Abandoning the Free Market to Save the Free Market: A Discursive Analysis of Neoliberalism in the Global Financial Crisis

Abstract

Despite repeated predictions of its demise in the previous decades, neoliberalism continues to dominate our understandings of economic and political reality. Focusing on the most dramatic crisis of neoliberalism, the Global Financial Crisis of 2008, this thesis uses the tools of Lacanian discourse analysis to explain the ongoing dominance of neoliberalism in spite of its repeated failures. Conceptualising neoliberalism as a dominant discourse, I argue that neoliberal dominance should be located both in its affective potency as discourse, and in the pervasiveness of neoliberal ontological presumptions, which predominate even in accounts that attempt to critique neoliberalism. Part I consists of a history of neoliberal thought, utilising concepts from Lacanian theory to understand the appeal of the neoliberal discourse. I theorise the free market as the master signifier of neoliberal ideology, and using Lacan’s theory of the four discourses, highlight the synergies between the ‘master’ and ‘university’ accounts of neoliberalism. Part II examines the moment of discursive rupture that emerged with the GFC, utilising a corpus comprised of newspaper articles, world leaders’ speeches, thinktank output and G20 documents. Though neoliberalism was challenged during the onset of the crisis, I suggest that critical accounts were largely constructed according to the logic of the hysteric’s discourse, implicitly accepting the validity of neoliberal categories of analysis – most notably, the state/market binary – thereby terminally constraining their ability to offer an alternative. Conversely, by drawing on the ‘master’ and ‘university’ logics, neoliberal accounts were able to reshape the ‘facts’ of the crisis to fit the fantasy of free market infallibility, and therefore demand the intensification of free market policies. In concluding, I use Lacan’s discourse of the analyst to consider future possibilities for thinking beyond the neoliberal horizon.