1.
UK: So what
is neoliberalism, if not a radical incarnation of cultural
hegemony—in that it intrinsically misrepresents (via a delusively
benignant reframing) all modes of civilizing engagement and every
mode of civilizing effect? The strange descendant of Aynian
objectivism and Rothbardian anarcho-capitalism, neoliberalism is a
creature that has shifted its unseemly shape beyond radical economic
ultra-orthodoxy, seeping into, until permeating, the entire cultural
landscape and the whole of society. In essence, this radical
incarnation seeks a hegemony founded on deculturization, in that it
implicitly negates all true forms of culture that are not
commensurate with its paradigms of individualist supremacy and such
supremacy’s necessarily incidental cultural adornments.
ST: that
neoliberalism reframes “all modes of civilizing engagement and
every mode of civilizing effect”;
that its “its
paradigms [are] of individualist supremacy”.
Do neoliberals
delude themselves that their efforts are towards civil society? Or
more bluntly that they are benign?
The question
concerns how neoliberals view themselves and what is the point of
view of neoliberalism. We can agree that this point of view reframes
civilization, as process and form of life. But it does not do so by
misrepresenting civilization. Neoliberalism, first of all, is not a
doctrine, and less an ideology; even less a political one, and not at
all a framing or reframing of whatever is supposed to pre-exist it.
It is a strategy of representation, not misrepresentation; and it is
not self-deluding, or delusive. It acts strategically, speaks
strategy, deals in the real world strategically, through eschewing
the kind of Grand Narratives on which our modernism relied, including
that one about the supremacy of the individual. In this neoliberalism
has going for it a kind of slippery postmodernism, and a decidedly
anti-representationalist slant. However, it is strategically
deployed.
2.
UK: The
self-imagery of neoliberalism is an endemic artfulness that is belied
by its extreme simplisticness and its intrinsic incapacity relative
to all paradox. This includes its incapacity relative to the paradox
of so-called civilization or the civilizing impulse that is
perpetually indicated or perceived as “progress.” To the extent
that the manifestation of whatever has been dubbed civilization has
been accounted “successful”, it has always been predicated upon
hegemony, rationalism and doubt (or the ambiguous certainties
heralded as “progress” itself).
Paradoxically—without
effacing hegemony, rationalism and doubt—much of
civilization-making activity has really been rooted in verifiable
humanizing processes and outcomes, in respect of the creation and
promotion of civic spaces and institutions, education, the arts and
so forth;
ST: that
civilization is based on “hegemony, rationalism and doubt” as
well as “humanizing processes” we might call civic, including
civic (civilizing) spaces and institutions.
This triad of
hegemony, rationalism and doubt appeals to the Cartesian cogito. I
find myself asking as readily what civilization is? as what is
neoliberalism? Isthis the right duality? Has not civilization, in the
face of human guilt and shame in the Shoah, got a bad name? (Let
alone representation (after Adorno).) Let us remember that the
founding event of neoliberalism is in 1947, Hayek’s convening of
the Mont Pelerin Society, still very active—still very active in
New Zealand, both in political and business circles. That is directly
after the war, a new dawn dawned. Red-faced, not at all. Red-handed
and red-fingered, perhaps.
3.
UK: As with
traditional (but ambiguous) civilization-makers, neoliberals, too,
harbor a quasi-religious (if passionately de-collectivizing)
conviction around a notion of “progress.” But in contrast to the
paradox of so-called civilization’s efforts at humanization
combined with hegemony, neoliberalism, is—by the nature of its very
contempt for all human nuance in which felicity is perforce
inextricable from vulnerability—an active, summary negation of all
verifiable humanizing processes, even those processes which have been
obligated to coexist with forms of hegemony.
What is unique about
neoliberalism—and where neoliberalism goes arguably further than
the most wretched of collectivized totalitarian ideologies—is that
(unlike fascism and bolshevism) it proactively anathematizes
community, and therefore society, and therefore humanity itself.
Neoliberalism militantly glorifies the market; above all, it
glorifies virile economic autonomy and self-exalting individualism as
the ostensible uttermost expressions of human existence. And it is
inherently contemptuous of all expressions of human life and
community that do not fulfill this paradigm;
ST: that
neoliberalism “proactively anathematizes community, and therefore
society, and therefore humanity itself. It militantly glorifies the
market and, above all, it glorifies virile economic autonomy and
self-exalting individualism as the ostensible uttermost expressions
of human existence. And it is inherently contemptuous of all
expressions of human life and community that do not fulfill this
paradigm”.
We can agree here
but not on the existence of a paradigm—and not on the issue of
virility. We can agree on the contempt in which Hayek and his
followers hold humanity—as they have colonised every level of human
undertaking. Again, it is not the expressions of human life and
community with which neoliberal strategies concern themselves. Rather
it is with expressing these and producing in them images drawn from a
new brain. This new brain belongs to the markets; and, like the mind
imagines the brain, the delusion is at this level: that there is a
brain, that there exist a market, is a work of the mind and of the
men and women who deal in markets and their creation, their
representation at the political level.
4.
UK: To
neoliberal eyes, humanity, alas, really does exist, and does so in
its unfulfilled guise: quotidian, dependent, plodding, seemingly
oblivious to the expansively independent and dynamically self-assured
opportunities and obligations of its agency. And of course, in the
neoliberal mind, there are all too many institutions that embody and
perpetuate this selfsame disgraceful, inert mediocrity.
Hence, what
neoliberals conceive as being incumbent upon themselves is a
sustained effort or visionary crusade to confront and undermine and
resolve the embarrassment that is humanity itself. The confrontation
thus pursued is the righteous animation of its virtuous contempt. The
expression of that contempt is the intrinsically fanciful empowerment
of citizens in every context through a unique form of infantalization
that presumes to treat human beings as dependent, misguided and
undisciplined children—and in the same breath compulsively wean
them off every expectation of a nurturing or protective environment,
or even one based on that most unruly and suspect of all human
frailties: solidarity (as opposed to narcistic co-admiration or the
self-satisfied collusion of the powerful with likeminded agents).
ST: that
“what neoliberals conceive as being incumbent upon themselves is a
sustained effort or visionary crusade to confront and undermine and
resolve the embarrassment that is humanity itself.”
We do agree but the
counter-image must also be given its place, of a source of and
strategy for the redemption of a shamed, a very guilty, and a no
doubt embarrassed humanity. It imagines a humanity embarrassed to
resolve that embarrassment by means not found in humanity—or in
civilization. These means can broadly be termed artificial
intelligence or the automated—and automations of the—marketplace.
5.
UK: It is the
intention of neoliberal philosophy to treat all who labor in
organizations of any kind, public or private, and all of those
members of society who are dependent in any form, as the suboptimal
specimens that they appear to be, by dint of their non-incarnation of
virtuously prodigious invulnerable independence. Since there is no
real hope that the vast majority will improve on these virtuous
terms—or ever seriously fulfill the righteous prescription of
neo-liberal sensibility—the majority must, at the very least, for
its own sake, be informed by an unsparing program of applied
disillusionment, in which the consequences of non-improvement are in
its face perpetually and, if necessary, forever. It is, after all,
not the fault of those who know better, that the majority choose to
remain as children, oblivious to, or resistant of, virtuously
self-surpassing ambition.
ST: that
neoliberalism prescribes ceaseless self-improvement, ceaseless
because in vain.
Here we are dealing
with human affects. But these too are not to be thought through and
decided upon by human agents. Self-improvement of course summons up
the idea of the subject who is an entrepreneur of the self, on social
media, say. Social media are already a kind of automatic, automated
marketplace in which social affects and human affects can be decided.
Self-improvement is
not prescribed by neoliberals, because, we agree, the human cannot be
improved upon, except by the nonhuman. Humanity enters a
self-improvement loop because nonhuman values prevail; and perhaps if
I am better, affirm better, do better, think better and smarter, I
will get a better deal out of an automatic, automated world.
6.
UK: Exalting
in the vanity of power as idealized human autonomy, neoliberals are
unique in extolling their warped notion of freedom. There is, upon
this earth, and in human history altogether, potentially no
expression of base authoritarianism more insidious—or insipid!—in
its hypocrisy than hegemonic pseudo-libertarianism; the latter being
perhaps the crux of what neoliberalism is altogether.
As an inherently
loveless creed, neoliberalism is also an inherently empty one.
Situated, seated, unconsciously in that blithe emptiness is pervasive
existential dread. In neoliberal sensibility, the flight from dread
is perused through the morbid festivity of presumptive aspiration in
which the individual is pretentiously immortalized, while the
collective is ceremoniously penalized and punished;
ST: that the
crux of neoliberalism may be a “pseudo-liberatarianism”, in which
the individual is offered freedom at the expense of the collective.
Yes, this was
Hayek’s theme. The crux, however, is still to outsource those
mechanisms by which such freedom is secured for the individual—to
the marketplace and the economic instruments of a neoliberal
political economy.
7.
UK: Sartre
said that the people must be brought into the temple of enlightenment
through the lavatory. The neoliberal take on this is that the people
must be brought into the temple of enlightenment through the
over-exerted order-fulfillment mass warehouse of bewilderment.
In neoliberal praxis
the inducement of bewilderment in all guises, situations, and sites
of controlled interaction is a creative strategy for in seeking the
correction or redemption of the embarrassment that is humanity
itself. What neoliberals require is a milieu compulsorily festive
bewilderment as a vindication of their own superior effacement of the
void.
This pseudo-heroism
seeks the acquirement of all others through the allegiance induced by
purposive bewilderment. Thus neoliberalism appears among humanity in
the guise of an elemental expression of pervasive lechery. Those who
are lecherous and powerful believe that anything desired may be
acquired as a matter of course and inherent right. What neoliberalism
desires is all humanity and yet neoliberalism is contemptuous of
humanity itself. The latter is not paradox but the inherent
self-contradiction of power that is most base.
ST: that
neoliberalism “in seeking the correction or redemption of the
embarrassment that is humanity itself” bewilders, desiring
humanity, contemptuous of humanity.
That it bewilders
even the best minds is bewildering. It may have to do with a
strategic deployment of agendas and no unified theory or code, with
doing what is necessary when it is necessary, for the good of that
which will secure for the individual the greatest freedom. Hence—the
paradoxes, around populism and militarism, Bolsonaro, May and Trump,
Trudeau and Ardern.
8.
UK: The
praxis that effaces neoliberalism is one that is inherent to a domain
of wisdom that has always contested hegemonic egoism, ever resisted
its claims, and ever insisted upon the prior authority of a
truth-process that is visibly grounded in authentic, verifiable human
priorities. Though urgently requiring of pervasively assertive (but
inherently non-aggressive) transmission in the localized and
globalized spheres of society, that wisdom is not itself a political
program, but a protean domain of esoteric elements that appear in
every context or province of culture. Ever in a state of defiant and
paradoxical co-existence with every form of cultural egoity, those
elements make up a great tradition or complex (but unitary)
foundation of integral praxis, or non-exploitable, non-exploiting,
integrality-focused, intrinsically full-humanizing practice and
process.
ST: that
neoliberalism is effaced in a “a protean domain of esoteric
elements that appear in every context or province of culture.”
Culture was the
first place neoliberals gathered with anything like decisive force in
NZ. Murray Edmund talks of the “man from Treasury” and his
forecast for a fully monetized cultural politic and economy. That is,
culture was the first place after Treasury to come under neoliberal
influence, as a trial-ground, a field of experiment for its
strategies.
9.
UK: As with
all forms of totalitarianism, the praxis of neoliberalism entails
insistent, invasive, propagandized modes of delusive benignity:
simulating cheer and hope, appropriating everything that is
potentially useful under the guise of a pretentiously engaged
pseudo-magnanimity, and, of course, acting out the smiling assassin
routine in neutralizing any threat.
Hence neoliberalism
is a highly methodical system but the ethos of that system is one of
inexorable vacuity. Unlike collectivized forms of totalitarianism,
neoliberalism is strikingly impoverished in its myth-making capacity
or its ability to tell clear and plausible stories. Deprived of
inspirational myth, neoliberalism relies on the obfuscation of
narratives through the infantalization of them. Hence, any agent or
any group that tells clear or plausible stories is a threat. Any
authentic narrative provides an affirmation of self-existing human
truths that, by their very nature, cannot be appropriated by any
system or program of ideologized dehumanization.
ST: that
neoliberalism is a praxis of “appropriating everything that is
potentially useful” and of “neutralizing any threat”, and, as
such “methodical”.
Also: “neoliberalism
is strikingly impoverished in its myth-making capacity or its ability
to tell clear and plausible stories.”
What are the stories
but the most plausible ones? The mythmaking ones? Yes, and the
icon-making ones? They are the famous “stories in our own words”.
Except that they are
not stories in our own words, ever, are they.
Methodical?
Methodological perhaps. Again, it is a question of capturing the
representation in the act of its preparation and production.
Methodology is presumed by method; and, once more, it is a
nonunifiable and only strategically existent discourse and discourses
of method which is attributable to neoliberals, many of whom do not
even identify themselves being such. This is some more meat for the
idea that neoliberalism is presumed by representation—in culture
and in the processes of humanising and civilization.
10.
UK: It is the
case that any true cultural process that is manifestly artful in its
submission to human need, whether artistically defined, whether
politically emphasized, whether grounded in what is called the
sacred, whether founded upon any integrity at all of any means and
character and insight, is, by virtue of its very underlying nature,
impervious to the neoliberal ethos altogether.
It is not that such
means entail resistance; much less do they stoop to benevolent
mitigation. Rather, it is the case that such processes, such means,
entail the radical exclusion of neoliberalism and its paradigms via
the propagation of full-humanness, or the transmission of hope in the
verifiable language of full-humanness itself: a language that
neoliberalism can never appropriate.
ST: that
there may be imperviousness to the neoliberal ethos by way of its
“radical exclusion” in a language.
We agree here in the
specific cases of institutional cultures and their ability to
represent their own claims as states of exception. These claims are
ontological as much as political. They invoke logics of noncapture,
insofar as they are produced independently of the claims of a
neoliberal political economy—and do not secede to it, or believe it
is possible strategy-wise to outsmart it.
The example always
springing to mind is the financialisation of ecological claims by the
Greens in Germany, 1980s. This finds its continuation in the carbon
markets endorsed by the Greens in NZ, 2000s.
11.
UK: All
authentic cultural processes contain the impulse of
full-humanization; as such, all such processes repudiate, and do not
reward, the submission to what is base, or the embracement of
whatever is mediocrely conformist. Unlike neoliberalism however, the
confrontation with mediocrity entailed by such processes is
dynamically sensitive to human development and relentlessly
supportive of the conditions of real human flourishing. As such, all
verifiably truth-bearing processes specifically repudiate the fallacy
of productive docility and the vacuous exaltation of elites upon
which neoliberal sensibility depends.
It is the case that
the latter radicalizes everything through a delusive benignity that
turns out to be perpetual emptiness and dread. By contrast, all true
cultural praxis is tending to radicalize everything in the “opposite
direction”: with open eyes, infusing every context with homely
truths, and extending the possibilities of human agency in
meaningfully co-supportive, truth-bearing terms. As such, all true
cultural praxis proactively sublimes the vicious vulgarity that the
neoliberal creed can never escape.
As such, all true
cultural praxis has nothing whatsoever to do with benevolent
mitigation of the dominant pseudo-narrative that is neoliberalism
itself. It is, rather, the assertion of a perpetual originality, and
the radically heart-sympathetic and explicitly life-sustaining
effacement of mediocrity in any context. Its narratives cannot be
acquired, for those narratives are intelligible only to those who are
like-hearted.
ST: that
neoliberalism is against something true: “with open eyes, infusing
every context with homely truths, and extending the possibilities of
human agency in meaningfully co-supportive, truth-bearing terms.”
Neoliberalism’s
strategic attitude to truth, to what is true, need only be cited
here—where the representative notion is of all opinion being untrue
and fake news until submitted to the collectivisation of the media
and means of representation in the marketplace—which has come to
stand for the media. (One might say that such collectivisation of
mass opinion amounts to a claim against any notional supremacy of
(the) individual, as being anywhere near the basis and ground of
neoliberal hegemony. This collective voice amounts, one might say, to
populism as such. So is unbewildering.)
12.
UK: The
inexorable vacuity and intrinsic lovelessness of the neoliberal creed
is its one true liability. The recognition of that liability, and the
militant effacement of it, is integral to a needful conscious
program, to be embraced by every individual and collective of good
will, in respect of a localized and globalized process that manifests
real civilization.
The only recourse
now is one whereby protean full-humanizing cultural processes are in
conscious, networked collusion in a relentless civilization-making
and perpetually civilization-affirming global movement: one that
overcomes the characteristic ambiguities of organized human society
that incorporate or necessarily ground themselves in hegemony,
rationalism and doubt (or the ambiguous certainties heralded as
“progress.”)
Such a movement is
one to be founded on sacred reason instead of presumptive
rationality. Yet it is not necessarily reflective of a singular
sensibility or pragmatic impulse. Such a movement is implacably
egalitarian, and yet is paradoxically elitist in its reliance upon
the integrity and virtuosity of unique agents. As such, a global
movement can flourish, trans-ideologically, in the guise of
constructively or creatively polarized sensibilities, as reflected in
the esoteric egalitarianism of Rudolf Steiner that was
contemporaneous with the esoteric elitism of Stefan George. In this
illustrative example, the twain does not meet and is not even
required to do so. Inevitably, Steiner and George deliberated in
their own way, feeling from their respective points of view toward a
paradigm of civilization that was grounded in visionary but
essentially pragmatic full-humanness.
ST: that
neoliberalism is against real civilization.
Civilization had run
its course, as Heiner Müller recognised, at least in Europe, by
1945. Adorno too: hereafter barbarism. But Hayek, and Popper too, and
I would guess Rudolf Steiner, with his esotoricism of flowers and the
genitals we are, belong to the same tradition—of real civilization.
The fact that it is a tradition, even when not civilization, or real
or false in any meaningful understanding of the terms, points forward
and back too, back to Nietzsche, forward to the French who
rediscovered in him the genealogist par excellence of the European
condition. (I reach here for a Japanese beer in a beautiful blue
glass.) Destroy: the timeline back to its founding event, which is
the founding event of its point of view, of its subjectivity—and of
the opinion which henceforth will not be submitted to the vagaries
and vicissitudes of the marketplace but be submitting every other
opinion, point of view and subjective position to them, to it.
Destroy: knowing what has been made can be unmade, what is done is
able to be undone. We have to find out how it was done. This goes for
the delusiveness of the Left’s benignancy as for the new Hayekian
liberal agenda’s delusiveness about its own. Then affirm, praise,
celebrate and exalt what you create—as your own creation and as the
production of what you would have desired.
The age of the supremacy of the individual has passed; we have entered into the age of its freely given and voluntary denial: we avow collective will, above the self, as it is represented in the automatic brain of the marketplace and its political economy. It does not matter if politics of power has been displaced by that of personal survival and the bottom line.
