A razão neoliberal: Economias barrocas e pragmática popular

Radical Américas

by Verónica Gago

La razón neoliberal propone pensar el neoliberalismo no como una doctrina homogénea y compacta sino como una compleja tecnología de gobierno, lo cual implica poner el foco en la multiplicidad de niveles en los que opera, la variedad de mecanismos y saberes que implica y los modos en que se combina y articula, de manera desigual, con otros saberes y formas de hacer.
Las prácticas “desde abajo” (las ferias, los talleres textiles, la villa), por su parte, operan una pluralización del neoliberalismo que deja ver la articulación con formas comunitarias, con tácticas populares de resolución de la vida, con emprendimientos que alimentan las redes informales y con modalidades de negociación de derechos que se valen de esa vitalidad social.
Es en esta pluralización donde también aparecen los modos de resistencia a un modo de gobierno que se ha mostrado extremadamente versátil, y donde se revelan, sobre todo, las maneras heterogéneas, contingentes y ambiguas en que la obediencia y la autonomía se disputan, palmo a palmo, la interpretación y la apropiación de las condiciones neoliberales.

396 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2014

About the author

Verónica Gago is Professor of Social Sciences at the University of Buenos Aires, Professor at the Instituto de Altos Estudios, Universidad Nacional de San Martín, and Assistant Researcher at the National Council of Research (CONICET). Her work is deeply influenced by active participation in the experience of Colectivo Situaciones.

Reviews

[Athena]

I only read about 25 percent of this book, including the introduction, conclusion, and first and last chapter. It's provocative because Gago takes the very popular Foucauldian idea of neoliberalism, which is based in governmentality, and asks: What if the spaces and practices that we have been understanding as responses to neoliberalism, as ways of managing and resisting governmentality, are actually ways of generating neoliberalism "from below"? Gago looks at concrete ways of being and doing around La Salada market on the periphery of Buenos Aires to think through how informal practices might be considered as preceding and giving rise to new formal structures, rather than as ways of making do in the absence of state care. She frames this in terms of Spinoza's conatus, as a vitalist striving for self-maintenance. I got lost here since I haven't read Spinoza, and it isn't clear from the sections that I read how this vitalism is ultimately vital -- as in life enhancing.

There are also some arguments about the neodevelopmentalism and extractivism of the supposedly anti-neoliberal, anti-extractive administrations in South America from 2000 onward. I'll probably return to this book because it seems to add an important dimension to neoliberal vs. anti-neoliberal takes on Latin American politics and resistance in 2019.

[R · Rating 5 out of 5]

"From below, neoliberalism is the proliferation of forms of life that reorganize notions of freedom, calculation, and obedience, projecting a new collective affectivity and rationality." (p 6)

The theory is as expected, the data is rich, the story is well told.

[Kyle · Rating 4 out of 5]

Understand neoliberalism and you understand the root of everything which happens today. Unfortunately something is lost in the english translations, sentences run on and the wording can get a little confusing.