Middlesex and universities

A good article on neoliberalism and universities here.

Northcott on Carbon Emissions Trading

Michael Northcott gave an interesting seminar at Durham yesterday in which he critiqued CET for relying on market mechanisms to solve political problems. He thinks this reliance on the market for everything, which neoliberalism has fostered for the last 30 years, has deformed us in that it has shaped us as agents who are less able to co-operate, partly because we don’t believe in it. This means when politicians get together to try to hash out deals (e.g. at Copenhagen) they a) think of market solutions first, b) are less able to govern by face-to-face agreement and negotiation, trusting instead to ‘government by algorithm’.

An excellent article by Jason Read

Which can be seen on the excellent Foucault Studies site. Read argues, following Foucault, that neoliberalism differs from classical liberalism by positing an anthropology based on competition rather than on exchange. This affects our subjectivity, causing us to view all of life through market eyes. His examples are considering marriage or children as an investment, looking to get the maximum gain from the minimum input. (I’m not sure that’s a good example for his case. Are people really daft enough to do that? I guess some are, but the majority? We need someone to do some study on that…).

Neoliberalism posits such an anthropology but also tries to create it. For instance, short term contracts encourage people to see other workers as competition rather than as fellow workers with whom one might be in solidarity. They also encourage seeing one’s whole life as a form of capital, so that everything must become an investment (taking courses to go on your CV etc). And this thinking pervades all of social life. (Again, perhaps a bit over done, but very perceptive I think). He ends with a great paragraph I’ll quote at length.

As Foucault argues, neoliberalism operates less on actions, directly curtailing them, than on the condition and effects of actions, on the sense of possibility. The reigning ideal of interest and the calculations of cost and benefit do not so much limit what one can do, neoliberal thinkers are famously indifferent to prescriptive ideals, examining the illegal drug trade as a more or less rational investment, but limit the sense of what is possible. Specifically the ideal of the fundamentally self-interested individual curtails any collective transformation of the conditions of existence. It is not that such actions are not prohibited, restricted by the dictates of a sovereign or the structures of disciplinary power, they are not seen as possible, closed off by a society made up of self-interested individuals. It is perhaps no accident that one of the most famous political implementers of neoliberal reforms, Margaret Thatcher, used the slogan, “there is no alternative,” legitimating neoliberalism based on the stark absence of possibilities…It is also this sense of possibility that the present seems to be lacking; it is difficult to imagine let alone enact a future other than a future dominated by interest and the destructive vicissitudes of competition. A political response to neoliberalism must meet it on its terrain, that of the production of subjectivity, freedom and possibility. (36)

It’s a bit pessimistic, as you might expect from a post-structuralist, but it also seems sadly accurate.