BIROn - Birkbeck Institutional Research Online O’Brien, Sean Joseph and Szeman, I. and Jagoe, E.-L. (2017) Introduction: We have never been democratic. Public 28 (55), pp. 5-14. ISSN 0845-4450. Downloaded from: http://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/26597/ Usage Guidelines: Please refer to usage guidelines at https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/policies.html or alternatively contact lib-eprints@bbk.ac.uk. http://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/26597/ https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/policies.html mailto:lib-eprints@bbk.ac.uk 1 SEAN O’BRIEN INTRODUCTION: WE HAVE NEVER BEEN DEMOCRATIC 1 As liberty is relocated from political to economic life, it becomes subject to the inherent inequality of the latter and is part of what secures that inequality. The guarantee of equality through the rule of law and participation in popular sovereignty is replaced with a market formulation of winners and losers. Liberty itself is narrowed to market conduct, divested of association with mastering the conditions of life, existential freedom, or securing the rule of the demos. Freedom conceived minimally as self-rule and more robustly as participation in rule by the demos gives way to comportment with a market instrumental rationality that radically constrains both choices and ambitions. -Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos 2 Of what do we speak when we speak about democracy? To what form of rationality does this term actually pertain? A slightly more attentive observation would show that those who discuss democracy today understand this term sometimes as a form of the body politic’s constitution, sometimes as a technique of government. The term thus refers both to the conceptuality of public law and to that of administrative practice: it designates power’s form of legitimation as well as the modalities of its exercise. -Giorgio Agamben, “Introductory Note on the Concept of Democracy” 3 The contributions to this special issue of Public are based on conversations held and work developed during the 2015 Banff Research in Culture (BRiC) research residency, “Demos: Life 2 in Common.” Held high in the mountains of Banff National Park, Alberta, “Demos: Life in Common” sought to “bring together artists, writers, researchers, and cultural producers who in their work are exploring the ways in which we might reinvigorate democratic life today—not just ‘democratic’ in its narrow, political sense, but as life in common in which being and belonging engenders the full flourishing of individuals and communities.” 4 Twenty-nine participant scholars and artists worked together with the 2015 BRiC faculty, including residency organizers Eva-Lynn Jagoe and Imre Szeman, distinguished scholar and political agitator Nina Power, renowned writer and activist Astra Taylor, and celebrated artist Alex Hartley. Over the course of the residency, the organizers, guest faculty and participant scholars and artists worked individually and collaboratively on a wide array of research and artistic projects, out of which grew a body of work that we have collected here under the theme, “We Have Never Been Democratic.” The theme of this issue riffs on the title of Bruno Latour’s We Have Never Been Modern, wherein Latour argues that modernity constitutes itself through a dualism between the natural and the social. 5 If, for Latour, the modern distinction between society and nature never actually existed, this dossier sets out to challenge the notion that the neoliberal present constitutes a radical deviation from a vibrant history of democratic liberalism, and to assert instead that democracy has since its inception been marked by its own imaginary dualism, between the demos and the sovereign. The Demos What does the concept of democracy name? The word democracy derives from two Greek words: it is a composite of “demos,” which means “the people,” and “kratos,” meaning “power.” 3 In its most basic sense, then, “demokratia” names the shared power of people thinking and acting together to narrate and decide the shape of collective life. What passes for democracy today, however, falls far short of the ideal form figured in its nomenclature. Instead of collective, equitable decision-making, we have a post-welfare security state, a socially and economically precarious populace, and an under-represented and disenfranchised electorate. And in a world beset by financial and ecological crises, whatever faith remained in the liberating potential of new technology has come up against a series of increasingly insurmountable limits. This collection asks how we might begin to think through the possibilities for collective life at a moment when the promises of social democracy heralded during the early postwar period have given way to the perils of a neoliberal order seemingly able to endure its own crises, and when democracy no longer seems to exist anywhere. A “demo” also refers to an experiment, a test or an attempt—as in the case of a musician, for example, who might record their own creative efforts and share them with others—that might suggest alternative paths through which to pursue these questions; be they academic, artistic, tactical or otherwise. To that end, a number of the contributions to this dossier take experimental approaches to the question of collective life in the present. We open the document with Catherine Ryan’s simultaneously incendiary and comical “Manifesto for the New, Political Pop Song,” a polemic that buries the boot-strap individualism of so much contemporary pop, advocating instead for the development of a popular music that is properly therapeutic and collective. Mobilizing the melancholia of the pop song, Ryan’s “Manifesto” offers a program for the implementation of a form of dance-pop that counters the atomized suffering of the neoliberal subject of market society. Attention to the political capacities of aesthetic experimentation also informs Francesca Hawker’s contribution to the dossier. In “Beef In The Sea,” Hawker takes an 4 inventive look at the band Bday Pres, and the way embarrassment figures in their live shows, drawing connections between performance, intimacy and the formalities that govern our subjectivities and socialities. Several of the pieces included here experiment with technology as a means to make sense of the present, while others pay homage to iconic moments of experimental praxis from the past. Addressing a gap in the capacity of existing representative forms to adequately capture the realities of extractive industries, David Janzen’s “Energy Demo(s): Towards a Rhythmanalysis of Capital & Abstraction” experiments with sound, and especially rhythm, as part of the project of reimaging environmental representation in an era of climate crisis. Fraser McCallum’s “The Unknown Student” examines the history and legacy of the titular sculpture produced at Rochdale College (1968-75), Toronto’s infamous experiment in alternative education and communal living, and draws connections between Rochdale’s closure in 1975 and the subsequent rise of the neoliberal university. And Angel Chen’s “Wandering Gramsciwards,” which is a travelogue that follows her protagonist’s arrival at a research university, draws on Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks to foreground connections between post-secondary education and the cultural hegemony of commodification and financial investment logic. There is yet another meaning to demos—they are manifestations of grievances, mass actions in which people collectively rally to draw attention to problems and limits of existing structures of government, law or economy, or to disrupt the dominant patterns of culture and politics. Public demonstrations can take a variety of forms: the protest rally, the march, the blockade, the riot and the occupation are but a few examples. They can be moments in which democratic ideals are reaffirmed against encroaching antidemocratic forces, or they might contest the very terms of political engagement proffered by the discourse of democracy. In 5 “Choreographies of Binding and Unbinding: On the Drawings of Andrea Bowers,” Hannah Ellul attends to the complex ways in which images of political action intersect with and shape processes of political identification, affiliation, and the desire for political agency. Examining Bowers’ piecemeal, meticulously-drawn iconography of protest, Ellul asks what it means to be preoccupied with protest imagery, and what attachments and detachments play out in these drawings. Bowers’ work contributes to the cultivation of a sense of collective political agency, not in terms of excavating a utopian, democratic past that never actually existed, but in reminding us of the collective struggles and forms of political agency that animate human history. The pieces included here seek at times to revitalize the demos, defending democratic life from the onslaught of neoliberal market forces. In “Creative Publics: Participatory Political Culture and the 2015 Canadian Federal Election,” Tara Mahoney draws on a sample of participatory engagement projects created by citizens leading up to the 2015 federal election. Drawing on her own election-related field study, Creative Publics, Mahoney explores the possibility of a significant shift in Canadian political culture towards a more expressive, critical and potentially transformative approach to political engagement rooted in shared aesthetic experiences and communicative capacities. Other pieces address the role of art in politics and public advocacy, particularly with reference to social practice art, or what Nicolas Bourriaud calls “relational aesthetics.” 6 Gretchen Coombs’s “Remember the Hoarding” recounts a conversation held during a seminar with Alex Hartley at BRiC 2015, in which the residents contemplated their involvement in a participatory and socially engaged art project in the Banff township, and highlights the trepidation they felt towards the creative economy. 6 Other contributions to the dossier mount challenges to the primacy of democracy as a conceptual framework through which to consider political possibility in the present. W. Oliver Baker explores contemporary limits to democratic politics in “Democracy, Class and White Settler Colonialism,” resituating the failures of US liberal democracy within the context of a much older yet nonetheless ongoing problem of white settler colonialism. For Baker, it is the settler-colonial relation—and its tendency to racialize class conflict—that most forcefully continues to delimit our capacity to envision or constitute forms of collective or democratic life. Darren Fleet, on the other hand, insists that the contemporary reign of finance capital overshadows any attempt to revitalize democratic citizenship. In his photo-essay, “‘To Tenant’: Situating the Realtor Within,” Fleet explores the state of real estate speculation in the Canadian city of Vancouver, tracing the historical transformation in the concept of housing from a discourse of rights to a concept in the language of finance. The multiple modes of the demos outlined here present a range of frameworks through which to consider the possibilities for collective life in the twenty-first century. Adopting a diverse set of critical and creative approaches, the pieces in this issue offer a reappraisal of the turn in the latter half of the twentieth century from the Keynesian social democracy of postwar liberalism to neoliberal economic doctrine and the reign of a financialized market economy. The Neoliberal Turn It is by now a familiar narrative: in the late 1970s, an international consortium of politicians and financiers, influenced by the neoclassical economic theory of the Chicago School, launched a program of radical political and economic reform—the so-called “neoliberal agenda,” an idea born in the minds of exiled Austrian economists in the early-twentieth century that has since rose 7 to planetary dominance on the heels of capitalist crisis. Published in 1944, Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom captured the strident anti-collectivism that he and his Austrian compatriot Ludwig von Mises had been defending since before the term neoliberalism was coined at a meeting in Paris in 1938. 7 Fearing for the fate of the individual in a world overwhelmed by the advance of totalitarianism, these two giants of neoliberal thought situated the social democratic projects of Roosevelt’s New Deal and the British welfare state on a continuum with the Nazism that had driven them into exile in France. Their influential ideas eventually spread from the Mont-Pelerin Society, which Hayek founded in 1947, to the think tanks and economics departments of the US, where they would ultimately find their champion in the figure of Ronald Reagan. But what exactly is neoliberalism? According to David Harvey, it “is in the first instance a theory of political economic practices that proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong property rights, free markets, and free trade.” 8 Here, Harvey captures the historical relation between the human subject and the entrepreneur whereby the distinction between the two figures breaks down. While nineteenth-century liberalism retained a sense of the public sphere and its citizens as relatively distinct from the terrain of economics— giving rise to conflicts between so-called democratic and economic freedoms—twentieth-century neoliberalism collapses the distinction between the social and the economic altogether, subsuming the public sphere under the purview of the market until the former vanishes entirely from view. One need only remember British Prime Minister and fellow champion of neoliberal reform, Margaret Thatcher, declaring in conversation with Woman’s Own magazine in 1987 that “there is no such thing as society.” 9 In a world in which corporations are people and people are 8 human capital, there is only the “free” association of individual enterprises operating within a legally regulated market framework. If the turn to neoliberalism in the second half of the twentieth century emerges from the economic theory of Hayek and Von Mises, it finds its roots in the economic rationality of the eighteenth-century physiocrats, for whom the market offers a new rationality of governance. In his history of neoliberalism, Michel Foucault argues that in the eighteenth century there occurred a shift from mercantilism to a new conception of the economy, exemplified in the economic theory of the free market put forth by the physiocrats, a group of Enlightenment French economists who insisted upon the “freedom of commerce” from government intervention. 10 For the physiocrats, and for economic theorists of the eighteenth century more generally, the object of economic intervention is no longer the market as it was under mercantilism, but the framing conditions within which the market can flourish when allowed to maintain a relative equilibrium according to its own internal mechanisms. In this way, the market comes to be understood in the eighteenth century as the site of a particular truth, a logic that both extends and deepens with the advent of neoliberalism, as the historical figure of homo æconomicus shifts from a “partner of exchange” (as the physiocrats envisioned) to an “entrepreneur of himself, being for himself his own capital, being for himself his own producer, being for himself the source of his earnings.” 11 No longer a labourer negotiating with capital over the terms of the wage, this enterprising figure is an economic actor who is remunerated for the sale of “human capital inasmuch as the ability-machine of which it is the income cannot be separated from the human individual who is its bearer.” 12 Securing economic stability is therefore a matter of personal responsibility, since organized networks of support put in place to mitigate the volatility of capital markets and provide a social safety net 9 for vulnerable populations only interfere with the naturally functioning rationality of the market. Democracy in Ruin As part and parcel of this paradigm shift in governmental reasoning, the welfare state and other public networks of support have come to appear as obstacles to the market’s flourishing, as fetters on the capacity for economic growth. And sure enough, since the 1970s, union power has declined precipitously, social safety nets have been systematically gutted, and privatization, austerity and deregulation rule the day. Many critical accounts of neoliberalism, however, insist that the consequences of the neoliberal turn are more wide reaching than the shared terrain of governmental and economic policy. In Undoing the Demos, Wendy Brown writes, “More than simply securing the rights of capital and structuring competition, neoliberal juridical reason recasts political rights, citizenship, and the field of democracy itself in an economic register; in doing so, it disintegrates the very idea of the demos.” 13 Brown stresses the paradigmatic character of the neoliberal turn as it unfolds across the social field, remaking the concepts of subjectivity, sociality and citizenship in the image of the market: “The replacement of citizenship defined as concern with the public good by citizenship reduced to the citizen as homo oeconomicus also eliminates the very idea of a people, a demos asserting its collective political sovereignty.” 14 For Brown, then, neoliberalism sounds the death knell for democracy. Amid the ruins of liberal democracy, the neoliberal subject flourishes. As Imre Szeman has argued, the thriving protagonist of the narrative of free-market sociality is the figure of the entrepreneur. In “Entrepreneurship as the New Common Sense,” Szeman writes: The entrepreneur has become a model of how to be and behave, and not only in the world of business. Entrepreneurship has come to permeate our social imaginaries in a way that 10 has quickly transformed its claims and demands on us from fantasy into reality. We are all entrepreneurs now, or, at a minimum, we all live in a world in which the unquestioned social value and legitimacy of entrepreneurship shapes public policy, social development, economic futures, and cultural beliefs and expectations. 15 Given the degree to which it has come to saturate the social field, the figure of the entrepreneur—heroic purveyor of human capital, neoliberal subject par excellence—offers a useful heuristic for framing a selection of the contributions in this issue. Eleanor King and Henry Svec’s “Roch Commune 2.0” playfully explores the recent transformations undertaken by the rock band Roch Commune, which in reincarnated form has abandoned cultural production in order to embrace a variety of entrepreneurial media practices. Reevaluating the capacity of American democracy to realize its ideals of meritocracy and individual freedom, Shama Rangwala’s comparative reading of Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth (1905) and Terence Davies’ film adaptation (2000) of the novel examines how the movement of narrative across form makes visible fundamental inequities of exchange for women in commodity society. Other pieces are more implicitly informed by the figure of the entrepreneur, touching variously on how, in the context of a marketized sociality, an emphasis on personal responsibility shapes discourses of pathology, communicative modes attach themselves to consumerist content and association, and debt replaces wages as the primary mode of social reproduction. In “Attention’s Deficit,” Eva-Lynn Jagoe forgoes the usual grumbling about society’s increasing speed and alienation, asking instead how the deficit that characterizes neoliberal subjectivity might in fact inhere in the person demanding that attention be paid, and what might be gained by reconsidering the term “deficit” in this way. In “Writing as Praxis,” Catherine Ryan talks to Nina Power about (among other things) the democratic capacity of specific writing practices to disrupt 11 myopic modes of thinking in a digitized discursive field. And in “Art, Culture and Systemic Change,” Tara Mahoney speaks with Astra Taylor about Taylor’s work with Strike Debt, the Rolling Jubilee, and the Debtors Assembly. Over the course of their conversation, Taylor discusses debt as a financial metric that disciplines the process of subject formation, and is thus a useful example for thinking about the way neoliberalism reconstitutes social relations at the level of individual. As Taylor notes, debt is a near universal condition, and is therefore a potential rallying point for political organizing; she reminds us that a critique of neoliberalism is also an opportunity to locate its sites of vulnerability, and a challenge to its authority. Critical accounts of neoliberalism have been castigated both for overemphasizing the role of greedy bankers and corrupt politicians in shaping the history of capitalism, and for wearing rose-tinted glasses when it comes to the Keynesian social democracy of the early postwar period. Moreover, the neoliberal consensus is itself showing signs of crisis: even the International Monetary Fund is asking if neoliberalism has been “oversold.” 16 With the UK set to exit the world’s largest common market, and US president-elect Donald Trump vowing to scrap the Transpacific Trade Partnership and the North American Free Trade Agreement, it would seem that the fate of the neoliberal program remains uncertain. But given the centrality of the demos to critiques of neoliberalism such as Brown’s, it is pertinent to note here that a fundamental ambiguity animates the concept of democracy itself, even when considered apart from its liberal variant. “Never did the demos really rule in liberal democracies,” as Brown notes. 17 What if we explore further the implications of this slippage between the people and the power structures that govern them, or indeed between the demos itself and those historically excluded from the category of citizen-subject? A critical reappraisal of democracy as a system of government inevitably encounters a 12 contradiction operating at the centre of the democratic project. As Giorgio Agamben has argued, democracy is split at its heart not into the demos and the executive power—as the composite demos+kratia would suggest—but between two forms of governmental rationality, “juridico- political on the one hand, economico-managerial on the other.” 18 Classical conceptions of democracy maintain a sharp distinction between the public sphere of political life and the economic management of the household—that is, between the polis and the oikos. The polis names the space populated by the demos—the ordinary citizens of the Greek city-state—while the oikos is home to those barred from citizenship (historically, slaves and women). These two poles of Greek democracy together constitute the terrain on which liberal governmentality gradually comes to collapse the distance between economic and political freedoms: If today we witness the overwhelming domination of the government and the economy over a popular sovereignty that has been progressively emptied of any sense, it may be that Western democracies are paying the price for a philosophical legacy they have assumed without reservations. The misunderstanding that consists in conceiving of government as a simple executive power is one of the errors most fraught with consequences in the history of Western politics. It succeeded in ensuring that the political reflection of modernity got lost behind empty abstractions like the Law, the general will and popular sovereignty, while leaving without response the problem which is from every point of view decisive: that of government and its articulation with the sovereign. 19 The managerial and regulatory tendencies of modern democracies that have since the 1970s come to eclipse the constitutional sovereignty of the demos were in fact always inherent in the concept of democracy as such. As a model of popular sovereignty, democracy necessitates a basic conflict between the constitution and the government, or what Agamben calls “power’s 13 form of legitimation” and “the modalities of its exercise.” 20 The rise of neoliberalism in the latter half of the twentieth century represents less a break with the radical spirit of democracy, more a contemporary realization of the historically disavowed underbelly of democratic sovereignty. Since its conception in ancient Greece, “demokratia” has worn two faces: that of the people, and that of the sovereign. But this constitutive dualism is a veil that conceals a more troubling reality. We Have Never Been Democratic Against critiques of neoliberalism as a simple anti-democratic turn, this collection begins from the position that the social democratic period preceding the rise of neoliberalism was marked by its own forms of precarity, regulation and exclusion, and that any attempt to come to terms with the present will necessary have to grapple with its tangled roots in the past. Indeed, our contention is that the ideal held out by the concept of the demos has never been realized, but is itself a category constituted through exclusion. Angela Mitropoulos has argued that, “if democracy means the rule of the demos (‘the people’), then the formal emptiness of the proposition of who ‘the people’ are is nevertheless constantly played out along both anthropological and racialised axes of differentiation.” 21 While the critique of neoliberalism provides an analytical framework through which to think about shifts in governmentality and subject formation since the 1970s—not only in terms of changes in policy or as an ideology, but as an entire remake of the concept of sociality in the mode of economics—a singular focus on neoliberalization tends to obscure the broader historical frameworks from within which neoliberalism develops and emerges as the dominant form of reason. In my interview with Mitropoulos included here, “Border, Theory, Contract,” she notes how, in their defence of social 14 democracy, critical accounts of neoliberalism also tend to uncritically reassert the taxonomic ranks of individual, family, party, nation, race and species-being. The tendency to reproduce conservative categories in critical discourse is partly a question of the methodologies through which we understand and critique the governing processes of sociality, and there is a danger in placing too much emphasis on the critical capacity of discursive concepts and buzzwords. The critique of neoliberalism often assumes a pastoral view of the social democratic arrangements of the early postwar period, proposing a return to the politics of inclusion and a reinvestment in the institutions of liberal democracy, and thus limits the framework through which we might imagine alternatives. As David Eso demonstrates in “An Introduction to the Poetry of James R. Louden,” oppositional and disruptive tactics to secure affordable housing often operate at the quotidian level of everyday life, and can assume forms not immediately identifiable in the terms of critical discourse, from barbeques on the steps of town halls to illegal camping. For all the problems associated with the critique of neoliberalism, there remains something historically distinct about the ways in which economic rationality has come to govern all forms of sociality, insofar as we might want to theorize possibilities for overcoming these conditions. Given an apparent lack of capacity to imagine alternative social forms, the discourse of neoliberalism would seem to suggest that we are not only at an economic impasse but a political one: “there is no alternative.” If this is indeed the case, then perhaps we need to rethink the ways in which alternatives are (being) imagined. Like Jacques Derrida’s notion of a “justice to come” that animates the conversation between Ryan Fitzpatrick and Kit Dobson, “Living in Messy Times,” Derrida’s spectral concept of a “democracy to come” (la démocratie à venir) offers a political horizon that takes the form of a promise—in this case, one that suggests that the 15 ideals held out by the demos arrive incrementally, but always in excess of the governmental mechanisms through which they are eventually implemented. 22 As Fitzpatrick asks Dobson, if justice and democracy are always to come, how might looking backwards help us see those horizons? We might consider recent social movements such as Occupy Wall Street or Black Lives Matter as pro-democratic, given their insistence on democratic ideals like the right to the city or bodily sovereignty, even as they operate outside the registers of legally sanctioned political engagement. In recent years, however, as struggles have erupted the world over, many of these political movements have had complicated relationships to the horizon of democratic participation. It would be more than a little reductive to suggest that either #OWS or #BLM can be usefully summed up according to a critique of neoliberalism or a defense of democracy. How should we understand the radicalism of contemporary social antagonisms in an ostensibly neoliberal era? Have the ideals of democratic liberalism not yet been entirely hollowed out, or should we think about these struggles from a vantage other than democracy? Do these struggles gesture towards a distant democratic horizon, or do they suggest the emergence in the present of radically different forms of life? Must today be terrible so that tomorrow might be better? “Demos: Life in Common” invited participants “to consider the ways in which we constitute and experience collective life in this century,” and it is in this spirit that the essays, interviews and artist projects in this issue engage in “experiments of thinking, acting, and making—demos that challenge the self-certainties and pieties of existing structures and practices, and so help to envision and enable renewed forms of democratic life.” 22 Any effort to answer the question that the demos raises in the present—namely, what possibilities exist for vibrant forms of collective life amidst the ruins of liberal democracy—requires both the cultivation of a 16 rigorous critical practice and the freedom of spontaneity if we are to grasp the lines of flight leading out of our precarious present. The work collected here constitutes a series of organized endeavors, carefully shaped and curated, that push the boundaries of disciplinary convention. Ranging quite widely over a broad variety of themes, adopting different methodological approaches and priorities, and working within divergent stylistic registers and political and empirical scales, this dossier provides an opportunity to reflect upon the virtues and risks of different conceptual, aesthetic, and stylistic forms for critical theorizing. I hope, too, that it speaks to those forms of political expression that erupt in the street and challenge the very categories by which we name them. NOTES 1 Many thanks to BRiC 2015 resident Sina Rahmani for his suggestion of the title. Thanks also to Bopha Chhay for help with early planning, and to all the residency participants and faculty for their invaluable input on the issue. 2 Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (New York: Zone Books, 2015), 41. 3 Giorgio Agamben, “Introductory Note on the Concept of Democracy,” Theory & Event 13.1 (2010). 4 “Demos: Life in Common.” http://test.banffcentre.ca/programs/demos-life-common 5 Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993). 6 Bourriaud defines relation aesthetics as “a set of artistic practices which take as their theoretical and practical point of departure the whole of human relations and their social context, rather than an independent and private space.” See Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics 17 (Dijon: Les presses du réel, 2002), 113. For critical engagement with the idea of relational, participatory, or social practice art, see Claire Bishop, Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and The Politics of Spectatorship (New York: Verso, 2012); Stewart Martin, “The Absolute Artwork Meets the Absolute Art Commodity,” Radical Philosophy 146 (2007): 15-25; and Marina Vishmidt, “‘Mimesis of the Hardened and Alienated: Social Practice as Business Model,” e-flux 43 (2013), http://www.e-flux.com/journal/43/60197/mimesis-of-the-hardened-and-alienated- social-practice-as-business-model/ 7 Friedrich A. Hayek, The Road to Serfdom (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2007). 8 David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 2. 9 Douglas Keay, Interview with Margaret Thatcher. “Aids, education and the year 2000!” Woman’s Own. 31 October 1987. 8-10. 10 Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France 1978-1979 (New York: Picador, 2004), 33. 11 Ibid., 226. Homo Œconomicus is a nineteenth-century term associated most immediately with John Stuart Mill and more generally with classical liberalism, but, according to Brown, drawing on Foucault, has been radically re-envisioned by neoliberal thinkers as a more fundamentally individuated economic actor via the concept of human capital. See Brown, Undoing the Demos, 79-111. 12 Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 226. 13 Brown, Undoing the Demos, 151-2. 14 Ibid., 39. 15 Imre Szeman, “Entrepreneurship as the New Common Sense,” The South Atlantic Quarterly 18 114.3 (2015): 472. 16 Jonathan D. Ostry, Prakash Loungani, and Davide Furceri, “Neoliberalism: Oversold?” Finance & Development: A Quarterly Publication of the International Monetary Fund 53.2 (2016): 38-41. 17 Brown, Undoing the Demos, 207. 18 Agamben, “Introductory Note.” 19 Ibid. 20 Ibid. 21 Angela Mitropoulos, “Autonomy, Recognition Movement,” The Commoner 11 (2006): 9-10. 22 Jacques Derrida, Spectres of Marx: The State of Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New International (New York: Routledge, 1994), 81. 22 “Demos: Life in Common.” http://test.banffcentre.ca/programs/demos-life-common