kfitz

More on That Word

This is in part an apology for having ranted and run yesterday; between the little project I’m trying to get launched in the next couple of weeks and a meeting that took up a good chunk of yesterday, I wasn’t able to stay on top of the conversation that my post started for very long.

I’ve tried to catch up on it, though, and have a few thoughts I now want to add.

My hatred of the term is not meant to signal any sense that the thing it’s meant to refer to doesn’t exist. To deny that the dominant logic of contemporary U.S. culture is the logic of the market would be a fruitless exercise. Nor do I want to defend that logic, or suggest that there aren’t real consequences to its dominance.

But I do want to suggest that the logic is so pervasive, and the concept used to describe it so totalizing, that, like “postmodernism” before it, at some point it ceases to have the desired critical effect. As in the case of postmodernism, one has to begin to wonder whether there is any outside to neoliberalism. If there is an outside, how do we get there? If there isn’t, what work is pointing out the water in which we all swim actually attempting to do?

The other problem with the term, and the one that I was mostly focused on yesterday, is its conduciveness to sloppy adoption and deployment. This, too, plagued “postmodernism,” a term that got tossed around like confetti until what descriptive or critical power the term had utterly dissipated. What makes it worse in this case is that “neoliberal” is so clearly meant to be a pejorative, and that it gets deployed in the ways that, as Ted Underwood pointed out on Twitter, “bourgeois” once was. There are times when that term is undoubtedly called for. But like “bourgeois” or “reactionary” or any number of other such terms, I have too often of late heard “neoliberal” deployed as an insult by people on the left against other people on the left. It’s the classic circular firing squad of ideological purity, and it makes me nuts.

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