Theoretical Criminology http://tcr.sagepub.

com/

Zombie neoliberalism and the ambidextrous state

Jamie Peck Theoretical Criminology 2010 14: 104 DOI: 10.1177/1362480609352784 The online version of this article can be found at: http://tcr.sagepub.com/content/14/1/104

Published by:
http://www.sagepublications.com

Additional services and information for Theoretical Criminology can be found at: Email Alerts: http://tcr.sagepub.com/cgi/alerts Subscriptions: http://tcr.sagepub.com/subscriptions Reprints: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.nav Permissions: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav Citations: http://tcr.sagepub.com/content/14/1/104.refs.html

>> Version of Record - Feb 25, 2010 What is This?

Downloaded from tcr.sagepub.com at University of Warwick on February 13, 2013

Theoretical Criminology
The Author(s), 2010 Reprints and Permissions: http://www.sagepub.co.uk/ journalsPermissions.nav Vol. 14(1): 104110; 13624806 DOI: 10.1177/1362480609352784

Zombie neoliberalism and the ambidextrous state

JAMIE PECK

University of British Columbia, Canada

Among of the scores of interviews conducted for Pierre Bourdieus monumental study of social suffering in the deindustrializing France of the 1980s, one of the most memorable was with a high-school principal in a riot-torn neighborhood recently restyled as an education priority zone. Stressed out, ground down, and effectively denied his vocation, the embattled principal complained that inner-city schools were increasingly being treated like police stations, while his own role had been degraded to that of a kind of superintendent, a maintainer of order, obliged to adopt strong arm tactics (Balazs and Sayad, 1991: 53, 1999: 493). Confronted daily with the social fallout from economic insecurity and welfare-state withdrawal, these frontline workers had reason, in Bourdieus mind, to feel abandoned, if not disowned outright, in their efforts to deal with the material and moral suffering that is the only certain consequence of this economically legitimated Realpolitik (Bourdieu et al., 1999 [1993]: 183). If neoliberalization, for Bourdieu, entailed the contradictory translation of an austere utopian vision into a political program, steered and consolidated by the machine-like rationality of the market, the social workers, school-teachers, and street-level bureaucrats of the left arm of the state were, at the time, among its least cooperative functionaries. In fact, he speculated that this lumpen class of social-state bureaucrats might even be driven to insurrection against its economically rationalist superiors, the new mandarins of market rationality and their technocratic aides, since the left hand of the state has the sense that the right hand no longer knows, or worse, no longer really wants to know what the left hand does (Bourdieu, 1998 [1992]: 2). In his characteristically provocative intervention, Loc Wacquant (2009) extends and augments Bourdieus analysis in the context of our late neoliberal conjuncture. He describes a marked historical evolution, beyond the 1980s configuration captured so vividly by Bourdieu and his colleagues (a research team which included Wacquant himself (Bourdieu et al., 1993)), 104
Downloaded from tcr.sagepub.com at University of Warwick on February 13, 2013

PeckZombie neoliberalism and the ambidextrous state when internecine struggles within the state apparatus itself took the form of an asymmetrical contest between those left-arm spending ministriesthe trace, within the state, of the social struggles of the past (Bourdieu, 1998 [1992]: 2)and those right-arm agents of austerity, privatization, deregulation, and marketization. In Wacquants (2009: 302) reading of the current configuration, what he characterizes as a genuine institutional innovation entails four interrelated tendencies. First, the bloated prison complex has assumed decisive new roles, alongside the various economic functions of the state, in what has become an increasingly muscular (and masculinized) right armthe authoritarian wing of the neoliberal state. Second, residual, left-arm (or social state) functions have been profoundly transformed through the workfarist logics of behavioral modification and market subordination. Third, innovations in contemporary statecraft reflect an increasingly ambidextrous relationship between the authoritarian and the assistential wings of the state, which between them exert an increasingly tight grip on the (distinctively postindustrial) regulatory dilemmas of labormarket flexibilization and advanced social marginality. And fourth, this historically unprecedented coupling, which is probably most appropriately characterized in terms of symbiosis rather than institutional-ideological unity, is not only registered among the higher echlelons of the state, but through conjoint logics and dynamics of regulation at the ground level, especially in the inner cities. So, it is no longer the case that the right arm of the state is ignorant, indifferent, and/or actively unsympathetic to what the left arm is doing, in the manner originally suggested by Bourdieu, and echoing the biblical injunction that is the idiomatic source of this corporal metaphor ([W]hen thou doest alms, let not thy left hand know what thy right hand doeth, Matthew 6:3). Today, Wacquant insists, the left and right hands of the state are working in ways that are functionally and organizationally complementary, to fashion new forms of active-and-punitive statecraft in the context of the contradictory order that is deregulated capitalism. Furthermore, this is not simply a generically (neo)conservative but a specifically neoliberal project, just as likely to be championed by politicians of the (center) left as those of the right. In fact, this transformative dynamic in the management of social marginality may even advance faster and farther under third-wayers, since they are seemingly less constrained by doctrinaire forms of antistatism. Ronald Reagan may have brought us benefit cutbacks and the toxic metaphor of the welfare queen, but it was Bill Clinton who eventually came through on the promise to end welfare as we know it; and Margaret Thatchers pugnacious employment minister, Norman Tebbit, may have lectured the unemployed to get on their bikes and look for work, but it was Tony Blairs workfare policies that ultimately delivered not only the metaphorical bikes but also an unambiguous push off welfare (Peck, 2001). Wacquants (2009: 302) invocation of neoliberalism as the root cause of the shift from social to penal forms of poverty management, and the subsequent rise of the carceral-assistential complex, rightly calls attention to the

105

Downloaded from tcr.sagepub.com at University of Warwick on February 13, 2013

106

Theoretical Criminology 14(1) evolutionary character of neoliberalization processes, though no doubt some will bridle at the de facto functionality (albeit post hoc functionality) of the resulting regulatory ensemble. Clearly, the principal tenets of neoliberalism were not handed down, as policy commandments, in tablets of stone from Mont Pelerin; Hayek himself always insisted that neoliberalism must be a flexible creed (Hayek, 1944; cf. Peck, 2008). In the long and winding path from its initial (re)articulation as an ideational-ideological project, through to its close encounters with (and enfoldment into) diverse forms of state and extrastate power over the past three decades, neoliberalism has demonstrated remarkable shape-shifting capacities. Its destructively creative logic may have initially been animated by the multifront war against the social state, social entitlements, and social collectivitieswhich can be seen as the roll-back phase of neoliberalism (Peck and Tickell, 2002)but the project has become increasingly consumed by the proliferating challenges of managing the costs and contradictions of earlier waves of neoliberalization. Neoliberalism, in this sense, is not what it used to be (and it can never be what it used to be). From dogmatic deregulation to market-friendly reregulation, from structural adjustment to good governance, from budget cuts to regulation-by-audit, from welfare retrenchment to active social policy, from privatization to publicprivate partnership, from greed-is-good to marketswith-morals the variegated face of roll-out neoliberalism represents, at the same time, a deeply consolidated and a crisis-driven form of market rule. Maybe it is still being guided, in some way or another, by Hayeks rusty old compass, trained on the unattainable (and stark) utopia of a free-market society, but the vanguard momentum of the revolution from above, such as the Thatcherite moment of unapologetic confrontation and conviction politics, has long since given way to opportunistic searches for Die Neue Mitte, ameliorative firefighting, trial-and-error governance, devolved experimentation, and the pragmatic embrace of what works. More often than not, the new neoliberalism learns (and evolves) by doing wrong, having become mired in the unending challenge of managing its own contradictions, together with the social and economic fallout from previous deregulations and malinterventions. It fails, but it tends to fail forwards. For all the ideological purity of free-market rhetoric, for all the machinic logic of neoclassical economics, this means that the practice of neoliberal statecraft is inescapably, and profoundly, marked by compromise, calculation, and contradiction. There is no blueprint. There is not even a map. Crises themselves need not be fatal for this mutable, mongrel model of governance, for to some degree or another neoliberalism has always been a creature of crisis. But selectively exploiting the crises of Keynesian-welfarist, developmental, or state-socialist systems is one thing, responding to crises of neoliberalisms own making is quite another. Increasingly, though, this is the unseemly task of metastasized forms of roll-out neoliberalism, be this in the aftermath of, say, the Asian financial crisis, Hurricane Katrina, or the recent unravelling of credit markets. Each of these moments is typically

Downloaded from tcr.sagepub.com at University of Warwick on February 13, 2013

PeckZombie neoliberalism and the ambidextrous state accompanied by frenzied attempts to reboot (and sometimes to rebrand) the rickety regime of market rule, but they are each alsoviscerally and strategicallypolitical moments, the outcomes of which cannot be predicted (see Leitner et al., 2007). It is possible that some neoliberalism 3.0 may neutralize, displace, or reschedule some of the underlying crisis tendencies, but these are never permanently resolved. Each new generation of the free-market software, even if it comes in different packaging, will contain new bugs, as well the old design flaws. This means that what passes for neoliberal governance at the present time invariably displays a rolling, if not roiling, dynamic. It is (re)animated as much by contradiction as by conviction. In this context, Wacquant productively trains his attention on the ongoing crises of flex-labor markets and social marginality, which under conditions neoliberal governance clearly exhibit an historically distinctive, if still evolving, form. There has, in fact, been a root-and-branch reconstruction of what Claus Offe (1985) once called the boundary institutions of the low-wage labor market over the course of the last three decades, which has been a zone of serial policy failure, as well as insistent institutional innovation and restless reregulation. Successive (and in some respects cumulative) waves of reformin the welfare/workfare regime, in incarceration policy, in housing and caring services, in immigration legislation, and so onhave incrementally remade conditions in, and around, contingent labor markets. In the process, new social contours of inclusion and exclusion, and new norms of employment and un(der)employment, have been forged. On the one hand, these labor markets really have been marketized in some respects. Laborpower is increasingly commodified, while prevailing forms of competition look more and more Darwinian. But no less significantly, they have also been institutionally and racially restratified, such that the prison system and workfare regimes, in particular, cast very long shadows, while new intermediaries, such as predatory temp agencies, are also actively reshaping the rules of the game (Peck and Theodore, 2000, 2001, 2008). Among the more generalized trends, rights of social entitlement or shelter from the labor market have been pared to a minimum, as the new boundary institutions seek perpetually, and purposefully, to rotate their clients through employability tests. For all their distinctive social functions and institutional dynamics, temp agencies do this; workfare programs do this; and even prisons do this. They not only reflect (contingent labor) markets, they actively remake them. Wacquants focus on cross-institutional connections, homologies, and meta-logics consequently keys into diagnostically critical features of this lateneoliberal regulatory conjuncture, not least as one of its preeminent sites of contradiction. He is surely correct to reserve a special place for workfare and prisons in the management of (increasingly normalized forms of) economic insecurity and social marginality. But my sense is that there remain some seriously open questions around whether the accompanying institutional matrix is more, or less, integrated. The right and left hands of the neoliberal state may have an increasingly tight grip around the fraught regulatory problems of flex-labor and social marginality, but this should not be mistaken for an effective grasp.

107

Downloaded from tcr.sagepub.com at University of Warwick on February 13, 2013

108

Theoretical Criminology 14(1) Wacquant is appropriately circumspect on this question. While pressing the strong argument that the functional logics of prisonfare and workfare have become increasingly entwined, indeed complementary, as they have coevolved with flexibilizing labor markets, he stops short of suggesting that some emergent, overarching form of regulatory equilibrium is in evidence. Both separately and together, these regulatory domains continue to be riven by deep irrationalities, glaring insufficiencies, and built-in imbalances (Wacquant, 2009: 313). What is it, then, that sustains this perverse form of worst-practice convergence, in the face of such deep contradictions and episodic waves of resistance and contestation? If neoliberalism was indeed the root cause of these developments (Wacquant, 2009: 302), can we still attribute the same kind of ideological, political, and institutional potency to the sullied, shop-worn, and profoundly discredited shell of late neoliberalism, the last rites of which have recently been read by Naomi Klein, Eric Hobsbawm, and others? Is it time to start thinking about neoliberal hegemony in the past tense? At this stage, it is impossible to reach a definitive conclusion, but it seems unlikely that the regulatory edifice of neoliberalism will collapse, in toto, house-of-cards style, if for no other reason than that neoliberalism was never a monolithic structure in the first place (see Peck et al, 2009). We may be spared, for a time, the hubris of free-market zealots, but the current turmoil may also strengthen the (supposedly safe) hands of the pragmatists and technocratsthe true inheritors of roll-out neoliberalism. George W. Bushs feeble protestation, on the eve of the G20 summit on the global financial crisis, that he remained a market-oriented guy might be seen as a perfect metaphor for the bankruptcy of unreconstructed neoliberalism. And the Obama administration's pragmatic centrism seems unlikely to mark a major break with business-as-almost-usual neoliberalism: unprecedented 'emergency' measures not only rebooted the financial system, but quickly restored Wall Street profitability; meanwhile, systemic un(der)employment has been restyled as a lagging indicator.1 But if one takes the view that what neoliberalism has really been about, ever since its birth as a transnational ideological project, in Paris, 60 years ago, at the Colloque Lippmann, has been the evolutionary development of proactive forms of liberal statecraft (Foucault, 2008; Peck, 2008; Mirowski and Plehwe, 2009), the market meltdown that began in 2008 might just as likely lead to further rounds of flawed, promarket reregulation as to a fallof-the-Berlin-Wall-style systemic implosion. And technocrats, as we know, tend to work quietly. The accompanying political language will surely be more about grim determination and cautious pragmatism, in contrast to the rising crescendo of market triumphalism over the past two decades. Get ready for the Fourth Way! Neil Smith (2008) surely has it about right when he diagnoses neoliberalism, channeling Habermass critique of modernity, as dead but dominant. The social interests that the neoliberal project was cobbled together to serve corporate capital, financial elites, the shareholding classes, transnational

Downloaded from tcr.sagepub.com at University of Warwick on February 13, 2013

PeckZombie neoliberalism and the ambidextrous state investorsmay have been flushed out into the open, but at the same time they have been reasserting their privileged interests with breathtaking audacity. In the still-unfolding politics of the US bailout, for example, the most urgent actions to date have been concerned with the salvation of failing banks and corporations, while pandering to the shattered confidence of the markets. On the face of it, as Hobsbawm, Klein, and many others are arguing, this is a damning, if not fatal, indictment of neoliberal governance. Maybe the tide has finally turned. But we must also remember that, while this clumsy resort to state power (for all the rank hypocrisy and cognitive dissonance of the recent period of crisis [mis]management) may have created some awkward moments for dogmatic believers in the free-market script, the active (ab)use of state power is quite consistent with the neoliberal playbook. The interests and institutions that were bailed out in 20082009 never played by the rules of the free market anyway (Chomsky, 1998; Henwood, 1998). And, we might ask which way the tide is actually going, when financial risk is being socialized at an incredible rate, and when the rationalities of Wall Street and Washington have become sutured together as never before? On the other hand, it is surely no mere oversight that endemic problems of socioeconomic insecurity, not only among the very poor but increasingly among the working and middle classes, remain brazenly unaddressed. Worse still, macroeconomic exigencies, we are told, could mean that this may not be the time for, say, extensions of healthcare entitlements, fair-housing legislation, redistributive tax reform, or systematic antipoverty efforts. Instead, the most urgent responses were focused on patching up the system of trickleup economics, in order to insulate the financial regime from future blowbacks (perhaps especially from below). The reregulation effort remains substantially preoccupied with the problem of financial risk and the hysteria of the markets. Meanwhile, bearers of social risk are expected to continue to get by on their own. At all costs, though, they must keep shopping. Exploiting crisis conditions, we must remember, has been a hallmark of neoliberal governance, even if the recent pattern of events seems less and less like a normal crisis. But again, the jaded and discredited project threatens to lurch haphazardly onward (if not forward)that is, unless concerted political opposition blocks its path, and until an alternative sociopolitical program begins to fill the attendant vacuum. Dead but dominant, neoliberalism may indeed have entered its zombie phase. The brain has apparently long since ceased functioning, but the limbs are still moving, and many of the defensive reflexes seem to be working too. The living dead of the free-market revolution continue to walk the earth, though with each resurrection their decidedly uncoordinated gait becomes even more erratic.

109

Note
1. President Bush Discusses Financial Markets and World Economy, White House Press Release, 13 November 2008, Federal Information and News Dispatch.

Downloaded from tcr.sagepub.com at University of Warwick on February 13, 2013

110

Theoretical Criminology 14(1) References

Balazs, G. and A. Sayad (1991) La Violence de lInstitution, Actes de la Recherche en Sciences Sociales 90: 5363. Balazs, G. and A. Sayad (1999) Institutional violence, in P. Bourdieu et al. The Weight of the World: Social Suffering in Contemporary Society, pp. 492506. Cambridge: Polity. Bourdieu, P. (1998) The Left Hand and the Right Hand of the State, in P. Bourdieu Acts of Resistance, pp. 110. Cambridge: Polity. Bourdieu, P. et al. (1993) La Misre du Monde. Paris: Seuil. Bourdieu, P. et al. (1999) The Weight of the World: Social Suffering in Contemporary Society. Cambridge: Polity. Chomsky, N. (1998) Profit over People. New York: Seven Stories Press. Foucault, M. (2008) The Birth of Biopolitics. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Hayek, F.A. (1944) The Road to Serfdom. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Henwood, D. (1998) Wall Street. London: Verso. Leitner, H., J. Peck and E. Sheppard (eds) (2007) Contesting Neoliberalism: Urban Frontiers. New York: Guilford. Mirowski, P. and D. Plehwe (eds) (2009) The Road from Mont Pelerin: The Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Offe, C. (1985) Disorganized Capitalism. Cambridge: Polity. Peck, J. (2001) Workfare States. New York: Guilford. Peck, J. (2008) Remaking Laissez-Faire, Progress in Human Geography 32(1): 343. Peck, J. and N. Theodore (2000) Work First: Workfare and the Regulation of Contingent Labour Markets, Cambridge Journal of Economics 24(1): 11938. Peck, J. and N. Theodore (2001) Contingent Chicago: Restructuring the Spaces of Temporary Labor, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 25(3): 47196. Peck, J. and N. Theodore (2008) Carceral Chicago: Making the Ex-offender Employability Crisis, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 32(2): 25181. Peck, J., N. Theodore and N. Brenner (2009) Postneoliberalism and its malcontents, Antipode 41(6): 123658. Peck, J. and A. Tickell (2002) Neoliberalizing Space, Antipode 34(3): 380404. Smith, N. (2008) Neo-liberalism: Dead but Dominant, Focaal 51(Summer): 1557. Wacquant, L. (2009) Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Insecurity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Downloaded from tcr.sagepub.com at University of Warwick on February 13, 2013