Writing Neoliberal Values

Rhetorical Connectivities and Globalized Capitalism

Rachel C. Riedner

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781349581252, 9781137547767
• eBook ISBN: 9781137547774
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political History & Theory
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book examines human-interest stories, unpacking from them violence inherent to neoliberalism, and considers if it is possible to find in these stories hints of people and labour that suggest other narratives.

1

Writing Value in a Neoliberal World: Necropolitics and Affective Rhetoric

A human-interest story tells about a woman from Kakamega Forest, Kenya, who enters the global and regional marketplace by selling butterflies, vastly improving her livelihood. In Nakuru County, Kenya, women who raise bees are able to send their children to school. At the same moment, a news story tells about how women who live on the margins of New York City find refuge in a shelter. In a short human-interest story that appeared in a university newspaper in Washington, DC, a subcontracted construction worker is killed in a tragic and regrettable accident at an urban university. He is briefly mourned, demonstrating the capacity for recognition and sympathy in the community, and then quickly forgotten. In Isiolo, Kenya, women from a third-world city try to help other women leave the sex industry with government support. Efforts to convince female sex workers who have children to leave sex work fail. Another story documents how a woman struggles to feed herself and her family in Cape Town, South Africa. Agents of the local government provide assistance.

Here is an example of a human-interest story that embodies the values of economic self-sufficiency:

KAKAMEGA FOREST, Kenya, Apr 24, 2010 (IPS) – For 10 years, Roselyne Shikami, sold boiled eggs at the bus station just outside the densely wooded Kakamega Forest in western Kenya, near the border with Uganda. Now she is selling butterflies.

“It was very difficult for me to sell two dozen boiled eggs a day,” the 35-year old told IPS. “Sometimes I sat there for more than eleven hours. But I rarely raised 200 Kenyan shillings (about US$2.60). Now with only two butterflies I can fetch much more.”

Shikami is one of a small group comprised mainly of women, who have started farming butterflies for sale in Kenya and the rest of Africa. They hope to gain customers in Europe and North America, the two most lucrative butterfly markets. Her husband, Joel, is part of the group. Like many others living around the Kakamega forest, he used to earn his income by cutting trees in the forest to sell as firewood. (Ncube 2010)

In this news report Roselyne Shikami sold eggs, we learn, because of the deforestation of the lower Congolese rain forest due to population growth and unemployment, which resulted in land clearance for farming. She is part of an emergent market of butterfly farming that is encouraged by the Kenyan government. And, it is noted, butterflies are good for the environment.

This is a narrative of gendered development—development in the sense of progress that is implied for individuals, groups, particularly women, nations, regions, and even continents as well as development in the sense of aid to individuals, groups, nations, or regions which are less economically advanced (i.e. not a “successful” part of a global capitalist system). The human-interest story is framed as a “progress” narrative: Roselyne Shikami is improving her economic situation by participating in a global market. The narrative implies that Ms. Shikami’s entry into the global marketplace increases her own agency, self-responsibility, and value as a working woman. In other words, this is a neoliberal story about gendered agency, self-responsibility, and economic self-sufficiency. Stories can be told and circulated about Ms. Shikami because her economic activity resonates with neoliberal cultural values as she is selling butterflies in the market. This activity enables neoliberalism to claim progress because Ms. Shikami “tends to her own value” to the market (Shenk 2015). Those who were previously not valued because of their gender, citizenship, race, sexuality, ability, or social designations are now included in new neoliberal rhetoric.

Gustavo Esteva argues that such rhetoric implies and asserts that participation in market and development programs are always already markers of progress: “a step from the simple to the complex, from the inferior to the superior, from worse to better” (cited in Dingo and Scott 2012, 5). As these texts are produced, circulated, and read, the implicit claim of their narrative is advanced: the telling of local stories (i.e., those about entrepreneurial women from the third world or successful immigrants in the first world) in a global setting (i.e., in a first-world context) is progress in itself. The narrative also implies that making first-world readers aware of third-world struggles provides assurance that oppression is being addressed; that a better life can be found; that solutions are on their way; and that struggle, poverty, and gendered oppression will be replaced by (economic) redemption. Human-interest stories are deployed so that the claim can be made that the exclusions and violence of the past have been addressed. As Wendy Hesford’s work on human-rights rhetoric argues, human-interest stories “activate” conjunctions of “cultural and national narratives and social and political relations,” what Raymond Williams calls “structures of feelings,” lived and felt sensations that connect people to social relations and historical narratives reiterated for the present (Hesford 2011, 9; Williams 1977, 130–31). This rhetoric creates assurances that public discourse has been reformed and reconfigured to recognize previously excluded others (Singh 2007). In other words, this story circulates and confirms consensus for ideologies and arguments that are already in circulation: neoliberalism brings prosperity, freedom, and stability to those who had previously been marginalized. In this book, it is my intention to push against celebratory claims of neoliberal human-interest stories that circulate melodramatic stories about previously marginalized people and populations.

My aim is to investigate what the rhetorics of human-interest stories do: how they deploy and orient values of rights, inclusion, and recognition to neoliberal political economic value. “Values” most often refers to shared, meaningful beliefs that are held in common. Value also has economic meaning as it describes the transformation of the activities and labor that people produce to sustain their lives (what Marx calls “use-value”) into capital that can be exchanged and turned into surplus through a process of production, circulation, and exchange. Most broadly, this book explores the rhetorical imbrication between cultural and economic value that is manifested in human-interest stories. This transformation is rhetorical: capital takes the products of human activity, or use-value, and writes them into a representation that allows them to function in a system of exchange. As Gayatri Spivak (2012) argues,

… the logic of capitalism weaves the socius like the textile of a particular set of relationships. Power and validation within this socius are secured by denying that web and transforming/displacing it into “natural” readability … . capital is a writing, which we must not read merely in terms of producing objects for use … In the current global postcolonial context, our model must be a critical of political culture, political culturalism, whose vehicle is the writing of readable histories, mainstream or alternative. (59, italics added)

My purpose is to explore the rhetorical process that reduces the range of human activity to a particular, affective representation (human-interest stories) that is oriented to a neoliberal political economy.

Concurrently, I am interested in the open-endedness of this rhetorical process: the ways in which a wider range of activities is active and present in the rhetoric of human-interest stories. Each chapter looks at bits and pieces of discourse that are present in these stories but that not part of the dominant narrative. These bits and piece of discourse suggest subjects (chapters two and three), activities (chapter four), and violence (chapters two and five) that are not valued by dominant rhetoric. These fragments are fully contained within the rhetoric of human-interest stories, yet the activities, subjects, and violence they refer to are not recognized by neoliberal capital. These fragments of text—or, of use-value—suggest a rhetorical open-endedness or indeterminancy, the sense that other activities and stories are beneath the surface of the dominant narrative.¹ Rather than taking neoliberal rhetoric as a consensus to be accepted, a story to be believed, or a persuasive language that has “natural” authority, I consider how textual fragments that are inside the story but outside recognition could be reconfigured, reimagined, or rewritten.²

To accomplish this, each chapter in this book begins with a human-interest story and moves outward, situating it within a wider context in which it is produced and circulated. I connect normal, everyday discourse to the political-economic moment in which it is situated, looking past isolated moments of rhetorical persuasion to the dynamic cultural, political, economic powers that are not so obviously present in these hegemonic texts in a given moment (Hall 1977). For example, by looking at stories about herb and seed gatherers in rural India and garden growers in South Africa, I explore how neoliberal rhetorics take hold of gendered political economy to advance neoliberal agendas. Chapters explore how rhetorics of gender, race, and other social categories are a means through which to produce neoliberal narratives and subjects in relation to neoliberal political economic aims (Wright 2011, 727). As such, this is a Marxist/feminist book: as I look at these short, intensive human-interest stories, my effort is to make social matrix and economic conditions visible in relation to the text’s affective narrative. Chapters unfold deep connections of gendered and racialized rhetoric to material and political contexts of the current phase of global-capital neoliberalism. Each text is reframed within an analysis of global and local formations of neoliberalism. And, each human-interest story is reframed through an understanding that gender, race, and other cultural categories are central to the rhetorical dynamics that connect genres of neoliberalism to neoliberal political economy. Building from this analysis, the book rewrites human-interest stories to call attention to the range of rhetorical possibilities and the limitations that these texts suggest.

This introductory chapter juxtaposes two representative human-interest stories: the first, a woman who sells butterflies in Kakamega Forest, Kenya, and the second, a group of women who are vulnerable to neglect and violence in New York City. The chapter moves between human-interest stories and analysis of the neoliberal political economy to critique narratives of self-responsibility and economic independence that emerge from Kenya, as well as narratives of social support are transmitted to a vulnerable population by the state. Following M. Jaqui Alexander (2005), I foreground simultaneous histories that are “often positioned as distinct and separate”—for example, who would connect a hopeful narrative about a Kenyan woman who is able to enter a global and regional market to the structural violence that is experienced by poor women in New York City?—but that occupy a concurrent temporality in neoliberalism.

As Alexander (2005) points out, this approach is not intended to collapse historical moments or downplay the impacts of neoliberal political economy in local places (Harvey 2005; Sassen 2014). Nor does it intend to conflate the economic capacities of women in different situations with one another, or to homogenize the complex political position of different women. Rather, this analysis is attentive to different relationships with nation-states and different historical and contemporary formations of gender, sexuality, age, race, and ability that shape women’s lives across geographical and nation-state borders. The purpose of linking human-interest stories that appear and circulate at essentially the same moment but that represent very different locations is to show how different global figures are affectively deployed to shore up neoliberal political economy. A second purpose is to show how these stories do not attend to gendered and racialized necropolitical violence that is intertwined across uneven spaces of global neoliberalism. My effort is to bring a range of human-interest stories together to open up an analysis of neoliberal political economy, and the violence it produces, that links complex and different locations.

Neoliberal portraits

As I explored in the article about Ms. Shikami, development narratives are presented as global solutions to local problems: a local place such as Kakamega Forest, Kenya is seen as undeveloped, unprogressive, and traditional. The solution to a problem of local poverty is a development narrative where entrance into the global economy offers all the benefits of neoliberalism: economic opportunity (where there was none), gender equality (as opposed to cultural patriarchy), and the promise of a future as a subject within global civil society (where citizenship was only local). In the example that I opened, the language of gendered agency (Ms. Shikami starts her own global business) comes together with her entrance into the global market; she has customers in other areas of Africa as well as Europe). Entrance into the global market enables Ms. Shikami to earn more money, with the implicit promise of a better, more fruitful life. As such, this is a neoliberal development narrative as it describes a (third-world, presumably, woman of color) citizen who is (developing) entrepreneurial responsibility for herself. In this narrative, she is aided by an open and inclusive economic system that empowers her to be more independent through participation in the global market.

Human-interest stories like Ms. Shikami’s are not unusual—there are many examples that I could draw upon to develop my analysis and to raise questions of representation. In addition to the herb and seed growers discussed in the preface, a story about Ms. Mary Ondolo, a honey grower from Nakuru County, Kenya, explains how the donation of resources enables women to bring extra income into their families. The story focuses on the singular activities of Ms. Ondolo and other women in her village whose economic challenges were “compounded by deeply rooted culture and gender disparity.” (Kibit 2014). Outside resources enable women to gain skills and confidence, to bring resources to their families, and to change gender dynamics.³

Scholars from Communication Studies (Reid-Brinkley 2012) have studied how human-interest stories circulate and recirculate scripts around racialized bodies that “appear to transcend negative stereotypes” (Reid-Brinkley 2012, 79). Through the repetition of stories in which some exceptional subjects can be saved from poverty, deviance, violence, and social decay, audiences read a familiar, stock script that positions some racialized figures as subjects. General norms of inclusion are extended to those who can be depicted as entrepreneurial, independent, and self-sufficient. These human-interest stories, as Melinda Robins argues following Stuart Hall, “shape and reinforce values” about racialized, gendered bodies through a narrative that reinforces neoliberal and national values (2003, 30).

Indeed, the human-interest stories that I analyze here proliferate and suggest inclusion. They constitute some racialized, gendered bodies as subjects—through the values that the subjects purportedly possess—that link up with neoliberal values. Human-interest stories, in the Butlerian sense, repeat the neoliberal rhetoric of inclusion and self-responsibility.⁴ These narratives claim a remarkable, unusual, even spectacular shift as they (appear to) offer sympathy, hope, inclusion, and the achievement for women of a more just world. Indeed, the repetition of hopeful narratives such as Ms. Shikami’s or Ms. Ondolo’s detract attention from stories about bodies that are exploited and then discarded (Kelly 2003), or survival as an act of resistance (Povinelli 2011, Bell 2001). This repetition reproduces failure to recognize non-value(d) parts of the narrative. In sum, these stories exemplify how the repetition of a melodramatic script (more on melodrama in the subsequent section) is “mobilized to obscure violence, terror, and death” for people of color (Dillon 2012, 116).

The plot of neoliberal development narratives follows a familiar script in which women struggle in third-world contexts where a familiar gendered story is told: day-to-day life is difficult and economic opportunities for women are slim. In this dominant mode, stories circulate an unfolding serial where women’s economic vulnerability is addressed and resolved: from mise-en-scène (the description of a local place where Roselyn Shikami sells eggs), to disclosure of oppression (the difficulty Ms. Shikami has making a living), to progress through intervention or awareness (the selling of butterflies by Ms. Shikami on the regional and global market), to development, reversal or resolution, to (sometimes) dénouement and redemption (the improvement of Ms. Shikami’s life through entrance into the formal marketplace) (Sunder Rajan 2003). As Raymond Williams argues, the structure of this narrative transposes complex and specific events onto a dramatic scenario, enabling the familiar serial to stand in for a much more complex situation (1983, cited in Anker 2014, 16). In this framework, a singular subject—often the celebrated entrepreneurial woman of color—stands in for an imagined group of newly successful women who have been aided, or “saved” by a just and equitable marketplace (Sunder-Rajan 2003, 53). This “typified rhetorical action” of the melodramatic human-interest story is not just about a particular subject or author, or the excellence of a particular text (Miller 1984, 158). Rather, human-interest stories emerge and function to encourage similar affective responses. There is an implicit claim that reporting hopeful, dramatic narratives of improvement for individual women is progress in itself, that interventions have been made for entire populations, and that progress has occurred (Dingo 2012).

The familiar narrative arc intensifies its persuasive and performative affect. Short human-interest stories emerge quickly, are circulated via transnational networks, and are replaced with similar, brief exempla. They do the work of reproducing recognizable images or sentiments, and they affect feelings quickly. Such images can be found in portraits of third- world women who are economically empowered by the expansion of the global economy, and, because of their economic independence, by the lessening of traditional ideologies of women’s productive roles. These stories don’t create a rationale for women’s economic advancement, nor do they provide context, background, or detai...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Writing Value in a Neoliberal World: Necropolitics and Affective Rhetoric
• 2 Transnational Ghosts: Regimes of Friendship, Neoliberal Abandonment, and Discourses of Mourning
• 3 Lives of Infamous Women: Gender, Political Economy, Nation-State Power, and Persuasion in the Neoliberal World
• 4 Writing Women’s Capacities in Cape Town’s Urban Gardens: Gendered Survival Practices and Transnational Feminist Literacies
• 5 From Spectacle to Crisis of Feeling: Slow Violence, Affective Rhetoric, and the Case of Caster Semenya
• Afterword: Writing Neoliberal Values: Literacies of Necropolitical Violence
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index