Constructing cultures of collective freedom (strand at LCCT)
Trafford, Tia and Trevatt, Tom (2017) Constructing cultures of collective freedom (strand at LCCT). In: London Conference for Critical Thought, 30 June - 1 July 2017, Southbank University, London, UK. (Unpublished)
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Contemporary politics is in disarray. In Europe and North America, are we witnessing the termination of the “third-way” “depoliticisation” of politics as coterminous with the demise of neoliberalism? Or, the revelation of the brutal truth of this conjecture? Emerging from these specific socio-political constellations appears, at first sight, to be forms of both left and right populism, in which borders are given primacy ahead of markets, and ethnocentrism at the expense of global trade. Do these movements suggest that new forms of collective action are possible, in ways that were actively prevented by neoliberalism’s construction of the individual-as-entrepreneur? Or, are these new political conditions going to produce novel forms of isolation as our current political common sense is replaced with new forms of subjectivity, social relations and cultural norms?
The simple suggestion that neoliberalism atomises society to individual “entrepreneurs”, so that we are incapable of building collective action might be too short-sighted. For example, the seeds for the kinds of cultural siloing we are witnessing now have been sown in the liberal emphasis upon an often depoliticized program of recognition, at the expense of structural change, and also the neoliberal use of difference as part of a cosmopolitanism “asset”. Moreover, insofar as recognition based politics has been co-opted into both liberal and neoliberal political modes of governance in the form of identity politics, the notion that emphasizing concrete and situated standpoints is inimical to, and corrective to the injustices of universalizing liberalism is to misunderstand the problematics of liberalism, and its relationship with power. Most pertinently, the depoliticisation of culture actively obscures the ways in which liberalism and neoliberalism rely upon massive local and global inequalities, both material and normative, that are occluded by the removal of such difference from the realm of the political.
It in this context that we think that there is a significant need to reconsider the construction of collective freedoms, in order to think beyond the political constellations of both neoliberalism and populism, and to consider ways in which we can actively engage in the reconfiguration of structural power. Freedom under neoliberalism is constructed around the belief in the (demonstrably false) freedom of the market – for individuals to be able to make rational, free choices – and not through the construction of commonality. These conditions, created in part by the focus on identity politics, allow us to ignore how political action can, and should, be directed at structural change, specifically, at the achievement of universal emancipation. Undergirding this research is a conviction that equally distributed freedom should be the express aim of any political action, not the construction of privileged spaces of closely guarded freedoms divorced from constructive collectivity.
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