undoing the demos neoliberalism's stealth revolution

Instead we attend to how race functions in structural and agential ways, integrally reproducing raced markets and social conditions.

Our collective provocation here is that this current conjuncture cannot be explained with reference to the exceptional intrusion of racism, nor the epiphenomenal status of race in relation to political economy. Since that original workshop, and against a consolidated neoliberal capitalist context, the political rise of fascistic movements has intensified across the globe. The central consensus among the scholars and activists who came together for the first Raced Markets Workshop in December 2015 was that ‘race’ may have begun as fiction, an invention of Europeans in the service of colonisation, however, the fiction of race became material over time, reproduced in relation to the manifold raced markets of the global political economy. The paper questions how such normative ideals can provide guidance where not only has the political and institutional imaginary that underpins them changed, perhaps irrevocably, but where the continued flagging of these ideas may be implicated in the kind of ideological camouflage Brown identifies. This paper considers Brown's critique in relation to the tendency in Media Studies to admit the unachievable idealism of certain ideas - particularly in relation to the public sphere and pluralism - while continuing to use them as guiding normative standards and values. Brown's concept of mourning has implications for Media Studies' constitutive focus on publicness and political participation within the democratic nation-state. The problem, as Brown outlines it, is not only that- to varying extents and in different scales across democratic states - market rationality has hollowed out representative structures and processes and organises social life, but also that 'basic principles and institutions of democracy are becoming nothing other than ideological shells' that nevertheless legitimate neoliberal governmentality. In her essay 'Neoliberalism and the end of liberal democracy' Wendy Brown suggests that critical political theory needs to 'mourn liberal democracy' in order to develop a transformative vision of 'the good'.

Undoing the demos neoliberalism's stealth revolution