Catherine Chaput

Rhetorical Circulation in Late Capitalism: Neoliberalism and the Overdetermination of Affective Energy

In the world we have known since the nineteenth century, a series of governmental rationalities overlap, lean on each other, challenge each other, and struggle with each other: art of government according to truth, art of government according to the rationality of the sovereign state, and art of government according to the rationality of economic agents, and more generally, according to the rationality of the governed themselves. 1 And it is all these diff erent arts of government, all these diff erent types of ways of calculating, rationalizing, and regulating the art of government which, overlapping with each other, broadly speaking constitute the object of political debate.

Economic Rhetoric as Taxis

This essay expands the rhetoric of economics conversation started by economist Deirdre McCloskey. Through a close engagement with Michel Foucaults lectures at the Collège de France from 1975 to 1979, concerning the dual problematics of liberalism and biopolitics, we argue for theorizing economic rhetoric as a governmental problem of order, or taxis, which arranges value among divergent subjects beyond the dichotomies of material/cultural and global/local. This approach toward rhetoric, we further contend, takes as its strategic form what Foucault and Agamben have called a dispositif. We demonstrate this premise through a case study of Stephen Dubner and Steven Levitts notion of freakonomics, suggesting that it can be understood as a rhetorical dispositif working within the broader political rationality of neoliberal governmentality. We end by gesturing toward a rhetoric of the common as an alternative to the dispositif of freakonomics.

A Rhetoric of Economics beyond Civic Humanism: Exploring the Political Economy of Rhetoric in the Context of Late Neoliberalism

Over the past 30 years cultural economy has evolved into an important interdisciplinary research paradigm in the humanities and social sciences. Responding to neoclassical economics and its desire to organize all aspects of modern society around the efficient market principles of homo oeconomicus, cultural economy has illustrated the limits of such a perspective and emphasized the necessity of normative belief systems in the constitution and performance of economic marketplaces. At approximately the same time that cultural economy began its development into a coherent body of thought, another research paradigm called the rhetoric of economics also began to take shape. Owing its self-conscious origins to the pioneering work of Deirdre McCloskey – particularly her 1985 publication of The Rhetoric of Economics – this critical project had a similar desire to complicate the positivist foundations of modern economics. Through a focus on the narratives, metaphors, and other symbolic figures of speech that enable economists to quantify and measure social phenomena, the rhetoric of economics showed that, far from being neutral and objective, the discipline of economics required persuasion for the adoption of its views and value systems. These parallel inquiries notwithstanding, a concern for the rhetoric of economics appears conspicuously absent from the literature on cultural economy. Although cultural economy’s scholarship implies a rhetorical orientation toward economic phenomena, there has been little work that explicitly assesses how these research paradigms relate to one another. The purpose of this introduction, and special issue more broadly, is thus to open up space for a more extended dialogue between cultural economy and the rhetoric of economics, particularly in light of the 30-year anniversary of McCloskey’s writing on the topic. The remainder of this introduction will argue that the disciplinary and methodological divides between the rhetoric of economics and cultural economy have less to do with substantive factors, such as different ontological and epistemological conceptions of reality, and more to do with outmoded disciplinary constraints that have historically circumscribed what economic rhetoric can and cannot be. By illustrating how, when approached in its broadest sense, the rhetoric of economics can be conceptualized as a material force that conditions the very possibilities for how economic practices are rendered intelligible and acted upon, this introduction offers a framework for

Stating the Exception: Rhetoric and Neoliberal Governance During the Creation and Passage of the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008

As a policy measure that provided

Neoliberalism and the rhetorical invention of counterpublic attunement

700 billion in funding for imperiled Wall Street institutions, the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008 (EESA) was framed by its detractors as a continuation of neoliberalism rather than an authentic act of interventionism rooted in the macroeconomic philosophy of Keynesianism. Its proponents crafted EESA as an anomalous but necessary state intervention into an otherwise well-functioning free market. This essay analyzes these opposing arguments—focusing specifically on the state of exception warrants we call historical expediency and moral critique—to show how each position operates within the political rationality of neoliberal governmentality. We maintain that whether constructing the financial crisis as an historical glitch or as an administrative failure, both sides of the debate rely on warrants of exceptionialism, inflected through technical solutions, that circumvent possibilities for a more dynamic and transformative conversation grounded in a rhetoric of the common.

Trumponomics, Neoliberal Branding, and the Rhetorical Circulation of Affect

This article demonstrates the many seamless ways that multiple and diverse publics align their automatic, instinctual behaviors within the broad agenda of neoliberalism. Rather than surreptitiously crafting discourse to appeal to unconscious public dispositions, as neoliberalism does, it suggests that counterpublics consciously apply this technology to themselves. Specifically, it advocates that they forge a productive friction between rational critical thought and bodily habituation so as to reconstitute public orientations and open unexpected occasions for oppositional communication. This requires that scholars engage both traditional neoliberal critics and new materialist critics to tease out the embodied aspects of publics theory and infuse new materialism with an oppositional edge. Michel Foucault’s late lectures provide a theoretical and practical scaffolding for this practice of differently capacitating bodies. The article concludes by gesturing at how this public formation might further pull from underutilized rhetorical resources to expand the communicative possibilities of counterpublic production.

Accountable to Whom? The Rhetorical Circulation of Neoliberal Discourse and Its Ambient Effects on Higher Education

ABSTRACT This article studies Trumponomics as a brand that derives its economic and political purchase from the patterns of affective circulation opened up by the contemporary political economy. Because neoliberalism enables branding to both extract surplus wealth and appropriate surplus affect directly from consumers, it changes the rhetorical terrain. In this new landscape, Trump’s incoherent economic policies fade into the background as the production of his economic brand occupies the foreground. My argument theorizes affect within the labor theory of value, analyzes the Trump brand within that framework, and explores the implications of including affective value within the rhetorical toolbox.

Affect and Belonging in Late Capitalism: A Speculative Narrative on Reality TV

The chapter uses Ron Greene’s cartographic methodology and a sensibility toward what Thomas Rickert calls ambient rhetoric to explore shifts in the felt environment of higher education. It tracks the rhetorical circulation of educational discourse through its historical formation and analyzes this ambient rhetoric within recent policy changes at the California State University (CSU) and the State University of New York (SUNY) systems. The history is culled from deliberations about federally funded educational initiatives interwoven with popular discourse manifested in newspapers, magazines, and best-selling economic literature. Ultimately, the chapter reveals a transition in the underlying warrant for education policies from the national social good to international market competition and a transformation in its recipients from individuals with social needs to statistical populations with market needs.