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Abstract
This article considers neoliberalism through the “peaceful violence” of its social spaces that are stratified and ordered around raciality whilst abjuring the explicit presence of racialised power. Many dominant analyses of neoliberalism in the social science have figured racial injustices as ideological fossils to be swept away by a fundamentally neutral political economy that has shaped all human activity according to market principles. As such, racial injustices are understood as material deviations from conditions of economic power on the one hand, and cultural deviations in hegemonic common sense on the other. Against the grain of these approaches, I argue that racialised power is better understood as a productive technology fundamental to the structuring of our worlds, their neoliberal organisation just one iteration of ongoing coloniality. Contrary to popular analysis and this account of neoliberalism, contemporary racialised violence and nationalist discourse are, therefore, not only consistent with the power of neoliberal classes but also result from weaknesses in their hegemonic power.
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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth 70.
2 Ciccariello-Maher, Decolonizing Dialectics 65.
3 Taylor, From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation 142–43.
4 Ibid. 143.
5 Trask 10.
6 See Bonilla-Silva; Goldberg; Spence.
7 Tilley and Shilliam.
8 Symbolic of these is Brown, Undoing the Demos.
9 Davies, The Limits of Neoliberalism 13.
10 Davison and Shire.
11 Harvey 79.
12 Tilley and Shilliam 535.
13 For a conception of worlds conducive to this one, see Lugones.
14 The arguments in the following are targeted specifically at this analysis of neoliberalism prevalent across the social sciences, and rooted in Foucault’s analysis. I do not intend to argue against all accounts of neoliberalism here, particularly those interested primarily in its historical emergence and entrenchment, nor am I making the claim that neoliberalism was, or is, intentionally structured around race. It is worth noting that I do think that this is a defensible position, which I intend to argue for in further work.
15 Davies, “Elite Power under Advanced Neoliberalism”; Lash; Latour; Massumi.
16 Fraser, “Social Justice in the Age of Identity Politics”; idem, Justice Interruptus; Honneth; Rawls; Spivak; Taylor, Multiculturalism; Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference.
17 Taylor, Multiculturalism.
18 Honneth 249.
19 On the latter, see the account in Davies, “Elite Power under Advanced Neoliberalism.”
20 Fraser and Honneth.
21 Young, “Responsibility and Global Justice” 114.
22 Young and Nussbaum 95.
23 Ibid. 55.
24 For an excellent overview, see Rouse.
25 Giddens; Bourdieu.
26 Butler.
27 hooks.
28 Foucault, Power/Knowledge. As Turner suggests, the turn towards practices in social theory encompasses a “large family of terms [ … ] such as tradition, tacit knowledge, Weltanschauung, paradigm, ideology, framework, and presupposition” (Turner, The Social Theory of Practices 2).
29 Kripke; Wittgenstein.
30 Foucault, “The Subject and Power.”
31 Frye 11.
32 Foucault, “The Subject and Power” 789.
33 Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference 41.
34 Indeed, Foucault’s central notion of a discursive formation relies upon there being a set of rules that both constitute and restrict a group’s discursive practices. Foucault, Archaeology of Knowledge 54.
35 Brandom.
36 Turner, The Social Theory of Practices.
37 Young, “Structural Injustice and the Politics of Difference” 70.
38 Boucher 99.
39 Brandom 189–90.
40 Sanctions are also central to Elder-Vass’s account (Elder-Vass, The Reality of Social Construction 254), though, as discussed above, they require a joint commitment to a norm in advance of the expectation of sanctioning.
41 Brandom 44.
42 See also the criticisms of Brandom and elucidation of the following in relation to norms of reason in Trafford. See also Kiesselbach.
43 See also O’neill.
44 As Habermas points out, the assessment of our attitudes is made not by “an addressee who is expected to give the speaker an answer” (Habermas 345) but by a community that plays an authoritative role in considering what our utterances mean, and also which actions are taken to be correct or incorrect (336).
45 As Elder-Vass puts it, an account of “some sort of collective pressure is required if we are to provide an explanation of the similarity between the social practices of different people” (Elder-Vass, The Causal Power of Social Structures 119).
46 Hill and Rubin.
47 This is consistent with linguistic research showing how:
[ … ] speakers can start an utterance without a fully formed intention/plan as to how it will develop relying on feedback from the hearer to shape their utterance and its construal and this provides the basis for the joint derivation of structures, meaning and action in dialogue. (Gregoromichelaki and Kempson 192)
48 Kiesselbach 123.
49 Ahmed 49.
50 Gregoromichelaki and Kempson.
51 Ahmed 43.
52 Wimsatt and Griesemer.
53 Ibid. 288.
54 Symbolic violence, for Bourdieu: “gentle, hidden exploitation is the form taken by man’s exploitation of man, whenever overt brutal exploitation is impossible” (Bourdieu 192). Similarly, this differs from Butler’s concept of normative violence as discussed in Chambers and Carver. See also Guha.
55 Omi and Winant 55.
56 Tilley and Shilliam 538. See also Chakravartty and Da Silva.
57 Contrary to some discourses of complex networks, as emphasised in network science and social complexity theory (Byrne and Callaghan; Byrne; Barabási), complex organisation typically leads to a stratified domain of intricately nested hierarchies and locally stable systems. See also Lane.
58 On engulfment, see Da Silva.
59 This shifts us away from a standard understanding of difference as ameliorating the practice of externalisation of norms and identity positions to prop up a specific set of practices as if they are universal. Benhabib; Brown, “Neo-liberalism and the End of Liberal Democracy”; Butler; Foucault, Power/Knowledge; Hall; Mouffe; Tully; Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference.
60 Wimsatt, Re-engineering Philosophy for Limited Beings 135.
61 Wimsatt and Griesemer 293.
62 Wimsatt and Griesemer.
63 See also the analysis of contingent forms of liberal government and the specific historical figurations and modes of possibility enacted by them in Turner, “Internal Colonisation.”
64 Fraser, Justice Interruptus 7.
65 Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference 53.
66 Fraser and Honneth; Rawls; Young, “Structural Injustice and the Politics of Difference.” For both, this requires the additional call for the recognition of difference as corrective to the supposed impartiality of Rawlsian approaches to basic structure.
67 Povinelli 26.
68 Goldberg.
69 Chakravartty and Da Silva 364.
70 Ibid.
71 Ibid. 369.
72 Ibid. 382.
73 Da Silva.
74 Fanon, “Why We Use Violence” 654.
75 Quijano 169.
76 Maldonado-Torres 243.
77 Cooper and Stoler; Pinderhughes; Turner. I am led to consider the axis of the United States/United Kingdom throughout as the target of analysis, though it does not escape me that in doing so I add to their centring in academic discourse.
78 Tilley and Shilliam 538.
79 Kelley.
80 Turner, “Internal Colonisation.”
81 Olson 9–10.
82 Gilbert 9.
83 Ibid.
84 Wynter 329.
85 Taylor, From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation.
86 Parenti.
87 Brown, “Neo-liberalism and the End of Liberal Democracy” 37.
88 Rottenberg 421.
89 Brown, Undoing the Demos.
90 Streeck.
91 Brown, “Apocalyptic Populism.” As Harmes argues, neoliberalism is fundamentally dependent upon nationalist policies, advocating fiscal and regulatory sovereignty within the context of international capital mobility.
92 Da Silva, “The Banalization of Racial Events” 61.
93 Goswami. As Roy puts it, where “microfinance is a preferred weapon of mass salvation, so the Middle East is the site at which the war on terror and the war on poverty are conjoined” (Roy 114–15. See also Chakravartty and Da Silva; Robinson.
94 Da Silva, “Notes for a Critique of the ‘Metaphysics of Race’” 145.
95 Povinelli.
96 France-Presse.
97 Mason.
98 Ciccariello-Maher, “Counterinsurgency and the Occupy Movement.”
99 Reed.
100 Wearing.
101 Mckenzie.
102 Reed.
103 Wimsatt, Re-engineering Philosophy for Limited Beings 137.
104 For example, we might work towards the end of police violence, not through retraining and community policing but through the abolition of the racialised structure of policing (Vitale) and imprisonment (Davis, “Race and Criminalization”; Davis, Are Prisons Obsolete?).
105 Chen.
106 Anderson and Samudzi.
107 For an attempt to reconstruct Gramscian hegemony in broadly similar terms, see Williams.
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