The (welfare) state is dead. Long Live the (neoliberal) state.

Another Thomas Lemke quote below, which helps me to get a better grip on Neoliberalism as a political rationality:

For Foucault the state itself is a "technology of government"; since it is "the tactics of government which make possible the continual definition and redefinition of what is within the competence of the state and what is not, the public versus the private, and so on, thus the state can only be understood in its survival and its limits on the basis of the general tactics of governmentality." The perspective of governmentality makes possible the development of a dynamic form of analysis that does not limit itself to stating the "retreat of politics" of the "domination of the market," but deciphers the so-called "end of politics" itself as a political program. The crisis of Keynesianism and the dismantling of welfare state forms of intervention lead less to a loss of the state's capacity to govern than to a reorganization or restructuring of technologies of government. This theoretical stance allows for a more complex analysis of neoliberal forms of government that feature not only direct intervention by means of empowered and specialized state apparatuses, but also characteristically develop indirect techniques for directing and controlling individuals. The strategy of rendering individual subjetcs (and also collectives, such as families, associations, etc.) "responsible" entails shifting the responsibility for social risks such as illness, unemployment, poverty, etc. and for life in society into the domain for which the individual is responsible, transforming it into a problem of "self-care." This form of individualization is therefore not outside the state. Likewise, the differences between the state and civil society, national regulation, and transnational agencies do not represent the basis and limits of practices of government, but rather function as their elements and effects.

Thomas Lemke

So, in contrast to political theories and projects which position, so as to critique and oppose, economic rationalism as the abandonment of supportive and social justice roles of the regulative state through deregulation and privatisation, the advantage of Foucault's 'governmentality' concept is that it explains what always seemed to be the contradiction of a deregulating and privatising government (I'm referring here to the Liberal-National Party Australian Federal Government - 1996-2007), increasing in size and increasing its regulatory regimes (eg. The phone book thick deregulatory industrial relations legislation: Workchoices) while presenting itself as the party of freedom from state interference.

Foucault understood neoliberal technologies of government as a transformation of the social rather than its end. The concept of governmentality allows us to call attention to the constitution of new political forms and levels of the state such as the introduction of systems of negotiation, mechanisms of self-organization, and empowerment strategies . . . [O]n the basis of the concept of governmentality, it can also be shown that privatization and deregulation do not follow economic imperatives so much as political strategies. Paradoxically, the critique of neoliberalism itself most often falls back on economic models of argumentation. The concept of governmentality proves to be useful in correcting the diagnosis of neoliberalism as an expansion of the economy into politics which takes for granted the separation of the state and market. The argument goes that there is some "pure" and "anarchic" economy that has to be "regulated" or "civilized" by a political response by society. Marx already demonstrated that such a position is untenable in his critique of political economy. Foucault's "critique of political reason" takes up the lines of this tradition. The transformation of the relations of economics and politics are therefore not to be investigated as the result of objective economic laws, but from the perspective of a transformation of social power relations. In short, instead of the power of the economy, the analytic of governmentality returns the focus to the "economy of power."

Lemke

The key point here is that Lemke is distinguishing between the social democratic critique of neoliberalism which figures a monolithic economic and financial machinery that forces nation-states to comply to its demands for labour flexibility and minimal environmental and capital controls, and a critique of neoliberal governmentality which figures the state (and citizen-subject) as constituted by techniques of market political reasoning and rationality. For example, within the current Federal Opposition leadership team, the Leader - Brendan Nelson - and shadow treasurer - Malcolm Turnbull, were referred to on ABC radio as the Opposition's key salesmen. The rationality, or logic, of this figuring of political technique in market terms is that the sphere of publicness in which these two representatives of the Opposition political party in Australia's Westminister-based Constitutional democracy are performing is actually a market-place where the citizenry are actually customers buying brands and goods. As Wendy Brown argues neoliberalism as political rationality is profoundly de-democratizing.

Critiques that seek to re-regulate what has been painted as de-regulation miss the extent to which neoliberalism's "economy of power", as Lemke puts it, is also operated through the semantics of not just "flexibility", but everyday "risk-assessment", "fitness", and "self-management." These are terms of 'mentality' in Foucault's 'govern-mentality', and comprise modes of subject-formation, or Bildungs, under neoliberalism.

We need a semantics and discourse, narratives too, that make claims on states, including the coming transnational ones, to regulate and govern without resorting to justifications in terms of market rationalities and without being always measured against the chronotope of the perfect commodity exchange with its atopian model of instantaneous, transparency under conditions of exact equality. But perhaps we first have to experience such forms of claim-making as rhythms, and follow Jaques Attali's lead in considering that music is prophecy.

I'd like to think that after neoliberalism there is the possibility of sustained sequences of eurhythmia - when social temporalities harmonise - which sounds like the Necks.

Thomas Lemke on neoliberalism - the semantics of flexibility

Over at Recording Surface Wendy Brown's illuminating essay on neoliberalism as a political rationality [“Neo-liberalism and the end of liberal democracy.” Theory and Event 7:1] is under consideration.

Brown draws on Thomas Lemke's writings for key concepts with which to think neoliberalism as a political rationality and form of governmentality. Lemke has an excellent website with many of his journal articles available to read and download.

Here's Lemke from 'The birth of bio-politics': Michel Foucault’s lectures at the College de France on neo-liberal governmentality.':

[T]he theoretical strength of the concept of governmentality consists of the fact that it construes neo-liberalism not just as ideological rhetoric or as a political-economic reality, but above all as a political project that endeavours to create a social reality that it suggests already exists. Neo-liberalism is a political rationality that tries to render the social domain economic and to link a reduction in (welfare) state services and security systems to the increasing call for ‘personal responsibility’ and ‘self-care’. In this way, we can decipher the neo-liberal harmony in which not only the individual body, but also collective bodies and institutions (public administrations, universities, etc.), corporations and states have to be ‘lean’, ‘fit’, ‘flexible’ and ‘autonomous’: it is a technique of power. The analysis of governmentality not only focuses on the integral link between micro- and macro-political levels (e.g. globalization or competition for ‘attractive’ sites for companies and personal imperatives as regards beauty or a regimented diet), it also highlights the intimate relationship between ‘ideological’ and ‘political-economic’ agencies (e.g. the semantics of flexibility and the introduction of new structures of production). This enables us to shed sharper light on the effects neo-liberal governmentality has in terms of (self-) regulation and domination. These effects entail not just the simple reproduction of existing asymmetries or their ideological obfuscation, but are the product of a re-coding of social mechanisms of exploitation and domination on the basis of a new topography of the social domain.

Thomas Lemke “'The birth of bio-politics': Michel Foucault’s lectures at the College de France on neo-liberal governmentality.” Economy and Society. 30.2: 190-207. p203. Emphasis added.

Meaghan Morris - said it best . . . Spectres of Keating

The media figure of Paul Keating, Treasurer in the Hawke Labor government of 1983-91, and Australian Prime minister 1991-96, became central to my effort to understand popular debate about history. Widely represented as embodying economic rationalism and globalization during the 1980s, Keating “morphed” in the 1990s into a bearer of history and nationalism. The critical, revisionary accounts of colonial history admitted to the mainstream during the Bicentenary became, for four brief but heady years, institutionally dominant accounts. They even crept into the tourist industry: most obviously through museums, and the promotion of Aboriginal culture, but also through state support for an export image of Australian as an urbane, socially liberal, multiculturalist heaven.



Given that the contradictions between this culturalist program and the economic realities of life for most rural and working-class people had been obvious for a decade before the “Keating era” had began, it is not surprising that the era ended with a devastating defeat for Labor at the federal election of March 1996. For historians, it will be a long time before this period can be seriously evaluated. As a cultural critic, however, I am concerned with the role played by images and stories of the past in the conflicts of the present. For me, analyzing both phases of the Keating mythos, “economics” (the 1980s) and “history” (the 1990s), is that it shows how profoundly so-called “local” and “everyday” issues of identity, community, and cultural power – so acutely raised by the social pressures of a tourist economy – are shaped by and responsive to the “global” struggle over the future of the nation-state.

Meaghan Morris "Introduction: history in cultural studies" from Too soon, too late: history in popular culture. (1998) : 13.

Two of my favourite quotes from Australian cultural critic Meaghan Morris, and ones which have an odd resonance now, after the return of the Labor Party to government, and on the day after the first budget this new government presented.

What feels strange is that during the Hawke and Keating period, even into the Howard era (1996-2007), politics was bursting with narrativity. Keating's struggle to overcome Hawke was a biographical narrative that had Shakespearean echoes, while the struggle to reform and modernise the economy (so that story goes) was a narrative full of danger, thrills and conflict. The end of the Howard era saw his deputy oddly annointed as the successor in such a controlled and bloodless manner that the aggressive campaign to sieze power that Keating and his coteries waged cast Costello's feeble plotting as weak and lacking drama.

And yet here we are around 6 months into a new Labor government and to use a term like mythos about Kevin Rudd, let alone about the Treasurer Wayne Swann, seems more than inappropriate. Mark Bahnisch gets it right when he argues that Swann and Rudd's lack of charismatic magnitude, their repetition of phrases like "working families" (a meme that Obama has picked up), are not due to lack of imagination or ineptitude, but rather arise out of a mode of forming and speaking to a constituency not mediated by the punditocracy or the commentariat.

Keating, on the other hand, did speak as though the commentariat was important, albeit with increasing selectivity after his 1993 election win. Notorious for his blue shouting down the phone at journalists who got the story wrong or made an enemy of him, Keating once Prime Minister, as Morris analyses it, morphed from vector of economics to history: his big picture now had cultural-historical reform painted alongside the modernisation of the economy.

And so the narrative often told of this period of transition from Labor to Liberal, a period marked by the intensification of teh culture wars, is that Keating alienated the battlers and ordinary Australians, once by economic rationalist reform (high interest rates, bankruptcy, manufacturing restructures) and twice by interpellating them as guilty, unsophisticated, conservatives. Howard, so it goes, listened, fought back against the cultural elites, declared that minority interest groups, the "X" industries (insert minor identity group), the cosmopolitan elites, the republicans.

The heat and stakes in that contest and conflict now seem to have been grossly inflated. Rudd and Swann, Deputy Prime Mnister Julia Gillard too, calm, technocratic, eschewing narratives aimed at the commentariat for catchphrases, like lines from haiku, repeated . . . repeated . . . repeated . . . relaxed & comfortable.

Does Keating hover over this weird calmness, as a spectre? Indeed has governmentality started to shift away from that phase informed by the myth of neoliberalism as deregulation toward a form of governing which clamly states and recognizes that even deregulation is a form of regulation?

On the other hand what was missing from the budget was any narrative forming responses to climate change. I wonder how Keating would have narrated a story about Australia's Green future?

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WATCHING THE TREASURER
John Forbes


I want to believe the beautiful lies
the past spreads out like a feast.

Television is full of them & inside
their beauty you can act: Paul Keating's

bottom lip trembles then recovers,
like the exchange rate under pressure

buoyed up words come out -
elegant apostle of necessity, meaning

what rich Americans want, his world is
like a poem, completing that utopia

no philosopher could argue with, where
what seems, is & what your words describe

you know exists, under a few millimetres
of invisible cosmetic, bathed

in a milky white flourescent glow.

From The Stunned Mullet & Other Poems