Neoliberal Freedom Research Articles

Voices of neoliberal freedom: convergent perspectives of young Chilean men from contrasting social positions

Voices of neoliberal freedom: convergent perspectives of young Chilean men from contrasting social positions

The Indonesian theater’s laku aktor: a counter discourse to the neoliberal depoliticization of the subject

ABSTRACT Neoliberalism is getting more intense in line with the increasing democratization of Indonesia’s post-Reformation political economy. The discourse of neoliberal freedom that positions individuals as a commodity and an object of administration leads to a process of depoliticization of the subject which is increasingly becoming a serious challenge for the Indonesian norm of collectivity. In moving toward an answer to this challenge, this experience-based article presents the spirit of Laku Aktor in the Indonesian theatrical acting system as a form of political subject category that can be positioned as a counter-discourse to the problem.

Moral Self-Licensing and Incorporated Values: Flawed Common Sense Shaping CEO Activism

The essay contributes to the literature on CEO activism by bridging it with research on moral self-licensing and neoliberalism. Mainly discussed in psychology, moral self-licensing deals with the notion that people access past actions to decide their course. Additionally, under neoliberalism, businesspeople develop a self-indulging view of their role as job-creators, which gives them a sense of entitlement to participate in civil society and share even opinions that may appear questionable. I argue that when celebrity CEOs share their political views in the public arena, they draft the core of their positioning from neoliberal common sense. This common-sense fails to see society as a legitimate concern and frames problems under the logic of egoism and competition that characterizes neoliberal freedom. I finish the discussion by highlighting potential uses for these ideas, moving beyond current debates on CEO activism, by better understanding how businesspeople operate as political actors.

Trumpism and the Dialectic of Neoliberal Reason

Guided by the thesis that fascism was the outcome of a dialectic of instrumental reason, I argue that Trumpism is the result of a dialectic of neoliberal reason. The 2008 crisis revealed that widely distributed consumption could no longer be sustained through escalating debt, as it had been since neoliberalizing reforms in the 1970s. Economic crisis has been interpreted through a culture market in which pseudo-individual consumers choose what hyperreal public they prefer and participate in pseudo-activity through social media. Retreat into insular hyperrealities and hostility to dissonant alternatives reinforce each other in an escalating logic generating partisan incivility and fake news. The de-democratization of the state through subservience to private interests and political dysfunction has combined with the consumer’s uncompromising mentality as a dissatisfied customer to channel politicization into populism. It aggregates negatively through shared dissatisfaction, driving escalating antagonism between technocratic responsibility and populist responsiveness. These escalating economic, cultural, and political contradictions heighten negative “freedom from” restraints while subverting positive “freedom to” relate meaningfully to the world. This intensifies anxieties and receptivity to authoritarianism as a self-defeating escape from neoliberal freedom. Trumpism exploits precarity, corrupts democratic norms, and licenses misdirected aggression. This neoliberal authoritarianism is inverted fascism. Trump’s presidency is more effect than cause.

Historicising Neoliberal Freedom: GB84 and the Politics of Historical Fiction

To imagine alternative futures it is essential to historicise and denaturalise neoliberal iterations of freedom. This paper builds on Wendy Brown’s injunction to ‘undo the inevitability or givenness of the present’ and Jameson’s analysis of historicity as ‘a perception of the present as history […] which somehow defamiliarises it’ produced by representations of past or future. I argue that many recent British historical fictions historicise the ‘inevitability’ and hegemony of neoliberal freedoms by figuring them as the product of sustained political/ideological conflict in the 1980s. This article’s case study is David Peace’s GB84 (2004), which presents the 1984-85 miners’ strike as a civil war in which the battle to define and embody ‘freedom’ is central. However, I argue that the text also produces a highly suggestive contradictory sense of historicity without futurity. It denaturalises the neoliberal present as the product of struggle and structural forces but also tacitly presents the neoliberal triumph of the 1980s as the ‘End of History’, after which political alternatives seem impossible to imagine and subjects remain inescapably determined by neoliberal ‘common sense’. This article argues that the novel is political only in profoundly ambivalent ways but that its aesthetic strategies offer a significant critical intervention which teases out what Jameson terms the ‘limits beyond which [contemporary subjects] cannot think.’

Isaiah Berlin, Michel Foucault and the Politics of Neoliberal Freedom

Starting with a historical inquiry into the notion of freedom as a political concept, in this article I argue that neoliberal freedom has attempted to satisfy demands associated with two quite distinct forms of freedom, representing a new understanding of the concept. Drawing on Isaiah Berlin’s lecture on the two conceptions of liberty – positive freedom to and negative freedom from – I consider their apparent heterogeneity, stemming from alternate relations towards individuals, and forming the basis of opposing political systems. Against this opposition, the neoliberal notion of freedom, as developed in the early works of liberal economists and their vision of a social market economy, is marked by a synthesis of politics and the economy, one that enables social regulation in conformity with market demands. Reflecting Foucault’s argument that power operates through both productive and repressive practices, neoliberal freedom poses a new understanding of subjectivity, where individuals become ‘entrepreneurs of the self’. By connecting personal freedom to rational action in the competitive marketplace, neoliberal culture can claim to grant both negative freedoms from the state and enabling freedoms to be a rational subject. With brief reference to contemporary political events, I point out some of the problems and implications of this form of freedom.

Participation and Decision-Making in Non-Dominant Communities. A Perspective from Civic Republicanism

The article investigates the civic republicanism non-domination approach to freedom, which encompasses power asymmetries. This freedom approach differs from the neo-liberal freedom approach which is essentially about non-interference. Recent jurisprudence from the Inter-American Court of Human Rights and the African Commission on Human and Peoples Rights is analyzed. It is found that the non-domination approach is a relevant approach in order to bridge the many gaps (participation/representation, accountability and protection) vulnerable communities depending upon harvesting of natural resources are struggling with. It is found that while the free, prior and informed consent requirement is not formally recognized in any states' legislation, the specification of the less demanding free, prior and informed consultation is by the IACHR interpreted in a manner which is essentially corresponding to the FPIC requirement.

Participation and Decision-making in Non-dominant Communities. A Perspective from Civic Republicanism

The article investigates the civic republicanism non-domination approach to freedom, which encompasses power asymmetries. This freedom approach differs from the neo-liberal freedom approach which is essentially about non-interference. Recent jurisprudence from the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (iacthr) and the African Commission on Human and Peoples Rights is analysed. It is found that the non-domination approach is a relevant approach in order to bridge the many gaps (participation/representation, accountability and protection) vulnerable communities depending upon harvesting of natural resources are struggling with. It is found that the free, prior and informed consent (fpic) requirement is not formally recognized in only one state’s legislation, the Philippines, specification of the less demanding free, prior and informed consultation is interpreted by the iacthr in a manner which is essentially corresponding to the fpic requirement.

Difference, Becoming, and Interrelatedness: A Material Resistance Becoming

Difference, Becoming, and Interrelatedness: A Material Resistance Becoming Robyn Henderson‐Espinoza Language has by far been used to colonize bodies. In fact, the coloniality of language is one such strategy in controlling bodies. The technology of control in movements that use strategies of resistance is something to which we should pay attention. I am thinking particularly to movements of liberation that are seeking something that is identifiable as “equality.” We see the myth of quality in the homonormative movement that is called marriage equality. That, if we, as a movement (that is mostly based in white liberal gay men and lesbian women of a certain economic class), can establish, and then mobilize, the language of “equality,” it can result in the state‐sanctioned and socially recognizable relationships that are found in coupledom. Yet, what we don't realize is that this language of equality is rooted in white, neoliberal capitalism that privileges the individuality of relationships, not the deep contours of community that have shaped our movements for decades. Stonewall, built on the backs of Transgender folks, remains a touchstone for me, a Latin@ queer Trans*gressive genderqueer. It was the material resistance of radical queers to normalization and the palpability of change that encourages me to this day. And, so, the movement of equality is an affront to real liberation, rooted in the collective consciousness of all, because equality simply roots us all in an economy of coloniality that refuses to take up the politics of resistance and instead uses strategies of 19th liberalism (in particular, individualism) to nourish this movement. If marriage equality is a movement of resistance, then we would see marriage manifested in new and different ways that challenge the status quo, and a movement that seeks to disrupt the economic structures that keep marriage in a very stable state‐recognizable expression. Instead, the state only recognizes a two‐person coupled unit. How does this state‐sponsored recognition encourage equality? Furthermore, how does the rhetoric of equality re‐inscribe the privileges that have been a part of state‐sanctioned marriages for centuries and in turn normalize the marriages of LGBT persons as part of the norm that was created? Here, I am focusing on the speech acts that emerge as part of marriage—a particular politics that focuses on unity and in theory, “equality.” When, in fact, what the discourse of marriage does is create an internal hierarchy whereby the state becomes the governing body of the couple, and the most dominant person in the couple becomes the spokesperson. Does the marriage equality movement realize this is what they are promoting? How is marriage equality a movement of resistance? I argue that it is not! I argue that marriage equality, couched in the language of white, neoliberal freedom whose outcome is marriage, is really a very particular iteration of white, upper‐middle class “liberation” tactics that are only meant for a certain economic class and racial structure. I can go further and suggest that it re‐inscribes the logic of white supremacy. It is assimilationist politics that I think are particularly antithetical to the history of the LGBTQ+ movements that have grown out of a sense of radical separatist moments that privilege, in philosophical terms, difference and becoming. I do not think that marriage equality is for all, or has the ability to liberate us all. It privileges the few, as seen in the cases that were presented to the U.S. Supreme Court and other U.S. state supreme courts. And, so, if marriage equality is actually harmful to the LGBTQ+ community, in that it promotes a universalizing reality of socially recognizable and state‐sanctioned relationships that is palatable to the dominant group, then can the LGBTQ+ movement reclaim its politics of resistance and struggle for freedom in the creation of a movement of radical difference, or a return to radical difference? If there is a word or gesture for which I would advocate, it would be that of a return to the politics of radical difference. What difference establishes (in non‐foundational ways) is a multiplicity through diffraction. Diffraction is that particular method of combining disparate strands of thinking and being (and becoming) and...

Margaret Atwood's dystopic fiction and the contradictions of neoliberal freedom

Margaret Atwood's MadAddam trilogy marks an emergent literary critique of neoliberalism which has emerged over the last 25 years, primarily in dystopian and science fiction. Rather than calling out neoliberalism for a hyporcitical statism, or for creating a kind of unfreedom all to easily envisioned as dictatorship, she shows us the tyranny inherent in its utopian idea of freedom, which ultimately restricts human action through diffuse channels based in quotidian realms. As such, the trilogy parts company with the earlier antifascist analytic that marked her earlier work The Handmaid's Tale. While affirming the didactic value of speculative fiction as a means of contesting neoliberal utopianism, this article also contends that if one takes Atwood's critiques too literally, they – like the wider popular tendency they inscribe – cause us to underestimate the continued importance of the centralised nation-state in maintaining capitalist social relations.

El baile de los que sobran. Los estudiantes secundarios chilenos y la posibilidad del desacuerdo

The article examines the high school students’ protest against the neoliberal conception of education during the first period of President Michelle Bachelet government. Specifically, I analyze how the new generation of young Chileans critically uses and produces pop culture — photoblogs, posters, and stencils — in order to express disagreement with the mercantilist approach to education and the very concept of neoliberal freedom and equality.Keywords: Chilean youth, street art, neoliberalism

Perverse Tongues, Postsocialist Translations

Challenging the prevailing use of the term postsocialism as merely another designation for former Second World spaces, “Perverse Tongues, Postsocialist Translations” works toward articulating it instead as a critical and analytical lens on the current global condition. The “postsocialist” here marks modes of personhood and locution that are perverse with respect to the reproductive aims of the post-1989 order. Deriving from the socialist past but not reducible either to its official doctrines or to its official dissident cultures, these modes persist in the present and disable, however momentarily, the apparently closed language of neoliberal freedom and progress. The essay turns to figurations of Eastern Europe’s contemporary predicament found in Michał Witkowski’s novel Lovetown (2004), which tracks an aging queer community for whom the transition to capitalism and liberal democracy brought not emancipation but the threat of catastrophe; and in Szabolcs Hajdu’s magical-realist film Bibliothèque Pascal (2010), which tells the story of a woman who returns from working in an elite brothel in the UK. What makes these texts apt reflections on the effects of the neoliberal order and indices of a more general global condition is not merely the social and economic marginality of these subjects. As they resist both the liberal dream of common humanity that might be achieved through recognition and the neoliberal dream of prosperity that is indifferent to the human as such, the novel and the film call for practices of reading and spectatorship that would be attentive to subjective and temporal fractures within the putatively unified global present.

Social Democracy or Neoliberal Freedom? Globalization and Contemporary Chinese Intellectual Politics

This paper intends to review contemporary Chinese intellectuals' cultural politics. It ties in the discussion of this subject with the ongoing development of China's political economy and social complex. After briefly reviewing the evolution of the ‘reform and open-up’ policies to delineate a general map of the intensifying ideological chaos, it explores the debate between the two major intellectual cliques, a tension between the pursuit of social democracy and that of neoliberal freedom. In the next section, the validity of two conservative theories offered by intellectuals to solve the legitimacy crisis of the state is analyzed. It is concluded with a discussion of the characteristics of the intellectual politics in this period—a gradual turning to a pursuit of ‘new socialism’ envisaged by the new left and the ‘conservative’ wing, and a disenchantment towards the neoliberal agenda by the broad populace.

“My grain of sand for society”: neoliberal freedom, language learning, and the circulation of ideologies of national belonging

This article explores the ways in which neoliberal discourses of individual freedom and choice come to typify Mexican migrants’ talk about what it means to be living in the USA and about themselves as learners of English. Interviews with migrants about the English language program Inglés Sin Barreras [English without Barriers] provide the context for these discursive displays. Inglés Sin Barreras is advertized repeatedly throughout the day on Spanish language TV, and it is an English language program that comprises 12 books, workbooks, CDs, and DVDs. Inglés Sin Barreras acts as a storehouse for ideas about personal freedom, citizenship, and the importance of English in belonging to the USA as a nation.

Putting the Market in Its Places

Putting the Market in Its Places Cotten Seiler (bio) A Brief History of Neoliberalism. By David Harvey. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. 256 pages. $40.00 (cloth). $19.99 (paper). Cultural Citizenship: Cosmopolitanism, Consumerism, and Television in a Neoliberal Age. By Toby Miller. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2007. 248 pages. $71.50 (cloth). $24.95 (paper). Desiring China: Experiments in Neoliberalism, Sexuality, and Public Culture. By Lisa Rofel. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007. 264 pages. $79.95 (cloth). $22.95 (paper). The term neoliberalism groups a number of dispositions that have been kicking around since at least the dawn of capitalism, but have insinuated themselves in the political and economic order with a particular vigor over the past four decades. On a general level, neoliberal rhetoric celebrates a starkly minimal, market-based species of individual freedom and disdains most forms of binding collective association and institutional authority, except those forms that protect and advance the formal conditions for neoliberal freedom—such as the courts and the military. Deriving from the contrarian writings of midcentury economists such as Alexander Rüstow, Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich von Hayek, and Milton Friedman, neoliberalism is characterized by its defenders as the return to primacy of the “classical” liberalism of Adam Smith, William Graham Sumner, and other theorists of the first and second industrial revolutions, who advocated the autonomy of the capitalist market from government influence; hence its association with “conservative” thought. Neoliberals herald this ostensible restoration as sweeping away the aberrant Progressive and Keynesian eras, during which a redistributive and therapeutic ethos guided state intervention into the matrix of social, economic, and political activity known as society. The twentieth-century events and conditions in the global north that made neoliberalism possible were the New Deal’s rescue of industrial and finance capitalism, the warfare state’s massive infusions of capital into domestic and [End Page 943] foreign economies, the formal delegitimation of imperialism and white supremacy, the state’s periodic efforts to meliorate the most destabilizing forms of poverty and inequality, the paranoid politics of the cold war, the social discord and economic malaise of the 1970s, and the collapse of the Soviet Union. Seeking legitimacy and institutional influence, U.S. and British proponents of neoliberalism in business, politics, academia, and religion used the racial, class, and gender rebellions of the 1960s and ’70s to construct a relatively coherent ideology that coded the reactionary disaffection of the majority in a seemingly innocuous vocabulary (“bootstraps,” “self-empowerment,” “responsibility,” and, of course, “freedom”) that obscured the retrenchment of various forms of privilege. By the early 1980s, apostles of neoliberalism had been elected or appointed to high office in regimes in Great Britain, the United States, Chile, and, ironically, China, and ensconced in powerful nongovernmental organizations such as the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the International Monetary Fund. Developed in northern Europe, distilled at the University of Chicago, neoliberalism was imposed first on the global south (and unraveled there first, by the early 2000s’ Latin American “left turn”), at the moment of imperialism’s evolution from the old model of occupation and administration to a more recent strategy of the cultivation of client states. Neoliberalism’s visible economic agenda of privatization, deregulation, casualization of labor, and excision of state expenditure not tied to empire building, enforcement of property law, or punishment forms a sort of façade for an even more transformational intervention at the level of subjectivity. This enterprise could be glimpsed in British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s then-bizarre assertion in 1987 that “there is no such thing as ‘society.’” Supplanting “society,” evoking as it does discernable, superindividual structures of causality and obligation, is the preferred reification of neoliberals, “the market,” which admits of no solidarity but the aggregated transactions of free, self-interested individuals whose successes and failures owe only to themselves. Subscribing to and conceiving of oneself as inhabiting this utopian revision of the world is a highly consequential act of subjectification approaching the religious. As Thatcher, evidently channeling Marx and Foucault, asserted, neoliberal economics were ultimately a means “to change the heart and soul.”1 Given such an end, it is not surprising that so many academics across the...

New generation’s career aspirations and new ways of marginalization in a postindustrial economy

The 1990s, a decade of democratic advances and consumption euphoria in South Korea, heralded a new wind called ‘neoliberal education’. It is within this historical juncture that I conducted an ethnographic research on low‐income youths who had dropped out of mainstream high schools. While I investigated these youths’ educational and career aspirations, I examined how discourses in neoliberal freedom and free marketization shape (and are shaping) these youths’ self‐fashioning. Central to my analysis is how this process of identity construction is intersected with class marginality. A predominate number of youths in my research express their preference in service sector and/or entertainment industries. The paper addresses how neoliberal discourses and consumerism ;rhetoric are negotiated and transformed in youth’s narratives on aspirations. The analysis speaks to the ideological pitfall of neoliberalism, echoing critical scholars’ thesis that neoliberalistic education with free market principles perpetuated and broadened existing inequalities.