Of neoliberalism and subjectivity

On the first page of their influential volume, Do Economists Make Markets, the sociologists Donald MacKenzie, Fabian Munesa and Lucia Siu describe the eminent economist Jeffrey Sachs, who served as an advisor to Bolivia in the 1980s, famously implementing "shock therapy," in which the Bolivian government spent much of its remaining reserves of foreign cash to remove pesos from circulation. He also eliminated government subsidies, removed import tariffs, and linked the Bolivian economy to the U.S. dollar, all in the name of enabling Bolivia to pay back its debt to the IMF. In short, Sachs implemented what has come to be called a neoliberal agenda. As MacKenzie et. al. observe, though, Sachs himself later questioned his application of purely academic theories to the specific case of Bolivia:

Later, Sachs was to muse on his meager understanding of the country to whose leaders he gave his crucial advice. It was only in a conversation a couple of years after his 1986 visit that he realized that Bolivia's physical geography was a fundamental feature of its economic situation, not merely an incidental fact. "Of course I knew that Bolivia was landlocked and mountainous.... Yet I had not reflected on how these conditions were key geographical factors, perhaps the overriding factors, in Bolivia's chronic poverty.... Almost all the international commentary and academic economic writing about Bolivia neglected this very basic point. It bothered me greatly that the most basic and central features of economic reality could be overlooked by academic economists spinning their theories from thousands of miles away" (Sachs 2005, p. 105) (1).

It strikes me that this conflict--between a universally-applicable solution for Bolivia, despite its mountains, and an "on the ground" solution in tune with Bolivia's specific situation--is also the conflict at work in Cosmopolis. In wanting to believe himself a universal subject, in desiring to transcend the earth, Eric Packer is acting just like Sachs. The very notion of a one-size-fits-all solution seems bound to Packer's singular identity. It is thus that the problem of subjectivity--the anti-Cartesian assertion about partial selves, and identifiable in Butler, Lacan, and Foucault--returns to haunt the Latourian/Callonian notion that all actors act in relation to a series of actants. Partial subjectivity, ill-fitting universal solutions--these are cut from the same philosophical cloth. It's quite possible, actually, that neoliberalism and old liberalism have something in common this way.

(Their point, of course, is about economics as a science intervening in the objects it observes: "economics is at work within economies in a way that is at odds with the widespread conception of science as an activity whose sole purpose is to observe and study, that is to 'know' the world" (2).