Living with/in and without neo-liberalism

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Living with/in and without neo-liberalism

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Clarke, John (2008). Living with/in and without neo-liberalism. Focaal, 2008(51) pp. 135147.

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Putting neo-liberalism in its place(s)

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Living with/in and without neo-liberalism

John Clarke

Abstract: This article explores some concerns about the concept of neo-liberalism,suggesting that it has been stretched too far to be productive as a critical analyticaltool. Neo-liberalism suffers from promiscuity (hanging out with various theoret-ical perspectives), omnipresence (treated as a universal or global phenomenon),and omnipotence (identified as the cause of a wide variety of social, political andeconomic changes). Alternative ways of treating neo-liberalism as more contin-gent and contested are considered. These emphasize its mobile and flexible char-acter, stressing processes of contextual assemblage, articulation, and translation.The article concludes by wondering whether the concept of neo-liberalism is nowso overused that it should be retired.

Keywords: assemblage, articulation, authority, globalization, neo-liberalism

Neoliberalism seems to be everywhere.Jamie Peck and Adam Tickell

Neoliberalism seems to mean many different things depending on ones vantagepoint. Aihwa Ong

This article starts from the puzzles identified bythese quotations. They point to what I think ofas the core problems of neo-liberalism as a con-cept: it is omnipresent and it is promiscuous.There may be a third: that neo-liberalism is om-nipotent, but we will come to questions of powerlater. I am intrigued by the two quotations inpart because of what work the word seems tobe doing in each of them. It opens up a momentof critical distance. For Peck and Tickell (2002),the critical distance concerns precisely how to

think of the relationship between neo-liberalismand space. For Ong (2006), it creates the condi-tion for critical reflection on how to thinkorrethinkneoliberalism as an analytic category.In the course of the article, I will take up theseas central issues for considering the transla-tion of neo-liberalism. But first, let me offer aword of warning about the article. It is deliber-ately conversational in approach. It forms partof a long-running conversation centered on thequestion of neo-liberalism. This is sometimes a

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conversation with myself, sometimes withfriends, and sometimes with people with whomI feel less comfortable. It represents one moreattempt to wrestle with puzzles that continue totrouble me in analytical and political ways (e.g.,Clarke 1991, 2004a, 2004b).

Promiscuous neo-liberalism

The question of what we might mean by neo-liberalism is a difficult one. The answers to thisquestion are various, divergent, and overlapping.The simplest answer is, perhaps, David Harveysview of neo-liberalism as the political/ideologi-cal project of a class seeking to change the bal-ance of power in global capitalism and create newmeans of capital accumulation (Harvey 2005).The attraction of this answer is that it is simple,it is evident everywhere, and applies to a varietyof economic and social phenomena, from ex-tensive land dispossession through to the newflexibilities of capital or to the dismantling ofthe social state (in societies of the North/West).

A related answer would perhaps stress thepoliticalideological dimensions more emphat-ically, pointing to the dismantling of earlier po-litical settlements and their forms of institu-tionalization (welfare states, forms of citizenship,corporatist settlements between capital and labor,Atlantic Fordism, etc.). These changes createnew ways of thinking, new political formations,and new institutional forms that can be charac-terized as neo-liberal because they involve boththe direct expansion of the scope and reach ofcorporate capital, and the indirect economiza-tion of areas of social and political life (publicfunctions to be either privatized or run like abusiness, for example). This view would focusrather more attention on the political and ideo-logical levels of analysis, and would be especiallyconcerned with processes of state reform or trans-formation, and about the spatial and scalar re-structurings with which it is associated (e.g.,Hartmann 2005; Jessop 2002; Peck 2004).

Despite their different emphases, these twoviews are linked by a foundation in political econ-omy, whether addressing forms of capital accu-

mulation directly or being more connected towhat Jessop might call their societalization indifferent regimes that attempt to organize andreorganize time and space. It is this analytic fo-cus that marks their difference from a set ofapproaches to neo-liberalism that views the con-cept through a Foucauldian analytic of govern-mentality. Here neo-liberalism marks the rise oftechnologies of governing populations that con-struct economic logics of calculation and in-vite people to become self-governing (e.g., Ong2006; Rose 1999). Such conceptions of neo-liberalism as governmentality link sites and tech-nologies as diverse as the management of securityor the constitution/regulation of a global space,the rise of NGOs (non-governmental organiza-tions) as a mode of governance in and of civilsociety, through the economization of the cal-culating self (as entrepreneur, as consumer, asprudential risk taker, etc.), to the rise of thera-peutic technologies of the self.1

Although I have sketched these as three differ-ent answers (see also Barnett 2005; Larner 2000),the boundaries between them blur and are tra-versed, as is usually the case with boundaries.From all three perspectives, some of the sametrends or tendencies are visible, even if they aremade to mean slightly different things. For ex-ample, the much-cited renaming of an unem-ployed person claiming unemployment benefitas a job seeker by the UKs Conservative gov-ernment can be read as (a) evidence of the sub-ordination of social policy to the power ofcapital and the liberation of the market; (b) evi-dence of trying to create a new economized ormarket centric rhetoric in displacing socialdemocratic, welfarist, or citizen-centered institu-tions; or (c) an instance of a governmental tech-nology for producing subjects who understandthemselves as entrepreneurial or willing selves(Maasen and Sutter 2007).

It might be that these boundaries are bothblurred and traversed by the question of eco-nomics. Although the economic is clearly at thecentre of political economic analyses of the ref-ormation of capital, it mutates in the second ver-sion to include questions of neo-liberalism aseconomic discourse (Peck 2004: 394), whereas

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some Foucauldian work locates the discursiveand governmental economization of social andpolitical life as a key feature of neo-liberalism(Brown 2005; Rose 1999). There are two pointsto be made here. On the one hand, these are not exactly the same economic: one refers to amaterial substructure of forces, relations, andinterests (which may be more or less directly ex-pressed in political and ideological forms); theother refers to a view of the economic as thosepractices, relationships, and forms of organiza-tion that are discursively constituted as eco-nomic through governmental work. This issueis both a focus of coincidence and analyticalfrustration. On the other hand, we might takethis coincidence not as the effect of bad theoret-ical work, but as indicating something trou-bling about both the central and problematiccharacter of the economic in contemporarytransformations. I realize this is a rather weakformulationbut I am not sure I can reconcilethe epistemological, theoretical, and politicaldivergences between Marxism and Foucauldiananalysis here (if ever). They will, however, con-tinue to haunt the concept of neo-liberalism.

Omnipresent neo-liberalism

There has everywhere been an emphatic turntowards neo-liberalism in political-economicpractices and thinking since the 1970s. Deregu-lation, privatization and withdrawal of the statefrom many areas of social provision have beenall too common. Almost all states, from thosenewly minted after the collapse of the SovietUnion to old-style social democracies and wel-fare states such as New Zealand and Swedenhave embraced, sometimes voluntarily and inother instances in response to coercive pres-sures, some version of neo-liberal theory andadjusted at least some policies and practices ac-cordingly. (Harvey 2005: 3)

I have some trouble with the view that every-where is neo-liberal even if the local forms varysomewhat. This view risks making neo-liberalismthe next-generation globalization concept, and

we might remember the difficult work that wasneeded to unlock the oppressive and over-whelming weight that the concept of globaliza-tion carriedand the sense of inevitability thatwas associated with it (Massey 2004a; see alsoBarnett 2005). But if it is not everywhere, is neo-liberalism merely the new colonialism, articulat-ing metropolises and peripheries in new formsof ruling at a distance? How to understand thecomplicated spaces of neo-liberalism has beenthe subject of much critical discussion in geog-raphy that has explored its uneven expansion,its variegated local forms, and its hybridity.For example, Peck argues that:

While neoliberalism may have begun life as aNorth Atlantic intellectual movement, its muta-tion into a variegated and internationalized stateproject over the past thirty years has been asso-ciated with a profoundly transnational processof social learning which has established newcircuits of neoliberal economic and legal exper-tise, new material connections between finan-cializing and globalizing economies and newforms of connection around neoliberal norms(2004: 402).

I have argued elsewhere that neo-liberalism is apoliticalcultural project that aims at transna-tional hegemony, in which different places areinvited, seduced, and compelled to join (Clarke2004a). Peck points to the strange doubling ofgeneral and particular in this process: Eachand every neoliberal transition, in this sense, isdistinctive though each also remakes the relation-ship between the part (an actually existing neo-liberal case) and the whole (the abstraction thatwe might provisionally term neoliberalism-in-general) (2004: 395). But this neoliberalism-in-general is itself a profoundly practical spatialimaginary: each specific neo-liberal transition is(further) evidence of a neo-liberal world, whichadds to the isomorphic pressures on other placesto conform.

For me, this also suggests the importance ofthe different modes of insertion into globalneo-liberalism that are experienced by differentregions, nations, and more local places. It also

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suggests the importance of the transnational re-lations through which such insertions are con-ducted.South East Europe forms such a nodewhere the processes and practices of insertionlook complicated, multiple, hesitant, and ambig-uousas are the ways in which they are locallyarticulated. This brings me to recent argumentsby Aihwa Ong discussing how to think aboutthe complicated distribution of neo-liberal gov-ernmentality. Ong is concerned with how neo-liberalism is reconfiguring relationships betweengoverning and the governed, power and knowl-edge, and sovereignty and territoriality (2006:3). This involves a different view of neo-liberal-isms unevenness. Rather than seeing it as atidal wave that rolls across all places (emanat-ing from the dominant metropoles), Ong treatsneo-liberalisms spread by examining it as anassemblage of technologies, techniques, andpractices that are appropriated selectively, thatcome into uncomfortable encounters with lo-cal politics and cultures, and that are mobileand connective (rather than global): It there-fore seems appropriate to study neoliberalismnot as a culture or a structure but as mobilecalculative techniques of governing that can bedecontextualized from their original sourcesand recontextualized in constellations of mu-tually constitutive and contingent relations(2006: 13).

I find Ongs insistence on treating neo-liber-alism as a mobile assemblage helpful. The forms,sites, mechanisms, and practices of such mobil-ity are criticalnot least for how transnationalinstitutions, practices, agents, and travelingknowledges come to work on new sites. Ratherthan assuming a neo-liberal core or essence thatis everywhere the same (and from which diver-gences might be measured), she captures some-thing of the diversity of specific forms andformations of neo-liberalism. It locates the po-litical and governmental work of neo-liberalismin practices of articulation, dis-articulation, andre-articulation that are, for me, central to pro-cesses of rule, domination, and hegemony(Clarke 2004a). In the process, this restores theissue of spaces, sites, forms, and resources ofcontestation, resistance, and recalcitrance.

Omnipotent neo-liberalism

There is little in the present for which neo-lib-eralism cannot be held responsible. As I waspreparing this article I encountered the follow-ing list of sites, institutions, processes, and prac-tices that were identified as neo-liberal (and Ido not think the list is exhaustive):

states, spaces, logics, techniques, technologies, dis-courses, discursive framework, ideologies, ways ofthinking, projects, agendas, programs, govern-mentality, measures, regimes, development, ethno-development, development imaginaries, globalforms of control, social policies, multiculturalism,audit cultures, managerialism, restructuring, re-form, privatization, regulatory frameworks, gov-ernance, good governance, NGOs, third sector,subjects, subjectivities, individualization, profes-sionalization, normalization, market logics, mar-ket forms of calculation, the destatalization ofgovernment and the degovernmentalization of thestate

Thats an impressive list, even for an omnipres-ent and promiscuous concept. It returns me toa double question, concerning what is, and whatis not, neo-liberal. If everything is neo-liberal,then Bondi and Laurie are right that there is no uncontaminated form of, or space for, polit-ical resistance that can be seen as remainingwholly outside neo-liberalism (2005: 399). Butwe might want to draw a distinction betweenthe presence of neo-liberalism almost every-where, and whether it is everywhere dominant.All sorts of thingsespecially discourses or waysof thinkingcan be found almost everywhere,but that is not necessarily an index of theirpower. Rather, we need to ask: Do they form thedominant or organizing principle for the placesand sites where they appear? This brings me backto practices of articulation and assemblage.

I want to suggest that adding the adjectiveneo-liberal to a site, process, or practice mightconceal two different political relations. Thefirst, most obvious, one is that this site, practice,or process is the effect or consequence of neo-liberalism: it would not exist without neo-liber-

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alism. The second meaning identifies the neo-liberal articulation of a pre-existing site, pro-cess, or practice. Whether we treat neo-liberalismfrom the standpoint of capitalist regimes of ac-cumulation, or as a version of liberal governmen-tality, most of its political work involves prac-tices of de- and re-articulation: reorganizingprinciples, policies, practices, and discourses intonew configurations, assemblages, or constella-tions (Li 2007a). To take a couple of examples,both development as a set of relations and pro-cesses centered on power, and managerialism asa way of organizing power in organizations, havelonger histories than can be encompassed byneo-liberalism (see e.g., Clarke and Newman1993; Kothari 2005; Pollitt 1993; Sharma forth-coming). So how does neo-liberalism rearticu-late them into new formations? Articulationhere might be understood as referring to theirinternal composition (innovative ways ofthinking and doing, with new ways of ordering,legitimating, and exercising power) and theirexternal configuration with other institu-tions, policies, and politics. I think this view ofthe neo-liberalization of things is more useful,not least because this conception of articulatedformations (internal and external) enables an un-derstanding of why they might be sites of con-tradiction, strain, antagonism, and ambivalence.

Neo-liberal cohabitation

By cohabitation I mean to identify the problemof how neo-liberalism lives with others in theworld. As a politicalcultural project it mustfind ways of engaging with other projects, seek-ing to displace, subordinate, or appropriate them.Most attention has been focused on the work ofdisplacementthe exclusion, marginalization,or residualization of other projects, discourses,and ways of imagining the world and life withinit. There are also the processes of subordinationand appropriation. Each of these terms accountsfor the continued place of alternative politicalcultural projects in a neo-liberal dominated ordirected assemblage. Subordination points tothe allocation of secondary or subsidiary roles

for other institutions, practices, and discourses:allowed to function but in more confined spaces,with narrowed scope (residual versions of thesocial or welfarism, perhaps; Clarke, 2007).Appropriation points to a more active processthat some have described as cooption or incor-poration. For example, Kothari (2005), writingabout the politics of development, argues thatthe neo-liberal agenda co-opted the alterna-tive critical discourses of development. As aconsequence:

Forms of alternative development become in-stitutionalized and less distinct from conven-tional, mainstream development discourse andpractice. This strategy of appropriation re-duced spaces of critique and dissent, since theinclusion and appropriation of ostensibly radi-cal discourses limited the potential for chal-lenge from outside the mainstream to orthodoxdevelopment planning and practice .As theseapproaches were adopted they were embeddedwithin a neoliberal discourse and became in-creasingly technicalised, subject to regimes ofprofessionalisation which institutionalizedforms of knowledge, analytical skills, tools, tech-niques and frameworks. (Kothari 2005: 4389)

This view of co-optation hints at the discursiveand political work of articulationtaking exist-ing discourses, projects, practices, and imaginar-ies and reworking them within a framing neo-liberal conception of development and its placein the world. Just as Kothari points to the incor-poration of alternative/critical approaches todevelopment, and work on difference points tothe reworking of radical politics of differenceinto a normalized model of the individual con-sumer citizen (Richardson 2005), so other would-be transformative political projects have beenappropriated and reworked through a neo-liberalframe. Dagnino (2006), writing about strugglesover citizenship in Brazil, points to the per-verse confluence between key organizing ideasand principles of social movements and neo-liberal politics, especially those of participationand citizenship, which were centrally articulatedby radical movements:


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There is thus a perverse confluence between, onthe one hand, participation as part of a projectconstructed around the extension of citizenshipand the deepening of democracy, and on theother hand, participation associated with theproject of a minimal state that requires theshrinking of its social responsibilities and itsprogressive exemption from the role of guaran-tor of rights. The perversity of this confluencereflects the fact that, although pointing to op-posite and even antagonistic directions, bothprojects require an active, proactive civil society

A particularly important aspect of the per-verse confluence is precisely the notion of citi-zenship, which is now being redefined througha series of discursive shifts to make it suitablefor use by neo-liberal forces. This new redefini-tion, part of the struggle between different po-litical projects, attests to the symbolic power ofcitizenship and the mobilizing capacity it hasdemonstrated in organizing subaltern sectorsaround democratizing projects. The need toneutralize these features of citizenship, whiletrying to retain its symbolical power, has madeits appropriation by neo-liberal forces necessary(Dagnino 2006: 158f.; emphasis in original).

Dagnino talks about the political frustrationand confusion resulting from the apparentlyshared discourse (2006: 162) in ways that areechoed by Bondi and Lauries observationsabout the sense of uncertainty, ambivalenceand perplexity about the politics of the pro-cesses we were observing and analyzing (2005:394). This confusion emerges precisely at thepoint of appropriation, articulation, and trans-formation exercised by the neo-liberal re-framingof existing radical and alternative discourses.Neo-liberalism is marked by a capacity to bendthese words (and the political and culturalimaginaries they carry) to new purposes.

Looking for the heart of neo-liberalism

Of course, neo-liberalism is heartlessbothmetaphorically and analytically. Attempts to de-fine a core or essential neo-liberalism have to

struggle with three problems: the variations ofneo-liberal discourses, technologies, and inter-ventions; the changing repertoire of neo-liber-alism over time; and the effects of strategies ofappropriation/articulation. For example, Pecktackles the first of these questionsabout howto chart this fluid, multidimensional and hy-bridized historical geography (2004:403). Iquote his argument at some length since it posesa set of difficult problems:

As a composite ideological structure, neoliberal-ism cannot be reduced to any one of its constit-uent elements. The state project of neoliberalismwas not constructed solely in the global North,nor exclusively in the South, but in both. Neo-liberalism is not solely an expression of free-market libertarianism, nor is it just an outgrowthof neoconservative moral authoritarianism, butit reflects both. Neoliberalism is not only a reac-tionary response to fiscal and debt crises, nor isit merely a handmaiden of financialization andcorporate globalization, but it is both. Neoliber-alism-in-general is a loose and contradiction-laden ideological framework that is evolving notonly through conflict with the external socialworlds that it encounters but also through vac-illating tensions between its own authoritarianand libertarian moments and constituencies. So, neoliberalism does not, and cannot, exist inpure form, but only manifests itself in hybridformations. Even the Bush and Blair projects,located as they are within the neoliberal heart-land, are appropriately characterized as hybrids,and as such they are no less hybrid than the neoliberalizing regimes of Chile or Mexico. Yetthe fact that a range of critical analysts, many ofthem working within different theoretical andpolitical traditions, continue to draw attentionto the shared neoliberal features of these hybridspoints to the importance of developing adequateaccounts of neoliberalism-in-general, withoutsuccumbing to the fallacies of monolithism,functionalism or convergence thinking. How-ever, the observation of family resemblance pre-supposes the existence of a (neoliberal) family;the naming of hybrids presupposes a more thantrivial degree of neoliberal content. In the absence

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of a more careful mapping of these hybrids-in-connection, the concept of neoliberalism remainsseriously underspecified, little more in some casesthan a radical-theoretical slogan (Peck 2004:403).

There is much here to reflect on (without evenengaging with the problems of biological-geneticconceptions of families and resemblances). Butwe may want to take up the concern with inter-nal contradictions, the hybridizing effect of ex-ternal encounters, and the problem of identify-ing a core for a composite ideological structure.These problems are exacerbated by the relation-ship between spatial differences and temporaldifferences in neo-liberalisms career. In trans-national relations, for example, each specific local/national instance of neoliberalism in prac-tice is going to be located in relation to previ-ously existing neoliberalisms in other placesand other institutions. Equally, Ong stresses theinnovative character of neoliberalism (e.g., as in-novative spatial administration; 2006: 19) andnotes that the practice of articulation itself in-serts a specific temporal dimension to neoliberalgovernmentality (Ong 2006: 17). As a result, neo-liberalism cannot be seen as having a static coresince it is consistently drawn into new entangle-ments as it tries to colonize the world.

But what might give these different appro-priations their neo-liberal character or form? Iwant to suggest that the coherence is providedby the combination of a logic of market ration-ality, a conception of personhood (centered on,but not exclusive to, human individuals), a cal-culating framework of efficiency, and a view ofauthority as a fundamental political and socialbond. Each of these brings a distinctive inflectionto thinking about the ordering and governingof societies. The market logic seeks to establishuniversalizing principles of ordering human af-fairs (through market relations, or, if necessary,through market-mimicking processes: see manyof the reforms of public services under the NewPublic Management, for example). The secondworks on a model of the self-possessed and self-possessing independent individual, borrowedfrom the white adult male figure so central to

the original formations of liberalism (or pos-sessive individualism to use Macphersons[1962] phrase). But this is now extended to theincorporation of previously excluded categoriesof individuals (previously understood as pos-sessed by others, or by forces, drives, passions,or even traditions beyond their control). Butthis conception of personhood is also extendedto other entitiescorporations, enterprises, andeven marketsas agentic beings. This idea ofpersonhood allows for boundaries to be drawn(as it did in earlier liberalisms). At least threecategories of person are visible in contemporarygovernmental discourse: established inde-pendent persons, people who might be em-powered to become independent (throughtechniques of self-development), and the resi-due requiring containment and control. Third,the calculating framework of efficiency is linkedto, but not the same as, market logic. It estab-lishes norms and ways of calculating value. Theseare typically economic, and often expressed infiscal calculations. But they are also linked toquestions of personhood in terms of evaluatingsubjects of value (Smith 1997) as hard work-ing producers,responsible consumers,effec-tive parents, and so on. Finally, the question of authority is central to the lexicon of neo-liberalism (and is one critical site for its articu-lation with other political projects, not leastconservatism and neo-conservatism). Forms ofauthority are multiplethe authority of themarket, of the consumer, of the family/house-hold, of corporations (and the business com-munity). Much has been made of the shift toprivate authority (Slaughter 2004), but it maybe more important to explore the blurring, in-terweaving, and fusing of different forms andsites of authority in neo-liberal political and gov-ernmental projects.

I realize there is nothing particularly newabout these four elements, nor are they individ-ually unique to neo-liberal ways of thinkingand doing. It is their combination and interplaythat marks the distinctiveness of neo-liberalism,and it is their co-existence that enables neo-liberalisms flexibility in processes of appropria-tion/articulation. Each can operate as a point of


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articulation with other projects and discourses,and not all need to be in play in that process.The elements have to be coherent, but that doesnot mean an absence of contradictions (whichmay explain why so many neo-liberal politicalprojects in specific national settings manage tobe liberal and authoritarian?). This view of a coreof elements borrows in part from CatherineKingfishers distinction between what she callsthe preliminary grammar of neo-liberalismand its disjointed, disjunctured articulationsin particular places (2002: 50). She argues thatIt is, in fact, only in the circulation of neolib-eral related meanings and their articulation withother meaning systems that neoliberalism takeson its multiple and contradictory lives (King-fisher 2002: 12).

This points to the capacity of neo-liberalismto circulate: to be decontextualised and recon-textualised. It travels well, in part, because it isheteroglossic and multiple. It always has some-thing to offer and that something promises tobe universal, modern, and efficient. It has alsobeen successful at colonizing the transnationalnetworks of transmission and translation. Neo-liberalism expresses the conditions of its ownflexibility and mobility. Ong argues that Neo-liberalism can also be conceptualized as a newrelationship between government and knowl-edge through which governing activities are re-cast as nonpolitical and nonideological problemsthat need technical solutions (2006: 3).

Here I want to argue that neo-liberalismshould be understood as the latest in a dishon-orable history of strategies of depoliticizationof politics that attempt to conceal the problemsand conflicts of politics behind an appeal toforms of knowledge and varieties of technicalexpertise (see e.g., Ferguson 1990; Rancire2006). Perhaps the most interesting thing aboutthis history is the vulnerability of such depoliti-cizing strategies to challenge and contestation.None of the ones that I know look like perma-nently stabilized successes. De-politicization car-ries with it the possibility, and indeed threat, ofre-politicization. Such strategies usually involvefairly anxious work devoted to maintaining theirnon-political and non-ideological claims, pro-

tecting the forms of knowledge and power fromcontesting incursions, or merely from the skep-tical gaze of doubtful publics (Clarke 2005).

However, this view of neo-liberal governmen-tality as constructing itself as non-political andnon-ideological raises a problem that govern-mentality analyses have with the question ofpolitics. The emphasis on the field of the gov-ernmental deliberately displaces the state as thecentral focus of analysis, but risks losing some-thing of the political as well as administrative/governmental formation of states as contradic-tory and contested formations. At the same time,subjects appear to be locked within the field ofgovernmental subjectionat best engaged innegotiating its complex terrain or folded intoethical or agonistic conflicts that are always al-ready framed by the governmental rationalitiesin play (see e.g., Ongs earlier (1993) analysis ofcultural citizenship). I doubt whether the fieldof government can ever be quite so all-encom-passing or coherent. Instead, other rationalities,political imaginaries, and projects occur thatoverflow the drive to incorporate, subject, andenmesh. These might be residual attachmentsthat cannot be adequately incorporated or dis-placed, they might be appropriations that comeloose from their neo-liberal fixings (articulationalways implies the possibility of re-articulation),or they might be emergent projects shaped byforces and imaginings that cannot be contained(Clarke, Newman, and Westmarland 2007). I donot intend to develop this sketch of possibilitieshere, but it seems to me that thinking about asingular governmentality must always be atten-tive to potential alternatives (see also Laurie,Andolina, and Radcliffes [2005] discussion ofindigenous knowledge). As Sharma argues inthe context of NGO empowerment programsfor women in India:

Perhaps a more productive question to ask iswhat kinds of subjects are being produced bythis use of empowerment and the resulting in-crease in interfaces between subaltern womenand state agencies. Do womens expanding re-lationships [to state institutions and processes]produce only active political subjects, or do they

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also produce regulated, subordinated, and dis-ciplined state subjects? (Brown 1995: 173). Myanalysis of the MS program substantiates Chat-terjees (2004) claim that governmental pro-grams do not just produce bureaucratized andpassive state subjects. In postcolonial contexts,these programs produce active, sometimes dis-sident, political actors who can provide theground for mobilizations of political society inwhich marginalized subjects make claims onthe state, negotiate entitlements, and contest so-cial hierarchies (Chatterjee 2004). Governmen-talization does not depoliticize so much as itspawns a subaltern politics that may take new,unexpected forms. (2006: 81)

As a result, I want to argue for a rather differentview of the conditions of governmental innova-tion as existing outside of, or beyond, the reachof the governmental. There are conditions, callthem problems, crises, issues, that become rec-ognized as needing to be governed, or governedbetter. This clearly includes the possibility of pre-vious governance failures (Li 2007b). Here wemight see neo-liberalism not just as the mutatingprogeny of earlier liberalisms, but as govern-mental inventions demanded to address, recog-nize, name, and manage problematic conditionsthat appear to be beyond the capacity of earliermodes of governing.2

Despite the appeals of political economy, theseare never just the problems and antagonisms ofcapital accumulation. They are about social re-lationsand the turbulence of the socialin awider sense. Governmental innovation can bethought of in terms of how to overcome crises,blockages, dislocations, and unruliness that arethreats to optimization. Some of those appearas economic, or are to be handled througheconomic logicsbut they have to be under-stood as social in the widest sense, and as politi-cal when they appear as movements and projectsthat demand not to be governed in the old way.Such a view of crisis and dislocation might en-able us to understand innovation better, andmight also point to the persistence of contradic-tions, disorders, and antagonisms (which newgovernmental interventions may manage to con-

tain, rework, or displace, but may not resolve).Governmental interventions may also give rise tonew antagonisms, contradictions, and crisespart of the disorderliness of governing (Cooper1998).

Translating neo-liberalism: Multiple and graduated sovereignties

For me, one of the most important features ofOngs recent approach to neo-liberalism has beenprecisely its combination of issues of translationwith questions of sovereignty. Translationlikearticulationputs an emphasis on discursivepractices in a way that opens up analytical andpolitical possibilities.3 Arguing for ethnographicattention to how neo-liberalism is mobile, andhow translation into specific contexts works, Ongindicates how working through the concepts ofarticulation, negotiation, and translation makespossible a more open-ended and differentiatedform of analysis:

[A]rticulations also refer to discursive practicesas ongoing negotiations of citizenship in condi-tions of displacement. Articulation as a con-ceptual temporality permits the exploration ofclaims as a contingent emergence within partic-ular assemblages of market rationalities, politicsand ethics. The stress on discursive negotiationor translation of contradictory elements withinthe space of conjuncture sidesteps a predeter-mined opposition or adversary position amongelements but maintains a conceptual opennessto unexpected possibilities and resolutions. A context specific inquiry allows us to capturehow opposing interpretations and claims can anddo interrupt, slow down, deflect, and negotiateneoliberal logics and initiatives. The temporal-ity of transmission, translation and negotiationin this fluctuating space is fraught with politicalcomplication, contingency and ambiguity.(2006: 17)

In many respects, this seems to connect closelywith discussions about the emergent construc-tion of forms of governmentality in the space of


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South East Europe (Deacon and Stubbs 2007)and it may be that Ong is correct in arguing thatviewing such dynamics from outside the claus-trophobic framing of North/South might makethe processes of transmission, translation, andrecontextualization more visible (2006: 12). Whatshe develops is an orientation to these questionsaround sovereignty, arguing that sovereignty isbeing reconstructed through new spatializingpractices that divide up territories in new ways,and govern them through differentiated anddifferentiating means (see also Ferguson andGupta, 2002; Sharma and Gupta 2007). Theseinnovations include sharing sovereign powerwith other authorities (supra-national agencies,multi-lateral agencies and corporations; Ong2006: 19). This produces a field of graduatedand overlapping sovereignties that also differen-tiate populations and subject them to differenttypes of rule, allocate them to different citizen-ship statuses, and so on.

These questions of new spatial and scalar organizationand their implication with ques-tions of multiple, graduated, or overlappingsovereigntiesseem to me to bear directly onthe issues of making up places. In particular,we can see how both governmental and non-governmental organizations might be linkedalthough not always in harmonious waysin theworking out of these processes. Such agencieswork as practices of transmission and transla-tionconnecting spaces and scales in innova-tive ways. They also articulate different voices,claims, and forms of authority in representingand regulating new places. Like Sharma, Ongsees NGOs in particular as occupying an am-biguous or ambivalent role in these emergentsovereigntiesfunctioning as both agents oftransmission and as agencies of representationand political-ethical claims-making on behalfof marginalized, excluded, and exploited groups(forms of noncitizenship). Both analyticallyand politically, ambivalence seems an appropri-ate relationship to both states and non-stategoverning. Located in the processes of manag-ing contradictions and antagonistic social rela-tions, it would be surprising if they were not thesite of ambiguity and ambivalence.

Living without neo-liberalism:A thought experiment

I want to rescue a series of propositions fromthis ramble around neo-liberalism. These arewhat I think of as my temporary standpointsfor worrying about neo-liberalism. They are tem-porary, fragile, and vulnerable to collapse. Butfor the moment they may allow me to put to-gether some almost coherent thoughts. Theyare linked by a concern with a set of words suchas contradictions, construction, and conflict onthe one hand, and ambivalence, assemblage,and articulation on the other.4

First, it would be a good idea to think of thesocial field with which neo-liberalism engages asa disorderly one, characterized by contradictions,antagonisms, and contested political projects.Neo-liberalism provides a political and govern-mental repertoire for trying to intervene in suchfields and direct them in particular ways. Sec-ond, such political and governmental projectsstruggle to resolve, reconcile, contain, or displacecontradictions and antagonisms (more or lesssuccessfully). As innovative strategies they mayalso generate new contradictions, antagonisms,and dysfunctions. Third, innovative political andgovernmental strategies have to be developed tomanage the contradictions, antagonisms, dys-functionsand even failuresof neo-liberalprojects. Are these also neo-liberal?

Fourth, neo-liberal strategies realignincontradictory and complex waysformationsof spaces, scales, and sovereignties. Fifth, neo-liberalism involves articulating practicesap-propriating other discourses, practices, and evenimaginaries and inflecting them. It enables us to grasp its flexibility and mobility. Sixth, neo-liberalism therefore denotes a double process ofarticulation and assemblage: first, the articula-tion of things into neo-liberalisms repertoire;second, the articulation of elements from neo-liberalisms repertoire into specific/local assem-blages or constellations as part of political andgovernmental projects to remake particularplaces. And finally, articulation always impliesthe possibility of re-articulationthe attachmentof words, symbols, practices, policies, and so on

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to alternative voices, vocabularies, imaginaries,and projects.

As usual, I want to emphasize these proposi-tions because they imply a way of thinking aboutneo-liberalism that reduces its density and to-talizing weightand the analytical and politicalbreathlessness that such weight induces. Keep-ing neo-liberalism open in these ways an-nounces the possibility of thinking about whatis not neo-liberaland thus the possibility of liv-ing without neo-liberalism. What concepts wouldwe need to use, or construct, in order to thinkabout the present without using the concept ofneo-liberalism? If my description of its omni-presence, omnipotence, and promiscuity is cor-rect, then perhaps we need terms that wouldallow us to think better. Neo-liberalismas aconceptfeels overworked: a more welfarist oreven compassionately conservative regime wouldretire it. Instead, we keep on finding ways ofmaking it do more work, and saving ourselvesthe trouble

Acknowledgments

This article was originally written for a work-shop on Transnational Governmentality inSouth East Europe: Translating Neo-liberalismon the Sovereign FrontierConcepts, Cases,Contestations, held in Rabac, Croatia 13 June2007, funded by the Friedrich Ebert Stiftung andorganized by Paul Stubbs. It was written while Iwas part of a three-month Maison des Sciencesde lHomme Programme International dEtudesAvances Comparing scales of citizenship: be-tween legal and social representations, at Co-lumbia University Institute for Scholars, ReidHall, Paris. I am deeply grateful to my colleaguesin this programKathleen Coll, Evelina Dag-nino, and Catherine Neveufor their efforts tohelp me think better and for tolerating my ob-sessions. This article also reflects long-runningconversations with Clive Barnett, Wendy Brown,Larry Grossberg, Wendy Larner, Janet Newman,and Paul Stubbs. They are, of course, not re-sponsible for its faults (even in an era of respon-sibilization). Finally, my thoughts have been

modified by conversations with colleagues atthe workshop and at a subsequent PhD confer-ence on Activism and the State of Neoliberal-ism, held in the Department of Sociology andSocial Anthropology at the Central EuropeanUniversity in Budapest (22-23 June 2007).

John Clarke is Professor of Social Policy at theOpen University, UK. His research and writingfocuses on the processes of remaking welfareand states. He is currently working (with JanetNewman) on a book about the conflicts at stakein encounters between changing publics andchanging public services.E-mail: [email protected].

Notes

1. Two special issues of Antipode devoted to neo-liberalism in 2002 and 2005 mark the distancebetween these two conceptions. The first (34 [3])deals with neo-liberalism in terms of politicaleconomic restructurings of scale and space. Thesecond (37 [3]) treats neo-liberalism primarilyas a set of governmental techniques, technolo-gies, and strategies of subjection in different sites(linked by questions of knowledge and power).

2. This slides past a whole set of problems aboutthe analysis of contradictions, antagonisms, anddysfunctions. But for some suggestive thoughts,see the discussion by Katz (2005) on contradic-tions between the economic and cultural politicsof neo-liberalism, Kalb (2005) on the antago-nisms generated by globalization flows, Gough(2002) on the tensions between individualiza-tion and socialization in and around neo-liber-alism, and Massey (2004b) on the production ofthe local as a potentially antagonistic field.

3. Translation is growing in significance as a focusof attention (see e.g., Czarniawska and Sevn,2005; Djelic and Sahlin-Andersson, 2006; Lend-vai and Stubbs 2006; Morris, 2006).

4. Because I think in alliterative threesomes, Icould also offer uneven, unfinished, and unsta-ble (as descriptions of political and governmen-tal projects); and transnational, translation, andtrajectories (as ways of marking the dynamicsof changing formations).


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Documents

Living with/in and without neo-liberalism