Let Them Eat Diversity
On the politics of identity.
Though he might not appreciate the cliché, Walter Benn Michaels is no stranger to controversy. In the early 1980s he wrote a series of articles with Steven Knapp entitled “Against Theory,” in which it was argued that literary works meant only what their authors intended them to mean. He created a stir beyond the Ivory Tower with a 2006 book, The Trouble with Diversity, premised around the idea that a focus on cultural diversity at the expense of economic equality has stunted resistance to neoliberalism.
Bhaskar Sunkara
Neoliberalism is often presented as a unified, homogenous ideology, but you differentiate between “left” and “right” neoliberalisms — what’s the difference and which one dominates American politics today?
Walter Benn Michaels
The differentiation between left and right neoliberalism doesn’t really undermine the way it which it is deeply unified in its commitment to competitive markets and to the state’s role in maintaining competitive markets. For me the distinction is that “left neoliberals” are people who don’t understand themselves as neoliberals. They think that their commitments to anti-racism, to anti-sexism, to anti-homophobia constitute a critique of neoliberalism. But if you look at the history of the idea of neoliberalism you can see fairly quickly that neoliberalism arises as a kind of commitment precisely to those things.
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