Category Archives: Long Form

Affect theory: Ruth Leys critique in Critical Inquiry

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A few months ago, back in what for me now seems ever so slightly like a previous life, I wrote a post about Ruth Leys and her work on the science behind the burgeoning field of affect theory. The paper mentioned back then, The Turn to Affect: a critique, is now published in Critical Inquiry. For anyone who is interested in the philosophical ideas raised by current debates about intentionality, embodiment, rationality, naturalism and the like – philosophical debates rather mangled in the canonization of ‘affect theory’ – Leys’ intervention should be essential reading. There are a few critical engagements with affect theory already – Constantina Papoulias and Felicity Callard’s great paper on the selective appeal made to scientific authority in some of this work, Claire Hemmings’ location of affect theory in a broader ontological turn in cultural theory, my own colleague Steve Pile’s effort to mediate between disputes over the relation between affect and emotions – but Leys zeroes in on some of the fundamental grounds of recent claims that affect theory constitutes a wholly dramatic innovation in cultural theory and philosophical thought. It works as a ‘critique’ by presuming that the claims made by adherents of affect theory – the main objects of Leys’ piece include Eve Sedgwick, Brian Massumi, Bill Connolly and Nigel Thrift – are indeed open to rational, measured assessment, not least in terms of the knock-down appeals in much of this work made to the apparently irrefutable evidence of neuroscience and certain strains of experimental psychology (I think in fact that one of the more interesting features of this field of research is the degree to which it systematically avoids argument – both in the exegesis of its own positions, and when challenged by those trying to engage this work in a critical spirit. This field of work would make a great appendix to Amanda Anderson’s The Way We Argue Now, but it would have to be called ‘the way we don’t argue with you because you obviously just don’t get it’). Nor, it should be said, do all variants of affect theory depend so heavily on this appeal to science-as-ontology – it’s not a feature, for example, of Lauren Berlant’s work (if you don’t count psychoanalysis as science).

Leys’ critique of affect theory focusses on 3 exemplary experiments which underwrite the external claim to scientific authority in much of this work, specifically the ‘basic emotions’ paradigm associated with Silvan Tomkins and Paul Ekman. She restores to view the sense of controversy around each one, the complexity of the findings, and their status as ‘cases’ – thereby raising the question of whether these fields can properly serve as the supports for claims made in affect theory – including the debates around the much-lauded ‘half second delay’ upon which writers such as Massumi and Thrift have staked strong claims for their anti-intentionalist visions. One of the more important aspects of Leys’ critique is the reminder that the experiments upon which much of this work alights tend to focus on particular sorts of embodied action (the hand movements involved in playing piano, throwing balls, that sort of thing), but abstract these from the wider “intentional structure or situation” in which such actions take place – in which they take on meaning as part of practices, if you like. The anti-intentionalist frisson of affect theory depends on generalizing up from what one might call ‘generic’ fragments of actions to make claims about the qualities of whole fields of embodied action. And it also depends, as Leys is also keen to point out in her essay, on a quite conventional dualistic separation of mind from body and brain. So it is, under the sway of this sort of theory, that the mind and associated concepts have come, once again, to be associated with ‘immateriality’. Affect theory, in its purest forms, tends to impute highly intellectualist views of meaning, signification, and mind to everyone else in order to make strong claims about the embodied and therefore non-intentional, non-rational qualities of affects.

The animating question behind Leys’ critique is “Why are so many scholars today in the humanities and social sciences fascinated by the idea of affect?” A good question indeed, and I’m sure there are many reasons. One version that occurs to me was triggered by
reading a piece by Michael Berubé recently about the legacy of the Sokal affair fifteen years on. Berubé’s main point was about how the ‘social construction of science’ position that was then a staple of the cultural left has now been adopted by climate-change sceptics on the American right. He didn’t say much about how cultural theory, in the period since this controversy, has also observably invested in various styles of scientism. The strands of affect theory which Leys pinpoints would be prime examples. Of course, the scientism often goes under the cover of ‘ontological’ claims – it is part of a more general drift of left theory towards seeking the foundations for the very possibility of radical change in deeper and deeper layers of covered-over ontological depth. Simon Critchley and Axel Honneth have discerned this trend towards the ontologization of politics, amongst others. ‘Affect’ might have become, at least in certain versions of the deployment of this concept, the prime example of this trend: understood as a surface for priming subjects behind their backs, before they know it, towards certain sorts of dispositions and responses, ‘affect’ is a medium for unrestricted discipline and accumulation – this is the bad politics of affect; at the same time, the same understanding of ‘affect’ as a figure of embodied, vital liveliness that escapes the strictures of mind, reason, and cognition means that it can also function as the name for an irreducible disruptive energy – this is the good politics of affect. Ben Anderson provides an excellent, concise articulation of both aspects of this understanding of the politics of affect, one in which Foucault is finally made safe for Marxism through the mediation of Toni Negri and an account of the real subsumption of labour to capital derived from Marx’s Grundrisse. Brian Massumi provides a briefer, more journalistic rendition of the same symmetrical understanding of the good-and-bad politics of affect in his reflections on recent ‘events’ – in a piece that reminded me that the only people who still believe in the concept of ‘mass media’ these days are theorists of ‘political affect’ like Massumi, Connolly, and John Protevi.

So, rather long-windedly, my point is that the ‘appeal’ of affect might be quite conventional, in so far as it sits within a quite standard assumption about the relationship
between Theory and Politics, and about Theory-as-Politics. The conception of subjectivity in this style of cultural theory is radically transformed, no doubt – but what remains in place, in what might in fact be a retrenchment, is the idea that the relationship of ‘culture’ and ‘power’ is always to be analysed primarily through the vector of reproduction. In this political imaginary, ‘power’ still fixes, naturalises, anticipates; and resistance always, forever, only, disrupts, interrupts, suspends. The emphasis on ‘plasticity’ and ‘becoming’ is the latest on a line of conceptualization which presumes that the most interesting thing one can do in political analysis is point out that things are made, constructed, composed, etc, and therefore, it is assumed to follow, can and should be changed.

As a move within the history of cultural theory, affect theory in its most anti-representationalist, anti-intentionalist variants at least, renders impossible the analysis of the ways in which ‘consent is won’ that might still represent, and here I am just following Berubé again, the single most important theoretical achievement and challenge of what we probably now have to call old-fashioned cultural studies. The most strongly politicized versions of affect theory are formally identical to a Chomsky/Herman style of the mass mediated manufacturing of consent (again, this seems a significant difference from the Berlant-style of affect theory – in which the emphasis is on trying to think about feelings of and for attachment which cannot be reduced to the machinations of power, discipline, or ideology – feelings that are ‘ordinary’, a word that Berlant uses a lot and which marks an affinity with a philosophical current closer to Ruth Leys’ position than that of the über-Marxism through which the ‘politics of affect’ has been most strongly articulated).

One of the peculiar achievements of affect theory is to make possible once again cultural analysis from the armchair (or cinema seat), in so far as it rests on a systematic refusal to countenance that people’s own viewpoints on their own actions and practices can count for much.  The dualistic presentation which opposes affect and emotion to belief and rationality means that these two sets of attributes now get divided between expert knowledge which is available to the expert analyst, on the one hand, and the unknowing actors responding to affective triggers on the other. Affect theory redistributes the unreflective and reflective aspects of action so that all of the reflection now stands on the side of the theorist, rather than being folded together ordinarily in practice, reflection and learning. This strong version of non-representational affect theory really depends on squeezing some interesting ideas into a frame in which the primary objective is to show how Theory cashes-out as having some big-P political value – another sense in which this range of work is more continuous with other traditions of cultural theory than is often acknowledged. The judgement of the theorist, in affect theory, can be substituted for the self-understandings of actors on the grounds that affects exceeds and/or subtends epistemologically held beliefs – this is a risk, of course, that all theories of ontological depth, fundamental causes, or unconscious processes run when they are translated into politically inflected cultural analyses. Something which remains to be addressed by adherents to strongly political versions of affect theory is just what is at stake in the project of correcting for overly cognitive, minded views of action – is it correcting other theories? If so, the problem is that affect theory, non-representational theory, and related styles of cultural theory depend too heavily on straw-figures of their own construction to get any traction. But sometimes, often perhaps, there is a slippage towards the sense that it is ordinary people’s ordinary understanding of themselves and others and what can be imputed to the mind – as intentional, potentially responsible, actors, for example – which is the target. In this, affect theory converges with a broader field of current popular scientific discourse about psychology and the brain – which as Alice Bell has commented has become like ‘the weather’ as a topic of shared conversation – in galloping towards questionable conclusions.

Leys also observes that affect theory is associated with a particular privileged aesthetic, one which accords primacy to the integrity of personal responses, and invests strongly in a Deleuzian inspired model of intensities. The elevation of ‘the image’ into the central category of cultural analysis is testament to this aesthetic – Leys’ paper suggests an interesting relationship between the investment in an avant-garde model of Film and the centrality of images to the experimental fields of psychology and neuroscience upon which affect theory draws.

The final ‘method effect’ which Leys’ paper throws light upon revolves around the vocabulary of layers and levels which is characteristic of affect theory – this architectonic of layering is central to the lessons drawn and claims made about the temporality of embodiment, cognition, intentionality and action – and is another aspect of this work which Leys helps to unpick by restoring a sense of context to the scientific sources of some of these arguments.

So, in short – if this range of work is of any interest, you should read the Leys essay. I understand that Connolly has a response forthcoming in a subsequent issue of Critical Inquiry, with a reply-to-the-response from Leys.

Theory in the streets

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A feature of much of the instant commentary on political events from Tunisia to Egypt, Bahrain to Libya has been a focus on those aspects of these processes that can be grasped even if you don’t know much, if anything, about these places. This is partly what is going on around all the discussion of the role of new media in facilitating and translating contestation across the Middle East – this is the aspect of these events can is familiar even from a distance. Indeed, it’s the aspect that makes these events accessible in new ways, in certain respects, while occluding aspects that are not so amenable to being communicated through these mediums.

So, rather than focus on what is most comforting about these events – the degree to which they might confirm a certain predisposition amongst a digitally wired intellectual strata of the importance of being digitally wired, I wonder if there aren’t things about them that might unsettle received wisdom. I wonder in particular if they might unsettle at all any of the conventions of contemporary ‘Theory’? This might appear a rather obscure concern, but it’s been interesting me this week as the figure of Gene Sharp, political theorist of non-violence, has been profiled in a range of after-the-fact reflections on political upheaval in Tunisia and Egypt in particular.  Sharp was mentioned in a New York Times article about these revolutions, and was then the subject of a follow-up profile. Interviews and blog notices about his influence  in shaping the non-violent strategies of protestors and with links to key publications have followed.

I particularly liked the blog posts which wondered aloud who Gene Sharp was, since he doesn’t seem to figure in a canon of contemporary political thinkers. In fact, Sharp is often a focus of attention when non-violent political action shakes more or less dictatorial, more or less authoritarian regimes around the world – he is credited with influencing non-violent political movement from Burma to Zimbabwe, Iran to Eastern Europe (there is an ultra-leftist riff on the blogosphere that Sharp is just an agent of the CIA, on the grounds that the events in which his influence is so often found tend to be supported also by the US government or US-based democracy promotion programmes).

What is interesting, theoretically, about Sharp’s analysis of non-violent political action, which informs the practical strategies picked up in such diverse contexts, is a conceptualization of power as being based on consent and obedience, not premised on violence. This might sound familiar – it is a Gramscian shibboleth to contrast coercion and consent after all. But in Sharp’s work, it is the basis of a pluralist understanding of the different ways in which power structures seek and secure consent – without reducing all of these to some fundamental substance in violence and coercion. It’s this difference between power and consent that underlies Sharp’s strategic understanding of the potential of non-violent action, which has clear resonances with Arendt’s account of concerted public action, as mobilising a fundamentally different register or mode of action than that of authoritarian or dictatorial regimes. The sense that power is not reducible to violence is also found in Arendt, even in Foucault. But its remarkably common in contemporary political theory and cultural theory alike to elide this difference, and to presume that in fact violence is the substratum of all power relations, or that apparent consent is really just the product of manipulation and manufacture – i.e., just a cover for coercion, which is not, one might suppose, what Gramsci was actually getting at. The failure to think through the political implications of the fact that consent has to be won is the focus of Michael Bérubé’s book The Left at War, and John Brenkman’s The Cultural Contradictions of Democracy, great books which seriously think through the limitations of conventions of current theoretical genres in light of the spiralling politics of violence of the last decade.

The influence of Sharp’s work, and the examples of non-violent political action with which his name is often associated, is a powerful rebuke to the metaphorical over-inflation of ‘violence’ in so much contemporary theory, whether in notions such as ‘symbolic violence’, or the ontologization of violence that runs from Sorel through Fanon to Agamben. It also stands in contrast to the current excitement around The Coming Insurrection, the anarcho-communist text that has become central to the case of the Tarnac 9 (0r 10) in France since 2008, and garnered lots of attention, and a translation with Semiotext(e), as a startling new and original conceptualization of the ‘politics of neocommunism’, as one contribution to a renewed Marxism-beyond-class (what would be the point of Marxism without class?). Interpreted by the French authorities as a manual for terrorism, it’s also been described as ‘elitist revolutionary strutting‘ and identified as really just a symptom of the absurdities of a failed lineage of left theory. It’s certainly odd to find a text which identities a new subject of political revolution – ‘youth’ – but has recourse to such a resolutely middle-aged, crotchety analysis of generalised alienation. It is also notable, in contrast to the theory of non-violent political action currently being enacted in the world, how far this style of political analysis depends on drawing symmetries between the modes of action of ‘the powerful’ and those who challenge them – the theoretical significance of the rhetoric of war, attack, and confrontation in this document lies here, I think, in this moral and political failure to be able to think of politics outside of a logic of mimetic hostility. And of course, whereas Gene Sharp’s name keeps coming up when it is realised that non-violent political action is strategic and organised, the analysis of a communism-to-come that is a purely immanent resonance with the current system requires no attention at all to the hard work of political action.

Favourite Thinkers IV: J.M. Coetzee

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I was idly surfing for videos of philosophers giving talks, and find that Robert Pippin, who you can watch ‘live’, has a recent essay in a collection of philosophical reflections on the work of J.M. Coetzee (Pippin is also writing about Westerns, a fun juxtaposition with his work on Hegel, Nietzsche, and the like). Coetzee has become a favourite of English-language philosophy with a Continental bent recently, with writers such as Stephen Mulhall, Stanley Cavell, Cora Diamond and John McDowell all finding resources for philosophical reflection in his work – in particular, it is Coetzee as an ethicist of sorts that seems to attract philosophers’ attention. The idea that Coetzee’s fictions add up to a sustained oeuvre of ethical thought is not a new one – the literary theorist David Atwell was making that argument more than a decade ago – but philosophical interest in Coetzee seems to be a ‘post-Disgrace’ phenomenon, related to the more explicit engagement with issues of animal rights and ethical propriety that Coetzee has been elaborating through the recurrent figure of Elizabeth Costello in a number of works.

The philosophical framing of Coetzee is a new stage in the variable reception history of his writing, which I wrote about way back in the late 1990s – then, you could discern both a geographical difference in how Coetzee was read in South Africa and South Africanist circles, and a generic difference in how he was read by academic theorists and generalist critics. In the late 1980s and 1990s, Coetzee was a favourite novelist for literary theorists, particularly those of a poststructuralist inclination,and especially amongst postcolonial theorists. There was a circular relationship involved here, in so far as Coetzee’s novels are of course highly ‘academic’ in their form and content, so they are kind of ‘always already’ available to be mined for evidence of certain literary theoretical axioms. I wonder if the same circularity isn’t involved in the philosophical interest in his work too? There is something odd about the supreme allegorist, Coetzee, having his novels read as allegories of certain theoretical, philosophical arguments.

I used Coetzee in my PhD back in the early 1990s, as a way of making sense of Spivak’s account of subaltern representation – not least, because at that time, she often invoked Coetzee’s Foe as an exemplar of her thesis. This engagement with Coetzee’s work was an important influence on my own intellectual and academic trajectory – it was a way into debates about South African cultural policy, and I ended up doing research on these issues from 1996 onwards; this was also a way out of a certain kind of dead-end of cultural theorising that 1990s human geography was sending me down. My initial interest was in the fact that Spivak’s invocation of Coetzee in support of her theoretical position was rather de-contextualised, in so far as it was detached from Coetzee’s rather controversial status at that time within debates about anti-apartheid cultural politics. Coetzee had always resisted incorporation into the forms and norms of ‘political’ writing that defined so much South African fiction in the 1980s (One of my most cherished ‘bookshop moments’ is coming across a copy of Upstream, a little magazine published in Cape Town in the ’80s, from 1988, in Ike’s bookshop in Durban. This edition, which cost me 10 Rand, contains an essay by Coetzee called ‘The Novel Today’ in which he tries to articulate the validity of the idea of the novel as an autonomous form not to be reduced to the imperatives of ‘historical’, that is political, expediency). At that time, the early 1990s, though, the settled models of cultural politics in South Africa were coming apart, both through ‘official’ revision in ANC circles and amongst academic writers such as Rob Nixon. Coetzee’s international reputation has grown and grown of course since the end of apartheid, and the end of that particular framing of South African writing – though of course, domestically he remained and remains a controversial figure, being denounced as racist when Disgrace was published (by a very high-ranking ANC politician no less) and then following a more general trend amongst white South Africans of emigrating (though he went to Adelaide, not Perth, or London). The Oxford based literary scholar Peter McDonald, in his book The Literature Police and elsewhere has uncovered the fascinating story of apartheid-era censorship systems in which Coetzee was, personally and as an author of fictions, ambiguously embroiled.

I haven’t worked on or written about Coetzee for more than a decade – as I say, it turned out that he was route away from literary theory and work on textuality (although I think these fields of research remain rather more valuable than they are given credit for in geography these days – a two decade metaphysical odyssey from postmodernism to ‘speculative realism’, affect theory and materialities has managed to pass by the flowering of all sorts of sociologically inflected, ethnographically informed accounts of the institutions and political economies of reading publics, publishing, popular literacy, national cultures, and educational practices, which might cash-out the promise of a materialist imagination rather better than repeated ontological assertions about materiality per se). I still read his books regularly, from a sense of duty and familiarity – they do have a ‘serial’ quality to them in their repetition of certain themes of high literary modernism. I like some of them more than others – Slow Man, his first novel after leaving South Africa, I enjoyed reading, while in South Africa, because it almost had a proper story in it. The multi-perspectival approach of The Diary of a Bad Year was a bit too didactic after a while. But Summertime, the most recent not-quite-autobiographical fiction managed to pull off the ‘where is the author?’ trick while also being funny, touching, and prosaically tragic (I know a South African who did a Masters dissertation on Coetzee’s fiction, Orli Bass, who wrote a letter to him to ask for an interview – she got a lovely, brief note in response, words to the effect that he believed that ‘books deserve to make their own way in the world’ – this is pretty much the theoretical premise that Coetzee’s fiction and his public profile seeks to systematically enact, which is why it proves so difficult to pin him and his work down in standard modes of critical interpretation. In turn, it’s why the fiction can be presented as exercises in ethical practice).

One of the things that seems to get lost in the theoretical-philosophical allegorization of Coetzee’s fictions is the brilliance, I think, of his work as a theorist and critic. He is after all, or was, a professional, academic, theorist. His conceptualization of the dynamics of censorship and offence in Giving Offence is wonderful and compelling; I think his consistent engagement with the problems of authentic expression in contexts saturated with ‘political’ imperatives, through the figure of Erasmus’ fool for example, is a deeply important contribution to thinking about the politics of free expression, ethics, and political responsibility; and one of my favourite pieces by him is an essay on The Misfits, which is as significant as anything written by Coetzee on the ethics and justice of human-animal relations through the figure of Elizabeth Costello I think, and which turns on the observation that a movie full of wonderful actorly performances by Monroe, Gable, Clift, and Wallach revolves around a purely deictic presentation of the suffering and fear and passion of horses. Sometimes, the real theoretical and philosophical force of Coetzee’s writings might be much better registered in these non-fictional genres – the essay or review – than in the fiction; but oddly, these texts don’t provide the same authority as the ‘stories’ which often enough write out the same arguments in fictional form.

What do ‘media’ do?

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Following my post on the reporting of events in Egypt, Alex Marsh sent me a link to this think-piece by BBC correspondent Paul Mason, Twenty reasons why it’s kicking off everywhere, which seeks to draw some general lessons from recent protest events in places as diverse as Greece, Ireland, North Africa and the UK. The piece has since been published in The Guardian, and has attracted some attention, not least as indicative of a BBC policy of encouraging journalists to engage in more detailed discussions via blogging.

Mason’s piece treads between a focus on ‘technology’ and a more interesting discussion of some of the sociological aspects of this range of events – the emphasis on the role of young, relatively highly educated people is surely correct. There is an inevitable journalistic emphasis on the newness of all of this, and the default assumption remains that this is really a story about how ‘technology’ transforms the conditions of political action. The geographer Tim Unwin has a list of various reports that address what he himself calls “the agency of mobile ‘phones and the use of social networking environments over the Internet” in shaping political upheaval in Tunisia, Egypt,  and beyond. His last comment is important: “Much research needs to be undertaken on the real role of ICTs in these ongoing political processes.  What seems apparent, though, is that many participants do indeed believe that these technologies are helping them achieve their objectives.” A certain view of the potential of digital communications is no doubt an important part of the ‘spontaneous philosophy’ of contemporary activism. Likewise, Mason’s think-piece refers in passing to how “activists have read their Chomsky and their Hardt-Negri”. I’m not so sure this necessarily means “they have a better understanding of power”, but in so far as it is true, it does certainly mean they are likely to have a particular, well-formed view of how power operates, for better or ill. But it seems to me that both of these aspects of activist self-understanding – of ‘communications’ and of ‘power’ – are more interesting if they are understood as internal dimensions to this form of organisation, without requiring anyone to affirm the ‘objective’ validity of either of these views of how political action unfolds. The focus on the importance of new media in much of this reporting and commentary allows a narrative framing in which politics is rooted in a generalised but unformed sense of ‘grievance’ rooted in ‘poverty’ and ‘oppression’ which is then given expression by new communications opportunities – Manuel Castells neatly summarises this narrative in his comments on all this.

In short, there is a particular concept of the mediating work that ‘media’, old and new, perform in much of the commentary on the role of social media and digital technology in contemporary politics – they can be ascribed so much importance by virtue of being attributed a merely mediating function. Amongst other things, what disappears from view from this perspective is the different practices that different communications technologies help to configure – twitter and facebook are playing different roles in contemporary events in the Arab world to that played by Al-Jazeera. While much of the commentary out there is about how new media changes how politics is done, my sense is that the real imperative behind much of this kind of commentary is the attempt to understand the changed conditions under which news is made, and indeed, the changed conditions under which academic expertise about complex situations can be articulated in real-time (and there might be interesting elective affinities between certain self-understandings of activism and the focus of media reporting on individualising effects of new media).

For an antidote to some of the more detached commentary on events in Egypt and Tunisia, there are some interesting debates going on amongst anthropologists, which provide much more depth of understanding than is found in much of the technology-focussed discussion. There are a couple of more circumspect reflections on the role of media in these political events. One of these pieces makes the point that the focus on the new mediums of political change is a recurrent feature of reporting and commentary on these types of dramatic political events: “This is an evergreen story…The interest that’s focused on social media now, ten years ago was focused on web portals, before that it was focused on email and list-serves, before that it was television.” And in this respect, there is an interesting archive of reportage and commentary on the protests around the contested Iranian election in 2009, described by some as a ‘twitter revolution’, which two years on is an interesting case-study of how the global news narrative of politics as technological expression unfolds and then unravels over time.

Geographies of Labour

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Becoming a parent is one of those occasions when one gets to see a lot of ‘the state’ – engaging with doctors, nurses, hospital administration; becoming a welfare recipient, through signing up for child benefit, or the now defunct child trust fund; visits from health visitors; registering a birth. Of all the professional people we have engaged with in this process, twice now, my heroes are the midwives. ‘We’ have had very different experiences of maternity care, first in Bristol, now in Swindon. In Bristol, with our first child in 2006, we were part of a progressive so-called ‘domino’ system of midwifery care, attached to a midwife-led maternity unit – this system is distinctive because the same midwives provide continuity of care through antenatal, intrapartum and postnatal stages. We were enrolled into this practice through one of our neighbours, at a summer street party actually, when she and one of her colleagues convinced us of the benefits of this approach, compared to the model in which community midwives provide antenatal and postnatal care, while different midwives are responsible for care while in hospital. The Bishopston midwife practice was, in fact, full of properly feminist midwives – Mary Stewart, our neighbour, was both a practicing midwife and a part-time PhD student at UWE at this time, and she is now an academic at Kings College London. I didn’t know this back then, but she is the editor of an important primer on feminist approaches to midwife care. I remember having a conversation with her, after the birth of our first child (she wasn’t actually the attending midwife at the birth), about her use of Judith Butler and qualitative methodologies in her PhD to understand midwives discourses about performing vaginal examinations during labour. The speed-reading I have done in this area, just by tracking Mary’s publications and where they lead, reveals an interesting and unexpectedly close relationship between high-falutin social theory – lots of Foucault in particular – and very practical concerns of how to enact, as they say, feminist principles of empowerment in contexts where midwives are mediating all sorts of imperatives, from surveillance of women, doing things to them, and sharing their experience and expertise with them.

One surprising thing about being part of this midwife practice was that we were quickly converted to the idea of having a home birth, which would previously have seemed like a bizarre thing to do. In the end, our first daughter wasn’t born at home, but the decision to start from a home birth as a first preference was an important aspect in ‘empowering’ and building confidence for my partner around the process of labour and giving birth. This second time round, in Swindon, things have been a little bit different. No domino system, and the Great Western Hospital in Swindon does not yet have a birth centre either (it opens later this year, and my partner couldn’t hold on). While not impossible to have a home birth, it was not in any way encouraged. Before Christmas, just as my partner started maternity leave, there was a rush of national news stories about funding cuts to midwife care and heightened risk to mothers in labour, and about ongoing controversies about the safety of home births. So we found ourselves in a context of renewed debates about medicalization of child-birth, and campaigns to protect maternity services in an age of ideologically-led austerity. But in the end, the birth of our second daughter involved two great midwives at the hospital, in and out in one day, and no sight of a doctor at all. And whereas we had planned to use a birth pool at home first time (I never even got to inflate it in the end), this second time ‘we’ did a have a water birth.

Two children in two different towns, both born in hospital but under different organizational arrangements. There is a large aspect of comparison to the practice of parenting – comparing one’s own conduct to peers and cohort groups, or to parents or sisters; and now, it turns out, comparing the second time to the first time. And then you remember there is something irreducibly singular about each birth, each child, each nappy. So I’m not going to generalize on the basis of our experience, not least because while in Bristol we got the ‘theory’ right, in Swindon we have had as nice, and in some respects even nicer, and as ‘empowering’ an experience despite being in a more classically ‘medicalized’ system. There is, of course, lots of serious social science about the geography of labour (though not really much in Geography), in at least two respects: the different arrangements available in different parts of the country; and at a different scale, but closely related to this, the differences between births planned at home, in midwifery units, or obstetric units. Our former neighbour Mary, since completing her PhD, has been working on a major Department of Health research programme, the Birthplace programme, looking at whether there are significant differences in outcomes for mothers depending on where births are planned. The results of the programme are due to be published later this year.

Democracy Live

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I came across an interesting theory blog the other day, called GonePublic, which belongs to Noelle McAfee, and focuses on links between philosophy, political theory and contemporary public life. She has a new book out, which I had not come across before, called Democracy and the Political Unconscious, which I haven’t yet read, but which sounds interesting in its emphasis on the relationships between collectively felt trauma and the challenges of building and sustaining democratic cultures. Her site also has a link to a recently published collection, Democracy in What State?, which includes contributions by some of the grandees of ‘continental-style’ political philosophy – Ranciere, Zizek, Badiou, Agamben, Nancy. Should make interesting reading, given the decided ambivalence about ‘democratic’ values one might impute to at least one or two of these thinkers. And while I am on the subject of things I haven’t read properly yet, there is also an interesting looking essay in Political Studies by Andy Dobson on Democracy and Nature, that thinks through the relevance of Latour’s provocations about nature and democracy by emphasising the importance of practices of listening as well as the well-trodden emphasis on speaking in recent democratic theory.

I stumbled across these references a week or so ago, and remembered them this week while finding myself watching a lot of day-time television, in that zonked-out, sleep-deprived way that one does in the first few days after the birth of a new child. We have sat glued to images of protest and violence in Cairo and other Egyptian cities. I wonder which, if any, of them would be most helpful for understanding what is going on there. Between them, these theoretical works look like they cover the shared terrain of cutting-edge democratic theory these days, which revolves around a couple of intertwined issues: how best to think of the mediums of inclusive democratic politics – in terms of deliberating, representing, and/or other modes of more or less embodied action; and how to square these images of how democratic politics should be best practiced with a more worldly acknowledgement that democracy is rarely founded democratically, but is shaped at its origins often by violence, trauma, and suffering. Of course, there is a style of theorising about ‘the political’ that presents these two sides as standing in a starkly contradictory, or aporetic relationship, so that democracies are always tainted at source by foundational violence. This serves as a way of reconfiguring some quite old-fashioned images of messianic revolution with ideals of democratic politics. Alternatively, there is an Arendtian vision in which the sorts of street protests going on in Egypt this last week or so are examples of a mode of collective, public action that is constitutively opposed to violence and yet is the very source of democratic energies.

Now I don’t know very much about Egypt, and am not inclined to over-interpret events there just for the sake of theoretical point-scoring. But watching these events, distracted by more real personal events and from a distance, I have been struck by how at times like this what you really want is contextual, social-scientific forms of analysis rather than interpretative political theory.  And, it’s also useful to have some sense of how things might be theorised by those more familiar with these contexts than the usual theory-suspects.

One of the riffs this past couple of week about Egypt, and before that about Tunisia, has been about the importance of social media like twitter and facebook in coordinating the protests and collective mobilizations that have shaken authoritarian regimes. To a large extent I think, this sort of emphasis is really an index of a culture of journalism that doesn’t know very much about the places where dramatic news events often take place, and is therefore forced to fall back on a familiar narrative line. Malcolm Gladwell has a neat little blog post on this theme here, in which he points out that the fact that the fact that events in Egypt have been partly shaped by the use of new media might be far down the list of relevant factors worthy of attention. His point is that the fascination with the mediums through which contemporary collective action is made possible, with the ‘how’, tends to distract attention from the content, from the ‘why’ of such action. There is a kind of flattening effect of this sort of news narrative, in so far as it makes political revolutions in Tunisia just another version of half-hearted online petition exercises led by government in the UK or the latest smart viral marketing campaigns of this or that underground pop song. The focus on the medium is not only exaggerated, as Gladwell suggests, but tends to obviate the need for any deeper analysis of why political events like this take place at all – I have actually learnt very little about Egyptian politics after a week of watching blanket news coverage from there.

Of the things I have had time to read on this issue, I enjoyed this piece on why the narrative that paints Egypt in 2011 as potentially a re-run of Iran in 1979 doesn’t hold up really helpful, precisely because it provided a basic outline of the social and organisational context in which these events are unfolding. It reminded me too of an old media studies analysis of the importance of tape cassettes to the Iranian revolution. Maybe each political revolution has its own  iconic ‘new media’ technology?

And the cassettes example isn’t as old sounding as it may appear. The anthropologist Charles Hirschkind has a detailed ethnographic account of the importance of taped sermons in shaping contemporary Islamic public spheres, in The Ethical Soundscape. One reason why this account resonates is that it reminds us that there is more to ‘media’ than just communicating – the ongoing importance of this media technology, in Hirschkind’s account, lies in the practices of self-sustained by a culture of listening, of being devout, of cultivating a particular spiritual and public ethics of life.

Hirschkind’s account of the practices of contemporary public life in Islamic societies like Egypt and Iran suggests a much more nuanced understanding of ‘public space’  than one often finds in spatial disciplines like geography or urban studies, which have a tendency to fetishize ‘real’ public spaces. I suppose the centrality of Tahrir Square to the events in Egypt in the last week might seem to confirm this emphasis. But I wonder. This seems to be an example of a struggle of over a specific site, as a symbolically important location rather than a site of real power, the control of which projects or reaches beyond its coordinates in space. A year or so ago I listened to a talk, at a workshop in Rome on political agency, by the Egyptian academic and activist Heba Raouf Ezzat, who talked about the vibrant but furtive quality of the political public sphere in Egypt. She recommended the work of Asef Bayat, who has written about new ‘post-Islamic’ social movement politics and the ordinariness of political action in the Middle East. Bayat has also written about the figure and reality of ‘the Arab street’, which he reconstructs as a complex of ideas and practices about the force of popular opinion, the fragility of state power, and the calibration of formal political processes to material conditions of life (what Africanist political theorists might call ‘the politics of the belly’). Bayat has updated this analysis of the new Arab street in the last week in relation to events in Tunisia and Egypt.

Between them, these sorts of analyses of the spaces of  political action are helpful in indicating the extent to which democratic energies might be understood as urbanized in certain respects without forcing one to fetishize a particular romantic image of the city as the scene of political life. There is an urbanity to the movements for change in Egypt, Tunisia, Iran and elsewhere, it seems – in so far as they are peopled by labour activists, and professional classes, by women’s organisations, as well as by varieties of religious activism which are resolutely modern in their concerns and maybe often even ‘secular’ in their form. And it seems too there might be something resolutely urbanized about the ‘conjunctural’ factors at work in these recent events – the central importance of economic grievances over unemployment and food prices is indicative of the interplay between spatially extensive infrastructures of provisioning upon which contemporary urban living on the scale of a city like Cairo depends; and more contained, lived and shared experiences of stunted citizenship.

After affect(s): Ruth Leys on affect theory

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I’m not sure if this is the best way to keep up with exciting theory debates, but I spent an evening this week in a ‘car supermarket’, trying not to fall into a salesman’s traps while also working out whether or not I liked driving an automatic rather than a manual transmission – what do you do with your ‘spare’ foot? In between all this, I stumbled across this announcement of a forthcoming lecture at Duke by Ruth Leys, promising a critique of affect (the things you can do with an iPhone). I will not be in North Carolina next week, but this looks really interesting, and long overdue. The post mentions a forthcoming paper in Critical Inquiry later this year, and Leys mentions in a recent interview that she is writing a book on the relationships between scientific understandings of affects and the affect turn in cultural theory. The interview, from last year, provides a taster of what Leys argument looks like – what is most interesting about this is that she is providing a genealogical analysis of the coherence between the anti-intentionalism of certain fields of psychology and neuroscience and a broad range of ‘affect theory’ in cultural studies and beyond. I was first turned on to Leys work on this stuff by Felicity Callard, who studied with her as a graduate student, and who is also working on the use of scientific authority in the affective turn amongst social scientists and in the humanities. In the interview, Leys explains that “The question that interests me is why so many cultural theorists – geographers, political theorists, new media theorists, and others – are so fascinated by the idea of affect and are so drawn to the work on the affects by certain neuroscientists”. Of course, part of the answer is that the science provides authority for strongly ‘political’ readings of particular models of action, embodiment, habit, and practice.  One thing she talks about in the interview is the degree to which ‘strong’ theories of the autonomy of affect tend to be resolutely dualistic, adopting quite old fashioned styles of materialism in setting embodiment off from the mind, affect from cognition. I think she is dead right – this is a clear feature of debates in human geography about non-representational theory, emotions, and affect, in which remarkably simplistic understandings of intentionality, meaning, or rationality circulate.

I have wondered for a while, and tried to articulate in writing, what is the academic pay-off of constructing non-cognitive dimensions of action or practice in the strongly anti-intentionalist ways as one finds in Deleuzian inflected theory – what is gained by the effacement of intention and meaning from the scene of action, and from the re-distribution of knowing rationality almost entirely onto the figure of the expert-theorist? Leys’ argument, which emerges from earlier work about broader shifts from discourses of guilt to discourses of shame in the study of trauma, pinpoints the way in which claims of scientific authority underwrite a motivated reconfiguration of what counts as political: “The whole point of the general turn to affect among recent cultural critics is to shift attention from the level of political debate or ideology to the level of the person’s subliminal or sub-personal material-affective responses, where, it is held, political influences do their real work”. And she goes on, this authorises “a relative indifference to the role of ideas and beliefs in politics in favour of an ‘ontological’ concern with people’s corporeal-affective experiences of the political images and representations that surround them” (of course, in geography and perhaps some media studies, what is most interesting about this sort of work is precisely that it focuses on a much broader array of affective ‘environments’). This ontologization of affect allows for a dark narrative of bad affects – in which people get manipulated for all sorts of sinister ends; and a nice story about good affects, which is meant to be the positive political inflection of affect theory – although this often turns out to be a rather standard ‘proof’ that subjectivities are much more malleable than we think, and can be best transformed by being exposed to some form of aesthetic disruption or other.

All a bit troubling, once you notice that ‘knowing’ has been entirely evacuated from the field of everyday action inhabited by ordinary people, and is now a capacity reserved entirely for those able to handle what are properly thought of as esoteric (in a Straussian sense) theories of affect. In certain respects, and despite the loud rhetoric of political radicalism that accompanies so much affect theory, this style of cultural theory of ‘the political’ might actually be a symptom of a deeply ingrained, scholastic cynicism about the political virtues of ordinary people.

Leys’ genealogy of the science of affect theory is an important resource for thinking through the politics of the ‘political’ invocation’ of affect in cultural theory and social science. Like the Dreyfus/McDowell debate, it is an example of some proper thinking about the forms of reasoning, demonstration, and indeed evidence that lay behind claims of expertise and authority which often work, certainly in geography, to have a chilling effect on serious thought. One thing her work suggests is that the ‘ontological’ commitments of what is now orthodox affect theory in the social sciences and humanities are, indeed, strongly theoretical – the reference to the authority of cutting-edge life sciences might be much more contentious than it appears (and shouldn’t we know this anyway).  Or maybe we should just call those commitments ‘metaphysical’, in the bad sense.

Fair is Fair

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Everybody’s talking about fairness, these days, as my colleague John Clarke observes. It’s been a central and recurring motif in discussions of the end of universal child benefit, the Browne review of higher education funding, and Nick Clegg’s announcement of the Pupil Premium. All this fairness talk is part of general break-out of explicitly normative political discourse in the last 6 months, or at least the surfacing of themes which have been floating around for a while – The Big Society, with it’s Burkean heritage and ‘Red Tory’ sheen of radicalism is just one example; Ian Duncan-Smith’s catholic inflected social justice agenda is another; David Willets’ account of intergenerational justice yet another, the latter two more obviously having policy relevance than Cameron’s more flaky sounding Big Society.  A key question here is whether it is wise to think of these discourses as simply ‘cover’ for spending cuts, simply means of legitimating more fundamental decisions.

John worries that fairness is too airy, lacking the incisiveness of a value like equality for example. I’m not so sure. Firstly, I think fairness is a term through which intuitive values of equality and justice is ordinarily expressed – these aren’t opposed terms at all. John Rawls’ egalitarian liberalism revolves around a notion of fairness, for example (a rather opaque account admittedly). But the principle of ‘from each according to ability, to each according to need’ also expresses an egalitarian sense of fairness. I think the intimate relationship between fairness and from abstract notions of equality or justice is worth considering more carefully as the politics of ‘the new politics’ begins to unfold, starting tomorrow with the comprehensive spending review. Last week, The Guardian’s right-wing provocateur Julian Glover managed to concoct a mean-spirited response to the ECHR’s report, How Fair is Britain?. What exercised Glover was precisely the coupling of fairness with equality in this report, leading him to argue that since fairness is a woolly idea, and since it is too easily mistaken as ‘equality’, we should do away with both notions. Glover’s self-serving argument elicited a debate , which underscored again the close relationship between these two different values.

My point is that we might do well to take seriously the different meanings of fairness, and attend to their changing deployment in public culture and in different contexts. But more than this, might usefully think of this break-out of fairness talk not so much as merely ‘legitimating’ economic decision-making, but as a form of justificatory discourse – in the sense that justificatory practices are understood by economic sociologists such as Luc Boltanski, Eve Chiapello, and Laurent Thévenot, as crucial mediums for the coordination of social life. From their perspective, justificatory discourses need to be understood as exerting real constraints on the exercise of unfettered capitalist logics, and as indices of fields of contestation and critique to which selective responses are made. From this sort of perspective, all this fairness talk is notable precisely because it is an index of the terrain of conflict and contestation to which an emerging, half-baked political programme feels itself obliged to respond in the hope of circumventing other modes of critique. Fairness is not meaningless, and certainly not an empty signifier. It has as set of intuitive associations, which the Coalition is doing its best to both make use of and control. David Cameron talks of fairness as ‘giving people what they deserve, and what people deserve depends on how they behave’. This definition ties fairness to a notion of individual responsibility, but it articulates a broader sense of fairness having to do with desert – an idea that is easily inflected in egoistically ‘meritocratic’ ways for sure, but which is also open to re-inscription.

So fairness might be worth taking more seriously than the urge to question all this woolly moralism leads us to think it should, if only because this is one terrain in which ‘the new politics’ is about to be articulated – not just spending cuts, but the coming debate about electoral reform too. It’s not the only one, of course, and there is no good reason to restrict oneself to the terms laid down by those in formal political control of events. In this respect, too, though, it is notable that there are some funny things happening in political discourse just now. For example, the reaction to the announcement of the end of universal child benefit by right-wing columnists in The Daily Mail and The Daily Telegraph is interesting not least because the challenge to the narrowly ‘transactional’ view of fairness expressed by Osborne and Cameron at the Tory conference was presented through a clear statement of a principle of public value – the defence of ‘stay at home mums’ receiving child benefit irrespective of personal or household income levels was made in the name of the principle that engaging in an activity that benefitted the collective life of the community deserved reward and support. This is a gendered, nationalistic, paternalistic vision of public value, no doubt, but a vision of public value it certainly is – it is in marked contrast to the ruling principle behind the Browne review of higher education, for example, which confirms an already evident drift to thinking of the public function of Universities primarily in terms of the efficiency with which they distribute private benefits to those who pass through their doors – a trend tracked by OU colleagues in the Centre for Higher Education Research and Information, and theorised by Craig Calhoun. If the ‘stay at home mum’ logic was applied to higher education, the proposals for University funding would look markedly different. All of which is to suggest that one task for a critical response to ‘the new politics’ of spending cuts, austerity, re-moralisation of the poor, electoral reform, and much else is to carefully track the modes of justification presented for different decisions, for it is here that one will be able to track the genealogies of vulnerability to which this idiosyncratic political project is responding and the opportunities for opposition it is helping to generate in its wake.

Vote early and vote often

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The response to the election of Ed Miliband as new leader of the Labour Party was interesting not least because it was the occassion for various commentators to articulate their views on what counts as properly ‘democratic’. Julian Glover is The Guardian‘s resident apologist for the coalition, in the sense that he keeps writing these pieces which try to articulate the idea that the coalition reflects some sort of ‘intellectual powerhouse’ rather than, say, a political deal (what would be wrong with admitting this?). Today Glover came up with a very weak argument against equality, on the grounds that any argument which prioritises this value “overlooks the possibility that the actions needed to compel equality may be seen as unfair by those who do not benefit from them”. Er, yes, I suppose they might. This might be true of people earning lots of money who don’t want to pay higher, progressive taxes, just as it might be true of white South Africans benefitting from apartheid who might not have welcomed the onset of a new democratic dispensation. Glover goes on to claim that “An equally valid idea of a fair society may be one in which people are given the space and the right to strive for inequality: advantage achieved by their own efforts”, and then admits that this might all sound “horribly right wing“. It actually just sounds a bit dim (not much intellectual power-housing going on in this sort of argument), although it is certainly provocative to read Glover at the moment because he seems to be trying to articluate a kind of Nozickian-style hyper-individualistic take on coalition spending plans as not just unfortunate necessities but as positively welcome. Each to their own, I suppose, and Glover’s perspective does at least have the advantage of suggesting that ‘the Big Society’ idea at least has some intellectual substance to it compared to what passes as ‘orangist’ Liberal Democract thinking – it reminds one of how far the Big Society narrative departs from a fully-loaded ‘liberal’ individualism of the sort ascribed to ‘Thatcherism’, how far Cameron’s rhetoric for a long-time has been geared to transcending the burden of ‘there is no such thing as society’, and how far the Big Society is properly part of a ‘conservative’ tradition of thought with some intellectual weight.

Anyway, where was I? A few weeks ago, Glover described Ed Miliband’s victory as ‘peculiar and undemocratic’, without quite explaining why. It might have been peculiar, certainly, in so far as electoral college arrangements always generate some oddities; but the ‘undemocratic’ charge seems peculiar itself. Firstly, Ed Miliband won within the rules, of course, which no one contested. Secondly, though, the results indicate that Ed Miliband would actually have ‘won’ the election on just about any electoral system one can think of, if the ‘bias’  built into the unequal loading of the three-way division of the electoral college system between Labour MPs and MEPSs, party members, and members of affiliated organisations is lifted and one only looks at total number of individual votes casts for the Labour leader: he would have won under a first-past-the-post system counting first preferences (the system the Tory party uses); and he would have won under an alternative vote system which counted each indivual vote cast equally too (the system the Liberal Democrats use). It was only close because the votes of those individuals most likely to vote for Ed Miliband were systematically discounted in the electoral college system – quite legitimately, of course (the real issue in all this is whether one thinks trade union members should be enfranchised in this particular electoral system; and more broadly, this episode exposed the deeply undemocratic attitudes of many commentators to the position of trade unions in functioning liberal democracies).

Anyway, somehow Glover’s hyper-individualism seems connected for me with a certain sort of self-righteousness that is associated with current arguments about electoral reform, in which it is widely presumed that proportional representation is the preferred ideal against which any other alternative voting system is an unfortunate, temporary compromise. But what if PR harbours a horribly thin, de-racinated conception of political life, in which all that matters about politics is being counted as an individual bearer of opinions? There are other values worth considering, and across the spectrum from Tory (and not so Tory) worries about representing geographical communities to genuine concerns about accountability and efficiency, these seem worth acknowledging. I have always had a soft-spot for electoral geography, a much maligned field which actually has really interesting things to say about the politics of Politics, and one thing this field reminds us of is that ‘choosing an electoral system‘ is always a thoroughly interested, grubby, political act. We are about to experience, in the UK, at least 9 months of public debate about the fairness of different models of voting, and it will be interesting to see which democratic values are given most prominence as we publicy learn more about the pros and cons of different voting systems – the deafult assumption of ‘proportionality’ bundles up just some of the relevant values, certainly, but while it appears to be intuitively the most ‘fair’, it also tends to cover a series of mathematical problems which means that no purely proportional system is really possible, and might even mean that any imaginable democratic system must always contain an element of electoral dysfunction. The point of all this, I think, apart from any interest one might have in social choice theory or rationality, is that the mathematics of democracy reminds us that there is always a politcal, normative excess in any discussion of ‘fair’ procedures of the sort to which we are about to be subjected. Let’s see how much of this excess is allowed to be clearly articluated these next few months (this excess is precisely why elections are the place where the ‘the political’, in the sense this idea is conceptualised by post-structuralists like Mouffe or Ranciere, is routinely exposed and made public).

And, on a sort of related issue, there is a new podcast interview with Michael Dummett, on Frege, on philosophy bites. Dummett is one of the grand old men of English-language, Analytical philosophy, but kind of interesting despite that (!) – an anti-racist campaigner (who has reflected on the relevance or not of Frege’s anti-semitism for interpreting his philosophy), and author of an important theory of voting in precisely that same tradition mentioned above. A different model of engaged intellectual from the one we have inherited from the ‘Coninental’ tradition.

Does size matter? Beyond ‘neoliberalism’

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I attended a day-long seminar this week honouring the work of my colleague at the OU, Janet Newman. One theme of the day was how to understand the new political context in the UK, one of impending public expenditure cuts, lots of talk of ‘The Big Society’, and the coalition stoking ‘blame the poor’ rhetoric to justify fundamental restructuring of welfare regimes. What struck me over the course of the day was how the task of grasping this new political ‘conjuncture’ remains horribly constrained by the inherited academic conceptualisation of ‘neoliberalism’ that has held such sway over the last decade amongst critically-inclined, lefty social scientists [and critical theories of neoliberalism and neoliberalization are very much a product of the 2000s, something which itself seems worth reflecting on – as simple descriptive term, ‘neoliberalism’ has been around a long time, and we all know what it means – but the formalization of grand explanatory theories around this name seems a much more recent phenomenon].

Amongst those who pioneered the development of theories of ‘hegemonic neoliberalism’, the new situation post-2008 has already been dubbed ‘postneoliberalism’. This is hilarious in its own way, but it is in line with a longer tradition in this neo-Gramscian strand of thought of always ensuring that any awkward real-world facts are rapidly taken to confirm the basic understanding of neoliberalization as involving a straightforward shift from ‘state’ to ‘market’. My favourite example of this theoretical sleight of hand is the conceptual distinction between roll-back and roll-out neoliberalism, as a way of suggesting that even when states were being expanded into new areas and government expenditure was growing, this was all still an expression of logics to reduce the state and expand markets – I have discussed the ways in which strand of theory retreats from serious social theory in an essay on publics and markets published earlier this year. Postneoliberalism as a term seems to acknowledge that something might have changed in modes of economic governance over the last couple of years, but that ‘post’ ensures that the basic understanding of neoliberalization in the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s remain intact. Perhaps we should just describe what we are about to experience in the UK as ‘roll-back-again neoliberalism’.

One notable thing about these Marxist accounts of neoliberalization is the way in which they hold to the same zero-sum understanding of the relationship between markets and states that one can find in classic right-wing, conservative and monetarist thinking. Aditya Chakrabortty noticed in The Guardian this week how George Osborne’s account of the deficit crisis revolves around the rhetoric of public sector borrowing ‘crowding out‘ private sector activity, in a direct echo of high monetarist theories of the 1970s and 1980s. But what is noticeable about debates which revolve around the size of the state, shrinking public spending, or the Big-ness or not of Society is precisely how they all revolve around the idea that it is the size of the state relative to markets and ‘civil society’ that most matters. But as Raymond Plant observes in his new book on The Neo-liberal State (Oxford University Press, 2010),  if it makes sense to talk of a neo-liberal political philosophy then not only should this be seen as first and foremost a theory of the state [one which privileges a particular account of the rule of law], not a theory of markets as preferable to the state, but in this strand of thought [in which Oakeshott is as important as Hayek, and Friedmann hardly figures], it is not the size of the state that really matters. It is the character of the state, specifically with regard to the attitude to pursuing putative common goals, that matters most.

The point of all this is to suggest that in large part, the politics of deficit reduction, public sector austerity, and welfore reform under politically conservative regimes, now as in the 1980s, in so far as it does indeed revolve around understandings of the optimal size of the state, is probably not best seen as a simple projection of a single coherent ‘neo-liberal’ programme of the sort imagined by Marxist theorists. Of course those same theorists would acknowledge all this under the sign of ‘contradiction’, but this is really just a cover for the intellectual blinkers which enable any and all counter-evidence to be subsumed into a morally coherent but empirically immunized narrative of neoliberal ‘hegemony’.

One cost of the hegemony of these theories of neoliberal hegemony amongst leftist academics is an inability to think seriously about what markets might be good for, two decades after the flourishing of debates about ‘market socialism’. Of course, there is plenty of interesting work, mainly from economic sociologists, which provides much more pluralist accounts of the intellectual agendas often subsumed beneath the term neoliberalism – Marion Fourcade‘s work on professional economics, for example; or Viviana Zelizer’s challenge to the anti-market moralism of Polanyi, which is so important to critical theories of neoliberalism (see Phillipe Steiner in Theory and Society, (2009) Volume 38, Number 1, pp, 97-110). But this work does not, of itself, challenge the chilling effect that Marxist accounts of neoliberalism have, certainly in the academic fields I have been circulating in over the last decade, which continue to press any and all signs of pluralism and multiplicity into a singular narrative of complicity or selling-out.

What is most surprising about the continuing credulity extended to these critical theories of neoliberalism and neoliberalization is these approaches actually display such a limited view of ‘politics’. Of course, these theories stake their primary claim on understanding neoliberalism as a political process, and also on uncovering this fact as itself a political gesture in itself. But this really just means that for these theories, ‘the state’  acts directly to secure the interests of Capital – either through policy and governance initiatives, in neo-Gramscian versions, or as purveyor of ‘ideology’ in David Harvey’s version. These theories of neoliberalism, which as I say flourished in the 2000s, are pale echoes of the analysis of ‘Thatcherism’ developed by Stuart Hall amidst debates of the 1980s – this account was just one part of an extended attempt to grasp political change as embedded in broader socio-cultural as well as economic transformations. It was Michael Foot who once argued that the real author of the ‘neoliberal’ transformations wrought on  the British economy and British society in the 1980s was not Thatcher, Hayek, or Friedman, but Enoch Powell (Foot’s good friend), principled defender of sound money and fiscal prudence as well as populist race-baiter. Powell hardly features in the narratives of neoliberalization developed by Marxist and Foucauldian theorists, and not the least reason for this is that these approaches have little feel for the contingencies of political process: they either present policy-centric visions of the unfolding of neoliberal logics, or stress the contingent outcomes of technological devices and assemblages. Neither has any feel for the broad sense of social change one finds, for example, in Rick Perlstein’s Nixonland, Jefferson Cowie’s Stayin’ Alive, or Andy Beckett’s When the Lights Went Out. These aren’t ‘theory’ books of course, but in reconstructing the turbulent crossings of conservative, radical, individualistic, anti-authoritarian cultural politics in the 1970s, they succeed in unsettling critical narratives of neoliberalization. At the very least, they suggest the need to think more seriously about the possibility of popular neoliberalism, with all the unsettling implications this notion has.

Theories of neoliberalism have, indeed, had a chilling effect on critical social theory over the last decade, ensuring that attempts to acknowledge the determinate effects of other processes in shaping political outcomes and possibilities is always swamped within a discourse of complicity and hegemony. Notions of ‘postneoliberalism’ are just the latest efforts to maintain this grip by seeming to acknowledge change while putting beyond criticism previous formulations of neoliberalism and neoliberalization. Perhaps it’s time to recognise that one reason it is so difficult to think about the politics of the current conjuncture is precisely because this style of thinking, which continues to serve as the horizon for these efforts, has never been able to think seriously about politics in anything other than highly scholastic terms: as an effect of policy, an expression of intellectual programmes, or as a process of ideology.