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Session Submission Summary

The Banality of Neoliberalism: Precarious Lives, Ordinary Lives in Chile

Sat, May 30, 12:00 to 1:45pm, TBA

Session Submission Type: Panel

Abstract

By alluding to Hannah Arendt's well known notion of the 'banality of evil', this panel makes clear its intention to generate though-provoking reflection and debate about the ambivalences of neoliberalism: its metamorphoses, ductility, and potential to both create and suppress lives, generating posibilities for some, while undermining the 'human condition' of others (Arendt 1958, Agamben 2005, Fassin 2010).
Second, we aim to open a space for critical reflection on the "banal" use of the notion of neoliberalism in social science, where at times describing something as neoliberal comes to stand in as an explanation, when, in fact, neoliberalism requires situated analysis of the practices and historical processes that shape it. Finally, the third dimension of the banal that this panel highlights is the powerful underground, diffuse, and global action of a neoliberalism that multiplies its impact on places (Ong and Collier 2005, Tsing 2009) and forms of everyday lives (Das 2006, Han 2012). We recognize Chile as a violent neoliberal laboratory (Klein 2007) where forms of governance, care and punishment (Schild 2013), multicultural politics (Richards 2013) and notions of victimhood and guilt are distributed according to notions of individuality and eventuality (Povinelli 2011). Through our research, we thus seek to problematize monolithic visions of neoliberalism by building upon the reflexiveness contained in our ethnographies of ordinary lives and extraordinary practices imbued in fields of force that produce precarity. From this perspective, the panel provides a forum for discussion and analysis of how the ordinary can serve as a locus of the potential for contestation and transformation.

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