Observatoire du discours financier en traduction - néolibéralisme

News Translation and Biocultural Diversity

René Lemieux — Mon, 07 Nov 2016 16:12:09 +0000

In my last post, I’d begun to think about the potential ethical and political role that translation could play with respect to how warfare and armed conflict is framed in the news. Drawing from Judith Butler’s work, I’d examined how the work of Roberto A. Valdeón gives us a better understanding of how the frames of war maintain their reiteration through news translation. Most translators of news articles do not in fact see themselves as translators, as Valdeón convincingly shows through rigorous data and interviews, and this contributes to the further marginalization and invisibility of translation in, as he perhaps unwittingly borrows from Levinas and Blanchot, the domain of the anonymous and impersonal.

If news translation operates in reiterating the frames of war so that human (and other) lives are increasingly seem as ungrievable, as is Butler’s argument, the same can be said for the lives of languages and cultures. This is because framing not only serves to maintain the justifiability of warfare, but the entirety of the Western (particularly American) military-industrial complex, and thus the justifiability of neoliberal economic policies. Valdeón’s thesis is that the framing that occurs in news translation participates in the construction of a world “according to Anglophone norms, interests and, most likely, ideological agendas.” (Valdeón 2008, p. 323)

In my doctoral dissertation, I’d tried to tackle what ecolinguists and other theorists call the question of biocultural diversity; “the diversity of life in all its manifestations – biological, cultural, and linguistic – which are interrelated within a complex socio-ecological adaptive system.” (Maffi, 2005) The most widely cited study from 1992 (Krauss) estimates the loss of 90% of the world’s languages by the year 2100, with more recent studies placing the figure a bit more optimistically at 50%. But as most of these languages are spoken by a very small number of people, their loss entails the loss of an entire culture. As a report jointly released by UNESCO (The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization), the WWF (The World Wide Fund for Nature) and Terralingua, an organization committed to biocultural diversity puts it, “languages have been called ‘the DNA of cultures’ – they have encoded the cultural knowledge that people have inherited from their ancestors, and each generation continues to add to this heritage.” (Skutnabb-Kangas, Maffi & Harmon, 2003) With respect to translation, Michael Cronin has importantly written that “the issue of translation and minority languages is not a peripheral concern for beleaguered fans of exotic peoples gabbling in incomprehensible tongues, but the single most important issue in translation studies today.” (Cronin 2003, 144) Cronin is one of the few people working in translation studies to champion “the contribution of translation to genuine biocultural diversity on the planet.” (Ibid., 4) So where does news translation fit in here?

Along with a study of the news events selected to be translated from BBCWorld into Spanish on the network BBCMundo, Valdeón suggests that

the selection of the information included in those reports contributes to create a certain perspective of the world, which is projected onto the target audience. This image accentuates an ethnocentric view of the world whereby Anglophone news is given prominence at the expense of more international items. (Valdeón 2008, 303)

Two examples can serve to illustrate Valdeón’s point; the news event of a terror alert at Ibiza’s airport, and another concerning the planting of bombs by the Basque separatist group ETA; both appear in BBCWorld, and yet were not deemed of sufficient interest for Spanish-language readers. In their selection of what news events to translate, he writes, “text producers are already participating in projecting a certain view of the world whereby Anglophone issues, however irrelevant or laughable… are regarded as crucial and, consequently, placed at the heart of the news portal.” (Valdeón 2008, 320) In other words, the frame that is being set up here could clearly be seen to contribute to a feeling of a certain inferiority of one’s culture and interests over another.

A key reason behind this may be a certain shift in the understanding of the role of the news in what Valdeón calls the information society. Valdeón’s thesis echoes Guy Debord’s famous theses in The Society of the Spectacle. As the latter argues, “the spectacle is not a collection of images; it is a social relation between people mediated by images.” (Debord, 2004, 7) The commodification of the news, as Debord might put it, works towards the disintegration of all community and critical awareness (Debord 2004, 14); towards the stage at which “the commodity has succeeded in totally colonizing social life. Commodification is not only visible, we no longer see anything else; the world we see is the world of the commodity.” (Ibid., 21) We see Adorno and Horkheimer argue something similar in The Dialectic of Enlightenment in their chapter “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception.” As they put it, the notion of amusement itself “ha[s] been taken over from above and brought fully up to date” by the culture industry. (Adorno & Horkheimer 2002, 107) For Valdeón, news is today understood mostly as a matter of entertainment; individuals seek information for pleasure (whether in gossip columns, celebrity news, or sports sections), information that is forgotten soon after. Information and translation, Valdeón argues, become mutually interdependent in a globalized, cosmopolitan and consumerist world economy. English thus becomes the Lingua Franca, the key currency of the language of information. As such, “in this brave new world, where information and entertainment have become almost indistinguishable, translation becomes a commodity itself, albeit an invisible one, much more so than in the past.” (Valdeón 2010, 155)

We are beginning here to have a better idea of the interplay between the devaluation of other languages and cultures, the championing of Anglo-American interests and norms, particularly as concerns entertainment and popular culture, and the acceptance of more sinister military ideologies and neoliberal economic policies. Nowhere can a military-industrial agenda be better served than when news and entertainment become indistinguishable. This is particularly the case when informative texts take on a persuasive function. “In some of these texts, the latter will prevail as information is presented in such a manner that it also intends to allure the reader to the product.” (Valdeón 2009, 77) Informative texts such as tourist brochures, Valdeón writes, interact with their readers, and consequently deal with “the translation of information, rather than with the translation of texts (as defended in Venuti 1995, 18) and, very often, with what could be described as product translation. Corporations and institutions are interested in communicating effective messages that may result in product consumption or in habit formation.” (Valdéon 2009, 79) As Donna Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto notes, global capitalism, in an important sense, requires unencumbered, universal translation. And, as Valdeón notes, informative texts differ from other kinds of texts, such as literary works, in that the former are commissioned from the source culture, not the target one. (Ibid., 79) Ironically, the more translation becomes a commodity in facilitating the championing of Anglo-American issues and political positions, neoliberal economic ideologies, and the mass consumerism of American material and cultural products, the more it erases its mediating role. Conversely, rethinking the role translation can play in biocultural sustainability, in fostering an appreciation for minority languages, alternate economies, and local cultures necessitates rethinking the interruptions and resistances can pose to dominant paradigms. And these will only be possible if we situate the visibility of translation otherwise, perhaps from the very periphery of the anonymous and impersonal.

Mots-clés libres du blogue:

Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments

Adorno, Theodor W et Max Horkheimer. Dialectic Of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments. Edmund Jephcott. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002.

Article(s)

News Translation and Biocultural Diversity

Frames of War: When is Life Grievable?

Butler, Judith. Frames Of War: When Is Life Grievable?. London & New York: Verso, 2010.

Article(s)

News Translation and Biocultural Diversity

Frames of War in News Translation: Butler and Valdeón

Translation and Globalization

Cronin, Michael. Translation And Globalization. London: Routledge, 2003.

Article(s)

News Translation and Biocultural Diversity

Observation as Critique in Financial Discourse

Society of the Spectacle

Debord, Guy. Society Of The Spectacle. Ken Knabb. London: Rebel Press, 2004.

Article(s)

News Translation and Biocultural Diversity

Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature

Haraway, Donna J. Simians, Cyborgs, And Women: The Reinvention Of Nature . London: Routledge, 1991.

Article(s)

News Translation and Biocultural Diversity

The world’s languages in crisis

Krauss, Michael. « The World’S Languages In Crisis ». Language 68, no 1 (1992), 4-10.

Article(s)

News Translation and Biocultural Diversity

Linguistic, Cultural, and Biological Diversity

Maffi, Luisa. « Linguistic, Cultural, And Biological Diversity ». Annual Review Of Anthropology, no 34 no 34 (2005).

Article(s)

News Translation and Biocultural Diversity

Sharing a World of Difference: The Earth’s Linguistic, Cultural and Biological Diversity

Skutnabb-Kangas, Tove, Luisa Maffi et David Harmon. Sharing A World Of Difference: The Earth’S Linguistic, Cultural And Biological Diversity. Paris: UNESCO, 2003.

Article(s)

News Translation and Biocultural Diversity

Anomalous news translation

Valdeón, Roberto A. « Anomalous News Translation ». Babel 54, no 4 (2008), 299-326.

Article(s)

Roberto A. Valdeón’s Research on Journalistic Translation (II)

News Translation and Biocultural Diversity

Frames of War in News Translation: Butler and Valdeón

Translating Informative and Persuasive Texts

Valdeón, Roberto A. « Translating Informative And Persuasive Texts ». Perspectives 17, no 2 (2009).

Article(s)

News Translation and Biocultural Diversity

Translation in the informational society

Valdeón, Roberto A. « Translation In The Informational Society ». Across Languages And Cultures 11, no 2 (2010), 149-160.

Article(s)

Roberto A. Valdeón’s Research on Journalistic Translation (I)

News Translation and Biocultural Diversity

Frames of War in News Translation: Butler and Valdeón

The Translator’s Invisibility

Venuti, Lawrence. The Translator’S Invisibility . London: Routledge, 1995.

Article(s)

News Translation and Biocultural Diversity

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

De l’évaluation de la dette à la subjectivité du guichet automatique

René Lemieux — Sat, 11 Jun 2016 17:23:13 +0000

Publié il y a quelques années, le livre La fabrique de l’homme endetté de Maurizio Lazzarato tente de faire de la dette l’archétype des relations de pouvoir dans le néolibéralisme. Il n’a pas tort, pour une énième année consécutive, la dette des particuliers tout comme des États augmente1. Bien que les sources philosophiques de l’essai de Lazzarato puissent paraître difficiles de prime abord, son argument principal demeure assez simple :

Voir dans la dette l’archétype du rapport social signifie deux choses. D’une part, faire commencer l’économie et la société par une asymétrie de puissance et non par l’échange marchand qui implique et présuppose l’égalité, introduire les différentiels de pouvoir entre groupes sociaux et donner une nouvelle définition de la monnaie, puisqu’elle se manifeste immédiatement comme commandement, pouvoir de destruction/ création sur l’économie et la société. D’autre part, commencer par la dette signifie rendre l’économie immédiatement subjective, puisque la dette est un rapport économique qui, pour se réaliser, implique une modélisation et un contrôle de la subjectivité, de telle façon que le « travail » est indissociable d’un « travail sur soi »2.

Se basant principalement sur la seconde dissertation de Nietzsche dans La généalogie de la morale qui fait de la dette le réquisit de l’échange – et conséquemment du troc, de la monnaie, etc. – une thèse « redécouverte » par Marcel Mauss et reprise plus récemment par l’anthropologue David Graeber, Lazzarato reprend en outre des discussions sur la politique tirées de Gilles Deleuze et Félix Guattari (en particulier dans L’anti-Œdipe). Le livre de Lazzarato a fait l’objet de nombreux commentaires (je recommande à cet égard la recension de Jean François Bissonnette dans Trahir3). Je m’attarderai moins à expliquer l’essai qu’à exprimer quelques considérations liées à la subjectivité et aux médias.

Au cœur du propos de Lazzarato, on retrouve l’affirmation selon laquelle l’échange entre le débiteur et le créancier précède l’égalité, à l’image, pourrait-on dire, du rapport que Karl Marx analysait quant au salariat. Rappelons que pour Marx, la caractéristique du marché du travail c’est l’inégalité entre l’employeur (capitaliste) et l’employé (prolétaire) :

Ce qui sur le marché fait directement vis-à-vis au capitaliste, ce n'est pas le travail, mais le travailleur. Ce que celui-ci vend, c'est lui-même, sa force de travail. Dès qu'il commence à mettre cette force en mouvement, à travailler, or, dès que son travail existe, ce travail a déjà cessé de lui appartenir et ne peut plus désormais être vendu par lui. Le travail est la substance et la mesure inhérente des valeurs, mais il n'a lui-même aucune valeur4.

Dans le « marché du travail », la marchandise est moins le poste offert que le chercheur d’emploi : les « foires de l’emploi » sont les seules foires où c’est la marchandise qui se déplace d’un kiosque à un autre. La relation entre débiteur et créancier que tente d’ajouter Lazzarato est pourtant essentielle pour comprendre le monde financier actuel. Si pour Marx, l’existence du prolétariat était réduite au minimum (à savoir la reproduction de sa classe avec ses enfants, selon l’étymologie du mot latin proletarius : qui ne vaut que pour sa descendance, proles), le monde du crédit exige toujours plus. Entre le minima du salariat pour que le travailleur survive et le maxima de l’endettement à la consommation pour que l’économie capitaliste s’intensifie, qui alors dicte la bonne mesure? Comment évalue-t-on la bonne moyenne? Comment se constitue la règle de la « bonne vie » (au sens philosophique) dans une économie de marché?

⁂

Énoncer la mesure entre le minima de la survie biologique et le maxima de la dépense est la tâche idéologique du néolibéralisme. Dans son commentaire à Lazzarato, Jean François Bissonnette, en critiquant l’auteur, commente en note de bas de page la dette de manière bien intéressante :

Il y aurait fort à dire sur le rapport entre la dette et le mode de vie consumériste qui définit la culture contemporaine, notamment en ce que celui-ci implique une certaine modulation du désir, dont la production, comme l’écrit Lazzarato sans plus s’y attarder, participe de l’infrastructure économique même (37). Le caractère infini de la dette apparaît comme l’envers de l’illimitation du désir, exalté par la publicité qui sature notre expérience sensorielle de la vie urbaine et vise à canaliser nos puissances affectives sur les marchandises qui défilent sans fin. La société de consommation a l’endettement pour moteur. En cela se manifeste un bouleversement historique considérable dans l’échelle des valeurs, transformation qui touche également à la signification et à la légitimité sociale de la dette. Avant l’avènement du crédit à la consommation, qui ne s’est véritablement développé qu’à partir des années cinquante, l’accès au crédit était conditionnel à des finalités productives. Pour l’auteur de ces lignes, descendant de deux générations d’ancêtres sincèrement impliqués dans le développement des coopératives de crédit au Québec, il importe de rappeler que l’accès au crédit, pour autant qu’il visait le développement d’une activité économique productive, a représenté un considérable levier d’« empowerment » économique pour les gagne-petits qui se voyaient interdits de commerce auprès des banques privées. La critique du mécanisme de la dette est certes nécessaire, mais il convient peut-être d’y introduire quelques nuances. Pour reprendre le concept du philosophe Bernard Stiegler, cette critique doit être « pharmacologique », c’est-à-dire consciente de l’ambiguïté fondamentale de tout pharmakon, à la fois poison et remède. En ce sens, il existe peut-être de « bonnes » dettes, et c’est moins l’outil lui-même que les finalités qu’il sert qui doivent être distinguées.

Que serait une bonne (ou une mauvaise) dette? Bissonnette donne peu d’indication, il cherche plutôt à faire voir que l’outil est d’abord « neutre ». Or, le concept qu’il utilise (pharmakon), tiré de Platon, mais repris de Jacques Derrida (particulièrement dans « La pharmacie de Platon »), peut être très fécond (quoique l’usage qu’en fait Bernard Stiegler me semble erroné). S’il est possible de dire qu’un pharmakon est à la fois une bonne et une mauvaise chose (remède et poison), il faut ajouter quelques considérations. D’abord, dans la logique exprimée par Derrida dans ce qu’il retrouve chez Platon, la différence qualitative est produite par une différence quantitative – une même substance, lorsqu’elle est administrée démesurément, devient problématique (logique homéopathique). Il s’agit là de savoir qui juge de la mesure acceptable. Deuxième élément, c’est la « découverte » du pharmakon par Derrida. Rien n’indique que Platon était conscient de la plurivocité du terme pharmakon en grec – après tout, il n’y a qu’un seul mot pour désigner ce qui se dit, en français, de deux manières différentes –, ni le traducteur, pourrait-on conclure, parce qu’il utilise deux mots (poison, remède) pour un même « concept ». Celui qui peut remarquer la disparité du concept se situe à l’extérieur du processus de la traduction, mais en est néanmoins témoin5. Ici, non seulement le juge ou l’évaluateur est extérieur, l’est aussi celui qui peut critiquer ce jugement ou cette évaluation.

Ceci étant dit, qui alors jugera ce qu’est une « bonne » dette ou une « mauvaise »? Dans notre monde, c’est généralement les médias qui organisent ce discours. Je ne donne qu’un exemple où j’ai pu entendre la distinction entre une bonne et une mauvaise dette. À Bazzo.tv (émission du 25 février 2016, segment « Discussion – deux cartes de crédit, est-ce trop? »), le comptable-journaliste Pierre-Yves McSween est capable d’énoncer ce qu’est une bonne dette, en se référant constamment à lui-même. Lorsqu’il affirme avoir un taux d’endettement de 200 % (par rapport à son revenu annuel), supérieur au taux moyen de 160 %, il explique « qu’à son âge » (36 ans, spécifie-t-il), c’est tout à fait normal (il vient d’acheter une maison). Lorsqu’on discute des taux d’intérêt des cartes de crédit, il répond : « Moi, je me fous du taux, mettez-moi une carte à 60 %, ça ne me dérange pas, je la paye. » Toute question sur la santé financière est ramenée à lui-même, à sa propre expérience.

On comprend là qu’il est lui-même le modèle, la mesure, d’une bonne dette, et qu’il s’impose comme une sorte de mesure universelle6. Bref, ce que Deleuze et Guattari désignaient comme l’insignifiance – et le mètre-étalon de tout et de rien :

Car la majorité, dans la mesure où elle est analytiquement comprise dans l’étalon abstrait, ce n’est jamais personne, c’est toujours Personne – Ulysse –, tandis que la minorité, c’est le devenir de tout le monde, son devenir potentiel pour autant qu’il dévie du modèle. Il y a un « fait » majoritaire, mais c’est le fait analytique de Personne, qui s’oppose au devenir-minoritaire de tout le monde (Mille Plateaux, p. 133-134).

On comprend peut-être mieux pourquoi Lazzarato, en effet, ne parle jamais de dettes en termes positif ou négatif. Se demander, avec Lazzarato, ce qu’est une bonne et une mauvaise dette, c’est comme reprocher à Marx de ne pas avoir distingué le bon du mauvais salariat. La question est ailleurs, et peut-être directement dans cette question : qui ou quoi énonce ce qu’est une bonne dette? Que cette énonciation soit consciemment produite par l’énonciateur n’est peut-être pas pertinent. Ce « Personne » du mythe homérique – Ulysse cachant sa véritablement identité pour piéger le cyclope et s’échapper avec ses camarades –, peut être tout le monde : critiquer ou même abolir le modèle ne suffit pas, car chacun s’y sent interpellé. Il faut plutôt analyser comment se constitue, et au bénéfice de qui, le mètre-étalon.

⁂

Et si l’énonciation de cette mesure n’était même plus humaine? C’est une des possibilités explorées par Lazzarato. Si on veut bien se donner la peine de faire une expérience de pensée, je proposerais de questionner quelle est la subjectivité produite à partir d’une machine, et plus précisément d’un guichet automatique. Lazzarato parle un peu trop rapidement du guichet automatique en le comparant à écrire des chèques. Selon lui, le guichet « automatiserait » notre réponse (mais ne faudrait-il pas comparer le guichet automatique à un guichet « humain »?) et ne convoque pas de « sujet » :

Lorsque vous actionnez un guichet automatique, il vous est demandé de répondre aux sommations de la machine qui prescrit de « composer le code », de « choisir le montant », ou de « retirer les billets ». Ces opérations « ne demandent certes pas d’actes de virtuosité intellectuelle – au contraire, serait-on tenté de dire. Ce qui nous est demandé, c’est de réagir juste, de réagir vite, de réagir sans erreur, faute de quoi on risque d’être exclu momentanément du système » (Lazzarato, p. 111, référence à A. J. Haesler, Sociologie de l’argent et postmodernité, p. 206).

Il y aurait sans doute plus à dire. Dans le cas de mon institution financière – si je peux me permettre cette anecdote personnelle –, si mon solde dans mon compte est inférieur à 1000 $, le guichet ajoute automatiquement le solde de la carte de crédit qui lui est associé. Je donne un exemple : si j’ai 400 $ dans mon compte et un solde de 50 $ sur une carte de crédit de 500 $, le guichet me dira que j’ai accès à 950 $ (la formulation exacte comme elle s’affiche à l’écran est « Disponible pour retraits : 950 $ »). Pensons-y un peu : si mon solde est de 50 $ sur 500 $, cela signifie que je dois 50 $, donc que je suis endetté de 50 $. Ce que je « possède » réellement, en ce moment, ce n’est pas 950 $, mais bien 350 $ (400 $ dans mon compte moins le 50 $ en créance). Mais voilà, et c’est peut-être là l’injonction subjectivante du crédit : ce n’est pas ce qu’on possède (actif moins passif) qui compte, c’est ce à quoi on a accès. Pour le dire autrement, ce qui compte, c’est posséder la capacité de s’endetter.

À cet égard, cet « accès » (tout comme la « limite » assez arbitraire – 1000 $ par jour dans mon exemple), est jugé, évalué, comptabilisé, de manière externe, par des instances qu’on ne contrôle pas. Nous n’avons pas accès directement à cette instance qui se présente à nous médiatisée par l’écran du guichet. Quelqu’un – ou quelque chose – décide de la limite, et la seule injonction reçue se décline en montant d’argent disponible. Ce montant n’est pas ce que je possède réellement, c’est le résultat mathématique d’une confiance qu’on me porte. Mon état financier est la réflexion des capacités à rembourser qu’on aura jugées ailleurs. Je suis en quelque sorte dépossédé de mon propre jugement sur la situation financière dans laquelle je me trouve7. Me ment-on? Oui et non : on fausse l’évaluation en incluant la confiance qu’on me porte, mais de cela, devrais-je être reconnaissant?

1. « Les Québécois, champions de la hausse de l’endettement », 18 mai 2016.
2. Maurizio Lazzarato, La fabrique de l’homme endetté, Amsterdam, 2011, p. 30.
3. Jean François Bissonnette, « Le passif de Sisyphe », Trahir, 4^e année, mars 2013.
4. Karl Marx, Le Capital, livre I, tome 2, section VI, chapitre 19, trad. J. Roy, Paris, Flammarion, 1985, p. 26.
5. Dans « La pharmacie de Platon », Derrida écrit : « On verra aussi à quel point l’unité plastique de ce concept, sa règle plutôt et l’étrange logique qui le lie à son signifiant, ont été dispersées, masquées, oblitérées, frappées d’une relative illisibilité par l’imprudence ou l’empirisme des traducteurs, certes, mais d’abord par la redoutable et irréductible difficulté de la traduction. Difficulté de principe qui tient moins au passage d’une langue dans une autre, d’une langue philosophique dans une autre, qu’à la tradition déjà, nous le verrons du grec au grec, et violente, d’un non-philosophème dans un philosophème. Avec ce problème de traduction nous n’aurons affaire à rien de moins qu’au problème du passage à la philosophie. » (dans La dissémination, Éditions du Seuil, 1972, p. 89).
6. Ou dans les termes de Deleuze et Guattari, l’« Homme-blanc-mâle-adulte-habitant des villes-parlant une langue standard-européen-hétérosexuel quelconque » (Mille plateaux, Éditions de Minuit, 1980, p. 133). La « description » a quelque chose de caricatural, bien sûr, mais c’est dans l’esprit, pour ces auteurs, des « idéaux » qui ne sont pas à proprement parler atteignables, mais ne sont pas moins un « repère » dans lequel chacun se reconnaît en partie en ne s’y reconnaissant jamais entièrement.
7. Il faudra aussi étudier l’ensemble des « slogans » et la manière qu’ont les institutions bancaires de vendre leurs produits financiers. Desjardins a longtemps eu pour signature « Conjuguer avoirs et êtres », l’usage du verbe (et du substantif) « être » ne venait-il pas en quelque sorte s’ajouter à « avoir ». À ce qu’on possède (l’avoir), on ajoute ce qu’on nous attribue comme potentialités (êtres). De même, la Scotiabank a depuis longtemps le slogan « You’re richer than you think », autrement dit, c’est à elle (l’institution bancaire) de vous dire combien vous valez, information dont même le sujet en question serait inconscient.

Mots-clés libres du blogue:

Le passif de Sisyphe

Bissonnette, Jean-François. « Le Passif De Sisyphe ». Trahir 4 (2013). https://trahir.wordpress.com/2013/03/29/bissonnette-lazzarato/.

Article(s)

De l’évaluation de la dette à la subjectivité du guichet automatique

Mille plateaux. Capitalisme et schizophrénie 2

Deleuze, Gilles et Félix Guattari. Mille Plateaux. Capitalisme Et Schizophrénie 2. Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1980.

Article(s)

De l’évaluation de la dette à la subjectivité du guichet automatique

La dissémination

Derrida, Jacques. La Dissémination. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1972.

Article(s)

De l’évaluation de la dette à la subjectivité du guichet automatique

Sociologie de l’argent et postmodernité. Recherche sur les conséquences sociales et culturelles de l’électronisation des flux monétaires

Haesler, Aldo J. Sociologie De L’Argent Et Postmodernité. Recherche Sur Les Conséquences Sociales Et Culturelles De L’Électronisation Des Flux Monétaires. Genève: Librairie Droz, 1995.

Article(s)

De l’évaluation de la dette à la subjectivité du guichet automatique

La fabrique de l’homme endetté. Essai sur la condition néolibérale

Lazzarato, Maurizio. La Fabrique De L’Homme Endetté. Essai Sur La Condition Néolibérale. Paris: Éditions Amsterdam, 2011.

Article(s)

De l’évaluation de la dette à la subjectivité du guichet automatique

Le Capital, livre I

Marx, Karl. Le Capital, Livre I. J. Roy. Paris: Éditions Flammarion, 1985.

Article(s)

De l’évaluation de la dette à la subjectivité du guichet automatique

Généalogie de la morale

Nietzsche, Friedrich. Généalogie De La Morale. Éric Blondel, Hansen-Løve, Ole, Leydenbach, Théo et Pénisson, Pierre. Paris: Éditions Flammarion, 2002.

Article(s)

De l’évaluation de la dette à la subjectivité du guichet automatique

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