Neoliberalism and the Contradictions of Freedom: Ideology, Subjectivity, and Critical Pedagogy

• In Event: 41.084 - Roundtable Session 16
  In Roundtable Session: 41.084-14 - Imagining Education: Beyond the Logic and Learning in Neoliberal Capitalism

Abstract

This theoretical paper investigates the function of the idea of freedom as a central figure in the ideology of neoliberalism. In the contemporary context, neoliberals argue that rolling back regulations and the marketization of social life create more choices and thus more freedom. This position has roots in the work of the economist and philosopher F.A. Hayek (1960/2011). For Hayek, freedom in the first instance meant freedom from coercion. However, rejecting a pure laissez-faire position, he also argued that political, social, and economic conditions could be optimized for the exercise of freedom. Likewise, in the present, neoliberalism has worked to appropriate and govern practices of freedom and autonomy as a strategy for evading the immanent contradictions of capitalism (Boltanski and Chiapello, 2005). Thus, on the terrain of production, post-Fordism’s shift to a framework of autonomy, self-control, and collaboration works to render the sclerotic apparatus of accumulation newly supple. On the terrain of policy and ideology, the shift in neoliberalism to a grammar of choice, responsibility, and self-actualization purports to “empower” individuals within a system which was always before thought to reduce and disempower them (Harvey, 2005). But the shift to autonomy that is the signature of this era takes shape after all within a capitalist system characterized ultimately by a logic of predation, and in this context our impulses to “freely” collaborate in material and intellectual labor become an important instrument of exploitation.

Furthermore, this paper argues that the ideological function of freedom also has to be investigated in terms of the politics of the subject. Thus, the questions “Are we free?” and “What kind of freedom do we have?” have to be explored together with the questions “Who are we?” and “What have we become?” Contemporary capitalism encloses and collapses the contradiction between the alienated and the authentic, and colonizes the truth of the subject (Negri, 2003). It is not only the neoliberal emphasis on freedom as competition in markets that is important, then, but also the subject of freedom that neoliberalism presumes. While it is important to challenge the narrow Hayekian definition of freedom (absence of coercion), at the same time the reconfiguration of work, education, and social relationships in the present also enrolls us into subjectivities and ways of being that work below and beyond hegemonic common senses (De Lissovoy, 2015). The entrepreneurial self secures the rule of neoliberalism in its very postures, habits and dispositions. Critical pedagogy aiming to work at this level has to engage students in an investigation that is embodied, emotional, and ethical (Ball & Olmedo, 2013). Educators need to pry students away from neoliberalism’s anxious autonomy and to introduce other notions and practices of freedom. In this context, the hope that Freire (1996) emphasized as central to critical pedagogy becomes a hope not just that the world might be different, but that we ourselves might be built from different imaginations and desires, and that we might be released from this neoliberal “freedom” that fragments and isolates us in ourselves.

Author

• Noah De Lissovoy, The University of Texas - Austin