On Class, Culture, and the Creation of the Neoliberal Subject: The Case of Jordan

Abstract

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)IntroductionSave the Children Trainer: Now that you have the business plan and you have the money to implement it, your neighbors' house burned down, they have kids, and the whole family is thrown in the streets. What would you do?Hussein: Of course we would give the money to the family, there is no doubt about it. Are you asking us to think?The unanimous nods from Hussein's classmates in a Save the Children program to teach microcredit to the marginalized youth of Amman, Jordan, angered the trainer, who told the future entrepreneurs: You are never going to good businessmen, I have been teaching you all semester long to focus on your aims and goals, to ignore any distractions, and to think of yourselves only.1 The reprimand reflects the ideal trajectory of the creation of the neoliberal subject: the entrepreneurial (train for microcredits), individualistic (think of yourself) self who believes in the free market (focus on aims and goals). The story, however, does not stop at this point. The crux is in the response of one the trainees, who addressed the class saying:I am the son of Baqa' and my neighbor's house burns down and you are telling me I should ignore that and focus on getting my business started! To hell with you and the SMEs, I do not want to an entrepreneur...If having my own business is going to lead me to forget my neighbors...If it is going to lead me to ignore the pain of my neighbors, I do not want to be my own boss [as encouraged by the trainer]. Do you know who my neighbors are? They are either my cousins, my uncles, or even brothers and sisters and you are asking me to forget about them and focus on my business...I do not need your training. We poor people survive by leaning on each other by helping each other, we live all together, not like you in West Amman [where] each lives in his own world!This local encounter highlights many of the tensions surrounding neoliberal subject creation in the context of development interventions that form the focus of this article. In the first instance, it clearly represents a local contestation of a microcredit training program and highlights the need for ethnographic research that can identify the spaces between discursive formation and on-the-ground practice, in order to understand what Ferguson (2010) refers to as the complex relation between the intentionality of planning and the strategic intelligibility of outcomes. Governable subjects do not represent blank slates on which neoliberal processes are inscribed. Local geographic and historical contexts, social relationships, identities, and consciousnesses continue to important in the reworking of capitalism everywhere in the world. In this case, the conflict led to the trainees leaving the class, and classes were cancelled until the director of the program intervened to resolve the dispute. Such conflicts have been the focus of a growing body of studies on the creation of neoliberal subjectivity, as discussed below.However, two further observations about this conflict are important to note. Previous studies of such conflicts have tended to focus on the role of culture in generating local contestations of neoliberal subject formation. For example, Adas (2006) notes the role of Islamic culture in generating opposition to the promotion of individualism in microcredit programs, while Karim (2001,2011) and Bernal and Grewal (2014) argue that NGO programs for women, rather than leading to the creation of neoliberal subjects, consolidated traditional forms and relationships of patriarchal power. Yet in the example above, it is not just culture, but a form of class consciousness that sparked trainee opposition to the program; in particular, trainees were committed to principles of collective solidarity and action, based on an understanding of themselves as embedded within and attached to social relationships of family, neighborhood, and the broader status of being poor-a status that in the Arab world is explicitly invoked as a marker of socio-economic class (Antoun 2000, Hourani, Khoury, and Wilson 2005, Khoury 2003, Parker 2009, Shryock 2000, Traboulsi 2014). …