Yet neoliberal ideology relies on more than fantasy. It involves a restructuring of political possibility. Neoliberalism. eliminates the symbolic identities made available under Keynesianism, providing instead a multiplicity of fluid and adaptable imaginary identities that converge around the strange attractors of the consumer and the criminal. 'Whereas the welfare state enabled the construction of political identities as sites for oppositional redeployment, neoliberal ideology forecloses such opposition in advance. Under the conditions of the decline of symbolic eficiency, identities are too fleeting and unstable to serve as sites of politicization.64 In the rapidly shifting media environments of communicative capitalism or in the complexities of urban war zones, identifications morph and mutate so rapidly as to be politically inconsequential. Likewise · insofar as brands themselves provide sites of identification that mobilize consumers, a focus on identity production as central to left political struggle afirms rather than contests corporate practice in a global neoliberal economy. How would climate change, for example, be rendered into the terms of political identity? Is it a matter oflifestyle? Ofbeing the sort of person who drives a Prius and carries an attractive nylon bag to the grocery store? Such a reduction to an imagined "green identity" formats climate change as an issue of individual consumer choice, as a fashionable cause. Not only does such formatting reinforce, yet again, the supposition that the free market, left on its own, wil find solutions to major problems but it is built on the exclusion of collective approaches to systemic problems.
The fantastic suppositions of neoliberal ideology have become part of the air we breathe, elements of our most fundamental assumptions about how the world works: everyone is an individual with a unique identityj the free market enables us to create <sub>ap</sub>d dev�lop these unique identities; everybody wins; there is no alternative. Even leftists critical of big, bad corporations and the growing extremes of wealth and poverty find it extraordinarily dificult to think of alternatives to the present configuration of power. In part this is because we have been unable to give voice to values of collectivity, cooperation, solidarity, and equity strong enough to counter neoliberalism's free-trade fantasy. It is also because we can't imagine how we would realize, enact, bring about such a vision. Our very supposition of democracy, as the following chapter explores, entraps us in the inequalities of communicative capitalism. 65
FREE TRADE
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