Desire and Neoliberalism
To discuss desire as the driving force of the social, as well as to identify certain forms of desire present in cultural expressions, it will be useful to bring up Jacques Lacan’s formulation of the realms of the Symbolic, the Imaginary and the Real. Using this framework, desire can be understood as a transindividual field that pertains to the realm of the Symbolic, with both conscious and unconscious dimensions. Desire can only be identified by its effects on discourse and culture, and neither discourse nor culture are the possession of an individual. For Lacan, Language, that is the realm of the Symbolic, actually precedes the subject, as signifying chains from which subject effects can be derived. Desire is governed by a fundamental lack, which keeps it moving from one object to the next, and keeps the subject desiring, and talking until death, without ever being able to fulfill “it.” Desire, in this sense, does not refer to an individual longing for something, a defined concrete object. Instead, desire can be recognized by its twisting effects in interrupting and disrupting the efforts of the Ego in creating the illusions of self-control, autonomy, and free will in the individual. In other words, the subject is already structured by desire, so it is desire that precedes the subject, and not the other way around. The disturbing fragmentation and discontinuity of bodily experience is suppressed by the Ego, creating the illusion of wholeness through an image of visual completeness of the body at the mirror stage. According to Lacan, subjectivation, the process of becoming a subject and achieving a sense of self, relies on the (mis)recognition of him/herself as an “other,” captured by his/her reflection in the mirror. The Lacanian realm of the Imaginary is composed by identifications, and is, in turn, structured by these complex symbolic webs of desire. The process for becoming a subject in the historical context of Western modernity requires achieving the illusion of the individual autonomous self (an Imaginary process), as well as becoming “subject of” or “subject to” particular webs of historically available meaning (a Symbolic process).
To be even intelligible as a subject, an individual has to find a place in the predefined registers of language and culture that precede her/him, such as Butler’s heterosexual matrix (1990). In Freudian terms, the subject becomes a subject of the paternal Law, culture and the order of sexual difference by virtue of a lack, a fundamental impossibility to satisfy desire. Desire is not conscious nor does it belong to the individual, since the unconscious is that part, of “concrete transindividual speech that the subject’s disposition lacks in order to re-establish the continuity of their conscious speech” (Lacan 248). This emphasis on the transindividual character of speech indicates that desire actually precedes the individual subject as a historical effect of the social production of meaning. At the core of this formulation is the need to decenter political projects from the individual and from the language of individual rights, to reflect about the social processes that sustain and reproduce this form of subjectivity.
Within Marxist theory, the role of the imaginary is already considered crucial in the works of alienation, as institutions and processes of production become autonomous from their function and exist as if independently of the contingent human practices that sustain them:
Slavoj Žižek, having already applied psychoanalysis and Marxism to the analysis of capitalism and neoliberalism as unconscious ideological formations, argues that desire is also metonymic, shifting constantly from one object to the next, reproducing itself while at the same time, while at the same time retaining a formal frame of consistency that corresponds with a set of “fantasmatic features.” This is relevant because it is the main form in which ideology structures our psyche. Žižek points this out in The Plague of Fantasies, that fantasy provides the coordinates for our desire, or in other words, fantasy “teaches us how to desire” (7), that is, fantasy, instead of being the imagined realization of a desire, is what organizes desire in the first place. Fantasy is radically intersubjective inasmuch as the Lacanian subject is originally split, decentered, and participating of an opaque network whose meaning and logic elude his control ( Žižek 10). If ideology is already “hiding” as a form of narrative in the fantasy that organizes our desire, what are the intersubjective fantasies and narratives that organize neoliberal desire, and what can we learn from experiences of activist performance that enact utopian desires, in terms of what fantasies can possibly organize these forms of desire? How can these experiences question or undermine the narratives that organize neoliberal desire?
In States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity, Wendy Brown asks questions about the formation of subjects at the crossroads of neoconservative and neoliberal narratives, which function as separate, even contradictory discourses, but also together to produce a particular kind of subject whose psychic constitution seems to trap them in relation to state power: a subject who lacks an authentic desire for an alternative to these regimes of domination. As a political theorist, Brown uses Nietzsche and Foucault to look at the mechanisms of subject formation themselves, rather than the institutional practices that prevent us from emancipating ourselves, thus looking into "the very making of bodily subjects and sociopolitical desire" (xii). Moreover, Brown asks about the political consequences of constructing identities based on the “injury,” and of projects that interpellate the state for the redress of that injury, in a context where progressive narratives have lost their utopian sense:
As global capitalism needs to keep reproducing the desire to consume, marketing strategies have crafted the idea of a universal abstract consumer who has the absolute freedom and the power to potentially acquire anything. A key element in this process is the access to consumer credit systems that created the illusion of democratization of consumerism and offered a quick sense of social integration via purchasing certain products. At the same time, consumer credit has become one of the main causes of instability among the middle and working classes in Chile, enhanced by the transformations of labor relations, the precariousness of social services and supports, and the virtual lack of redistributive policies and mechanisms. While consumerist desire is instilled in all classes through mass access to consumer credit, the majority has been condemned to have their desires for material happiness constantly frustrated and unmet, and are forced to live in a state of constant vulnerability. Moreover, the notion of desire completely has organized and reshaped the public space as a consumer space particularly through the proliferation of the Mall as a sign of economic success and modernity in Neoliberal Chile. At the space of the Mall a permanent, always available spectacle of eroticized objects is presented to us as if we could reach them through the transparent windows. The Mall is the place to see and be seen, where complicated desires take place in the seduction and consumption of these eroticized objects. I take interest in Moulian’s suggestion of consumerism as a performance of class offering working class youth the ability to partake in a simulacrum of class through the purchase of objects that are symbols of privilege (be they Swatch watches or Nike running shoes) serving as a shortcut for social integration (if society is just an aggregation of consumers and entrepreneurs). On the other hand, I am interested in thinking of the Mall as a “stage” for the performance of desirable modern metropolitan consumers/citizens. The Mall is also a place of constant surveillance where private security guards are the gatekeepers of proper performances of class, race, gender, and sexuality that mirror normative citizenship under market nationalism.
But neoliberalism is not a universal set of principles from which a single neoliberal subject emerges in a deterministic way. Chilean Marxist intellectual Tomás Moulian looks at the complex and contradictory social relations and dynamics of consumption and consumerism, and the ways that subjectivities are experienced in the particular neoliberal context of post-dictatorship Chile. Moulian takes a pessimistic Marxist approach in which capitalism seems to have “won” because it has anchored itself in our psyche in the form of consumerism, following the logic intrinsic to desire, that is, the impossibility of its fulfillment. His criticism of consumerism points to the fact that, under neoliberalism, we are enticed to substitute our desire for collective happiness with individual and partial gratifications. This fits the nostalgic narrative that, because of the advancement of neoliberalism in Latin America, the big metanarratives of the previous decades, the grandiloquent discourses of Revolution, the People, and Human Happiness, had to be abandoned and replaced by the more modest and partial gratifications of consumerism. At the same time, Moulian is critical of Marxists who simply dismiss consumerism based on a moralist judgment of its character as a lustful desire for objects, since a puritan critique of consumerism as a lustful and sumptuous desire emphasizes as its opposite, self-control and austerity as moral virtues. Moulian concludes that desire in a neoliberal context is present, inescapable, and partially pleasurable, yet also linked to our dispossession and fragmentation, and the displacement of other utopian desires. Already in 1995 Garcia-Canclini cast a critical eye on looking at consumerism simply as a passive and oppressive practice, proposing a more complicated understanding of consumerism in its political and sociocultural dimensions; he criticized earlier Marxist explanations that overestimated the impact of mass media in processes of cultural hegemony.
It is almost a commonplace by now to state that neoliberalism, as ideated by Milton Friedman, was born in Chile. The dramatic transformation of Chilean economic and social life under the authoritarian military rule first and later under the democratic rule of the Concertación has been widely documented (Taylor, Solimano, Winn, Nagy-Zekmi and Leiva). What is now ubiquitously called “the Chilean experiment,” conducted by the Chicago Boys in complicity with the Chilean ruling classes, aimed to violently transform a traditionally state-centered developmentalist society into a state-led deregulated economic field open to foreign investment, resulting in the privatization of education, health and the pension system, among other changes, and the dismantling of systems of social protection and redistribution that for decades had helped to equalize class and social relations in Chile. In fact, the country has even been labelled as “the most neoliberal country in the world” (Sader 2006). Marcus Taylor highlights that the “Chilean miracle,” heralded as a model for the rest of the world, was a state-led project that dramatically changed the conditions of possibility for subjectivity in Chile. Imposing a neoliberal economy was not then a process that only happened in the realm of formal labor and “the economy” but rather, it entailed the violent imposition of a neoliberal narrative, which translated into a cultural transformation of values (from solidarity to meritocracy) and ideals (from utopian happiness for all to individual immediate gratification).
The narrative of the free market promoted by the “Chicago Boys” was based on the idea of a natural but rational system of exchange between equal subjects in which the state does not necessarily recede, but takes on the role of promoting and guaranteeing the conditions of “freedom.” The overall effect would be the extended commodification of social relations and the reinforcement of market discipline in shaping the distribution of resources, power, and insecurity within society (Marcus 7 and 8, From Pinochet). Part of the project unfolding during the Pinochet years was “to rebuild the country morally, institutionally and materially,” and “to transform the conditions for political subjects, for which [a] more fundamental renovation of social institutions would be necessary: one that could reassert a renewed separation of politics and economics by atomising the collective subjectivities forged in the previous decades, reasserting the rule of the law and the primacy of private property... (Taylor 31-32, From Pinochet). Under the rhetoric of promoting “freedom,” government policies after 1982 began a concerted programme of removing obstacles to profitable investment and they aggressively promoted exports resulting in the transnationalization of the Chilean economy, which relied on highly gendered, under-regulated, precarious, and insecure labour (Taylor 73-75). Altogether, the transformations in labour relations initiated by Pinochet in 1979 with the Plan Laboral and continuing through the post-dictatorship worked to individualize, atomize, and depoliticize Chilean society, in addition to securing a cheap and disciplined labour force and safeguarding the concentration of power and wealth enjoyed by large corporations and grupos económicos (Taylor 98, 149).
Consider the 2013 U.S. film The Wolf of Wall Street, directed by Martin Scorsese. The film is a fictionalized account of the real life Jordan Belfort, character portrayed by Leonardo di Caprio, who made a fortune in the stock market through various means, including violence, corruption, and crime (in fact, almost all of Scorsese’s filmography can be read as a romanticized apology for capitalism, and of the mafia structure of the corporate world). Our hero is unapologetically presented as a self-made man, who starts poor and with an “ordinary looking” wife, to build an empire of wealth and influence and marry an aristocratic, younger, and whiter (and, as we are to understand, formerly less attainable) wife. This is a sentimental account, though, in which we are made to sympathize with Belfort as he and his “tribe” of mostly male workers indulge in a constant orgy of cocaine, alcohol, and sex as forms of tribal-like rituals that create very meaningful homosocial bonds. In a key scene, after being confronted with imminent legal charges by his father and his lawyer, Belfort is supposed to announce his stepping down from the firm in front of his associates. However, at the last minute Belfort changes his mind and exhorts his workers in a highly cathartic moment reminiscent of Jimmy Swaggart or other public “charismatic” religious ministers.
Neoliberalism then, is not just a technocratic set of economic policies, but mostly, a sentimental, romantic narrative that requires us to develop a sense of “faith,” irrational love, and devotion. The preaching of the virtues of the freemarket, as formulated by Friedman opened the path to market nationalism in which the emotional investment in the national project is mediated by a narrative of recycled signs (such as “the Popular” and “Revolution,” terms that are exploited by the Opus Dei inspired Unión Demócrata Independiente, U.D.I.). Moreover, the national space was reconfigured in the social imaginary as an even field of opportunity, in which successful subjects are creative, autonomous individuals who can advance themselves through their own efforts. Through this narrative, Cárcamo Huechante argues, the economic “structural adjustment” that took place under the dictatorship produced a subsequent “cultural adjustment” or symbolic shift in which the nation-state is imagined now as a nation-market and Chile becomes a logotype, a corporative sign that needs to be promoted. Re-imagined in the context of the global market, Chile itself becomes a brand, its geography a list of exploitable and marketable natural and human resources, where subjectivity is dependent on the ability to participate as a citizen-consumer under the neoliberal illusion of freedom and autonomy. Neoliberal market nationalism depends then on instilling a desire for belonging to a competitive and successful community. The best example of this is the narrative that Chileans needed to undergo every “sacrifice” so the nation could remain competitive in the global market when policies of labor flexibilization were implemented.
Based on Cárcamo-Huechante’s analysis of Milton Friedman’s speech in Chile in 1975 and Joaquin Lavin’s book La Revolución Silenciosa, we can further understand neoliberalism as a cultural discourse belonging to the genre of a “preach,” una prédica. Friedman’s speech is presented as a technocratic discourse of “illness” versus “recovery” as prescribed by a doctor, or a father, in which this position of “prescriber,” the superiority of the doctor’s knowledge, is framed within the neocolonial hierarchy North-South. Freemarketism, as a key narrative of neoliberal doctrine, operates as a sort of “sermon” that presents the economy as masculine through a language of technical and scientific rationale as opposed to the feminized “ideology.” This gendered dichotomy pits ideology—guided by passion and, thus, feminine and subjective—against the economy, which, by contrast, is viewed as rational and objective, and, thus, masculine. Despite this representation of the economy as the terrain of the rational and technocratic that provides neoliberalism with scientific truth, it appears that the freemarketist narrative requires the blind belief in the abstract entity of the market, that is, of the market as the “invisible hand” that regulates exchanges between equals. In this sense, freemarketism can be seen as a religion of believers that presents itself as a mere description of “the way things are.” In “The Essence of Neoliberalism,” Pierre Bourdieu conceives neoliberalism as a form of religious and utopian doctrine:
Freemarketism presents the market as a sacred, pontificated, transcendental entity, complete with the image of the angel of freedom breaking free from the slavery of communism. This is significant if we consider, again, that progressive narratives had been preempted of their utopian character.
In the context of market nationalism, the social libidinal investment with the nation-market that helps sustain and legitimize neoliberalism as a dominant mode of relationship is mediated by spectacles. Nationalisms have historically depended on how spectacles of the nation can capture the image of the nation as a whole, as “[n]ational representations are performed through public spectacle, each nation having its own genealogy of performance, often with specific gender connotations and representations” (Radcliffe 1997, 96). At the same time, the growing “spectacularization” of everyday life under neoliberalism is mostly apparent in the primacy of television, and the proliferation of hypermarkets, malls, and shopping centers as the spaces for social life; as Cárcamo-Huechante notes, “[t]he subject becomes the object of a spectacularized economy of varieties, of object-brands that massively pounce on cars (and minds) of a consumer subsumed in the fiction of the options.” It has already been explored how the neoliberal restructuring that began with the dictatorship transformed the available narratives by which subjects were able to find meaning and identity, including a new imagination of the community of belonging, from the nation-state to the nation-market (Cárcamo-Huechante). We must then shift our thinking about contemporary nationalism in Chile from a state-centered perspective to one of “market nationalism,” in which all the passions associated with the imagining of a community of belonging are articulated around the referent of the (national and transnational) market society, and where everyday life is now mediated by a number of brands, logos, and publicity images. As Cárcamo-Huechante argues, in this new scenario the social field of desire itself is mediated by market nationalism, which in turn guarantees the reproduction of a particular subjectivity functional to the neoliberal order.2
I argue that spectacles of market nationalism and the free market in Chile work to reinforce the idea that national liberal democracy is the order representing freedom, presented in the form of endless consumer choices and, more specifically, an order proffering sexual freedom and transparency—ultimately sold as a transcendental order that was beyond reproach. Spectacular power produces ahistorical explanations of how power itself works and grounds its legitimacy in a transcendental aura, so that neoliberal narratives and spectacles present “the market” as an ahistorical entity that surpasses human agency: the market just behaves as it does because it is governed by the natural rules of supply and demand, economic and political forces that lie beyond human practices.
To be even intelligible as a subject, an individual has to find a place in the predefined registers of language and culture that precede her/him, such as Butler’s heterosexual matrix (1990). In Freudian terms, the subject becomes a subject of the paternal Law, culture and the order of sexual difference by virtue of a lack, a fundamental impossibility to satisfy desire. Desire is not conscious nor does it belong to the individual, since the unconscious is that part, of “concrete transindividual speech that the subject’s disposition lacks in order to re-establish the continuity of their conscious speech” (Lacan 248). This emphasis on the transindividual character of speech indicates that desire actually precedes the individual subject as a historical effect of the social production of meaning. At the core of this formulation is the need to decenter political projects from the individual and from the language of individual rights, to reflect about the social processes that sustain and reproduce this form of subjectivity.
Within Marxist theory, the role of the imaginary is already considered crucial in the works of alienation, as institutions and processes of production become autonomous from their function and exist as if independently of the contingent human practices that sustain them:
Marx knew this. (...) When he spoke of the fetishism of merchandise and showed its importance for the actual functioning of the capitalist economy, he obviously went beyond a purely economic view and recognized the role of the imaginary. When he stressed that the memory of past generations weighed heavily on the consciousness of the living, he pointed once more to this peculiar mode of the imaginary manifest in the past lives as present, where ghosts are more powerful than men of flesh and blood, where the dead clasp the living, as he liked to say. (Castoriadis 132)
Slavoj Žižek, having already applied psychoanalysis and Marxism to the analysis of capitalism and neoliberalism as unconscious ideological formations, argues that desire is also metonymic, shifting constantly from one object to the next, reproducing itself while at the same time, while at the same time retaining a formal frame of consistency that corresponds with a set of “fantasmatic features.” This is relevant because it is the main form in which ideology structures our psyche. Žižek points this out in The Plague of Fantasies, that fantasy provides the coordinates for our desire, or in other words, fantasy “teaches us how to desire” (7), that is, fantasy, instead of being the imagined realization of a desire, is what organizes desire in the first place. Fantasy is radically intersubjective inasmuch as the Lacanian subject is originally split, decentered, and participating of an opaque network whose meaning and logic elude his control ( Žižek 10). If ideology is already “hiding” as a form of narrative in the fantasy that organizes our desire, what are the intersubjective fantasies and narratives that organize neoliberal desire, and what can we learn from experiences of activist performance that enact utopian desires, in terms of what fantasies can possibly organize these forms of desire? How can these experiences question or undermine the narratives that organize neoliberal desire?
In States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity, Wendy Brown asks questions about the formation of subjects at the crossroads of neoconservative and neoliberal narratives, which function as separate, even contradictory discourses, but also together to produce a particular kind of subject whose psychic constitution seems to trap them in relation to state power: a subject who lacks an authentic desire for an alternative to these regimes of domination. As a political theorist, Brown uses Nietzsche and Foucault to look at the mechanisms of subject formation themselves, rather than the institutional practices that prevent us from emancipating ourselves, thus looking into "the very making of bodily subjects and sociopolitical desire" (xii). Moreover, Brown asks about the political consequences of constructing identities based on the “injury,” and of projects that interpellate the state for the redress of that injury, in a context where progressive narratives have lost their utopian sense:
What kinds of injuries enacted by late democracies are recapitulated in the very oppositional projects of its subjects? What conservative political impulses result from a lost sense of futurity attendant upon the break-down of progressive narratives of history? (p.xii)
As global capitalism needs to keep reproducing the desire to consume, marketing strategies have crafted the idea of a universal abstract consumer who has the absolute freedom and the power to potentially acquire anything. A key element in this process is the access to consumer credit systems that created the illusion of democratization of consumerism and offered a quick sense of social integration via purchasing certain products. At the same time, consumer credit has become one of the main causes of instability among the middle and working classes in Chile, enhanced by the transformations of labor relations, the precariousness of social services and supports, and the virtual lack of redistributive policies and mechanisms. While consumerist desire is instilled in all classes through mass access to consumer credit, the majority has been condemned to have their desires for material happiness constantly frustrated and unmet, and are forced to live in a state of constant vulnerability. Moreover, the notion of desire completely has organized and reshaped the public space as a consumer space particularly through the proliferation of the Mall as a sign of economic success and modernity in Neoliberal Chile. At the space of the Mall a permanent, always available spectacle of eroticized objects is presented to us as if we could reach them through the transparent windows. The Mall is the place to see and be seen, where complicated desires take place in the seduction and consumption of these eroticized objects. I take interest in Moulian’s suggestion of consumerism as a performance of class offering working class youth the ability to partake in a simulacrum of class through the purchase of objects that are symbols of privilege (be they Swatch watches or Nike running shoes) serving as a shortcut for social integration (if society is just an aggregation of consumers and entrepreneurs). On the other hand, I am interested in thinking of the Mall as a “stage” for the performance of desirable modern metropolitan consumers/citizens. The Mall is also a place of constant surveillance where private security guards are the gatekeepers of proper performances of class, race, gender, and sexuality that mirror normative citizenship under market nationalism.
But neoliberalism is not a universal set of principles from which a single neoliberal subject emerges in a deterministic way. Chilean Marxist intellectual Tomás Moulian looks at the complex and contradictory social relations and dynamics of consumption and consumerism, and the ways that subjectivities are experienced in the particular neoliberal context of post-dictatorship Chile. Moulian takes a pessimistic Marxist approach in which capitalism seems to have “won” because it has anchored itself in our psyche in the form of consumerism, following the logic intrinsic to desire, that is, the impossibility of its fulfillment. His criticism of consumerism points to the fact that, under neoliberalism, we are enticed to substitute our desire for collective happiness with individual and partial gratifications. This fits the nostalgic narrative that, because of the advancement of neoliberalism in Latin America, the big metanarratives of the previous decades, the grandiloquent discourses of Revolution, the People, and Human Happiness, had to be abandoned and replaced by the more modest and partial gratifications of consumerism. At the same time, Moulian is critical of Marxists who simply dismiss consumerism based on a moralist judgment of its character as a lustful desire for objects, since a puritan critique of consumerism as a lustful and sumptuous desire emphasizes as its opposite, self-control and austerity as moral virtues. Moulian concludes that desire in a neoliberal context is present, inescapable, and partially pleasurable, yet also linked to our dispossession and fragmentation, and the displacement of other utopian desires. Already in 1995 Garcia-Canclini cast a critical eye on looking at consumerism simply as a passive and oppressive practice, proposing a more complicated understanding of consumerism in its political and sociocultural dimensions; he criticized earlier Marxist explanations that overestimated the impact of mass media in processes of cultural hegemony.
It is almost a commonplace by now to state that neoliberalism, as ideated by Milton Friedman, was born in Chile. The dramatic transformation of Chilean economic and social life under the authoritarian military rule first and later under the democratic rule of the Concertación has been widely documented (Taylor, Solimano, Winn, Nagy-Zekmi and Leiva). What is now ubiquitously called “the Chilean experiment,” conducted by the Chicago Boys in complicity with the Chilean ruling classes, aimed to violently transform a traditionally state-centered developmentalist society into a state-led deregulated economic field open to foreign investment, resulting in the privatization of education, health and the pension system, among other changes, and the dismantling of systems of social protection and redistribution that for decades had helped to equalize class and social relations in Chile. In fact, the country has even been labelled as “the most neoliberal country in the world” (Sader 2006). Marcus Taylor highlights that the “Chilean miracle,” heralded as a model for the rest of the world, was a state-led project that dramatically changed the conditions of possibility for subjectivity in Chile. Imposing a neoliberal economy was not then a process that only happened in the realm of formal labor and “the economy” but rather, it entailed the violent imposition of a neoliberal narrative, which translated into a cultural transformation of values (from solidarity to meritocracy) and ideals (from utopian happiness for all to individual immediate gratification).
The narrative of the free market promoted by the “Chicago Boys” was based on the idea of a natural but rational system of exchange between equal subjects in which the state does not necessarily recede, but takes on the role of promoting and guaranteeing the conditions of “freedom.” The overall effect would be the extended commodification of social relations and the reinforcement of market discipline in shaping the distribution of resources, power, and insecurity within society (Marcus 7 and 8, From Pinochet). Part of the project unfolding during the Pinochet years was “to rebuild the country morally, institutionally and materially,” and “to transform the conditions for political subjects, for which [a] more fundamental renovation of social institutions would be necessary: one that could reassert a renewed separation of politics and economics by atomising the collective subjectivities forged in the previous decades, reasserting the rule of the law and the primacy of private property... (Taylor 31-32, From Pinochet). Under the rhetoric of promoting “freedom,” government policies after 1982 began a concerted programme of removing obstacles to profitable investment and they aggressively promoted exports resulting in the transnationalization of the Chilean economy, which relied on highly gendered, under-regulated, precarious, and insecure labour (Taylor 73-75). Altogether, the transformations in labour relations initiated by Pinochet in 1979 with the Plan Laboral and continuing through the post-dictatorship worked to individualize, atomize, and depoliticize Chilean society, in addition to securing a cheap and disciplined labour force and safeguarding the concentration of power and wealth enjoyed by large corporations and grupos económicos (Taylor 98, 149).
Consider the 2013 U.S. film The Wolf of Wall Street, directed by Martin Scorsese. The film is a fictionalized account of the real life Jordan Belfort, character portrayed by Leonardo di Caprio, who made a fortune in the stock market through various means, including violence, corruption, and crime (in fact, almost all of Scorsese’s filmography can be read as a romanticized apology for capitalism, and of the mafia structure of the corporate world). Our hero is unapologetically presented as a self-made man, who starts poor and with an “ordinary looking” wife, to build an empire of wealth and influence and marry an aristocratic, younger, and whiter (and, as we are to understand, formerly less attainable) wife. This is a sentimental account, though, in which we are made to sympathize with Belfort as he and his “tribe” of mostly male workers indulge in a constant orgy of cocaine, alcohol, and sex as forms of tribal-like rituals that create very meaningful homosocial bonds. In a key scene, after being confronted with imminent legal charges by his father and his lawyer, Belfort is supposed to announce his stepping down from the firm in front of his associates. However, at the last minute Belfort changes his mind and exhorts his workers in a highly cathartic moment reminiscent of Jimmy Swaggart or other public “charismatic” religious ministers.
Neoliberalism then, is not just a technocratic set of economic policies, but mostly, a sentimental, romantic narrative that requires us to develop a sense of “faith,” irrational love, and devotion. The preaching of the virtues of the freemarket, as formulated by Friedman opened the path to market nationalism in which the emotional investment in the national project is mediated by a narrative of recycled signs (such as “the Popular” and “Revolution,” terms that are exploited by the Opus Dei inspired Unión Demócrata Independiente, U.D.I.). Moreover, the national space was reconfigured in the social imaginary as an even field of opportunity, in which successful subjects are creative, autonomous individuals who can advance themselves through their own efforts. Through this narrative, Cárcamo Huechante argues, the economic “structural adjustment” that took place under the dictatorship produced a subsequent “cultural adjustment” or symbolic shift in which the nation-state is imagined now as a nation-market and Chile becomes a logotype, a corporative sign that needs to be promoted. Re-imagined in the context of the global market, Chile itself becomes a brand, its geography a list of exploitable and marketable natural and human resources, where subjectivity is dependent on the ability to participate as a citizen-consumer under the neoliberal illusion of freedom and autonomy. Neoliberal market nationalism depends then on instilling a desire for belonging to a competitive and successful community. The best example of this is the narrative that Chileans needed to undergo every “sacrifice” so the nation could remain competitive in the global market when policies of labor flexibilization were implemented.
Based on Cárcamo-Huechante’s analysis of Milton Friedman’s speech in Chile in 1975 and Joaquin Lavin’s book La Revolución Silenciosa, we can further understand neoliberalism as a cultural discourse belonging to the genre of a “preach,” una prédica. Friedman’s speech is presented as a technocratic discourse of “illness” versus “recovery” as prescribed by a doctor, or a father, in which this position of “prescriber,” the superiority of the doctor’s knowledge, is framed within the neocolonial hierarchy North-South. Freemarketism, as a key narrative of neoliberal doctrine, operates as a sort of “sermon” that presents the economy as masculine through a language of technical and scientific rationale as opposed to the feminized “ideology.” This gendered dichotomy pits ideology—guided by passion and, thus, feminine and subjective—against the economy, which, by contrast, is viewed as rational and objective, and, thus, masculine. Despite this representation of the economy as the terrain of the rational and technocratic that provides neoliberalism with scientific truth, it appears that the freemarketist narrative requires the blind belief in the abstract entity of the market, that is, of the market as the “invisible hand” that regulates exchanges between equals. In this sense, freemarketism can be seen as a religion of believers that presents itself as a mere description of “the way things are.” In “The Essence of Neoliberalism,” Pierre Bourdieu conceives neoliberalism as a form of religious and utopian doctrine:
Thus we see how the neoliberal utopia tends to embody itself in the reality of a kind of infernal machine, whose necessity imposes itself even upon the rulers. Like the Marxism of an earlier time, with which, in this regard, it has much in common, this utopia evokes powerful belief—the free trade faith—not only among those who live off it, such as financiers, the owners and managers of large corporations, etc., but also among those, such as high-level government officials and politicians, who derive their justification for existing from it. For they sanctify the power of markets in the name of economic efficiency, which requires the elimination of administrative or political barriers capable of inconveniencing the owners of capital in their individual quest for the maximisation of individual profit, which has been turned into a model of rationality. They want independent central banks. And they preach the subordination of nation-states to the requirements of economic freedom for the masters of the economy, with the suppression of any regulation of any market, beginning with the labour market, the prohibition of deficits and inflation, the general privatisation of public services, and the reduction of public and social expenses.8
Freemarketism presents the market as a sacred, pontificated, transcendental entity, complete with the image of the angel of freedom breaking free from the slavery of communism. This is significant if we consider, again, that progressive narratives had been preempted of their utopian character.
A key assumption of neoliberalism is that the free market is the most efficient mechanism for the production and distribution of goods in society. (...) This view is fixed with an unencumbered access to the marketplace to provide cost-effectiveness, competition, and innovation, resulting in lower prices and more choices for the consumer, greater profits for the successful entrepreneur, growth for the economy and greater benefits and opportunities for all. Despite evidence of the contrary, the “everyone benefits” fiction persists. One might observe that like a religious orthodoxy, the idea of free market as an impersonal, god-like force inspires religious-like fervor in its proponents. (Alexander, 21, my emphasis)
In the context of market nationalism, the social libidinal investment with the nation-market that helps sustain and legitimize neoliberalism as a dominant mode of relationship is mediated by spectacles. Nationalisms have historically depended on how spectacles of the nation can capture the image of the nation as a whole, as “[n]ational representations are performed through public spectacle, each nation having its own genealogy of performance, often with specific gender connotations and representations” (Radcliffe 1997, 96). At the same time, the growing “spectacularization” of everyday life under neoliberalism is mostly apparent in the primacy of television, and the proliferation of hypermarkets, malls, and shopping centers as the spaces for social life; as Cárcamo-Huechante notes, “[t]he subject becomes the object of a spectacularized economy of varieties, of object-brands that massively pounce on cars (and minds) of a consumer subsumed in the fiction of the options.” It has already been explored how the neoliberal restructuring that began with the dictatorship transformed the available narratives by which subjects were able to find meaning and identity, including a new imagination of the community of belonging, from the nation-state to the nation-market (Cárcamo-Huechante). We must then shift our thinking about contemporary nationalism in Chile from a state-centered perspective to one of “market nationalism,” in which all the passions associated with the imagining of a community of belonging are articulated around the referent of the (national and transnational) market society, and where everyday life is now mediated by a number of brands, logos, and publicity images. As Cárcamo-Huechante argues, in this new scenario the social field of desire itself is mediated by market nationalism, which in turn guarantees the reproduction of a particular subjectivity functional to the neoliberal order.2
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