industryterm:political technology

Neoliberalism as Political Technology: Expertise, Energy, and Democracy in Chile, Manuel Tironi and Javiera Barandiarán
▻https://muse.jhu.edu/book/34700

in Beyond Imported Magic, Essays on Science, Technology, and Society in Latin America, edited by Eden Medina, Ivan da Costa Marques, and Christina Holmes with a foreword by Marcos Cueto, The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, London, England, 2014

Chile ’ s unique policy path can largely be attributed to a uniquely powerful and ideologically coherent team of free-market technocrats, with a long-term vision for the Chilean economy. Fourcade-Gourinchas and Babb 2002, 545 – 546

Neoliberalism has had a profound impact on contemporary Chile. Neoliberal policies redefined sectors and institutions in industry ( Ffrench-Davis 1980 ), labor ( Foxley 1983 ), health ( Ossand ó n 2009 ), the city ( Portes and Roberts 2005 ; Sabatini 2000 ), and the environment ( Liverman and Vilas 2006 ), from the 1970s through today. Many say that nowhere else has neoliberal restructuring been more extended and aggressive ( Klein 2008 ; Lave, Mirowski, and Randalls 2010 ). In addition, the link between neo- liberalism as a set of policies and as an epistemological framework related to the Chicago School of Economics ( Van Horn and Mirowski 2009 ) is embodied in Chile by the infamous Chicago Boys — a group of Chicago-trained economists, endorsed by the military regime, who overhauled the Chilean economy in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

Although an abundant literature exists on neoliberalism in Chile, we identify two accounts still missing from this history. First, neoliberalism has been understood more as an epochal and abstract force than as situated practices. More detailed analyses of how neoliberalism unfolded in specific sites and through specific controversies are needed to interrogate the material and knowledge practices that enact neoliberalism. Second, while a robust literature has focused on the arrival of neoliberal ideas and the implementation of neoliberal policies in the 1970s, little has been said about how neoliberal ideology adapted to the post-dictatorship settings of the 1990s and 2000s. To tackle these gaps, we examine neoliberalism as a political technology . Neoliberal- ism as technology means it is applied knowledge about how to define, order, and cal- culate the world. Neoliberalism as a political technology draws attention to how this applied knowledge is used pragmatically and purposefully to transform the state and society.

#Chili #économie #société #néo-libéralisme #histoire

Important: Beating the Drums of Orientalism – Zainab Saleh
►http://divinity.uchicago.edu/martycenter/publications/sightings/archive_2012/0517.shtml

The US occupation of Iraq, coupled with its attendant deployment of sectarianism as a political technology, has foreclosed the possibility of non-sectarian modes of seeing or critiquing political life in Iraq. In an article originally published by The Associated Press and re-posted by The Washington Post and The Washington Times, the five contributors, four of whom write from Iraq, adopt this lens in reflecting on the contentious relationship between Sunnis and Shias there. In “Shiites and Sunnis in post-US Iraq: separate and unequal; some predict dissolution of country,” the authors hone in on the Shia persecution of vulnerable Sunnis in the aftermath of the withdrawal of US troops. Such a portrayal produces the occupying imperial power as a neutral arbiter of Iraq’s religious communities, or in the authors’ words, as Iraq’s “peacemakers.” Without them, we are told, Iraq’s Sunni minority has to fend for itself in a now Shia-dominated country.

Instead of providing a historically informed, nuanced analysis of the current situation in Iraq, where everyone bears the brunt of sectarianism, the authors resort to the simplistic and oft cited ahistorical binary of Sunnis vs. Shias. They mention the word “Iraqis” only once, as if only sectarian subjects, not Iraqis, inhabit Iraq. Reading this article raises the ghosts of works by Gertrude Bell in which she expresses fear of Shias, albeit in a very different Iraq. It also uncritically replicates the common media (mis)representations of Iraq since 2003. These perceive Iraq as a place consisting of three antagonistic groups, namely Sunnis, Shias and Kurds. As such, the article reproduces an Orientalist trope in which on the one hand stands a benevolent colonial occupying power while on the other are the inhabitants, who belong to two opposing sectarian groups: the one predatory, the other persecuted.

The article erases the recent history of US occupation and its attendant imperial politics of subjugation. That thousands of Iraqis were killed and wounded, maimed and displaced, because of this occupation is completely dismissed. As are the consequences of the 2007 US troop surge, which deepened the ethnic and sectarian segregation of neighborhoods in Baghdad. The article also remains silent on the fact that the US administration, in collaboration with the exiled Iraqi opposition to Saddam Hussein, institutionalized a sectarian quota system after toppling the Iraqi regime in 2003. By so doing, the occupation regime has entrenched and set the tone of political sectarianism in a way that appears to be inescapable, but in reality, is not.