610922

research-article2015
MCS0010.1177/0163443715610922Media, Culture & SocietyDawes

Crosscurrents Special Section: Ideology and Media Studies

Media, Culture & Society

Foucault-phobia and the

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DOI: 10.1177/0163443715610922
neoliberal ideology: a response mcs.sagepub.com

to Downey et al.

Simon Dawes
Université Paul Valéry, Montpellier, France

Abstract
Among a spate of recent articles addressing the legacy of Stuart Hall’s work on ideology and
the media, John Downey, Gavan Titley and Jason Toynbee have recently argued for the urgent
need to recover the key dimensions of Hall’s ideology critique. While affirming the need for
an effective critique of neoliberalism, this article takes issue with two aspects of Downey
et al.’s article: first, their principal claim that ideology critique has been marginalised within
the neoliberal academy, and second, their flippant dismissal of the benefits of a Foucauldian
approach for critiquing neoliberalism and thinking more reflexively about ideology.

Keywords
critique, governmentality, ideology, Michel Foucault, neoliberalism, Stuart Hall

There has recently been a spate of articles in this journal addressing the legacy of Stuart
Hall’s work on ideology and the media. Whereas some of them have sought to situate
(and revaluate) Hall’s privileging of ideology over experience within the context of
debates internal to British Marxism and the humanities (Scannell, 2015), or to link the
materialist ‘will to deconstruct’ in his early published and unpublished writings to that of
the contemporary critique of social media (Couldry, 2015), John Downey et al. (2014)
have regretted what they see as the selective reading of Hall’s work in contemporary
research, and taken the opportunity to call for a renewed emphasis on ideology critique
in media studies.

Corresponding author:
Simon Dawes, Université Paul Valéry, Route de Mende, 34199 Montpellier Cedex 5, France.
Email: simondawes0@gmail.com

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2 Media, Culture & Society 

Referring back to Hall’s (1988a) classic 1982 essay on ideology in media studies, the
authors argue that despite occasional references to ideology in the literature, the kind of
ideology critique advocated by Hall, in which the ideological legitimation of inequality
and dominance is revealed, has all but disappeared (Downey et al., 2014: 879).
Furthermore, they argue that this absence of ideology critique per se, which they see as
caused by selective readings of Hall’s account that privilege identity-based politics and/
or discourse analysis over a critique of the ideological support of dominance and con-
struction of consent, is ‘indicative of just how dominant […] neoliberal ideology has
become’ (Downey et al., 2014: 886). Consequently, the authors aim to recover the ‘key
dimensions’ of ideology critique, which they take to be the linking of ideology to power,
the demonstration of how inequality and domination are obscured through mediation,
and the uncovering of two levels of misrepresentation: ‘an account of the social world
and the status of that account’ (Downey et al., 2014: 880).
The article seems deliberately written to incite a reaction from those, in particular, that
they effectively accuse of conducting ‘ideology critique lite’ scholarship. Indeed, the
main targets of Downey et al.’s attack would probably be surprised to hear that what they
have been doing is not ideology critique. Critical discourse analysts, for instance, tend to
perform an ‘unabashedly normative’ (Van Dijk, 1993) form of critique, which often priv-
ileges the ‘unmasking’ of strategic language use, foregrounds the connections between
language, power (understood more precisely as dominance) and ideology (Fairclough,
1989: 4), and which draws on theories and methods in terms of their relevance to achiev-
ing particular socio-political goals (Van Dijk, 1993).
The article also features, however, a more flippant aside that is no less inflammatory.
In acknowledging that ideology involves a ‘reality effect’ larger than particular, dominant
views, the authors seem obliged to gratuitously drop the conceptual F-word – Foucault –
and to distance their narrowly defined form of ideology critique from what they call a
‘depth-less Foucauldian power-knowledge’ approach (Downey et al., 2014: 880).
While affirming that there is indeed an urgent need to critique neoliberalism and, for
instance, the causes of contemporary social immobility, in this short response to Downey
et al.’s claims, I would like to nevertheless take issue both with their claim that ideology
critique is absent from contemporary media studies, and, more particularly, with their
flippant dismissal of Foucault and a Foucauldian approach to critiquing neoliberalism. I
do not dare to take on the task of trying to convert Foucault sceptics to the Foucauldian
cause, or to use this space to mark my own territory and defend the broadly Foucauldian
approach that I adopt over that of others; nor do I wish to suggest that I have anything
other than respect for these authors and their work. What I would like to do, however, is
highlight and critique a kind of banal Foucault-phobia – that I detect in this article as well
as in a great deal of media studies literature – and a critical approach that I find, in con-
trast to the interpretation of these authors, over-privileges (albeit implicitly) an ideology
critique approach to the critique of neoliberalism.

A hegemonic approach?
To begin with, the dramatic increase in scholarly references to neoliberalism since the
1980s (Peck, 2013) does little to suggest an academic reluctance to critique it. The

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Dawes 3

commandeering of the term for the purposes of political critique has, however, meant that
it has been little more than a convenient bogeyman for commentators on the disempower-
ment of politics by economics, particularly in the context of market attacks on the welfare
state (Gane, 2012: 613). Just as the ‘inflation’ of the concept of ‘ideology’ had become a
problem for media researchers in the 1980s and 1990s, ultimately limiting further explora-
tion of the issues it had so productively opened up in the 1970s (Corner, 2001: 532), so the
contemporary critical bogeyman of ‘neoliberalism’ has also been prone to inflation (Allison
and Piot, 2011; Collier, 2012; Peck, 2013: 17). Such inflationism has been associated with
a sampling preference to investigate neoliberalism in ‘sites located at some distance from
centres of hegemonic power’ (Brenner et al., 2010: 201), and to contrast such sites with the
essential features of a ‘pure variant’ in either neoliberal theory (specifically, the Washington
Consensus) or a neoliberal core (invariably, the United States). Rather than making this
pure variant an object of analysis, however, such studies tend to presume its essential fea-
tures, suggesting that it is only once neoliberal theory and practice is implemented that it
becomes a proper subject of inquiry (Hilgers, 2010: 351).
But despite the abundance of the term in the academic literature, authors rarely
explain what is meant by the term, assuming instead a commonsensically shared under-
standing of what is evoked. When greater specification is provided, neoliberalism’s
essential features are ‘variously described, but always include’ (Ferguson, 2010: 170):
consumer choice (Harvey, 2007: 42); private ownership and property rights, free trade,
free markets, privatisation, and state withdrawal from social provision (Harvey, 2007:
2); deregulation, the restriction of state intervention, opposition to collectivism, empha-
sis on individual responsibility and a belief that economic growth leads to development
(Hilgers, 2010: 352); valorisation of private enterprise over the state, tariff elimination,
currency deregulation and enterprise models that run the state like a business (Peck,
2008); a logic of ‘DIP (deregulation, individualisation, privatisation)’ (Bauman and
Rovirosa-Madrazo, 2010: 52); as well as an emphasis on the entrepreneurial self; and
the social scientist’s particular bugbear regarding Thatcher’s claim that there is ‘no such
thing as society’ (Mirowski, 2013). Emphasis is also placed on the encroachment of
market relations into domains previously considered exempt, and on the opportunities
such encroachment provides for figures, such as Rupert Murdoch, to not only extend
and diversify their commercial media empires, but even to ultimately influence the
political process (Harvey, 2007: 34). More broadly, neoliberalism is seen as the rein-
vention of the classical liberal tradition, expanded to encompass the whole of human
existence, whereby the market stands as the ultimate arbiter of truth, and where free-
dom is recoded to mean anything the market allows (Mirowski, 2013). Other uses of
‘neoliberalism’ see it as shorthand for a new era of capitalism in more speculative times,
or as an abstract and external causal force, often little more than a ‘sloppy synonym’ for
capitalism or the world economy and its inequalities (Ferguson, 2010: 171). Indeed,
some have warned of the problem of substituting a Marxist class analysis of capitalism
with a critique of neoliberalism, accusing such approaches of complicity in the ‘making
invisible’ of capitalism (Garland and Harper, 2012).
Confusion can arise, furthermore, from there being ‘so many distinct referents for
the same widely used term’, leading to shallow analyses (that do not really say much)
as well as ineffectual politics (that is reduced to merely denouncing neoliberalism)

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4 Media, Culture & Society 

(Ferguson, 2010: 171). The mechanical reproduction of over-simplifications and

unquestioning presumptions ‘should at least give some pause’ (Collier, 2012: 192), but
does it substantiate the claim that such critiques of neoliberalism are not proper cri-
tiques of neoliberal ideology? This ‘critical’ tendency to use ‘neoliberalism’ a little too
loosely and freely, seeing it as a Leviathan (Collier, 2012) that immerses itself every-
where, and denouncing it wholesale without really engaging it as an object of study
in its own right, has been located within a broader weakness of the Left to reduce poli-
tics to negation and resistance, to the extent that it is often ‘anti-everything’ but rarely
‘pro-something’ (Ferguson, 2010: 167). There are, furthermore, theoretical and meth-
odological weaknesses to a structural and moralistic approach that ignores debates
and developments that may challenge one’s own approach; a self-defeating conse-
quence of which may be to also undermine the political efficacy of such critique.
Although it is true that much of the scholarly literature on neoliberalism is not
explicitly a critique of neoliberal ideology, as Downey et al. would have it, the ten-
dency for media studies scholars is nevertheless to follow their use of the word ‘neo-
liberalism’ with a reference to either Harvey (2007) or Hall (1988b, 2003, 2011).
While Downey et al. would maybe take issue with the misreading or taming of
Harvey’s and Hall’s ideology critiques, what surprises me is that Harvey and Hall
should be the first and only ports of call, when there has been such a rich and varied
climate of theoretical and methodological debate on how to effectively critique neo-
liberalism. Ideology critique it may not be, but neither can much of the media studies
literature on neoliberalism see a way of critiquing neoliberalism beyond the (dare I
say) ‘hegemonic’ paradigm of ideology critique. While Hall himself, for instance,
offered an admirably nuanced account of neoliberal hegemony that refused to reduce
Thatcherism to a simple phenomenon of ideological class interests, he nevertheless
made the ideological impulse of Thatcherism of ‘considerable importance’ (Barry
et al., 1996: 11), while refusing to acknowledge neoliberalism itself as anything other
than an ideological project.
I agree that despite all the references to ‘neoliberalism’ and even ‘ideology’, and
despite abundant citations of Harvey and Hall, there is little to suggest that the
majority of authors have explicitly adopted Harvey’s and Hall’s approach to demon-
strating how neoliberalism is an ideological and hegemonic project (Hall, 2011: 728;
Harvey, 2007: 3) to disembed capital from the constraints of Keynesian intervention-
ism (Harvey, 2007: 11), and to oversee ‘the shift of power and wealth back to the
already rich and powerful’ (Hall, 2011: 721; Harvey, 2007: 42). Indeed, I suspect that
the lack of critical engagement with Harvey’s and Hall’s approach, coupled with the
limited acknowledgment of the wider array of perspectives on neoliberalism, sug-
gests a certain disinterest in treating neoliberalism as an object of study in itself –
that is, in understanding what neoliberalism actually is and how it actually works.
But whereas Downey et al.’s issue is with the need for a less selective reading of Hall
and a more explicit embrace of ideology critique, I would argue for the need to sup-
plement that with a closer reading of alternative approaches, such as those influ-
enced by Foucault’s engagement with both ideology critique and neoliberalism, and
for a more critical engagement with the extent to which ideology critique and other
approaches can be compatible.

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Dawes 5

Foucault’s problem with ideology critique

There is little appetite in British media studies, however, for an appreciation of Foucault
– I have often been advised by well-meaning colleagues to keep up the good work, but
drop the Foucault. Whereas the concept of ideology has had an ‘ambiguous heritage’
(Thompson, 1990: 5) in media research – with ‘a good deal of media research’ either
taming it or dispensing with it altogether (Corner, 2001: 527) – the ‘ambivalent legacy’
(Curran, 1990: 140) of Foucault in this domain has involved a great deal of ‘critical’
scholars being outright hostile to such an approach; particularly when its adoption leads
to what is interpreted as a relativist celebration of commercialism and consumption
(Fiske, 1987; Hartley, 1999). Whereas a British critical tradition responded to Thatcherite
policies by drawing on Gramsci and Althusser (or Habermas), another tradition evolved
in the Southern hemisphere that drew more on Foucault. The two have since become
exemplars of opposing approaches to media research, both equally dismissive of the
other with few attempts to bridge the gap between them.
However, while Downey et al. (2014) call for a ‘more fully worked-out theoretical
and methodological approach’ to ideology critique (p. 883), there seems to be no solu-
tion in sight to the problem of the lack of a ‘coherent theoretical scheme that can effec-
tively guide the analysis of the ways in which meanings and values relate to material
interests’ (Corner, 2001: 532), and to the ways in which the very concept of ideology
critique suggests a ‘theoretically precise grasp of mediation processes that [is] simply
not present’ (Corner, 2001: 532). Although critiquing neoliberalism as ideology paints
a (conveniently) clear picture of the relationships between doctrine and practices
(Cahill, 2012: 177), contemporary neoliberalism is a multi-centred and networked
movement with few, if any, fixed points, frustrating attempts to draw a straight line
‘from some fixed ideology to political programs’ (Mirowski, 2013).
The contrasting sociology of neoliberalism that has developed over the past few dec-
ades under the banner of ‘governmentality studies’, however, has been motivated instead
by dissatisfaction with the broadly Marxist reduction of capitalism to economic rela-
tions, of ideology to false ideas that serve ruling class interests, and of power to a falsifier
and suppressor of ‘true’ human essence (Miller and Rose, 2008: 2–4). The work of the
early ‘Anglo-Foucauldians’ (Barry et al., 1996; Miller and Rose, 2008; Rose, 1999) on
the neoliberal assaults on the welfare state focused on the governmental rationalities that
emerged during the period. Seeking to understand neoliberalism without recourse to ide-
ology (Miller and Rose, 2008: 4), the authors found Foucault’s approach more fruitful
than that of Gramsci or Althusser, and particularly useful for distancing themselves from
‘certain conceptual tools which have a powerful hold over critical thought’ (Rose, 1987:
61), as well as a more adequate way of capturing the productive, individualising aspects
of power.
The Foucauldian (genealogical) approach is still about power, power relations and the
interests inscribed in them, but genealogy, as a ‘critique of the present’ (in the sense of
producing a counter-discourse and counter-history that feeds into resistance), adds ana-
lytical techniques that other positions (ideology critique as well as the ‘critical’ approaches
to discourse analysis that Downey et al. criticise) do not sufficiently do. Indeed, it is
often in the context of the attempt to bridge a critical or ideological approach with a

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6 Media, Culture & Society 

historical and empirical analysis that many scholars (and many that are explicitly Marxist,
such as Lazzarato, 2000) turn to Foucault; not as a means of proving critique wrong and
embracing the alternative, but of supplementing a Marxist approach and addressing
change by reference to the heterogeneity and strategically mobile character of the con-
flicting forces shaping it. For while the more typically ‘critical’ critiques of neoliberal-
ism, for example, are ‘frequently revealing and insightful’ (Rose, 1987: 66), successful
at capturing many of the rationales, motivations and effects of neoliberalism (whether in
terms of ideology, hegemony or even the withdrawal of the state), they are dependent
upon the dualisms of state/market or citizen/consumer that play important roles in con-
stituting liberal-capitalist societies (Lemke, 2001). ‘Ideology’ is helpful but insufficient
for expressing the complex relations of power between them (Lazzarato, 2009: 113), as
there is no relation of causality, symbolism or representation, but only ‘mutual presup-
postion’. This is why, for their critique of Thatcherite reforms, Nikolas Rose and col-
leagues turned to the history of public–private distinctions to understand liberal and
neoliberal governmental rationality, rather than merely echoing the more dominant cri-
tiques of privatisation, marketisation and neoliberal ideology. To fragment the present in
this way is to be perspectivist rather than relativist, to destabilise traditional approaches
(such as ideology critique) rather than to critique or dismiss them, highlighting the ‘his-
torically sedimented underpinnings of particular problematisations’ rather than assuming
a grand historical process or singular underlying cause (Barry et al., 1996: 5).
Foucault’s distancing from Marxist theory was admittedly wide-ranging and sweep-
ing, (Fontana and Bernati in Jessop, 2007), ranging from vulgar to academic Marxism,
obsessions with class and labour rather than detailed studies of subjects and modalities
of class struggle, and fetishisations of ideology and dialectics. He dismissed, in particu-
lar, the political-economic critique of neoliberalism that normatively equates it with an
extreme form of classical liberalism, arguing that critical accounts of consumption, con-
sumer society and mass society ‘have no value’ in understanding consumption in neolib-
eral thought (Foucault, 2010: 226). He nevertheless maintained an ‘uninterrupted
dialogue’ with Marx (Fontana and Bernati in Jessop, 2007) that suggests more of a ‘tacti-
cal alliance’ with Marxism, whereby his opposition to Marxist theory corresponds with
his appropriation of Marx’s historical analyses and political-economic concepts (Balibar
in Jessop, 2007: 35).
That said, much of the early governmental approach and the literature subsequently
inspired by it have, however, been accused of relativism, or at least of lacking any speci-
ficity in their understanding of neoliberalism (Wacquant, 2012), while Rose has more
particularly been criticised for his preference for the relatively nebulous ‘advanced liber-
alism’, over-privileging its incoherence as a diverse assemblage of techniques and
rationalities, and confining ‘neoliberalism’ itself to a contingent feature of particular
political formations, such as Reaganism and Thatcherism (Dean, 2012). Foucault’s lec-
tures on the subject have themselves been criticised for having neglected an analysis of
the earliest period of neoliberal thought in the 1920s, or even of the Mont Pelerin Society
(Gane, 2014), and for relying too heavily on secondary French sources for an under-
standing of German and American arguments (Tribe, 2009: 694).
There is also the recurring accusation that Foucault was somehow an apologist for
neoliberalism, which again caused some debate recently (Steinmetz-Jenkins and Arnold,

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Dawes 7

2015). Earlier this year, Colin Gordon debunked a recent book (Zamora, 2014) that suc-
ceeded in rekindling this debate as a mixture of ‘confabulations, misinformation and
slurs’ (Gordon, 2015), while simultaneously critiquing the wider ‘attention-seeking
claim that Foucault’s thought has become the unassailable, hegemonic discourse of our
time, while its Marxist critics are now reduced to marginality within the neoliberal
academy’ (Gordon, 2015).
I would venture that Downey et al.’s article – defensive about the marginalisation of
ideology critique, suggestive about the threat of the Foucauldian ‘other’ – is sympto-
matic of this very assumption about the state of contemporary academia. Indeed, it is
an assumption that clashes sharply with my own experience of a tendency among
British media scholars to privilege a view of neoliberalism as an ideology, and to pep-
per their critique of neoliberal ideology with derogatory digs at a vaguely described
Foucauldian approach.

Less dogma, more reflexivity

The belated publication in French, and then in English, of Foucault’s (2009, 2010) lec-
tures on liberal and neoliberal governmentality has offered new occasions – not only for
a close and critical engagement with Foucault’s concepts, but also for the re-invigoration
of the theoretical and methodological debate between ideological and governmental
approaches to the critique of neoliberalism.
More recent critical engagement with the history of neoliberal thought has further
demonstrated how flawed dogmatic assumptions are (Mirowski, 2009: 434), allowing us
instead to see it as a vision of the ‘good society’, within which laissez-faire, deregulation
and the shrinking state are far from necessities; rather, the fundamental concern is to
reregulate society, marketise government and redefine the state’s role as active producer
and guarantor of a stable market society (Mirowski, 2009: 434–436). Similarly, critical
engagement with empirical studies of actually existing neoliberalisms around the world
suggests that neoliberal techniques do not necessarily go hand in hand with the preserva-
tion of ruling class interests, nor are they automatically detrimental to the poor or to the
public sphere (Collier, 2011; Ferguson, 2010). Such a critical history of the contradictory
‘origins, tenets and imperatives’ of neoliberalism (cf. Mirowski and Plehwe, 2009; Peck,
2008, 2010; Stedman Jones, 2012), as well as ‘theoretically informed, and informing,
empirical work’, further refine our understandings of neoliberalisation (Peck, 2013: 19).
While the critical instinct of ‘structuralists’ is to reveal the political agency and com-
mon project behind ‘economic conditions, state formations and ideologies’, and to estab-
lish a critical counterpoint to such a project, ‘non-structural’ approaches propose a
‘different kind of critical reflection on neoliberalism’ that critically probes neoliberal
ideas rather than merely denouncing them uncritically (Collier, 2012: 194). Although
every approach stubbornly defends its own hard core, auxiliary hypotheses and problem-
solving machinery (Lakatos, 1978: 4–5), each tradition also has its margins, and it is at
the margins of ideology critique, Foucauldian and other traditions that neoliberalism can
be engaged at both theoretical and methodological levels (Springer, 2012). In contrast to
the ideology–governmentality binary that exists in English-language media studies
between British and Southern hemisphere traditions, there has been much more vibrant

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8 Media, Culture & Society 

engagement with these traditions, and with the extent to which they can be reconciled, in
disciplines such as geography, urban studies and sociology. Authors such as Jamie Peck,
Nik Theodore and Neil Brenner, for example, are among those that have made the most
serious attempt to find a compromise between them (Collier, 2012: 188). What is more,
the failure of the global economic crisis of 2008 to bring an end to neoliberalism has
further prompted reconsideration of its explanatory status, and opened up the possibility
of dialogue between various approaches (Peck, 2013: 1).
Grappling – as Hall did – with ‘the perplexities of finding adequate theoretical foun-
dations’ (Scannell, 2015: 9) for the critique of neoliberalism may, actually, pay greater
homage to Hall than a dogmatic return to a framework he elaborated over 30 years ago,
especially when coupled with a flippant dismissal of his critics and alternative approaches.
Furthermore, sensitivity to the theoretical arguments of multiple perspectives, and an
attempt to bridge methodological approaches to actually existing practices, can avoid
both the elitist, moralist and partisan tendencies of ideology critique, as well as the rela-
tivist and agnostic tendencies of some of the more Foucault-inspired studies. Potentially,
it could also lead, I would suggest, to a less dogmatic and more reflexive approach,
which could ultimately deepen (and make more effective) the critique of neoliberalism.

Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this
article.

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