The Ethics of Success: Paradoxes of the Suffering Neoliberal Self in the Andean Peruvian Music Industry

Abstract

In this essay I examine the effects and limit of neoliberal logics in the commercial huayno music industry in Peru. Commercial huayno is a mass-mediated musical genre which combines folkloric and popular elements and is performed and listened to nationally, especially in the Andes and among Andean migrants. I begin by outlining transformations in the industry during Peru's neoliberal period before focusing on the agency that a neoliberal notion of the subject and attendant ideas about ‘success’ have on the discourse and practice of commercial huayno pop stars. However, I seek to contextualise and complicate understandings of these neoliberal logics and identify their limits by highlighting alternative sources of ethical subject formation, which have the potential to endorse, contradict and mediate the ideal type of the neoliberal subject in practice. Thus, in the second section, I consider how the discourse of suffering associated with huayno music and huayno stars – itself connected to Catholic moral philosophy – complicates any straightforward mapping of a neoliberal subjectivity on to huayno performers.