I just came across a neat blog called Decasia: critique of academic culture run by Eli Thorkelson, a graduate student in the anthropology department at the University of Chicago. I started to offer a response to his though-provoking post on neoliberalism in the academy when I realized that really I was running on so long that my thoughts should be a post of their own.
In essence, Eli is trying to work through how to ask questions about neoliberalism from an ethnographic perspective–in other words, how to think through the contingencies and particularities of an object that itself traverses many such contexts.
This, of course, is one of the great anthropological questions of the past 30 years, and has been played out in everything from Eric Wolf to Arjun Appadurai to Aihwa Ong and Anna Tsing; from everything from the anthropology of globalization and modernity to the anthropology of the state to the anthropology of humanitarianism.
Appropriately, I think, Eli and friends are trying to tackle this problem through the specific case of universities: how can we make sense of what seem to be linked issues–shared problems, if not exactly shared responses–in the very nature of academic practice today? I ran into a similar issue when developing my dissertation project on police reform in France: so much of what was going on with Nicolas Sarkozy’s reform of the Police nationale seemed to follow a set script, but it wasn’t long into my time there that i realized that the issues at stake in his “culture of results” were different than, say, what was going on in Berkeley, or London.
How to make sense of this?
For starters, Foucault’s suggestion– in “What is Critique?” and elsewhere— has suggested that “liberalism” is best understood as a form of governance which seeks its own principle of limitation and therefore its corresponding form of critique–liberal critique– is to ask the question: do we have too much government? In other words, continual and reflexive self-limitation on the power and scope of governance is the characteristic feature of liberalism across its various manifestations. Beyond that, however, the particular mechanism of this self-limitation is variable.
If the first part of Foucault’s formulation (liberalism as form of self-limitation by government of governance) can be buttressed by the work of everyone from Albert Hirchman to Max Weber, the second part (thinking through the various mechanisms of liberal governance) is most fruitfuly approached, i think, by a group of scholars who follow the work of Nikolas Rose.
For example, rose argues that the distinguishing characteristic of neoliberalism is not “lack of governance,” “accumulation of wealth,” “excess of greed,” or even “privatization” (all popular definitions of the term). rather the difference between “classical” liberalism and “neoliberalism” is that whereas the former sought a principle whereby the role of government could be limited through the cordoning off of separate “public” and “private” spheres, the latter attempts to use a set of techniques developed in the Market–located, for classic liberalism within the “private” sphere–to better regulate a variety of domains–including those classically relegated to the “public sphere”.
Now, several anthropologists–Aihwa Ong and Jim Ferguson being chief among them, I think– have taken up Rose’s work here in order to focus on the myriad ways neoliberal techniques have been taken up for purposes not predicted by grander theories of economic transformation. Their point here is, I think, that neoliberalism is a technical toolkit that can be used in the service of a whole array of political projects.
Now, having said that, in my own dissertation I argued that, while the police reform that I was ethnographizing was indeed a form of liberalism which made use of some of the management techniques usually associated with neoliberalism in the Rose/Ong/Ferguson post-Foucaultian understanding of the term, I’m not sure that it was the sole mechanism of self-limitation.
On the one hand, I think I’m “not sure” mostly because neither were the people I was studying. in a very tangible sense, they were trying to figure out how to delimit the legitimate violence they were entrusted with. On the other hand, this very fact seems to suggest that there was at least some kind of experimentation with another, yet emergent, form of liberalism.
Dr. Ong and I have been going back and forth a bit about this ever since: what, for example, I ask her, would a new form of liberalism look like, if it were neither “classical” nor “neo” liberalism? Can we see any evidence of such a thing in the world around us? For example, in the post-economic collapse U.S. where there at least circulates the idea that market techniques are not in themselves sufficient “regulation”?
This is the terrain I think Eli & co. are on as they try to think through everything from the University of California’s current economic crisis to Mexican student protests of the 1990’s to ethnic violence at Cameroonian universities. It is exciting territory, and I’ll be interested to see what they find…
Further reading
Appadurai, A. (2000). Grassroots Globalization and the Research Imagination Public Culture, 12 (1), 1-19 DOI: 10.1215/08992363-12-1-1
Fassin, D. (2007). Humanitarianism as a Politics of Life Public Culture, 19 (3), 499-520 DOI: 10.1215/08992363-2007-007
Ferguson, J., & Gupta, A. (2002). Spatializing States: Toward an Ethnography of Neoliberal Governmentality American Ethnologist, 29 (4), 981-1002 DOI: 10.1525/ae.2002.29.4.981
Foucault, M., Faubion, J. D., Rabinow, P., & Hurley, R. (2000). “Omnes et Singulatim”: toward a critique of political reason (Vol. 3, pp. 298-325). New York: New Press.
Foucault, M., Schmidt, J., & Geiman, K. P. (1996). What Is Critique? (pp. 382-398). Berkeley: University of California Press.
Kearney, M. (1995). The Local and the Global: The Anthropology of Globalization and Transnationalism Annual Review of Anthropology, 24 (1), 547-565 DOI: 10.1146/annurev.an.24.100195.002555
Ong, A. (2000). Graduated Sovereignty in South-East Asia Theory, Culture & Society, 17 (4), 55-75 DOI: 10.1177/02632760022051310
Ong, A. (2006). Neoliberalism as exception : mutations in citizenship and sovereignty. Durham [N.C.]: Duke University Press.
Rose, N. (1999) Powers of freedom: reframing political thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University press.
Tsing, A. (2000). The Global Situation Cultural Anthropology, 15 (3), 327-360 DOI: 10.1525/can.2000.15.3.327
WOLF, E. (1999). Anthropology among the powers Social Anthropology, 7 (2), 121-134 DOI: 10.1017/S0964028299000117
Kevin Karpiak's Blog 
hi Kevin,
This is great and really interesting. I haven’t read any of this stuff aside from a bit of foucault, so I will have to save all these citations for later. Your blog is awesome, by the way. The list of recently read stuff, with all the doi links, is a great scholarly tactic. Do you have some software to automate that?
Anyway, more substantively, your post really made me curious about this question: is neoliberalism primarily a mode of *governance*? Here you’re situating neoliberalism in the genealogy of technologies of power (if that’s the word for them), protocols of political control, of state action. Which is intriguing because, although of course a lot of university neoliberalism IS dictated by the state, one has to add that university neoliberalism is also something that works outside the state, something that universities do to themselves, that academics voluntarily participate in (as small capitalist entrepreneurs, sometimes). One way of putting this might be: how do you see the difference between governance and management? Is the latter reducible to the former, as if local neoliberal organizational practice is basically to be read as a symptom of larger sorts of dominant political orders? If universities decide to brand themselves or to save money by casualizing their teaching staff, that seems like something more related to economic imperative and local managerial ideologies than to political technologies per se… but maybe I draw too sharp a distinction between what’s imposed from above (eg, by the state) and what’s ‘voluntarily’ performed from below.
One other query — maybe this is obvious but again I am ignorant of this literature — how do you think about the relationship between liberalism and nationalism? Curiously, I don’t think there is much of a literature on what a “liberal” university looks like — the “neoliberal” university is routinely contrasted with something like the “popular” university (in the Mexican case) or the “national” university but at any rate never with the “liberal” university. Though surely there must have been a philosophy of education associated with classical liberalism? I’ll look around a bit.
take care, eli