In what I have called epochal analysis, a cultural process is seized as a cultural system, with determinate dominant features: feudal culture or bourgeois culture or a transition from one to the other. This emphasis on dominant and definitive lineaments is important and often, in practice, effective. But it then happens that its methodology is preserved for the very different function of historical analysis, in which a sense of movement within what is ordinarily abstracted as a system is crucially necessary, especially if it is connected with the future as well as the past. In authentic historical analysis it is necessary at every point to recognize the complex interrelationships between movements and tendencies both within and beyond a specific effective dominance. It is necessary to examine how these relate to the whole cultural process rather than only to the selected and abstracted dominant system. (Williams, 1977: 121)
Williams argues that the temptations, and risks, of ‘epochal analysis’ involve treating the epochal dominant as a ‘static type’ abstracted from the ‘real cultural processes’ that are its conditions. Instead, he points to the importance of crafting an ‘authentic historical analysis’ that is attentive to the internal dynamic relations of specific moments:
We have certainly to speak of the ‘dominant’ and the ‘effective’, and in these senses of the hegemonic. But we find that we have also to speak, and indeed with further differentiation of each, of the ‘residual’ and the ‘emergent’, which in any real historical process, and at any moment in the process, are significant both in themselves and in what they reveal of the characteristics of the ‘dominant’. (Williams, 1977: 121–2)
This chapter will certainly speak of the dominant – neoliberalism – and its shifting shapes and strategies, not least those that have arisen as neoliberalizing processes find new ways of dealing with its residual and emergent others. That will be the focus of the next section of the chapter. The following two sections consider the residual and the emergent more directly in their own terms.
Neoliberalism: from anti-social to remaking the social
Neoliberalism has certainly had an anti-social disposition, visible in several dynamics. There is a core commitment to the individualization of society, treating it as a multitude of self-seeking individuals engaging only in market or market-like transactions (embodying the conventional homo economicus of neoclassical economic theory). This individualization works through multiple imaginary figures, inviting/inciting subjects to see themselves as producers and consumers, as entrepreneurs and investors, as life planners and budget managers. This individualization is simultaneously an economization of the social, refusing to recognize forms of social relationship and interaction beyond the transactional. But these two dynamics are interwoven with a third, familialization. Indeed, it could be argued that the critical attention to neoliberalism’s individualization has tended to obscure this other dynamic, in which neoliberal processes tend towards what might be called possessive–competitive familialism. For example, in the United Kingdom, the recurring political–cultural incitement of people to be ‘hard working’ and ‘responsible’ was aimed less at individuals and more at families (invoking a nation of ‘hard working, responsible families’). This emphasis was foreshadowed by Margaret Thatcher’s famous observation that ‘there is no such thing as society’ which concluded that ‘there are only individual men and women and their families’. This individual–familial nexus provided a foundation for the anti-social policy logics of neoliberalism, in particular the dismantling or reform of collective or public institutionalizations of the social: public services, collective housing provision, the varieties of welfare state, and so on. It is also argued elsewhere (Clarke, 2007), that it is worth considering different sets of processes that have been in play in neoliberalism’s ‘subordination of the social’. These have included its subjugation to brutal market logics, its privatization and domestication (locating the social in the realm of the familial household), its spatial and scalar ‘narrowing’ as a residual setting and its valorization (treating it as the source of potential value, whether through processes of marketization or privatization of public resources or through its role as a setting for the creation and discovery of subjects of value, people who can be monetized in different ways, such as loan systems).
These arguments focus fundamentally on neoliberalism’s dominant character but certainly do not exhaust its repertoire of strategies for governing the social. To explore these involves opening up the political–cultural dynamics of neoliberalism to greater scrutiny, not least its interaction with alternative conceptions of the social. Such interactions emerge more visibly when we consider ‘actually existing neoliberalisms’ rather than treating it as an abstracted general position. At this point we have to consider the ways in which neoliberal policies have found ways of cohabiting with other political and cultural processes and ways of imagining the social. Neoliberalism has proved remarkably adaptable (Peck, 2010) and this includes accommodations with different types of political regimes and forms of political culture. Neoliberalization has been conducted through dictatorships, authoritarian regimes, forms of liberal democracy and, of course, through a variety of international organizations like the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) seeking to make the world safe, and profitable, for capital during the so-called ‘Washington Consensus’ era with the ‘stabilize, liberalize and privatize’ mantra (Williamson, 2008). Similarly, it has been enacted through conservative, neo-conservative, liberal, authoritarian and social democratic political programmes. This tends to confirm the hegemonic status of neoliberalism, but looked at from the other side, that dominance has been accomplished by learning to adapt, co-opt, incorporate and ventriloquize these many others. As Williams argued, the relationship between the dominant and the emergent is a critical issue for conjunctural analysis, and one exemplary focus for this dynamic has been questions of equality: of gender, ‘race’ and sexuality, especially (see inter alia Duggan, 2003; Lamble, 2013; Ludwig, 2016). Different neoliberalisms have found it possible to accommodate and incorporate social, political and cultural movements generated around equality by rendering them ‘individual’ matters (of choice, especially) and by folding them into what Harzig, Juteau and Schmitt (2003) call the ‘master narrative’ of diversity (but see also Cooper, 2004). Meanwhile, other neoliberalisms have been equally comfortable with political regimes of a more conservative, reactionary or restorationist character that have refused such diversity politics as undermining ‘the social fabric’ and ‘social order’.
More generally, the social constitutes a field that governing processes, including neoliberal ones, continually strive to occupy, dominate and direct. Governing processes are always directed towards finding ways of ordering the population (differentiating, hierarchizing, sorting, improving and more) and aim to institutionalize strategies that have the objective of making the people who they should be. Neoliberalism features here as a project or process committed to transforming the social, working through strategies of economization, individualization and familialization that aim to create (or ‘release’ in the naturalizing imagery of neoliberalism’s advocates) the array of responsible, dynamic and entrepreneurial selves; and, in reverse, to discipline and punish those who fail their new obligations. But alongside this, neoliberalization