Did Somebook-body Say Neoliberalism? On the Uses and Limitations of a Critical Concept in Media and Communication Studies

Abstract

This paper explores the political-economic basis and ideological effects of talk about neoliberalism with respect Keywords: Neoliberalism, Marxism, Critical Theory, Critical Media and Communication Studies, HackgateThe media and communication studies textbooks of the early 1980s constituted an ideological battleground for the struggle between liberal pluralism, on the one hand, and Marxism, on the other (see, for example, Gurevitch et al. 1982). Under the influence of European critical theory and British cultural studies, Marxist communication scholars talked of capitalism and class struggle, and accused pluralists of underestimating structures of domination (Hall 1982). With stronger roots in US sociological tradition, pluralist media critics advocated for democracy, chastising Marxists for their economic determinism or functionalism. While it is certainly possible to read the history of the relationship between Marxist and liberal pluralist approaches to media and cultural studies in terms of a series of rapprochements and overlaps (McLennan 1989), there can be little doubt that in recent decades, the pluralist perspective has all but vanquished its erstwhile ideological competitor.Marxism has always, of course, been marginalised in media and communication studies. In the twentieth century, for example, McCarthyism in the US and the Radikalenerlass in Germany restricted the activities of Marxist communication scholars. Nevertheless, in the 1960s and 1970s, Marxism was a driving force in workers' struggles and a tangible presence in the academy. The critical marginalisation of Marxism became particularly apparent with the ebbing of class struggle in the 1980s and 1990s. In these decades, the disciplines of media and cultural studies, under the sway of a celebratory postmodernism, came to distinguish their pluralist wisdom from the supposedly "elitist" positions of the different Marxist traditions, continually emphasising the eclectic nature of their own standpoints and of the media cultures they critiqued. According to the pluralist paradigm, the newspaper reader, the television viewer, the radio listener are free to consumer culture as active, empowered, resistant audiences in a marketplace of ideas underpinned and sustained by liberal democratic ideology. Following on from this there is the recognition that capitalism may have some shortcomings, but it is 'the best we've got' and so must be made the best of: the capitalist system and its media institutions are seen to represent the best possible arrangement of things. The popularity of this perspective in the cultural studies milieu of the 1990s has reconfigured the ideological co-ordinates of cultural and media theory, so that for many critics today, the task of media and cultural criticism is no longer to critique capitalism, but to defend the principles of "democracy" and "pluralism" against unwelcome encroachments of the market -

On the perils of invoking neoliberalism in public health critique

“…Although its conceptual intelligibility is often taken for granted (Garland & Harper, 2012), neoliberalism is variously used as: a sloppy synonym for capitalism itself, or as a kind of shorthand for the world economy and its inequalities … a kind of abstract causal force that comes in from outside to decimate local livelihoods … [or] a broad, global cultural formation characteristic of a new era of 'millennial capitalism' -a kind of global meta-culture, characteristic of our newly deregulated, insecure, and speculative times. And finally, 'neoliberalism' can be indexed to a sort of 'rationality' in the Foucauldian sense, linked less to economic dogmas or class projects than to specific mechanisms of government, and recognizable modes of creating subjects.…”