- Nov 2018
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A Convention In My Mind
A post by Sherri Spelic that led me to the works of Jana Bacevic, like the one Sherri refers to in this post, "The paradox of resistance: critique, neoliberalism, and the limits of performativity".
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janabacevic.net janabacevic.net
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The paradox of resistance: critique, neoliberalism, and the limits of performativity
I found this post from Sherri Spelic's post, "A Convention In My Mind.
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This is why, in the seemingly interminable debates about the ‘validity’ of neoliberalism as an analytical term, both sides are right: yes, on the one hand, the term is vague and can seemingly be applied to any manifestation of power, but, on the other, it does cover everything, which means it cannot be avoided either.
Neoliberalism's ambiguity: it can describe anything, and yet is also everything.
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Neoliberalism is the requirement to submit all your research outputs to the faculty website, but neoliberalism is also the pride you feel when your most recent article is Tweeted about.
The Tweet pride part of this hits home.
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In formal terms, critique is a form of a Russell’s paradox: a set that at the same time both is and is not a member of itself.
Critique as Russell's paradox.
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Namely, the object or target of critique becomes increasingly elusive, murky, and de-differentiated: but, strangely enough, so does the subject.
Interesting: so something like as critique gets deeper (?) the agency of the critic disperses.
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Varieties of neoliberalism, varieties of critique?
The three main varieties of critique of neoliberal knowledge production: marxist, poststructuralist, and neo-materialist (eg, big data, ai, machine learning).
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Relatedly, given the level of agreement among academics about the general direction of these changes, engagement with developing long-term, sustainable alternatives to exploitative modes of knowledge production has been surprisingly scattered.
Alternative practices to exploitative knowledge production have not kept up with critiques.
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