Paige Sweet Week 8

In his piece on neoliberalism, James Ferguson (2009) has pinpointed some critiques of the literature on neoliberalism that often difficult to articulate. One of his central concerns is how to address neoliberalism as a political project without giving it a mystical, all-encompassing power, capable of structuring and defining everything in the modern world. However, I think Ferguson focuses too much on neoliberal policies in his analysis, while devaluing the impact of those policies’ accompanying discourses and their interpellation of subjects. It makes sense that social policies developed within a neoliberal framework will include aspects that both benefit and harm populations – they may provide resources, but they also invest subjects with amplified self-responsibilization. And that self-responsibilization is linked to other dominant formations, such as biomedicine (i.e. the mandate of “good health”) or proper feminine embodiment, for example. In my own work, I try to weigh carefully the benefits and dangers of biomedicalization, or the transformation of domestic violence into a diagnosis/disease. This task of “weighing” speaks to Ferguson’s critique of scholarship on neoliberalism because it includes both an understanding of the material benefits doled out to patients (victims may access domestic violence resources directly from the hospital) while also attending to the dangers of turning the social problem of domestic violence into an “objective” medical condition.

When Ferguson focuses on policies at the expense of neoliberal discourses and their constitution of particular types of subjects, we see a washing-away of radical politics, much like we see in the biomedicalization of domestic violence. We can’t talk about patriarchy when abuse is a medical condition, because it is seen as having a biomedical etiology and treatment solution. Similarly, how can we imagine different types of communities and/or political-economic structures when we resign ourselves to living through neoliberal discourses of social wellbeing? I agree with Ferguson that we should not characterize neoliberalism as an “evil entity” or as having some sort of preformed “unity.” After all, it should be our task to explicate neoliberalism, to track its movements and its disjunctures and its trespasses. We are not dealing with a preexisting structure, something that sits still in order for us to probe its contours. I do not think this means, however, that we should abandon analyses that hold both two contradictory elements in our analyses at the same time: the necessary resources provided by some newer neoliberal public-private types of arrangements and the destructiveness and ubiquity of neoliberal discourse. The question becomes, how can we do critical studies of neoliberal formations without giving it a mystical power? How can we not take neoliberalism for granted before we ever explain what it’s doing and where to find it in our particular cases?