Neoliberalism, the public sphere, and a public good

ABSTRACT

This essay considers the challenges that neoliberalism raises for conceptual models and practices of a multiple public sphere. Engaging difference and attending to inequality, a multiple public sphere facilitates the circulation of a dynamic public good that may articulate mutual standing and relationships among people to enable the construction of a collective “we” for coordinated action. Weakening relationships among people and devaluing coordinated action, neoliberalism envisions a public of atomistic individuals who compete with one another for comparative advantage. Flattening difference and obscuring inequality, a neoliberal public presumes a universal subject that obscures its own particularity and discounts the uneven burdens faced by those who cannot seamlessly identify with its mode of subjectivity. Further, for a neoliberal public, inequality serves as the condition and end of competition. Resistance to neoliberalism may arise in the networked locals of a multiple public sphere, as advocates reclaim connections that neoliberalism seeks to deny.

KEYWORDS:

• Networked public
• multiplicity
• counterpublic
• education
• networked local

Notes

1. Gerard A. Hauser, Vernacular Voices: The Rhetoric of Publics and Public Spheres (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1999), 71.

2. Seyla Benhabib, “Toward a Deliberative Model of Democratic Legitimacy,” in Democracy and Difference: Contesting the Boundaries of the Political, ed. Seyla Benhabib (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 73–74. [emphasis in original]

3. See Daniel C. Brouwer and Robert Asen, eds., Public Modalities: Rhetoric, Culture, Media, and the Shape of Public Life (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2010).

4. Thomas R. Dunn, “Remembering Matthew Shepard: Violence, Identity, and Queer Counterpublic Memories,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 13 (2010): 611–52.

5. Phaedra C. Pezzullo, “Resisting ‘National Breast Cancer Awareness Month’: The Rhetoric of Counterpublics and Their Cultural Performances,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 89 (2003): 349.

6. Nancy Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy,” in Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed. Craig Calhoun (Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1992), 122–28.

7. Catherine R. Squires, “Rethinking the Black Public Sphere: An Alternative Vocabulary for Multiple Public Spheres,” Communication Theory 12 (2002): 446.

8. Daniel C. Brouwer, “Communication as Counterpublic,” in Communication as … Perspectives on Theory, eds. Gregory J. Shepherd, Jeffrey St. John, and Ted Striphas (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2006), 198. [emphasis in original]

9. Jürgen Habermas, Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy, trans. William Rehg (1992; Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1996), 360.

10. Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (New York: Zone Books, 2015), 31. [emphasis in original]

11. Brown, Undoing the Demos, 36.

12. Brown, Undoing the Demos, 38.

13. John Dewey, The Public and Its Problems (1927; Athens, OH: Swallow Press, 1954), 24.

14. Dewey, Public, 151.

15. Michael Warner offers an attenuated version of this argument in holding that “a public is constituted through mere attention.” Warner’s position productively draws attention to the constructed character of publics through “active intake.” However, he limits this activity in at least two ways: first, Warner emphasizes identification over and against the possibility of dissociation. He writes to audience of his book: “If you are reading this, or hearing it or seeing it or present for it, you are part of this public.” Yet this insistence conflates awareness and affiliation, which leaves no agency for someone who encounters something they find objectionable, or someone who may be aware of discourses that exclude them. Second, Warner discounts dialogic models of publics as placing too much emphasis on “polemic” and “argument.” Instead, he privileges the circulation of texts, which appears to compel a choice among modes of communication and limits the means of constructing publics. Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics (New York: Zone Books, 2002), 87, 91.

16. Fraser, “Rethinking,” 128–29.

17. Sarah J. Jackson and Brooke Foucault Welles, “#Ferguson Is Everywhere: Initiators in Emerging Counterpublic Networks,” Information, Communication & Society 19 (2016): 398. [emphasis in original]

18. Robert L. Ivie, “Enabling Democratic Dissent,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 101 (2015): 54, 49. Drawing on rhetoric as an important public practice, Danielle Allen underscores the importance of relationships for addressing differences through her provocative conceptualization of the roles of trust and political friendship among members of a polity. Allen distinguishes her conception of political friendship from a quotidian understanding, noting that “political friendship is not mainly (or not only) a sentiment of fellow-feeling for other citizens. It is more importantly a way of acting in respect to them” (140). While respect is certainly important, the positive affect of friendship may linger in this conception, potentially obscuring the crucial work that interlocutors must undertake to build and sustain relationships. Moreover, at times, Allen appears to draw back from relationships themselves to position her framework attitudinally as an orientation toward action. For example, she writes: “We might simply ask about all our encounters with others in our polity, ‘Would I treat a friend this way?’” (140). Danielle S. Allen, Talking to Strangers: Anxieties of Citizenship Since Brown v. Board of Education (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004).

19. The need to move beyond deliberation does not arise because deliberation itself necessarily operates as a restrictive practice, but because it is but one of many modes of communication. Against models of deliberation that stress disinterestedness and consensus, Ivie argues that “rhetorical deliberation is often a rowdy affair, just as politics is typically messy.” A “rowdy” view of deliberation sustains “a productive tension between cooperation and competition” and does not privilege “any single perspective to the exclusion of all others.” Robert L. Ivie, “Rhetorical Deliberation and Democratic Politics in the Here and Now,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 5 (2002): 278, 279.

20. Brouwer, “Communication,” 198.

21. Yvonne Slosarski, “Jamming Market Rhetoric in Wisconsin’s 2011 Labor Protests,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 13 (2016): 258.

22. Slosarski, “Jamming,” 259.

23. Hauser, Vernacular, 66–67.

24. Dewey, Public, 147.

25. Chantal Mouffe, The Democratic Paradaox (London: Verso, 2000), 103. See also Chantal Mouffe, Agonistics: Thinking the World Politically (London: Verso, 2013), 7–9.

26. Iris Marion Young, Inclusion and Democracy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 136.

27. Young, Inclusion, 137.

28. Young, Inclusion, 139.

29. Brouwer, “Communication,” 200. Similarly, Robert Danisch argues that scholars ought to attend to the “rhetorical structures” that enable and sustain discourse in the public sphere. Robert Danisch, Building a Social Democracy: The Promise of Rhetorical Pragmatism (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2015), 189–219.

30. Fraser, “Rethinking,” 123.

31. Oskar Negt and Alexander Kluge, Public Sphere and Experience: Toward an Analysis of the Bourgeois and Proletarian Public Sphere, trans. Peter Labanyi, Jamie Owen Daniel, and Assenka Oksiloff (1972; Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993).

32. Young, Inclusion, 108.

33. Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger (1962; Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1989), 56. [emphasis in original]

34. See, e.g., Gerard A. Hauser, “Civil Society and the Principle of the Public Sphere,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 31 (1998): 30–36; Joan B. Landes, “The Public and the Private Sphere: A Feminist Reconsideration,” in Feminism, the Public and the Private, ed. Joan B. Landes (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 142–44; Michael Warner, “The Mass Public and the Mass Subject,” in The Phantom Public Sphere, ed. Bruce Robbins (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 239–40. On the standing of universals in contemporary “Habermasian” models of the public sphere, see Lincoln Dahlberg, “The Habermasian Public Sphere and Exclusion: An Engagement with Poststructuralist-Influenced Critics,” Communication Theory 24 (2014): 21–41.

35. Joshua Cohen, “Deliberation and Democratic Legitimacy,” in Deliberative Democracy: Essays on Reason and Politics, eds. James Bohman and William Rehg (Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1997), 75–76.

36. To account for varying motivations in public deliberation, James Bohman has developed a notion of “plural public reason.” He explains that “public reason is plural if a single norm of reasonableness is not presupposed in deliberation; thus, agents can come to an agreement with one another for different publicly accessible reasons.” James Bohman, Public Deliberation: Pluralism, Complexity, and Democracy (Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1996), 83.

37. John Rawls, Political Liberalism (1993; New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 59.

38. Rawls, Political, 217, 224.

39. Simon Springer, “Neoliberalism as Discourse: Between Foucauldian Political Economy and Marxian Poststructuralism,” Critical Discourse Studies 9 (2012): 136–37.

40. As Catherine Chaput observes, “neoliberalism governs our everyday activities through an embodied habituation—a way of thinking and acting that stems from discrete but interconnected technologies all bound up within the same asymmetrical power dynamics of economic competition.” Catherine Chaput, “Rhetorical Circulation in Late Capitalism: Neoliberalism and the Overdetermination of Affective Energy,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 43 (2010): 4.

41. Milton Friedman, Capitalism and Freedom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), 1–2. In this book, Friedman identified himself as a classical liberal. Nevertheless, as scholars have noted, Friedman played a crucial role in the establishment of neoliberal theory and he acted as a strong proponent of neoliberal policy. See, e.g., Rob Van Horn and Philip Mirowski, “The Rise of the Chicago School of Economics and the Birth of Neoliberalism,” in The Road from Mont Pelerin: The Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective, eds. Philip Mirowski and Dieter Plehwe (2009; Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015), 139–78.

42. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (1958; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 200.

43. John M. Jones and Robert C. Rowland, “Redefining the Proper Role of Government: Ultimate Definition in Reagan’s First Inaugural,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 18 (2015): 706.

44. Megan Foley, “From Infantile Citizens to Infantile Institutions: The Metaphoric Transformation of Political Economy in the 2008 Housing Market Crisis,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 98 (2012): 389.

45. Friedman, Capitalism, 5. Friedman’s invocation of classical liberalism reflects what Jamie Peck has referred to as “an idealized past for the Chicagoans.” Jamie Peck, Constructions of Neoliberal Reason (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 20.

46. Van Horn and Mirowski observe that “it was the Chicago School that innovated the idea that much of politics could be understood as if it were a market process.” Van Horn and Mirowski, “Chicago,” 162. David Harvey writes that through its commitment to markets, neoliberalism only recognizes the freedom of enterprise. See David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 36–38.

47. Brown, Undoing the Demos, 41.

48. Paul Turpin, The Moral Rhetoric of Political Economy: Justice and Modern Economic Thought (New York: Routledge, 2011), 67.

49. Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval, The New Way of the World: On Neoliberal Society, trans. Gregory Elliott (London: Verso, 2013), 263.

50. Dardot and Laval, New Way, 265.

51. Brown, Undoing the Demos, 106–07. [emphasis in original] See also Lisa Duggan, The Twilight of Equality? Neoliberalism, Cultural Politics, and the Attack on Democracy (Boston: Beacon Press, 2003), 14–17.

52. Nancy Fraser, “Feminism, Capitalism, and the Cunning of History,” in Fortunes of Feminism: From State-Managed Capitalism to Neoliberal Crisis (London: Verso, 2013), 220.

53. Rebecca Dingo, Networking Arguments: Rhetoric, Transnational Feminism, and Public Policy Writing (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012), 48.

54. Darrel Wanzer-Serrano [published as Darrel Enck-Wanzer], “Barack Obama, the Tea Party, and the Threat of Race: On Racial Neoliberalism and Born Again Racism,” Communication, Culture & Critique 4 (2011): 24.

55. See J. David Cisneros, “A Nation of Immigrants and a Nation of Laws: Race, Multiculturalism, and Neoliberal Exception in Barack Obama’s Immigration Discourse,” Communication, Culture & Critique 8 (2015): 359–60; Roopali Mukherjee, “Bling Fling: Commodity Consumption and the Politics of the ‘Post-Racial,’” in Critical Rhetorics of Race, eds. Michael G. Lacy and Kent A. Ono (New York: New York University Press, 2011), 178–80.

56. Bradley Jones and Roopali Mukherjee, “From California to Michigan: Race, Rationality, and Neoliberal Governmentality,” Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 4 (2010): 402.

57. Bradley and Mukherjee, “California,” 407.

58. Wendy S. Hesford, “Surviving Recognition and Racial In/justice,” Philosophy and Rhetoric 48 (2015): 539.

59. Mouffe, Democratic, 101–02.

60. Peck, Constructions, 42.

61. Sanford F. Schram, The Return of Ordinary Capitalism: Neoliberalism, Precarity, Occupy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 25.

62. Schram, Ordinary Capitalism, 26–27.

63. Maurizio Lazzarato, “Neoliberalism in Action: Inequality, Insecurity, and the Reconstitution of the Social,” Theory, Culture & Society 26 (2009): 116.

64. Chaput, “Rhetorical Circulation,” 4–5.

65. Lazzarato, “Neoliberalism,” 117.

66. Friedman, Capitalism, 89.

67. Through Title I of the Act, the Johnson administration developed a funding formula based on the number of poor children in a district, which eventually covered 94 percent of all school districts in the United States. See Patrick J. McGuinn, No Child Left Behind and the Transformation of Federal Education Policy, 1965–2005 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2006), 31.

68. See Hubert Morken and Jo Renée Formicola, The Politics of School Choice (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999); John F. Witte, The Market Approach to Education: An Analysis of America’s First Voucher Program (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000).

69. Katherine Cierniak, Molly Stewart, and Anne-Maree Ruddy, Mapping the Growth of Statewide Voucher Programs in the United States (Bloomington: Center for Evaluation and Education Policy, Indiana University, March 2015).

70. Christa Pugh, “Estimated Per Pupil Payments for Incoming Pupils in the Statewide Private School Choice Program, 2015–16 to 2024–25” (Legislative Fiscal Bureau Memo, Madison, WI, May 26, 2015).

71. See, e.g., Dave Zweifel, 2016, “Property Taxpayers on Hook to Save Public Schools,” The Capital Times, March 9. http://host.madison.com/ct/news/opinion/column/dave_zweifel/plain-talk-property-taxpayers-on-hook-to-save-public-schools/article_3f4ed36f-8589-597a-affe-f712738e1745.html.

72. Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction, “Statewide Voucher Program Enrollment Counts,” [DPI-NR 2015-103] October 27, 2015.

73. For analyses of contemporary activism, see, e.g., Sarah J. Jackson and Brooke Foucault Welles, “Hijacking #myNYPD: Social Media Dissent and Networked Counterpublics,” Journal of Communication 65 (2015): 932–52; Kashif Jerome Powell, “Making #BlackLivesMatter: Michael Brown, Eric Garner, and the Specters of Black Life—Toward a Hauntology of Blackness,” Cultural Studies↔Critical Methodologies 16 (2016): 253–60.

74. I offer three provisos to caution against reading my turn to the local as an essentialist, space-based conceptualization of resistance. First, in keeping with my orientation toward public sphere theory as critical theory, my turn to the networked local constitutes an effort to engage theory and practice and seek out inspiration from actual sites of resistance. The efforts by people in their own communities on a range of issues, especially race and education, have suggested to me alternatives to a neoliberal public. Second, as I explain in this section, the local is no panacea for what ails the public sphere, as it is susceptible to the shortcomings of variously situated publics and counterpublics. Third, the qualities I associate with a networked local may be reproduced through other means (although the exploration of these means lies outside the bounds of my study), as, for example, with online publics and counterpublics. On public sphere theory as critical theory, see Robert Asen, “Critical Engagement through Public Sphere Scholarship,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 101 (2015): 132–44. On online publics and counterpublics, see, e.g., Damien Smith Pfister, Networked Media, Networked Rhetorics: Attention and Deliberation in the Early Blogosphere (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2014).

75. In “Creative Democracy,” Dewey famously defines democracy as “a personal way of individual life  …  it signifies the possession and continual use of certain attitudes, forming personal character and determining desire and purpose in all the relations of life.” John Dewey, “Creative Democracy—The Task Before Us,” in John Dewey: The Later Works, 1925–1953, vol. 14, 1939–1941, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991), 226. [emphasis in original]

76. Dewey, Public, 151.

77. Dewey, Public, 213.

78. Dewey, Public, 216–17.

79. Hauser, Vernacular, 52.

80. Hauser notes that “members of pluralistic societies belong to several, perhaps many, overlapping discursive arenas in which they experience the polyphony of concurrent conversations.” Hauser, Vernacular, 67.

81. Dewey, Public, 216.

82. Erin Richards, 2015, “Spurred by Scott Walker Budget, Parents Rally for Public School Funds,” Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, May 3. http://www.jsonline.com/news/education/spurred-by-scott-walker-budget-parents-rally-for-public-school-funds-b99492322z1-302375441.html.

83. Mary Young, Marva Herndon, Gail Hicks, and Sandy Whisler, 2016, “Parents to Politicians: Support Our Schools,” Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, May 5. http://www.jsonline.com/news/opinion/parents-to-politicians-support-our-public-schools-b99719549z1-378351261.html.

84. See Jack Dougherty, More Than One Struggle: The Evolution of Black School Reform in Milwaukee (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004); Barbara J. Miner, Lessons From the Heartland: A Turbulent Half-Century of Public Education in an Iconic American City (New York: Free Press, 2013).

85. Young, Herndon, Hicks, and Whisler, “Parents.”

86. Southern Wisconsin Area Principals, public letter to Governor Scott Walker and the Wisconsin Legislature, July 13, 2015. http://archive.lakecountrynow.com/news/lakecountryreporter/principals-lament-decreased-education-funding-less-local-control-b99543098z1-320293961.html.