Neoliberalism and the rhetorical invention of counterpublic attunement

Abstract

This article demonstrates the many seamless ways that multiple and diverse publics align their automatic, instinctual behaviors within the broad agenda of neoliberalism. Rather than surreptitiously crafting discourse to appeal to unconscious public dispositions, as neoliberalism does, it suggests that counterpublics consciously apply this technology to themselves. Specifically, it advocates that they forge a productive friction between rational critical thought and bodily habituation so as to reconstitute public orientations and open unexpected occasions for oppositional communication. This requires that scholars engage both traditional neoliberal critics and new materialist critics to tease out the embodied aspects of publics theory and infuse new materialism with an oppositional edge. Michel Foucault’s late lectures provide a theoretical and practical scaffolding for this practice of differently capacitating bodies. The article concludes by gesturing at how this public formation might further pull from underutilized rhetorical resources to expand the communicative possibilities of counterpublic production.