Neoliberalism and the rhetorical invention of counterpublic attunement

The theory and formation of neoliberalism and its publics

The history of neoliberalism goes back to the period between World War I and World War II during which economists and politicians grappled with the limits of capitalism’s colonial model. As Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (1992) predicted, the 19th-century market expanded until it covered “the whole surface of the globe” (p. 21). With this accomplished, capitalism’s “spatial fix” (Harvey, 1999, p. 415) hit a hard limit. Mired in stagnant profits and struggling with anti-colonial sentiments, economists and free marketers tasked themselves with reinventing capitalist structures and social relations. This task resulted in a broad embrace of state welfare as the safety net for those who slipped through capitalism’s economic cracks, presenting neoliberals with both a sense of urgency and a clearly identified opponent. As a counterpublic opposed to Keynesian-style political economic strategies, diverse constituents from the wealthiest capitalist nation-states convened in 1947 and annually thereafter, at the initiation of Friedrich Hayek, to strategize how best to unleash capitalism’s competitive spirit from the constraints of state intervention.

Under Hayek’s leadership, this group, calling itself the Mt. Pèlerin Society, created a neoliberal environment and its attendant subjects by employing a multifaceted counterhegemonic campaign that adhered to a core set of philosophical tenants. Rationality may appear to be the driving force of advanced societies, but, they interjected, this appearance masks a more fundamental decision-making apparatus. In the chronotope of everyday activities, people make decisions based on the available facts; in the less visible and more immediate space of bodily thinking, people unconsciously rely on non-rational, instinct-based rules to arrive at their personal and political conclusions. They depend on tacit activities that take place on an entirely different plane from modes of rational problem solving. The neoliberal counterrevolution used this insight to thread its discursive strategies through unconscious bodily communication. In part, neoliberal ideology holds a hegemonic position today because of this crucial tactic. It is, therefore, worth revisiting neoliberal public formation and its campaign against the Keynesian-style organization of capitalism for its employment of communication strategies as well as for its insights into how somatic activities contribute to the unconscious attunements of participating bodies.

Through a voracious study of cognitive psychology, Hayek infused economics with a philosophy of efficient exchange by non-deliberating subjects. According to his The Sensory Order, most decision-making stems from physical encounters in the world and the body’s neurological cataloging of that experience into particular orientations toward new information. The agentive force of individual action, according to Hayek (1963), stems from “a complex of relations” (p. 35) recorded and stored as memory through the brain’s simultaneous, web-like neurological firings. An intricate relationship between neurological processing and other anatomical functions (heart rates, blood flows, body temperatures, and hormonal secretion, for instance) endows individuals with dispositions toward ideas, practices, and policies that stem from their lived experiences. These dispositions dwell in bodies and as those bodies form publics, individual dispositions develop into social rules that organically establish community practices without the imposition of rational calculation. Hayek uses the metaphor of a map to explain the repeated historical patterns—the semi-permanent order built up through past events—and references the model to describe the sensory order evoked by a moment in time. The map and the model work together so that one’s behavior derives from the historical information encoded within the map as well as the immediate sensory data of the model. Although imprinted onto brains as a kind of disposition, bodily knowledge constantly develops through the ongoing and involuntary intake of sensory data. Hayek concludes that humans have a propensity toward social rules that emerge from and evolve through biological processes that are, nevertheless, available for cultivation.

Breathing new life into Adam Smith’s invisible hand thesis, Hayek asserts that economic exchange follows a spontaneous order of operations governed by processes too complex for any individual or group of individuals to understand. People are directed, he (Hayek, 1967) argues, by rules that follow “a super-conscious mechanism which operates upon the contents of consciousness but which cannot itself be conscious” (p. 61). Because individuals attune to their world through the mind’s unconscious sensory order and its pre-verbal operations, the discourses that constitute public formation need to attend to this labyrinth of associations via everyday experiences that biologically prime audiences for later policy advocacy. Thus, Hayek and his colleagues decided to cultivate neoliberal depositions throughout the entire capitalist terrain as necessary preparation for later public deliberations.

Consequently, this theory of unconscious bodily communication grounds the discursive interventions of the neoliberal counterpublic. Take, for instance, Hayek’s hugely popular public-facing text, The Road to Serfdom, which narrates the slippery slope from well-intentioned government assistance to ill-intentioned state interference. Published for a mass audience, the book was abbreviated for the mainstream Readers Digest, adapted into graphic form, and distributed by General Motors. Arguing that government interventions as apparently benign as providing citizens with jobs, health care, and other basic needs are one small step from totalitarianism, this text resonated substantially with the bodily attunements of post-war Americans. In addition to repeating its foundational argument among diverse publics, the book and its multiple reproductions bolstered the bodily memories of those still hungry from the breadlines of the Great Depression, still traumatized from the battlefields of World War II, and still reeling from the unfolding story of the Jewish holocaust. These implicit warrants belong to the long string of neurological associations that likely fired automatically among a late-1940s audience confronted with the proposition of totalitarianism. Whether by intension or accident, this narrative moves along familiar biological pathways for a post-war public experientially predisposed to fear expanding government authority. Such resonances redouble those fears and (because of the associative links among government, rational calculation, and public deliberation) valorizes unconscious, tacit communication above traditional deliberative practices. The book instructs audiences to follow their instincts and view rational arguments against those bodily dispositions as duplicitous. Although noteworthy for its founding myth as well as its enduring popularity, The Road to Serfdom exemplifies a pervasive strategy used throughout neoliberal’s vast public-making efforts.

Hayek regularly advanced neoliberal tenants through non-expert opinion and popular discourse to influence public dispositions in advance of policy deliberation. Outreach to the masses, whose associative capacities and orientations to the political economic world take place implicitly through a series of repeated experiences, requires cooperation from a host of sympathetic individuals. Thus, Hayek (1944/2005) called on “journalists, teachers, ministers, lecturers, publicists, radio commentators, writers of fiction, cartoonists, and artists” (p. 107) to help circulate neoliberal values. He ingeniously absorbed these “second-hand dealers in ideas” (p. 105) into what would otherwise be professional conversations—inviting them to meetings of the Mt. Pèlerin Society, for instance—and gave them the language—spontaneous order, economic freedom, and the corruption of big government, to name a few—with which to influence public opinion. This multipronged approach to public pedagogy circulates concepts, stories, and critiques throughout the entire terrain of life experience. Each discursive iterance produces a neurological burst that strengthens past matches cataloged in the body’s memory and reinforces a specific relationship to the world through which all future information must pass. Ultimately, this widespread repetition enabled the neoliberal model to harden into a public disposition.

Using journalism, popular literature, and formal education to constitute subjects who spontaneously interpret the world as though they were rationally adhering to a fully-fledged economic theory, the neoliberal juggernaut infiltrated the private lives of public subjects through a series of high-impact interventions. At the forefront of this spectacle, Milton Friedman hosted a privately funded documentary series, Free to Choose, and penned its best-selling accompanying book. He appeared in unexpected venues like the Phil Donahue Show, invented tag phrases like there’s no such thing as a free lunch, and wrote a regular Newsweek column. As its amiable, soft-spoken, public voice, Friedman helped transform neoliberalism from a political economic philosophy into a lifestyle that feels as natural as the bodies that guide worldly practices. It is difficult to overestimate the collective influence of these popular interventions that over multiple decades recrafted the prevailing public disposition.

Advancing its doctrine as a universally applicable way of inhabiting world, neoliberalism gradually encroached on all forms of decision-making. Books like Richard Thaler’s Nudge; Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow; and Stephen Levitt’s Freakonomics series illustrate the incredible breadth of issues, from health care and education to climate change and interpersonal relationships, purportedly solved through a proper neoliberal environment. In a tradition forged by Hayek and popularized by Friedman, these economists appropriate cognitive psychology to craft public policy arguments and market consumer goods in ways that align with the predominant bodily dispositions of neoliberal publics. In addition to the enormous audience of these best-selling books, their authors exert further influence by teaching the future generation of business leaders and policy makers. Kahneman works for the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs and Thaler teachers courses in choice architecture—his term for constructing the terrain so as to coax a predetermined choice. His (Thaler & Sunstein, 2008) choice architecture focuses on the impact of those contextual elements studied by critical theorists and cognitive psychologists alike—default position, visual and discursive representations, risk aversion, and status quo bias—to design opportunities for choice that will account for what he views as predictable “human fallibility” (p. 37) or the regularized way in which bodily thinking supersedes rational thinking. In short, Thaler instructs neoliberal strategists on how to stage public debate so that its architecture bleeds into the natural environment and manipulates its audience on a tacit, bodily level.

These economists and their collaborators have made good use of diverse rhetorical strategies and multiple venues of propagation, but they have also been able to go further in their designs by employing an understanding of how bodies process and communicate information. It is this latter understanding of non-signifying bodily communication that those publics opposed to neoliberalism need to explore in more depth. Take, for instance, the public understanding of the much publicized Russian interference into the 2016 U.S. presidential election. The Russians did not hack into election results and change votes nor did they explicitly advocate for a particular candidate. Instead, they manipulated the deliberative environment to encourage votes toward their preferred candidate. Through a widespread social media campaign, they circulated stories about voter fraud and Clinton malfeasance targeted at preselected audiences. Computer generated robots disguised as niche demographic types shared these messages with audiences primed to positively receive them. These programs mined social media for default positions, political and cultural representations, and biases; then, they designed messages to resonate with these deeply embedded bodily associations. In so doing, they ensured a statistically meaningful success rate wherein its targeted audiences freely chose the desired candidate because of bodily resonances that were subsequently rationalized.

To be clear, I do not advocate for clandestine operations like the Russian intervention into democratic elections not the development of more benign forms of choice architecture, but I do think neoliberal public formation offers important lessons. Neoliberal advocates refused the commonplace that public life and its political practices exist on a unique terrain separate from private life. They equally refused the assumption that political work relies exclusively on rational deliberation. Denying the twin foundations of traditional public work, neoliberalism invented its own platform for political economic intervention into embodied orientation. A carefully crafted, decades-long project that moved as adroitly within private spaces and popular mediums as within academic and governmental spaces and culminated in a vibrant networked public whose political economic and cultural platforms bleed across life practices, neoliberalism has much to teach its opponents about public formation and communication in the contemporary era.

In particular, the theorization of unconscious bodily activities offers an opportunity to push publics theory and its attachment to critical agency beyond consciousness-raising and activism. Such public work does not have to abandon rationality or function underhandedly. On the contrary, it can self-consciously aim rationality at rhetorical being—the unconscious, habituated responses to familiar stimuli that orient deliberative engagement in the world. This focus seeks to produce public subjects capable of both experiencing and understanding the uneven terrain of neoliberalism such that an oppositional embodiment emerges spontaneously in new and unexpected ways. Using both thinking minds and sensing bodies, human beings have the ability to attune themselves to the ontological element that circulates through materiality and then to adjust that attunement to another frequency. As neoliberal public formation illustrates, the invention of counter-attuned bodies requires a multifaceted publics theory that draws from the humanism of public deliberation as well as the post-humanism of ecological dwelling. With this in mind, the next section explores the possibilities for a productive intersection between these two divergent theories.

A critical encounter between publics theory and new materialism

The preceding discussion of neoliberal public formation tracked the long-term strategy of reconstituting bodily dispositions. Steadily gathering momentum, these neoliberal designs received an unlikely shot in the arm from the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Instead of undermining public faith in contemporary political economic practices, these attacks substantially reinforced the instinctual connections among anti-capitalist discourse, indiscriminate violence, and totalitarian regimes. Already disposed toward these linkages, post-9/11 Americans responded by defending the neoliberal agenda. The resulting public gave voice to what Bradford Vivian (2006) characterizes as a “neoliberal epideictic” that, in turn, “unite[d] an otherwise fractured citizenry in a dynamic affective experience” (p. 8). First in its emergency response mode and then in its commemorative mode, 9/11 rhetorics persuaded citizens to occupy a form of U.S. patriotism that supplanted political work with the “preoccupations of private life” (p. 15). In studying this spirited praise of contemporary capitalism, often equated with freedom and the American way of life, Vivian makes it clear that affect, feeling, and sentiment pull divergent groups together despite their material differences. Although these embodied sensibilities rose with and were strengthened through the public embrace of 9/11 rhetorics, they did not disappear as those discourses waned. Even after coming down from the emotional heights of the consumerism-as-patriotism moment, individual bodies still swarmed with neoliberal allegiances.

This conundrum in which multiple publics identify with and support practices that disproportionally favor a small segment of the population has fueled a surge in scholarship exploring the preference for private sphere solutions among citizens across the political spectrum. Many of these accounts position neoliberal doctrine and its practices as central to the increasing distrust of democratic governing structures. For instance, Wendy Brown’s (2015) much anticipated Undoing the Demos charges neoliberalism with corrupting the democratic populace by replacing collectively deliberating publics with the individually calculating homo œconomicus. Naomi Klein’s (2017) impassioned response to the election of Donald Trump similarly asserts that “neoliberalism is shorthand for an economic project that vilifies the public sphere and anything that’s not either the workings of the market or the decisions of individual consumers” (pp. 79–80). Robert Asen (2017) further indicts neoliberalism as enforcing an economic uniformity that “discounts the productive power of diversity and difference in the public sphere” (p. 3). These scholars harmonize on one chord: neoliberalism delimits public discussion of the collective good within its own economic parameters. They offer a host of procedures intended to reanimate public-oriented politics such as telling different stories, building relations across groups, and forging a common cause. Specifically, Brown stresses the role of education in valorizing difference and public service; Klein argues for assembling activist coalitions that simultaneously oppose neoliberalism and put forward practical alternatives; and Asen proposes local, face-to-face organizing. For these thinkers, there are many divergent groups whose sociopolitical problems and goals overlap in their opposition to neoliberalism; these groups need to be connected. As Asen (2017) sees it, this requires the networking of “discursive, embodied, and material relationships” (p. 4). Individuals need to walk through their neighborhoods, engage others, and discover how the burdens of neoliberalism cut across their differences. Such local practices provide the foundational kindling for change and yet they require an external spark to catch fire.

The enormously difficult task of moving from the back-and-forth maneuvering within the current neoliberal milieu to the possibility of producing a radically different political economic terrain with its own set of possibilities and constraints requires that experience be manufactured into fuel for change. Just as crude oil must be refined into gasoline through chemical processing, a set of experiences and their felt sensibilities represent the raw materials of public formation that must be refined into oppositional energy. Different from the formation of coalitions among pre-established groups and prior to rhetorical publicity, the processing of experience and its affective investments cultivates critical subjects who do not yet exist. This purposeful manipulation of material sensibilities moves public theory toward the invention of subjects capable of experiencing and acting in the world through an oppositional attunement.

Traditional public theory hints at this possibility. Asen (2017) argues that communities are not simply the aggregate of individual actions, but, quoting Dewey, characterizes them as constituted through “close and direct intercourse and attachment” (p. 342). In a networked public, individuals pool their ideas, learn from each other, determine the best course of action, and advocate for it. This behavior, to the extent that it engages bodies through “active and purposeful attention to relationships” (Asen, 2017, p. 343), alters dispositions and changes what those individuals are and are not capable of as public subjects. However crucial to the formation of networked publics, strong interpersonal associations among divergent individuals are not easily achieved. Individuals come to relationships with intellectual preconceptions as well as bodily dispositions. Even if preconceptions and group interests can be quarantined, people have little control over the tacit, bodily thinking that influences their encounters. Networks of such unconscious associations pervade the public sphere and its embodied subjects, producing unexpected difficulties for coalitions of those adversely affected by neoliberalism. When practices that make sense in theory fail in practice, scholars must rethink even their most enduring tenants. As Asen (2015) elsewhere explores, the mutually informing relationship between publics scholarship and its enactment must be infused with the “self-reflexive spirit of critical theory” (p. 142). This reflection can be approached, as Dana Cloud and Kathleen Feyh (2015) suggest, through an inquiry into the fidelity between emotional identifications and rational political positions. In addition, scholars can explore the bodily orientations and environmental underpinnings of those emotional and rational responses. The latter practice does not aim to rescript discourse—fighting one story with another story—but to reconstitute the material vitality that informs spontaneous engagements. By extending inventional practices in such a direction, public theorists will inevitably intersect with new materialism.

Theorizing communication through an ontological lens, new materialism represents a small, but growing stand of rhetorical scholarship. Whether focused on pre-rhetorical affectability (Davis, 2010), ambient rhetoric (Rickert, 2013), public ecologies (Rice, 2012), or agentive capacities (Stormer & McGreavy, 2017), this perspective places the guiding forces of invisible materialities under the purview of communication studies. Although this common inquiry into the powerful orienting materialities that operate separately from conscious reflection often focuses on individual bodies and discrete things, it can be scaled up to study groups and environments. According to Jane Bennett (2010), for instance, material things carry “a certain vital force, but there is also an effectivity proper to the grouping as such: an agency of the assemblage” (p. 24). Individual subjects surge with energy and when that energy connects with other circulating forces, it swells, amplifies, and overflows its apparent boundaries to saturate an environment with cues for its possibilities and constraints. These energetic forces move through physical matter to construct bodily resonances or what Thomas Rickert (2013) calls rhetorical being—the sedimentation of forces that habituate an individual’s ability to act in a given environment. Individuals who inhabit similar spaces eventually embody similar energetic forces, aligning their deliberative capacities. Thus, while traditional public theories suggest that discourse mediates between individuals and their environment, new materialism adds that energetic, material forces mediate between human beings and their discursive practices.

Offering a theory of ongoing affectability, new materialism replaces the strict division between material being and conscious negotiation with a theory of entanglement such that all matter and its vibrant forces affect all other matter through a complex, though often unconscious, series of calibrations and recalibrations. Reflecting this perspective, Rickert uses the concept of ambient rhetoric to discuss how bodies adjust their material being to the affordances of their environment as a means of inventing opportunities for communication. He locates this material vibrancy “prior to the symbolic” and characterizes it as “emotions, sensations, and other marks and traces of psychical and material experience” (p. 57). As he explains it, alignment with the ambient cues of our situated practices creates agentive possibilities. Because new materialism opens the space for rhetorical invention as the modulation of the material vitalities animating human subjectivity, one can become an agentive subject by taking material being as an object of cultivation.

Critical engagement with the material core of rhetorical being can, I propose, serve as the spark that ignites the networked counterpublic activities. New materialism usefully locates agentive capacity at the micro-level of embodiment, one invisible to the senses, and extends it to non-human matter. Too much emphasis on ambient rhetorical processes, however, overshadows the importance of rational thinking. This can be mitigated by approaching embodiment with purposeful intentions. In other words, the space produced from the collision between traditional public theory and new materialist theory opens possibilities for cultivating a critically thinking subject and a subject materially orientated toward an oppositional mode of being-in-the-world. Ronald Greene (2003), who shares a new materialist suspicious of rhetorical deliberation as the route toward substantive change, nudges us in the direction of such subject constitution. Although critical thought by itself cannot penetrate material orientation, an individual, he says, can engage in practices that rhetorically produce an individual as “a subject of a particular kind” (p. 192). Invoking Foucault’s technologies of the self, Greene beseeches us to explore subjectivity as the practice of cultivating one’s ethos. In so doing, he illuminates prospects for constituting material instincts in opposition to neoliberalism.

With Greene, I draw from Foucault, especially his discussion of parrhesia, for the project of crafting publics negatively attuned toward neoliberalism. As Foucault studied it, parrhesia is not confined to a rhetorical form between sender and receiver; exceeding such boundaries, it expands to include practices of establishing the subject. Foucault’s lectures on parrhesia teach us how to invent subjects capable of confronting the exploitation and oppression wielded in the name of hegemonic truths. Employing a series of ritual acts, those who wish to be truth-tellers redesign their embodied knowledge with the intention of becoming a person endowed with the moral courage to speak publicly against prevailing norms. From this perspective, one that differs from Art Walzer’s (2013) discursive interpretation, parrhesia entails the practice whereby one becomes the person capable of first knowing truth and second speaking that truth even at great personal risk. As Vivian (2015) explains, “Foucault’s principal concern with the speaking subject lies not in formulae of outward address” but “in how the very subjectivity of the speaker is implicated in his or her speech” (p. 369). Although the parrhesiastes is “compelled to speak what he or she understands as true irrespective of majority opinion” (p. 370), this speech is only the outward sign of the energetic work of subject cultivation. In its subject-making focus, parrhesia offers an embodied practice—one Michael Hardt (2010, 2011, 2012) characterizes as militant and Kelly Happe (2015) calls radically democratic—capable of fracturing neoliberalism and opening up possibilities for an as yet undiscovered alternative.

Although Foucault never claimed to be a parrhesiastes and often sought to efface himself from strictly political agendas, his own biography illustrates this subject-making work. In his reoccurring meditations on method, he often positions his work against overarching theories and their fully autonomous subjects. In a much discussed passage from his Archeology of Knowledge, for instance, he (Foucault, 1972) explains that his scholarship participates in an unstable field through which “questions of the human being, consciousness, origin, and the subject emerge, intersect, mingle, and separate off” (p. 16). As he articulates it, this work struggles to create new spaces from which to speak. He describes this practice as a “preparing—with a rather shaky hand—a labyrinth into which I can venture” (p. 17). Tellingly, reading, writing, speaking, and listening—the traditional practices required of a deliberative public—fold into a public-focused lifestyle that, for Foucault, also included political protests, prison advocacy, bodily experimentation, and an asceticism adopted from his time in Tunisia (Macey, 1993). With this coupling of conscious reflection and lifestyle cultivation, Foucault exemplifies subject formation as an embodied, active, tentative practice that connects the private sphere to the public one vis-à-vis a discursive network into which new identities dwell, expand, and exceed. In my reading, he binds the two modalities of public engagement described in this section (rational deliberation and bodily attunement) to create a space for alternative productions of the ubiquitous material forces that shoot through people, things, and environments. For this reason, the next section engages Foucault as a potential resource for preparing anti-neoliberal counterpublics.

Foucault and the production of oppositional spontaneity

Whereas Habermas studies how deliberating publics emerged in tandem with political and economic liberalism to direct, correct, or otherwise engage state action, Foucault theorizes the relationship between power and subject formation as bound up in the process of opposing diverse governing structures littered across civil society. By attending to subjectivity, he explores the material capacity of individuals to experience and engage the world. So conceived, Foucauldian power neither deprives the subject of agency, as Fraser claims, nor offers a new transcendentalism, as Habermas suggests. On the contrary, Foucauldian power addresses the concrete, material conditions that enable possibilities for agency. His discussion of power, like Rickert’s ambient rhetoric, offers a way to understand material processes that take place at an accelerated speed and on a microscopic level. In ways that foreshadow new materialist inquiries, such analysis highlights the physiological underpinnings that enliven networked discourses, experiences, and subjects to discipline bodies toward particular practices, ideas, and relationships. The ability to navigate these pervasive powers toward alternative ends requires, in Foucault’s formulation, bodily training. Thus, this section surveys Foucauldian power as a materialist approach to governing, something Greene has long advocated, and combines it with his discussion of parrhesia to speculate about the possibility of forging publics counter-attuned toward neoliberalism.

Power insinuates itself into the somatic life of individuals, producing what Foucault famously termed docile bodies or bodies that self-regulate according to community expectations. Many of his interlocutors mistake this and other bodily language as metaphorical, even though Foucault emphasizes subjects as flesh and blood bodies. Critics, for instance, reference disciplinarity as a capillary power to underscore its ability to circulate throughout small and seemingly inconsequential social practices. Yet, Foucault’s discussion of capillary power stresses its physiological aspects. As a “terminal, capillary form of power,” disciplinarity, he (Foucault, 2006) says, “reaches the level of bodies and gets a hold on them, taking actions, behavior, habits, and words into account” (p. 40). He goes on to assert that power’s influence derives from “the synaptic contact of bodies-power” (p. 40) and especially the brain’s material processing. For Foucault, this physiological uptake of power supersedes concerns over state power and entirely replaces psychological queries with concrete material ones. According to his hypothesis, disciplinary power directs brain synopses and does so through experiential contact with the world rather than vis-à-vis a predetermined revolutionary subject or a universally embedded human psychology. Thus, he (Foucault, 1977) privileges a critical method that “shortens its vision to those things nearest to it—the body, the nervous system, nutrition, digestion, and energies” (p. 155). Focusing on how material experiences inform energetic bodies, Foucault tracks the same invisible, circulating force that Marxist theorists abstract through the concept of value and psychoanalytic critics invent as desire, but his mapping follows bodily processes throughout the panoply of everyday experiences.

Experience, rather than value or desire, grounds Foucault’s study of how bodies maneuver through the daily practices of their situated milieu. The human being, from his (Foucault, 1991) perspective, “is an animal of experience, he is involved ad infinitum within a process that, by defining a field of objects, at the same time changes him, deforms him, transforms him and transfigures him as a subject” (p. 124). Paul Veyne, fellow historian at the Collège de France, argues that this perspective relies on the driving force of unconscious relationships just as other critical theories do. But, in revolutionary fashion, the invisible causal element (the so-called motor of history) and its visible effects (how people think and act in the world) derive, for Foucault, from the same material substance. Veyne likens Foucault’s method to studying a giant iceberg that appears stable even as it undergoes constant transformation. The vast majority of the iceberg exists below the ocean’s surface, supporting and enabling the ice formations above. Importantly, however, the ice below and above have the same material properties. As Veyne (1997) says, “the concealed base of an iceberg is not some agency that is different in nature from the exposed tip; it is made of ice, like the rest” (p. 156). Power is not a special force that sovereign authorities impose on others; rather, power—the possibility of acting and being acted upon—is ordinary and everywhere because it stems from and is reproduced through daily experience. Moving in lock step with embodied practice to produce agentive capacities, power reflects the “total structure of actions brought to bear on possible actions” and the particularities of this experiential totality make other actions “easier or more difficult” (Foucault, 1982, p. 789). Stated simply, power capacitates and orients individuals toward some ideas and behaviors and way from others through the dynamic, experiential complex that influences living bodies.

Power takes hold of bodies through these experiences and the somatic processing of that experience produces what Foucault calls transactional realities—manufactured automations that operate as though they were an enduring part of the natural world. The instinctual system so important to neoliberal theorists, the one that orients behavior before rational thinking, emerges through the open terrain of human experience. What passes for inevitable human nature is built up through interpersonal, institutional, and environmental interactions. This theory of naturing nature, wherein the cultural embeds itself within the biological, informs Foucault’s understanding of capitalism, civil society, and public action. In his (Foucault, 2008) assessment, liberalism and neoliberalism both characterize the public as an organic “reality which asserts itself, struggles, and rises up, which revolts against and is outside government or the state” (p. 297). Questioning the spontaneity of public formation, he suggests an alternative conception of publics as transactional realities generated from “the interplay of relations of power” (p. 297). As a transactional reality forged through experience and in confrontation with power, a public materializes according to a constantly evolving set of priming activities. From this perspective, neoliberalism’s material roadblocks are not sufficient cause to instigate a truly transformative pubic. Such a collective requires shared biopolitical experiences that capacitate individuals through a common energetic resonance capable of fueling spontaneous confrontation with governing structures.

Given the necessity of this purposeful manufacturing of material sensibilities, it should be no surprise that after ending his biopolitical lectures with these speculations about public formation, Foucault turns to an exploration of classical Greco-Roman practices of self-subjectification. Including a host of consciously employed bodily activities, writing practices, and reflective exercises, these ancient technologies of the self, he (Foucault, 2007) says, “are not linked with an art of interpretation, but with arts such as mnemotechnics and rhetoric” (p. 165). Designed to reconstitute one’s transactional nature, self-subjectification allows individuals to take responsibility for crafting their own natural dispositions. Far from embracing political relativism, such an undertaking revolves around the ability to discern and act on truth.

Locating this self-making capacity in the pursuit of parrhesia, Foucault offers an extended genealogy throughout his last two annual lectures. He begins with political truth-telling in the democratic context, moves through philosophical truth-telling, and ends with critical truth-telling in the public sphere. What binds these different forms of parrhesia together is an embodied practice of crafting oneself as capable of confronting those in power even in dangerous circumstances. Like the self-interested subject of liberalism or the competitive subject of neoliberalism, the parrhesiastic subject emerges through transactional experiences in the everyday environments. The parrhesiastes, however, explicitly develops one’s subjectivity from a position suspicious of and antagonistic to the prevailing power formations. Using an enlarged notion of enlightenment—one that includes both knowledge and bodily capacity—truth-telling practices recultivate the subject’s transactional nature, priming the flesh to spontaneously challenge hypocrisies, complacencies, and normative practices.

Foucault uses the Cynics to illustrate the critical parrhesiastic lifestyle. Cynics take to the streets to tell a truth that is not confined to one’s individual life but also exists “in their social life, their public and political life” (Foucault, 2011, p. 224). This practice functions as a “carnivalesque continuity” (Foucault, 2011, p. 228) on the traditional philosophical lifestyle. It resembles the Socratic/Platonic modality in its need to reconstitute subjectivities, but diverges from it through its desire to produce radically new sociopolitical structures and not simply better leaders for the current structure. Foucault illustrates this difference by comparing Plato’s philosopher king with the Cynic king. In The Republic, Plato famously argues for arduous academic and ethopoetic training so that one can achieve “that ideal point where the philosopher will really be able to exercise a monarchy over others” (Foucault, 2011, p. 274). The Cynics, in Foucault’s reading, offer an alternative model. They assert themselves as kings without a kingdom—leaders who need no political apparatus to exercise their authority. Contrary to the political king who requires family lineage and formal education to secure his status along with armies and counselors to maintain his authority, the Cynic simply proclaims himself as king with no resources or justification. Moreover, the Cynic is not identified with a particular city or nation, but establishes himself as king “for the whole of humanity” (Foucault, 2011, p. 280). Through self-subjectification, the Cynic as critical parrhesiastes assumes responsibility for instinctually confronting injustice throughout the entirety of human experience.

Blending embodied spontaneity and conscious decision-making, this parrhesiastic lifestyle offers a reinvigorated notion of agency. The agency that founds the Cynic lifestyle is not a simple decision one makes like any other, but a decision that is simultaneously made for the individual through unconscious, somatic activities and by the individual through a conscious choice to undertake a particular lifestyle. Thus, this mode of subjectification intersects with a range of new materialist theories that highlight bodily thinking and unconscious decision-making. Nevertheless, it retains a form of rationality, one that differs from the objective, all-knowing scientism that Foucault critiques in his early work. Localized within particular bodies and their experiential training, this rational decision-making does not correspond to any full-fledged metanarrative of critical theory. The critical parrhesiastes seeks only to interrupt unjust practices by confronting others with a raw, undeniable truth. This practice functions negatively, opposing the prevailing power structures and paving the way for possible alternatives. Because critical parrhesia never promotes specific proposals, it remains perpetually situated within the sphere of preparation for future deliberation and action. The importance of such preparatory work seems especially important for a neoliberal moment characterized, in part, by the colonization of diverse subjects within its framework of economic competition. Indeed, attention to critical subject-making may offer a useful antidote for the limitations of identity politics and the struggle to build coalitions in the post-truth era. The basic compounds for this remedy can be found, I believe, in a series of rhetorical terms currently undergoing reevaluation. The next section concludes with a brief discussion of the theoretical and practical values these concepts might bring to an enlarged understanding of public formation.

Implications for rhetoric and public theory

This article has argued that neoliberal orientation to contemporary global capitalism proceeded through the bodily attunement between ordinary practices and a new economic discourse. The incredible pull of neoliberalism cannot be explained fully by its encroachment on everyday discourse or its unprecedented global reach. A fuller explanation requires an understanding of how discourse and experience collaborate to align bodily sensibility—what behavior economists have popularized as instinctual thinking—with the political economic structures of global capitalism. According to Foucault, this latter process happens through subject formation. A spontaneous mode of existence, one that feels effortless and natural, results from a particular set of experiences and their attendant associations. Because it primes decision-making capacities, this process of subject formation isn’t just a neoliberal becoming but a rhetorical becoming toward neoliberalism. One way to combat such neoliberal synergy is for publics scholars to enhance their traditional discursive approaches with theories that attend to bodily experience as the material substance of rhetorical capacity. Public theory need not reinvent itself along a Foucauldian trajectory to theorize the kind of critical subject formation capable of combatting neoliberalism however.

Scholars can draw, instead, on a wealth of rhetorical resources in effort to infuse public communication with an anti-neoliberal attunement. Many rhetorical theorists are currently pulling underutilized concepts from the Greco-Roman era and repurposing them for the contemporary moment. Picking up on Aristotle’s discussion of energia, theorists beginning with George Kennedy (1992) and including such diverse thinkers as Catherine Chaput (2010), Ralph Cintron (2010), and Debra Hawhee (2015) have revitalized this classical term. As one of the key words highlighted in Rhetoric Society Quarterly’s 50th anniversary issue, energy—whether conceived as a vitality, a force, or a power—remains an important consideration for how public deliberation animates and fuels active social change. Energy can be circulated, modulated, and reinvented through actions designed to build specific bodily dispositions. From the perspective of new materialism, rhetorical energy requires indirect, bodily engagement, suggesting the importance of yet another underrepresented concept. The ancient notion of bodily cunning, metis, enables one to maneuver strategically within the public sphere, using one’s body as a barometer for potential counterpublic opportunities. Like the Cynics who roamed the landscape and confronted problems as they arose, contemporary counterpublics must be trained to experience the world through alternative sensory capacities and then to turn that bodily potential into public action. Such metistic approaches infuse publics with an “enhanced sensitivity to rhetorical ecologies without losing sway of the spatio-temporal effect structures in which they operate” (Trapani & Maldonado, 2018, p. 282). The cultivation of differently charged energies attuned to bodily craftiness applies rational thinking to the cultivation of oneself and extends the notion of rhetorical invention from something practiced on discourse to something enacted on bodies. Peter Simonson (2014) encourages this extended definition of invention generally and Kendell Phillips (2002) emphasizes its ability to guide publics toward opportunities for radical dissention.

In addition to appropriating innovative rhetorical theories, public scholars may want to adopt critical practices that intersect with this shifting terrain of bodies, environments, and capacities. Two important examples of contemporary engagement in this arena are disability studies and rhetorical fieldwork. These areas of pragmatic practice attend to communicative work through bodies, their experiences, and their capacities. For instance, Shannon Walters (2014), who re-envisioned traditional rhetorical processes through haptic experience, offers an impressive example of how sensory bodies and not just thinking minds interpret, engage, and react to the discursive cues of their situated struggles. Positioning sensation at the center of identification and persuasion, she explores how rhetoric both functions through and alters bodily capacitation. Fieldwork, a method that Robert Asen wishes were more utilized in public scholarship, similarly extends knowledge at the same time it reinvents bodies. From Asen’s (2015) perspective, fieldwork provides access to inchoate argument formation; from the perspective of new materialism, it puts scholars in proximity with other bodies and their processes of becoming public subjects. More than third-party observers, field researchers inevitably participate in self-subjectification by engaging in the diverse experiences of others. To the extent that researchers repeat these experiences and do so with a critical orientation, they recraft their rhetorical natures—the instinctual, automated, embodied material that shifts through and orients one’s ability to hear, understand, and respond to others.

When individuals critically inhabit unfamiliar spaces, they produce rhetorical opportunities to recapacitate unconscious discernment. Taking advantage of these openings, public actors might learn to shift their bodily dispositions so that what previously produced slight or even imperceptible muscular contraction, accelerated heart rate, and bodily withdrawal—the kiss between a same sex couple or the street corner populated by young Black men, for instance—will, in the future, relax muscles, evince a smile, and compel a gesture of recognition. These instinctual responses occur without conscious intention, but they result from the ways people choose to inhabit and experience the world. Because bodily responses cannot be overwritten by conscious intention without a simultaneous rewriting of our bodily nature, public theory and its pragmatic work requires critical engagement with different experiences as a foundation to future public formations and their wide-ranging campaigns.