Violent Symbolism: Good Governance and the Making of Neoliberal Subjects

Abstract

In building consensus, neoliberalism has constructed a vast network of neoliberal knowledge production and diffusion, through deeply entrenched intellectuals and think tanks (Peck 2008; Weller and Singleton 2006). The rise and “rule of experts” is not only a central part of the history of modernity (Mitchell 2002), but it further helps to explain the current dominance (Sparke 2004) and governance (Sparke 2006b) of neoliberalism. The special role of intellectuals and “experts” is what Bourdieu (1989) would call symbolic power, and it is inscribed in social relations as a fundamental form of power, analogous to the power ascribed to discourse by Foucault (1990). Discourse, however, goes beyond experts’ attempts to construct knowledge and thereby implement power exclusively “from above.” Instead, the dispersion and redistribution of verbal performances is what Foucault (2002, 121) referred to as a “discursive formation,” such that “the term discourse can be defined as a group of statements that belong to a single system of formulation.” Foucault was thus able to speak of clinical discourse, natural history discourse, psychiatric discourse, and, in his series of lectures at the Collége de France in 1978–1979, a neoliberal discourse that systematically constructs subjects and the worlds of which they speak (see Foucault 2008). Foucault (1982, 1991) accordingly emphasized processes of “subjectification,” whereby individuals are made subjects through their everyday functioning as transistors (and resistors) in the circuits of knowledge via the “from below” productive power of governmentality, which imposes particular laws of “truth.”