Thwarting Neoliberalism: Bureaucracy, Malaise, and Other Disappointments

• In Event: Conceptions of Collectivity

Abstract

This paper examines modes of collective agency for thwarting neoliberalism that may seem disappointing or dispiriting from the perspective of revolutionary imaginaries, but still successfully challenge neoliberalism’s evisceration of public life.  Working around unhelpful binaries of agency as either powerless or potent, this paper attends to the bureaucratic, the inept, and the obsolete as challenges to neoliberal developments in American urban spaces.  To examine these uninspiring actions it turns to the problematic television drama about urban life in Baltimore, The Wire, described by its producer as a series about “raw, unencumbered capitalism.” But contrary to what its producers contend, the spread of capital in the show is in no way "unencumbered."  In The Wire bloated bureaucracies obstruct legal and illegal attempts to smooth capital flows, communities form in mundane ways to successfully thwart neoliberal regulations, and the moral codes of various complex actors refuse to cohere into a market rationality that upholds entrepreneurship and profitmaking, revealing how neoliberal rationality is fundamentally uncompelling.  The Wire, however unwittingly, thus presses scholars of neoliberalism to attend to the uninspiring forces of bureaucratic inertia, community bickering, boredom, underfunded agencies, desires for nonmonetized power, and failed heroic action as potentially productive tactics for challenging neoliberalism. 

Author

• Elisabeth Robin Anker, George Washington University