Notes for Discussion for Session 8 on The Neoliberal State

Aihwa Ong, Neoliberalism as Exception: Mutations in Citizenship and Sovereignty (Duke University Press, Durham, 2006), Introduction.

Ong in the introduction to Neoliberalism as Exception: Mutations in Citizenship and Sovereignty expresses that despite viewing neoliberalism as a strategy of market domination, the Asian governments have selectively incorporated them in their functions. Neoliberalism is viewed as a new political optimization tool which is redefining the interactions between the governing and the governed, power and knowledge, and sovereignty and territoriality, and in this context she seeks to look at its interventionist character. Ong’s description of exception is in a broad sense an “extraordinary departure in policy that can be deployed to include as well as exclude”.  With this background she explores neoliberalism (with a small ‘n’) and exception together to comprehend the change in the citizenship and sovereignty discourse with respect to the neoliberal reason and mechanism. The book evaluates the concepts above in the Asia-Pacific region where neoliberalism is not considered as one of the more prominent tools of governance. The relationship between neoliberalism and exception is looked at from two perspectives, firstly neoliberalism as an exception and secondly, exceptions to neoliberalism.  Neoliberalism as an exception entails sites where market-driven decisions are used for management and administrative purposes while exceptions to neoliberalism are implored in cases where certain sections are excluded from the neoliberal calculations. The necessity to study these two concepts together is deemed necessary due to the nature of relations between the government and the citizens, the study of sovereignty, the mechanisms of open markets and the self-governing aspect of neoliberalism. The creation of metropolis and megalopolis which have repositioned the cities as the primary sites of administration is also seen as a result of market-driven calculations. The introduction has also looked at the genealogy of neoliberalism as a concept and has linked neoliberal governmentality to Foucault’s notion of “biopower”. In this geographical location, the focus of exception is on women and the minority groups and the interventions of humanitarian and ethnic movements and the emergence of new political spaces.

John Gledhill, Neoliberalism. In Nugent and Vincent, 332-48.

John Gledhill in this essay stresses on the need to look at the changes that occurred within advance capitalism in order to explain the acceptance of neoliberalism as an idea which in the beginning seemed self-destructive. According to Peck and Tickell it was an intellectual movement which was politicized by Reagan and Thatcher in the 1980s which went on to be a technocratic form on the lines of the “Washington Consensus” of the 1990s highlighting the relationship between neoliberalism and capitalist globalisation. Consensus of Monterrey was asked to be read as involving the society in the help provided by the IMF and not simply as an extension of the standard neoliberal model. The inclusion of society is debated either to have drawn the policy away from the neoliberal stance towards a “Third Way” or simply “soft neoliberalism”. Neoliberalism is said to be a process and not an end state. There was also a shift from “roll-back” to “roll-out neoliberalism”. One of the problems posed by neoliberalism is the diffused nature of power, an example of that has been discussed are the NGOs. The NGOs are a part of the decentralised global framework and may disempower those that they seek to empower which necessitates to study the everyday effects of the transformations that have taken place in the world. Comparison of neoliberalism and grass-roots attitude is done by looking at the similarities where the individual is championed and how they have promoted neoliberalism in the daily life. Neoliberalism is defined as the ideology which has deepened capitalism where the commodification of human relations occurs. The audit culture accompanying neoliberalism is in converse of what neoliberalism champions leading to virtualization. These observations highlight the desocializing and virtualizing capacity of neoliberalism. The US neoliberalism with has religious backing is said to be more value laden than the secularized versions but how this strength is manifested in the larger scheme of things hasn’t been mentioned. The author discusses the emergence of counter movements such as transnational movements and how globalization has opened up new spaces for discussion. Neoliberalism and globalization is said to have brought human rights and gender issues to the fore.