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title: "Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies Communicative Capitalism and Left Politics"
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# Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies Communicative Capitalism and Left Politics
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Steagal Act in 1999 so as to enable the formation of financial superpowers composed of commercial banking, investment banking, and stock brokerage) . Neoliberalism's supporters and adherents have to rely on political alliances and in so doing compromise some of the values and ideals they champion. At the same time, to retain its dominant position neoliberalism as an ideological formation has to ofer something to the people whose lives it shapes. It has to structure their expectations and desires so that it feels right, like the way things just are. It can't say directlJ "Hey, you guys go work really hard so that rich people can get even richer:
Lacanian psychoanalysis, particularly as reworked by Slavoj Zizek, helps explain the way ideological formations link together a set of often conflicting and contradictory promises for enjoyment and explanations for its lack (for people's failure to enjoy despite al the promises that they would). Enjoyment (jouissance) is the Lacanian term for an overwhelming, even agonizing, afective intensity.2 It designates something we desire but can never fully get, and something we want to avoid but can never fuly shake. It's that "something extra" for the sake of which we do what might otherwise seem irrational, counterproductive, or even wrong. And it's that "something extra" we can't help but suspect accompanies even those actions that we hope are rational, productive, and right. Ideological formations, then, work as economies of enjoyment to forbid, permit, direct, and command enjoyment.3
The category ofenjoyment is an important a�dition to the theory of Ideology insofar as it accentuates the way an ideological formation is more than a set of meanings, images, and the accumulated efects ·of dispersed practices. Rather, ideology "takes hold" of the subject at the point of the nugget of enjoyment outside the meaning or significance the ideological formation provides. This excess enjoyment marks the incompleteness of a formation the limits of what it can explain, and the extra "kick" it promises. Fantasies organize these remainders, accounting for societies' failures, ruptures, and inconsistencies in ways that promise and produce enjoy;. ment. In so doing, they bind subjects to certain sets of relations, structuring and config their thinking and acting so as to attach them to seemingly inescapable patterns of domination, patterns they may well recognize as domination but keep following, nevertheless.
Chapter 1 takes up the fantastic investments in technology informing and attaching some leftists to democraCYJ the fantasies of abundance, participation, and wholeness. This chapter considers neoliberalism's underlying fantasy of free trade and the kinds of enjoyment this fantasy promises and provides. It highlights a specific problem neoliberalism creates for left politics, namely, the change in the subject positions available for political deployment. Whereas the Keynesian welfare state interpellated subj ects into specific symbolic identities ( such as the worker, the housewife, the student, or the citizen), neoliberalism relies on imaginary identities. Not only do the multiplicity and variability of such identities prevent them from serving as loci of political action but their inseparability from the injunctions of consumerism reinforces capitalism's grip.
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What Is Neoliberalism?
In recent years, scholars have produced significant analyses of neoliberalism as a set of policy assumptions favoring corporations, as inseparable from globalization and imperialism, as a "project for the restoration of class power," as a specific form of governmentality, and as a new form of the state.4 The folowing sketch of neoliberalism synthesizes these contributions.
Most generally, neoliberalism is a philosophy viewing market exchange as a guide for all human action. Redefining social and ethical life in accordance with economic criteria and expectations, neoliberalism holds that human freedom is best achieved through the operation of markets. Freedom (rather than justice or equality) is the fundamental political value. The primary role of the state is to provide an institutional framework for markets, establishing rights of property and contract, for example, and creating markets in domains where they may not have existed previously. Consequently, neoliberalism accords to the state an active role in securing markets, in producing the subjects of and conditions for markets, although it does not think the state should-at least ideallyintervene in the activities of markets.
In his unpublished lectures on governmentality, Michel Foucault emphasizes two fundamental diferences between: early political liberalism and contemporary neoliberalism. 5 First, neoliberalism inverts the early model of the state as a limiting, external principle supervising the market to make the market form itself the regulative principle underlying the state. Second, neoliberalism relies on a diferent notion of the individual or subject. For classic liberals, such as Thomas Hobbes and John Locke, the free, rational individual is the very foundation of the state, that which grounds and limits legitimate government. Neoliberals neither anchor their account of the rational chooser in a domain of natural freedom nor make the rational chooser the ground and limit of government. Rather, they see the subject as acting and reacting in accordance with various economic incentives and disincentives. For neoliberals, then, a goal of governance is to "construct responsible subjects whose moral quality is based on the fact that they rationally assess the costs and benefits of a certain act as opposed to other alternative acts:'6 In short, neoliberalism doesn't rely on preexisting conditions. It creates new ones, reformatting social and political life in terms of its ideal of competition within markets.
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The key principles of neoliberalism were formulated by a group of economists, philosophers, and historians who gathered around the Austrian philosopher Friedrich von Hayek. 7 In 194 7 they founded the Mount Pelerin Society (the name comes from the Swiss spa where they first met). Their commitment to the role of competitive markets in securing freedom vehemently opposed both Marxist theories of centralized state planning and Keynesian polices of state intervention in the economy.
Over subsequent decades, neoliberalism remained a marginal economic movement, far outside mainstream Keynesian's commitment to regulatory policies designed to stabilze capitalism and protect citizens from its worst excesses. Nonetheless, as they combated the hegemony of Keynesianism in academic and policy circles, neoliberals slowly gathered support from financial and political elites. A crucial element of this success was their establishment of alternative institutions. They created "a huge international network of foundations, institutes, research centers, publica� tions, scholars, writers, and public relations hacks" who developed, packaged, and pushed neoliberal doctrine.8 In 1974, von Hayek received the Nobel Pri�e in Economics. Two years later another key member of his circle won the prize as well, the neoliberal economist Milton Friedman, the primary figure in the Chicago School of economics.
Not until the elections of Margaret Thatcher in the United Kingdom in 1979 and Ronald Reagan in the United States in 1980 did neoliberal ideology come to dominate economic policy.9 The preceding decades had been the heyday of l(eynesian policies wherein the role of the state was to guide the economy and distribute risk so as to shield the inevitable losers in a capitalist market. One such policy endeavors to ensure the stability of production by guaranteeing consumption, either by the state or private consumers. For Keynesians, a living wage is not just a moral issue. It's an economic one, a way to guarantee consumers' purchasing power and stabilize production . . Michael Lebowitz explains: "Increased wages would increase aggregate demand, stimulate job creation and new investment . . . mass consumption, it was argued, is necessary for mass production. H.owever, to realize these benefits the market itself would not sufice-state policies and micromanagement were seen as critical:' 10 The Keynesian state protects production through oversight and intervenes in order to stimulate demand. The market by itself can't guarantee continued productivity.
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By the 1970s, the cons�nsus around Keynesianism was unraveling, in part in reaction to the "structural crisis" in the world economy. Dumenil and Levy note the main aspects of the crisis: "diminished growth rates, a wave of unemployment and cumulative inflation:'11 Elsewhere they identify the crisis as a decline in the rate of profit; unemployment, then, was not a cause of the crisis but an efect, a way for employers to control costs. 12 Other scholars draw attention to additional blows against the Keynesian economic orthodoxy: the collapse of the Bretton Woods Agreement in 1973, the dramatic increases in the price of oil ("oil shocks") brought about by OPEC in 1973 and 1979, and the failure of K.eynesianism "to develop public understandings of the economy which could compete with the neoliberal rhetoric of 'free markets: "13 The previous chapter attributes this failure not to Keynesians but to leftists who joined the attack on the state and collective approaches to the economy. The left's failure to ·defend core IZeynesian commitments to collectivizing risk, diminishing the impact of contingenc;ies on al concerned (such as ilness, natural disaster, economic crisis), and redistributing some portion of the economic surplus to ensure a min�al standard of living contributed to the hegemonic position of neoliberal ideology. 14 Indeed, this failure is the fundamental political trauma affecting the contemporary left. Absent an adequate defense of collective approaches to common problems and in the face of seeming acceptance of the fiction that there is no alternative, the left knows neither who or that it is, nor what it would advocate if it existed at al.
Thatcher and Reagan responded to rising unemployment and inflation in the UK and United States by tightening the money supply (already undertaken by Jimy Carter in the United States), reducing the power and influence of the unions (Thatcher infamously breaking the coal :miners union and Reagan firing the air-trafic controlers who refused to return to work), deregulating the economy (eliminating or loosening regulatory oversight in a slew of areas, including banking, communications, utilities, trading, airlines, and the railways so as to foster competition), and pursuing privatization strategies (involving both the subcontracting out of public services and their complete selling of to the private sector) .15 Reagan, and to an extent his predecessor, Jimy Carter, specifically defended privatization in terms of neoliberal ideology, that is, as a means of forcing government to ctembrace private marketplace models" and "respect capitalist measures of success:'16 Bill Clinton and AI Gore further extended neoliberal ideology. As became ever clearer during Clinton's first term, government was like any purchased good, a product offered to satisfy customers even as its production and provision demanded a mindful eye toward the constraints of the market.
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Since the early eighties, increasing numbers of states worldwide have adopted neoliberal policies of privatization, deregulation, and fi.nancialization. Some of them have done so on their own (or, more accurately, as a response to pressures from ruling financial elites seeking to restore their class power). Others have been compelled by international institutions such as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund to remove price controls, accept inferior terms of trade, and dism�ntle their public sectors as a condition for aid and loans. Previously committed to a view of development emphasizing the managerial role of the state, these institutions came in the late seventies and early eighties to be dominated by the Washington Consensus, the conviction that neoliberalism provided the quickest and surest formulae for growth. Structural adjustment policies involving cuts to state budgets and programs for the poor were thus instituted throughout the Second and Third Worlds to encourage the development of markets (or to eliminate barriers to the flow of capital and capacity outside countries to more profitable investment sites). The former Soviet Union likewise underwent "shock treatments" as its stateowned and controlled economy was rapidly privatized.
By the end of the twentieth century, neoliberalism had replaced Keynesianism as the reigning approach to the economy; the state, and development.17 As Robert Polin observes: "The neoliberal economic agenda-of eliminating government deficits and inflation, sharply cutting back government spending, deregulating labor and financial markets, and opening national economies to free trade and multinational capital investments- has become so dominant throughout the world over the past generation that even thinkg through serious alternatives presents itself as a daunting task."18 The charge led by Margaret Thatcher as she dismantled the British welfare state and defeated the trade unions in the name of increasing competition now prevails as the common sense of neoliberal ideology-There Is No Alternative.
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Free Trade
Neoliberal ideology relies on the fantasy of free trade. The fantasy promises that an unfettered market benefits everyone. Why? Because markets are the most eficient ways of ensuring that everyone does what they are best suited for and gets what they want. Michael Lebowitz describes this faith: "The unfettered market, we are told, insures that everyone benefits from a free exchange (or it would not occur) and that those trades chosen by rational individuals (from all possible exchanges) wil produce the best possible outcomes. Accordingl)lj it follows that interference with the perfect market system. by the state must produce disaster-a negative-sum result in which the losses exceed the gains. So, the answer for al rightthinking people must be, remove those interferences:'19 Everyone benefits, not just some, all. The free market fantasy is that everyone wil win. To ensure that everyone wil win, the market has to be liberated, freed from constraints, unleashed to realize its and our ful potential. 20 As free rational agents armed with ful information, people will make the right choicesbut, again, only so long as nothing biases or constrains these choices, so long as nothing fetters the freeness of the market.
Four aspects of Slavoj Zizek's discussion of the role of fantasy in ideology are helpful for analyzing neoliberalism's fantasy of free trade. Zizek argues, first, that the "external ideological ritual. is the true locus of the fantasy which sustains an ideological edifice:'21 Fantasy isn't hidden underneath oficial statements and policies. It's not like some kind of trick or illusion duping the poor, gullible masses. Rather, fantasy is manifest in our actual practices; these practices, what people actually do, are the location of ideological beliefs. Neoliberal ideology focuses on trade, that is, on practices of exchange. The ordinary exchanges of everyday peoplecleaned up and understood as rational decisions made under ideal conditions-are trade. When neoliberals talk of free trade, most of us tend to imagine these individual exchanges. We might think of small farmers and local businesses or about how great it is to get to choose what we want from abundant, alluring consumer items. We might imagine lemonade stands or buying and selling on eBay. Only rarely and with great efort do we focus on banks, credit cards, subprime mortgages, structured debt vehicles, currency trading, or insurance companies' profit-oriented eforts to deny payment to those who have dutifuly paid their premiums for years. Neoliberalism.'s fantastic appeal stems in part from the way individual exchanges stand in for global flows {upward) of capital.
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Second, Zizek holds that fantasy answers the question "What am I to the Other?"22 In the United States, the typical answer to this question is "free:' To the Other, I am the one, we are the ones, who are free. After September n, 2001, "because we are free" answered the question "Why do they hate us?" From the U.S. perspective, to cite an earlier example, the Cold War was fought between freedom and totalitarianism. Neoliberalism afrms and extends this self-understanding in terms of freedom (or, better, freeness). Its emphasis on free trade answers the question of who we, as Americans, . are-we are those who trade freely, who value freeness. Ours is the home of the free (despite or because there is no such thing as a free lunch). Increasingly, neoliberalism afrms technology's fantasy of wholeness to tell us who "we" are in a global sense. We are those connected to each other through exchange, the exchange of commodities as well as of contributions. On the Internet, we are free to buy anything from anywhere at any time.
Third, Zizek explains that fantasy occults an original deadlock.23 In neoliber� ideology, the fantasy of free trade covers over persistent market failure, structural inequalities, the prominence of monopolies, the privilege of no-bid contracts, the violence of privatization, and the redistribution of wealth to the "have mores:' Free trade thus sustains at the level of fantasy what it seeks to avoid at the level of reality-namely, actualy free trade among equal players, that is, equal participants with equal opportunities to establish the rules of the game, access information, distribution, and financial networks, and so forth. Paradoxically, free trade is invoked as a mantra in order to close down possibilities for the actualization of free trade and equality.
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We can see this closure at work in the slippage between ideas of competition and winning. On the one hand, neoliberal thought emphasizes the necessity of competition. As George points out, competition was Margaret Thatcher's central value and faith in competition was the governing precept of her destruction of the British public sector. George quotes Thatcher, "It is our job to glory in inequality and see that talents and abilities are given vent and expression for the benefit of us all:'24 On the other hand, even as neoliberalism emphasizes competition, it holds on to the notion that everyone is a winner, a notion dearly at odds with competition because in competition there are winners and losers. Thus, so-caled Third World or "developing" countries are not told, "Sorry, losers, that's the breaks in a global economy:' Rather, they are promised that everyone will win.25 The Global Report on Human Settlements notes: "Conventional trade theories see increased trade and a liberalized trade regime as purely beneficialj but, as in all chance, there are, in fact, winn.ers and losers. Those participating in the active, growing areas of the world economy or receiving (unreliable) trickle-down efects benefit. Those who do not participate at best receive no benefits, but, in fact, are usually losers, sin.ce capital tends to take flight from their countries or their industries to move to more productive zones, reducing work opportunities and business returns as currencies and wages fall or jobs disappear:'26 Just as the Washington Consensus promised the less-well-of countries that they would al benefit from free trade, so in the United States are workers a.dvised not to worry about the decline in manufacturing and rise of outsourcing. New jobs will be created. With education, workers can be retrained. This same promise that no one wil lose reappears at the level of the local school. Kids today are taught that everyone's a winner. Everyone gets some kind of prize or ribbon just for showing up. In some U.S. districts, schools no longer post grades or rankings out of fear of hurting the self-esteem of those students near the bottom. Perhaps surprisingly, the emphasis on testing inherent in George W Bush's education policy, No Child Left Behind, is not accompanied by a corresponding ranking of students. Instead, schools and teachers are ranked and assessed-but not the students, because everyone is a winner.
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Zizek writes, fourth, "Fantasy constructs a scene in which the jouissance we are deprived of is concentrated in the other who stole it from us:'27 I mentioned at the beginning of this chapter that in Lacanian psychoanalysis, enjoyment is something we desire but can never fully get. Zizek's insight here is that one of the ways fantasy keeps our desire intact as desire is by telling us why we haven't fulied it. It accounts for our failures to enjoy. We haven't fulied it, we haven't gotten it, we haven't really enjoyed because someone stole the enjoyment from us. But for them, we would enjoy. I would have had a fabulous evening if you hadn't gotten drunk) flirted with the bartende1j looked at me in that weird way. This might be called the "excuses, excuses" role of fantasy.
Free trade stages the scene of stolen enjoyment as a deferred promise of fulfient. \Nhen we carry out our exchanges in the market, our needs/and desires will be met. This is the very definition of a perfect market. It wil meet everyone's needs and desires. In a crude sense, financial, stoc� bond, and commodities markets are bets on this future, investments in the promised fulilment. We could also include here mortgages, loans, credit cards, al sorts of diferent financial instruments that rely on a presumption of future satisfaction.
To be sure, market exchanges do not actuilly provide jouissance. Or, more precisely, when the market serves as vehicle for jouissance, it is mesmerizing, repulsive, excessive (this is that aspect of enjoyment as that which we want to avoid but can't). The point \_is clearer when we distinguish between free trade's staging of the lack of enjoyment as a loss or theft and its figuring of the corresponding excess of jouissance. Recall, the fantasy of free trade tells us everybody wins. If someone loses, this simply indicates that trade was not free. Someone cheated. He didn't play by the rules. She had secret information, the benefits of insider knowledge or the advantag:s of an unfair monopoly. Within the frame of the fantasy, the solution to this failure to enjoy is oversight, preferably by those familiar with the industry or practice in question. The government can make sure that others are not out there stealing our enjoyment, the fruits of our labor, through their dishonest and unfair dealings.
There are risks, however, for which the fantasy allows. The government might get overinvolved. It might overstep its boundaries and impede "free trade:' Although it might seem to be in tension with the fantasy of keeping trade free, the notion of oversight sustains enjoyment as stolen in a way that reinforces the hold of the fantasy. "Oversight" strengthens rather than undermines free trade as it shifts the location of thievery from the insider or cheat to the government itself-the government might tax me too muchj it might pay for the medical expenses of all sorts of illegal immigrants while I could lose my health insurance at any pointj it might use my tax dollars to support tenured radicals (who look down their laz)IJ secular noses at me and my hardworking, God-fearing way of life) while I can't even aford my kids tuition . . . . The fantasy of free trade thus plays host to a series of tensions and anxieties associated with our failure to enjoy.28 It displaces these anxieties away from the brutalities and uncertainties of the neoliberal market and onto the state as art institution for collective approaches to social, economic, and systemic problems.
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Neoliberal ideology's fantasy of free trade also accounts for the lack of jouissance or enjoyment in terms of excess, that is, as the sacrifice or expenditure of "too much:' The one who fails to enjoy fails because he has overdone something; there is something excessive in his relation to the market. A company expanded too fast; it tried to do too much too quickly. Perhaps it failed because it overpaid its workers, overproduced, or overdiversified (and hence lost touch with its fundamentals). SimilarlYi those who find their stock portfolios, retirement accounts, and pension funds decimated by falling markets are likewise alleged to have expended too much. They were overconfident; they didn't play it safe enough; they had too much faith in the market. They didn't temper their faith in the market with good old common sense or with an appreciation of the mysteries and vagaries of markets (which, perhaps oddly, are the same thing) . Everybody knows that ordinary people can becom.e overexuberant and that this can lead to speculative bubbles. The wise investor should believe in the market, but not too much. In the terms of the fantasy of free trade, these losers were irrational in their expectations. Perhaps they were even greedy. At the very least, they failed to achieve the proper balance necessary for the promised, inevitable market success.
How the fantasy accounts for losers is actually less interesting than the remarkable twists it employs to explain winners' failure to enjoy. "Why don't they enjoy? One version of the neoliberal fantasy of free trade answers the question by diferentiating between market and spiritual ful-.fillment and showing how the former depends on the latter. 29 Not only is success in the world empty when it is purchased at the cost of spiritual fulillment but spirituality makes good business sense.
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