The thing that ’s most important to un derstand here is that the citizen no long er has rights, but interests.

[Henk Elegeert]

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http://www.areachicago.com/issue2/neoliberal-appetites.htm
A R E A | C H I C A G O

"
Brian Holmes

Neoliberal Appetites


I’d like to begin this text with a little anecdote.

Recently, I spent some time in New York City. Having lived outside the
US for some fifteen years now, one of the things you wonder about when
you come back—one of the little anxieties—is “what exactly am I gonna
eat?” The food system in Europe has not progressed to the degree of
industrialization that’s long been common in the US. Things aren’t quite
so uniformly processed, people sit down for lunch, cows still graze and
they let some of the chickens run around, that sort of thing. You don’t
have the same impression of lining up at a conveyor belt, though the
situation is unfortunately changing. But here, it’s really on another
level. And if you know something about current conditions in the US—if
you read a book like Fast Food Nation, for instance, or you happened to
hear that Bush appointed a former lobbyist for the cattlemen’s
association as an undersecretary of the FDA—then you really start to
wonder what’s in your burger. Which makes it harder to take that first
bite, of course.
Staying with friends in Williamsburg, I saw there was a health-food
store right outside their door. What’s more, it was open 24 hours.
Fantastic, I thought, the USA’s really improving! It’s easy to get good
food around here. So on a Sunday morning I availed myself and started
picking out a few tasty items for breakfast. But what I discovered was
something entirely new: not just health food but rich people’s food! I
mean, these prices weren’t expensive, they were unbelievable: 4 bucks
for a half a pint of cream, 3 if you only wanted a quart of milk, a
small bag of granola was about 6 dollars and I passed on most everything
else.
Since then, I have noticed that in Chicago everyone teaching at the
universities seems to shop at a kind of modernized health food
supermarket called Whole Foods, and what’s more, they call it Whole
Paycheck. So this brings me to the question I really want to ask in this
paper: how does our society get us to swallow this two-tiered food
system? And how does it get us to tolerate such massive inequalities
across the board, in practically every domain of social existence?
I’ve become concerned about the ways that increasing levels of awareness
and increasing ranges of choice become a factor not of heightened
perception but of blindness to the overall conditions of the world
around us. The blindness particularly concerns anything that would have
to do with equality, even though equality remains one of the stated
central values of democratic societies.
I think this kind of self-instituted blindness has become a mode of
governance. By governance I don’t mean the direct process of governing
through legislation, public programs and enforcement of rules, but
rather a more diffuse process. Governance describes the ways that
individuals and organizations spontaneously adjust their behavior to
each other, within a specific environment. The current neoliberal
philosophy, which has been in effect for about 25 or 30 years now,
stresses governance over government. It claims that civil society can
take care of itself, with a minimum of regulation. One of its big
selling points is that it shuns any ideology—that is, any totalizing
explanation of the society, and above all, any attempt to guide society
in a specific direction. Instead, it claims that society is going
precisely in the directions that you want it to. The specifically
neoliberal conception of society constantly tries to convince the
citizens that they are really at the helm, making all the choices from
which their lives concretely result.
Now, that claim is a very strong one. It even has a moral content—the
notion of self-reliance, of responsibility for your own destiny—and that
has given it a surprising power over people’s hearts and minds. If you
like, you can go as far as Michel Foucault does, and say that
neoliberalism tends to install a new mindset or a new governmentality in
our heads—in order words,
a new common sense, a new rationality for dealing with all the decisions
we have to make in a complex society.
Let’s try to understand this new rationality, and then see if we can
apply it to the food system. In its most basic form, neoliberal
governmentality consists of two commandments and a promise. The first
commandment: seek the best information available to you. The second
commandment: make the choice that corresponds best to your personal
interests. The promise: society will then reshape itself to fit your choice.
Now, does that sound familiar? Is there a place where social relations
work like that?
I would say that theoretically at least, there is such a place. These
two commandments and the promise connected to them are derived from a
theory of the market, where the nature, quality, quantity and price of
the goods for sale are said to vary according to the demands of the
buyers. If you scratch the surface of this theory, you will find some
very curious things.
The first thing is that this theory conceives the buyer, or the subject
of the marketplace, as being possessed of a sovereign self-interest,
which is entirely unique, which cannot be determined in advance, and yet
which varies across time. Sovereign self-interest is what motivates the
subject of the marketplace; it’s the prime mover of the entire market,
it’s the source of market dynamics.
 From this concept of the buyer derive the two key questions of
neoliberal theory. The first one claims to be scientific. It asks, how
does a market optimally respond to the multiple and variable
self-interest that characterizes its subjects? The second one has a
prescriptive or normative intent. It asks, how can democratic pluralism
work most efficiently, pragmatically, to satisfy the citizens’ best
interests?
The theory of neoliberal governance starts with the proposition that the
market can only provide an optimal response to the desire of its
subjects by permitting the clearest, most transparent and yet at the
same time, most efficient circulation of information between the buyers
and those other participants in the marketplace which are the sellers.
It’s interesting to realize the extent to which pure neoliberalism is
bound up with information theory. The basic unit of information is the
price. The buyer will seek the lowest possible price for each individual
item; the seller will adjust both the availability of particular kinds
of goods, and their price, in order to seek the highest possible margin
of profit on the total volume of sales. The behavior of every-one in the
marketplace, and therefore, the kinds and quantities of goods that will
be available there, will ultimately be determined by the fluctuation of
the prices; and the competition of a multiplicity of participants
looking to find and to furnish the best prices will guarantee the
effi-ciency of the system. Now, that model of market behavior will
become the normative definition of democracy itself in the neoliberal
theory of social relations.
It’s important to note that the theory of the market requires a
multiplicity of sellers, be-cause of the multiple and changing nature of
the demand, that is, of the buyer’s self-interest. No single seller
could possibly gather enough information to respond adequately to all
the varieties of self-interest. The efficiency of the marketplace
depends on the multiplicity of information-gathering sellers, just as
the dyna-mics of the market depend on the multiplicity of
self-interested buyers.
So, if neoliberals talk about the market as being free, it is first of
all because the market is supposed to both permit and reflect the free
ex-pression of the individual’s self-interest. Goods are sold to satisfy
this self-interest; competition exists to lend greater efficiency to
this process of satisfying the buyer’s self-interest. But the market is
also considered free because it allows for the free flow of information.
Prices are available to anyone; information about the quality of goods
can be provided whenever the seller deems fit, and above all, whenever
the buyer demands it; and information about the desires of the buyer can
be gathered by any seller who wishes to improve efficiency and
therefore, lower prices. The free flow of information allows the seller
to address the free choice of the buyer, who always has the last word.
That’s the information society in a nutshell. That’s one of the reasons
for the tre-mendous expansion of the world-wide web, for instance. But
what I want to show now is that the World-Wide-Wal-Mart, with its
extra-ordinary information system and its incredible just-in-time
restocking system, has really become the model of neoliberal democracy.
What has happened in effect over the last 30 years is that the model of
the market has increas-ingly been applied to the governance of society.
And this has brought a number of significant changes to the postwar
social democracies.
Formerly, the citizen was considered as having responsibilities and
increasingly, as having rights. The responsibilities were to respect the
law, to work during adult life, and above all, to go to war if the
nation called on you. The rights were to an expanding range of social
services: education, housing, health care, unemployment insurance,
retirement. These were considered as ways of making the formal claim to
equality, which lies at the very basis of democracy, into something
substantial. Elections were conceiv-ed as the arena in which the
citizens exercised their political liberty, in the form of a choice over
the proper balance between obligations and rights. This was the postwar
welfare state.
Neoliberalism is basically a response to what was conceived as the
excessive growth of the welfare state. What the neoliberal mode of
governing has done is to treat social services as a marketplace, by
offering the citizen-client a choice of various options, ranging from a
minimum service which may be provided free by the government, all the
way to a theoretically optimum service which will always be provided by
the market, which in practice means the big corporations. A whole
panoply of public-private deals have sprung up in between the state-run
sector and the market. Private businesses are subcontracted to perform
public services; private individuals can also be compensated with public
money, or with tax breaks, when they go to a cor-poration to purchase
what was formerly a public service. The citizen has fewer obligations;
you are no longer called upon by universal conscription to go to war.
Elections have become a kind of marketplace where, every few years,
prices are compared with quality; or in other words, the proposed level
of taxation is compared with the services rendered, and above all, with
the performance of the private economy where most services are actually
obtained. If taxes are low, streets are clean, growth is high and jobs
are abundant, the party in power is voted back in.
It’s the economy, stupid, as one of our great Democratic presidents
learned to say. That’s what neoliberal governance is all about.
The thing that’s most important to understand here is that the citizen
no longer has rights, but interests. Now in particular—and this is where
we’re eventually going to get back to food—the citizen is supposed to
have great interest in keeping him or herself healthy, educated and
up-to-date, because this is the way to get the best price for oneself on
the job market. The citizen, as a recipient of services in health and
nourishment and education and insurance and entertainment, is now
conceived as the entrepreneur of his or herself, making wise or unwise
investments in his or her human capital, and selling the results for a
more or less advantageous price. This is the theory of a guy named Gary
Becker, who taught right here in Chicago and who is the author of a book
entitled Human Capital. What does that mean, not just to have but to be
capital?
The person who must not only choose what they like on the marketplace,
but also put their time up for sale on the marketplace, can only
consider themselves, their own subjectivity, the quality of their own
time, as a capital investment. Invest wisely in the capital of yourself.
Gather the best information possible about quality and prices, and then
make the best choice possible. But watch out: the wise investment will
always be with a private service supplier, a supplier of health or
education or leisure or insurance, be-cause the government is too big to
handle information well and therefore can only provide an average (i.e.
inferior) service. And then when it comes to selling yourself, i.e.
selling your health and education and capacity to entertain, the best
price will always come from a private employer, for similar reasons.
Only a private employer is flexible enough to get the best position for
your particular skills and aptitudes on the great marketplace of life.
Thus the only way for the government to address itself to the liberty of
the citizen is by counseling the citizen to have recourse to the market,
by counseling the citizen to buy and sell herself on the market.
What this means is that by addressing itself to the liberty of the
individual, neoliberal management produces democratic consent to the
privatization of everything. If you ever wonder-ed why welfare has
disappeared, the answer is very simple. The logic of the marketplace has
made government appear extremely inefficient in satisfying the
self-interest of the individual. On the contrary, the same logic makes
private enterprise appear inherently favorable to individual free
choice—even when the development of the two, private enterprise and free
choice, leads to ecological catastrophes, war, Wal-Mart, and the
degradation of everyday living conditions for the collectivity, as it is
doing today.
Now, I think we all know that the idea of governance without government
is a myth. But this myth is very important for our ruling class to
protect. What neoliberal government does to protect this myth of an
unregulated society, is simply to avoid, as far as possible, setting up
laws that directly restrict you from doing things. You’re not ostensibly
forced to swallow anything, in fact. You can do what you please, as long
as you can afford it. What government will do is to exert its direct
influence, not on the individual players, but on the rules of the social
game. At the behest of enormous industrial lobbies, it will create a
very complex subsidy system for American farmers, essentially in order
to encourage them to purchase ever more expensive equipment allowing
them to farm ever larger parcels of land and produce ever greater
quantities of perfectly awful chemicalized food which can be profitably
packed and distributed by a few highly industrialized companies; and
then market forces will naturally produce relatively cheap precooked
food which is a great thing to have, after all, in a city like Chicago
where so many people are working on flextime schedules for subminimum
wages. And at the same time, if it becomes apparent that certain people
would like to eat much better food, that information will circulate and
the market will provide for that, at a higher price level of course. But
God forbid that the government should provide for infrastructure like
transportation, co-operative storage rooms and coolers, free use of
public property and other such arrangements that would make it possible
for local organic farmers to supply Chicago residents with something
decent to eat. Because that would mean interfering with the magic of the
marketplace and restricting your freedom of choice.
Now why do people accept what has really become a disastrous food system
in the USA? Why do people accept a health-care system that is
tremendously expensive and tremendously unequal when it comes to
providing services for the entire population? Why do people accept to
trade an expensive public school system for an equally expensive public
prison system? One of the answers to these questions is that the
relentless individualization of every issue inhibits any attempt to look
at the big picture, the whole society, the entire population. You can’t
see the forest for the trees—or the wide world for the web. And this is
one of the reasons for trying to map out the system, trying to study the
infrastructure that neoliberal globalization is really based on. But
another answer, closer to home, is that people accept all these things
because the system always offers a better alternative for the individual
who is dissatisfied. In other words, the system has successfully
justified itself by offering freedom of choice. And that justification
is at the very heart of neoliberal governmentality.
To see this neoliberal governmentality in action, just take yourself
down to a store like Whole Foods. Look at all the good stuff they have
to eat down there. Consider how much better you would feel if you
weren’t all burnt out on junk food, and how much better you would look
if you ate some of those organic vegetables. Aren’t you starting to get
somewhere in life? Doesn’t someone like yourself deserve a better diet?
Don’t you want to forget about all those depressing products like
Twinkies and Frosties Taco Bell and Chicken McNuggets and all that crap
that was fed to you when you were growing up in the suburbs? Why not
take a little better care of yourself? Won’t you be able to concentrate
better on your job? Couldn’t you make more money if you were just a
little healthier?
By focusing the attention of the most active sectors of the national
population on the constantly offered opportunity to satisfy their
sovereign self-interest, and, by so doing, improve their human capital
and advance in the social hierarchy, neoliberal governance has succeeded
in maintaining a kind of self-instituted blindness to the increasing
degradation of the conditions under which we live together.
It then becomes possible to see that a revolt against neoliberalism
takes place whenever people organize themselves in a way that is not
directed and structured by the primary motivation of an interest that
can be satisfied by a market. In other words, the subjects of a revolt
against neoliberalism cannot be self-interested individuals, and they
cannot evaluate their decisions according to monetary information, that
is to say, according to the prices of things. Instead, they have to
adjust their relations to each other in another way and on another basis.
Who, then, can be the subject of a revolt against neoliberalism? What
are the motivations of subjects in revolt? How do they organize
themselves? On what basis do they evaluate their efforts? Toward what
ends do they work? Why and how are they able to oppose the system that
places them within the extremely unequal class-structure of neoliberalism?
I think these questions are worth asking whenever you set out on a
cultural or political project these days. Because the those two kinds of
projects are actually inseperable. Our tastes—our appetites—are one of
the ways we fit into society. You can have a taste for different
qualities of social relations, you can have various understandings of
what it means to be youself, what it implies, what consequences it has
for others. Neoliberal governmentality works at exactly this level. So
the notion, and even more, the sensation of sovereign self-interest is
something that one can play with. It’s at stake, for instance, in a
cultural and political project about food, how it’s produced, how it’s
distributed, what its economy is and what its ecology could be. The
point is not one of moralism, of self-abnegation, it’s not the idea that
you should sacrifice yourself because it’s the only right thing to do.
It’s more a matter of what you want to buy into, what you want to
swallow, and also how it tastes. It’s a matter of a taste for the kind
of society you might want to live in.
"

En nu, welke kant wil D66 op?

Henk Elegeert

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