The two most compelling sentences I have read this week, from a piece by Anne Anlin Cheng on Parasite and Get Out.
In the ultimate neoliberal fantasy, appropriation and tribute (stealing and virtue-signalling) can be one and the same. Just as parasitism and hosting collapse under this political economy, so do familial and individual/consumer values.
My only quibble is to ask if this is fantasy or reality? Just taking the cases of two Baltimore ex-mayors is suggestive. Both were convicted of fraud that stemmed from activities that were signalling social concern. Though prosecuted and found guilty, the important thing to glean is that they easily adopted these sloppy scams — one subsequent to the other. One city, one post. How many other similar situations must there be? The POTUS is the lead example, of course, but it so interesting that so many lower positioned operators would come so readily to this way of seeing themselves in the world.
These cases are two more virulently narcissistic ways of of living in the neo-liberal world defined by Michael Tomasky in the following way:
I have sometimes found this word confusing. I first encountered it as a young reader of The Washington Monthly, and so I accepted the definition advanced by that magazine’s founder, Charlie Peters, who wore the label proudly. He meant “neoliberal” as still working for traditional liberalism’s goals but simultaneously casting away some prejudices that had come to hurt Democrats politically (being seen as antimilitary, for example). But in economics, the word has an older meaning, going back to the 1930s, and in this meaning, neoliberal is pro–free market, antiregulation, anti-Keynes—very much akin to what we more commonly today call supply-side conservative economics. The “liberal” in this “neoliberal” is the liberalism of the late eighteenth century, of Adam Smith and his contemporaries, a liberalism built around the concept of protecting the free individual from the coercive power of the state and enabling him to work for his economic self-interest. [My emphasis.]
Many folks don’t go all the way, perceiving the law to be a form of the coercive power of the state that the individual needs to shake. Yet most do believe that making sense of their world is something to be left to them and not to anyone else, including experts of any kind whose association can be extended to the state or some other related coercive agency [e.g. press, scholarly and any other form of elite]. It is a pyrrhic, cheap form of eqalitarian democracy: you are entitled to think anything you want, and this is freedom, regardless of the circumstances you actually live.
The downstream of this is that folks expect to think for themselves, but not in the sense of responsible, clear, comprehensive and critical thinking. It is more like shopping. It is your legacy from the neoliberal state to think as you see fit, even if this means seeing the law as nothing but something that applies to someone else. Foucault’s opening to the preface to The Order of Things, citing Borges, describes the effect nicely.
This book first arose out of a passage in Borges, out of the laughter that shattered, as I read the passage, all the familiar landmarks of my thought — our thought, the thought that bears the stamp of our age and our geography — breaking up all the ordered surfaces and all the planes with which we are accustomed to tame the wild profusion of existing things, and continuing long afterwards to disturb and threaten with collapse our age-old distinction between the Same and the Other. This passage quotes a “certain Chinese encyclopedia” in which it is written that “animals are divided into: (a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) sucking pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (1) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way off” look like flies”. In the wonderment of this taxonomy, the thing we apprehend in one great leap, the thing that, by means of the fable, is demonstrated as the exotic charm of another system of thought, is the limitation of our own, the stark impossibility of thinking that.
Foucault saw this eclectic world ordering as routine and unique structured in every epoch. This eclecticism wreaks havoc on ideological purity, not to mention rational thought. The “thinking of that”, that is, the thinking of individual, peculiar, particularist taxonomies is the approach to thought the current consumerist, post-truth age has sanctioned. Further, it is endlessly promoted and resourced by any and all agencies and institutions, and it is difficult to penetrate or bring into a level playing field.
The emphasis is to choose what suits for your reality, as opposed to face the very definitive limits of what you deem to be reality. This is very appealing, if disastrous; much more inviting than having to see yourself as limited and needing to constantly get a grip. This is played out everywhere. For example, how many voters in the South Carolina primary examined Obama and his retinue with a similar rigour as Tomasky does, leaving the question of his legacy open, if not utterly dubious, and therefore, putting into question Biden’s feckless candidacy? Not much difference here with Trump cultists save a wisp of faux civility merely signalling justice for minority rights.
Not much will alter with this election. Not much can as a parasitical consumerist/individualistic virus corrupting social thinking is much too entrenched to lead to sustained progressive action. Things will have to reach a much higher level of precariousness, if not outright catastrophe, to get folks to dig to the depths required to understand how their thinking, and their derived sense of reality, is framed by a rather pernicious episteme, as Foucault called it back in the Order of Things. We can call it the putative ontology of neo-liberalism.