The institutionalization of neoliberal rule in ‘actually existing neoliberalisms’ has involved extensive political and governmental work: finding partners, building alliances, making compromises (both material and discursive) that seek to co-opt, absorb and incorporate other possibilities. The social is central to this understanding of the pragmatics of neoliberalism, since it is the terrain on which people live their everyday lives, find points of attachment, investment and identification (as well as distinction, detachment and refusal). Without underestimating neoliberalism’s destructive, ruthless and authoritarian capacities, it matters to understand how it seeks to enrol and engage people in specific places. As Ludwig argues:
neoliberalism also needs to be investigated as political project that engages people, deploys their hopes and promises them a good life, more freedom, wealth or personal fulfilment. Sexual politics need to be investigated as technologies of power that help to organize acceptance and consensus within neoliberalism. (Ludwig, 2016: 426)
In the process, new mappings of the social are elaborated through political and governmental projects and processes. The neoliberal remaking of the social has extended well beyond its articulation with the economic, producing new assemblages of people, positions and practices. Such changes have necessitated the remaking of ways of life, the elaboration of sets of distinctions and relationships within a population and between populations (in neoliberal’s globalizing effects). It has required the inculcation of habits and practices appropriate to dominant conceptions of a ‘modern people’ who need to step forward to take their place in a global world.
However, this poses some difficult political and analytical challenges for thinking about neoliberalism and its others. It suggests that we should be wary of thinking of policies, strategies and conceptions of the social as ‘essentially’ neoliberal, attending instead to the complex political work of borrowing and blending, incorporation and ventriloquism that goes on as neoliberal processes seek to find means of ruling that enrol populations into the desired ways of thinking and being. It may be that the processes of being co-opted or incorporated into neoliberal political and governmental projects strips the alternative or radical possibilities from these alternative conceptions of the social. For example, Andrea Muehlebach’s (2012) remarkable exploration of the rise of ‘the moral neoliberal’ in Italy points to the paradoxical, and apparently contradictory, strands of thought and feeling that underpinned the growth of voluntary care work in Italy, strands that included Catholic and socialist lineages. Muehlebach argues that the apparent opposition between such orientations and seemingly rational, market-centred neoliberalism conceals a larger unity. This larger view, she argues, ‘allows us to grasp neoliberalism as a form that contains practices and forces that appear as oppositional yet get folded into a single order’ (Muehlebach, 2012: 8). Her exploration of the connections between neoliberal rationality and other-oriented sentiments allows her:
to grasp neoliberalism as a complex of opposites that can contain what appear as oppositional practices, ethics and emotions … Neoliberalism thus appears not simply as malleable, but a process that may allow for the simultaneity and mutual dependency of forms and practices that scholars think of in oppositional terms. Neoliberalism is a force that can contain its negation – the vision of a decommodified, disinterested life and of a moral community of human relationality and solidarity that stands opposed to alienation. (Muehlebach, 2012: 25)
This is a significant argument about the shape-shifting and multi-vocal dynamic of neoliberalism, but it leaves us with two questions. First, is there an outside or a beyond to neoliberalism: something, somewhere, some orientation that is not neoliberal or has not (yet) been neoliberalized? Second, do those elements that are incorporated in neoliberalism necessarily remain neoliberal? Might they, in some place, at some time, be dis-incorporated or rearticulated to an alternative political project?
Abstractly, this matters: it seems wrong to treat incorporation as a one-way and one-time political process. In contrast, articulation, and the possibilities of dis-articulation and rearticulation seem a more fluid and dynamic way of thinking about such processes of ideological/discursive or cultural work. With this in mind, we now turn back to questions of what Williams called ‘the residual’, and its relations to the dominant.
Tracing the residual
When Williams writes about the residual, he is not treating it as simply as a historical left-over. Rather he is pointing to the significance of persistence. Here his understanding of the residual can be used to think about the persistence of ideas of the social, the public and social welfare (and their diverse institutionalizations). Williams argues that:
The residual, by definition, has been effectively formed in the past, but it is still active in the cultural process, not only and often not at all as an element of the past, but as an effective element of the present. Thus certain experiences, meanings and values which cannot be expressed or substantially verified in terms of the dominant culture, are nevertheless lived and practised on the basis of the residue – cultural as well as social – of some previous social and cultural institution or formation. (Williams, 1977: 122)
In this light, it can be argued that forms of collective social provision remain the focus of deep social and cultural attachments, not least because they speak to experiences, problems and desires that cannot be effectively addressed within the terms of the dominant. So, to what extent have older conceptions of the social persisted in the face of neoliberalism’s anti-social and re-socializing tendencies? The persistence of many of the problems and experiences that collective welfare provision was supposed to address – poverty, unemployment, ill-health, education and so on – serve to keep older images of the social alive, even if in subordinate ways. The intensification of those ‘social problems’ under neoliberal rule has constantly been accompanied by demands for more and better welfare, even as welfare states have been dismantled and restructured.
Indeed, the persistence of those experiences (as structural features of the social organization of capitalism) has sustained the ‘residual’ imaginary of social welfare and wellbeing. In its turn, this persistence of residual identifications, attachments and desires has supported the persistence of aspects of state welfare, public services and other forms of collective support and provision. As some versions of path-dependency theory argued, such attachments formed a critical feature of the ‘resilience’ of welfare states. For example, Paul Pierson argued that a variety of factors, but especially those located in popular politics, coalesced to make radical revision, or abolition, of welfare states unlikely:
There are strong grounds for scepticism about the prospect for any radical revision of the welfare state in most countries. Almost nowhere have politicians been able to assemble and sustain majority coalitions for a far-reaching contraction of social policy … The reasons have already been outlined. The broad scale of public support, the intensity of preferences among programme recipients, the extent to which a variety of actors (including employers) have adapted to the existing contours of the social market economy, and the institutional arrangements which favour defenders of the status quo make a frontal assault on the welfare state politically suicidal in most countries. (Pierson, 2001: 416)
Welfare states (in their different guises) have proven unevenly resistant to unlocking under neoliberal rule. This has been visible both in the persistence of a range of social/public institutions (for example, the NHS in the UK) and the forms of care and support that they provide. There are two important qualifications to the ‘resilience’