On a Critique of Actually Existing Neoliberal Media

The trouble with many critiques of the neoliberalization of the media is that they tend to be more concerned with disparaging neoliberalism than with trying to understand it. More often than not, the term is invoked cursorily and applied as more of a storytelling device than a formally explicated concept as such (16). And although there may be a political necessity to “name neoliberalism,” ostensibly critical accounts that offer grand narratives of hegemony, ideology, class interests, and the imposition of monolithic neoliberalism—as politically effective and important as such accounts may be—only go so far toward understanding how the process of neoliberalization actually occurs.

Taking particular issue with this tendency among media scholars to reduce everything around us to a unitary neoliberalism imposed from outside, Sean Phelan draws upon a diverse range of theoretical sources (though he is most indebted to Pierre Bourdieu and Ernesto Laclau) and a handful of illustrative case studies in order to diagnose the contemporary condition of “actually existing neoliberalism.” Distinct from the political capture of ideological neoliberalism in the 1970s and 1980s, this current variant of pragmatic, postpolitical, or postideological neoliberalism, he argues, simultaneously “normalizes, while also officially disavowing, a normative commitment to neoliberal policies” (9).

Limiting the scope of the book to an analysis of the mainstream media of Anglo-American and liberal democratic media systems, and presenting the political rhetoric of the UK New Labour governments (1997–2010) as the exemplar of this postideological neoliberalism, Phelan looks not only toward UK and US contexts but also to Ireland and New Zealand. While Ireland and New Zealand have been described by neoliberals, at different moments, as model economies to follow, they also offer pertinent examples of the normalization, generalization, and internalization of neoliberal logics that Phelan sees as typical of contemporary neoliberalism. And as an Irishman currently based in New Zealand, Phelan is well placed to offer an informed account of the media and political cultures of these less well-documented cases.

After a brief overview of the literature on neoliberalism within “critical media studies,” distinguishing between critical political economy, cultural studies, and Foucauldian governmental approaches, Phelan sets out his own theoretical and methodological approach to studying something called neoliberalism. Following Jamie Peck’s recognition of neoliberalism as a variegated process (34), rejecting the false dichotomy between Marxist and Foucauldian approaches to neoliberalism, and emphasizing the relational logic of the social (64), he develops a discourse-based account of neoliberalism. This approach builds on the work of Laclau (and Chantal Mouffe) on the idea of the “political” as much as their approach to discourse theory, and mobilizes Bourdieu’s field theory as a sociological and theoretical supplement to Laclau (35). His approach is also indebted, to a lesser extent, to Jason Glynos and David Howarth’s particular version of discourse theory, as well as to their privileging of logics (57), the work of Michael Billig on banal rhetoric, and the work of Nick Couldry on media rituals.

Instead of overrelying on a reified version of neoliberalism, Phelan argues, it is more productive to see neoliberalism as a series of constitutive, discursive logics—in particular, those of market determinism, commodification, individualization, competition, and self-interest (61–62). Rather than replacing, or being imposed, he contends, these neoliberal logics are dialectically internalized (32) and contextually, didactically (57), and hegemonically (64) articulated with other political, social, and fantasmatic logics (32, 57).

Through the various case studies, Phelan then illustrates the ways in which such logics are internalized and articulated in different contexts. Arguing that the contemporary media discourse in New Zealand naturalizes the assumption that neoliberalism is now a part of the country’s past, Phelan demonstrates, through an analysis of a political news story from April 2011 (the dramatic “comeback” of an explicitly neoliberal politician), the relational construction of identities in both journalistic and political fields (71) and the ways in which neoliberal logics remain contextually articulated in present-day New Zealand. In particular, he deconstructs contemporary...