The neoliberal linguistic consensus: neoliberal multilingualism and linguistic governmentality in Morocco

Abstract

ABSTRACT Neoliberalism has had substantial resonance in Moroccan governance in the past few decades. Neoliberalism has occasioned a wide-ranging reconstitution of profit accumulation, politics, society, and the individual ‘citizen’ not least as part of the construction of a new collective common sense. The contention of this paper is that Moroccan language policy/politics is articulated amidst this neoliberal capture. It unfolds in a discursive and institutional environment characterized by uneven, dispersed but dense topographies of neoliberalization, in turn carved up by the political rationalities of state-sanctioned capital accumulation, reproduction and governmentality. While tokenistically congenial to linguistic pluralism, the Moroccan language regime espouses a marked neoliberal reconfiguration of language and multilingualism. The Moroccan language regime appears to have congealed into a neoliberal linguistic consensus predicated on neoliberal multilingualism, a stratified matrix of linguistic differentiation informed by the ideologies and structures of neoliberal political economy and practices of power. Embedded in this regime is linguistic governmentality, the linguistically sanctioned nurturing of neoliberal subjectivity couched within the coordinates of performativity and the neoliberal discursive assortments of human capital, the knowledge economy, employability and lifelong learning. This paper attempts to sketch the lineaments of this evolving linguistic regime with a view to rendering visible the spaces of interplay between neoliberal governance and language politics. The paper concludes with a reflection on the implications for the analysis of potential permutations of neoliberalism under Covid-19.