucault. This new “amalgam stamps all the major elements of political commonsense in financialized capitalism. With respect to agency, the subjects of this regime are interpellated as autonomous centers of initiative, the antithesis of ‘passive clients’ of state-managed capitalism. But autonomy is figured as private and centered on
‘choice’ and ‘personal responsibility.’ Cut loose of public and political commitments, freedom consolidates old and new into a collage “as earlier consumerist motifs are hitched to newer tropes that hail subjects as possessors of human capital, which it is their responsibility to manage and maximize” (Fraser 2015, 82). Rationality mutates here. On one level, the rationality of government coordinates around this task, but on another, rationality shifts from agential (individuals) to procedural (markets). As individuals are encouraged to defer to the superior rational, knowledge-processing capacity of the market, the neoliberal contract largely relocates the domain of freedom to the subject herself.
With these innovations, the new-liberal account largely restages the site of freedom to the 126 self. Self as the locus of freedom was at issue for Foucault when he aligned the predominant form of freedom in modernity with processes of self-constitution. For
Foucault in The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978—1979, liberalism itself must consume, produce and traffic in freedom, and involves a precision of mediation between these functions that he deems the “art” of governmentality, or the negotiation of the tension between the need to produce freedom and the limitations and restrictions on freedom this presupposes. Because, Foucault specifies, “The new governmental reason needs freedom,” the “new art of government consumes freedom,” for to produce freedom is already to encroach on freedom by engineering its boundaries and modes of regulation (63). As such, “The new art of government therefore appears as the management of freedom, not in the sense of the imperative ‘be free,’ with the immediate contradiction that this imperative may contain” (63). Though sharing the antagonistic relationship to freedom that Foucault notes of the liberalism of the 18th-century, which
“entails a productive/destructive relationship [with] freedom” (64), neoliberal strategy differs insofar as it has been concerned in the main with calibrating a self that is disposed to conduct conducive to the economic order but that appears as self-interest. This subject represents to Foucault an amalgam of technologies that have been brought to bear on her by the technologies of neoliberalism, each are meant to engender the ‘freedom to choose’ as its core obligation and orientation. If, to Foucault, markets were testing stations, sites of
“verification-falsification for governmental practice” (2008, 32), subjects were the new objects of biopolitical administration. At once a technique, a discipline, and a gateway to the neoliberal utopia, freedom mediates a relationship between market, state, and self, and reduces to the freedom to remake oneself in the image of private enterprise. 127
To achieve this end, and to synthesize freedom in the form of entrepreneurialism, the state has restaged the site of authority from without to within; its mode of intervention has shifted from force to facilitation: “In a free society the state does not administer the affairs of men. It administers justice among men who conduct their own affairs”
(Lippmann, 1937, 267). To be sure, “good government is no substitute for self- government, and it is an essential function of the state to make as much self-government as possible available” (Tribe 2009, 86). Installing freedom at the core of subjectivity took on a decidedly moral exigency, for “individual freedom, which it is most appropriate to regard as a moral principle”; and “like all moral principles, it demands that it be accepted as a value in itself” (Hayek 2011, 129). All but deleting the self-willing agential substance from autonomy in the paradox of enforcing the ‘freedom to choose,’ neoliberal thought runs squarely into this contradiction: “Man in a complex society can have no choice but to submit to what to him must feel like the blind forces of the social process and obeying the orders of a superior” (Hayek 1972, 24). To neoliberal thought, the ideal market order hinges on engendering in individuals the imperative to enterprise and entrepreneurial initiative, work ethic, and the moral weight of responsibility to these undertakings of self that they appear as self-generated prerogatives. Personal choice and the conditions for healthy, protracted and perpetual competition, all critical to actualizing the market order, has called for a strategy beyond the scope of economic adjustment alone. Throughout the
1980s, Thatcherism would register the precise tactical approach of neoliberal state practice.
As she disclosed infamously 1978: “Economics are the method; but the object is to change the heart and soul.”
New Law & Ethics 128
Set against the backdrop of Kantian contractualism, Hayek’s position reveals new dynamics between law and ethics, between politics, popular sovereignty and society.
Whereas Rousseau understands the state as the embodiment of the social contract, Kant makes the state the embodiment of the ‘original contract.’ Constitutional republics, those states maximally suited to protect individual autonomy, most directly reflect what Kant calls the “original contract,” the universal agreement among citizens. For Kant, the original contract is not an historical actuality but an a priori ideal that belongs in the category of
Platonic Ideas, and which tethers sovereign power and law to natural restrictions arising from the general will of the citizenry. The general will compels the sovereign to issue laws that could in theory represent the universal will of an entire people. As freedom is the single a priori right for Kant, the general will could not will a law that violates freedom, which sets up a moral (rights-based) limit to legitimate legal authority and law. In Hayek, the relationship Kant draws between morality and law is upended. As Pierre Dardot and
Christian Laval critically observe, interpreting the whole of “German tradition of
Rechtsstaat to Kant’s Philosophy of Right,” Hayek inverts the “deductive order in which
Kant himself formulated morality and law, [and] freely interprets the famous ‘categorical imperative’ as an extension to the sphere of ethics of the basic idea of the supremacy of law” (2013, Ch. 5, Loc. 3183). To be sure, in Kant’s “Theory and Practice,” ethics do not derive from law but determine it. Bound by the ethically-contoured dimensions of the
Doctrine of Right, Kant’s general will cannot produce laws that violate the universal rights of the individuals in which it subsists. Laws that would, for instance, retract welfare protections, fail to protect citizens, etc. countermand the framework on which it rests. The restriction works as follows: All rights proceed from the general will and represent the 129 totality of rights that exist within a political society; the general will cannot therefore do any individual wrong through its law (8: 295). Two steps draw Hayek far away from
Kant’s general will: (1) the limitations on individual autonomy under the neoliberal contract are identical with private law; and (2) the state is beholden to the economy. In this, governments become the “guardians of the general will by being the guardian of the rules of private law” (Dardot and Laval). The same empathy requiring us to put ourselves in the thought and place of someone else that is indispensable to the state’s operating principal under Kant’s contract also makes it incompatible with a state whose mandate is safeguarding private law. The private law society Hayek imagines departs fundamentally from the society of the commonwealth Kant envisioned. Provided it maintains a civil constitution, the contractual union society represents an end in itself for Kant. Social contracts establishing a civil constitution are distinct among “all the contracts by which a multitude of people unites into a society” in that such a society manifests the general will
(Theory and Practice , 290). Any idea of a general will in the Kantian sense is unintelligible within the Hayek’s account and what appears in its place is only the market mechanism.
No Society
Strictly speaking, there can be no collective will under neoliberalism because there is no collective. Appeals to the “Great Society” in Lippmann, Smith, and Hayek notwithstanding, under the neoliberal contract, there is no society. When Thatcher infamously declaimed in 1987, “there is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families,” she was following Hayek and Friedman to the letter.
To their thought, an ideal market economy theoretically disqualifies society as a category 130 as a protection against its coercive force that undermines the individual freedom requisite to its operation. Though society to Hayek is a market, in the ideal market economy, there is no society, for such an ideal market economy theoretical disqualifies the mutuality on which society rests. Milton Friedman writes: “In an ideal free market resting on private property, no individual can coerce any other,” and “There are no values, no ‘social responsibilities’ in any sense, other than the shared values and responsibilities of individuals” (12). Reduced to arbitrary, self-interested convergences, society as a socio- political totality becomes a kind of category error, along with any viable notion of the
‘public’ or a ‘public good.’ Whereas in Kant any moral good can only arise from the general (united) will of the people the neoliberal contract calculates the good against the totality individual self-interests, transforming the public into an aggregate of self- motivated decisions.
No Politics
In the classic-liberal formulation, political freedom precedes and produces economic freedom, and economic well-being is a function of political assertion.
Neoliberalism reverses this causal order. As Milton Friedman explains in the introduction to Capitalism and Freedom, the neoliberal position attempts to establish competitive capitalism as a necessary precondition for political freedom (6). Throughout the text his contention is that economic freedom provides a natural fortification against political or economic persecution in as much as the market separates economic activities from political views irrelevant to an individual’s productivity. Following Hayek, Friedman ultimately denounces the political altogether for its invariable encroachment on economic liberties, placing politics and individual freedom in a zero-sum relation in which every political 131 freedom accorded entails a proportional reduction in economic freedom. This is a seminal innovation in the neoliberal project. On the classic-liberal account, economic liberty was the wellspring of political and civic liberty. Neoliberalism relocates the origin and reroutes the flow such that economic freedom is the source from which political, civic, and religious freedoms flow and depend. Liberty and individual rights are here given a register entirely unfamiliar to classical liberalism.
As conceived in neoliberalism, property rights are freedom’s sole guarantor, the form of protection without which other safeguards on individual liberty are meaningless.
Friedman’s contention is that economic freedom provides a natural fortification against political or economic persecution in as much as the market separates “economic activities from political views and protects men from being discriminated against in their economic activities for reasons irrelevant to their productivity” (117). Wendy Brown notes that for
“Friedman, the twin threat of politics to freedom rests in its inherent concentration of power, which markets disperse, and its fundamental instrument of coercion, whether by rule or dictate, while markets feature choice” (2017, 63). To accede here to Friedman’s neoliberalism is to confront one of an ensemble of paradoxes to the systemic logic of freedom: the market promises liberation for the very subjects it remakes in its image and according its imperatives. Neoliberal opposition to politics replays Hayek’s objection to rational planning by placing politics and individual freedom in zero sum antagonistic relation, where every political act entails a proportional reduction in economic freedom.
The objection to planning and politics restages a more essential, patterned resistance—to every law, to governmental intrusion on the private sphere, to reason, to the unchecked power of legislative assemblies—all on the basis that they subtract from or imperil 132 economic freedoms. Thus, the notion of political autonomy to Friedman is oxymoronic:
“The political principle that underlies the political mechanisms is conformity. The individual must serve a more general social interest—whether that be determined by a church or a dictator or a majority. The individual may have a vote and a say in what is to be done, but if he is overruled, he must conform” (Friedman 1970, 12).
The same logic applies to collective political expression. If to support the market’s internal equilibrium is to support individual freedom, the ‘general will’ cannot be allowed to impose on the autonomy of either. Granting power to the public at large amounts in neoliberal thought to sanctioning the imposition of the idiotic masses on the omnipotent functioning of markets. The neoliberal utopian myth and the civilizing mission that naturally extends from it both run into diametric tension with a will-to-limit popular sovereignty that has, from the start, motivated the neoliberal thought collective. To secure property rights, market autonomy and support the market’s internal stability, the public will have to be suppressed, subordinated, even silenced. Louis Rougier in 1938 proposed constitutional reforms to insulate “the choice of a ruling elite dedicated to the defense of common rules of individual competition from ‘acting minorities’ and ‘lunatic majorities;’”
Walter Lippmann could not ultimately conceive of a system of fair competition wherein
“the masses could impose their wishes on governments”; and for Hayek, “the rule of private law” should be exempted from any form of “control by collective will” (Amable
2011, 17).
Leveraging Aristotle to make the point, Hayek argues that Athenian assemblies who often refused to be bound by universal law was the basis for Aristotle’s disaffection with representative democracies and hence with the coercive imposition of the collective 133 will. It is not popular power but reason, Hayek argues, in the sense of human application of universal law, that Aristotle takes as the exclusive basis for coercion: “When Aristotle
(Politics, 1287a) demands that ‘reason’ and not ‘will’ should govern, this clearly means that abstract rules and not particular ends should govern all acts of coercion” (1976, Loc.
3015).
But Aristotle explicitly acknowledges the authoritative power of public justice. In
Politics, 2.16, Aristotle refutes the aristocratic objection to popular participation in governance:
The many, each of whom is not a serious man, nevertheless could, when they have
come together, be better than those few best—not indeed individually, but as a
whole, just as meals furnished collectively are better than meals furnished at one
person’s expense. For each of them, though many, could have a part of virtue and
prudence, and just as they could, when joined together in a multitude, become one
human with many feet hands and senses, so also could they become one in
character and thought. This is why the many are better judges of the work of music
and the poets, for one of them judges one part and another, another and all of them,
the whole. (Politics 2013, 78-79)
Though unambiguously hostile to legislative overreach, and to grounding universal legal authority in human agency, Aristotle nonetheless explicitly assigns determinant power to public justice as an indispensable expression of the reciprocality of rule and as that form of freedom which expresses equality. That which is resolved by the majority,
Aristotle insists, if the polis is to be regarded appropriately as individuals unified under equality must be final and authoritative justice. In Politics, 11.12b, Aristotle maintains that 134
“what is resolved by the majority is authoritative”; popular will expresses that form of
“freedom that is based in equality” (Aristotle 2013; 173). Beyond these tensions, there is a purely technical subtraction in political freedom in privatization and marketization. Ever- expansive markets furnish new, largely technical calculi and alternatives for otherwise political solutions. Friedman: “the wider are the range of activities covered by the market the fewer are the issues on which explicitly political discussions are required” (1962, 24).
Here, we are miles from viable compatibility with Aristotle’s treatment of freedom.
When run through an Aristotelian filter, both Hayek’s and the neoliberal orientation to politics reduce to insensibility. If per Aristotle, “a polis is a community of those who are free” (2013, 59), then if there is no society, no public, no collective will, and no polis, then there can’t be an operable politics or any viable index for freedom. To delete the political is to delete the theater of freedom’s exercise in Aristotle, to dismantle the triangulation between rationality, freedom and politics and thus the matrix within which freedom achieves sensibility for Aristotle. Just as when Hayek hollows out the general will that anchors Kant’s original contract, he upends Kant, when Hayek disavows the political dimensions of freedom, with the full displacement of homo politicus by homo economicus, he severs any connection to Aristotelean freedom. For individuals, the impasse between neoliberalism and freedom reads roughly this way: the subject “has come to understand her choices and decisions as the ground of self-determination and autonomy, when in reality her life is being incorporated all the more fully into the totalizing objectivity of society”
(Prusik 2017, 232).
IV. Identification: Neoliberal Rhetoric 135
If there is a particular indication of the rhetorical labor that freedom performs in the neoliberal argument, it consists in the sacrifices that safeguarding individual freedom demands. As it develops in Hayek, the mandate to protect individual freedom has no limiting principle: there can be no fidelity to reason, no calculus for planning social order, no distribution of resources, and no true power invested in the juridical authority vested in democratic assemblies; there can be no legislating for social equity, no freely associating politically, no collective expressions of freedom, and it becomes a category error to regard
‘society,’ to register a ‘public good,’ the ‘social,’ ‘justice,’ or ‘collectivity’—on every point, protecting individual freedom demands it. On the basis of this, we can begin to answer the much more complex and layered question of how freedom has become a form of subjection under neoliberalism.
With Never Let a Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial
Meltdown, Philip Mirowski traces the discourse of freedom through neoliberalism’s intellectual flashpoints and concludes that from the early days and deliberations of neoliberal thought the discourse of freedom was integral to an argument that was to feature two sets of instructions for the two tiers of society: one truth for the elite, who would be instructed in the “transgressive, Schmittian necessity of repressing democracy,” another for the masses, “who would be regaled by ripping tales of ‘rolling back the nanny state’ and
‘freedom to choose,’ ” leading inevitably in a system grounded in the principle of
(manufactured) competition to a state in which “freedom must be as unequally distributed as the riches of the marketplace” (2013, Ch. 2, Loc. 1743 & 1759).
How is it then, that most of us have capitulated to the neoliberal status quo? How does freedom sustain its hold? Affect and identification offer answers. 136
We can account in some measure for how neoliberalism has become lodged in our contemporary unconscious as a brand of commonsense in part by and through the parity between the neoliberal and American narratives and the fantastic degree to which freedom as a sign and ordering ideal constitutes the substantive core of the American collective identity. Neoliberal discourses derive much of their rhetorical authority from their intersection with myths at the heart of U.S. nationalism: the supremacy and divinely endowed capacity of the self. American ‘exceptionalism’ effectively extends this image of the singular self-reliant hero outward to a national scale. As a composite, these narratives form a kind of potently amplified, and modernized ‘Bootstraps’ story ala Horatio Alger’s early-American tale. Freedom, individualism, enterprise, entrepreneurialism, vertical mobility—all these standard neoliberal god terms and keywords that resonate with an early
American mythology of self and nation. The “keywords,” per Raymond Williams, that have told the neoliberal story collectively resonate with foundational beliefs about western providence, the supremacy of the individual will, rugged enterprise, self-reliance, myths of the ‘self-made man’ and ‘upward mobility.’ Where neoliberal discourses elevate individual autonomy to exalted status, within the American myths of the ‘self-made man,’ happiness and private property are inextricably bound. Driven by the ideal of “competitive equality,” the early American subject of upward mobility, like the neoliberal subject, represented a paradox: the self-interested drive to “sheer accumulation of property, recognition, and gain with little concern for others” was the “basis for the common good” (Heike 370). In The
American Jeremiad, Sacvan Bercovitch explains that the quasi-theocratic orientation of proto-American (Puritan, New Amsterdam Dutch, and Pennsylvania) society rested on a mercantile ethos united under a common entrepreneurial fantasy: “from the start [the U.S.] 137 was a culture committed to a free enterprise vision of utopia.”35 Self-interest and individual success were identified with the providentially determined telos of the nation, both part of an unfolding prophesy linked to free enterprise. The ‘self-made man’ mythos flourished in tandem with the mirage of a classless society as ‘upward mobility’ graduated into a ‘gospel of wealth” (Bercovitch 2012, Ch. 1 Loc. 110). Still more analogically hospitable to the neoliberal ethos of entrepreneurial self-governance, the American “dream of harmony” and the myth of “possessive individualism” suggested competitive freedom was the guarantor of the public wellbeing and conflated economics with natural law. To Emerson, for one,
America stood for an economic system with “all of nature behind it.”36 Invoking
Emerson—the virtues of “independence and self-reliance, individual initiative and local responsibility”—Hayek conflates neoliberalism with Americanism, configuring the former as the realization of the mythic promise of the latter (Hayek, 2001, 220). Where America’s national sense of self, its collective superego we might say, has been inflected from its beginnings with the certainty of divine appointment, appeals to ‘personal responsibility’ in
Hayek are grounded in the supremacy of the individual into a Judeo-Christian ethical imperative that was tethered to Western civilization. Hayek writes “[t]he essential features of that individualism” were elements of “Christianity and the philosophy of classical antiquity” that was “developed during the Renaissance and has since grown and spread into what we know as Western European civilisation—the respect for the individual man qua man, that is the recognition of his own views as supreme in his own sphere, however
35 Sacvan Bercovitch. 2012. The American Jeremiad, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press; loc. 254, no pagination. 36 R. W. Emerson, “Self-Reliance,” from The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1976; cited in Sacvan Bercovitch, The American Jeremiad, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2012, location 4355, no pagination. 138 narrowly that may be circumscribed, and the belief that it is desirable that men should develop their own individual gifts and bents” (Hayek, 2001, 14). Emersonian self-reliance, the Jacksonian democracy of the western ‘man-on-the-make’, the wildcat banker, Horatio
Alger’s ‘bootstraps’ vision—neoliberalism consolidates these culturally-pervasive myths and repackages them in a personal license to unrestricted, entrepreneurial appetite. For Jodi
Dean, the fantasy of neoliberalism affirms America’s collective identity as a freedom from commercial limitations. As Americans, she notes, “we are free to buy anything, anywhere, at any time” and “Our answer to the other, when she asks who we are, we are the free one, the emblem of freedom’s victory” (np). Thus, the word “freedom resonates so widely with the commonsense understanding of Americans that it becomes ‘a button’ that elites can press to open the door to the masses to justify almost anything’” (Rapley 55). But just as the ideal of a classless society implied by the myth of self-made, vertical mobility was always utopian, the ideals of a free market, inhabited by economically liberated agents of private enterprise were always elusive and unattainable. So too has freedom proven unattainable to classic liberalism and to its revision. For if to design freedom is already to limit it, the impasse that 18th-century liberal architects confronted, to synthesize an artificial freedom, the ambition and ongoing focus of the present liberalism, is just a political project under another name.
139
CHAPTER SEVEN: NEOLIBERALISM & STUDENT DEBT
Student poverty is merely the most gross expression of the colonization of all domains of social practice. The projection of this social guilty conscience onto the student masks the poverty and servitude of everyone. ~Situationists International (1966)
Debt keeps us isolated, ashamed and afraid— of becoming homeless, of going hungry, of being crippled or killed by a treatable illness, or of being trapped in poverty level jobs. Those facing foreclosure, medical debt, student debt or credit card debt feel alone, hounded by debt collectors, and forced into unrewarding work to keep up with payments. ~Strike Debt
What comes through in virtually every word of the second statement above is that student debt is the perfection of neoliberal governmentality. As I have been arguing throughout this dissertation, the task of neoliberal governance is to architect a system of motivations and incentives that orchestrate authority from within, ideally by activating subjects to perform in what they perceive to be self-interest. The “art of shaping populations (subjection) and the self-interest. The “art of shaping populations (subjection) and the self (subjectification)” neoliberal governmentality is a strategy of hands-off control
(Waquant 2012, 69). Recognizing debt creation as the “strategic heart of neoliberal politics,” this chapter examines the student debt industry as a case study in the neoliberal 140 production of debt and the subjective condition of infinite debt under neoliberalism.37 It takes a nonlinear route from geopolitics, to the University of California (UC), to a general condition of indebtedness, or life-debt, to the notion of infinite debt and to the neoliberal state. I will argue from the positions developed by Annie McClanahan and Morgan
Adamson McClanahan and Adamson maintain that the student debt crisis is an example of life debt that extends well into the society beyond it to shape geopolitical decisions about the economy and the contemporary culture more generally. What I hope to add to the current of thought from which they build, from Gilles Deleuze through Agamben and
Marcel Mauss, is the set of structural components at work geopolitically and thus in the current workings of the university structure.
I. Networked Consensus
U.S. student debt is now a multi-billion-dollar financial services industry, a development entirely consistent with the emergence of a “debt state”38 under neoliberalism, and the testing stations public universities have become for the techniques of privatization. The scale is stunning, including nearly four-thousand financial institutions, lenders, guarantors, collection agencies, and a system of brokers and secondary markets. The student debt industry depends both for functionality and profitability on collaboration among the financial sector, state agencies, the legislative branch, universities, and the federal government—both independently and in concert with the Department of Education.
Structurally, the debt industry models the broader dynamics of neoliberal society directly: the fiscal responsibility (tuition) for public services is shifted from institutions to indebted
37 See Maurizio Lazzarato, The Making of Indebted Man, Amsterdam: Semiotext(e), 2011. 38 See Sandy Brian Hager, Public Debt, Inequality, and Power: The Making of A Modern Debt State, Oakland: University of California Press, 2016. 141 individuals (students); the systemic depredation of public service is rationalized through appeals to inevitability and impotence; and militarized police forces are mobilized to supplement the market’s “hidden hand” with a quite visible fist. U.S. student debt, as an industry, ends up being a story about this set of relationships, particularly between the economy and the state, and the emergence of a “debt economy.”39 Following Kenneth
Burke, G. Thomas Goodnight et. al figure the debt ecology as a “student debt bubble” ordered by a “network and rhetoric of motives” (75). Driven by neoliberal trajectories of discourse that comprise networked arguments, these motives converge to form a networked consensus among stakeholders. As a totality, they argue that the networked consensus “drives the alarming financial practices that bring about an unstable system”
(78). These motives unfold in “policies regarding loan procedures, admissions, funding aid, program support, faculty selection, course availability, and other decisions designed to rationalize cost and use resources more efficiently” (77). This consensus accelerates costs and debt as it distributes profit among the sectors of the network and corresponds to a deepening coordination between lenders, universities, the federal government, and the DE that enables each of these entities to profit from student debt.
The history of student lending shows a gradual transfer of accountability from institutions to students and the individuation of responsibility, risk and accountability, beginning as early as 1973 that converges decisively with the ascent of neoliberalism.
Crises of indebtedness in the housing sector and student lending emerge with a reordering the economy in ways that began ostensibly in August 1973. That year the Nixon
39 See Christian Marazzi. 2011. The Violence of Financial Capitalism, Los Angeles: Semiotext(e). 142 administration announced that “foreign-held U.S. dollars would no longer be convertible into gold” and thereby “initiated the regime of free-floating currencies that exist to this day” (Graber 2011, 361). By 1973, the U.S. hold over international financial arrangements had slipped, and the dollar no longer served to anchor the value of the rest of the world’s currency (See Martin 2002). These conditions led to innovations in denominated agreements, bonds, debt bundles, among other arrangements based on issuing credit and repaying debt. To sustain geopolitical economic power, the US was forced by falling rates of accumulation to recycle “global surpluses” by liquidating capital through the “U.S.
Treasury-Wall-street IMF- complex” (Mahmud 2011, 638). Internationally, this trend triggered a series of still-precarious debt-and-crash cycles across the developing south. The
U.S. and its partners exploited these debt crises by forcing indebted nations to adopt the neoliberal reform package of liberalization, deregulation, and free trade, resulting in
“wealth and asset transfers from the poor to the rich” (Mahmud 2011, 638). Consumer debt was securitized by the “bundling of individual bills into bonds that can be traded in specialized markets” (Martin 20). This practice was one of the financial instruments that was developed after 1973 to create “unsalable” debt packages that would flood the student debt market. The National Defense of Higher Education Act (NDHEA) of 1958 established direct federal lending to non-military students., and the Higher Education Act (HEA) of
1965 included the Guaranteed Student Loan provision, today’s Stafford Loans, and extended NDHEA’s federal backing for students borrowing to attend private universities.
In 1972 the Nixon administration solicited the private sector to partner and support federal lending. This approach led to the creation of the Student Loan Marketing Association
(Sallie Mae). The federal lending program was ultimately structured around instruments of 143 financialization: collateralized debt obligations, asset-backed securities, and credit default swaps, among others.
In 1975 the now infamous Trilateral Commission raised an alarm over the need to limit the surge in political participation that followed from the expansion of access to higher education. In response to such announcements, the HEA responded in 1965 with
The Crisis of Democracy, which proposed two options:
Should a college education be provided generally because of its contribution to the
overall cultural level of the populace and its possible relation to the constructive
discharge of the responsibilities of citizenship? … If the question is answered in the
negative, then higher educational institutions should be induced to redesign their
programs so as to be geared to the patterns of economic development and future job
opportunities.40
In 1980 congress quietly removed laws forbidding usury interest rates that by the
Bankruptcy Abuse and Prevention Act of 2005 (BAPCA) ended deliberations since 1978, extending non-dischargability to all categories of student loans. These decisions intersected with changes in ownership of public debt. State discourses have extended naturally from the reconstitution to support the state’s objectives. Where 1972 initiated a gradual inversion of the federal lending program’s motives from democratization to accumulation,
BAPCA, in establishing federally securitized, risk-free lending for private loans, crafted the key deregulatory instrument that drives the current industry. In making student debt the
“only sector of the consumer credit market that is insured by the state” (Adamson 2009,
40 Joji Watunuki, Michel Crozier, Samuel P. Huntington, “Report On The Governability of Democracies to The Trilateral Commission.” New York: New York University Press. 144
100), BAPCA provided the financial sector unrestricted, state-sanctioned access to U.S. student debtors and the capital they represent.
II. Indebted Subjects: Writing in Debt
But the decisive shift came with the financialization of the economy. With the financialization of the student loan market, students have been forced to remake themselves as “risk-taking entrepreneurs” and as responsibilized subjects “called forth by neoliberalism” (Mahmud, 485, 2012). What is distinctive in the neoliberal turn to financialization after 1970 is that capital was effectively “liberated.” No longer limited by national borders or the need to change currency denomination as it moves across them, financialization liquidated capital flows and by extension multiplied the reach of capital appropriation and expropriation. If through Marx and others, the social productivity and utility of capitalism has long been understood, financialized debt instruments amplified its capacity for exerting political control over individuals. With the financialization of the student loan market, students have been drawn in and forced to calibrate themselves as
“risk-taking entrepreneurs” remade through debt into responsibilized subjects “called forth by neoliberalism.”41 As neoliberal policies since 1971 have replaced access to affordable education with increasingly innovative opportunities to access credit, student debtors have had to adapt to the shifting rule regimes of financial capitalism, each in its own way a form of privatization of the personal. Where debt creation is the “strategic heart of neoliberal politics,” Maurizio Lazzarato indicates that student debtors represent the “ideal of financialized society” (2013 66).
41 Tayyab Mahmud, “Debt and Discipline” American Quarterly, vol. 64, no. 3, September 2012, pp. 469-494, 486; 485. 145
Indebtedness under neoliberalism functions as a “credit panopticon,”42 an ever watchful, self-surveillance that places debt at the leading edge of neoliberal governmentality. According to Lazzarato, the “debt-economy” refers to social and individual debt that are infinite. The shift to a debt economy in this diagnosis is fundamentally bound to the hegemony of financial capitalism. If, in the 1960s, profit exceeded rent and taxation as the primary mode of capital appropriation, the advent of neoliberalism reshaped this relationship: expropriation ever since has been primarily achieved through taxation and (financial) rent. With the transition to a financialized economy, the U.S. economic profile for postsecondary education has shifted to a tuition
(debt)-based financial structure. By 2012, as state appropriations per student had fallen nearly 21% since 1990, tuition had nearly doubled at many universities, as the burden for making up the difference was transferred to student debtors. According to the State Higher
Education Finance report for fiscal year 2015, tuition dollars made up 48% of the national public higher education budget and comes from tuition that 71.3% of students finance through student loans. Accounting for nearly half of the public university economy, tuition
(debt)-based financing had taken over much of the U.S. economic profile for postsecondary education. From May 2012 to June 2015, members of congress introduced fifty-one legislative proposals, including some provision for reducing, redressing, or forgiving existing student-debt, reducing interest rates, or restructuring how interest is compounded, and injecting modest consumer protections into the debt system. None passed. Rather than legislating to redress the difficulties of student borrowers, in August of
2013 the Obama administration tied federal loan rates to market rates, bookending a 48-
42 Dawn Burton, 2007. Credit and Consumer Society. London: Routledge. 146 year period beginning in 1965 that transformed a commitment to educational access into a debt-for-all financial structure.
III. A Case Study: University of California
The UC system has been a test case in the dynamics of these arrangements and the logic of privatization. Since passing the Higher Education Compact of 2004, the UC leadership had imposed tuition increases on its students through appeals to inevitability and impotence. According to the leadership, tuition increases had been the unfortunate but unavoidable consequence of state divestment in higher education. After UC’s regents approved a 32% tuition increase in 2009, then president Mark Yudof offered UC’s students one iteration of an appeal to impotence: “When you have no money, you have no money.”
Yet as UCSC Professor Robert Meister rather infamously demonstrated in 2009, tuition increases had been used to collateralize construction bonds. Increasing tuition thus “gave
UC a growing opportunity to break free of the state in its capital investment projects.”43
The revelation of Meister’s report was that by collateralizing tuition increases to finance construction contracts, UC had engineered the debt students would incur to finance them; tuition increases hadn’t been reactive to economic exigency, but proactive in pursuing revenue through credit swap strategies typical of privatization. In that UC had been using the difference between the 6.8% interest students were paying on their loans, and the 5% at
43 Robert Meister describes the workings of privatization as follows: “A privatizing university will generate the higher tuition used to finance capital projects by requiring [students] to borrow the same money from the home mortgage and student loan industries” and thereby supporting UC’s excellent bond rating by taking on personal debt backed by [students’] own credit rating. This is a surreal form of credit swap in which UC funds new construction by getting your parents to risk foreclosure and you to risk insolvency for much of your adulthood” (Meister 2010, “Open Letter”).
147 which UC could loan money to the state, student debt was subsidizing this lending arrangement. In 2012, the UC system, in cooperation with the state and university police, demonstrated a will to protect this arrangement by force. In March of that year, eleven UC
Davis students and associate professor Joshua Clover were arrested for orchestrating a sit- in blockade of the campus branch of the U.S. Bank to protest the ongoing privatization of universities nationally, and the contract between UC Davis and U.S. Bank specifically. The group had targeted U.S. Bank because its contract with Davis unambiguously demonstrated a continual flow away from educational services to private markets. When forced to close its campus branch office in breach of its contract with UC Davis, the bank argued Davis was responsible for all associated costs, claiming it was “constructively evicted” because the university had not responded by arresting the “illegal gathering.”
Shortly thereafter, the UC Davis administration encouraged the city’s district attorney to charge the participants with twenty counts each of obstructing movement in a public place and one count each of conspiracy. Prosecuting individuals engaged in legal, non-violent protest, the state enforced the economic relationship between Davis and US Bank by elasticizing state law to accommodate its financiers. According to Farah Godrej, these tuition hikes and budget cuts are part of the “legal-political resources of the neoliberal state,” and they demonstrate the “neoliberal state’s complicity with private capital in order to build political legitimacy” for repressing and criminalizing dissent” (2014, 125). Dissent was criminalized by increasing militarization on campuses nationwide to enforce tuition increases and to frame individual resistance to the broader project of transferring wealth from students to corporate interests as a criminal activity. Responding to the incident,
Joshua Clover linked escalating campus security to university investments in capital 148 projects that absorb money otherwise allocated for educational services, thereby “shifting burdens to students at a rate which can only be financed though student loans” (Clover
2012, 5). With this cost-shift, universities ostensibly deliver students to the lending institutions that “service” the debt this economic transfer is designed to produce. This rhetorical strategy “assigns responsibility for privatization to recalcitrant state legislators” who return blame, insisting on “state disinvestment in public education” (Godrej 2014,
125). The consequence is that privatization retrenches further into the fog of inevitability, and material accountability lands on the student debtor alone.
UC provides a case-in-point for how the “access” to the higher education that federally securitized credit affords is also the mechanism through which it is able to generate unprecedented wealth by extending risk-free credit to previously “unfit” borrowers. Christopher Newfield has supplemented Meister’s point, while making an even more salient one regarding the relation between tuition and debt as recursively assuring escalation. After the heated Regents meeting in November 2014, Newfield analyzed reports from Berkeley’s Legislative Analyst’s Office, and UC’s financial aid policy and determined that “the high tuition / high financial aid system functions as a debt engine.
Frozen tuition means "ever-increasing debt," in Professor Birgeneau's terms. But so does increased tuition. The current financial aid system is structured to translate both higher tuition and higher financial "aid" into higher debt” (99). Translating higher aid into her debt Newfield continues “is not an accident of an insufficient financial aid budget” but “is built into all the calculations” (130).
IV. Debt & Discipline 149
In Debt to Society, Miranda Joseph approaches debt from a counterintuitive position that’s nonetheless critical to understanding the tension that defines the student debt ecology. Debt is “an immanent component of social relations rather than an imposition from without” (Joseph 2014, 2). Abstraction as such takes its appropriate form not as a noun but a verb, not a result but itself a process. Indebtedness then is what Marx calls a “form of appearance” of underlying structures of exploitation and dispossession
(Joseph 2014, 2). For her, debt is symptomatic of a broader, ontological societal state of subjection. No mere financial obligation, debt is itself “a form of life” under neoliberalism
(Adamson 2009, 106; 98), or, as in Joseph, invoking Marx, maintains, a form of appearance that indexes an immanent condition.
To install a dual state of precarity and flexibility, debt is the perfect instrument.
“Debt and finance,” Maurizio Lazzarato argues in Governing By Debt “constitute the apparatus of evaluation, measurement and capture of all social activity” (2013, 104). In both of his key texts, Lazzarato is attuned to the affective and psychological ramifications of debt. Inextricably an economy and an “ethics,” debt is also an ethico-political injunction to “morality that forces [the debtor] to be both accountable and guilty” (2011, 49).
Anxiety, obligation, dereliction, self-loathing, and the injunction to act responsibly—these are the affective mechanisms through which debtors interiorize the contingency of debt and fail to externalize it for critique. The financial precarity of debt reinforces the status quo by forcing students to make employment and life decisions that are most likely to manage debt and encourages students to opt for private-sector employment over public sector service. 150
Federally securitized credit is the mechanism through which lenders are able to generate unprecedented, risk-free wealth by extending credit to previously unfit, “high- risk” borrowers. College affordability and access at this point can’t be decoupled from a rhetoric of capital accumulation. In the absence of any risk for student lending, the quantities that Sallie Mae (now Navient), Wells Fargo and the rest of the super-creditor collective will finance has no plausible ceiling. With no limit on what can be financed, it becomes problematic to claim that universities have any real incentive to minimize cost for students. ‘Access’ and ‘inclusion,’ thus register rhetorical functions similar to the packaging of debt as financial ‘aid’ and “reward.” Of the 1.6 trillion cumulative student debt reported in 2019, 69% of college students borrowed an average of $29, 900; 11.1 % are at least 90 days delinquent; 2.8 million are in default; and nearly 40% of borrowers may default by 2023.44 Debt and default are at crisis levels among black college students who default at nearly 5 times the rate of white borrowers, 21 % to 4 %.45 Julia Barnard, a student debt expert at the Center for Responsible Lending, identifies the problem as one of
“structural discrimination ... [of a] a larger civil rights issue.”46 Nearly 38% of all black students who entered college in 2004 defaulted on student loans within 12 years, a rate 3 times higher than their white counterparts.47 In “Debt to Society: The Case for Equitable
Student Loan Cancellation and Reform” Hark Huelsman reports for Demos (2019) that
44 https://www.forbes.com/sites/zackfriedman/2020/02/03/student-loan-debt- statistics/#770265f3281f ; https://studentloanhero.com/student-loan-debt-statistics/. 45 https://www.brookings.edu/research/the-looming-student-loan-default-crisis-is-worse- than-we-thought/. 46 https://www.cnbc.com/2019/07/27/how-the-student-debt-crisis-has-hit-black-students- especially-hard.html. 47 https://www.brookings.edu/research/the-looming-student-loan-default-crisis-is-worse- than-we-thought/. 151
“One in 9 borrowers is at least 90 days late on a payment, and nearly 7.2 million
Americans with federal loans are in default.”48
Student debt has most profoundly affected minority students, just as the subprime mortgage crisis decreased funding for social entitlements, increased wealth gaps, reduced employment prospects, and “entrapped low-income and racial minorities into networks of debt” (Mahmud 2012, 486). If titles from like “23 Senators Demand Investigation Into
Mismanagement Of Student Loan Program” and “DeVos Is Sued By 17 States” speak to a system rife with corruption, that “Student Loans A Lot Like The Subprime Mortgage
Debacle, Watchdog Says” testifies to a predatory lending system. Minority students are mortgaging their futures more rapidly than their majority peers. Pursuing education through debt inverts the lessons with which it has traditionally been associated, shifting the register from what can be realized to what is out of reach. Under the imposition and asymmetrical weight of debt obligation, what is drained out isn’t just wealth, social mobility, but possibility itself. Throughout “The Pedagogy of Debt,” Jeffrey Williams details the instructions that indebtedness offers to student debtors and in so doing registers the interchangeability of its lessons with those offered to the neoliberal subject. As a pedagogy, indebtedness teaches that “Debt is your own problem or failing, so you should not complain about it” and “that the social contract is an obligation to the institutions of capital” (165). Just as neoliberalism directs individuals to regard themselves as solely responsible for her performance in the arena of capital accumulation and risk arbitrage, debt trains individuals that “disparities of wealth are an issue of the individual rather than
48 https://www.demos.org/research/debt-to-society.
152 society” (Williams 2007, 165).
In his search for the origins of moral duty that grounds the debt contract, in Debt:
The Last 5000 Years, David Graber considers the notion of infinite debt, whether primordial, as in Nietzsche, or to society, as in Hobbes. Graber approaches the question with a dialectic. First, there is the logic of the market in which we owe nothing to each other, and second, there is the logic of a debt to society, in which our mutual dependence means we owe everything to each other. Graber dismisses both. Whether infinite as primordial debt (to a transcendental divine) or to society a State, infinite debt runs up against the principle that underwrites all debt: the “notion of infinite debt” fails when it becomes clear that it “utterly defies the logic of exchange” (Graber 2011, 267). Debt is simply a contract en route to closure. Yet with the turn to financialized capitalism the credit contract doesn’t close. In the move from the dominance of industrial capital to financial capital beginning ostensibly in 1971, and with the corresponding move to a credit economy, infinite debt becomes the condition for sustained capital accumulation. If credit is the primary mode of accumulation, to close the credit contract is to halt the influx of capital. But more importantly, neoliberalism replaces exchange as the basis for social interaction with the asymmetry of the creditor-debtor relation as it reworks the social contract in the image of private enterprise. To the extent that debtors collateralize loans with yet-to-be performed labor, with the person of a future self, student debt appropriates and expropriates students’ futures. Student debt preemptively disciplines students to speculative indeterminacy and thereby privatizes possibility, allowing capital to expropriate the yet-to-exist. Amanda Armstrong characterizes debt as a “gravitational force” that affords “less time for organizing strikes, and other uneconomic activities” 153 initiating students into years of future indebtedness in ways that close “them off from the temporal substance of their present and future lives”(2012). Indebtedness defers “the moment at which students will have to pay the cost of their education” and directs choices after graduation, postponing receipt of higher education’s return, the value of debt “visible only after the fact” (Armstrong 86). When Deleuze and Guattari diagnose a kind of life- debt, a condition of obligation to capitalism indefinitely deferred, they’re referring to a theoretical debt of existence. This form of life is a permanent obligation born within the subject, “a debt of existence, a debt of the existence of the subjects themselves” (1983,
197-198). The condition of permanent debt in which “the debtor never quits repaying” turns on the asymmetrical psychological dynamics of obligation. Where “lending is an option,” repayment “is a duty” (Deleuze and Guattari 1983, 198). As debtors interiorize the asymmetry of the creditor-debtor relation, “debt [is] internalized at the same time that it is spiritualized” (Lazzarato 222).
IV. Inverting Debt
In today’s student debt market, internalization works in tandem with force. Early in
2013 then Sallie Mae CEO Jack Remondi summed up the dynamics of the industry with the following pitch to potential industry investors: “the margins here are really a function of alternative financing opportunities. And if you think about our products, we’re making loans to the parents and students, family education loans. Their alternatives are fairly limited” (cited in Collinge, 91). Although student debts are payable, this statement makes clear that industry protocols are calculated to protract these debts permanently across a debtor’s lifespan. Student debt rests in net at 1.5 trillion, distributed across 44 million U.S. students, each of who carry an average debt burden of $39, 400. Taking into account that at 154 the close of 2016, only 37% of students were paying down their principles, 40% were in technical default and millions more are officially behind on payments, for these students, the prospects for closing the debt contract is more an abstraction for many than a viable outcome. In her work with student debtors at UC Berkeley, literary theorist and activist
Annie McClanahan alerts us to the fact that by simply drawing that abstraction out to its logical end, the foundation of the permanent debt contract fails to hold. Through a simple grammatical adjustment, permanent debt becomes permanent nonpayment. Read in the context of a collective movement, McClanahan explains, the “melancholic awareness ‘I’m in debt forever becomes a positive threat: ‘I’m in debt, forever.’ After all, the logic of credit is to defer payment into the future, but not to defer it forever: much as to demand nothing is also to demand everything, to be in debt forever is to refuse to be in debt at all”
(76).
Such a disruption alerts us to the final, if opaque, immateriality of debt, to its final lack of substance or essence. Though there can be no denying its material implications, as
David Graber writes of debt, “It’s not ‘really’ anything; therefore, its nature has and presumably always will be a matter of political contention” (2011, 372). Though we cannot deny that debt carries palpable, deeply consequential implications, taken together,
McClanahan and Graeber’s points can be applied more broadly to the neoliberal ecology, and to its axiological underpinnings. In the present, neoliberal frame, none of us owes anything to one other, but we certainly owe a debt to the financial industry for the various rents we have taken out. To return to where this dissertation ostensibly began, Francisco
Tapia’s act in 2014 brought the contingency of debt into light by disrupting the logic of individuated responsibility with the ecological principal of collective interdependence. It 155 disrupted the logic of obligation at the heart of debt under neoliberalism along with its story of individuated responsibility. If we understand student debt, per Miranda Joseph’s analysis, as a particular kind of accounting, as the products of “practices of knowledge production,” that is, as a calculus of priority, then it becomes conceivable to “imagine the university helping to organize collective dissent”; it becomes possible to “develop alternative accounts of who owes what to whom” (286). To follow Tapia’s lead, it becomes possible to suggest that U.S. students in debt don’t owe another penny.
From its intellectual incubation in post-war Europe at the Walter Lippman Colloquium, to its implementation across the developing South, a narrative of individual liberation and enfranchisement has performed much of the rhetorical labor within the neoliberal program.
In The Falling Rate of Leaning and the Neoliberal Endgame, David Blacker explains that neoliberalism is a story and a lie advanced "explicitly and also, more powerfully, implicitly, as common sense” (np). Anything is possible, the story goes, provided we engage in pedagogically introspective self-correction “in the self-hating spirit of our dominant religious narratives” (np). As Jennifer Edbauer observes in her discussion of counter rhetorics, writing and counter-discourses “expand the lived experience of the original rhetorics by adding to them—even while changing and expanding their shape”
(2004, 19). At their most basic, we can think of counter-discourses and counter-narratives as “stories which people tell and live which offer resistance, explicitly or implicitly, to dominant cultural narratives” (Andrews 2004, 11)—often by exposing ethically-significant details obscured or underattended—and to pervasive forms of constructing subjectivity.
With the “antenarrative,” for instance, a model predicated on ante- or pre-story, David M. 156
Boje notes that there is no sequential progression, defined beginning or end, dénouement or the closure associated with traditional narrative, as its function is to displace the sealed structures of narrative with interactive “emergent accounts of incidents or events” (2007,
224). Structurally and strategically, the antenarrative does not confront a cultural master- narrative in a one-to-one contest; instead it confronts its monolithic structure with a patchwork of fragmentary discourses whose disunity allows them to infect institutional culture over time to destabilize existing values. Counter-discourses that involve multiple texts, multiple authors and multiple sites, would appear to maximize their transformative potential. Several examples attest to this. In their study of the viability of autoethnography as a means to combat racism in technocultures, Kathy A. Mills and Amanda Godley indicate in “Race and Racism in Digital Media” that autoethnographic accounts were viable forms of resistance to widely-circulated racist tropes in technocultures; new stories took shape in first-person accounts of marginalization as writers made themselves visible by converging on networked spaces to “counternarrate inequality” (76). K. Jocson has demonstrated how digital counter-narratives as they circulate in remixes have been critical resources for reaching isolated geographic regions and giving youth activists access to wide audiences. In Carlos Beltrán’s study of undocumented youth narrating their stories of migration online, he found that these mediums represent a set of counternarratives to pervasive tropes about immigrants and immigration. K.A. Mills B. Exley’s study into indigenous Australian students’ stories using the Ipad app. Tellegami to create counter- narrative historical poetry about white colonial invaders who displaced Indigenous people from their lands. As Boje explains of antenarratives, though fragile, “like the butterfly,
[they] are sometimes able to change the future,” or, more accurately, they “seem to bring 157 about a future that would not otherwise be” (2007, 226). What I have been arguing throughout this chapter is not specific to the calculations of anti-narrative production: all writing remakes the future. As Geoffrey Sirc indicates, the endgame of counter-discourses is to clear obfuscation, “to see the (other) [stories] that dwells within the (purported) story” (Sirc 2002, 193).
-- 158
REFERENCES
Abraham, Matthew. 2014 Out of Bounds: Academic Freedom and The Question of Palestine. New York: Bloomsbury. Adamson, Morgan. 2009. “The Financialization of Student’s Life: Five Propositions on Student Debt.” Polygraph 21: (98): 97 – 111. Admati, Anat and Martin Hellwig. 2013. The Banker’s New Clothes: what’s Wrong with Banking and What to do About it, Princeton: Princeton University Press. Ahmed, Sara. 2004. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. New York: Routledge. ———. 2010. “Orientations Matter.” New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics. Ed. Diana Coole and Samantha Frost. Durham: Duke University Press. 234-257. ———. 2012. On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life. Durham: Duke UP. Allen, Ira J. 2018. “Composition is the Negotiation of Fantastical Selves” CCC 70 (2): 169-194. Amable, Bruno. 2011. “Morals and Politics in the Ideology of Neo-liberalism,” Socio- Economic Review, 9: 3-30. American Empire," in Empire Reloaded: Socialist Register Edited by Leo Panitch and Colin Leys. New York: Monthly Review Press 49-50. Andrews, M. 2004. “Opening to the original contributions: Counter-narratives and the power to oppose.” in Considering Counter-narratives: Narrating, Resisting, Making Sense. Edited by M. G. W. Bamberg and M. Andrews. Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Aristotle. Politics. 2013. Translated by Carnes Lord, Second Edition, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Armstrong, Amanda. 2012. Reclamations Blog, June 4, 2012 www.reclamationsjournal.org/issue06_armstrong.html. Baudrillard, Jean. 2012. The Ecstasy of Communication. Los Angeles: Semiotext. Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1981. The Dialogic Imagination. (eds.) M. Holquist, ed. Austin: University of Texas Press. ———. 1990. “Marxism and the Philosophy of Language." In The Rhetorical Tradition: Readings from Classical Times to the Present, edited by Bizzell, Patricia, and Bruce Herzberg, 928-944. Boston: Bedford. Barad, Karen. 2003. “Posthuman Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 28 (3): 801- 831. Bay, Jennifer. 2004. “Screening Information: Bodies and Writing in Network Culture.” JAC (24) 4: 929-946. Beinart, Peter. 2017. “A Violent Attack on Free Speech at Middlebury.” The Atlantic March 6, 2017 theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/03/Middlebury-free-speech/ Beltrán, C. 2015. “Undocumented, unafraid, unapologetic”: DREAM activists, immigrant politics, and the queering of democracy. In From voice to influence: Understanding citizenship in a digital age, edited by D. Allen & J. S. Light. pp. 80–104. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Bennett, Jane. 2010. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, North Carolina: Duke 159
University Press. Bercovitch, Sacvan. 2012. The American Jeremiad, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Blacker, David. 2013. The Falling Rate of Leaning and the Neoliberal Endgame, London: Zero Books. Blocher, Joseph. 2007-2008. “Institutions in the Marketplace of Ideas,” Duke Law Review 57 (4): 821 – 890. Bloom, Allan. 1987. The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students. New York: Simon & Schuster. Blyth, Mark. 2013. Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea. New York: Oxford University Press. Boas, Taylor C. and Jordan Gans-Morse. 2009. “Neoliberalism: From New Liberal Philosophy to Anti-liberal Slogan.” Studies in International Comparative Development 44 (2): 99-138. 137– 61. Boje, David M. 2007. “The Antenarrative Turn in Narrative Studies.” In Communicative Practices in Workplaces and Professions; Cultural Perspectives on the Regulation of Discourse and Organizations. Edited by Mark Zachry and Charlotte Thralls. New York: Baywood Publishing Co. Inc. Boyle, Casey, James J. Brown Jr. & Steph Ceraso. 2018. “The Digital: Rhetoric Behind and Beyond the Screen.” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 48:(3): 251-259. Boyle, Casey. 2016. “Writing and Rhetoric and/as Posthuman Practice,” College English 78 (6): 528-550. Braidotti, Rosi. 2013. The Posthuman. Cambridge: Polity. Brenner, Neil, Jamie peck and Nik Theodore. 2010. “Variegated neoliberalization: geographies, modalities, pathways.” Global Networks: A Journal Of Transnational Affairs 10 (2): 182-222. Brooke, Collin G. Lingua Fracta: Toward a Rhetoric of New Media. Cresskill: Hampton Press, 2009. Print. Brook, Collin and Jeffry T. Grabill. “Writing is a Technology through Which Writers Create and Recreate Meaning.” Naming What We Know: Threshold Concepts of Writing Studies, edited by Linda Adler-Kassner and Elizabeth Wardle, Utah State UP, 2016. Brown, Wendy. 2003. “Neoliberalism and the End of Liberal Democracy,” Theory and Event 7: (1): 37-59. ———. 2006. “American Nightmare: Neoliberalism, Neoconservatism and De- democratization,” Political Theory 34 (6): 690-714. ———. 2015. Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution, New York: Zone Books. ———. 2017. “Neoliberalism’s Frankenstein.” Critical Times 1 (1): 60-79. Bruni, Frank. 2017. “The Dangerous Safety of College,” New York Times, March 11, 2017: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/11/opinion/sunday/ Bryant, Levi R. 2011. The Democracy of Objects. Ann Arbor: Open Humanities. Burgin, Angus. 2012. The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free Markets since the Depression. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 160
Burleigh, Nina. 2016. “The Battle Against ‘Hate Speech’ on College Campuses Gives Rise to a Generation That Hates Speech.” Newsweek Magazine. May 26, 2016. Burton, Dawn. 2007. Credit and Consumer Society London: Routledge. Campbell, Karlyn. 2003. “Agency: Promiscuous and Protean” In Alliance of Rhetoric Societies. Evanston, IL. Canterbury, Dennis C. 2005. Neoliberal Democratization and New Authoritarianism, Burlington, UK: Ashgate. Carter, Michael. 2002. Where Writing Begins: A Postmodern Reconstruction. London: Verso. Castells, Manuel. 2012. Networks of Outrage and Hope. Malden, MA: Polity Press. Chaput, Catherine. 2010. “Rhetorical Circulation in Late Capitalism: Neoliberalism and the Overdetermination of Affective Energy,” Philosophy & Rhetoric 43 (1): 1-25. Clark, Andy. 2008. “Where the Brain and the World Collide.” Material Agency: Towards a Non-Anthropocentric Approach. Ed. Carl Knappett and Lambros Mala-fouris. New York: Springer. Clover. Joshua. 2012. “Reflections from UC Davis: On Academic Freedom and Campus Militarization.” College Literature: A Journal of Critical Literary Studies 39 (2). Collinge, Alan. 2009. The Student Loan Scam: The Most Oppressive Debt in U.S. History—and How We Can Fight Back. London: Verso. Cooper, Marilyn M. 2011. “Rhetorical Agency as Emergent and Enacted,” College Composition and Communication 62 (3): 420-449. ———. 1986.“The Ecology of Writing,” College English 48 (4): 364-375. ———. 2011. “Being Linked to the Matrix: Biology, Technology, and Writing.” Rhetorics and Technologies: New Directions in Writing and Communication Ed. Stuart Selber. Columbia: U of South Carolina P, 2010: 15–32. Print. ———. 2019. The Animal Who Writes: A Posthumanist Composition. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. Crawford, Beth and Patrick Ingraham. 2015. “Student group USC 2020 Vision plans walk- out issues list of demands.” The Daily Gamecock November 17, 2015. http://www.dailygamecock.com/article/2015/11/student-group-plans-walkout. Coe, Richard M. 1975. “Eco-Logic for the Composition Classroom,” College Composition and Communication 26 (3): 232-237. Comaroff, John and Comaroff, Jean. 2001. Millennial Capitalism and the Culture of Neoliberalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Condit, Celeste. 2003. "Why Rhetorical Training Can Expand Agency." Alliance of Rhetoric Societies. Evanston, IL. ———. 2000. Breaking Up [at] Totality: A Rhetoric of Laughter. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP: Print. Daza, Mauricio. 2014. “Abusos, Abandono, Olvido y Papas Fritas,” The Clinic, May 19, 2014. Dean, Jodi. 2009. Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies, Durham and London: Duke University Press. Deleuze Gilles, and Felix Guattari. 1983. Anti-Oedipus. Translated by Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, Helen R. Lane, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Massumi. U. of Minnesota Press. Derrida, Jacques. 1978. Writing and Difference, Translated by Alan Bass, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1994. Spectres of Marx: the State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International. Translated by Peggy Kamuf, New York: Routledge. ———. 1997. Of Grammatology. Translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. The Johns Hopkins University Press: Baltimore & London. Denord, François. 2009. “French Neoliberalism and Its Divisions: From the Colloque Walter Lippmann to the Fifth Republic.” In The Road From Mont Pèlerin: The Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective, edited by Philip Mirowski and Dieter Plehwe, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Dickens, Edwin. 1997. “The Federal Reserve’s Tight Monetary Policy During the 1973- 1975 Recession: A Survey of Possible Interpretations.” Review of Radical Political Economics 29 (3): 228-247. Dienst, Richard. 2011. The Bonds of Debt, New York: Verso. Dingo, Rebecca. 2012. Networking Arguments: Rhetoric, Transnational Feminism, and Public Policy Writing. Pittsburg: Pittsburg University Press. ———.2018. “Toward a Transnational Feminist Literacy.” in Circulation, Writing, and Rhetoric, edited by Laurie Gries, and Collin Gifford Brooke, Utah State University Press. Dobrin, Sidney. 2011. Postcomposition. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP. Dobrin, Sidney, J. A. Rice, and Michael Vastola. 2011. “Introduction: A New Postprocess Manifesto.” In Beyond Postprocess, edited by Sidney I. Dobrin, et al., 75-93.Utah State University Press. Dobrin, Sidney I., J.A. Rice, and Michael Vastola. 2011. “Reassembling Postprocess: Toward a Posthuman Theory of Public Rhetoric.” In Beyond Postprocess, edited by Sidney I. Dobrin, et al., Utah State University Press. Duménil Gérard and Dominique Lévy. 2006. The Crisis of Neoliberalism. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Duncan-Andrade, J.M.R. 2007. “Urban Youth and Counter-narration of Inequality” Transforming Anthropology 15 (1): 26-37. Edbauer, Jennifer. 2004. “Unframing Models of Public Distribution: From Rhetorical Situation to Rhetorical Ecologies.” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 35 (4) 5-24. ———. 2005. “(Meta) Physical Graffiti: ‘Getting Up’ as Affective Writing Model.” JAC: 131-159. Elbow, Peter. 1973. Writing Without Teachers, New York: Oxford University Press. 162 Feher, Michael. 2009. “Self-Appreciation; or, The Aspirations of Human Capital” Public Culture 21 (1): 21-41. Fischer, Claude S. Michael Hout, Martín Sánchez Jankowski, Samuel R. Lucas, Ann Swidler, and Kim Voss. Inequality by Design: Cracking the Bell Curve Myth. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996. Fish Stanley 1999. The Trouble with Principle London: Harvard University Press 1999. Fleckenstein, Kristie S., Clay Spinuzzi, Rebecca J. Rickly and Carole Clark Papper. 2008. “The Importance of Harmony: An Ecological Metaphor for Writing Research,” College Composition and Communication 60 (2): 388-419. Foucault, Michel. 1995. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Vintage Books. ———. 2008. The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978— 1979. Translated by Graham Burchell, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Fraser, Nancy 2015. “Legitimation Crisis? On the Political Contradictions of Financialized Capitalism” Critical Historical Studies 2 (2): 157-189. Freeman, Walter. 2000. How Brains Make Up Their Minds. New York; Columbia: UP. Friedman, Milton. 2002. Capitalism and Freedom, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———.1970. The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Profits.” New York Times Magazine, September, 1970. Friedersdorf, Conor., 2016. “Should Any Ideas be ‘Off the Table’ in Campus Debates?” Atlantic June 30, 2016. ———. 2017. “A Columbia Professor’s Critique of Identity Politics.” Atlantic, June 30, 2017. Frost, Gerald. 2002. Antony Fisher: Champion of Liberty, London: Profile Books, Ltd. Gilder, George. 1993. Wealth and Poverty, New York: ICS Press. Giroux, Henry. 2007. “Beyond Neoliberal Common Sense: Cultural Politics and Public Pedagogy in Darks Times,” JAC 27 (1/ 2): 11-61. Gries, Laura Agential Matters: Tumbleweed, Women-Pens, Citizen-hope and Rhetorical Agency, in Ecology, Writing Theory, and New Media: Writing Ecology. Ed. Sidney I. Dobrin. New York: Routledge, 2012. Godrej. Farah. 2014. “Neoliberalism, Militarization, and the Price of Dissent Policing Protest at the University of California.” In The Imperial University: Academic Repression and Scholarly Dissent. Edited by Chatterjee, Piya; Maria, Sunaina Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Graeber, David. 2011. Debt: The First 5000 Years, New York: Melville house, 2011. Green, Ronald Walter. 2004. “Rhetoric and Capitalism: Rhetorical Agency as Communicative Labor” Philosophy and Rhetoric, 37 (3): 188-206. Gunner, J. 2016. “What Happens When Ideological Narratives Lose Their Force?” in Welch N. & Scott t. (Eds.), Composition in the Age of Austerity (pp. 149-162). Boulder, Colorado: University Press of Colorado. Haake, Katherine. 2000. What Our Speech Disrupts: Feminism and Creative Writing Studies, Urbana, Illinois: National Council of Teachers of English. Hager, Sandy Brian. 2016. Public Debt, Inequality, and Power: The Making of A Modern Debt State. Oakland: University of California Press Haidt Jonathon and Greg Lukianoff 2018. “The Coddling of the American Mind.” New York: Penguin Press. 163 Hall, Stuart and Alan O’Shea. 2013. “Common-sense Neoliberalism.” Soundings: A journal of politics and culture, 55 (Winter): 8-24. Hall, Stuart. 2012. “The Neoliberal Revolution,” Soundings 48 (10): 9-27. Hartocollis, Anemona. 2015. “With Diversity Comes Intensity in the Amherst Free,” Speech Debate,” New York Times. November 28, 2015. Hartwell, Ronald Max. 1995. A History of the Mont. Pèlerin Society. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund Inc. Harvey, David. 2006. A Brief History of Neoliberalism, Oxford University Press. Hawhee, Debra. 2002. “Kairotic Encounters” In Perspectives on Rhetorical Invention, edited by Janet M. Atwill and Janice M. Lauer. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press. Hawk, Byron. 2004. “Toward a Post-Techne, Or, Inventing Pedagogies for Professional Writing.” Technical Communication Quarterly 13 (4): 371-392. ———. 2007. A Counter-history of Composition: Toward Methodologies of Complexity, Pittsburg: University of Pittsburg Press. ———. 2007 “Reassembling Postprocess: Toward a Posthuman Theory of Public Rhetoric.” In Beyond Postprocess, edited by Sidney I. Dobrin, J.A. Rice, and Michael Vastola. Logan: Utah State UP. Hayek, Friedrich von 2001. The Road to Serfdom, New York: Routledge Classics. ———. 1967. Studies in Philosophy, Politics and Economics, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. ———. 2011. The Constitution of Liberty. Edited by Ronald Hamowy, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1962. “The Moral Element in Free Enterprise” Foundation for Economic Education, July, 1962. fee.org/articles/the-moral-element-in-free-enterprise/ ———. 1976. Law, Legislation and Liberty: A New Statement of the Liberal Principles of Justice and Political Economy: Vol. 2: The Mirage of Social Justice. Chicago: University Press. ———. 1973. Law, Legislation and Liberty: Vol. 1: Rules and Order, Chicago: University Press. ———. 1972. Individualism and Economic Order, Chicago: Regnery. Hayles, N. Katherine. 2005. My Mother was a Computer, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. 1999. How We Became Posthuman, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Healy, Thomas 2017. “Who’s Afraid of Free Speech? What critics of campus protest get wrong about the state of public discourse,” Politics, June 18, 2017 Heike, Paul. 2014. The Myths that Made America, Germany: Knowledge Unlatched. Hidalgo Para, Luis Hidalgo, and Lili Loofbourow. 2013. “No to Profit: Fighting Privitization in Chile” The Boston Review, May 16, 2013. Holland, John. 1992. “Complex adaptive Systems,” Daedalus 121 (1): 17-30. Horner Bruce. 2001. Terms of Work For Composition: A Materialist Critique Albany State University of New York Press. Horner, Bruce, Brice Nordquist, and Susan M. Ryan. 2017. “Introduction” In Economies of Writing: Revaluations in Rhetoric and Composition, edited by Bruce Horner, et al., Utah State University Press. Hull, G. A., & A. Stornaiuolo. 2014. “Cosmopolitan literacies, social networks, and 164 “proper distance’: Striving to understand in a global world.” Curriculum Inquiry, 44 (1): 15–44. Huntington, Samuel P., Joji Watunuki & Michel Crozier. 1975. “Report On The Governability of Democracies to The Trilateral Commission.” New York: New York University Press. Jaschik, Scott. 2013. “Fireable Tweets,” Inside Higher Ed., December 19, 2013. Jocson, K. 2013. “Remix revisited: Critical solidarity in youth media arts.” E-Learning and Digital Media. 10(3): 68–82. Jones, Daniel Stedman. 2012. Masters of the Universe: Hayek, Friedman, and the Birth of Neoliberal Politics. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Johnson-Eilola, Johndan. 2004. “The Database and the Essay: Understanding Composition as Articulation.” In Writing New Media: Theory and Applications for Expanding the Teaching of Composition. Ed. Anne Frances Wysocki et al. Logan: Utah State University Press. Joseph, Miranda. 2014. Debt to Society: Accounting For Life Under Capitalism, University of Minnesota Press. Jung, Julie. 2014. “Systems Rhetoric: A Dynamic Coupling of Explanation and Description.” Enculturation 17: September, 2014. (Digital Only). Kant, Immanuel. 1793. “Theory and Practice,” Berlinische Monatsschr. ———.1996. The Metaphysics of Morals, trans. Mary Gregor, in Practical Philosophy, Edited and translated by Mary Gregor Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Kent, Thomas. 1989. “Hermeneutics and the Possibility of Rhetoric,” Rhetoric Review 8 (1): 24-42. ———.1992. “Externalism and the Production of Discourse.” Journal of Advanced Composition. 12(1): 57-74. Klein, Naomi. 2007 The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, New York: Picador. Kynard, Carmen. 2013. Vernacular Insurrections: Race, Black Protest, and The New Century in Composition-Literacy Studies, Albany: State University of New York Press. Koray Caliskan and Michel Callon. 2009. “Economization Part 1: Shifting Attention from The economy towards processes of economization” Economy and Society 38.3: 369-98 Lecercle, Jean-Jacques. A Marxist Philosophy of Language. Trans. Gregory Elliott. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2009. Print. Lazzarato, Maurizio. 2011. The Making of Indebted Man, Amsterdam: Semiotext(e). ———.2013. Governing by Debt, Amsterdam: Semiotext(e). Leff, Michael. 2003. “Tradition and Agency in Humanistic Rhetoric,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 36 (2): 135-147. Lemke, Thomas. 2001. “‘The birth of bio-politics’: Michel Foucault’s lecture at the Collège de France on neo-liberal governmentality.” Economy and Society. 30(2): 190–207. Licona, Adela, and Herndl, Carl G. and Adela C. Licona. 2007. “Shifting Agency: Agency, Kairos and the Probabilities of Social Action.” In Communicative Practices in Workplaces and the Professions: Cultural Perspectives on the Regulation of 165 Discourse and Organizations, edited by Mark Zachary and Margaret Thralls. Amityville, NY: Baywood Publishing Company. Lippmann, Walter. 1937. An Inquiry into the Principles of a Good Society. Boston: Verso. Long, Roderick T. 1996. “Aristotle’s Conception of Freedom.” The Review of Metaphysics 49(4): 775 – 796. Lotier, Kristopher M. 2016.“Around 1986: The Externalization of Invention and the Emergence of Postprocess Invention.” CCC 67(3): 360-384. Luis, Rene. 2014. “Chilean artist claims to steal, burn $500M worth of student ‘debt papers,” Al Jazeera, May 19, 2014. Lundberg, Christian and Loshua Gunn. 2005.“Ouija Board, Are There any Communication?” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 35 (4): 83-105. Lyon, Arabella. 2013. Deliberative Acts: Democracy, Rhetoric and Rights. University Park: Penn State University Press. Lynch, Paul and Nathaniel Rivers, eds. Thinking with Bruno Latour in Rhetoric and Composition, Southern Illinois U. P., 2015. ———. 2011. “Is It Greek or Deja Vu All over Again: Neoliberalism and Winners and Losers of International Debt Crises” Loyola University Chicago Law Journal 42: 629-712. Mahmud, Tayyab. 2012. “Debt and Discipline” American Quarterly 64 (3): 469-494. Mann, Kate and Jason Stanley. 2015. “When Free Speech Becomes a Political Weapon.” Chronicle of Higher Education November 13, 2015. Marazzi, Christian. 2011. The Violence of Financial Capitalism, Los Angeles: Semiotext(e). Martin, Randy. 2002. The Financialization of Daily Life. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Manzerolle, Vincent and Atle Mikkola Kjøsen. 2012. “The Communication of Capital: Digital Media and the Logic of Acceleration.” Communication, Media, and Film Publications 10: (2): 214-229. Marcuse, Herbert. 1965. “Repressive Tolerance.” In Critique of Pure Tolerance, 81-118. Boston: Beacon Press. Marcuse, Herbert. 1964. One Dimensional Man. Boston: Beacon Press. Martin, Randy. 2002. The Financialization of Daily Life. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Marx, Karl. 1977. Grundrisse. Translated by Martin Nicolaus, New York: Random House. Massumi, Brian. 2002a. “Navigating Movements: A Conversation with Brian Massumi.” In Hope: New Philosophies for Change” Ed. Mary Zournazi, 210– 42. New York: Routledge. ———. 2002b. Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Mays, Chris. 2017. “Writing Complexity One Stability at A Time: Teaching Writing as a Complex System.” CCC 68(3): 559-585. McClanahan, Annie. 2010. Salto Mortale: Narrative, Speculation, and The Chance of the Future. PhD. Dissertation: University of California, Berkeley. ———. 2011. “The Living Indebted: Student Militancy and the Financialization of Debt.” Qui Parle 20 (1): 57-77. Meister, Robert. 2010. “Open Letter from CUCFA President Meister to UC President 166 Mark Yudof on This Year’s Tuition Increase.” November, 2010. http://www.cucfa.org/news/2010_nov15.php. Miller, Carolyn R. Miller, 2007. “What Can Automation Tell Us about Agency.” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 37 (2): 137-157. Mills, Kathy A. and Amanda Godley. 2018. “Race and Racism in Digital Media: What Can Critical Race Theory Contribute to Research on Technocultures?” In Handbook of Writing, Literacies and Digital Cultures, edited by Kathy A. Mills, Amy Stornaiuolo, Anna Smith, and Jessica Zacher Randya, New York: Routledge, pp. 65-83. Mills, K.A. & B. Exley. 2015. “Decolonizing digital heritage practices for indigenous literacy: a multimodal analysis of Ipad Tellegami Videos.” Paper presented at the 2015 AERA Annual Meeting. Chicago, Il. Mirowski, Philip. 2014. Never Let a Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown, London: Verso. Mitchell, Katharyne. 2010. “Governed Space: Global Security and the Geopolitics of Broken Windows” Political Geography (5): 289-297. Morton, Timothy. 2010. The Ecological Thought. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ———. 2010. “Ecology as Text, Text as Ecology,” Oxford Literary Review 32 (1): 1-17. Muckelbauer, John, and Debra Hawhee. 2000. “Posthuman Rhetorics: ‘It’s the Future, Pikul.’” JAC 20 4):767–74. Ong, Aihwa. 2007. Neoliberalism as Exception. North Carolina: Duke University Press. Peck, Jaime. 2010. Constructions of Neoliberal Reason, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Petsoulas, Christa. 2001. Hayek’s Liberalism and Its Origins: His Ideas of the Spontaneous Order and of Scottish Enlightenment, London: Verso. Plehwe, Dieter. 2009. “Introduction.” In The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective, edited by Philip Mirowski and Dieter Plehwe, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Rapley, J. 2007. Globalization and Inequality: Neoliberalism’s Downward Spiral. Boulder: Lynne Reiner Press. Read, Jason. 2009. “A Genealogy of Homo Economicus: Neoliberalism and the Production of Subjectivity,” Foucault Studies 6 (February): 25-36. Robbins, Paul. 2102. Political Ecology: A Critical Introduction, second edition, West Sussex U.K.: Wiley Blackwell, Ltd. Ross, Andrew. 2013. Creditocracy and The Case for Debt Refusal, New York: OR Books. Phelps, Louise. 1988. Composition as a Human Science, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Powers, M. Karen and Catherine Chaput. 2007. “Anti-American Studies" in the Deep South: Dissenting Rhetorics, the Practice of Democracy, and Academic Freedom in Wartime Universities.” College Composition and Communication 58 (4): 648-681. Rancière, Jacques. 2010. Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics, Translation by Steven Corcoran, London: Bloomsbury Academic. Reidner, Rachael. 2015. Writing Neoliberal Values: Rhetorical Connectivities and Global Capitalism. UK: Palgrave Macmillan. Rappaport, Sam. 2016. “Protesters force Alvarez off of U. of C. Campus,” Hyde Park 167 Herald February 18, 2016: http://hpherald.com/2016/02/18/ protesters-force- alvarez-off-u-of-c-campus. Rickert, Thomas. 2013. Ambient Rhetoric: The Attunements of Rhetorical Being, Pittsburg: Pittsburg University Press. ———. 2007. Acts if Enjoyment: Rhetoric, Zizek, and the Return of the Subject, University Of Pittsburgh Press. Rivers, Nathaniel A. and Ryan P. Weber. 2011.“Ecological, Pedagogical, Public Rhetoric,” College Composition and Communication, 63 (2): December 201l: 187- 218. Rossiter, Ned. 2003. “Processual Media Theory,” Symploké, 11 (1) and (2): 104- 131. Rowe, Aimee Carrillo. 2005 “Be Longing: Toward a Politics of Relation.” NWSA Journal 12(2): 15-46. Sanchez, Raul. 2007. The Function of Theory in Composition Studies, New York: State University of New York Press. Sassen, Saskia. 2014. Expulsions: Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Schmidt, Peter. “Colleges call hard lines against calls to restrict speech,” 2016 American Counsel of Trustees and Alumni, February 29, 2016. Scott, Tony. 2016. “Subverting Crisis in the Political Economy of Composition,” CCC, 68 (1): 10-37. Shaviro, Steven. 2003. Connected, or, What it means to live in a network society, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Shepley, Nathan. “Rhetorical-Ecological Links in Composition History.” Enculturation 15 (2013). Web. 15 Mar. 2013. Sirc, Geoffrey. 2002. English Composition as a Happening, Logan, Utah: Utah State University Press. Smeltzer, Sandra and Alison Hearn. 2015. “Student Rights in an Age of Austerity? ‘Security’, Freedom of Expression and the Neoliberal University.” Social Movement Studies. 14(3): 352-358. Springer, Simon. 2016. The Discourse of Neoliberalism: An Anatomy of a Powerful Idea, London: Rowman & Littlefield International. Stenberg, Shari. 2016. “Beyond Marketability: Locating Teacher Agency in the Neoliberal University.” Composition in the Age of Austerity, edited by Nancy welch and Tony Scott, University Press of Colorado, Boulder, Colorado, pp. 191–204. Stewart, Kathleen. 2007. Ordinary Affects. Durham: Duke University Press. Stormer, Nathan and Bridie McGreavy. 2017. “Thinking Ecologically about Rhetoric’s Ontology: Vulnerability and Resilience.” Philosophy & Rhetoric, 50 (1): 1-25. Syverson, Margaret. 1999. The Wealth of Reality: An Ecology of Composition. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Szeman, Imre. 2015. “Entrepreneurship as the New Common Sense” South Atlantic Quarterly 114 (3): 471-490. Taylor, Mark C. 2001. The Moment of Complexity: Emerging Network Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Terada, Rei. 2011. “Out of Place: Free Speech, Disruption, and Student Protest” Qui Parle: Critical Humanities and Social Sciences 20 (1) (Fall/Winter): 251-269. 168 Thoburn, Nicholas. 2007 “Patterns Of Production Cultural Studies After Hegemony.” Theory, Culture and Society 24(3): 79-94. Tribe, Keith. 2009. “Liberalism and Neoliberalism in Britain, 1930 – 1980.” In The Road From Mont Pèlerin: The Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective, ed. Philip Mirowski and Dieter Plehwe, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Trimbur, John. “Writing After Print Capitalism.” JAC 32 (¾): 723-731. Valdez, J. 1995. Pinochet’s Economists: The Chicago School in Chile, Cambridge University Press. Van Horn, Rob and Philip Mirowski. 2009. “The Rise of the Chicago School of Economics and the Birth of Neoliberalism.” In The Road from Mont Pèlerin: The Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective, ed. by Philip Mirowski and Dieter Plehwe, Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Vitanza, Victor J. “Abandoned to Writing: Notes toward Several Provocations.” Enculturation, Fall 2003. Accessed 26 January 2009. Von Mises, Ludwig.1977. Socialism. Translated by Jacques Kahane, Indianapolis: Liberty Fund Press. Waquant, Loïc. 2012. “Three Steps to a Historical Anthropology of Actually Existing Neoliberalism” Social Anthropology 20 (1): 1-34. Weisser, Christian. 2002. Moving Beyond Academic Discourse: Composition Studies and the Public Sphere. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP. Welch, Nancy. Living Room: Teaching Public Writing in a Privatized World, Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook, 2008 Whicker, John H. 2015. Object Oriented Writing Theory: Writers, Texts, Ecologies, PhD. Diss, Ohio University. Williams, Jeffrey. 2006. “The Pedagogy of Debt,” College Literature 33 (4): 155-169. Winn, P. 2004. Victims of the Chilean Miracle: Workers and Neoliberalism in the Pinochet Era 1973 – 2002. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Worsham, Lynn. 1987. “The Question Concerning Invention: Hermeneutics and the Genesis of Writing,” PRE/TEXT, Vol. 8, pp. 197-244. ———. 1991. “Writing Against Writing: The Predicament of Ecriture Féminine in Composition Studies” in Contending with Words: Composition and Rhetoric in a Postmodern Age, New York: MLA. pp. 82-104, 101-102. Yagelski, Robert. 2011. Writing as a Way of Being: Writing Instruction, Nonduality, and the Crisis of Sustainability. Cresskill: Hampton Press. Zimmer, Robert. 2016. “Free Speech Is the Basis of a True Education,” Wall Street Journal August 26, 2016. Žižek, Slavoj. 1993. Tarrying With the Negative. Duke University Press Books.