EcoLogics

In my posts about the Leitch Review of Skills, I have repeatedly referred to the discourse, but also to the ideology of neo-liberalism. A reader has helpfully suggested that I should explain how I distinguish between discourse and ideology, and what I mean by neo-liberalism [or what in later posts I now spell as neoliberalism, without the hyphen]. I am glad to clarify the first point, and the on-going saga of Northern Rock provides a welcome opportunity to explain the second point (what is neo-liberalism), albeit in a somewhat indirect manner.

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To begin with the difference between discourse and ideology: building on the work of Foucault(1), but also echoing the definitions of post-Foucauldian analysts who engage in something known as ‘critical discourse analysis’(2), I take it that discourse refers to more or less systematically organised statements that reflect the meanings and values of specific institutions, or more likely, of clusters of institutions. The principle is firstly that ideas have individuals as much as individuals have ideas. But also, that ideas—perhaps I should say ‘certain ways of thinking and doing’—tend to emerge in, and be shaped by, institutional contexts. So it is, for example, that lawyers have a particular way of approaching legal matters, and that medical specialists have a certain way of articulating the matters pertaining to their specialism. The same is, of course, true for all academic disciplines, and indeed for many everyday ways of approaching a variety of practices. Whatever the context, the ‘way of approaching’ or the ‘way of articulating’ is the discourse.

Now in the case of law and of medicine as in most if not all other professional discourses, discourse is enabling insofar as it allows individuals and groups to act on problems and to resolve them in a certain way. The difficulties, in so far as there are difficulties, arise when a certain ‘way of approaching’ is not recognised as being just that—a certain way of approaching something; or, what is almost the same, when, over time, a discourse that was once relatively explicit becomes transparent or invisible to its own users, its own ’subjects’. When this happens, there is a risk that discourse generates a kind of ‘tunnel vision’ that disables its agents (those who use it, or reproduce it) from developing a critical perspective vis-a-vis whatever is being represented. It is, finally, also the case that discourses, or rather their agents, tend to colonize new domains for which the discourse is inappropriate. A case in point, the colonization of healthcare and educational systems by a neo-liberal discourse such as I describe below.

I’ve now explained, however briefly, what I mean by discourse. I reserve the concept of ideology to refer to the process whereby one or more discourses—but also, meaningful forms more generally, be they linguistic or not—serve to establish and/or sustain durable relations of domination within a social group, or indeed across social groups(3). Simplifying greatly, the discursive process begins to include some, and to exclude others in a durable and relatively systematic way.

I find that this is a useful distinction because discourses (and their subjects) do not necessarily produce ideological relations (as defined above), and also because some discourses can be produced to contest ideological relations. Of course, the successful discourse, or rather its agents, may eventually work to establish new relations of ideology; but if we don’t make this distinction, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that any and all discourses are always already ‘ideological’.

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What, then, is neo-liberalism? On one level, neo-liberalism is a discourse, that is to say a set of statements—but also its associated forms of subjectivity, values, and implicit ‘world view’— whose subjects or agents have fetishized the virtues of a market which they conceive, apparently, along the lines of Adam Smith’s metaphor of an invisible hand. I use ‘fetishized’ in the anthropological sense of the word: like all Moderns (and I suspect we are mostly that these days), the advocates of neo-liberalism are a superstitious lot (I contest in this way the idea that we Moderns are somehow above anything like superstition). What makes the superstitions of neo-liberals special is that, whatever else they do, neo-liberals worship the notion that society is fundamentally about business, and that business works, ‘ceteris paribus’, along the lines of a quaint 18th century market where what is sold is what is bought, where the price of what is sold is, ‘over time’, commensurate with what is offered, and where selfish individuals working to maximize their own profits ensure, as a group, the ‘common good’. I have liberally (or perhaps illiberally) sprinkled inverted commas because of course, no such market existed in the 18th century, and it goes almost without saying that no such market place exists today.

That, however, has not stopped a select few groups of people from using the seductive image of the romantic market place to make themselves obscenely wealthy. It is on this level analysis that the ideological dimension of the discourse comes into the frame. Neo-liberalism has helped some groups of people to grow wealthier and more powerful, even as it has arguably ensured that others have become more impoverished, and more marginalised. While this has, on occasion, been a matter of design, more often than not it has been a matter of ‘knock-on effects’, of ‘unforeseen consequences’, or, perhaps more accurately, of ‘foreseeable unforeseens’. For example, while neo-liberals tend to be avid State-bashers, much of their leading members’ wealth and power is a function of what has been described as corporate welfarism: as I noted in the context of the Leitch Review of Skills, the advocates of neo-liberalism are exceedingly good at getting the State to deregulate things when it suits, and to re-regulate them (or at any rate to bail them out) when it doesn’t. It is probably true that no one sets out these days to try to make the poor poorer; but there are certain policies and forms of governance that can be shown to have had just that effect in the past. If this is the case, why should anyone reproduce those policies, and those forms of governance?

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Of course, economic liberalism has come and gone for centuries now, but its neo-liberal variant came roaring to life in the 1970s when American monetarists led by Milton Friedman allegedly demonstrated that its principles could be made to work in Chile—that is to say, in Pinochet’s dictatorship. The Conservatives in Britain were the first to try to emulate this nefarious experiment. Indeed, it is not surprising that Margaret Thatcher was so keen to visit Mi General during his infamous house arrest in London; whatever Pinochet’s role in the Falklands/Malvinas, after Pinochet Thatcher was the second ruler to sign up for Friedman’s neo-liberal model and its bitter prescriptions. We seem to have forgotten about the mass unemployment that followed. In one of the great ironies of the time, Thatcher’s own Cecil Parkinson is famous for having said in an interview in the pro-Pinochet paper El Mercurio that ‘It [the Chilean economic experience] is very similar to what we are trying to develop now in Great Britain.’

I might add that we should not be surprised that it was Gordon Brown’s own [ally] Jack Straw who pardoned Pinochet and let him go back to Chile. New Labour, whose members are even more neo-liberal than the Conservatives, must now be hoping that we have forgotten that the Chilean experiment came to an end in 1983 when Pinochet had to nationalise some of the largest Chilean banks to stop them from going completely bankrupt.

Did I hear anyone utter (or think) the words ‘Northern’ and ‘Rock’?

References

1) See especially Foucault’s essay ‘The discourse on language’ in M. Foucault (1972) The Archeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language, Translated by A.M.S. Smith, New York: Pantheon Books.

2) See for example Norman Fairclough’s account at www.ling.lancs.ac.uk/staff/norman/critdiscanalysis.doc

3) This definition owes much to the work of J.B. Thompson, Ideology and Modern Culture, Cambridge: Polity, 1990.