(Dis)placing Neoliberalism - Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos. Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (New York, Zone Books, 2015)

Abstract

( dis ) placing neoliberalism Wendy B ROWN , Undoing the Demos. Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (New York, Zone Books, 2015) Undoing the Demos is a brilliant analysis and polemic, providing a lens on life as it is lived in the contemporary West that throws daily experience into stark and disturbing relief. As befits the best kind of social science, reading Undoing makes the familiar strange and freights ordinary decisions with often uncomfortable new forms of self- consciousness. The book’s central argument explores the relationship of neoliberalism to the possibility of “democratic self-rule” [11]. Here I will reflect most centrally on Brown’s discussion of the first term in her argument, the analysis of neoliberalism itself. Following on Foucault, the book argues that the evolution of “neoliberal reason” has remade both selves and society, turning workers into human capital and a democratic polity into a managed universe, its criteria for good governance reduced to economic calculation. This has a set of important consequences on both sides of the equation. For individuals, understood now as neither selves with interiority, laborers nor citizens, the modal relationship to self is one of investment: incurious, future oriented, individualized and, most fundamentally, calculating. On the other side, the “social” as we have known it has been disassembled. There is no community, but instead a set of self-interested individuals, purposely left to fend for themselves on the grounds of market efficiency and utility, organized by definition through competition rather than cooperation, the notion of “common good” now an oxymoron. This market structure is neither natural nor automatic. To the contrary, part of the job of the neoliberal state is to maintain sufficient inequality to support permanent competi- tion; hence rather being than a laissez-faire state, the neoliberal state is deeply involved in the market. All this undermines the logic of “solidar- ity” and so makes opposition more and more difficult and unlikely. One of the consequences of this overriding logic, Brown argues, is that it flattens substantive distinctions, creating a language that moves seamlessly across social sectors, subjecting all to the same language of “benchmarking” and “optimization” and “stakeholders.” Terminology is never innocent. As the language of the economy becomes hegemonic, moving from business to university, studio and Leslie Salzinger, University of California, Berkeley [lsalzinger@berkeley.edu] European Journal of Sociology, 57, 3 (2016), pp. 460–465—0003-9756/16/0000-900$07.50per art + $0.10 per page aEuropean Journal of Sociology 2016. doi: 10.1017/S0003975616000199 Downloaded from https:/www.cambridge.org/core. Access paid by the UC Berkeley Library, on 19 Jan 2017 at 05:15:21, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https:/www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0003975616000199