Carlos Palacios

This article develops a diagnostic lens to make sense of the still baffling development of a ‘humanitarian marketplace’. Ambivalently hybrid initiatives such as volunteer tourism, corporate social responsibility or even fair trade do not strictly obey a distributive logic of market exchange, social reciprocity or philanthropic giving. They engender a type of ‘economy’ that must be apprehended in its own terms. The article argues that the large-scale collaborative effects of such a dispersed market can be theorized without resorting to the classical biopolitical move of simplified agency/holistic reification. The argument proceeds counterintuitively, by appropriating the notion of symbiosis as redefined by contemporary biology, contending through historical contextualization and conceptual work that nature itself offers the best example to grasp spontaneous collaboration among unrelated human beings as a non-automatically balanced and intrinsically political affair that calls for critical management through an ex post facto interventionist policy of selective cultivation.

The idea that anyone, with the right critical knowledge and a certain amount of spare time and resources, could become a globally responsible citizen has been skeptically questioned at least since the time of Rousseau. But, during the last two decades, the specific concern that has troubled critical qualitative researchers has been the possible complicity of the active citizen with a neoliberal regime of governmentality, a regime that often uses the injunction to volunteer as a political tactic of responsibilization. The article seeks to address this latent concern through the study of a particularly marketized act of global citizenship: the immersive experience of volunteer travel. Through an innovative Foucauldian analysis and original qualitative method, designed to excavate deeply seated skeptical insights among returned volunteers in Australia, this study elucidates, first, how a personal sense of complicity actually surfaces within the market-mediated volunteer experience, and, second, how the ensuing predicament can be tackled, both from the perspective of the critical academic and of the citizen on the ground.

Critical theory has long resisted the notion that an “invisible hand” can operate within the real social dynamics of a free market. But despite the most radical desires of the socially critical imagination, the optimization of that “spontaneous order” or depersonalized way of ordering things known as “the economy” has become the dominant playing field and decisive electoral issue of modern politics. Within this broad contemporary context, Michel Foucault made a strange theoretical intervention that, to this day, continues to baffle readers. During a lecture, he argued that Adam Smith’s invisible hand was, after all, truly and purposively, that is, for technical rather than ideological reasons, “invisible.” This article argues that there is a counter-positivism or tactical irony contained within the logic of such a controversial thesis; namely, that when one acknowledges that the principle of economic competition encourages an efficient self-organizing effect at all times, regardless of context, one is also immediately in a position to appreciate why the art of government should always maintain its political primacy over the spontaneous order of the market.

The Foucauldian conception of power as ‘productive’ has left us so far with a residual conception of freedom. The article examines a number of historical cases in which ‘relationships of freedom’ have potentially come into existence within Western culture, from ‘revolution’ and ‘political truth-telling’ to ‘cynicism’ and ‘civility’. But the argument is not just about demonstrating that there have in fact been many historical inversions of ‘the conduct of conduct’. It is about theorizing how freedom can be ‘productive’ or give rise to cultural norms if any such inversion can only come into being as an event in itself.

Thanks to Michel Foucault, one might say it has become possible to conceive that the political relevance of humanity in modern thought does not have to do with its “philosophical essence” but rather with its “nonessence.” Yet this very idea surfaced earlier in Western thought, at the time of the revolutionary turn towards a politicized humanitarianism, and helped to shape some crucial political strategies making up modern liberal democracy. Its potential eluded even Foucault. I contend that tracing the contours of this classical, if long unthinkable idea, can inform our response to the other of social critique.

It has been commonplace to equate Foucault’s 1979 series of lectures at the Collège de France with the claim that for neoliberalism, unlike for classical liberalism, the market needs to be artificially constructed. The article expands this claim to its full expression, taking it beyond what otherwise would be a simple divulgation of a basic neoliberal tenet. It zeroes in on Foucault’s own insight: that neoliberal constructivism is not directed at the market as such, but, in principle, at society, arguing that the value of this insight goes beyond the critique of a neoliberal present. The neoliberal rationale rather helps him to reveal a unique historical architecture, a latent approach to the social dissimilar to the one that has long predominated in the human sciences. The inversion of homo œconomicus in neoliberal theory amounted to the unearthing of a ‘social subject of interest’ within civil society. Such a subject, barely recognized by neoliberals who simply instrumentalize it for the sake of the market, demonstrates that the social is not necessarily the natural product of ethical subjects; that society may also need to be constructed.