Undoing the sacred:

neoliberalism

‘The claim that neoliberalism is profoundly destructive to the fiber and future of democracy in any form is premised on an understanding of neoliberalism as something other than a set of economic policies, an ideology, or a resetting of the relation between state and economy. Rather, as a normative order of reason developed over three decades into a widely and deeply disseminated governing rationality, neoliberalism transmogrifies every human domain and endeavor, along with humans themselves, according to a specific image of the economic. All conduct is economic conduct…’ (pp.9-10).

‘when there is only homo oeconomicus, and when the domain of the political itself is rendered in economic terms, the foundation vanishes for citizenship concerned with public things and the common good’

neoliberalism as

HOW IS BROWN'S NEOLIBERALISM "SACRED"?

• ‘NEOLIBERALISM…IS BEST UNDERSTOOD NOT SIMPLY AS ECONOMIC POLICY, BUT AS A GOVERNING RATIONALITY THAT DISSEMINATES MARKET VALUES AND METRICS TO EVERY SPHERE OF LIFE…’ (P.176).

sacred status

• '...TO EVERY SPHERE OF LIFE…’ (P.176).
• NEOLIBERALISM BECOMES "NATURAL" OR "SOVEREIGN"

SACRED function

• '...governing rationality that disseminates…’ (P.176).
• Neoliberalism acts on the world by "divine fiat"

edward said

secular criticism

• ‘secular criticism is the practice of elucidating the ruse of those tacit processes that create, control, and sustain conditions of heteronomy, that is, conditions where the power of real men and women is configured to reside in some unassailable elsewhere’ (Stathis Gourgouris)

noninterference

• ‘For the intellectual class, expertise has usually been a service rendered, and sold, to the central authority of society…The same sort of thing is true of literary critics and professional humanists, except that their expertise is based upon noninterference in what Vico grandly calls the world of nations but which prosaically might just as well be called “the world”’ (p.2).

the invisibilty of cultural norms

• ‘in our age of media-produced attitudes, the ideological insistence of a culture drawing attention to itself as superior has given way to a culture whose canons and standards are invisible to the degree that they are “natural”, “objective”, and “real”

the work of secular criticism

• Said writes: ‘criticism must think of itself as life-enhancing and constitutively opposed to every form of tyranny, domination, and abuse; its social goals are noncoercive knowledge produced in the interests of human freedom’ (p.29).

criticism to alternatives

• Brown states clearly that her work is, ‘in the classical sense of the word, a critique [that] does not elaborate alternatives [but] only occasionally identifies possible strategies for [resistance]...However, the [criticism] might contribute to the development of such alternatives and strategies, which are themselves vital to any future for democracy’

educationalists (especially theorists) must engage in criticism

• if neoliberalism is not going to have the status or function of the sacred within the sphere of education, it's negative influences must be critiqued and alternatives proffered
• imbricated as we are in the "project" of neoliberalism, we must, nevertheless, take the stand that there is nothing beyond critique