Neoliberal Culture

Living with American Neoliberalism

Patricia Ventura

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781138115613
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317089070
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Departing from the conventional understanding of neoliberalism as a set of economic and political policies favoring free markets, Neoliberal Culture presents a framework for analyzing neoliberalism in the United States as a culture-or structure of feeling- which shapes American everyday life. The book proposes five 'components' as the keys to any study of American neoliberal culture: biopower, corporatocracy, globalization, the erosion of welfare-state society, and hyperlegality, these five components enabling rich analyses of key artifacts of the neoliberal era, including the Iraq War, Las Vegas, welfare reform, Walmart, and Oprah's Book Club. Carefully organized according to its central themes and adopting a case study approach in order to allow for thorough, illustrated analyses, this book is an important tool for scholars and students of contemporary cultural studies, popular culture, American Studies, and sociology.

Chapter 1
Understanding the Components of American Neoliberal Culture

As the introduction argued, American neoliberal culture is rooted in the forms of contemporary liberal rule that had been developing for years but that finally emerged as a structure of feeling and later as a cultural dominant when the end of the Cold War finally enabled the efflorescence of a market rationality in which profit, productivity, and unapologetic inequality formed a larger political and moral standard. In this chapter, I define the components of American neoliberal culture that result from this market rationality—biopolitics, corporatocracy, erosion of welfare-state society, globalization, and hyperlegality—and explore sites of cultural controversy to exemplify how the components emerge as keys to understanding the neoliberal structure of feeling.

Contextualizing the Components

If some of these components have arisen to vital importance in a wide variety of analyses of neoliberalism, the component of globalization has become nearly synonymous with neoliberalism itself. As a term describing the flows of people, finance, culture, information, and goods across national borders, globalization enables the development of the neoliberal subject—an individual who views him-or herself as primarily a consumer rather than a producer. After all, globalization has been a necessary element in the exporting of relatively high-paying jobs, erosion of organized labor, and importing of relatively cheap goods—all of which fundamentally shape the neoliberal subject. If, as David Harvey argues, neoliberalism is globalization’s “political-economic story” (Brief History 4), it is also the case that globalization is neoliberalism geographic-cultural story. Of course, globalization is a much older phenomenon than neoliberalism, or even liberalism for that matter, but what renders globalization so essential to understanding neoliberal culture is that globalization has become unprecedentedly extensive and intensive since the institution of neoliberal governmentalities throughout the world including, of course, in the US.

The central priority of these American neoliberal governmentalities is the erosion of the state structures that look after the wellbeing of society—the component that most specifically enacts the gendered and racialized oppressions that have historically marked and defined American culture. Eroding the power of “big government” to assist the population with basic needs such as food and housing as well as slightly less basic needs such as funding for college education, preserving collective bargaining, and protecting the environment has been, since the creation of the Keynesian state, the central domestic-policy mission of the forces of liberal economics. But opposition to the welfare state looks different today than in the past, and part of that difference is accounted for by the component of corporatocracy. For if the state’s program of pastoral care of society is eroding, it is not the case that the US federal government is getting smaller and returning to its pre-welfare-state size. The institutions of “big government” do not just disappear in a few decades, especially since they are rooted in tradition, interest group involvement, and brigades of employees. Instead the state is shifting its priorities from the care of society ever more toward the care of corporations, which in turn, ostensibly, care for the nation’s people. This shift lies at the heart of the component of corporatocracy. Indeed, we cannot understand the erosion of welfare state society without understanding that a corporatocracy has arisen to redirect towards itself the energies, tax dollars, and access to credit available to the federal government.

But if the government prioritizes corporate care, what becomes of the individuals no longer cared for by the state? What kinds of governmentalities operate with regard to them? It is here that the component of biopower emerges. Biopower has become an integral part of neoliberal studies through the writings of Michel Foucault and figures such as Nikolas Rose working in the Foucauldian tradition. Analyses of biopower involve an understanding of how relations of power are exercised concretely on bodies and through their biological features in order to force life in a population to endure in very prescribed ways. Embodied in an interweaving between biological and political lives, biopower encourages self-government and has become the hallmark of what is called the “corporeal turn” in political and social thought. Biopower—and biopolitics as a vehicle for the expression of biopower (to borrow a definition from Majia Nadesan)—operate at the level of specific material and concrete relations of power that emerged in the modern era and have particular resonance in neoliberal culture.

But while components such as globalization and biopower have become integral to neoliberal studies, the final component I will discuss, hyperlegality, will seem less familiar. Legal theorist Nasser Hussain elaborated this concept to explain policies such as the indefinite detention of prisoners at the American military base in Guantanamo Bay that were made possible through the use of special tribunals and the creation of extensive legal categories that offer jurisprudential justification for policies that are deeply oppressive or imperialistic. If hyperlegality flies in the face of the now widely accepted understanding of Guantanamo as the embodiment of a lack of legality because it creates categories of people utterly unprotected by law—homo sacer in Agamben’s terms—hyperlegality also contradicts common ways of understanding neoliberalism as utterly intertwined with states of exception, as in studies such as Aihwa Ong’s Neoliberalism as Exception. But in the context of domestic American neoliberal culture, neoliberalism is marked less by a state of exception from the law than an intensified subjection to it. So, returning to Agamben, if his powerful analysis of figures such as the refugee illustrates a global breakdown of political subjectivity as tied to national territory, these stateless figures also illustrate, as a point of contrast, an intensification of American political subjectivity based on increased legal scrutiny to which people living inside the US are subjected. Indeed, I argue that hyperlegality best expresses on a domestic level neoliberalism’s rationalities related to rule of law—noting here that rule of law is an essential feature of all versions of liberalism (Tamanaha 32).

In order to lay down the groundwork for the case studies that make up the individual chapters of this book, I use the rest of this chapter to explain and exemplify the five components through short analyses of contemporary social concerns and controversies such as the hand-wringing surrounding childhood obesity, the expansion of anti-immigrant laws, the bailout of corporations, the political impact of the War on Terror, and the long-term economic and political significance of free trade.

Examining Globalization through NAFTA

We cannot begin understanding neoliberal culture without examining globalization. “Globalization” has become a ubiquitous term reflecting the crossing and erosion of borders, both for better and for worse, through the movement of people, culture, goods, and finance, but globalization is also a collection of practices and events that involve the organization of power relations that both replicates established patterns of inequality and generates new inequalities and new sovereign formations. If the term globalization suggests the eroding nature of national boundaries, for instance, this erosion can be seen not only in the numbers of people crossing borders, but also in the heated and desperate efforts of nationalist groups to keep these people out.

After the end of the Cold War when the major force resisting capitalism’s expansion itself, the Eastern bloc, became part of the capitalist establishment, the processes of globalization grew quickly in intensity and extensity. Tellingly, before the late 1980s there were no publications with the term globalization in the title; by the year 2000 there were close to 300 (Waters 2).

Considering globalization in economic terms, within a decade after the Cold War, about two-thirds of the world’s economies (measured by gross domestic product or GDP) broadly operated along open trade principles; in the late 1980s less than half did (Held et al. 165). In the industrialized nations, trade as a proportion of GDP grew higher in the neoliberal globalization era than it had ever been. Global trade patterns have evolved such that “North and South, in this context, are becoming increasingly empty categories” (Held et. al. 177). Global economic-political priorities and the tremendous advances in technology and communications have enabled the world’s major markets to interconnect so that London, New York, and Tokyo function as a single market operating around the clock and instantaneously. The speed and sheer volume of financial transactions—many of them speculative—constitute the most profound economic development of the neoliberal globalization era. This market itself is not novel but its scale, scope, and complexity are. What is true for finance in this regard is as true of many aspects of the world economy, and they indicate that a significant change has occurred from previous eras. As Saskia Sassen concludes, “There has been a world economy for several centuries. But its geography, composition, and institutional framework have changed over time. The ‘world economy’ never included the entire planet” (“Global Visions” 61).

As corporate power grew in this neoliberal capitalist era, so too did the vulnerability of America’s working people. In the US, this vulnerability can be analyzed in relation to the economic insecurity working people experienced in the wake of the North American Free Trade Agreement, a trilateral trade bloc that eliminated trade and investment barriers between Canada, Mexico, and the US. Though some see regional trade blocs as competitors to true globalization, I would argue that the growth of such blocs is a significant example of globalization in that they are sovereign formations that challenge the preeminence of the nation-state. Certainly, they eliminate or alter national protections for many industries and ways of life, as with the famous case of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation that declared (a largely nonviolent) war against the Mexican state because NAFTA required the privatization of communal land that was essential to indigenous peoples’ ways of life. Certainly, NAFTA led to the relocation of many traditionally American-based jobs, and their loss contributed to the American working class’s larger economic decline. According to the Economic Policy Institute, as of 2010, U.S. trade deficits with Mexico totaling $97.2 billion had displaced 682,900 U.S. jobs (Scott). Foreign direct investment (FDI) from the US into Mexico rose 259 percent from $16.1 billion to $58.1 billion after ten years of NAFTA; according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, these are numbers “NAFTA helped to increase” by containing provisions to decrease investor risk while expanding profitability (Hornbeck). While Mexico would at least be expected to have benefited from some of the changes, it actually developed a large trade deficit with the rest of the world. While the Mexican unemployment rate shrank in the decade after NAFTA was signed, underemployment grew leading to a decline in real wages and a lack of access to stable, well-paid jobs (“NAFTA at Seven”). Farming, for instance, became increasingly difficult since competition with heavily subsidized American agribusiness is a tremendously tough proposition.

But perhaps it is in financial speculation that US investors had the most impact on Mexico (and on the US through concomitant disinvestment). After the signing of NAFTA, there was a surge in speculation in the Mexican peso, which increased the wealth of speculators but also increased the instabilities in the Mexican economy, damaging the Mexican working and middle classes. Beyond these events, internal Mexican politics and supply-side economics led to massive reductions in state assistance in many rural areas including the slashing of supports for farmers and the sale of traditionally communal land.

Mexican poverty is a systemic and long-term problem, but if NAFTA and neoliberal economic policy more generally exacerbated the problem, stepped up immigration into the US became a significant coping strategy for Mexicans, and it is one encouraged by the Mexican government which even provides official identification cards called matricula consular that enable unauthorized immigrants to blend into American consumer life and obtain credit cards, car loans, and accounts at major banks. Such policies show that illegality can be symbiotic with corporatocracy.

Billed as a means to reduce illegal immigration to the US, NAFTA policies contributed to the conditions that had led a high of 7 million Mexican nationals to live in the US illegally by 2007 (Passel and Cohn). NAFTA policies, for example, are known to have driven over 2 million Mexican farmers off the land because they were unable to compete with heavily subsidized Canadian and American products (Faux); such examples of massive worker displacement certainly contributes to the immigration numbers. Numbers of Mexican nationals in the US declined to 6.5 million by 2010 (Passel and Cohn) with the downturns in the US economy, increasing dangers of crossing the crime-ridden border, and some infrastructural improvements in parts of rural Mexico—especially in education and the availability of birth control (Cave). Nevertheless, immigration remains for millions of Mexican nationals a deeply significant means of improving not only their economic circumstances but that of their families back in Mexico.

By 2003, remittance flows into Mexico reached more than $13 billion and became Mexico’s second largest source of external finance after oil, greatly overshadowing FDI and tourism (Hernandez-Coss 5). By 2008, in the midst of the US’s worst economy since the Great Depression, the remittances nevertheless totaled $25.3 billion, a figure representing three percent of Mexico’s GDP (Coronado and Canas). While these resources unquestionably benefitted the Mexican people, they would not be available if US business did not benefit disproportionately from the arrangement.

Since unauthorized immigrants are part of an underground economy and since the issue is so politically charged and complex, definitive measurements can be controversial. However, there are some revealing reports. The Pew Hispanic Center estimates that in the year between June 2009 and June 2010, when the so-called Great Recession officially ended, foreign-born workers in the US gained 656,000 jobs while native-born workers lost 1.2 million; however, during that same period, foreign-born workers saw their median weekly earnings decreased 4.5 percent with Latino immigrants experiencing the sharpest drop (Kochlar and Espinoza).

Economist George Borjas estimates that “immigration lowers the wage of competing workers: a 10 percent increase in supply reduces wages by 3 to 4 percent” (1335). But such results can only tell part of the story. In particular industries, the impact of unauthorized immigration is particularly significant. For instance, meatpacking, widely considered the most dangerous factory job in the US, was until the 1980s largely unionized and highly paid. However, because it is relatively low-skilled work, it was able to be transformed into low-paying, non-union labor with a workforce having almost no legal protections; a significant, but uncertain, number of these employees are unauthorized immigrants. Not surprisingly, the average salary in processing and packing plants dropped from $18 an hour adjusted for inflation in the 1980s to $6 per hour by 2001, a wage that has since remained consistent (Tanger 69).

In the 1990s and 2000s a number of voluntary regimes sprouted up that allow corporations to claim they are making good faith efforts to follow the requirements of immigration-related laws. Such corporate social responsibility programs are encouraged by Congress’s 1996’s creation of a “good faith” defense for employers who are charged with failing to properly verify the status of new hires. But due to massive deregulation, the number of legal cases completed against employers declined 80 percent just between 1998 and 2001 (Tanger 67). Although this number began to rise somewhat in the wake of 9/11, the trend has been to under-police and rarely enforce existing law when it affects corporate ability to hire unauthorized immigrants, except in the notable cases of US states such as Arizona and Alabama that have decided to take on the job with rabidly xenophobic exuberance.

These examples help illustrate something that is clear to anyone who observes the US economy’s absolute reliance on highly exploitable immigrant labor: immigration and border management tends to be more about image than actual security and deterrence, more about a Darwinian culling of the “weakest” unauthorized immigrants than about actually ending illegal activity. Peter Andreas posits that the border became a particularly useful myth to ease citizen discontent over globalization in general and NAFTA in particular. By this logic, the intensity of globalization with its cross-border flows explains the intensity of the effort to highlight the border and border patrol. He quotes Timothy Mitchell in arguing that borders “define our conception of the state and have given the state the appearance of autonomy, authority, and power,” and along with immigration controls, employment verification regimes, passports, and the like, generally act as a way to “help manufacture an almost transcendental entity, the nation state” (cited in Andreas 615).

Since the 1990s, border security helped shore up the American state in the wake of the globalization that characterized the post-Cold War years. Globally, these years ushered in a regime in which nation-states could no longer be seen as the pinnacle of sovereign government as in the post-colonial era of the mid-twentieth century but would be seen as part of new kinds of sovereignties in which the nation shares authority with the likes of supranational organizations, multinational corporations, nongovernmental organizations, and international trade blocs (Hardt and Negri Empire). Given the relative rapidity of these changes, we can say indeed that in the US, border security was at least in part a perception strategy adopted by the federal government to ease Americans’ anxieties in the wake of these changes. But rationalities governing domestic policies may well have had as much to do with those increased anxieties as anything happening at the global level. To begin understanding those rationalities, we have to turn the analysis to the level of American society.

“There is no Such Thing as Society”: The Erosion of Welfare-State Society

While neoliberalism operates at the level of the population it aims to make the members of the population feel divorced from the larger group. This sense of separation is part of the larger death-of-society rhetoric, and it is an inescapable aspect of any analysis of neoliberalism or neoliberal culture. Often it is introduced through arch-neoliberal Margaret Thatcher’s infamous assessment, “There’s no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families.” (Bob Dole offered an American version of this sentiment in his 1996 presidential nomination acceptance speech when in response to then-First Lady Hillary Clinton’s book It Takes a Village [to raise a child] he groused: “It doesn’t take a village to raise a child. It takes a family.”) Given the instrumental role Thatcher’s example in Britain played in institutionalizing neoliberalism around the world, her proclamation has drawn attention and derision—both richly deserved. And while it certainly encapsulates a key neoliberal rationality in that, as Mitchell Dean argues, neoliberalism is a first step in the effort to eliminate society and replace it with more individualized collectives such as family and voluntary associations, the implications of Thatcher’s statements have also been overstated. Dean argues that from a liberal point of view, society is “an always and already existing natural reality”; it delimits a population, often in coordination with the nation, and it necessarily contains the apparatuses for that population’s government (see Dean chapters 6 and 7). For its part, the US in the neoliberal era is “post-national” in the sense that national sovereignty became a more global affair involving supranational institutions such as the World Trade Organization, NAFTA, and multi- and transnational corporations. These changes are sometimes represented as the end of society but what such changes really represent is the erosion of a particular kind of society: the society of the welfare state.

There have been many ways in which to envision society—for instance, as a moderating force between the economy and the state, as a population sharing a culture or key institutions, as the framework for c...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: American Neoliberal Culture
• 1 Understanding the Components of American Neoliberal Culture
• 2 Learning from Neoliberal Las Vegas: Understanding Globalization in Location
• 3 Home is Where the Market is: Corporatocracy in Context
• 4 Poverty and Welfare: Hyperlegality and the Erosion of Welfare-State Society
• 5 Biopower and Operation Iraqi (Governing Through) Freedom
• Conclusion: Resisting Neoliberal Culture
• Works Cited
• Index