Culture & Subjectivity Course Syllabus - Spring 2022 (original) (raw)
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Culture & Subjectivity Course Syllabus - Spring 2021
This is a course about neoliberalism, its social and psychological consequences, and possible alternative conceptions of the social and forms of subjectivity in the 21st century. Neoliberalism is a contested signifier that designates both an economic program and a cascade of cultural changes that began coalescing and accelerating in the early 1980’s and has continued to exert an influence that has only recently been challenged by the resurgence of nationalism ushered in by the Trump era which has reverberated across the globe. Neoliberalism has had widespread ramifications not only as an economic doctrine that spurred and intensified globalization but also as a cultural ideology that has influenced self-concept and modes of social relating. This course focuses on the concept of human subjectivity and how subjectivity appears within a neoliberal horizon. The critical psychologist Thomas Teo states, "society, culture, and history provide forms (molds) of subjectivity, whereby (developing) individuals have the agency to sometimes choose, expand or change forms, and in rare circumstances, they may even be able to transcend these forms. Under normal circumstances, however, humans adapt, (ful)fill, and actively 'suture' into these forms, allowing for variations and new actualizations." To elucidate the current cultural molds informing neoliberal subjectivity, the historical development of neoliberal economic doctrine and its implementations will be studied, followed by an examination of neoliberal cultural products (e.g. Serial TV and Social Media) considering both their content and form. Finally, recent reactionary phenomena will be considered in relation to the effects of neoliberalism as well as what social and subjective alternatives exist within our current indeterminate conjuncture.
Neoliberal Culture / the Cultures of Neoliberalism
2015
This introductory essay situates the contributors’ articles in relation to the over-arching questions for this special issue: how has neoliberalism impacted on culture, and how is neoliberalism thought from cultural perspectives; or, what happens to the idea of culture under neoliberalism? We acknowledge extensive disagreement among commentators as to what neoliberalism is, its coherence as a concept, and its duration. We trace the different values attributed to neoliberalism, from social democratic inflections that decry growing disparities in wealth distribution, to those perspectives that emphasise its promise of self-determination and the individual, social and ethical potentials of self-determination and consumer choice in market relations. Noting that neoliberalism is a term used to explain wide range of contemporary cultural phenomena, we argue that it maintains enough coherence as a project to act as an influential force on material life, even if it operates in some spheres ...
Putting neoliberalism in its time and place: a response to the debate
The debate in this journal on neoliberalism neatly illustrates Nietzsche’s proposition that ‘all concepts in which an entire process is semiotically concentrated defy definition; only something which has no history can be defined’ (Nietzsche 1994 [1887]: 53). This claim is implicit in Daniel Goldstein’s remarks about the ‘surprisingly thin’ trope of ‘actually existing neoliberalism’ and, more pointedly, about how many anthropologists invoke neoliberalism ‘as a sort of explanatory catholicon’ (2012: 304). Even authors who accept that neoliberalism is a valid analytical object still differ over the entry points they adopt to establish its essential qualities – referring variously to a particular genealogy, a particular time period, a particular case or set of cases or a particular policy field. Others deny that neoliberalism has a quintessential form, insisting on its diverse origins, continuous reinvention, diverse local instantiations or variegated nature, without, however, asking what this polymorphic, even polymorphous, ‘it’ might comprise. The result is that neoliberalism tends to become a ‘chaotic concept’. In this context, it is interesting to note that this term is more often used by outsiders and critics of neoliberalism than it is by the advocates and supporters of the ideas, institutions, strategies and policies that this slippery concept is said to denote. For these reasons, as some contributions to this debate also indicate, neoliberalism may serve more as a socially constructed term of struggle (Kampfbegriff) that frames criticism and resistance than as a rigorously defined concept that can guide research in anthropology and other social sciences.
Università Ca' Foscari Venezia, 2016
Starting from the banal observation that the optimistic promises of our globalized neoliberal society clash with the undeniable truth of rampant economic inequality, poverty, anxiety and insecurity; and from the fact that few individuals manage to “success” in the ruthless and all-embracing mechanisms of competition and workfare of enterprises, I investigate what exactly is meant by “neoliberalism”. Thus, in the first part of this dissertation, I examine the most important theories and interpretations of neoliberalism. I acknowledge that the neo-Marxist and the neo-Foucauldian accounts are the most relevant interpretations of neoliberalism; yet I argue that they are not entirely compatible with each other. I underline the limits of several neo-Marxist accounts and support the hypothesis that a neo-Foucauldian perspective has more explanatory power as it discloses several peculiar points of neoliberalism. In particular, I argue that the Foucauldian analysis of the human capital theory paves the way for one of the most effective critique of neoliberalism today. In the second part of this dissertation, adopting a neo-Foucauldian perspective, I advance a critique of the neoliberal subjectivity, mainly analysing the field of contemporary Human Resource Management. Finally, in the third part, I acknowledge that the analyses I carried out in the second part of my dissertation, focused on the “microphysics” side of power, need to be constantly verified by concrete empirical in-depth macro-analyses of the society. In this sense, I recover the work of Antonio Gramsci and try to link it with that of Michel Foucault.
Based on a Neo-Sprangerian geisteswissenschaftlichen approach to forms of life in Western cultures, and drawing on humanities-based ideas about personality, a critical-hermeneutic description of a neoliberal form of life and its corresponding form of subjectivity is presented. It is argued that the neoliberal Lebensform has become dominant in western and globalized cultures and is colonizing all spheres of physical and mental life. In the neoliberal form of subjectivity, the self becomes central, but in a way that the distinction between an ego and the self are no longer relevant. Neoliberal thinking is reduced to utilitarian, perceptual thinking in all domains of life from work, to interaction, and to identity. Feeling is considered relevant, much more than thinking, and is used to manage stress while aiming for forms of happiness, which are core to a neoliberal form of subjectivity. It is argued that agency is reduced to self- and family-interests while consequences for the conduct of life are presented. Concepts such as a new nihilism, the reduction of individuality, and the (im)possibility of resistance in the overarching neoliberal form of life, are discussed.
Why "Neoliberalism?" On Critique and Method [Workshop Agenda and Concept Note]
Over the last thirty years a growing body of scholarship across the social sciences has deployed and developed the concept and terminology of neoliberalism. Since exploding in the early 1990s, its usage has not only surpassed related terms (“libertarian” “Washington Consensus” “financialization”) in academic research but has enjoyed exceptional success in public discourses as well (Venugopal 2015) The term has been identified with a variety of large-scale processes and seemingly contradictory trends. As a policy agenda of liberalization and regulatory retrenchment, its implementation over the last thirty years has entailed a massive increase in the volume and complexity of legal rules (Vogel 1996, Braithwaite 2008). As a discourse rooted in the valorization of individual freedom, it has facilitated the consolidation of collective power and, in some contexts, justified the expansion of incarceration and surveillance (Brown 2015, Harcourt 2011) As a political project associated most often with Reagan and Thatcher's efforts to lower taxes and weaken labour power (Harvey 2005), its advance has coincided with a paradoxical combination of rising national inequality measures and a flattening of the global inequality distribution (Milanovic 2012). What initially appeared as disagreements about the origins and causes of the neoliberal ascendance have now come into view as more fundamental divides over the nature of the concept itself. For some, neoliberalism is a set of economic policies enacted all over the world since the 1970s; for Marxists, the result of the resurgent power of global financial elites; for readers of Foucault, it names transformations of political rationality and subjectivity corresponding to an economization of all social life. (Flew 2014) These conceptualizations are nonetheless united by an implied periodization. Neoliberalism promises to mark off the present from the past, emphasizes the underlying continuity of capitalism, and evokes nostalgia for a post-WWII Golden Age. Given this unifying thread, differences in usage may reflect deeper differences about the salient aspects of social order, the nature of social change and proper governance of political order. Thus, debates over “neoliberalism” may serve as a proxy for more fundamental divisions over theory and norm, method and discipline. Recent years have witnessed a number of countervailing trends. A growing genre of research has developed critiques of the concept's theoretical fungibility and drawn on the multiplicity of its valences in practice to seriously question its explanatory value. (Venugopal 2015, Boas & Gan-Morse 2009) Research depending on the concept has nonetheless continued to intensify, and to jump further across disciplinary lines, becoming a centre point of symposia and special collections in a number of fields (Grewal Purdy 2014, Birch Springer 2016) Finally, scholars have increasingly reached into the past, long before the crisis of the 1970s, to find institutional, philosophical and conceptual precursors of today's neoliberal practices. (Gane 2012, Kipnis 2008) In the context of these trends, this workshop offers a momentary opportunity for methodological reflexivity. In an interdisciplinary group that includes historians and sociologists, legal scholars and moral philosophers, political scientists and others, participants will be invited to present, reframe and contextualize their own work in a way that reflects on the analytical, normative and critical value of “neoliberalism.” What insights does the term bring to sites of research left undertheorized by other concepts? Beyond naming and identifying aspects of the world, concepts draw things together and keep other things from view. What analytical connections does “neoliberalism” facilitate, and what processes does it obscure? What new spaces of understanding does the concept open up, and how? On the other hand, what are the risks and pitfalls of leaning too heavily on the term? When might it be time, to borrow a phrase, “to take a break from neoliberalism?” (c.f. Halley 2006). By providing a setting to compare approaches across methodological differences, we hope to not only map the uses of neoliberalism (Ferguson 2010), but to learn something about the origins of the present and, more broadly, about the promises of critically engaged social science.