2004
"One of the essential characteristics of totalitarian regimes in Communist Europe was their persistent effort to stimulate mutual distrust among citizens. Inducement of uncertainty and of distrust in communication, and the propagation of fear, helped to maintain the stability of the regime." - Marková 2004: 9
2004
"The attraction of the concept of hegemony is supposed to lie in its broadening out of the ways in which political domination is meant to operate — through consent as well as coercion. But the recurrent feature of the political-economy invocation of hegemony is that it lacks any clear sense of how consent is actually secured, or any convincing account of how hegemonic projects are anchored at the level of everyday life, other than implying that this works by 'getting at' people in some way or other. And this is where the second use of Foucault in theories of neoliberalism-as-hegemony comes to the fore. Extending the range of activities that are commodified, commercialized and marketized necessarily implies that subjectivities have to be re-fitted as active consumers, entrepreneurial subjects, participants, and so on. Accordingly, the notion of 'governmentality' is appealed to in order to explain how broad macro-structural shifts from state regulation to market regulation are modulated with the micro-contexts of everyday routines. [9] ...
"The blind-spot in theories of neoliberalism — whether neo-Marxist and [sic] Foucauldian — comes with trying to account for how top-down initiatives 'take' in everyday situations. So perhaps the best thing to do is to stop thinking of 'neoliberalism' as a coherent 'hegemonic' project altogether. For all its apparent critical force, the vocabulary of 'neoliberalism' and 'neoliberalization' in fact provides a double consolation for leftist academics: it supplies us with plentiful opportunities for unveiling the real workings of hegemonic ideologies in a characteristic gesture of revelation; and in so doing, it invites us to align our own professional roles with the activities of various actors 'out there', who are always framed as engaging in resistance or contestation. The conceptualization of 'neoliberalism' as a 'hegemonic' project does not need refining by adding a splash of Foucault. Perhaps we should try to do without the concept of 'neoliberalism' altogether, because it might actually compound rather than aid in the task of figuring out how the world works and how it changes. One reason for this is that, between an overly economistic derivation of political economy and an overly statist rendition of governmentality, stories about 'neoliberalism' manage to reduce the understanding of social relations to a residual effect of hegemonic projects and/or governmental programmes of rule ... [and] pay little attention to the pro-active role of socio-cultural processes in provoking changes in modes of governance, policy, and regulation. [11]" - Barnett 2005
"The blind-spot in theories of neoliberalism — whether neo-Marxist and [sic] Foucauldian — comes with trying to account for how top-down initiatives 'take' in everyday situations. So perhaps the best thing to do is to stop thinking of 'neoliberalism' as a coherent 'hegemonic' project altogether. For all its apparent critical force, the vocabulary of 'neoliberalism' and 'neoliberalization' in fact provides a double consolation for leftist academics: it supplies us with plentiful opportunities for unveiling the real workings of hegemonic ideologies in a characteristic gesture of revelation; and in so doing, it invites us to align our own professional roles with the activities of various actors 'out there', who are always framed as engaging in resistance or contestation. The conceptualization of 'neoliberalism' as a 'hegemonic' project does not need refining by adding a splash of Foucault. Perhaps we should try to do without the concept of 'neoliberalism' altogether, because it might actually compound rather than aid in the task of figuring out how the world works and how it changes. One reason for this is that, between an overly economistic derivation of political economy and an overly statist rendition of governmentality, stories about 'neoliberalism' manage to reduce the understanding of social relations to a residual effect of hegemonic projects and/or governmental programmes of rule ... [and] pay little attention to the pro-active role of socio-cultural processes in provoking changes in modes of governance, policy, and regulation. [11]" - Barnett 2005
2007
"Soviet Communism and 'real socialism' [— [d]ubbed by Althusser a 'posthumous revenge of the Second International' — gave rise to debates over] Stalinist economic determinism; post-Stalinist Marxism gradually shifting towards the management of the status quo and torn between what were at times the two antagonistic spheres of interest of the 'socialist camp' and the 'international Communist movement'. The most interesting thing here would be to analyse the extreme tension running through this ideology (which to a large degree doubtless explains its attraction), between a project of resistance to capitalist modernization (if not indeed of a return to the communal modes of life that modernization destroys), and a project of ultra-modernity, or of the supersession of modernity by a 'leap forward' into the future of humanity (not just 'electrification plus soviets', as Lenin's slogan of 1920 had it, but the utopia of the 'new man' and the exploration of the cosmos)." - Balibar 2007: 87
2009
2010
"How would political responses to public problems change were we to take seriously the vitality of (nonhuman) bodies? By 'vitality' I mean the capacity of things — edibles, commodities, storms, metals — not only to impede or block the will and designs of humans but also to act as quasi agents or forces with trajectories, propensities, or tendencies of their own. My aspiration is to articulate a vibrant materiality that runs alongside and inside humans to see how analyses of political events might change if we gave the force of things more due." - Bennett 2010: viii
