![]() ![]() What I see as specific to Walkerdine and Bansel's notion of government work is also specific to private-sector employment, in particular the type of work being done on and off Wall Street that self-actualizes: financialization. In other words, identity politics takes on a decidedly market formation and rationale for conducting tasks, evaluating productivity, viewing colleagues and coworkers as competition, and seeing every decision as economical and as a social determinant to success. The terms of this self-actualization are tautly strung between discourses of freedom and enterprise on one hand, and the regulatory and punitive practices of government on the other, with work positioned and promoted as the best way to improve one's situation" (3). ![]() (186)Īlong with the incursion of market into the cultural sphere (Kapur and Wagner), there is also a psychological aspect to neoliberalism.Īs Walkerdine and Bansel's pioneering chapter has demonstrated, identity produced in relation to work has yielded subjects that "self-actualize through their own labor. A free order, in this view, is incompatible with the enactment of rules which specify how people should use the means at their disposal. In the words of David Field and Anthony McGrew, neoliberalism includes the extension of market to more and more areas of life the creation of a state unburdened by "excessive" intervention in the economy and social life and the curtailment of the power of certain groups (for instance, trade unions) to press their aims and goals. Yet something else in this decade needs further reflection-that is, the financialization of daily life, a far more ephemeral thing to couch within these two congressional bills.įor many, this neoliberal triumphalism is directly tied not just to the deregulation of markets in media and finance but also to the deregulation of the human capacity to resist or comprehend these market forces on culture. It is no coincidence that this unprecedented expansion of the financial and media industries marked a new logic in the development of capitalist life in the 1990s. In close succession was the 1996 Telecommunications Act, which dissolved the legal barriers that once had separated media industries and ushered in the right for multinational conglomerates to own and vertically integrate television, news, and film companies. President Bill Clinton's advocacy to repeal the Glass-Steagall Act (1936) and replace it with the Gramm-Leach Bliley Act in 1995 was greeted with near unanimous support by both the Washington political establishment and Wall Street, each seeking further deregulation after the Reagan era. A GREAT MARKET EUPHORIA SWEPT THROUGH the United States by the 1990s, with two deregulatory bills signposting a neoliberal triumphalism. ![]()
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