Commentary
Neoliberalism in denial
Simon Springer
University of Victoria, Canada
Abstract
In responding to Weller and O’Neill’s ‘Argument with Neoliberalism’, I question the novelty of theirapproach and the problematics of denying the critical power and associated violence that neoliberalismcontinues to wield in our world. While they do raise an important epistemic challenge, a closer reading of the geographical literature on neoliberalism reveals that Weller and O’Neill tend to paint with the broadstrokes of caricature. Notions of neoliberalism as inevitable or as a paradigmatic construct have long beendebunkedbyhumangeographersreplacedbyproteannotionsofvariegation,hybridity,andarticulationwithexisting political economic circumstances. A discursive understanding of neoliberalism further reveals it asan assemblage and thus to hold neoliberalism to a sense of purity is little more than a straw man argument.Despitethepositivedesiretoallow spaceforalternatives,WellerandO’Neillunfortunatelyconstructtheirargument in such a way that positions it as part of an emerging genre of ‘neoliberalism in denial’.
Keywords
articulation, denial, developmental state, discourse, neoliberalism, violence
The thing about denial is that it doesn’t feel like denialwhen it’s going on.Georgina Kleege (quoted in Kudlick, 2011: n.p.)
Introduction
Academic trends are a curious phenomenon. Thereare ebbs and flows to scholarly attention as individ-ual researchers hedge their bets on what will be invogue tomorrow, lest we be accused of treadingwater. I have no misgivings for such ongoing move-mentsinourcollectiveintellectualmusings,asitisa process of vital importance. The practice of chang-ing paradigms moves our theorizations forward toenable the exploration of new philosophical vistas,and as the world continues to turn, empirical con-texts are never content to sit still while we retreatto the halls of the academy to write about what’sgoing on. By the time we have formulated an opin-ion, written those ideas into an article, jumped through the hoops of peer review, corrected proofs,and finally seen our hard work come to fruition inthe form of a published article or book, the world wewerewritingabouthasradicallychangedandour analyses are always and inevitably a case of ‘too lit-tle, too late’. On a personal level, I also write from aradical perspective, which means I have an innatedistaste for orthodoxy. When certain ideas becometoo entrenched within the academy, I relish theopportunity to find cracks in the facade of invinci- bility. Yet granted all of this, I still find the denial
Corresponding author:
Simon Springer, Department of Geography, University of Victoria, Victoria, BC V8P 5C2, Canada.Email: simonspringer@gmail.com
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of neoliberalism a very peculiar endeavor. Thereremains a critical purchase to the theorization of neoliberalism and its application to empirical con-texts, wherein despite a very important need for cri-tique, what is also required, is a continuing sense of watchfulness for the ongoing power and influenceof neoliberalism in our world. Weller and O’Neill’s(2014) ‘Argument with Neoliberalism’ thus repre-sents the latest salvo in what has become somethingof a genre in its own right, a process of denial inhuman geography that began with Barnett’s (2005)‘there’s no such thing’, continued with Castree’s(2006) ‘necessary illusions’, and has taken on a newcharacter with Birch’s (2014) ‘we’ve never been’.
The developmental languageof denial
If Weller and O’Neill’s ‘starting point is language’,it is curious that they didn’t engage the discursiveargument I advanced in a recent article called ‘Neo-liberalism as discourse’ (Springer, 2012b). Giventhat this article was a sustained effort to use lan-guage as a means to demonstrate the resonances of various interpretations of neoliberalism and the cir-cuitous functioning of certain ideas that might bequalified as ‘neoliberal’, it seems an unusual over-sight. In particular, Weller and O’Neill are attentiveto the various understandings of neoliberalism(hegemony, governmentality, policy, and program),which I similarly employ in my discursive reading,yet they come to a very different conclusionthan I do, arguing that these different understand-ings cannot be unified. The possibility of such a‘grand combination’ is summarily dismissed as an‘Orwellian fiction’ that would supposedly ‘defy allwe know about the presence of contestation and resistance in all social and material processes’(Weller and O’Neill, 2014). Setting aside the factthat recent intelligence leaks have revealed theOrwellian
fact
of the contemporary moment(Springer et al., 2012), my account of neoliberal-ism as discourse demonstrates that different inter- pretations can actually be brought into productiveconversation. So to the question of does
neoliber-alism-in-general
even exist?
the answer I would venture is ‘yes’, but like anythingwe can name, and even things we can touch
. . .
theyare always and only understood as representationsthrough the performative repercussions of discourse.Some readers might contend that this caveat amountsto a ‘no’, and they would be correct if ‘neoliberalismin general’ is understood as a ‘real word’ referent,something I have been arguing against. Again, therejection of an assumed ‘real world’ does not refuseacertainmaterialitytoneoliberalism orother phenom-ena, but instead recognizes materialism in the Fou-cauldian sense of an ‘archeology of knowledge’whereby discourse and practice, or theory and event, become inseparable. (Springer, 2012b: 142)
Accordingly,whenconsidered as a discursivefor-mation,wherebythevariousunderstandingsofneoli- beralism are read as an ongoing reconstitution of a particular political rationality (Brown, 2003), we areabletorecognizeneoliberalismasageneralformthatallows for both comparison and potential solidarities between various contexts. Far from being the antith-esis of Weller and O’Neill’s account, I actually seesignificant parallels insofar as neoliberalism as dis-course is a type of ‘global imaginary’. But if suchanimaginaryisafabrication,andfabricationissome-thingthatismade,theninordertoimproveourstrug-gles against neoliberalism we have to have a firmunderstanding of the ways in which neoliberalismis
made flesh
, wherein the slippery character of theidea is properly accounted for:
recognizing neoliberalism as representation stillrequires social struggle. Moreover
. . .
the buildingof transnational solidarity through a ‘larger conversa-tion’ is also needed, because such activity hastens the pace at which neoliberalism may recede into historicalobscurity to be replaced with a new discourse, a novelrepresentation that we can hope produces a more ega-litarian social condition. Contestation actively workstoward and opens pathways to achieving this goal(Purcell,2008;Springer,2010a,2011b),andwhiledis-course may for a time reinscribe the power of particu-lar logics, Foucault (1990) insists that no discourse isguaranteed. (Springer, 2012b: 142)
Thus, we can recognize that although particular discourses may prevail to varying degrees acrossdifferent geographical contexts, there remains an
Springer
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ever-present potential for meanings to shift and for subaltern discourses to disrupt the existingorthodoxy.Although providing qualification to their usage,I’m further unsettled by Weller and O’Neill’s useof the label ‘developmental state’ for Australia. Not because I think this is an inappropriate description,and certainly they make a strong case for how thislabel actually fits. Rather, I’m troubled by the lack of reflexivity for how this categorization, which isforever associated with the Southeast Asian context,may actually accommodate neoliberalism (Park et al., 2011; Springer, 2009a). I don’t think Weller and O’Neill have spent enough time considering theresonances that might conceivably be drawn out between ‘developmental’ and ‘neoliberal’ states,and instead, it seems that they are content to employa very odd strategy: they stretch the boundaries of one political economic descriptor to contest thestretched boundaries of another political economicdescriptor. Of course, political economic contextsare never ‘hard and fast’, ‘this or that’ scenarios, butrather they always express a shifting ‘both/and’quality that can never be fully known or pinned down. To suggest otherwise is to invoke the theore-tical crutch of an Archimedean point, as though onecould ever attain an objective or omniscient per-spective on the entire goings on in any given society(Springer, 2014). Thus, we can demonstrate or refute any manner of characterization, picking and choosing our examples carefully. This critiqueworks both ways. The main point though, which isentirely overlooked by Weller and O’Neill, is thatneoliberalism remains a ‘radical political slogan’(Peck, 2004: 403), and when we engage this ideaas ‘a reference point in building solidarity and unit-ing diverse struggles against the disciplining,exploitative, and dominating structures of capital-ism, we retain the critical potential and radical promise that geography provides’ (Springer,2010c: 1035). Although hybridized and variegated under neoliberalism, capitalism remains alwaysand everywhere a callous beast. Thus, in seekingto illuminate how processes of neoliberalization and violence coalesce, ‘we open our geographical ima-ginations to the possibility of (re)producing spacein ways that make possible a transformative and emancipatory politics’ (Springer, 2012c: 141) that breaks with neoliberalism.Despite the potential insights to be gained, thenature of Weller and O’Neill’s critique leads metobelievethatthelinkbetween‘developmental’and ‘neoliberal’ ideas would be dismissed. They supporttheir generalargumentbysuggestingthat,‘there isa blurring of the boundaries between neoliberal and non-neoliberal reforms, enabling non-neoliberal practices to be rolled into the neoliberal story orelserelegated to an incidental category’. But again,this criticism seems at odds with the contemporarygeographical literature, where for example, whenI write about ‘articulated neoliberalism’ in Cambo-dia (Springer, 2011a), the existing cultural–politi-cal–economic matrix is not seen as superfluous.Instead, I argue that by
theorizing neoliberalization as an articulated, proces-sual, hybridized, protean, variegated, promiscuous,and travelling phenomenon
. . .
the particularity of theCambodian context suggests that the four-way rela-tionshipbetweenneoliberalism,violence,kleptocracy,and patronage is necessarily imbued with characteris-tics that are unique to this given setting. (p. 2567)
Ifail to see howthis is any less ‘inquisitive’ thanthepositionbeingadvancedbyWellerandO’Neill.My argument is not intended as a plenary, trans-geohistorical account wherein the substantiveeffects of neoliberalism are rendered as every-where and always the same, but rather it attemptsto locate neoliberalism within a particular contextas but one component to the unfolding of a com- plex political economic story. By the same token,however, I would agree that accounts like Lewis’s(2009)‘progressivespacesofneoliberalism’donotimplicitly allow enough space for alternativefutures to materialize. In contrast, White and Wil-liams (2012) have demonstrated how alternativesocial practices that break with neoliberalism can be found in the mundanity of the everyday. At thesame time, I don’t think that simply not talkingabout neoliberalism will make it go away asGibson-Graham (1996) argue. What is needed thenis a high degree of reflexivity for the ways in whichour projects may be subsumed by or break from
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