Reworking Critical Theory under Neoliberal Conditions: Chari's Political Economy of the Senses

This review was originally presented as a symposium at the 2016 meeting of the Western Political Science Association. The book is divided into three sections, which the reviewers treat in turn.

________

Anita Chari's A Political Economy of the Senses: Neoliberalism, Reification, Critiqueundertakes a critical analysis of the neoliberal condition as well as an exploration of the possibilities of its critique. The account she offers is rich and complex, developed through engagement with a diverse range of theories and positions. The starting point of the book is an inquiry into the specificity of neoliberalism; that is, what makes it different from earlier eras of capitalism and what might be unique about its domination.

For Chari, the answer to both questions revolves around the state in neoliberalism. What she describes as a particularly neoliberal form of domination is essentially a project of depoliticization that is based on a shift between the state and civil society that is simultaneously orchestrated and obfuscated by the state. The state, thus, plays a crucially important but also deeply ambiguous role in neoliberalism. Such an emphasis on the neoliberal state may seem surprising at first, given that the cliché of neoliberalism as a doctrine of ever-expanding, self-regulating markets would suggest that the state is of only marginal importance in neoliberalism. However, siding with scholarship that examines neoliberalism predominantly in its 'actually existing form', Chari makes a convincing case that the state is a crucial agent in the process of bringing about neoliberalism and ensuring its continued domination. ¹

What exactly do such processes of neoliberalization entail then? Chari argues that they result in a "specific way in which class dynamics are being obscured and depoliticized, mainly through a reorganization of the relationship between the neoliberal state and the economy and through shifts in the relationship between the economic and political spheres more broadly" (23). She illustrates this core thesis by pointing to new forms of (economic) governance 'at a distance' that give the appearance of a state that abstains from any intrusion into the economy and thus make denial of any state responsibility for economic outcomes somewhat credible. While this kind of economic governance may be desirable for political decision makers who can engage in what political scientists refer to as 'blame avoidance', Chari contends that governing at a distance through 'soft' law, networks, etc. also leaves the economy more prone to crisis and, ironically, that the job of dealing with actual crises and the responsibility for a speedy amelioration of socio-economic conditions tends to fall at the feet of the state and its actors once again.

More generally, Chari argues, the neoliberalcondition is characterized by an inversion of the relation between state and economy under liberalconditions: The mantra of a radical economic liberalism may have been a simple 'laissez-faire' directed at the state. In neoliberalism the state has to constitute and maintain markets while still trying to convey the impression that it keeps its distance from the economic sphere. In Chari's view, the deficiencies of both contemporary critical theory and radical democratic thought stem from a failure to acknowledge this shift and to draw the conclusions for their respective modes of critique. Both cling to a view of the political sphere/the state as a more or less autonomous realm while, in reality, we see a complex intertwinement of the political and the economic. Political economists of predominantly Marxist persuasion, she notes, are well aware of this intertwinement and their theorization of the recent crises is based on it. However, according to Chari, their critique of contemporary capitalism is void of an experiential dimension that she finds indispensable for an effective challenge of neoliberalism. ²

Before we turn to the potential deficiencies of other critical approaches to neoliberal capitalism and Chari's own perspective, let...