Introduction: Neoliberalism and the public sphere

Abstract

In contemporary scholarship, the term “neoliberalism” seemingly appears everywhere. Rather than seeking to develop a single definition that unifies these varied appearances, scholars in various disciplines, subdisciplines, and interdisciplinary domains may develop critical conceptualizations that inform particular, active areas of inquiry. This special issue represents such an effort for rhetorical and communication scholarship on the public sphere. As both an intellectual orientation and a practical project, neoliberalism challenges longstanding commitments of public sphere scholarship. In this introduction, I consider the challenges that neoliberalism presents to public sphere scholarship and public practice concerning themes of subjectivity, public engagement, and agency/structure.

In contemporary scholarship, the term “neoliberalism” seemingly appears everywhere. As a critical concept, neoliberalism captures a crucial feature of our current condition, an era, according to Wendy Brown (2015), in which “the model of the market [is applied] to all domains and activities—even where money is not at issue—and configures human beings exhaustively as market actors, always, only, and everywhere as homo oeconomicus” (p. 31). Brown discerns in neoliberal practices an existential threat to civic engagement and democracy. If, as an imperialist project, neoliberalism is everywhere, then scholarly references to the term may illuminate a wide range of activities, from politics to media, culture, and more. Yet, for some scholars, this wide-ranging application has served as an indictment of neoliberalism, which from this perspective has become an overused and ill-considered term that obfuscates more than it illuminates. Historian Philip Mirowski (2014) provides perspective on the rise of neoliberalism as a key term in scholarship. Tracing the number of books published with the root “neoliberal” in their title from 1935 to 2010, Mirowski notes the relative absence of the term until 1980, when books referencing neoliberal in their title began to appear. Then, in the early 1990s, the number of such books started rising exponentially. Mirowski tracks a similar pattern with regard to academic journal articles, although the initial references and exponential rise of neoliberalism began earlier (in the 1950s and 1980s, respectively). Perhaps because of its prominent and promiscuous circulation, neoliberalism has become, in geographer Jamie Peck’s (2013) words, “an unloved, rascal concept” (p. 133).

Although prevalence, by itself, does not warrant censure, scholarship of neoliberalism would benefit from greater attention to varied meanings and uses of the term. Even so, scholars hoping that such attention will produce a unified definition of neoliberalism will find themselves disappointed. If neoliberalism reconfigures the market from a distinct sphere of society to a perspective that may shape society broadly (Davies, 2017), then efforts at unification necessarily will fail as market perspectives proliferate, without widespread coordination, in divergent directions. Resisting the urge to articulate a definitive account of neoliberalism as such, scholars more productively may recognize the manifestation of multiple neoliberalisms. From this vantage point, scholars in various disciplines, subdisciplines, and interdisciplinary domains may develop critical conceptualizations that inform particular, active areas of inquiry. This special issue represents such an effort for rhetorical and communication scholarship on the public sphere. The contributors recognize that scholars should attend to neoliberalism as both an intellectual orientation and a practical project that challenges long-standing commitments of public sphere scholarship.

Most directly, neoliberal theory and practice challenges the orientation of public sphere theory as a project of critical theory (Asen, 2015). As Slavko Splichal (2008) explains, publicity itself emerged during the Enlightenment as a critical concept, championed as “a critical impulse against injustice, based on the secrecy of state actions and as an enlightening momentum, substantiating the ‘region of human liberty’, making private citizens equal in the public use of reason” (p. 25). Judged on values of liberty and equality, actually existing publics did not meet these critical standards, as Jürgen Habermas (1962/1989) explained in his historical account of the bourgeois public sphere. Indeed, Habermas underscored a series tensions of the bourgeois public sphere, including its false claim to represent a universal humanity. Yet, “as long as publicity existed as a sphere and functioned as a principle, what the public itself believed to be and to be doing was ideology and simultaneously more than mere ideology” (p. 88). The “more than mere ideology” import of this historical public stemmed from its reconfiguration of political authority not as the will of the king as the embodiment of power, but as the engaged voice of the people. To be sure, this assertion of public authority raised more questions than it answered, but it fundamentally shifted the grounds of debate.

Contemporary scholarship has continued to pursue the critical promise of publicity with vigorous attention to issues of inclusion and exclusion, equality and inequality, and difference and power. Although Habermas acknowledged the existence of a proletarian public sphere, he focused his attention on the bourgeois public. Contemporary scholars have focused instead on the actions and interactions of multiple publics, exploring how publics may exclude some potential participants in explicit and implicit ways. Catherine Squires (2002) explains that

the move away from the ideal of a single public sphere is important in that it allows recognition of the public struggles and political innovations of marginalized groups outside traditional or state-sanctioned public spaces and mainstream discourses dominated by white bourgeois males. (p. 446)

Scholarship on counterpublics has explored how people who have perceived various forms of marginalization have worked with similarly situated others to articulate alternative interpretations of their interests, needs, and identities (see, for example, Jackson & Foucault Welles, 2016; Sowards & Renegar, 2006). In contrast to the bourgeois public sphere, which presumed that interlocutors could bracket their status differences and interact on equal terms (Fraser, 1992, pp. 118–121), contemporary scholarship has considered how inequality has shaped interactions within and among publics and counterpublics. As Phaedra Pezzullo (2003) suggests, “public dialogues reflect a multi-faceted negotiation of power” (p. 349). Amid these concerns, scholars have emphasized the capacity of difference in its many forms—as identity, experience, perspective, positionality, engagement, and the multiform intersections thereof—to energize and expand public discourse in the sometimes difficult process of living lives together.

In the remainder of this introduction, I identify three significant (although not exhaustive) challenges that neoliberalism presents to public sphere scholarship and public practice concerning themes of subjectivity, public engagement, and agency/structure. I then briefly introduce the contributions to this special issue.

Subjectivity

Public sphere scholars have viewed subjectivity as relational, transformative, and diverse, while neoliberal models of publics assert a view of the subject as an atomistic individual motivated by their own self-interest. Articulating the relational character of subjectivity, Hannah Arendt (1958) held that people appear publicly in a “web of human relationships” through which they achieve agency (p. 183). Individuals do not appear as discrete, ready-made actors prior to their interactions with others. Rather, interactions constitute the individual, as “nobody is the author or producer of [their] own life story” (p. 184). An individual’s story is written in the webs of relationships in which they act. And this story undergoes constant revision: public engagement transforms subjectivities because communicating with others—whether through deliberation, speech-making, protesting, or some other mode—shapes people’s perspectives. Such shaping does not necessarily produce agreement, but, to the extent to which individuals engage others across differences, they become aware of their perspective as situated amid others (Young, 2000). In Capitalism and Freedom, Milton Friedman (1962) rejected ideas of individuality as a relational construct. Against US President John F. Kennedy’s famous 1960 call for citizens to consider the mutual connections and commitments of the nation, he retorted sharply that “to the free man, the country is the collection of individuals who compose it, not something over and above them” (pp. 1–2).

Public engagement

As I have argued elsewhere (Asen, 2017), public engagement draws importantly on the promise of a public good. This notion of a public good does not necessarily refer to an accepted body of principles or beliefs, a common set of experiences, or a shared desire to seek consensus. Rather, this public good refers to a practice of cultivating relationships with others that recognizes the mutual standing required to address shared concerns. Along these lines, John Dewey (1927/1954) regarded individuals’ perception of their mutual implication in the consequences of human action as the basis of public formation. Perception functioned actively in this process, enabling individuals to articulate shared interests and aims and to organize themselves as a collective subject, a “we” who could coordinate individual action. Yet, this “we” could not plan a specific course of action apart from the learning that public engagement facilitated. Because social problems presented themselves as shared problems, and because individuals, on their own, were limited in their perspectives, public engagement created opportunities to share knowledge, to generate knowledge, and to test and evaluate knowledge. In these contexts, perspectives offer diverse approaches to shared concerns. Public engagement thus offers some means of addressing the contingencies of an unpredictable and changing world. In contrast, identifying self-interest as a universal human motivation, neoliberal models of publics assert a limited view of knowledge as direct experience as the basis for public engagement (Pennington, 2014). Drawing on a tradition made famous by Walter Lippmann (1927/1993), neoliberal models contend that, because they ask people to make decisions outside of their direct experiences, calls to advance a public good cannot produce efficacious action.

Agency/structure

Public sphere scholars recognize that people act individually and collectively within a field of opportunities and constraints. Indeed, the scholarly development of a model of a multiple public sphere drew inspiration and conceptual resources from the struggles of individuals and groups to overcome exclusions and inequalities, and to assert themselves as agents capable of participating in public life. In these struggles, as with publicity generally, agency operates within limiting structural conditions, even as individual and collective agency may reshape structural conditions. And these structural conditions, at least in Western societies, tend to exert uneven influence often tied to historically marginalized differences of race, gender, ethnicity, religion, sexuality, and more. Public sphere scholars have examined how racism and sexism, for instance, create different degrees of obstacles for different actors, challenging the agency of even the most determined actor (see, for example, Bruell, Mokre, & Siim, 2012; Eltantawy, 2008; Jackson & Foucault Welles, 2015). In contrast, neoliberal models of publics discount these difficulties, emphasizing instead individual action. Nancy Fraser (2013) maintains that neoliberal policy has co-opted the feminist critique of the traditional roles of breadwinner and homemaker, romanticizing “female advancement and social justice” while undermining the structures necessary for these achievements (p. 220). On race, neoliberal publics assert the existence of a post-racial society that rewards individual initiative regardless of identity. In this context, efforts to articulate the dynamics of racism—or even to discuss race—themselves become practices of racism (Jones & Mukherjee, 2010; Wanzer-Serrano, 2011).

Contributions

Considering the implications of neoliberalism for public sphere theory and practice, the contributors to this special issue address a range of cases, suggesting common themes and distinctive differences. In her article, Catherine Chaput argues that neoliberalism may require public sphere scholars to place our commitment to purposeful, deliberative engagement in tension with an embodied, habitual mode of communication. Whitney Gent turns to US debates over homelessness to illuminate how neoliberal policy frameworks construct some groups of people as independent, responsible actors and others as dependents who consume public resources without offering any benefits to publics. Shifting from policymaking to the courts, Luke Winslow, Alec Baker, and Charles Goehring examine five key US Supreme Court decisions to explicate how neoliberal reasoning has become a prominent mode of decision making for this institution. While law and policy represent ostensibly regular modes of governance, in her essay Jennifer Wingard considers how neoliberal modes of governance shape responses to public crises, in this case the widespread flooding in the Houston, Texas, metropolitan area in 2017 caused by Hurricane Harvey. Turning to ongoing crises in the Middle East, Rebecca Dingo examines the contrasting images of two young women who have spoken out against violence, revealing the ways in which media representations reinforce neoliberal values. Concluding this special issue, Damien Smith Pfister and Misti Yang articulate a “technoliberalism” that elucidates the intersections of neoliberalism and new communication technologies. Together, the six contributions to this special issue exemplify the scholarship necessary to understand our current moment, a moment in which people across the globe have looked to markets for answers to public problems and often have looked skeptically at value of a democratically oriented public sphere.