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File: Neoliberal agencies-Ilana Gershon.pdf

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Seeing the social as constructed was liberating when faced with people who nat-uralized power
in order to exercise power. No more. Neolib-eral constructions of agency have wilted the efficacy
of this formerly reliable insight. Neoliberal perspectives have incor-porated as a central belief the
knowledge that all that is social could be otherwise. Faced with this, what ethical analytical labor
should anthropologists perform when confronted with neoliberal perspectives?

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Recently various anthropologists have recommended that scholars interrogating neoliberalism
should insist on discuss-ing its local manifestations instead of framing it as an over-arching,
unified, and coherent global trend

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Kingfisher and Maskovsky (2008) continue this critique of neoliberalism as uniformly hegemonic in
a recent special issue of Critique of Anthropology, suggesting that neoliberal policies are partial
and incompletely instantiated.

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In this Keywords essay, I suggest that for anthropologists faced with neoliberal perspectives,
insisting on the local is an important step but an insufficient one, because neoliberal perspectives
themselves also take context to be crucially for-mative. Pointing out local particularities will not
necessarily do the unsettling work this move once accomplished. I argue that precisely because
of the ways in which neoliberal per-spectives rely on a particular form of agency, the most
effective form of anthropological critique would be to emphasize peo-ple's epistemological
differences and social organization, a form of analysis that many anthropologists have abandoned
in the wake of a disciplinary-wide rejection of the culture concept.

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Some readers may be surprised by my claim that anthro-pological and neoliberal perspectives will
both assume that subjects and markets are made, not given

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Experience is not a function of mind or con-sciousness, but mind and consciousness are rather a
product of experience (Hayek 1984:226)

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Michel Foucault 4 (Lemke 2001) and Wendy Brown (2003, 2006) both view a major distinction
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between neolib-eralism and liberalism to be the neoliberal emphasis on mar-ket rationality as an

achieved state

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In short, in order for neoliberal policies to be implemented, people on the ground had to start
engaging with (and perhaps perform-ing) neoliberal concepts of agency.

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I have already alluded to the first shiftthat subjects, markets, economic rationality, and
competition are all recognized as socially con-structed under neoliberalism. The second shift is a
move from the liberal vision of people owning themselves as though they were property to a
neoliberal vision of people owning them-selves as though they were a business.

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This is a self that is produced through an engagement with a market, that is, neoliberal markets
require participants to be reflexive managers of their abilities and alliances

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Unlike the three selves just mentioned, the reflexive aspect of the neoliberal self exists before
rela-

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tionships and contexts and actively decides how he or she will connect to other people,
institutions, and contexts. In this sense, the neoliberal self is autonomous.

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If neoliberal selves exist before relationships, what are re-lationships under neoliberalism?

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In short, with this view of relationships and selves in the background, neoliberal agency emerges
as conscious choices that balance alliances, responsibility, and risk using a means-ends calculus.
The freedom that neoliberalism provides is to be an autonomous agent negotiating for goods and
services in a context where every other agent should ideally be also acting like a business partner
and competitor.

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