How Capitalism Forms Our Lives by Alyson Cole & Estelle Ferrarese

Author:Alyson Cole & Estelle Ferrarese [Cole, Alyson & Ferrarese, Estelle]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780367785680
Google: u9IdzgEACAAJ
Goodreads: 56461249
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2021-03-31T00:00:00+00:00

A critical (neo)liberalism?

At the beginning of my paper, I raised the following line of argument: Isn’t neoliberalism a set of political and economic strategies that give individuals the opportunity to exercise their freedom, allowing them to choose their own personal way of life without coercion? Isn’t it a form of governmentality that leaves maximum space for the subject’s self-creation and thus effectively facilitates individual difference? And, therefore, doesn’t it already comprise a form of critical force against domination and discrimination?

In The birth of biopolitics, Foucault argues that liberal and neoliberal arts of government fundamentally rely on individual freedom. Instead of interpreting this claim as proof of Foucault’s sympathy for or endorsement of neoliberalism, however, we need to combine it with what I have shown so far, remembering that freedom, for Foucault, is not a metaphysical concept, but instead an embodied and specific set of practices (Foucault, 1997, pp. 282–284, 300; 2000, pp. 354, 355). Freedom, then, is not to be understood as a condition of perfect and absolute autonomy, nor is it simply an unattainable ideal. It is rather the name for a strategic field of relations that is never stable, but always in motion. As Foucault makes clear several times, the exercise of power in the form of government is

a set of actions brought to bear upon possible actions; it operates on the field of possibilities in which the behavior of the acting subjects is inscribed: it incites, it induces, it diverts, it makes easier or more difficult, it broadens or restricts, it makes more or less probable. (Foucault, 1982, p. 789)

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