AlexRogansBeta

You’re bang on. As a linguistic anthropologist I found this “meme” confusing and misleading. And your point about the impossibility of consistency is spot on.

Much ex-mo content is just angry people taking what they think are clever jabs at the church. Most of that content isn’t nearly the ‘gotcha’ meme makers think they are. But man, when ex-mo content hits good, it hits real good haha.

When does plating become egregious? I dunno. But if this tasted good then I am in!

If we actually wanna support the essence of what we’re engaging on, we shouldn’t factionalize by user interface and should avoid names attached to Lemmy, Mastadon, or KBin. We should instead be Federates of the Fediverse.

I feel this in my bones as an anthropologist when it comes to semi-structured interviews, which frankly have very little to do with anthropological inquiry but have nonetheless become a rote methodology.

This is so wildly unnecessary and wildly awesome at the same time

The reason you’re confused is because 90% of the people in this thread haven’t read or understood Foucault, who gave us the best (though certainly not the only) description of neoliberalism. In it’s muddled use by every day people and the media, it’s meaning has become very confused.

What people here are describing (deregulation, positive valuation of wealth generation, free markets, etc) is just different flavours of liberal capitalism. Neoliberalism isn’t that.

Neoliberalism names the extension of market-based rationalities into putatively non-market realms of life. Meaning, neoliberalism is at play when people deploy cost/benefit, investment/return, or other market-based logics when analysing options, making decisions, or trying to understand aspects of life that aren’t properly markets, such as politics, morality/ethics, self-care, religion, culture, etc.

A concrete example is when people describe or rationalize self-care as a way to prepare for the workweek. Yoga, in this example, becomes of an embodiment of neoliberalism: taking part in yoga is rationalized as an investment in self that results in greater productivity.

Another example: how it seems that most every public policy decision is evaluated in terms of its economic viability, and if it isn’t economically viable (in terms of profit/benefit exceeding cost/investment) then it is deemed a bad policy. This is a market rationality being applied to realms of life that didn’t used to be beholden to market rationalities.

Hence the “neo” in “neoliberalism” is about employing the logics of liberalism (liberal capitalism, I should say) into new spheres of life.

A good (re)source for this would be Foucault’s Birth of Biopolitics lectures, which trace the shift from Liberalism to Neoliberalism. As well, there’s excellent literature coming out of anthropology about neoliberalism at work in new spheres, in particular yoga, which is why I used it as my example here.

Neoliberalism was created, as a term, to describe something real, pervasive, and problematic. It has been co-opted as an underserving boogyman by the left, and co-opted mistakenly by the right as libertarianism. Neither understand it’s original formulation and what it names.

So, while you’re 100% correct about neoliberalism not belonging to either the left or the right, your basic description of neoliberalism isn’t correct. What you describe (deregulation, positive valuation of wealth generation, free markets, etc) is just liberal capitalism.

Neoliberalism names the extension of market-based rationalities into putatively non-market realms of life. Meaning, neoliberalism is at play when people deploy cost/benefit, investment/return, or other market-based logics when analysing options, making decisions, or trying to understand aspects of life that aren’t properly markets, such as politics, morality/ethics, self-care, religion, culture, etc.

A concrete example is when people describe or rationalize self-care as a way to prepare for the workweek. Yoga, in this example, becomes of an embodiment of neoliberalism: taking part in yoga is rationalized as an investment in self that results in greater productivity.

Another example: how it seems that most every public policy decision is evaluated in terms of its economic viability, and if it isn’t economically viable (in terms of profit/benefit exceeding cost/investment) then it is deemed a bad policy. This is a market rationality being applied to realms of life that didn’t used to be beholden to market rationalities.

Hence the “neo” in “neoliberalism” is about employing the logics of liberalism (liberal capitalism, I should say) into new spheres of life.

A good (re)source for this would be Foucault’s Birth of Biopolitics lectures, which trace the shift from Liberalism to Neoliberalism. As well, there’s excellent literature coming out of anthropology about neoliberalism at work in new spheres, in particular yoga, which is why I used it as my example here.