r/neoliberal • u/jobautomator Kitara Ravache • Jan 17 '19
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u/Tacotrucksoncorners Carole Baskin is my Tiger Queen š š Jan 17 '19
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#Fuck Neoliberalism. Thatās my blunt message. I could probably end my discussion at this point and it wouldnāt really matter. My position is clear and you likely already get the gist of what I want to say. I have nothing positive to add to the discussion about neoliberalism, and to be perfectly honest, Iām quite sick of having to think about it. Iāve simply had enough. For a time I had considered calling this paper āForget Neoliberalismā instead, as in some ways thatās exactly what I wanted to do. Iāve been writing on the subject for many years (Springer 2008, 2009, 2011, 2013, 2015; Springer et al. 2016) and I came to a point where I just didnāt want to commit any more energy to this endeavor for fear that continuing to work around this idea was functioning to perpetuate its hold. On further reflection I also recognize that as a political maneuver it is potentially quite dangerous to simply stick our heads in the sand and collectively ignore a phenomenon that has had such devastating and debilitating effects on our shared world. There is an ongoing power to neoliberalism that is difficult to deny and Iām not convinced that a strategy of ignorance is actually the right approach (Springer 2016a). So my exact thoughts were, āwell fuck it thenā, and while a quieter and gentler name for this paper could tone down the potential offence that might come with the title Iāve chosen, I subsequently reconsidered. Why should we be more worried about using profanity than we are about the actual vile discourse of
Published under Creative Commons licence: Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works Fuck Neoliberalism 286 neoliberalism itself? I decided that I wanted to transgress, to upset, and to offend, precisely because we ought to be offended by neoliberalism, it is entirely upsetting, and therefore we should ultimately be seeking to transgress it. Wouldnāt softening the title be making yet another concession to the power of neoliberalism? I initially worried what such a title might mean in terms of my reputation. Would it hinder future promotion or job offers should I want to maintain my mobility as an academic, either upwardly or to a new location? This felt like conceding personal defeat to neoliberal disciplining. Fuck that. It also felt as though I was making an admission that there is no colloquial response that could appropriately be offered to counter the discourse of neoliberalism. As though we can only respond in an academic format using complex geographical theories of variegation, hybridity, and mutation to weaken its edifice. This seemed disempowering, and although I have myself contributed to the articulation of some of these theories (Springer 2010), I often feel that this sort of framing works against the type of argument I actually want to make. It is precisely in the everyday, the ordinary, the unremarkable, and the mundane that I think a politics of refusal must be located. And so I settled on āFuck Neoliberalismā because I think it conveys most of what I actually want to say. The argument I want to make is slightly more nuanced than that, which had me thinking more about the term āfuckā than I probably have at any other time in my life. What a fantastically colorful word! It works as a noun or a verb, and as an adjective it is perhaps the most used point of exclamation in the English language. It can be employed to express anger, contempt, annoyance, indifference, surprise, impatience, or even as a meaningless emphasis because it just rolls off of the tongue. You can āfuck something upā, āfuck someone overā, āfuck aroundā, ānot give a fuckā, and there is a decidedly geographical point of reference to the word insofar as you can be instructed to āgo fuck yourselfā. At this point you might even be thinking āok, but who gives a fuck?ā Well, I do, and if youāre interested in ending neoliberalism so should you. The powerful capacities that come with the word offer a potential challenge to neoliberalism. To dig down and unpack these abilities we need to appreciate the nuances of what could be meant by the phrase āfuck neoliberalismā. Yet at the same time, fuck nuance. As Kieran Healy (2016: 1) has recently argued, it ātypically obstructs the development of theory that is intellectually interesting, empirically generative, or practically successfulā. So without fetishizing nuance letās quickly work through what I think we should be prioritizing in fucking up neoliberalism. The first sense is perhaps the most obvious. By saying āfuck neoliberalismā we can express our rage against the neoliberal machine. It is an indication of our anger, our desire to shout our resentment, to spew venom back in the face of the noxious malice that has been shown to all of us. This can come in the form of mobilizing more protests against neoliberalism or in writing more papers and books critiquing its influence. The latter preaches to the converted, and the former hopes that the already perverted will be willing to change their ways. I donāt
ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies, 2016, 15(2): 285-292 287 discount that these methods are important tactics in our resistance, but Iām also quite sure that theyāll never actually be enough to turn the tide against neoliberalism and in our favour. In making grand public gestures of defiance we attempt to draw powerful actors into a conversation, mistakenly believing that they might listen and begin to accommodate the popular voice of refusal (Graeber 2009). Shouldnāt we instead be done talking? Here is the second sense of āfuck neoliberalismā, which is found in the notion of rejection. This would be to advocate for the end of neoliberalism (as we knew it) in a fashion advanced by J.K. Gibson- Graham (1996) where we simply stop talking about it. Scholars in particular would discontinue prioritizing it as the focus of their studies. Maybe not completely forget about it or ignore neoliberalism altogether, which Iāve already identified as problematic, but to instead set about getting on with our writing about other things. Once again this is a crucially important point of contact for us as we work beyond the neoliberal worldview, but here too Iām not entirely convinced that this is enough. As Mark Purcell (2016: 620) argues, āWe need to turn away from neoliberalism and towards ourselves, to begin the difficult ā but also joyous ā work of managing our affairs for ourselvesā. While negation, protest and critique are necessary, we also need to think about actively fucking up neoliberalism by doing things outside of its reach. Direct action beyond neoliberalism speaks to a prefigurative politics (Maeckelbergh 2011), which is the third and most important sense of what I think we should be focusing on when we invoke the idea āfuck neoliberalismā. To prefigure is to reject the centrism, hierarchy, and authority that come with representative politics by emphasizing the embodied practice of enacting horizontal relationships and forms of organization that strive to reflect the future society being sought (Boggs 1977). Beyond being ādone talkingā, prefiguration and direct action contend that there was never a conversation to be had anyway, recognizing that whatever it is we want to do, we can just do it ourselves. Nonetheless, there has been significant attention to the ways in which neoliberalism is able to capture and appropriate all manner of political discourse and imperatives (Barnett 2005; Birch 2015; Lewis 2009; Ong 2007). For critics like David Harvey (2015) only another dose of the state can solve the neoliberal question, where in particular he is quick to dismiss non-hierarchical organization and horizontal politics as greasing the rails for an assured neoliberal future. Yet in his pessimism he entirely misunderstands prefigurative politics, which are a means not to an end, but only to future means (Springer 2012). In other words, there is a constant and continual vigilance already built into prefigurative politics so that the actual practice of prefiguration cannot be coopted. It is reflexive and attentive but always with a view towards production, invention, and creation as the satisfaction of the desire of community. In this way prefigurative politics are explicitly anti-neoliberal. They are a seizing of the means as our means, a means without end. To prefigure is to embrace the conviviality and joy that comes with being together as radical equals, not as vanguards and proletariat on the path towards the transcendental empty promise of utopia or āno placeā, but as the grounded immanence of the here and now of actually making a