Observatoire du discours financier en traduction - flexibilité

La nature de la flexibilité

René Lemieux — Wed, 03 Aug 2016 15:51:20 +0000

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. Cette fable, entièrement fausse – il n’y a pas d’expérience scientifique qui la prouve –, est toutefois utilisée tant par les groupes écologistes pour parler des changements climatiques, les libertariens pour parler de l’érosion des droits civils, ou encore les survivalistes pour parler du déclin de la civilisation. On peut même retrouver la fable dans les manuels de gestion pour critiquer une adaptation trop rapide aux changements managériaux (Debaig & Huete 1999), et l’économiste Paul Krugman y faisait directement référence dans une chronique au lendemain de la crise financière de 2008 :

I started thinking about boiled frogs recently as I watched the depressing state of debate over both economic and environmental policy. These are both areas in which there is a substantial lag before policy actions have their full effect – a year or more in the case of the economy, decades in the case of the planet – yet in which it’s very hard to get people to do what it takes to head off a catastrophe foretold.

And right now, both the economic and the environmental frogs are sitting still while the water gets hotter (Krugman 2009).

L’« adaptation » est ici pensée de manière négative, et malgré qu’à peu près tout le monde reconnaisse la fausseté de la fable, il n’en demeure pas moins que l’on associe changement (ou absence de changement) à ce qui relèverait de la nature. Dans une autre perspective, on favorisera au contraire l’adaptation (ou ses dérivés sémantiques : flexibilité, souplesse, accommodement, compromis, ajustement, malléabilité) en usant tout autant d’une référence naturelle. C’est le cas par exemple de Tony Killick, chercheur associé au think tank britannique Overseas Development Institute (ODI), dont un des objectifs est d’influencer la mise en place de politiques et de pratiques dans les pays en voie de développement. Dans l’ouvrage collectif qu’il a dirigé, Flexible Economy (1995), dans une section intitulée « The prima facie case: the permanence of change », il écrit :

All economies are constantly in a state of flux, buffeted by developments in the rest of the world, by shifts in the composition of demand, by technological changes. There is thus an ever-present need to respond to – and take advantage of – such changes in the economic environment. The imperative to do so has been intensified in recent decades as economic interdependence among nations has increased, with the rise of trade and international capital movements relative to domestic economic activity. There are rich rewards for those who find ways of leading this expansion; increasingly, none can afford to be left out.

An analogy suggests itself here with the concept of « fitness » in Darwinian theories of evolution. We can view economic competition among nations as a kind of survival of the fittest, where fitness is determined by the speed with which economies can respond to shocks, and can move to take advantage of new technologies or markets, and adjust to the actions of others. The greater the ease, and the lower the costs, with which an economy can adjust, the more it is likely to prosper (Killick 1995: 2).

Même si la conception de la nature qu’on peut encore avoir aujourd’hui, celle consistant à s’opposer à la culture, est un produit du XVIII^e siècle1, il est intéressant de noter la référence, complètement erronée, à Darwin : le plus « apte » (fittest) est celui qui survit – la loi de la jungle, donc. Si on veut relier cette pensée à celle des sciences naturelles, c’est plutôt du côté de la théorie lamarckienne qu’il faudrait voir : à force de vouloir atteindre les feuilles des branches plus hautes, la girafe pourra s’agrandir le cou. Si elle le veut vraiment, bien sûr.

D’une manière ou d’une autre, il est intéressant de noter qu’avec la notion de flexibilité, on a une conception du changement qui vient d’une nature qui s’oppose aux actions individuelles. La nature n’est pas seulement un environnement, c’est aussi un objet qui fait face au sujet qui doit s’y adapter. Elle est en outre une occasion, il faut vouloir prendre à bras-le-corps cet environnement. C’est peut-être vers Machiavel qu’il faudrait se tourner pour comprendre cet environnement et la conception (ici genrée) de la nature comme hasard (avec l’allégorie de la Fortuna) qu’avait la Renaissance, à laquelle la virtù des hommes doit commander :

Je conclus donc que, la fortune changeant, et les hommes s’obstinant dans la même manière d’agir, ils sont heureux tant que cette manière se trouve d’accord avec la fortune; mais qu’aussitôt que cet accord cesse, ils deviennent malheureux.

Je pense, au surplus, qu’il vaut mieux être impétueux que circonspect; car la fortune est femme : pour la tenir soumise, il faut la traiter avec rudesse; elle cède plutôt aux hommes qui usent de violence qu’à ceux qui agissent froidement : aussi est-elle toujours amie des jeunes gens, qui sont moins réservés, plus emportés, et qui commandent avec plus d’audace (chap. XXV).

C’est un peu un accident de l’histoire des langues qu’économie et écologie soient toutes deux liées par le même préfixe « éco- » dont l’origine se trouve dans le mot grec οἶκος signifiant « maison », sa racine indo-européenne étant *weyḱ- qui désigne le fait de s’établir. Cela donnera en outre le grec οἴκισις qui désigne la colonie et la colonisation (l’établissement), la stabilité d’un lieu habité plutôt que le changement du déplacement. Le mot grec est par ailleurs demeuré comme terme technique en anglais, sous une forme qui y ressemble peu : ecesis, qui se dit du processus d’établissement réussi d’une plante ou d’une espèce animale dans un habitat autrefois infertile en raison d’une catastrophe.

1. Classiquement, par exemple en droit, le droit naturel est celui qui ne change pas. C’est le droit positif, celui des sociétés, qui s’adapte aux mœurs du temps.

Mots-clés libres du blogue:

Le paradoxe de la grenouille : rompre avec les paradigmes dominants pour créer de la valeur

Debaig, Michel et Luis María Huete. Le Paradoxe De La Grenouille : Rompre Avec Les Paradigmes Dominants Pour Créer De La Valeur. Brigitte de Gastines. Paris: Dunod, 1999.

Article(s)

La nature de la flexibilité

Flexible Economy: Causes and Consequences of the Adaptability of National Economies

Killick, Tony. Flexible Economy: Causes And Consequences Of The Adaptability Of National Economies. London & New York: Routledge, 1995.

Article(s)

La nature de la flexibilité

Boiling the Frog

Krugman, Paul. « Boiling The Frog ». The New York Times, 2009. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/13/opinion/13krugman.html.

Article(s)

La nature de la flexibilité

Le Prince [1515]

Machiavel, Nicolas. Le Prince [1515]. Paris: Union générale d’Éditions, 1962. http://classiques.uqac.ca/classiques/machiavel_nicolas/le_prince/le_prince.pdf.

Article(s)

La nature de la flexibilité

Flexibility III - John Sinclair’s ‘Objective’ Approach to Language

René Lemieux — Sat, 02 Jul 2016 12:43:13 +0000

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.

Sinclair begins by identifying two general trends in language analysis: subjectivity and objectivity (and my reader will probably already anticipate the difficulties involved therein). “The basic task is the explication of the text, and while some scholars reject any systematic approach, relying instead on a direct appeal to the sensitivities of their audience, many prefer to make use of descriptive schemes, claiming that they have several advantages over the self-reliance of the individual.” (Sinclair 2004: 115) Citing Norman Fairclough among others, for Sinclair ‘critical discourse analysis’ = subjectivity, against which he situates his own descriptivism and objectivism. Text study, as he puts it, is a slow and laborious process in that it is expected to be comprehensive; it must cover, indeed saturate, the entire field of its context. He quickly concedes, however, that such analyses will always fall short of their goals, “since at extremely refined levels of interpretation there is almost certain to be a personal element, no shared system of analysis will be considered accurate. This reservation, of course, applies to all areas of intellectual inquiry.” (ibid.: 116) The reality of any observation involves a certain slippage between subjectivity and objectivity, but ideally, a context would be without subject. Technology has given linguists the possibility of studying large corpora, objectively, in contrast to the appeal to emotion on the part of the subjectivism of critical discourse analysis. “Reference can be made to the huge accumulation of usage that is lodged in the corpora, providing evidence of shades of meaning and subtleties of expression that have not until now been transferable into the shaded area.” (ibid.: 117)

Using Fairclough’s analysis of flexibility as an example (see Fairclough 1999), Sinclair dismisses as an Orwellian paranoia the notion that a word having exclusively unpleasant consequences for its users would occur only in positive or benign contexts. Corpus linguistics, he argues, goes beyond an individual’s capacity to inspect a certain discourse like that of flexibility. “For example, the flexibility reported in Fairclough’s paper is represented as uniformly undesirable for those who are obliged to be flexible, and yet there are plenty of instances in the corpus of flexible and flexibility used with approval by people other than the captains of industry.” (Sinclair 2004: 119-20) Citing 13,318 occurrences of the word in his corpus, Sinclair notes that the majority of these are positive, and Fairclough’s argument thereby all the weaker. But this point is just banal; of course flexibility is generally a good thing I think most people prefer over rigidity. People generally prefer freedom over control, and life over death.

The thing with words is that a championing of ‘freedom’ can just as easily be rallied to support the unsanctioned military invasion of a country by the US, just as a championing of ‘life’ can bizarrely justify both blowing up abortion clinics and encouraging the death penalty. Flexibility also works to ensure high turnover rates, decrease workers’ rights, reduce trade barriers, foster unemployment, all the while maintaining the lifestyle of the planet’s wealthiest elite. Sinclair’s argument is that “citation of ‘used language’ proves nothing in itself about language unless the process of selectivity that is inevitable in such circumstances is controlled.” (ibid.: 120)

Sinclair has a point; of course one can’t only focus on observing those occurrences of a term that support one’s ethico-political claim. But perhaps two different aims are at stake here: one could study throughout the entire corpora of financial print culture occurrences of the word ‘dollar,’ but the reasons why one would do so would be lost on me. It’s unfair to say of Fairclough that his focus on certain concepts lack context, particularly because context itself is neither subjective nor objective, any observation of discourse will always entail a certain normativity.

The strangest thing of Sinclair’s book for me is in fact its opening dedication to M.A.K. Halliday, one of the founders of ecolinguistics. Halliday undertook laborious deconstructions of the grammatical metaphor in English to reveal that many of our blind spots concerning environmental degradation were built into the structure of the language itself (see his “New Ways of Meaning” in The Ecolinguistics Reader). An awareness of these structures, it is hoped, would pave the way for a more just ecological future. Indeed, if context is itself the oikos of ecology and economy, any observation or description of language bears within itself, or is inextricably bound up with a possible resistance, critique and normativity for a more just economical, and ecological future.

Mots-clés libres du blogue:

flexibilité

flexibility

néolibéralisme

Global Capitalism and Critical Awareness of Language

Fairclough, Norman. « Global Capitalism And Critical Awareness Of Language ». Language Awareness 8, no 2 (1999), 71-83.

Article(s)

Flexibility III - John Sinclair’s ‘Objective’ Approach to Language

Flexibility II - Norman Fairclough’s Critical Language Awareness

New Ways of Meaning: The Challenge to Applied Linguistics

Halliday, M. AK. « New Ways Of Meaning: The Challenge To Applied Linguistics ». Dans The Ecolinguistics Reader: Language, Ecology And Environment, 175-202. New York: Continuum, 2006.

Article(s)

Flexibility III - John Sinclair’s ‘Objective’ Approach to Language

Trust the Text: Language, Corpus and Discourse

Sinclair, John. Trust The Text: Language, Corpus And Discourse. New York: Routledge, 2004.

Article(s)

Flexibility III - John Sinclair’s ‘Objective’ Approach to Language

Flexibility II - Norman Fairclough’s Critical Language Awareness

René Lemieux — Fri, 01 Jul 2016 15:16:30 +0000

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. Citing an earlier paper of his, he writes, CLA should be “a prerequisite for effective democratic citizenship, and should therefore be seen as an entitlement for citizens, especially children developing towards citizenship in the educational system.” (Fairclough 1999: 71) The example he uses, fruitful for our purposes here, is the discourse of flexibility, and Fairclough retraces the general arguments put forth by Harvey I covered in a previous blog post concerning the shift between Fordism and flexible accumulation. Flexibility, he argues, is not an inevitable feature of global capitalism, but rather “a real feature of contemporary economies for which there is ample scientific evidence.” (ibid.: 72) Here, both the discourse of flexibility and its real effects are inextricably intertwined;

the discourse is an irreducible part of the reality. The change from Fordism to flexible accumulation is inconceivable without the change in economic discourse. Why? Because the emerging global economy is the site of a struggle between the old and the new, and the discourse of flexibility is a vital symbolic weapon in that struggle. It is as Bourdieu (1998) has put it a ‘strong discourse,’ that is a discourse which is backed by the strength of all the economic and social forces (the banks, the multinational corporations, politicians and so on) who are trying to make flexibility – the new global capitalism – even more of a reality than it already is (Fairclough 1999: 72).

Fairclough then sends about finding examples through a wide variety of texts in what Leigh Claire La Berge has called ‘financial print culture,’ (2014: 8) everything from books written by ‘management gurus’ to economic and noneconomic discourses in the press.

However, he notes, flexibility also permeates everyday language. Fairclough gives here the example of ‘Stephen,’ who works illegally doing small, flexible ‘fiddly’ jobs while collecting social security, who uses the discourse of flexibility in explaining his position. “It’s a matter of us being cheaper… It’s just the flexibility. You’re just there for when the jobs come up, and he [the ‘hirer and firer’] will come and get you when you’re needed.” (Fairclough 1999: 73) Here, Fairclough writes, is not just a case of everyday language becoming colonized by the language of the powerful: “here is ‘Stephen’ appropriating the discourse in construing his own perfectly coherent rationale for his (illegal) way of living. One aspect of economic flexibility from his perspective is that companies need the flexibility of workers doing fiddly jobs.” (ibid.) A critical awareness of language, then, allows people to reflect on dominant discourses such as that of flexibility, allows them to ask questions such as “what insights [flexibility] gives us into the way economies work or could work, and what other insights it cuts us off from; whose discourse it is, and what they gain from its use; what other discourses there are around, and how this one has become so dominant.” (ibid.)

When observation is thought in terms of this critical reflection, as does the Odft, it challenges the hegemony of dominant discourses and fosters the invention of new possibilities and knowledges of life in its oikoi. “If on the other hand language and other semiotic modalities are viewed as simply transparent media for reflecting what is, the development of knowledge is likely to be impeded.” (ibid.: 75) But the fact that all social life is textually mediated opens onto a dangerous dialectic, he writes, of colonization and appropriation on the one hand and emancipation on the other.

It opens up unprecedented resources for people to shape their lives in new ways drawing upon knowledges, perspectives and discourses which are generated all over the world. But in so doing it opens up new areas of their lives to the play of power. There is a colonisation-appropriation dialectic at work… if people are to live in this complex world rather than just be carried along by it, they need resources to examine their placing within this dialectic… and those resources include a critical awareness of language and discourse which can only come through language education (ibid.: 75-76).

Here again is reiterated the key problematic of this excursus; what grounds the opposition between living in the world and being carried along by the world as concerns language or discourse? Does the discourse of flexibility carry people along in the world, preventing them from living it (as Bourdieu at times seems to suggest), or does it also convince people they are indeed living in the world when they are really just being carried along by it? If activity and passivity, the performative and constative, normative and descriptive aren’t so dissociable here, it’s perhaps because capital itself also works in blurring these distinctions, as Derrida hints at in his seminar La Peine de mort (2015: 268). If I’m still in the spirit of Fairclough’s argument, the object of a critical awareness of language would not be to restitute activity and passivity, etc., to their proper positions beyond a logic of capital, but to work through their contamination in making dominant discourses foreign to themselves, to take into account the perhaps infinitely differentiated contexts within which their tropes occur. Context, then, is an inextricable condition of resisting neoliberalism, but what is context? Does it offer any clarification on the subjective/objective, the act and its others in observing and thinking about how the tropes of neoliberal discourse are translated in and out of financial print culture?

Mots-clés libres du blogue:

L’essence du néoliberalisme

Bourdieu, Pierre. « L’Essence Du Néoliberalisme ». Le Monde Diplomatique, 1998, 3. https://www.monde-diplomatique.fr/1998/03/BOURDIEU/3609.

Article(s)

Flexibility II - Norman Fairclough’s Critical Language Awareness

Flexibility I - Bourdieu and Flexploitation

Acts of Resistance: Against the Tyranny of the Market

Bourdieu, Pierre. Acts Of Resistance: Against The Tyranny Of The Market. Richard Nice. New York: New Press, 1999.

Article(s)

Flexibility II - Norman Fairclough’s Critical Language Awareness

Flexibility I - Bourdieu and Flexploitation

Séminaire La peine de mort. Volume II (2000-2001)

Derrida, Jacques. Séminaire La Peine De Mort. Volume Ii (2000-2001). Geoffrey Bennington et Crépon, Marc. Paris: Éditions Galilée, 2015.

Article(s)

Flexibility II - Norman Fairclough’s Critical Language Awareness

Observation as Critique in Financial Discourse

Global Capitalism and Critical Awareness of Language

Fairclough, Norman. « Global Capitalism And Critical Awareness Of Language ». Language Awareness 8, no 2 (1999), 71-83.

Article(s)

Flexibility III - John Sinclair’s ‘Objective’ Approach to Language

Flexibility II - Norman Fairclough’s Critical Language Awareness

Scandals and Abstraction: Financial Fiction of the Long 1980s

La Berge, Leigh Claire. Scandals And Abstraction: Financial Fiction Of The Long 1980S. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2014.

Article(s)

Flexibility II - Norman Fairclough’s Critical Language Awareness

Flexibility I - Bourdieu and Flexploitation

René Lemieux — Thu, 30 Jun 2016 15:18:44 +0000

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.

Bourdieu begins his intervention “Job Insecurity is Everywhere Now” by asking what the final outcome, the ‘point’ of the intellectual discussions at the Rencontres européennes contre la précarité, a conference attended by civil servants, politicians, trade unionists and economists, both employed and unemployed. Economists in particular bear the brunt of his critique in their lack of concern with social reality, “or indeed with reality at all.” (Bourdieu 1999: 81) Bourdieu rejects the Walrasian myth of a ‘pure theory’ (the idea that all economics can be understood by way of mathematics) as underlying the stubbornness by which economists are able to present neoliberalism as an inevitability (1998). Academics, including economists, have great responsibilities, particularly when, “by their silence or their complicity, they contribute to the maintenance of the symbolic order which is the condition of the functioning of the economic order.” (Bourdieu 1999: 82)

Bourdieu’s key argument here is that job insecurity robs people not only of a future, but of a belief in the future that can impel one to change it, of a capacity to “project themselves into the future.” Evoking Marx’s 11^th thesis here, “to conceive a revolutionary project, in other words a reasoned ambition to transform the present by reference to a projected future.” (ibid.: 83) Neoliberalism works precisely by making people feel insecure about their future, and presenting even exploitative work as a privilege and a commodity, flexploitation thus forces workers into accepting neoliberalism through this constant threat of insecurity, of losing their jobs.

So insecurity acts directly on those it touches (and whom it renders incapable of mobilizing themselves) and indirectly on all the others, through the fear it arouses, which is methodologically exploited by all the insecurity-inducing strategies, such as the introduction of the notorious ‘flexibility,’ – which, it will have become clear, is inspired as much by political as economic reasons. One thus begins to suspect that insecurity is the product not of an economic inevitability, identified with the much-heralded ‘globalization,’ but of a political will (ibid.: 84).

In another piece, Bourdieu poses otherwise the alleged inevitability of the contemporary economic world and its ‘flexible’ labour market. “What if it were in reality, only the implementation of a utopia, neo-liberalism, thus converted into a political programme, but a utopia which, with the aid of the economic theory to which it subscribes, manages to see itself as the scientific description of reality?” (ibid.: 94) Neoliberalism is not, he writes, a desocialized and dehistoricized ‘theory,’ but is capable of “making itself true.” (ibid.: 95)

An essential point may be held in anticipation here; if neoliberalism simply were an economic inevitability, as the economists Bourdieu criticizes seem to suggest, then perhaps all that one could do is observe, interpret and describe its mechanisms, as a classical scientist describes gravity with little concern of changing or critiquing its laws. The reason this is insufficient is that the job insecurity made possible by discourses of flexibility itself resists a simple compartmentalization between theory and practice, the descriptive and the normative; it is animated by a political will that, as I showed with Harvey in a previous blog post, works to keep the rich rich at whatever cost to others, the environment, indeed really the economy itself. As Bourdieu writes, “it seems to me that what is presented as an economic system governed by the iron laws of a kind of social nature is in reality a political system that can only be set up with the active or passive complicity of the official political powers.” (ibid.: 86) This notion of passive and active complicity highlights what I’m talking about here; complicity is not only passive or theoretical, it crosses over into activity and the practical: practice can just as much serve to reinforce a dominant discourse as it can to critique it, it is not universally revolutionary. (This is, I’d suggest, one of the points of a total coherence between a dialectics of neoliberalism and the dialectical materialism hinted at in the 11^th thesis.)

Bourdieu seems to agree; along with many other features it shares with Marxism, neoliberalism is grounded in a belief in the utopia, this time that of an ‘absolute reign of flexibility,’ a ‘free trade faith’ that allows it to justify the dissolution of all forms of collective solidarity (the nation-state, work groups, unions, societies and cooperatives, the family) in the interest of a (false) Darwinian struggle for existence between individuals, one that justifies an “extraordinary mass of suffering.” (ibid.: 102) But there is a possible resistance against this ‘liberalism.’ Bourdieu warns against reading any thought of ‘conservation’ as ‘conservative’ or ‘reactionary’; conservation can amount to resistance, “so long as we know how to conduct the symbolic struggle against the incessant work of the neo-liberal ‘thinkers’ aimed at discrediting and disqualifying the heritage of words, traditions and representations associated with the historical conquests of the social movements of the past and the present.” (ibid.: 103)

Mots-clés libres du blogue:

L’essence du néoliberalisme

Bourdieu, Pierre. « L’Essence Du Néoliberalisme ». Le Monde Diplomatique, 1998, 3. https://www.monde-diplomatique.fr/1998/03/BOURDIEU/3609.

Article(s)

Flexibility II - Norman Fairclough’s Critical Language Awareness

Flexibility I - Bourdieu and Flexploitation

Acts of Resistance: Against the Tyranny of the Market

Bourdieu, Pierre. Acts Of Resistance: Against The Tyranny Of The Market. Richard Nice. New York: New Press, 1999.

Article(s)

Flexibility II - Norman Fairclough’s Critical Language Awareness

Flexibility I - Bourdieu and Flexploitation

Theses On Feuerbach

Marx, Karl. Theses On Feuerbach, 1845. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/theses/theses.htm.

Article(s)

Flexibility I - Bourdieu and Flexploitation

Observation as Critique in Financial Discourse

Neoliberalism, Flexibility, and Postmodernism: Reflections on the work of David Harvey

René Lemieux — Tue, 17 May 2016 15:36:34 +0000

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. Indeed, Harvey provides insights into the very ontological and metaphysical grounds of this shift as constituted by a profound transformation in the experience of space and time.

While an exemplary scholarship runs through both texts at the levels of history, political economy, and cultural studies among others, Harvey unfortunately repeats at times the very neoconservatism he critiques in his readings of philosophy, within which what he calls ‘postmodernism’ has gone ‘too far,’ citing real or potential Nazi sympathies in Nietzsche, Heidegger, or in the ‘deconstructionism’ of Derrida, along with Deleuze and Guattari’s imagined championing of actual schizophrenia in responding to capitalism. Harvey follows Terry Eagleton’s critique of Lyotard in which ‘there can be no difference between truth, authority, and rhetorical seductiveness; he who has the smoothest tongue or the raciest story has the power,’ (B 198) suggesting that the latter, like Foucault, “accepts the potential open qualities of ordinary conversations in which rules can bend and shift so as ‘to encourage the greatest flexibility of utterance,’” (C 47 emphasis added) and that this flexibility works to cement a complicity with the aestheticization seen in the charismatic politics of Thatcher and Reagan. And perhaps nowhere can this be seen more clearly than in Trump, who himself recently flaunted his ‘flexibility’ on immigration issues.

There is a serious sense within which flexibility allows one to resolve irreconcilable differences and contradictions in one’s discourse, lets one say everything and nothing; in neoliberalism, this can be especially read in what Harvey calls the ‘unholy alliance’ between libertarian free-market individualism and the authoritarianism of neoconservatism. Still, does Harvey not risk closing himself off to philosophies of time and space which might allow him to not only theorize the metaphysics and ontology of this transition into flexibility more thoroughly, but perhaps offer a way through its aporias? Let us defer and delay this question for now. The import of his reading, as I take it, suggests the reverse: that any post-whatever theory not deny itself the practice of meta-theory “which can grasp the political-economic processes (money flows, international divisions of labour, financial markets, and the like) that are becoming ever more universalizing in their depth, intensity, reach and power over daily life.” (B 117) A contamination that operates from both sides regardless.

What is neoliberalism? Harvey defines it as “a theory of political economic practices that proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free market, and free trade.” (B 2) In other words, the freedoms of the individual are guaranteed by the freedoms of the market. As he cites Treanor, “neoliberalism values market exchange as ‘an ethic in itself, capable of acting as a guide to all human action, and substituting for all previously held beliefs’.” (B 3) But this utopian rhetoric camouflages a more sinister political purpose; the reconstruction of the power of economic elites and the reestablishment of the conditions for capital accumulation. For Duménil and Lévy, he writes, “neoliberalization was from the very beginning a project to achieve the restoration of class power.” (B 16) Between these two dimensions of neoliberalism, the utopian and the political, the latter has dominated. When the libertarian and individualistic principles of neoliberalism clash with the restoration of class power, Harvey writes, “then the principles are either abandoned or become so twisted as to become unrecognizable.” (B 19) Neoliberalism will side with a good business climate and the integrity of the financial system at the expense of collective rights, the quality of life, the well-being of the population, or the capacity of the environment to restore itself. On this last point, the era of neoliberalism does not just coincidentally coincide with that of the sixth mass extinction of plant and animal species and climate change; its commitment to the financialization of everything overflows even the demand for an inhabitable earth.

The sea change in both cultural and political economic practices since 1972 or 1973, he writes, is bound up in new ways within which we experience space and time. Harvey thus posits “some kind of necessary relation between the rise of postmodernist cultural forms, the emergence of more flexible modes of capital accumulation, and a new round of ‘time-space compression’ in the organization of capitalism.” (C vii) Harvey understands the transition from the rigidities of Fordist-Keynesian embedded liberalism to neoliberal flexibility as one between ‘regimes of accumulation’ and the related modes of social and political regulation. A regime of accumulation, as understood by the ‘regulation school,’ “describes the stabilization over a long period of the allocation of the net product between consumption and accumulation; it implies some correspondence between the transformation of both the conditions of production and the conditions of reproduction of wage earners.” (C 121) A mode of regulation, whether at the social or political level, might be understood as the materialization of a regime of accumulation, the interiorization of its rules in norms, habits, laws, and so on, ensuring the unity and coherency of the regime. The shift from modernism to postmodernism, as with that from Fordism/Keynesianism to neoliberalism, is thus coextensive with one from rigidity to flexibility.

As Harvey explains, the postwar boom from 1945 to 1973 can be understood as structured in a Fordist-Keynesian model of labour control practices. A highly unionized workforce, he writes, entailed acertain rigidity in labour markets, allocation and contracts, particularly resistant to pressures of de-skilling in the workplace. However, this rigidity made it difficult for Fordism-Keynesianism to contain the contradictions of capitalism. The recession of 1973 thus entailed processes of experimental economic and political restructuring that would give way to an entirely new regime of accumulation. As he puts it, “the more flexible notion of capital emphasizes the new, the fleeting, the ephemeral, the fugitive, and the contingent in modern life, rather than the more solid values implanted under Fordism.” (C 171) Any form of social solidarity that would hinder market flexibility had to be dismantled, “in favour of individualism, private property, personal responsibility, and family values,” (B 23) hence Thatcher’s famous claim that there is no society, there are only individuals. This increase of flexibility, Harvey adds, has led to a total restructuring of labour towards sub-contracting, temporary and self-employment. Workers can now expect several periods of de- and re-skilling in their lifetimes. (C 230) What would become called flexible specialization in labour processes and ‘flexi-time arrangements’ would be attractive to individual labourers excluded from union protection, and could easily be integrated into neoliberal rhetoric. (B 53) “‘Flexibility’ becomes the watchword with respect to labour markets. It is hard to argue that increased flexibility is all bad, particularly in the face of highly restrictive and sclerotic union practices.” (B 75) There are, of course, positive aspects to this. As Harvey cites Marx,

even the ‘variation of labour, fluency of function, universal mobility of the labourer’ demanded by modern industry, holds the potential to replace the fragmented worker ‘by the fully developed individual, fit for a variety of labours, ready to face any change of production, and to whom the different functions he performs, are but so many modes of giving free scope to his own natural and acquired powers’ (Capital, 1:458). (C 109)

Flexible employment arrangements can indeed be sometimes mutually beneficial, he adds. However, its effects on the whole concerning insurance coverage, pension rights, wage levels, and job security are by no means positive. (C 151)

At the level of financial markets, the explosion of new and complex financial instruments, including the entire credit industry, can be read in this shift towards flexible accumulation. (C 194) The penchant of postmodern flexibility for the fleeting and transitory has manifested itself into one for immaterial money and fictitious capital. Above all, he adds, flexible accumulation has witnessed the emergence of “greatly intensified rates of commercial, technological, and organizational innovation.” (C 147) Indeed, Harvey suggests, capitalism has become ever more organized “through dispersal, geographical mobility, flexible responses in labour markets, labour processes, and consumer markets, all accompanied by heavy doses of institutional, product, and technological innovation.” (C 159)

On the social and cultural level, flexible accumulation has been mirrored in quickly-changing consumption patterns with respect to fashion, and at the aesthetic level shifted from the stability of Fordism to an aesthetic celebrating difference, ephemerality, spectacle, and fashion. (C 156) As Harvey asks, then, is postmodernism as much of a radical break with modernism as it seems? Is it simply a revolt against high modernism’s relative comfort with dominant power structures, its “subterranean celebration of corporate bureaucratic power and rationality?” (C 36) Does it offer revolutionary and emancipatory potential with respect to its attentiveness to racial and sexual minorities? Or does it thoroughly integrate with neoconservative politics and the logic of late capitalism? Postmodernism, as Harvey suggests, is simply the social and cultural manifestation of the financialization of everything; the market’s power over the entirety of cultural production. Harvey thus draws from Daniel Bell in noting the institutionalization of creative impulses in what the latter calls ‘the cultural mass’ “the millions of people working in broadcast media, films, theatre, universities, publishing houses, advertising and communications industries, etc.” (C 60) The turn to pop culture and ephemeral fashion has in fact come to embody the “mindless hedonism of capitalist consumerism.” (C 60) The political implications of postmodernism thus fall on the one hand into incoherence, he suggests, or on the other seek a “shameless accommodation with the market [that] puts it firmly in the tracks of an entrepreneurial culture that is the hallmark of reactionary neoconservatism.” (C 116)

Neoconservatism and authoritarianism are thus the seemingly contradictory aspects through which neoliberalism pursues its mission to consolidate class power through the provision of a good business climate. Labour and the environment will thus always be commodities submitted to this imperative; Wall Street will always win out over main street, and a good business climate will win out over collective rights. In the early 1970’s, Harvey writes, the belief in individual freedom could come together with questions of social justice against an overly intrusive state and its role in unjust wars, consumerism, overly powerful corporations, and traditional values concerning sexuality and reproductive rights. However, Harvey writes, “by capturing ideals of individual freedom and turning them against the interventionist and regulatory practices of the state, capitalist class interests could hope to protect and even restore their position.” (B 42) Indeed, he adds elsewhere, “the evident insecurities of flexible accumulation create a climate conducive to authoritarianism of the Thatcher-Reagan type.” (C 167) Neoconservatism, he adds, is entirely consistent with neoliberalism on the questions of class power, its suspicion of democracy as a threat to individual rights and liberties, and its emphasis on market freedoms. (B 81) Neoliberalism thus manages to secure the power of the elite through courting the white working class to vote against its own interests via questions of cultural nationalism, moral values, racism, homophobia, and antifeminism, evangelical Christianity, and pro-life positions. “The problem was not capitalism and the neoliberalization of culture, but the ‘liberals’ who had used excessive state power to provide for special groups (blacks, women, environmentalists, etc.)” (B 50) And it is no coincidence today that Trump professes his love for uneducated voters since these can be easily rallied around radically xenophobic positions concerning immigration, only to then flaunt his ‘flexibility’ when attacked on the latter.

Mots-clés libres du blogue:

The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change

Harvey, David. The Condition Of Postmodernity: An Enquiry Into The Origins Of Cultural Change. Cambridge: Blackwell, 1992.

Article(s)

Neoliberalism, Flexibility, and Postmodernism: Reflections on the work of David Harvey

A Brief History of Neoliberalism

Harvey, David. A Brief History Of Neoliberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.

Article(s)

Neoliberalism, Flexibility, and Postmodernism: Reflections on the work of David Harvey

Capital (3 volumes)

Marx, Karl. Capital (3 Volumes). New York, 1967.

Article(s)

Neoliberalism, Flexibility, and Postmodernism: Reflections on the work of David Harvey

Histoire, repérage et traduction du terme « flexibility »

René Lemieux — Thu, 10 Mar 2016 21:38:45 +0000

En vue du Deuxième Colloque international sur la traduction économique, commerciale, financière et institutionnelle (UQTR, 17-18 août 2016), nous proposons une étude qualitative du terme « flexibility » et de ses équivalents « souplesse », « flexibilité » et « adaptabilité » dans un corpus constitué de textes provenant de diverses institutions : les journaux canadiens, les sociétés de capitaux, la Banque du Canada et la Fed.

Le terme et ses dérivés présentent un intérêt sur le plan conceptuel, voire idéologique, car les idées de flexibilité, d’assouplissement et d’adaptabilité sont au cœur des réformes bancaire, financière et monétaire, sans parler du marché de l’emploi et des nouvelles méthodes de gestion du personnel qui ont marqué les quarante dernières années. À l’égard de la main d’œuvre, Pierre Bourdieu avait lancé le terme « flexploitation » (1998) pour dénoncer le règne de la flexibilité imposée à la main d’œuvre précarisée par des contrats de courte durée, des horaires variables, des quarts de nuit et un climat de concurrence entretenu par des objectifs de rendement personnels, dernier gadget de la gestion participative et moyen d’auto-exploitation qui ne dit pas son nom, toujours selon Bourdieu.

Daniel Simeoni (1993) exhortait les traducteurs à une critique de la fonction structurante de la langue structurée par les institutions. Tout usager initié aux langues de spécialité relevant des domaines économique, bancaire, financier et administratif doit connaître le rôle qu’il joue dans la reproduction des formes du discours dominant dictées par les normes lexicales et perpétuées par la terminologie, les cooccurrents et les formules dites consacrées.

C’est donc un éclairage critique que nous comptons jeter sur le terme « flexibility », entre autres mots porteurs du discours néolibéral qui impose un ordre symbolique régi par la logique des marchés (productivité, compétitivité et adaptabilité maximales).

Mots-clés libres du blogue:

Contre-feux: Propos pour servir à la résistance contre l'invasion néo-libérale

Bourdieu, Pierre. Contre-Feux: Propos Pour Servir À La Résistance Contre L'invasion Néo-Libérale. Paris: Liber-Raisons d'agir, 1998.

Article(s)

Histoire, repérage et traduction du terme « flexibility »

L’institution dans la langue: lexique et pensée d’État

Simeoni, Daniel. « L’Institution Dans La Langue: Lexique Et Pensée D’État ». Ttr 6, no 1 (1993), 171-202. http://www.erudit.org/revue/TTR/1993/v6/n1/037143ar.pdf.

Article(s)

Histoire, repérage et traduction du terme « flexibility »