Neoliberal Condition Research Articles

Machine aurality: uncanny resonances and the sonic anxieties of surveillance capitalism

ABSTRACT This paper examines the aurality of voice-activated AIs (VA AIs) through uncanny encounters with the devices. Glitches such as Alexa spontaneously bursting into laughter or accidental activations putting users’ privacy at risk, have incited suspicions among users as to the motives of tech companies and the technical capabilities of their devices. Building on previous contributions that show that the feminised voices of VA AIs are strategically designed to display reassuring attributes and obscure surveillance practices, I discuss the aural moments in which VA AIs fail to reassure, shifting from a convenience to a threat through the experience of the uncanny. I argue that anxieties tied to VA AIs are both produced and mediated by their aurality: both their voices and listening practices. I theorise uncanny encounters with the voice and listening capacities of VA AIs such as glitches, features which seek to imitate humans, disembodied voices and disembodied listening, and invasions of privacy as enacting perversions of care and inducing fear of impersonation and intrusion. This paper contributes to the literature on the specificity of sound in conceptions of the uncanny valley, and also seeks to enrich conception of vocality and listening as vector of anxieties within the neoliberal condition.

Art under Neoliberalism

Abstract Apart from the longstanding and much-debated problem of art's commodification, how does neoliberalism transform and determine the conditions of artistic practice? Further, if neoliberalism is a substantially distinct stage in the history of capitalism, and not merely its intensification, what are the implications of this new condition for the practice and criticism of contemporary art? What does it mean to practice and theorize art, to be an artist or critic, under neoliberalism? Drawing on the central topic of this issue, is aesthetic, artistic, or political radicality in art still possible under the neoliberal condition? Can, or should, artistic practice constitute a significant site of resistance? Conversely, is the contemporary art world a paradigmatic case of, and even a model for, neoliberal capitalism?

Gender, Class, and Capital: Female Migrant Workers’ Writing in Postsocialist China and Zheng Xiaoqiong’s Poetry

This article takes Zheng Xiaoqiong’s poetry as an example and investigates Chinese New Women Workers’ writing under the postsocialist and neoliberal condition. It begins with a critical survey of the emerging discourse of New Workers’ Literature in China, followed by positioning Zheng’s depiction of female migrant workers’ dagong experience within the women’s question in contemporary China. I read Zheng’s writing from the combined perspectives of gender and class, investigating the way in which the sexuality of female migrant workers is remodeled or reproduced by capital and their labor. Finally, I explore how their labor, essentially governed by capitalist logic, contributes to their quagmires in developing sound gender identity and effective class consciousness. I argue that Zheng’s portrayal of female migrant workers resonates with the development of new workers and new conditions for women and helps to build a unique case representative of New Women Workers’ Literature in postsocialist China.

The affective politics of policy making spaces: Gendered and racial embodiments of neoliberal deservingness and power in a city council meeting

Bringing together feminist works on affect, neoliberalism, and the racial dimensions of dependency discourse, this paper discusses affective politics in policy making spaces by examining a Durham (North Carolina, USA) City Council meeting. We focus on a 2017 Housing Needs Hearing where bodily gestures and speech acts were crucial parts of emotional interactions that defined, maintained, and challenged subject positions and power structures. We argue that embedded within legacies of racial and gender inequality, neoliberal sensibilities work through embodied emotional performances that impact policy conversations. Our analysis reveals how, despite progressive aspirations and accomplishments in Durham, the meeting's extractive set up perpetuates inequities by positioning those seeking assistance to prove their worth through a contradictory performance of desperation and self-actualization while enabling supporters of housing affordability, including city officials, to adopt the role of caring advocates. We find that a performance of pain and the rhetorical proof of self-responsibility opens up potential access to affordable housing and in doing so reveals both the limits and impact of a broken housing system. We thus extend analysis of the neoliberal condition of US housing inequality by deepening understanding of how neoliberal deservingness is embodied and shapes racialized, classed, and gendered subject positions.

Of Fairy Tales: The Reparative Fantasy in Christina Rossetti’s “Goblin Market”

With the heated debate on the utility of the humanities as a context, this paper reads Rossetti’s “Goblin Market” as an attempt to reconcile the emerging functional attitude towards the humanities and the susceptibility of the humanities to the neo-liberal condition. This paper traces connections between the “reparative” or the “post-critical” turn and fairy tales or fantasies in order to argue that Christina Rossetti’s much debated poem, “Goblin Market,” could be framed in a fantastic framework that substantiates a reparative orientation that is “additive and accretive” (Sedgwick, Touching Feeling 149). A stubborn insistence on the hermeneutics of suspicion has informed much of the readings of the “Goblin Market,” especially the haunted market, as “kinda subversive, kinda hegemonic” (Sedgwick, Queer Performativity 15). I aim to provide a different approach given that recent scholarship on “Goblin Market” ignores the possibility of reparation. In this paper, I attempt to withhold suspicion in order to hone caring eyes to uncritical materials that are often deemed untenable to politicized life. I reparatively read the female participation in the market that resuscitates a full female identity and the “muted” ending that is often subjected to paranoid readings. Locating “Goblin Market” in a fantastic framework, I argue, helps us to see the actual world and it helps us visualize a fantastic world that brings out an ethical efflorescence that entertains human experience in its plenitude. This essay also argues that “Goblin Market,” partakes in “a new wave of innovative fairy tales” (Zipes 98) that gained ascendancy in the latter half of the nineteenth century and this serves as an affective archive to document long marginalized figures and feelings. I also argue that Rosetti’s poem invites thoughts on how aesthetic devices sustain and reproduce selves that ripple off from real-life experiences in a fantastic interruption of spatiality and temporality.

The Secondary Gains of Neoliberal Pain: The Limits of Consolation as a Response to Academic Anguish

The contemporary global academic is an exemplary neoliberal subject. This condition is, of course, not unreflected upon, even if those communities of scholars dubbed ‘critical’ and ‘problem-solving’ might address it in different ways. The critical crowd is, however, caught in a particular predicament: We enact and embody neoliberal discourse in our daily practice, all the while raging about the psychosocial harm it inflicts. Indeed, though working within an industry ever more industrialised in conformity with the violent economic technologies of precarity, competition, quantification, standardisation, and individualism, considerable professional rewards remain on offer for those who master ‘the game.’ We become academic subjects in and by ‘making deals’ at the juncture of productive and coercive power—that is, by reproducing hierarchies. The discourse of personal triumph against neoliberal adversity—performed, if in different ways, by critical and mainstream scholars alike—is part and parcel of becoming a good player, of generating affective and socio-economic payoffs, and, ultimately, of re-entrenching the neoliberal condition. This essay does not argue for a second-order responsibilisation of this already tormented subject—to radicalise not-yet-brutal-enough self-appraisals. Rather, it is concerned with a certain disavowal of responsibility which derives from the implication in our own and each other’s suffering, as formulated in Lynne Layton’s work. Instead of offering consolation in response to the neoliberal suffering, and thus deepen the collusion, I suggest a re-thinking of responsibility in response to the concreteness of the neoliberal pain. Expressed and theorised from within the lived experienced of academic anguish, this is as much an autobiographical as a sociological tale.

The role of the state in the commodification of urban space: The case of branded housing projects, Istanbul

Globally, cities have been experiencing neoliberal urbanization processes since the 1970s, while also contributing to the production of the neoliberal condition per se. The neoliberal state plays a core role in such processes, which have deepened the commodification of urban space via various mechanisms such as the privatization of public land and key urban infrastructure. This article critically investigates the direct involvement of the neoliberal state in the commodification of urban space by focusing on its triple role as a restructuring mechanism, a land developer and a volume housing developer in Turkey. The research develops and applies a theoretical framework based on Lefebvre’s production of space and Gramsci’s theory of hegemony. The paper examines the development of branded housing projects, which are private neighbourhoods, by analysing national legislative and organizational changes leading to the production of this type of development and illustrates this using four example projects in Istanbul. The paper contributes to the international evidence of the variegated characteristics of the neoliberal state in relation to urban development, and the neoliberal state’s role in the accumulation of capital in contemporary capitalism.

Testifying for the Invisible: Documentary Poetics of Estrangement

This exposition is a semi-dialogical inquiry into the potential of the methods and poetics of estrangement in documentary and political cinema, where we focus on the representation of the “neoliberal condition” in present-day society. We reflect on and rethink ideas that stem from various theories and strategies of emancipatory practices in cinema and literature. Here we acknowledge the tensions between conventions in for example social documentary, political cinema, and different conceptions of realism versus the idea of estrangement as an artistic strategy. The struggle to emancipate spectatorship and readership from the passivity and uncritical temptations promoted by the spectacles of the hegemonic culture industries has been a central concern in theoretical debates and artistic praxis that involves estrangement as a technique. How do Jacques Rancière’s notions on emancipation and radical equality challenge Brechtian ideas and methods of estrangement? How could the lineages of Third Cinema and testimonial literature help to rethink these matters today? What are actually the relevant means of estrangement in contemporary documentary art and literature?

Late Capitalism on Vinyl: Neoliberalism, Biopolitics, and Music

Research Article| July 01 2018 Late Capitalism on Vinyl: Neoliberalism, Biopolitics, and Music Jeffrey R. Di Leo Jeffrey R. Di Leo University of Houston–Victoria, Texas Jeffrey R. Di Leo is dean of the School of Arts and Sciences and Professor of English and Philosophy at the University of Houston-Victoria. He is editor and publisher of American Book Review and the founder and editor of symplokēr. His recent books include Corporate Humanities in Higher Education: Moving Beyond the Neoliberal Academy (2013), Criticism after Critique: Esthetics, Literature, and the Political (2014), Dead Theory: Death, Derrida, and the Afterlife of Theory (2016), Higher Education under Late Capitalism: Identity, Conduct and the Neoliberal Condition (2017), and American Literature as World Literature (2017). He is currently working on the Bloomsbury Handbook of Literary and Cultural Theory, which will appear in 2018. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google CR: The New Centennial Review (2018) 18 (2): 107–134. https://doi.org/10.14321/crnewcentrevi.18.2.0107 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Jeffrey R. Di Leo; Late Capitalism on Vinyl: Neoliberalism, Biopolitics, and Music. CR: The New Centennial Review 1 July 2018; 18 (2): 107–134. doi: https://doi.org/10.14321/crnewcentrevi.18.2.0107 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveMichigan State University PressCR: The New Centennial Review Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © Michigan State University Board of Trustees Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Work, culture, and play in the neoliberal condition

ABSTRACTFoucault’s [2008. The birth of biopolitics: Lectures at the collège de France 1978–1979. New York, NY: Picador] lectures on neoliberalism present a powerful challenge to the Marxist critique of capitalist work as alienating and dehumanizing. Foucault suggests that neoliberalism allows work to be seen in terms of an individual’s pursuit of personal happiness. Seminal cultural theory in Hoggart [1957/2009. The uses of literary: Aspects of working-class life. London: Penguin] and Williams [1961. The long revolution. London: Chatto & Windus] view working-class culture as a matter of tacit rules and a ‘structure of feeling’ that permeates everyday life. Adorno’s critique of the capitalist ‘culture industry’, by contrast, suggests that a culture of neoliberal capitalism would be an oxymoron. This perspective is self-defeating, I argue, as we then essentially give up the task of understanding how neoliberalism translated into a pervasive social psychology. Following Richard Sennett’s [2008. The craftsman. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press; 2012. Together. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press] work on craft and cooperation, I examine some elements of such neoliberal culture. Across many contemporary cities, there is a clear trend of local small-scale production that stands at odds with the aesthetics if not the underlying reality of the globalized economy. This suggests that utopian counter-currents to neoliberal governance are better drawn from reconfiguration rather than abandonment of work.

The Automedial Zaniness of Ryan Trecartin

The Automedial Zaniness of Ryan Trecartin

Professing Contradictions: Knowledge Work and the Neoliberal Condition of Academic Workers

In this paper, we will provide an interpretation of the condition of academic labor, which is understood as a particular kind of knowledge work and labor. Our objective is to explore the contradictory condition of academics in terms of class position, production of value and subjectivity, showing both its idiosyncrasies as well as its alignment with the broader experience of working in current post-Fordist capitalism. First, paying particular attention to the US media and communication departments that develop critical cultural scholarship, we reflect on the unresolved impasse deriving from the distinction of mental and manual labor. Second, we describe this profession as being characterized by a contradictory class location and a valorization that relies on a continuous negotiation for better exchange rate between intellectual and financial capital. Third, we consider how such a context subjectively translates in an ever-resolved condition of ‘employability,’ which comprises vocational aspects and the necessity dictated by the hope to reach stability and recognition.

Professing Contradictions: Knowledge Work and the Neoliberal Condition of Academic Workers

In this paper, we will provide an interpretation of the condition of academic labor, which is understood as a particular kind of knowledge work and labor. Our objective is to explore the contradictory condition of academics in terms of class position, production of value and subjectivity, showing both its idiosyncrasies as well as its alignment with the broader experience of working in current post-Fordist capitalism. First, paying particular attention to the US media and communication departments that develop critical cultural scholarship, we reflect on the unresolved impasse deriving from the distinction of mental and manual labor. Second, we describe this profession as being characterized by a contradictory class location and a valorization that relies on a continuous negotiation for better exchange rate between intellectual and financial capital. Third, we consider how such a context subjectively translates in an ever-resolved condition of ‘employability,’ which comprises vocational aspects and the necessity dictated by the hope to reach stability and recognition.

Laziness in Postqualitative Inquiry

Laziness is commonly perceived as lethargy and carries a negative connotation. In this article, I argue to understand laziness as a political stance and suggest that lazy practices can become useful for postqualitative inquiry that seeks to disrupt normative explanations of the world. As political action, laziness, then provides postqualitative inquiry with an additional tool for contributing to social justice via social research. Laziness combats the neoliberal condition in which academic research is situated and might serve as a virtue of postqualitative inquiry.

Distinguishing Financialization from Neoliberalism

Neoliberalism and financialization are not synonymous developments. Financialized nations are directed by particularly financialized epistemologies, cultures, and practices, not only neoliberal ones. In examining the financialization of the UK economy since the mid-1970s, this study discovers a socio-economic shift beyond the broad transition from Keynesianism towards free-market fundamentalism. Economic developments were guided by the very particular economic paradigms, discursive practices, and financial devices of the City of London, as financial elites became influential in the Thatcher governments. Five epistemological elements specific to finance are discussed: the creation of money in financial markets, the transactional focus of finance, the centrality of financial markets to economic management, the orthodoxy of shareholder value, and the intensely micro-economic approach to financial calculation. Identifying these distinctions creates new possibilities for understanding financialization, elites, and the neoliberal condition that brought about both the financial crash of 2007–8 and the political and economic crises that have followed.

Neoliberalism in Higher Education: Can We Understand? Can We Resist and Survive? Can We Become Without Neoliberalism?

Concern regarding capitalism, profiteering, and the corporatization of higher education is not new. A market focus that creates students as consumers and faculty as service providers has dominated global practices in colleges and universities for some time. Most recently, however, this more liberal market-driven focus has actually morphed away from a jurisdictional emphasis (with a potential focus on fairness) to forms of veridiction (neoliberal truth regimes) that legitimate intervention into all aspects of society, the environment, interpretations of the world around us, even into the physical individual bodies of human beings as well as the more-than-human. In higher education, this neoliberal saturation has led to changes that are of seismic proportion. The authors in this special issue describe their own research into, interpretations of, and life experiences as they attempt to survive within this neoliberal condition, and as they also generate counter conducts and ways of thinking without neoliberalism.

Contemporary American Literature as World Literature: Cruel Cosmopolitanism, Cosmopoetics, and the Search for a Worldlier American Novel

AbstractWith reference to Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad (2010), Amy Waldman’s The Submission (2011) and Teju Cole’s Open City (2011), the first two parts of the article attempt a reappraisal of contemporary American literature’s world-literary potential by problematizing cosmopolitanism and neoliberal globalization in close relation to 9/11, the ideal of American multiculture and non-American assertions of alterity. Introducing Lauren Berlant’s Cruel Optimism (2011) and Mitchum Huehls’ After Critique (2016), the third part then shifts its focus onto the crisis of the neoliberal condition as lived in America today. Rather than insisting merely on thematic and demographic reprioritization, Berlant and Huehls are shown to strike at the very core of the literary and the human, exposing the ‘cruelty’ of both the novel and cosmopolitanism as residual expressions of a now anachronistic and ultimately harmful optimism regarding national cohesion and global understanding. The article concludes its search for a worldlier, more cosmopoetic American novel with an analysis of George Saunders’ short story collection Tenth of December (2013).

Shanghai swings: The Hongqiao project and competitive urbanism in the Yangtze River Delta

That cities compete against each other is a cliché of the contemporary neoliberal condition, in which so much focus and energy is expended on a zero-sum-game of trying to outshine imagined rivals. In this article, we examine how this type of competition plays itself out in China, and more specifically in and around Shanghai, in the Yangtze River Delta. We argue that the competition here, principally for foreign and domestic inward investment, is intense and multi-scalar. It is fuelled in particular by China’s nested territorial administrative structure, leading to a situation that eventually involves all scales, from district to central government. We choose therefore the term competitive urbanism to encapsulate these multi-scalar and multi-directional competitive forces. Lying at the centre of this competitive urbanism in the Yangtze River Delta is the giant new Hongqiao project in west Shanghai, second only in expanse and ambition to Pudong. The Shanghai municipal government has promoted this project partly in response to competitive pressures from other cities in the Yangtze River Delta, and partly to swing the dynamic of growth westward within the city and link it better to its hinterland. In this way, Hongqiao is reinforcing and accelerating the competitive urbanism that characterizes China’s most prosperous region.

The Methods of Breaking Bad: Essays on Narrative, Character and EthicsJacobBlevins and DafyddWood, Editors. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2015.

The Methods of Breaking Bad: Essays on Narrative, Character and Ethics Jacob Blevins and Dafydd Wood, Editors. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2015.It is hardly surprising that a series whose finale drew 10.3 million viewers should generate substantial scholarly interest. Already, several collections and numerous articles have emerged from fields as varied as law, criminology, psychiatry, education, and literary/cultural studies. The Methods of Breaking Bad, drawing on an almost equally diverse range of disciplines, is overall a worthy addition to the literature.Most of the contributions echo one another in satisfying ways. Certain themes-masculinity, neo liberalism, and defamiliarization-are interwoven throughout with some of the show's more memorable and/or vexing moments, including the Fly episode, the one-eyed bear sequence, and the iconic opening shot of Walter's trousers in the wind. However, the broad interdisciplinarity sometimes yields mixed results.The richest contributions come from literary scholars, namely Wood, Jeffrey DiLeo, Jason Landrum, and Cheryl E de Is on. Wood offers a comprehensive account of the show's achievements, situating his observations between two no less polarizing figures than the respective fathers of Kulturkritik (Theodor Adorno) and cultural studies (Raymond Williams). DiLeo makes a compelling case for Fly as the thematic center (29) of the show, embedding the latter's critique of neoliberalism within a broader philosophical tradition. Having traced the episode's Nietzschean heritage through Superman and Flies in the MarketPlace, he anchors his reading in the present via the Genealogy of Morals, contrasting indebted with entrepreneurial man (42) and connecting the neoliberal condition to that of existential man, responsible for his freedom and [...] guilty for his fate (44).Landrum's is the densest piece, positing that postpatriarchal (96) male characters inhabit a state of emergency (95) between two Lacanian figures: the symbolic Name-of-the-Father who prohibits the subject's enjoyment and the transgressive primal father (96-8) who commands it. Landrum sees Walter oscillating (99) between these poles in a rich essay that incorporates desire, loss, and drive and situates the masculine dilemma within late capitalism's own injunction to enjoy. The essays on masculinity read in sequence, however, point to one of the book's shortcomings: demanding pieces like Landrum's alternate a little too readily with more accessible ones-in this case Philip Poe's sound, but simpler, reading of Walter as driven by patriarchal ideology in a more general sense.Edelson puts an intriguing spin on the mad scientist motif, contrasting Walter's literary/cinema tic predecessors, in their domination of Foucauldian place, with Walter's own Certeauvian use of space (187). …

Jeffrey R. Higher Education Under Late Capitalism: Identity, Conduct, and the Neoliberal Condition by Di Leo

Reviewed by: Jeffrey R. Higher Education Under Late Capitalism: Identity, Conduct, and the Neoliberal Condition by Di Leo Abbey Zink (bio) Di Leo, Jeffrey R. Higher Education Under Late Capitalism: Identity, Conduct, and the Neoliberal Condition. New York: Palgrave, 2017. Jeffrey R. Di Leo's Higher Education Under Late Capitalism: Identity, Conduct, and the Neoliberal Condition (Palgrave 2017) is the kind of read that lingers long after turning the last page. Di Leo's key points echo in multiple ways: in daily headlines in The Chronicle of Higher Education, in random conversations with faculty and fellow administrators, and in relationship to other recent books about contemporary academe such as Cathy Davidson's The New Education: How to Revolutionize the University to Prepare Students for a World in Flux (Basic Books 2017). While Davidson and others focus primarily on the need for pedagogical innovation, Di Leo takes a clear-eyed view of the academic workplace itself and finds it similarly lacking. In Higher Education Under Late Capitalism, Di Leo examines different aspects of contemporary academe across nine chapters that range in topic from the academic workplace (a term Di Leo objects to in a later chapter, "Punch the Clock") to the impact of big data on academic decision-making. These chapters can be read as individual essays that examine the mostly detrimental effects of neoliberalism on various aspects of faculty life. Indeed, "Breaking Bad," the final chapter, appeared first as part of a collection on the popular television series of the same name. In this chapter, Walter White's progression from promising doctoral student to demoralized high school chemistry teacher to meth manufacturer extraordinaire is presented as a cautionary tale of the psychic costs of neoliberalism on the individual. Di Leo opens Higher Education Under Late Capitalism with a refreshingly honest assertion in "The Two Austerities": Describing the sweeping changes in higher education as a "crisis" is disingenuous. We are more than a decade, for example, into widespread disinvestment in public higher education. The same goes for the rise of the assessment culture and increased focus on outcomes. These issues are no longer new or temporary. As Di Leo eloquently argues, wishful thinking that the fully funded and unfettered academe of the nostalgic past will be restored only delays the deep discussions that need to occur about the not-so-new status quo. What do we need to discuss instead? Di Leo suggests focusing on neoliberal changes that affect the academic workplace in mostly negative ways: Austerity, transparency, happiness (or lack thereof), big data, and student debt. Perhaps counterintuitively, in "Unlit Classrooms," Di Leo argues that transparency is not necessarily a positive. Indeed, he argues, the drive for transparency has given lawmakers and opinion leaders too much information that can be—and is being—used against higher education. Metrics used for formula-based models often lack important context. Here's an example: Is a 70 percent six-year graduation rate good or bad? It [End Page 158] depends (on the institution and its mission). Unfortunately, however, Di Leo asserts, neoliberalism's hammer often does not distinguish among proverbial nails. Context also doesn't often make for catchy headlines. Even so, I struggled with Di Leo's argument in "Unlit Classrooms." No aspect of life is free of accountability. More often than not, the taxpayers who fund public higher education work in private sector jobs that include accountability measures and even time clocks. In that context, tenured and tenure-track faculty still enjoy tremendous freedom in the higher education workplace and are relatively free of the restrictions that govern even private sector professionals' work lives. We forget this distinction at our peril. If we're as good as we say we are (and I believe that we are), perhaps a better approach would be to redouble efforts to advocate for more meaningful and nuanced accountability measures to help us better serve our students and regions. I mean, in academe, we embrace rigorous peer review and that is an intellectual accountability system that doesn't appear to be going away anytime soon either. Moreover, as an administrator, I fear that we haven't been transparent enough with faculty for shared governance to work...