What are the relations between Neoliberalism and Postmodernism?

Question

The following passage surprised me, not only because it has neoliberals in place of postmodernists, but also because it describes everything I see as a consequence of so-called "Postmodernism" (or whatever name you give it: post-structuralism, deconstructionism, moral relativism...): destruction of meaning, praise of fragmentation, anti-intellectualism...

Neoliberals are part of a long, intellectual, (or anti-intellectual) tradition which seeks to deny the importance of meaning and even destroy its relevance. Why would anyone want to do that? Because, as history shows, destroying meaning is the key to gaining, at least temporarily, power and control, whether it be over other human beings or natural processes in general. For example, in his brilliant book on the history of debt, David Graeber reveals how different forms of slavery succeed by displacing people from their meaning-rich contexts. As well as the application of brute force, people are rendered powerless through being dislocated, fragmented, and thus, disoriented. Those held in slavery have often survived by eventually creating new systems of meaning, often through embracing religion of some form as a way of transcending the power of their oppressors.

What are the relations between Postmodernism and Neoliberalism?

Answer 1

Maybe I'm the wrong person to answer your question because my gounding in philosophy is not that great, maybe I'm the right one because I likely share some of your political outlook ...

One of the posits of postmodernist thought is, I believe, that nothing has meaning per se, meaning is always assigned, negotiated etc. And so meaning can be destroyed. And this was always so, postmodernists and their forerunners are just the ones pointing this out instead of making up complicated metaphysic systems to safe a concept of meaning.

So neoliberals are just recent thinkers in a long line who tried to restructure society by, among other things, destroying systems of meaning and belonging - or solidarity! - that get in their way. As mentioned in the paragraph, this destruction of meaning was practiced millenia before Nietzsche wrote the first text that inspired Focault that inspired Deleuze or whomever.

One could also point out that certain systems of belonging, e.g. the specific nationalism of the Nazis to take the least controversial example, should be destroyed.

You could also ask what "meaning" in the context given above is supposed to mean (no pun intended), if it's not the meaning we give to things in a given moment, shaped by our experiences and thus pretty malleable.

Answer 2

Neoliberalism and Postmodernity are inversely related. Both follow what might be called high Modernism, which constituted a set of postwar institutions, values, and assumptions.

Among these were the concepts of the unity of the sciences, technological progress, abstraction in art, the Bretton Woods Accord and the United Nations, mass infrastructure, functionalist architecture, the welfare state, and a globalist outlook. At the same time, however, this unitary view was starkly divided by the the existence of conflicting economic systems in the so-called communist and capitalist realms. Not monotheism, but manicheanism.

In the developed Western nations, the situation produced the "managerial state" stabilizing welfare, Keynesian policies, large-scale public corporations, and broad labor union agreements--all meant to ameliorate the excesses and periodic collapses of capitalism. The Neoliberal revolution grew out of a reaction to inflation, along with a self-conscious conservative-capitalist "revolt." With the decline of state communism, the Neoliberal orthodoxy spread through global deregulation, debt financing, shareholder value, and a positivist, pseudoscientific view of "market pricing" as the sole calculus of value.

While this Thatcher-Reagan-Friedman dogma might claim to be type of social pluralism arising through deregulation and market "freedom," it was in fact a highly idealistic, financially centralized, globally aggressive hegemony imposed upon the world often through violent means. The author you quote seems to be making the point that such "postmodern" economics destroys local values, traditions, cultures, etc. through global finance and rampant commodification.

In a kind of dialectic inversion, this market utopianism gave rise to the various cultural trends loosely called Postmodernism, first in architecture. These are characterized by a skeptical pluralism and critique of the "grand narratives" or "gods-eye-view" of Modernism. The unity of the sciences, for example, could not be naively sustained amid increasing scientific specialization and more attention to the history and actual working methods of scientists. A certain relativism, for better or worse, becomes inevitable with the sheer accumulation of information.

The "inverse relation" I refer to is really the continuing dynamic of capitalism, which at one level unifies mass markets and concentrates wealth, while at another level accelerates the diversification of commodities and the "division of labor," including such cultural labors as science and art. This is undoubtedly an impetus to the various Postmodern trends. The mass-market destruction of local cultures, traditions, architectures, languages, species, and so forth likewise lends urgency to a pluralistic and preservationist reaction.

If you are interested, the geographer David Harvey has written a number of influential critiques of both Neoliberalism and Postmodernism from a Marxist perspective. While Neoliberalism is an active and well-defined ideological program, Postmodernism is more of a set of trends and critiques marked by its skepticism towards such one-size-fits-all programs.

Answer 3

To the degree it proceeds along the same trajectory at all, Neoliberalism here is a step far before Postmodernism. It is the embodiment of Enlightenment thinking in a wish to make more and more dependent upon less and less so that we are all 'free' from one another and from the harsher demands of our reality. It is primarily an economic theory that reduces everything to market forces and freedom. In that, it has a lot more to do with Existentialism than Postmodernism.

As 'The Genealogy of Morals' or Marxism points out, this war of the powerful constantly undermining the previous means of being powerful has been going on forever. And it is wholly unrelated to the ultimate loss of the modernist dream to its own logic.

Neoliberalism is totally consonant with late modernism -- taking science and individuality as the center of the universe and rendering it cold, sterile, independent and unattached to any deeper meaning. This attempt to make the universe rational and efficient is the ascending direction of the 'modernism' that Postmodernism questions. It is part of what Postmodernism actually resists, by emphasizing context and admitting the relevance of the aspects of reality that we cannot know.

Displacing someone from their cultural embedding as a strategy for power, by controverting their religion with science and displacing their cultural institutions with your own, or with your own rational constructions, does not assume a respectful and constructive relativism. It assumes that relativism is wrong and that dedication to institutions that are not entirely modern and rational is primitive and wasteful. It seeks to leverage that 'waste' for 'good', without realizing that 'good' is selfishly defined and is itself something wasteful of what is embodied in traditions themselves over time.

Answer 4

Old question, but that's ok...

First, let's be clear: postmodernism (as such) does not exist, except in certain branches of aesthetics (fine art, architecture, perhaps literature...). The term 'postmodern' (when used by people talking about social theory or political philosophy) is something between a straw-man and a bogieman: it takes a wide variety of acute and painful social critiques and lumps them under a disparaging term where they can be blown off as occult reasoning. Anyone who uses the term 'postmodernist' in his way treats it as synonymous with pretentious, overblown, and sloppy thinking. And while there are clearly pretentious, overblown, and sloppy thinkers out there in the world — I've read a few myself — every craft has its share of poor craftsmen. We don't judge fine art by the holdings of MOBA, and we don't judge modern philosophy by the work of those who habitually trip over their own egos.

That said, neoliberalism is anti-philosophical and anti-intellectual, but that doesn't imply that they are trying to 'destroy meaning'. Neoliberals actually do the opposite: they try to construct and maintain a carefully husbanded worldview, so that people will return to the understandings of the world which allowed neoliberals to become powerful and wealthy. That isn't quite as crass as it sounds; I suspect most neoliberals honestly believe that worldview to be righteous and good. But the fact is that they are trying to construct a set of meanings which ipso facto implies the effort to destroy other worldviews and meaning-sets.

The kinds of things that get lumped derisively under the term 'postmodernism' are explicitly intellectual and philosophical. They are all, in their distinct ways, part of the protracted effort to uproot and dispose of the fancies and fabrications found in neoliberalism and other status quo ideologies. If neoliberalism tries to build a great dam that constrains and holds meaning within a circumscribed, defined comfort zone, these philosophical movements try to tear pieces of that dam down: to free up meaning, as it were. Neither project is explicitly nihilistic.