Dr Will Davies, Goldsmiths, University of London
Abstract
Yanis Varoufakis, former Greek Finance Minister, described his encounter with the Troika as follows: "You put forward an argument that you’ve really worked on, to make sure it’s logically coherent, and you’re just faced with blank stares. It is as if you haven’t spoken. What you say is independent of what they say. You might as well have sung the Swedish national anthem." Varoufakis was voicing a critical sensibility that is becoming widespread today, that power has become somehow immune to reasoning or deliberation or evidence. Critical voices are becoming increasingly hysterical: twitter hashtags such as #thisisacoup and #labourpurge suggest that the status quo has become imbued with violence; the Artist Taxi Driver's mantra is that "This is not a recession, it's a robbery". These claims suggest something about the nature of contemporary power, that needs exploring. This paper does this by offering an alternative periodisation of neoliberalism, from the 1970s to the present, suggesting that a new form of state power emerged from 2008, that does not operate through the quest for legitimacy or consent. Instead, its main organising principle is the execution of punishments, rather than the promotion of efficiency or competitiveness. This builds on the analysis in The Limits of Neoliberalism (Sage, 2014).
Biography
Dr Will Davies is a Senior Lecturer at Goldsmiths and author of The Limits of Neoliberalism: Authority, Sovereignty & The Logic of Competition and The Happiness Industry: How the Government and Big Business Sold Us Well-Being. From his website: “My research explores how we have come to understand and govern economic practices in the way that we do. To explore this, I draw on a combination of history of economics, the work of Michel Foucault, the pragmatist sociology of Luc Boltanski and related traditions of cultural and critical theory. My concern in all of this is the question of how political and philosophical issues have been excluded from everyday economic practices, and how they might be reintroduced, for critical and transformative purposes. I am especially interested in the history of neoliberalism, and more recently in how mental wellbeing has become an economic policy issue. In order to consider how economic institutions can be constructed differently, I have also carried out research on co-operatives and alternative economic practices.”
