Neoliberalism in everyday life

Recently, I was reading Richard Seymour's excellent blog Lenin's Tomb. He had put up a speech there that he had made at the International Socialist network. I was very struck by these lines:

"He [Foucault] understood it [neoliberalism] as a comprehensive project for transforming society, right down to the micro-physics of self-hood. He wrote that neoliberals sought to install new techniques of ‘self-government’, that is disciplinary means, using incentive and punishment, of getting people to accept the idea of themselves as entrepreneurial agents, enjoying the thrill of risk.

We see this with the way in which welfare and the penal state is re-organised. It doesn't necessarily reduce the costs of expenditure, but it does attempt to fundamentally change people's behaviour - for example, if you have a small child, don't just stay at home and look after her. Outsource the childcare to a minimum wage babysitter, and go out and bet on various opportunities on the market. Take a few jobs, buy some shares, reinvent yourself with new clothes and a new body, take a flutter in a casino - the revival of gambling under neoliberalism is not coincidental. If you're not very good at this, then we have bureaucratic punishments, the casual sadism of everyday life, the pleasure of mocking and humiliating the wretched - the rise of the bear-baiting show, exemplified by Jeremy Kyle, is also not a coincidence.

Now people don't change suddenly into Thatcherites; they don't wholeheartedly swallow the neoliberal dogmas. But it gradually forms part of the fabric of their everyday experience: and the structure of incentives and punishments makes you a mug not to adopt certain neoliberal behaviours - turn your house into an asset, treat your body as a saleable commodity, refit your personality according to the needs of buyers on the labour market, and so on. (You see this increasingly with Facebook, where employer-friendly profiles show constantly exuberant, happy, sociable, well-connected people - fuck 'em.) It shapes culture not just in the sense of representation - films, literature, popular science, and so on - but in the Raymond Williams sense of 'ordinary culture', the anthropological sense, the way people live.

So when we look at polls that say that over 70% of people support welfare cuts, we know that this doesn't mean they fully subscribe to the neoliberal project - its exoteric doctrines are too riddled with crudities and contradictions for that to be true. But we also know that they are profoundly affected by neoliberal governmentality, and the conception of themselves and everyone around them as entrepreneurial agents; and thus the conception of 'the market' as the almighty information processor and distributor of just rewards and punishments.

And we should see this as part of an ongoing, long-term project. If you think about the way student loans have been deployed, and the way the education system is being financialised, this is designed to impose a new kind of disciplinarity - even though the higher education system remains a state apparatus, it comes to be experienced not as a public good, but as a commodity that enhances your entrepreneurial self. And the more that is reinforced, the more it undermines - at an ideological level - the division between producers and consumers; the idea is that we're all producers, and we're all consumers. Some of us just happen to be more successful than others. Hence, the basis for 'class consciousness' is eroded"

That is a fascinating passage. It gallops through several really interesting ideas. I'm not sure which bit of Foucault he is referring to (probably just a bit I haven't read). But the idea that Neoliberalism is a more all-embracing ideology than it first appears seems quite true to me. In fact, I would go so far as to say that it is a religion. It has its totems, its gods, its prophets. It also has a religion's desire to define "good" and "bad" in quite a fixed way.

One thing that particularly rings true is the bland aggression of insisting that people maximise efficiency all the time - and that you, you personally, are always to blame for any failure to do what your masters require. Thus, in an office environment, you might be loaded down with work - your company might keep taking on new projects without calculating whether its existing workers can deliver them - you might be constantly called on to do other, unscheduled things - you might, in short, be put in an impossible position - but if you fail to do everything that your managers want you to do, you are to blame. Why? Because you need to learn better "time management".

You can learn a lot about an ideology by which solutions it forbids. Human beings are clever: left to our own devices, we can usually come up with ways around a problem. If that problem is that we have an economy that has very high levels of unemployment or, in the case of America, a health-care system that is manifestly failing a large proportion of society - well, these are problems that humans, being clever, can potentially solve.

But not every political system is comfortable with every solution. Ayn Rand accuses "collectivist" philosophies of denying that part of human nature that wants to trade, to make markets, to remain in control of the things that we create. (I'm not saying Ayn Rand is right - I think that her philosophy is a self-contradictory mess that promotes a political situation that undermines the values on which it is built; but that is a discussion for another time).

Neoliberalism rules out the possibility of state or collective action. This despite the fact that it might be the simplest or most efficient way to solve certain problems. A universal health care system makes use of the economies of scale which only the government can provide to deliver health care more cheaply and efficiently than the baroque and wasteful internal market that the US currently uses. There are all sorts of productive facilities standing idle that could be used by unemployed people to start making new things and contributing to the economy again. And so on.

But the Neoliberal cannot accept such solutions, because they involve doing things that Neoliberal ideology cannot, ever, recognise as good. If you challenged a Neoliberal (or a member of one of Neoliberalism's subsects, which includes most libertarians) then he would come up with all sorts of reasons not to try those solutions at all. Most of those reasons would be rooted in highly debateable or disproved claims about economics, or - if you dug deep enough - on claims to be able to foresee the future (see this blog for a large number of posts asking quite reasonable questions about neoclassical and neoliberal economics).

It seems to me that this is a fundamentally mystical belief - a religious belief, really, although the spirituality in which it is rooted seems to me to be Satanic. It has a diabolical grandiosity, promises everything in return for very little, talks in terms of a kind of perfectionism that I more associate with mental illness than with psychological health.

What is interesting about Seymour's comment is that it suggests that if we import the values of Neoliberalism into our everyday life, we will wind up doing something similar: ruling out options, dismissing ways of acting, because we have been convinced in advance that only certain things are right. If Neoliberalism is, effectively, a religion - and I think that it is - then we are all of us living in an intensely spiritual environment, where an alien - possibly one might say spiritually toxic - belief system surrounds us, constantly pressing us to define "good" and "bad" in misleading ways. One of the ways in which it hurts us is by encouraging us all to blame ourselves for problems which are structural or systemic - and, of course, by strongly discouraging us from any thoughts about changing the system.

That doesn't seem like a very healthy or happy state for any person to be in: self-blaming, but denying oneself any alternative way of being. It seems like the sort of state of mind that would lead, quite naturally, to depression.

Shingeki no Kyojin - Advance of the Giants

One thing I like to do from time to time is to read manga - not the manga in stores, but manga that has been scanlated (i.e. scanned and translated) into English by people online. I have no idea who these mysterious translators are, or where they find the time, but they are wonderful, wonderful people. Why? Because they make available to someone like me (who speaks no other language than English) a huge treasury of art.

Now, quite a few of these scanlated manga are utterly terrible. More than one features a teenage introvert loser who mysteriously picks up a harem of women, at least one of whom is clearly underage.

Some, though, are very good indeed.

One such is Shingeki no Kyojin, which you can read here: Mangareader.

Variously translated as "Attack of the Giants", "Advance of the Titans" and (bizarrely) "Attack on Titan", this is a piece of bleak, post-apocalyptic science fiction somewhere between a Giant Robot story and a zombie apocalypse: JG Ballard meets Starship Troopers. Describing it in terms of other works of art, though, does not really do justice to the extraordinary tone, which is bleak and nightmarish in the best possible way.

At some indeterminate point in the future, giants - or titans as the translation calls them - have appeared. These creatures, which look like enormous, naked, deformed and sexless humans, between three and fifty meters in height, appear to want nothing more than to eat people. Lots of people. The last remaining humans on Earth have been driven back behind the towering walls of a city the size of France. The story begins when an unusually large titan appears and kicks in the gate of one of the outermost walls, precipitating a titan invasion.

The main characters are teenagers, responding to the aftermath of the attack and trying to come to terms with a world in which humanity may well be on the verge of extinction.

Now, all that probably sounds a bit depressing. And it is. The violence is utterly horrific, with titans biting people in half (or worse) on a fairly regular basis, and the titans themselves being exceedingly fleshy and anatomical. So why read it?

Well, you might just like that sort of thing.

Assuming you don't, the number one draw is that it is very exciting. Not knowing when and if something horrible will happen (and this is a series that often kills people off) makes the scenes of action and danger genuinely gripping.

Furthermore, none of the characters is stupid: people work things out fast, react sensibly and come up with reasonable plans.

Then there are the titans. These creatures are compellingly horrible to look at: clearly inspired by Bosch and Breugel, they have almost kindly expressions above their monstrous jaws. If you like the creepy style of Junji Ito, these monsters are rather reminiscent of that, although they are also exploring a space of the uncanny all their own.

Finally, this is not the dull, one-note/one-idea world of a zombie apocalypse. There are clearly larger things going on here. There are conspiracies among the humans and the larger mystery of just what is going on with the titans keeps getting deeper and more intriguing.

There is a headlong feel to this comic. It is the author's first and one gets the sense that he is plunging ahead into new territory - that this could go anywhere (even though little details dropped here and there that later pay off suggest a degree of careful planning). Although it only seems to be translated relatively infrequently, there are already about 70 chapters online. This is a ride worth catching, I think.

EDIT: I wrote this a long time ago, in pop culture terms. Since then, the anime of SHINGEKI has come out, and the fandom has exploded in size. It is now very well known and almost ubiquitous. Meanwhile, the plot has progressed in some interesting directions. It is now clear that the author has been artfully and carefully planning ahead. Unfortunately, recent chapters have not always had the headlong feel I mentioned. Ah well. It remains interesting.