Language and Neoliberal Governmentality

Luisa Martín Rojo, Alfonso Del Percio, Luisa Martín Rojo, Alfonso Del Percio

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781138575196
• eBook ISBN: 9781000012330
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Against a background of the ongoing crisis of global capitalism and the fracturing of the neoliberal project, this book provides a detailed account of the ways in which language is profoundly imbricated in the neoliberalising of the fabric of social life.

With chapters from a cast list of international scholars covering topics such as the commodification of education and language, unemployment, and the governmentality of the self, and discussion chapters from Monica Heller and Jackie Urla bringing the various strands together, the book ultimately helps us to understand how language is part of political economy and the everyday making and remaking of society and individuals. It provides both a theoretical framework and a significant methodological "tool-box" to critically detect, understand, and resist the impact of neoliberalism on everyday social spheres, particularly in relation to language.

Presenting richly empirical studies that expand our understanding of how neoliberalism as a regime of truth and as a practice of governance performs within the terrain of language, this book is an essential resource for researchers and graduate students in English language, sociolinguistics, applied linguistics, linguistic anthropology, and related areas.

1Neoliberalism, language, and governmentality

Luisa Martín Rojo and Alfonso Del Percio¹

Language and neoliberal rationality

Under current conditions of capitalism, neoliberalism has become much more than an economic policy, evolving into a form of governance which extends the logic of the market throughout public and private life. Principles such as globalisation, free markets, deregulation, quality, quantification, freedom, flexibility, and competition now permeate virtually all areas of social behaviour, including education, work, human rights, culture, the media, urban planning, migration, public administration, security, and health. These principles also affect language policies and speakers’ trajectories and practices.

Educators and students have witnessed how academic institutions are becoming increasingly responsive to business logic, in which the overriding priority is coming to be that of satisfying the needs of the market. As citizens, we are viewed as “clients” of services that are funded by our taxes but which at the same time are obliged to profit from our patronage. As researchers, we are called upon to produce knowledge at a pace that barely allows reflection, and to compete for resources, in accordance with a business logic that is turning us into entrepreneurial scientists. As workers, flexibility, mobility, and insecurity are our constant companions. As individuals, we strive to overcome these market conditions (although at times we barely survive) through the persistent accumulation of skills and certifications, maximising performance in our respective fields of competence.

What has made these developments possible, when for centuries the search for knowledge has been considered quite separate from economic concerns? To what extent is colonisation by business logic impacting on linguistic trajectories and practices? What role is played by discourse and language ideologies, and by linguistic disciplinary knowledge as a material resource in this economic takeover? How do economic principles affect the ways in which institutions and individuals view themselves and others, and how individuals present themselves in society? In everyday life, how are market principles colonising social life? How and why is this process endorsed and reinforced (and also contradicted and contested) in the daily practice of social agents and individuals, each with their own agenda and occupying unequally-valued positions in our social order? What do these circumstances tell us about power and how it is viewed and exercised under the present conditions of capitalist expansion and of neoliberal principles, ideologies, and knowledge?

These questions are at the core of the present volume. They are the product of our concerns about contemporary regimes of power and control, and about their effects on the ways in which we understand language, subjects, and social life. The authors contributing to this volume seek a better understanding of the processes that make such colonisation possible, how it takes place, the role of language, and whether there exist any loopholes for resistance. They also examine the effects of this colonisation on speakers, on how they view themselves and others, and on their ability to acquire social, material, and emotional comfort.

We employ the term “neoliberal governmentality” as a conceptual lens for addressing these issues from critical, sociolinguistic, and discursive standpoints. Our objective is to grasp how neoliberal governmentality is constructed, reproduced, strengthened, and disseminated via discourse by means of daily institutional practices (accompanied by techniques of self-presentation and self-knowledge employed by institutions and individuals). As a further goal, we examine how this form of governance affects the ways in which language is seen, used, and governed, and consider the roles played around the world by language and communicative practices in the neoliberalisation of institutions, in diverse socio-political contexts. Finally, we consider whether any opposition to this rationality, despite the inescapable logic of neoliberalism (encapsulated by the motto “There Is No Alternative”),² is emerging and, if so, what forms may be taken by such resistance and what alternatives are offered.

The understanding of neoliberalism put forward in this book is different from that prevailing in studies of language and political economy (for an overview, see Allan, 2018; Allan and McElhinny, 2017). Scholars of neoliberalism in the language disciplines have foregrounded how neoliberal ideology governs language (Block, Gray, and Holborow, 2012; Holborow, 2015), as well as how neoliberalism, inequality, and social class mediate language in societal issues (Block, 2018). In addition, scholars have sought to understand the circumstances through which shifting conditions of political economy have turned languages into economic resources, which then poses new/old questions as to what counts as legitimate language, who counts as a legitimate speaker, and who benefits from the linguistic resources produced (Duchêne and Heller, 2012; Park and Wee, 2012).

Departing from past theorisations of language and neoliberalism (see Allan and McElhinny, 2017; Dlaske et al., 2016; Flubacher and Del Percio, 2017), this volume propels the study of language and neoliberalism in a new direction. Drawing on a Foucauldian theorisation of the microphysics of power and on more recent developments of Foucault’s concept of “governmentality”, we examine how language and communication intersect with all-encompassing regimes of power. Neoliberalism is then understood as a political rationality that informs the contemporary governance of populations, institutions, and practices, including language and subjects. This approach is related to recent contributions in sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology to the study of governmentality by authors such as Urla (2012), who focuses on language policies; Flores (2013), Urciuoli (2010), and Gao and Park (2015), on education and language learning, and teaching; Barakos (2016), in private sector businesses; Urciuoli (2008), Dlaske et al. (2016), in the domain of work; Del Percio (2016), on the activities of nongovernmental organisations (NGOs); and Rampton (2014; see also Charalambous et al., 2015), on security and securitisation; McIlvenny, Klausen, and Lindegaard (2016), in discourse studies, among others. Within this frame, this volume places more decisively subjects at the heart of the analysis. Thus, we study not only how language becomes commodified but also how speakers can accumulate language and communication skills as a personal asset; and we not only address the question of how population is governed within a neoliberal frame but also how neoliberal rationality produces and transforms subjectivities. We share the conviction that understanding, rigorously analysing, and conducting a radical critique of how neoliberalism shapes subjectivities could be the first step in triggering resistance.

Thus, informed by eight empirical studies investigating the workings of neoliberal governmentality in diverse educational and work settings, in a variety of geographical contexts, the present volume makes several novel contributions.

First and foremost, this volume examines the processual nature of this political rationality, that is, how and with what effects neoliberal governmentality is exercised, and by means of which power techniques. Second, we consider the practices and circumstances in which neoliberalism as a political rationality is constructed and circulated through discourse. Our analysis focuses on the concrete practices adopted in education and in the workplace whereby economic principles associated with neoliberalism, such as competitiveness, freedom, quality, flexibility, and internationality, are reinforced, naturalised, and inculcated into people’s minds. The successive chapters in this volume show that the implementation of these new practices and processes is transforming our understanding of language and speaking. Third, we study how neoliberalism as a political rationality produces specific subjectivities, that is, specific ways of understanding the self, that affect the ways in which individuals exert control on their own (linguistic) conduct and monitor that of others. Thus, we study how these neoliberal subjectivities are actually produced, that is, how and via which practices individuals are interpellated by specific personae and invited to socialise themselves into specific modes of being and speaking. Fourth, this book presents a new understanding of how neoliberalism as a global rationality becomes entrenched with local, longer-standing histories of colonialism, modernity, and capitalistic exploitation and dispossession. Finally, we study how institutions and actors dialectically engage this political rationality, and to what extent this logic is reproduced and challenged by their peers with different (linguistic) agendas.

In summary, this edited volume provides both a theoretical framework and a significant methodological “tool-box”, one that is offered to “users” rather than “readers” (Foucault, 1994: 523–524), enabling them to critically detect and understand the impact of neoliberalism on everyday social spheres, particularly in relation to language.

In the following sections, we first define the concept of neoliberal governmentality, understood as a specific form of political rationality, focusing on the kinds of knowledge and discourses it generates, and on the techniques of power that it mobilises. We then explain the rationale for the volume, and how the two parts in which it is organised respond to two of the main processes by means of which neoliberalism is colonising other areas of our social and personal life, beyond the economy, that is, the neoliberalisation of institutions and the production of neoliberal subjects. To do so, we reflect on the production of neoliberal rationalities that shape our current understanding of languages, skills, and competences, and how this is affecting social classes and ethnic groups in social fields such as education and the labour market. In the final section of this chapter introduction, we consider the extent to which the expansion and naturalisation of neoliberal rationalities is changing forms of subjectivity, thus producing neoliberal subjects who are also neoliberal speakers, trained to accumulate language skills and capital in order to survive in a world of competition, strenuous life-long education, and increased productivity.

Neoliberal governmentality

In this volume, neoliberalism is seen as both a practice and a form of governance, and so the first contribution presented seeks to understand how this governing happens and how it is conceived (Foucault, 2008: 319), approaching these questions from the standpoint of language. In order to develop this approach, we take as a starting point Foucault’s “governmentality”. This concept first appeared in two of the courses imparted (Security, Territory and Population, 1978; Naissance de la biopolitique: Cours au Collège de France, 1979) as part of a series of public lectures given between 1970 and 1984. These lectures advanced his work in this field, and were later edited and summarised from audio recordings by Michel Senellart. Unlike other concepts, which, either as “discipline” or as “biopolitics”, can be precisely located at the heart of his main books, the notion of neoliberal governmentality is sometimes fuzzy and its place within the Foucault universe is not always apparent.

The concept of governmentality was broached in Security, Territory and Population in 1978, when its author professed the ambition to abandon “institutional analysis only to be enjoined to enter into another type of institutional analysis in which, precisely, the State is the stake” (Foucault, 2007: 164). Subsequently, governmentality was held up as representing “to the State what techniques of segregation were to psychiatry, what techniques of discipline were to the penal system, and what biopolitics was to medical institutions” (Foucault, 2007: 166). In the 1978 course, the concept of governmentality was developed in a precise, historically determinate sense, referring to the techniques of government deployed in the eighteenth century, underpinning the formation of the modern state and enabling the question of the State to enter the scope of analysis of micro-powers (see Senellart in Foucault, 2007: 494).

As Senellart explains, subsequent to 1979, the concept came to be viewed in more abstract terms. It “no longer only designates the governmental practices constitutive of a particular regime of power (police state or liberal minimum government)”, but “the way in which one conducts people’s conduct”, thus serving as an “analytical perspective for relations of power” in general (Senellart, 2007: 495). The framework for studying governmentality in the 1979 course was that of liberalism around the world, including an overview of the latest developments. This shift in the understanding of governmentality is the source of frequent confusion: although the term “governmentality” has been applied to a variety of historical periods and to different regimes, it is often used (by other scholars and by Foucault himself) in reference to “(neo)liberal governmentality”. In other words, it is used to refer to a particular type of governmentality that characterises advanced liberal democracies, one that has displaced other forms of governance like sovereignty and discipline.

Although neoliberalism is currently generating more privatised, marketised, and increasingly dispersed modes of governmentality than any envisioned by Foucault (Fraser, 2003: 166), the liberal frame explored by this author has made the concept of governmentality particularly appealing and useful for authors in the fields of social sciences, political economy, and political theory. As the present volume shows, it is now also used in the fields of sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology as a means of understanding neoliberal forms of government.

The first definition of “governmentality” provided by Foucault refers to:

the body of institutions, procedures, analyses, reflections, calculations, and tactics that facilitate the exercise of this very specific (albeit complex) form of power, which has the population as its target, political economy as its principal form of knowledge, and the ‘apparatuses of security’ as its essential technical instrument.

(Foucault, 2007: 144–145)

In order to understand how governmentality operates, we now examine the key elements involved in its definition: “population as a target”, “political economy as its principal form of knowledge”, and the “apparatuses of security”.

“Population”, “political economy”, and the “apparatuses of security”

Foucault observed a significant shift in the eighteenth century, from sovereignty over the territory to the regulation of populations. Population, which in the 1978 lectures was associated with the theme of “biopower”, was understood as a set of procedures, or relations, that manipulate the biological features (for example, the birth rate and fertility) of the human species and thus shape a political strategy for governing an entire population. The concept of population was presented as a novel and key concept to understand the functioning of political power. According to Sokhi-Bulley (2014), “population” in this sense refers not simply to “people” but also to phenomena and variables, such as birth rate, mortality, and marriage. As Foucault highlights population gives rise to a mass of juridical, political, and technical problems that have a disruptive effects in the field of economic reflection and practice (Foucault, 2007: 107). Population needs then to be analysed by the field of economic theory and be managed by the government’s economic-political action within liberalism and neoliberalism. Individuals and the series of individuals, who were the target of disciplinary power, are no longer pertinent as the objective, but simply as the instrument, relay, or condition for obtaining something at the level of the population (Foucault, 2007: 55; see also Castro-Gómez, 2010: 76). Thus, the term “population” encompasses then the whole field of “the social”, and describes both the network of social relationships and also the site at which political power operates. By this means, political power becomes omnes et singulatum – “of all and of each”.

Moving further towards the concepts involved in Foucault’s definition, the issue of population is related to security, in the sense of techniques specific to the management of populations, which Foucault considers a feature of modern liberal society. In relation to security, Foucault sees a very important change within liberalism and neoliberalism. The problem within neoliberalism is:

no longer that of fixing and demarcating the territory, but of allowing circulations to take place, of controlling them, sifting the good and the bad, ensuring that things are always in movement, constantly moving around, continually going from one point to another, but in such a way that the inherent dangers of this circulation are cancelled out.

(Foucault, 2007: 93)

These mechanisms (fo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Neoliberalism, language, and governmentality
• Part I Language and the neoliberalisation of institutions
• Part II Language and the neoliberal subject
• Towards an ethnography of linguistic governmentalities
• Neoliberalism as a regime of truth: Studies in hegemony
• Index