http://damiencahill.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/Neoliberal-revolution.jpg
At the LA Review of Books, Peter Gratton reviews two recent major works on neoliberalism’s consequences for democracy: Maurizio Lazzarato’s Governing by Debt and Wendy Brown’s Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution. Check out an excerpt below, or read the whole review here:
Lazzarato, for his part, joins other recent thinkers, such as Giorgio Agamben, in offering that we should completely “unwork” (he borrows from the French term désoeuvrement, which means to render inoperative) the current political and economic arrangements since “reform has become impossible.” He writes:
Completely privatized, pacified, and colonized, [the] public space intermittently returns to life only when struggles open up islands of non-communication, of non-response, of non-speech […] the only conditions for new possibilities of expression, new words, and democratic practices […] and in this way recover equality, the basis of political organization.
For Lazzarato, there hasn’t been a diminishment of sovereignty in the contemporary period, a point at the center of Brown’s Walled States, Waning Sovereignty (2014), but rather a buttressing of governmentality in service of the markets. The only means for taking on such power, he argues, is to opt out of negotiating or even, literally, working with it. His ode to a certain form of “laziness” in the last chapter of the book is easy to ridicule: “workers of the world unite, you have nothing to gain but your hammocks.” But given that neoliberalism converts all manner of our interactions into “shadow work” and that any leisure has to be convertible into some form of efficiency (the famous “me time” or “quality time” that is meant to make myself or my children better laborers later on), a valorization of kinds of thinking disallowed by neoliberalism must be a starting point. Why must we always be laboring? Why must even time at a university be thought only in terms of profitability for loan purveyors and for your future self?
Image via damiencahill.net