Alter-neoliberal analysis: Abduction,critique,radical imagination

Abstract

Radical critique and praxis today face an unprecedented challenge because neoliberal rationalities partly succeeded in encroaching upon emancipatory ambitions. On the one hand, as critical sociology informs us, this is because many of the utilitarian tenets of neoliberal rationalities have become naturalized in everyday conduct. On the other hand, as pragmatic sociology shows, because neoliberalism has succeeded in incorporating critical activity into its mode of functioning, challenging neoliberalism comes at the cost of its partial reproduction. Against this backdrop, the goal of this article is to reconsider both the role of critique in neoliberalism and the mode of inquiry of critique, in order to map out an ‘alter-neoliberal analysis’: a normative mode of critical inquiry that seeks to discover what would need to be the case for a future beyond neoliberalism to be conceivable. Building on the inferential logic of abduction, alter-neoliberal analysis (1) defamiliarizes the opaque ways in which neoliberal rationalities encroach upon practices, so as to (2) critique them in ways that curtail their reproduction and (3) radically imagine politico-epistemological positions that are unintelligible to neoliberal rationalities.

Between 2014 and 2018, I examined political subject formation in the Greek anti-austerity movement, by tracing how participants narrate their changed selves before, during, and after their movement experience; and what remains of this experience years onward (Soudias, 2023). One of my interlocutors, Artemis, described herself as ‘apolitical’ before joining the movement. Today, she is active in many solidarity initiatives in Athens ranging from ecofeminist political groups to collectives that provide psychosocial care, all of which signify a reaction against, and a radical alternative to, years of austerity neoliberalism. When I asked Artemis how she organizes her actions in these initiatives, she provided a puzzling response.

I took a very practical stance towards what I want to do…to organize my time, my space…how to put my thoughts in order…A ‘business plan’ I find…very important and I think it is important for whatever. It may sound a bit horrible – ‘business plan’…But in order to organize your work, it helps a lot so it is clearer to you what you want to do, how you want to do it…When you start a project or if you have a project that isn’t going very well, you can do a SWOT analysis…and think about: What are our Strengths? These we need to promote. What are the Weaknesses, so what do we need to improve?…With what ways can we solve these weaknesses? Opportunities asks: what are the people that could join the group or what are the people that are interested in what the group is doing, so they can all promote the thing that we are doing? And Threats is what are the threats: the state? The government? The European Union? Capital (laughing)? Whatever threat there is and how we can protect ourselves from that threat. So all these tools are totally ‘marketist’. But if you look at their substance, some of them you can use for doing what you want to do without losing, now listen: your character. Because you remember what we said the other day: don’t become the same shit as them. But as a tool, they aren’t evil.

SWOT analyses are modes of evaluating the performance of organizations under competitive conditions, with the goal to optimize that performance (Leigh, 2010). Though Artemis understands and is critical of market-based knowledges, her critique does not categorically reject their use. This is because she assumes, implicitly, that they are essentially neutral tools that can be put to use for emancipatory ends.

While recently there are claims emerging that neoliberalism is ‘dead’ (e.g. Gerstle, 2022), or that we are moving to a ‘post-neoliberal’ period that weakens neoliberal key tenets vis-à-vis policymakers’ overriding concern for the market (Davies & Gane, 2021), Artemis’ example attests that the incursion of market-based thinking into everyday conduct and emancipatory practice continues to reproduce neoliberalism in opaque ways. Neoliberalism is therefore best understood as a historically contingent politico-epistemological programme that succeeded in shaping what we can know and how we can know, by extending the reach of market-based methods of evaluation beyond the market; rather than unfettered capitalism that is solely about creating new markets (e.g. Davies, 2014; Laruffa, 2023).

Normative critiques have pointed to the difficulty of challenging neoliberalism, precisely because neoliberal understandings of, for example, tools, projects or improvement have become ‘simply obvious’ (Fisher, 2009, p. 16) and ‘generic commonsense wisdom of the early twenty-first century’ (Mirowski, 2020, p. 220), thus permeating our political and moral imaginations of what is conceivably possible and how to attain this possibility. The task of normative critiques, such as those put forward by French critical sociology or the Frankfurt School of critical theory, is to unveil neoliberalism’s dominating and exploitative qualities, by way of moral and political judgements. Indeed, critical theorists, such as Horkheimer and Adorno (2002), have explored the hegemony of instrumental rationality in capitalism and contest the artificial separation of ethics and instrumental reason as a practice of domination and exploitation. If radical theorists like Honneth (2007) or Bourdieu (2013) are correct to assume that emancipatory politics must unmask the appearance of the seeming necessity and inevitability of the status quo and re-signify it as contingent so as to make the radically emancipatory attainable, then the critical analysis of neoliberalism requires demystifying and challenging the seeming naturalness and neutrality of its rationalities, so as to be able to imagine radical alternatives. Despite the argumentative power of normative critiques, their prescriptive nature has been criticized for its latent paternalism and its underestimation of actors’ critical abilities (Susen, 2014a). Importantly, what remains underappreciated is the subtle ways in which neoliberalism co-opts critical activity for the purpose of its own reproduction.

Pragmatic critiques, ¹ on the other hand, uncovered precisely this co-optation of critique in the ‘new spirit of capitalism’ (Boltanski & Chiapello, 2017), by attending to how actors perform critical judgements and justify their practices and those of others. Such critiques acknowledge that, as opposed to previous formations of capitalism, neoliberalism has managed to incorporate historically emancipatory concepts, such as creativity and autonomy, into its mode of functioning. This includes the very process of critique itself, as neoliberalism cultivates efficiency-maximizing metrics and norms of evaluation, such as SWOT analyses and business plans, that allow for judging and changing relations; but only so as to correct and reproduce, rather than challenge and overcome, neoliberalism. These immanent forms of critique, which Artemis effectively perpetuates, infuse neoliberal rationalities with unprecedented ideological legitimacy (Susen, 2014b) and dilemmas of how to resist them. While pragmatic critiques have succeeded in rendering theoretical questions of critique empirical by providing thick descriptions of actors’ critical activities, their non-normative ambition has seldomly attempted to transgress neoliberalism for an emancipatory future (Hansen, 2016). Critics claim pragmatic critiques’ refusal to constitute any foundational criteria makes (political) judgement virtually impossible. Michael Thompson (2020, pp. 43, 44), for example, argues that whereas the pragmatist intention is to ‘emancipate us from a dead metaphysics’, it essentially becomes little more than an ‘epistemic hall of mirrors’ with no available standpoint for normative critique. While such concerns are largely justified because the inherent (moral) relativism of pragmatic critiques makes them vulnerable to neoliberal co-optation, their outright rejection risks invisibilizing their epistemic merit in, ironically, laying bare precisely how neoliberalism has succeeded in incorporating (normative) critical activity into its mode of functioning.

How can we challenge neoliberal rationalities in a way that analytically distinguishes between emancipatory processes of transformation and immanent critiques that reproduce and foster neoliberalism; and politically furthers the former, while curtailing the latter? To address this question, the first goal of this article is to explore the possibility of cross-fertilizing normative and pragmatic modes of critiquing neoliberalism, by outlining what we may call ‘alter-neoliberal analysis’: a recursive and iterative mode of normative inquiry that (1) defamiliarizes the doxic ways in which neoliberal rationalities encroach upon practices, so as to (2) critique them in ways that curtails their reproduction and (3) radically imagine politico-epistemological alternatives that are unintelligible to neoliberalism. To do so, the second goal is to reconsider the very mode of inquiry of critique itself. Specifically, I show how abductive reasoning (Reichertz, 2010) can be mobilized to structure alter-neoliberal analysis. Grounded in the anti-foundationalist presumptions of American pragmatism, abduction is concerned with cultivating surprising findings by questioning what is taken for granted and making new discoveries: ‘What would need to be the case for an observation to make sense’? I argue for politicizing abduction against and beyond neoliberalism, by asking ‘what would need to be the case for an alter-neoliberal future to be conceivable’?

This article is structured as follows: The first section politicizes the logic of abduction as an iterative and recursive mode of inference for defamiliarizing, critiquing and radically imagining alternatives to neoliberal rationalities. The second section elaborates on the movement of defamiliarization, which is about making visible neoliberal rationalities and their commonsensical assumptions. The third section explores the movement of critique, which is about contesting these assumptions. Acknowledging that critique in neoliberalism partly reproduces that against which it stands, I outline a set of normative principles that curtail this reproduction. The fourth section is about the movement of radical imagination: envisioning that which politico-epistemologically is unintelligible to neoliberalism.

Abduction

If deduction signifies a mode of analysis that is concerned with formulating law-like rules to express the relationship between cause and effect, and induction is the verification or falsification of these rules through empirical observation, then abduction transcends the dichotomy between induction and deduction for the purpose of discovering novel knowledge. Grounded in the non-essentialist pragmatist thought of C. S. Peirce, abduction signifies the construction of speculative hunches for unexpected findings, by assuming that social life and its meanings, practices and structures are perpetually changing. In Peirce’s words, abduction is ‘if we were to assume something to be true that we do not know to be true,…facts would arrange themselves luminously’ (as cited in Paavola, 2004, p. 263). To do so, abduction takes a sceptical stance towards what is taken for granted and tasks us to ‘not be satisfied with what you already incline to think’ (Peirce, 1931). Central questions in abduction are ‘what else could it be? What would need to be the case for a puzzling observation to make sense?’ Tavory and Timmermans (2014) have developed an analytical framework for treating abduction as a craft that can be cultivated by manipulating habits of thought and conduct via three processes: by familiarizing with observations and a literacy in theoretical knowledges; defamiliarizing with observations by turning them into problems that require a solution; and revisiting observations by comparing, abstracting and imaginatively positioning them in different situations. Importantly, as Jo Reichertz (2010, p. 163) remarks, ‘abductive efforts seek some (new) order, but they do not aim at the construction of any order, but at the discovery of an order that fits the surprising facts’. They are ‘a matter of producing answers to the question of “What to do next?”. New orders, therefore, are also always oriented towards future action’.

Applying these considerations to Artemis’s account, we are confronted with the puzzling observation that she acknowledges and criticizes the market-basis of the knowledge she builds on to try to change the status quo. Yet, she advocates for business plans and SWOT-analyses regardless. We can frame this observation, inductively, through pragmatic sociology that in neoliberalism ‘the price paid by critique for being listened to, at least in part, is to see some of the values it had mobilized to oppose the form taken by the accumulation process being placed at the service of accumulation’ (Boltanski & Chiapello, 2017, p. 29). In light of the futurability of abduction, and the pragmatist assumption that meaning-making occurs in imagining the potential consequences of practices, we can also ask what is at stake for the future of emancipation when we address the consequences of market-produced inequalities by building on market-based knowledge. Arguably, however, to imagine what would need to be the case to achieve Artemis’s normative ambition of challenging neoliberalism in light of the fact that she builds on neoliberal ways of knowing, requires us to politicize the purpose of abduction.

Politicizing abduction

For Timmermans and Tavory (2022, p. 156), the starting point of abduction is discovering the unanticipated, and explicitly not to support an ideological agenda. To argue for politicizing abduction is to acknowledge that even the unanticipated is value-laden. As Doppelt (2007, pp. 193–194) convincingly argues by building on the works of Longino (1990) and Kuhn (2012), the link between theory and evidence cannot be that of induction, abduction or deduction alone. Rather, ‘values and social interests fill the gap between theory and evidence that the pure logic of inference opens up’. Seismic changes in our ways of knowing require a ‘normative shift in the epistemic problems, data, standards and values taken to be required of theories’. Indeed, because the Greek word ‘theoró’ means to observe, to assume, but also to judge, ‘theories create worlds rather than corresponding to them’ (Barnes, 2002, p. 42). Politicizing abduction, then, is about both questioning neoliberal ways of knowing and evaluating and discovering conceivable politico-epistemological alternatives. This is pertinent considering that Peircean abduction was itself an epistemological challenge to the philosophy of sciences at the time, particularly the artificial separation in positivist thinking between the ‘context of discovery’ and ‘context of justification’ (Tavory & Timmermans, 2014, p. 36), which has been most prominently advocated by a founding member of the neoliberal Mont Pèlerin Society: Karl Popper. Politicizing abduction is to occupy the futurability of abduction for emancipatory ends. If pragmatist thinkers like Dewey (1938) and Peirce (1931) are right to assume that abduction arises when habits of action and ordinary experience are disrupted by unanticipated events, then abduction for alter-neoliberal analysis can be signified as the purposeful imaginative construction of crises ² that seek the requalification of ordinary experience with the ensuing perceived desire to change the conditions that led to that experience. Politicizing abduction is not necessarily about starting with a puzzling fact, but about a heterotopian aspiration that might seem as inconceivable. Put differently: if abduction is concerned with cultivating surprising findings and making new discoveries by asking ‘what would need to be the case for an observation to make sense?’, politicizing abduction against and beyond neoliberalism is based on the pragmatic finding that neoliberalism incorporates critique for the purpose of its own reproduction, to ask: ‘what would need to be the case to curtail this reproduction’? And, on this basis, ‘what would need to be the case for an alter-neoliberal future to be conceivable’? Regarding Artemis’s statement, abduction helps to carve out the unconsidered assumptions that led her to advocate for business plans and SWOT analyses as contributing to radical change, with the ensuing desire to change the conditions that led to these assumptions. Abduction in this formation is not so much about the construction of a closed order, or about making ‘predictions about the future on the basis of the past’ (Reichertz, 2010, p. 163). Rather, it is about taking pragmatic puzzles like that of Artemis as constitutive for the abductive discovery of normative principles that are antithetical and unintelligible to neoliberalism.

To work towards this end, alter-neoliberal analysis is based on three iterative and recursive movements: defamiliarization, critique and radical imagination. ³ By iterative, I mean that alter-neoliberal analysis is about moving back and forth between these movements, thereby allowing for the discovery, formulation and reformulation of normative principles of how to challenge and imagine a future beyond neoliberalism, in a way that curtails the reproduction of neoliberal rationalities. Analogous to Audrey Alejandro’s work (2021), what is recursive is that I used alter-neoliberal analysis to create alter-neoliberal analysis. Here, the normative critique against neoliberalism and the radical imagination of politico-epistemological positions beyond neoliberalism are not only the means to radically challenge neoliberalism in a way that curtails neoliberal reproduction but also an analytical-emancipatory result of ‘doing’ alter-neoliberal analysis.

Defamiliarization

How can we visibilize and defamiliarize the doxic ways in which neoliberal rationalities encroach upon practices?

Defamiliarization is the analytical movement of raising taken-for-granted assumptions to the level of discourse, where they can be critiqued. As Simon Susen (2014a, p. 324) remarks with reference to Bourdieu (2013), ‘the first step towards challenging mechanisms of domination through processes of emancipation is to shift from doxic illusion to critical insight, from intuitive belief to reflexive reasoning, from practical immersion to theoretical distance-taking, and from know-how to know-why’. Similarly, defamiliarization is analogous to Foucault’s (1988, p. 155) non-normative understanding of critique: ‘a matter of pointing out on what kinds of assumptions, what kinds of familiar, unchallenged, unconsidered modes of thought the practices that we accept rest’. Making the unconsidered ways in which neoliberalism encroaches upon practices visible firstly requires a familiarity with various theoretical knowledges. As Will Davies (2014, p. 12) cautions us, any critical inquiry into neoliberalism must be aware of ‘neoliberal ways of thinking, measuring, evaluating, criticizing, judging and knowing’. Similarly, Jana Bacevic (2019) remarks that ‘knowing neoliberalism’ requires an understanding of neoliberalism as both, an epistemic subject that helps us observe and sensitize certain phenomena and developments, and an epistemic object of analysis based on a set of normative positions. Familiarity with existing theories of neoliberalism, and (critical) theories about neoliberalism, helps us spot and decipher the multiple codes and contents of neoliberalism’s most ordinary forms.

The problem with neoliberalism is that many of its rationalities remain hidden from view precisely because they have become naturalized, and they have become naturalized because they are thought of as a fact, rather than a value (Fisher, 2009). Indeed, as Russian Formalist Viktor Shklovsky (2015, p. 163) notes, as we experience various subjects and objects again and again, we grow accustomed to them; ‘in terms of recognition: a thing is in front of us, we know this, but we do not see it’. To render the taken-for-grantedness of objects and subjects visible is to defamiliarize them. Shklovsky treats observations as if they were happening for the first time, for example, by not calling certain objects and subjects by their name, so as to create a sense of estrangement. Similarly, Paul Ricoeur’s (1970) hermeneutics of suspicion caution us to read texts with scepticism so as to expose their presumed hidden meanings. Defamiliarization builds on theories of and about neoliberalism, but only so as to render the ordinariness of neoliberal rationalities alien and discomforting. In abductive terms, defamiliarization forces us to re-imagine the relationship between that which we observe, and the habits of thought and action that guide how we observe (Tavory & Timmermans, 2014), so as to question not only what we assume to know about neoliberalism but also how we know neoliberalism. If, for example, our habits of understanding neoliberalism are guided by theories that reduce it solely to privatization and the expansion of unregulated markets, then we might not be able to spot how neoliberalism extends its epistemic logics beyond the market: for example, as sports analytics or positive thinking.

Practically, illuminating the opaque ways in which neoliberalism creeps into conduct is a twofold task. On the one hand, it requires defamiliarizing the assumption that neoliberal rationalities are ‘natural’, by visibilizing the factual orderings of neoliberal rationalities, that is, that they are constructed. Foucault (2008, p. 132) presciently remarked that neoliberalism should not ‘be identified with laissez-faire, but rather with permanent vigilance, activity, and intervention’. Importantly, historians have traced how neoliberals succeeded in constructing their own understandings of, for example, the market, efficiency or competition as the ‘natural order’ (Mirowski, 2014). Nicholas Gane (2020, p. 55) remarks that both Mises and Hayek ‘present inequality as something natural and desirable’. Indeed, Mises’ (2005, p. 115) understanding of human nature is based on essentialized biological differences between individuals and a conceptualization of nature as marked by perpetual threat in the guise of ‘extreme poverty and insecurity’. Similarly, Hayek’s (1992, p. 20) conceptualization of market economies is based on the idea of a ‘spontaneous order’ of rules that ‘forms of itself’ in an evolutionary manner ‘analogous to genetic mutations’. For neoliberals, Mirowski (2009, pp. 435–436) concludes,

market society must be treated as a ‘natural’ and inexorable state of mankind. Neoliberal thought therefore spawns a strange hybrid of the ‘constructed’ and the ‘natural’, where the market can be made manifest in many guises. What this meant in practice was that there grew to be a mandate that natural science metaphors must be integrated into the neoliberal narrative.

Defamiliarization makes visible the constructedness of neoliberalism and renders its claim to naturalness estranging. Applied to Artemis’s statement, we need to denaturalize her idea that market-based tools have a ‘substance’ and make visible the consequences of pursuing non-market ends through market-based means.

On the other hand, defamiliarization requires questioning the assumption that neoliberal rationalities are ‘neutral’, by visibilizing the normative orderings of these rationalities, that is, that they are value-laden. Grounded in positivism, the epistemic programme of neoliberalism espouses a mathematical and physical conventionalism, one that balances utilitarian philosophy and a sceptical epistemology with the proclaimed commitment to scientific progress and objectivity (Beddeleem, 2020). In effect, this commitment created the impression of an epistemologically neutral agenda, aimed at providing non-ideological answers to policy problems (Chernomas & Hudson, 2017). On this basis, neoliberalism disenchants politics by economics, by replacing (biased) qualitative judgment with (allegedly unbiased) quantitative measurement and critique with technique (Davies, 2014). Because quantification and measurement have their own affective appeal, calculative forms of reasoning are associated with the highest epistemic claims to truth and neutrality in the popular imagination. Mirowski and Nik-Kah (2017) posit how neoliberals signify the market as a technical ‘information processor’ patterned on complex rational calculation processes, so as to justify its neutrality (and preclude critiques from the outset). In colonizing calculation and rationality for the purpose of efficiency-maximization, neoliberalism succeeded in presenting its own metrics, such as competitiveness rankings or impact measurements, as neutral representations of the social world. Defamiliarizing the neoliberal claim to neutrality is to shed light on the fact that efficiency-maximizing metrics and indicators (e.g. SWOT indicators, calorie counters) construct, rather than represent, the world they claim to observe, by way of producing incentives that are inherently normative: in a constant state of utilitarian optimization. Regarding the statement by Artemis, what is required is defamiliarizing the agnostic presumption that business plans and SWOT analyses are neutral ‘tools’ chosen from an equally neutral toolkit of standard organizational methods. It is about making visible that strengths, weaknesses, threats and opportunities are compartmentalized to quasi-metric indicators and evaluated in a utilitarian manner, with the normative goal to improve performance in quasi-competitive settings. It is, in a word, about exposing the strangeness that something called Strength–Weakness–Opportunity–Threat analysis is used to organize care work and emancipation.

Critique

How can we challenge neoliberal rationalities in a way that curtails their reproduction?

The movement of critique attempts to reconcile a central tension in the literatures of normative critiques (esp. critical sociology) and pragmatic critiques (esp. pragmatic sociology of critique). While critical sociology has a normative ambition, it does not scrutinize the stabilizing qualities of critique in neoliberalism as pragmatic sociologists do. And while pragmatic sociology illuminates how critique furthers neoliberalism, it does not have a normative ambition (Hansen, 2016). The goal of this section is to recursively envision a set of normative principles against neoliberalism (critique), which are based on an epistemological position beyond neoliberalism (radical imagination), so as to curtail how alter-neoliberal critique reproduces neoliberalism from the outset. On the one hand, this normative ambition is grounded in the claim that neoliberalism plays on moral character, but only so as to achieve a utilitarian competitive order and altogether ‘eliminate the very category of value in the ethical sense’ (Fisher, 2009, p. 17). On the other hand, it is based on the pragmatic observation that actors’ critical capacities are inherently moral (Boltanski, 2011). In Artemis’s words, market-based methods ‘aren’t evil’ per se, as long as we ‘don’t become the same shit’ as neoliberals. Hence, solely defamiliarizing unconsidered assumptions about neoliberalism signifies being critical as ‘an intellectual property of thought, not a political one’ (Hage, 2015, p. 51). The movement of critique in alter-neoliberal analysis is explicitly political in that it signifies a reaction against, and rejection of, neoliberal rationalities. The normative basis of that critique ought to be based on politico-epistemological positions that radically curtail the reproduction of the factual claims and normative orderings of neoliberalism: because critique ‘exists in relation to something other than itself’ and signifies ‘a means for a future or a truth that it will not know…’ (Foucault, 1997, p. 25), the abductive task is to imagine which politico-epistemological positions that might be. Hence, this movement begins with the epistemic limit: with the acknowledgement that it occurs from within the realities of neoliberalism.

The role of critique in neoliberalism

The question of whether emancipatory transformation can occur from a position of being of this world and against it has been raised in many different ways in anarchist thought, critical theory, Marxism and revolutionary feminism, amongst others. What pragmatic critiques show to be particular about neoliberalism, as opposed to previous capitalist formations, is that neoliberalism achieved to appropriate ‘the subversive forces that sought to undermine the legitimacy of capitalism for its own purposes’ (Susen, 2014c, p. 15). On the one hand, the epistemological programme of neoliberalism consists of its own, immanent methodologies, evaluative practices and ways of knowing. The widespread presence of quantitative evaluation in neoliberalism, such as national competitiveness benchmarking or university rankings, makes it possible to question the status quo, but only so as to regulate and correct, rather than to challenge and radically transform. The continuous performance of such immanent forms of critique is ‘to make visible the fact that there is a norm’ (Boltanski, 2011, p. 104), in order to confirm and stabilize neoliberal rationalities. As Susen (2014b, p. 189) remarks,

the more a social system succeeds in giving a voice to critique without running the risk of being undermined, the more critique becomes an affirmative force contributing to, rather than a negative counterforce moving away from, the reproduction of social domination.

On the other hand, neoliberal rationalities parasitically encroach upon competing worldviews and succeeded in co-opting, partly, the historically radical qualitative critiques of, for example, creativity, imagination or cooperation for their own reproduction. Amongst others, this ability facilitated the transmutation of the conservative institution of the family (Cooper, 2017), the emancipatory politics of feminism (Gill, 2008) and the very pursuit of happiness (Davies, 2015). In this sense, neoliberalism succeeded in limiting the imagination of what is possible and worth striving for. An academic critique of neoliberalism that, for example, quantifies neoliberalism to measure its impact (cf. DePhilipps, 2015); or an attempt to develop progressive modes of needs provision by building on (social) innovation or design thinking (cf. Britton, 2017), comes at the cost of stabilizing neoliberal rationalities.

Critique as anti-politics

In this light, the pragmatic task is to abductively discover those politico-epistemological positions that are at the core of neoliberal reproduction. The normative task is to contest them on the grounds of neoliberal reproduction (critique), from a politico-epistemological position beyond this reproduction (radical imagination). This formulation reveals the recursive relation between the movements of defamiliarization, critique and radical imagination in alter-neoliberal analysis, where these normative principles are not only a means to radically critique neoliberalism in a way that curtails its reproduction but also the result of ‘doing’ the movements of alter-neoliberal analysis. As I will show, the movement of critique needs to challenge positivism, utilitarianism, quantification, psychologization, innovation and productivity. This selection is preliminary and subject to further abductive discovery. What links these principles is, firstly, their doxic epistemic authority as natural and neutral (rather than constructed and value-laden); secondly, their ethos of instrumental reason and efficiency-maximization; and thirdly their affective appeal as being not only necessary modes of being and knowing in neoliberalism, but also desirable ones.

Against positivism: Neoliberalism rests on positivist ontology, and although it is constructed and normative, it presents its underlying logics as natural and neutral and reproduces these assumptions through the proliferation of its intrinsic methods of evaluation. Neoliberalism feeds off of positivism, in that ‘nothing is allowed to remain outside, since the mere idea of the ‘outside’ is the real source of fear’ (Horkheimer & Adorno, 2002, p. 11). A positivist critique of neoliberalism cannot denaturalize neoliberalism’s objectivist claims, and even an intuitive turn to orthodox Marxism as a source of critique first needs a stripping off of its ‘positivistic and naturalistic overtones’ (Thompson, 1982, p. 659). By mobilizing abduction to defamiliarize neoliberal reason, alter-neoliberal analysis is an exercise of critiquing positivism from an epistemological position beyond positivism and, as I show in the next section, the discovery of epistemologies that are unintelligible to neoliberalism. This is because the very practice of ‘discovering’ already assumes anti-essentialist positions that departs from the aggressive demand for objectivity in both positivism and neoliberalism.

Against utilitarianism: If positivism forms the ontological basis of neoliberalism, utilitarianism is its epistemological one. Neoliberalism is based on the utilitarian view that human conduct is guided by optimization. Jeremy Bentham’s (1876) ‘Greatest Happiness Principle’, for example, assumes that human desire can be depoliticized and reduced to the minimization of pain and the maximization of pleasure. The ‘terminal dystopia’ of this view, Davies (2015, p. 261) observes, ‘is of a social world that has been rendered totally objective, to the point where the distinction between the objective and the subjective is overcome’. If neoliberalism perpetuates efficiency-maximizing processes such as assetization (Birch & Muniesa, 2020) or self-optimizing selfhood (Bröckling, 2019), then a radical critique of neoliberalism cannot be grounded in utilitarian precepts. Alter-neoliberal critique highlights how deeply utilitarian logics are ingrained in our habits of conduct in the mundane, positivist shape of costs and benefits, pros and cons, opportunities and threats, or pain and pleasure. Critiquing utilitarianism serves the purpose of repoliticizing that which neoliberalism depoliticizes in the name of efficiency-maximizing rationality. This forms the basis for imagining a rationality that is unintelligible to neoliberal reason.

Against quantification: If utilitarianism replaces intrinsic value with extrinsic valuation, any critique of neoliberalism needs to challenge the application of quantification to every sphere of life for the continuing existence of neoliberalism. By reconciling the relationship between price and value, neoliberalism constructs commensurable metrics. These are always political, yet neoliberalism conveniently denies that they are, by presenting metrics as neutral and natural truths. As (anti-)intellectual dominance, quantification is not the quest of truths, but the pursuit of power. As Foucault (2009) has shown, the disciplinary technology of statistics made it possible for governments to create a reality, which they could then control. Arguably, as long as neoliberalism is a hegemonic reality, any critique that builds on quantitative logics is destined to be immanent. This is because quantification in neoliberalism, as a logic of measure, assumes equivalence and comparable value across objects and subjects, but only so as to perform evaluations of inequality (e.g. rankings, impact measurements). While quantification reduces the ambiguity and uncertainty of complex relations to the (quasi-)numerical, the price paid for this simplification is that everything non-utilitarian, metaphysical, deontological or ethical is simultaneously rendered invisible. Alter-neoliberal analysis cannot be based on quantification. It critiques efficiency-maximizing measurement, so as to radically imagine what neoliberalism cannot measure and quantify.

Against psychologization: Utilitarianism and quantification provide neoliberalism with the epistemic authority to grasp the individual as a measurable bundle of efficiency-maximizing behaviours, preferences and mental attitudes (Davies, 2015). On the one hand, this psychologization allows the self to assume it can compartmentalize, master and improve itself in a classically Cartesian way: where the rational mind manages an inefficient and unruly body (Moore & Robinson, 2015). On the other hand, the tendency to psychologize the self reduces structural critique to self-critique and nurtures individualized subjects. Positive psychology, for example, assumes change and happiness to come from within us, rather than from social relations between us, and pathologizes structural critique as pessimist whining (Ehrenreich, 2010). The social or cultural is reified to a medicalized resource that is ‘prescribed’ to optimize individual well-being and self-efficacy (cf. Morton et al., 2015). Alter-neoliberal critique acknowledges the relative cogency and affective appeal of the ‘therapeutic spirit’ (Foster, 2016) of neoliberalism to develop and change the self and treats it as a compelling object of analysis and an illuminating heuristic device. But it cannot concede to the idea that resilience, positive thinking, mindfulness or nudging – to name a few techniques which neoliberals claim maximize well-being – can be mobilized to overcome neoliberalism.

Against innovation: These techniques link to the notion of neoliberal selfhood as a state of constant self-innovation. Though historically innovation has ‘carried an emphasis on originality and imagination in knowledge creation’ (Eagleton-Peirce, 2016, p. 106), neoclassical economics succeeded in re-signifying it as the commodification of ideas into products or services, so as to maximize efficiency and outpace competitors (cf. Metcalfe & Ramlogan, 2008). Here, knowledge is treated as a market opportunity for the purpose of innovation. Neoliberalism translates the logics of innovation to spheres beyond the market. Social innovation, for example, fuses the entrepreneurial ethos of creating new services and products with the social goal to alleviate social inequalities. At the same time, the discourse of innovation has come to denote the ‘quality’ of organizations (Ord, 2022) and a universalized solution to large-scale problems ranging from poverty reduction to public sector reform. The politico-epistemological fusion of quantitative practices of evaluation, and qualitative narratives of social purpose or cultural value, has led to the generation of hybrid-economic practices, such as social investment or cultural management. This fusion allows neoliberalism to encroach upon and economize previously untapped fields in the name of creativity (re-conceived as cultural and creative industries) or solidarity (re-conceived as social entrepreneurship). Alter-neoliberal critique challenges entrepreneurial innovation and its adjacent panacea of ‘creativity’. This is because entrepreneurial innovation and creativity, and their offshoot methodologies such as ‘design thinking’, assume and mimic (quasi-)competitive situations from the outset. And rather than inventing something novel, they ‘produce more of the same’ (Mould, 2018, p. 40). Being against innovation and this kind of creativity is to undermine the pedagogical character of neoliberalism’s most prominent methods of accumulation and dominating by change.

Against productivity: If neoliberalism is a creation and accumulation-based capitalist formation, then alter-neoliberal critique needs to valorize practices that refuse productive activity. Harney and Moten’s (2013) work on the Undercommons constitutes a realm that is not that of rebellion, but of refusing to reproduce oneself as a productive worker, so as to throw capital into crisis. Relatedly, Peter Fleming’s (2013, p. 629) work advocates for ‘silence’, claiming it does not mean being bereft of words. Rather, silence signifies the refusal to participate in neoliberalism’s ‘language game’ of productive activity. Silence and refusal give voice to that which neoliberalism renders invisible and does not measure. They refuse to acknowledge. To refuse productivity is to free ourselves from the idea of ‘making it’ in the cultural imaginaries of the likes of the European or American Dream: refusing not only its norms, but the logics of motion and activity upon which these norms rest. This requires refusing that which was first refused to us ‘and in this refusal reshape desire, reorient hope, reimagine possibility and do so separate from the fantasies nestled into rights and respectability’ (Halberstam, 2013, p. 12).

By rejecting these principles, while abductively discovering novel ones, the movement of critique is both: the basis for, and recursive result of, imagining an emancipatory future from within neoliberalism that curtails the reproduction of neoliberalism’s most eminent positions.

Radical imagination

How can we radically imagine a future that is incomprehensible to neoliberal modes of thinking, knowing and evaluating?

As the imagination stems from experience, and our experiences of the world are intersectionally different (vis-à-vis sexuality, race, gender, class, ability, etc.), the emergence of the radical imagination is rooted in whether and how normative critiques and conflicts over these differences play out (Haiven & Khasnabish, 2014). Neoliberalism has succeeded in enclosing our imagination of what is possible, in that it rarely allows for going beyond what has been experienced. Envisioning how we can be more competitive tomorrow to navigate the precarities emanating from our intersectional differences, in the ‘cruel optimism’ (Berlant, 2011) that if we subject ourselves to this logic, we will one day be able to free ourselves from it, signifies an unradical imagination precisely because it rests on the structuring logics of neoliberal reproduction. The radical imagination does not deny experience, but it requires that we refuse, at least in part, the necessity of experience, with the ensuing desire to change the conditions that led to that experience. The radical imagination has a recursive relation with critique because it is, in the words of Cornelius Castoriadis (2005, p. 252), not ‘imagining what is not’, but radically imagining ‘one thing by means of another thing, being able to ‘see’ in what is what is not there…’ Because it suggests as possible that which feels as somewhat inconceivable, what is radical about the radical imagination is that it profoundly differs from the politico-epistemological experience of the status quo. The radical imagination begins with acknowledgment – that it is only possible with and within what one is against – so as to exercise abductive discovery, a willingness to rattle the ontological foundations of the social worlds we inhabit. If Boltanski (2011) is correct to assume that every mode of confirmation constructs its own mode of justification, then, for the radical imagination to transform the status quo, the mode of confirmation must never succeed in determining the mode of justification. The abductive task is to imagine what would need to be the case for a future beyond neoliberalism to be conceivable. In what follows, I outline a set of initial dimensions that are subject to further abductive discovery. What links them is that they are both unintelligible to neoliberal rationalities and arduous for neoliberalism to enclose.

The non-denumerable: If neoliberalism is based on positivism, utilitarianism and quantification, then the radical imagination needs to move beyond the correlative and causalistic. Alter-neoliberal analysis rejects the application of measurement and quantification to every sphere of life because life’s ‘spectrum of the possible is much larger than the range of probability’ (Berardi, 2015, p. 224). Building on the work of Deleuze and Guattari (2005, p. 470), the radical imagination highlights the importance of the ‘non-denumerable’, that is, that which cannot be quantified: liminal relations, connections, flows. In their own words, ‘the non-denumerable is neither the set nor its elements; rather, it is the connection, the “and” produced between elements, between sets, and which belongs to neither, which eludes them and constitutes a line of flight’.

Epistemologies of the South: If neoliberalism is a Eurocentric politico-epistemological programme that succeeded in colonizing social relations through quantitative economic logics, then radically imagining alternatives needs to build on anti-colonial knowledge traditions. For de Sousa Santos (2016, p. 15), building on epistemologies of the South makes possible ‘other kinds of knowledge and other partners in conversation for other kinds of conversation’ and opens up ‘infinite discursive and non-discursive exchanges with unfathomable codifications and horizontalities’. Here, his focus on absences seeks to ‘transform impossible into possible objects’ by carving out the knowledges and experiences ‘that have not been fully colonized’ (p. 238). These may include pre-colonial conceptualizations of Umuganda in Rwanda (Uwimbabazi, 2012), Zapatista practices in Mexico (Esteva, 1999) or queer indigenous knowledges in Australia (Clark, 2015) to configure alter-neoliberalism through non-Eurocentric modes of knowing and being.

Prefiguration: For neoliberals, any conception of knowing and being can be reduced to a single means-ends rationality. Mises (2003, p. 92) notes that ‘everything that we regard as human action’ is about choosing ‘between given possibilities in order to attain the most ardently desired goal’. His student Israel Kirzner (1973, p. 36) picks up on this ahistorical conceptualization to introduce the notion of change through elements of entrepreneurial alertness to opportunity: ‘the changing patterns of ends-means held relevant to successive decisions are the possibly understandable outcome of a process of experience’. Here, there is no space for a mode of action that goes beyond means-ends systems, and experience is used solely to optimize that which is already known. Prefiguration, on the other hand, is a radically alternative mode of conduct where ‘means and ends become, effectively, indistinguishable…in which the form of the action…is itself a model for the change one wishes to bring about’ (Graeber, 2009, p. 210). Put differently, prefiguration means that practices today already embody the values and norms of the type of society one seeks to build for tomorrow. If we are right to assume that neoliberal rationalities are based on means-ends systems, and if it is true that neoliberal thought conceives of a priori moral and ethical principles as metaphysical nonsense (Davies, 2014), then prefiguration is a type of practice that is unintelligible to neoliberalism.

Alter-rationality: If neoliberalism claims human action can be reduced to economic means-ends rationality, ‘which power and force are unable to alter and to which they must adjust themselves if they hope to achieve success, in precisely the same way as they must take into account the laws of nature’ (Mises, 2003, pp. 3–4), then the radical imagination needs to embrace a rationality which neoliberalism would deem to be ‘irrational’: to not behave in a utility-maximizing fashion. We need to not treat relations ‘as if’ they were cost–benefit analyses; or strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. Instead, alter-neoliberal rationality ought to be guided by values other than the ethos of maximization. An egalitarian and anti-authoritarian ethic, based on love, solidarity, trust, equality, direct democratic practice and feminized forms of collective care, amongst others, is antithetical to the transactional, competitive, self-interested, socially distrustful, privatized and individualized ethos of neoliberal practice. As the values of an egalitarian and anti-authoritarian ethic are not based on calculation and utility-maximization, neoliberal rationalities will find it difficult to enclose them without transmuting them into something else entirely. Indeed, highlighting these values serves to re-visibilize that which neoliberalism does not count, such as reproductive and emotional forms of labour. Self-governance, self-organization and autonomy (from the state), which are equally important for an anti-authoritarian ethic, ought to be carefully based on such alternative values, because neoliberalism, too, caters to ideas of self-governance and self-organization (via spontaneous orders) and autonomy (via libertarian self-responsibility).

Alter-subjectivity: If homo economicus is the archetypical form of neoliberal subjectivity, the radical imagination needs to envision a form of being that goes beyond the self-interested, biologized, psychologized and neuronal understandings of neoliberal personhood (Pitts-Taylor, 2010), in which ‘to know ourselves’ means to ‘format’, ‘track’ or ‘quantify’ ourselves (Koopman, 2019) into self-discipline. In effect, this tasks us to de-psychologize and de-economize selfhood in neoliberalism, in an effort to re-socialize and re-politicize it. Unhappiness and dissatisfaction need to lead to critique and radical contestation against structures of power, rather than to behavioural treatment via therapy or self-help. Stress needs to be seen as a political issue rather than a medical one. Change needs not to come from within us, but from relations between us. Alter-subjectivity addresses grievances not in individual behaviours or attitudes, but instead in intersectional relations of inequality.

Conclusion

As the example of Artemis has shown, radical critique and practice today face an unprecedented challenge because neoliberal rationalities succeeded, partly, in encroaching upon emancipatory ambitions. This article has addressed this challenge, by attempting to bridge a central gap between normative critiques of neoliberalism and pragmatic ones: While normative critiques have an emancipatory ambition, they do not scrutinize the stabilizing qualities of critique in neoliberalism as pragmatic critiques do. And while pragmatic critiques illuminate how critique furthers neoliberalism, they often lack an emancipatory ambition. To bridge this tension, this article conceived of a recursive mode of critical inquiry that seeks to discover what would need to be the case for a future beyond neoliberalism to be conceivable, by defamiliarizing neoliberal rationalities and critiquing the fact that neoliberalism incorporates critique into its mode of functioning. To achieve this, this article politicized the inferential logic of abduction to radically imagine which politico-epistemological positions are incomprehensible to neoliberal rationalities.

To conclude, I would like to reiterate the importance of the limit in alter-neoliberal analysis by pointing to three dimensions I could not address in detail. The first is the importance of considering the intersectional limitations of the researcher to visibilize, critique and imaginatively overcome neoliberal rationalities from within the neoliberal university, the latter of which enforces its own productive economies of writing. The second has to do with the reality that Peircean abduction is closely related to pragmatism (although Peirce highlights that his work is ‘pragmaticist’ in order to distinguish himself from pragmatism), which has been mobilized to challenge neoliberalism (Villacañas de Castro, 2020), but which has also been a source of inspiration for neoliberal thinkers (Posner, 2003). Thirdly, early Austrian neoliberal thought itself emerged as a form of critique of the then-dominant Marxist trends in interwar ‘red Vienna’. This is to highlight the importance of the genealogy, malleability and transmutation of neoliberal rationalities. In this light, alter-neoliberal analysis needs to be seen as a navigational map that is, by virtue of its abductive premises, very much in-the-making, rather than an exhaustive theory. This article is an invitation to further develop, or constructively challenge, alter-neoliberal analysis as both a mode of critical inquiry and an outline for the limits and potentialities of emancipatory practice in neoliberalism.