Is Resistance Futile?: Cultural Studies at the Zenith of Neoliberalism

After years of relatively optimistic arguments about resistant readings of mass culture texts that were meant as a corrective to the dour attitude of the Frankfurt School, new books on neoliberal culture by Jodi Dean, Gillian Harkins, Janice Peck, and Gregory Sholette indicate a move by cultural studies writers toward a more pessimistic view of capitalist hegemony. As Cotton Seiler noted in a review essay in this journal, “Putting the Market in Its Places,” the term neoliberalism has become almost as popular a framing device as postmodernism once was.¹ These books demonstrate the impact of two major approaches to neoliberalism in cultural studies scholarship. The first is a Marxist analysis, as articulated by the geographer David Harvey, whose Brief History of Neoliberalism provides the definition and history of neoliberal economic policies for all four books. The second analysis is Michel Foucault’s interpretation of neoliberal “biopolitics,” introduced to the English-reading scene in the 1990s by the sociologist Nikolas Rose and popularized by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Empire in 2000.²

Harvey, Foucault, Hardt, and Negri all agree on the economics of neoliberal capitalism, but there are fundamental differences in their accounts of the state and in their theories of subjectivity. Foucault’s understanding of neoliberalism defines it against the laissez-faire of traditional liberalism as government by “permanent vigilance, activity and intervention.”³ In contrast, Harvey argues that the neoliberal state operates inconsistently in whatever way serves to support the ruling class, so that there is a basic contradiction between neoliberal ideology and neoliberalism as a practice whose purpose is to “sustain elite power.”⁴ Foucault also argues that neoliberalism has produced an “enterprising self,” a characterization of the neoliberal subject that appears in all four books under review. In economic terms, their authors agree with Harvey, Hardt, and Negri that one of neoliberalism’s major characteristics is “financialization,” by which they mean that finance capital has overtaken material production. While a number of Marxist economists support this analysis, which comes from the work of the economists Gérard Duménil and Dominique Lévy, others do not, and lively debates between explanations of the current crisis as caused by financialization or the tendency of the rate of profit to fall continue to rage among Marxists. As part of that debate, Harvey, in a sort of “neo-popular frontism” that attacks the Far Left as the handmaid of the Right, blames leftist critiques of the welfare state for the rise of neoliberalism itself. Dean echoes Harvey in arguing that and the Left’s “failure to defend core Keynesian commitments . . . is the fundamental political trauma affecting the contemporary left.”⁵ Hardt and Negri retain the critique of Keynesian economics and, more importantly, promote a neo-anarchist strategy of autonomous resistance, while Harvey argues for collectively organized resistance through labor unions and political parties.⁶ Among the authors reviewed here, only Harkins critiques the welfare state instead of calling for a return to it, and she is the only one of the authors to suggest that small, localized examples of micropolitics will suffice.

Written in the context of the Great Recession, the failure of mass international mobilizations against U.S.-led wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to have much impact on national policies, the continued growth of mass incarceration, and the disappointment with Democratic Party leadership, Dean, Harkins, Peck, and Sholette begin from the perspective that we are in a moment of neoliberal hegemony...