EPS Seminar Series - DIMITRIS SOUDIAS: " Alter-Neoliberal Analysis: Abduction, Critique, Radical Imagination"

This event is part of the Seminar Series of the theme group European Politics and Society.

If you would like to attend, please contact Martijn Schoonvelde (martijn.schoonvelde rug.nl).

Abstract

Yet again, neoliberalism has been declared dead. This time, it is due to the COVID-19 pandemic, climate breakdown, and the cost-of-living crisis.

The fact that we keep writing obituaries for neoliberalism, crisis after crisis, raises some important politico-epistemological issues about the ways in which we understand, analyze, and challenge neoliberal rationalities—and the prospects of eventually overcoming them.

On the one hand, as capitalist realist writings inform us, many of the utilitarian tenets of neoliberal rationalities have become naturalized in everyday conduct. On the other hand, as pragmatic sociologists show, because neoliberalism has succeeded in incorporating critical activity into its mode of functioning, challenging neoliberalism comes at the cost of its partial reproduction.

Against this backdrop, the goal of this article is to re-consider the role of critique in neoliberalism and map out what we may call 'alter-neoliberal analysis'. Building on the inferential logic of abduction, alter-neoliberal analysis 1) visibilizes the opaque ways in which neoliberal rationalities encroach upon practices, so as to 2) critique them in ways that minimize their reproduction and, on this basis, 3) radically imagine emancipatory politico-epistemological alternatives that are incomprehensible and unintelligible to neoliberal rationalities.