On connaît tous sans doute l’histoire de cette grenouille qui, plongée dans une cuve d’eau bouillante, se débattra pour en sortir. Si toutefois on la pose dans une cuve d’eau à la température de la pièce et que l’on en augmente par la suite la température jusqu’à ébullition, la grenouille s’ébouillantera – sa mort sera la conséquence de l’adaptation à son environnement.
The thesis of the seventh chapter of John Sinclair’s Trust the Text (2004) is difficult, as it highlights the necessity of refraining from taking a stance on an emotionally charged problem (neoliberalism, for our purposes) in order to describe how language makes its meaning.
Norman Fairclough, it seems, might follow Bourdieu in suggesting that a critical awareness of language, or CLA, can serve to challenge the dominant discourses of global capitalism.
I want to flesh out certain descriptive and normative, theoretical and practical, ontological and ethical aporetics in the concept of flexibility in financial discourse through the work of Pierre Bourdieu.
Reading together David Harvey’s two books A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2005, hereafter cited B) and his earlier The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Cambridge, Blackwell, 1992, hereafter cited C) allows one a singular attempt to think both the shift from Fordist-Keynesian embedded liberalism to neoliberalism and that from modernism to postmodernism as one from rigidity to flexibility.