Stating the exception: rhetoric and neoliberal governance during the creation and passage of the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008.

• Author: Hanan, Joshua S.

The German Ideology, written in 1846, argued that the key political debate of the time reflected particular relations of power rather than universal interests. According to its authors, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, the contemporary "doctrine of the separation of powers" represented a deliberative compromise between different economic interests and not "the common interest of all the members of society" (65-66). As the old German monarchy and aristocracy became increasingly dependent on international commerce to maintain their wealth and power, they articulated a new political rationality that divided power along the axes of executive and legislative (parliamentary) branches. The question of the common good, Marx and Engels contended, was never on the table. A democracy that actually worked on behalf of common interests required "the abolition of the antagonism between the town and country" and a new set of political discourses contingent on the subjugated knowledge of the proletariat (Marx and Engels 69). Although Marx and Engels focus on the German state and the reformist tendencies of its Young Hegelians, the tension they identify between common interests as the constituent power of democracy and the constituted power of the state remains a central concern for the practice of sovereign power throughout world history (Bruner; Negri).

Not surprisingly, a similar problematic expresses itself today in the doctrine of neoliberalism. As the flows of global capitalism have transformed the antagonism between the town and country into a spatial metaphor that Hardt and Negri describe as the "biopolitical metropolis"-a political landscape defined by multiple and competing antagonisms that administer life from afar--neoliberalism has come to reign as the new political rationality of our times (Commonwealth 154). Like the balance of power thesis embedded in nineteenth-century democracies, neoliberalism constitutes or proscribes democratic power by representing itself as working on behalf of the common interests even as it centralizes wealth within the ruling classes (Harvey). Its class interestedness notwithstanding, support for the idea of neoliberalism, what Jodi Dean calls the "fantasy of free trade," has proliferated in the public vernacular as well as in public policy (56). Today an array of discourses--emanating from institutional spaces such as the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Trade Organization to internet websites such as the Ludwig von Mises Institute, the Free to Choose Network, and the Peter Schiff Show--tell citizens that the old Keynesian plan of large-scale government spending on everything from education to health care to job creation must be replaced. Rather than establish government institutions and regulatory agencies to foster a more secure and stable financial climate as the New Deal did, neoliberalism advocates a free market, hands-off approach to public policy. Society, the argument goes, has become increasingly dependent on international competition to stimulate economic growth, and thus any regulatory barrier to trade is an impediment to proper market operations.

But how different, really, is this opposition between neoliberalism and Keynesianism? Do these macroeconomic philosophies actually represent two agonistically opposed policy positions, or, like the debate surrounding political representation in the mid-nineteenth century, do these positions merely reflect two different instantiations of today's dominant cartography of power? According to a recent article by argumentation theorists David Hingstman and G. Thomas Goodnight, the latter situation is more likely the case. Noting that since the Great Recession of 2008 neoliberalism and Keynesianism have become increasingly articulated to right and left wing policy positions, Hingstman and Goodnight argue that the differences between these two macroeconomic philosophies "are considerably more ambiguous than claimed" (18). In their examination of a 1932 debate between the philosophical progenitors of neoliberalism and Keynesianism--Friedrich August Hayek and John Maynard Keynes--they contend that "it turns out that Hayek is not a right-wing hero, any more than Keynes is a liberal managerial technician" (2). Instead, they argue, when analyzed in the context of the financial crisis of 2008, "partisan and ideological uses of the Keynes-Hayek debate to fortify the case against state intervention allow market fraud to go unchecked" (20). The rhetorical opposition between Keynes and Hayek works to distort, rather than illuminate, both the critical positions of these two macroeconomic philosophers and the current economic crisis. (1)

In this essay, we adopt a similar position to Hingstman and Goodnight by suggesting that current debates over neoliberalism and Keynesianism in public culture obfuscate what is truly in the interest of the common good. However, whereas Hingstman and Goodnight believe that this argumentative failure stems from an inability to understand the shared rhetorical commonplaces of Keynes and Hayek, we are hesitant to place as much faith in an emancipatory theory of argumentation articulated to a political rationality of economic liberalism. As rhetoricians, we recognize the potential for discursive interventions into our political and economic conditions, but we also seek to attenuate what Ronald Greene calls "the rush to a politics of representation" in argumentation studies (31). If Hingstman and Goodnight are correct that the financial crisis of 2008 reflects "a system underwritten by cronyism" (17), then we argue it is crucial to theorize neoliberalism not only as an argumentative construct but also as an extra-discursive state of exception that, in Foucault's words, creates "a regime of truth dividing the true and the false" (Birth of Biopolitics 20). Put differently, by exploring how the state of exception negotiates rhetorically the very interaction between discourse and structures of democracy, we suggest that scholars should focus as much critical attention on the material possibilities for advocacy as on argumentative methods.

To make our case, this essay centers on a key moment in the ongoing debate over Keynesianism and neoliberalism--the creation and passage of the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008 (EESA). As a policy measure that provided $700 billion in funding for imperiled Wall Street institutions, EESA prompted serious questions about neoliberalism and about whether alternative political rationalities might be more beneficial for the national and international governance of today's economy. Far from generating a truly agonistic debate, however, we argue that the dialogue surrounding the bill maintained the smooth flows of neoliberal governmentality by falling back on a shared warrant of exceptionalism. Although this warrant materialized differently depending on how each rhetor we analyzed articulated his position to the tropes of Keynesianism and neoliberalism, both sides described the contemporary moment through the political logic of exceptionality and thereby preserved--rather than successfully interrogated--the structure of a state that deploys interventionist policies on behalf of capitalist interests. Viewed from this rhetorical angle, the artificial binary established through the ideological sedimentation around Keynesian versus free market economics begins to loosen, revealing a common backing for these different warrants: a market logic saturating both the state and civil society that simultaneously critiques and embraces government interventionism. Importantly, both those who support as well as those who critique EESA uphold this operative governing fantasy.

Our argument proceeds in three parts. To begin, we offer a review of the state of exception theory, ending with an endorsement of Ahiwa Ong who ties the state of exception to neoliberalism. The link between Ong's theory and Agamben's articulation of the state of exception as paradigmatic of modern governmentality allows us to show how one manifestation of this concept is a rhetorical warrant that precludes certain populations from achieving political representation through debate and deliberation. We explore this claim through two clashing arguments constituting the EESA debates--what we call historical expediency and moral critique. Whereas historical expediency sidesteps complicated contradictions among federal politics, neoliberal economics, and lived experience by emphasizing systematic hiccups rather than collective human agency, moral critique remains mired in a similar problematic by condemning the Bush Administration at the expense of interrogating larger structures of social and economic production. We conclude by discussing how this "exceptional" rhetorical style highlights the need to explore a rhetoric of the common, which, when used in conjunction with embodied social movements such as Occupy Wall Street, may generate actual alternatives to neoliberal rule.

THE STATE OF EXCEPTION: FROM INSTRUMENTALITY TO NEOLIBERAL GOVERNMENTALITY

The state of exception has gained popularity in the humanities as a model for explaining the complex operations of power under late capitalism (Agamben; Biesecker; Gunn; Mouffe). Developed by German jurist and Catholic philosopher Carl Schmitt during the first half of the twentieth century, the state of exception has its origins in the desire to rationalize Nazi Germany's suspension of the Weimar constitution leading up to World War II. According to Schmitt, a sympathizer with the Nazi party, certain calamitous circumstances--such as war, economic crisis, and natural disaster--provide the fertile terrain for a democratically elected sovereign to establish autocratic rule. These states of siege, Schmitt argued, produce an imminent logic of crisis that justifies the suspension of democracy in the name of persevering democracy. (2)

Despite his specific...