“Why Fighting Neoliberalism Won’t End

Inequality”

Tanja N. Aho, PhD CandidateAmerican Studies, Department of Transnational Studies

University at Buffalo, SUNY &University of Erlangen-Nuremberg

“Fighting Inequality” LAWCHA/WCSA ConferenceGeorgetown University, Washington, D.C.

28 May 2015

Neoliberalismas “field ofadversity”(Foucault, TheBirth of Biopolitics, 106)

David Rodgers: “Across the multiple fronts of ideational

battle, … conceptions of human nature that in the post-World

War II era had been thick with context, social circumstance,

institutions, and history gave way to conceptions of human

nature that stressed choice, agency, performance, and

desire.” (Age of Fracture, 3)

Teresa Ebert: “For the contemporary, what is new is the way

the concrete has become a defense of the singular, the

sensuous, and the affective—a delectable materiality—and, I

argue, a legitimization of prevailing social relations and market

individualism. The textual activism of contemporary critique is

an extension of, not an opposition (or even a resistance) to

capitalism.” (The Task of Cultural Critique, 6)

“Cities are being transformed through neoliberal globalization: they are privatizing their assets and making public policy decisions based on the logic of the global market” (46)

“once-public facility … into private space” (47)

Whose public?