Neoliberal choice is a pretense limited by means, networks, and inherited position

Evidence

One can only concur with Grant Farred’s comment, then, that the “new” society of post-apartheid South Africa is characterized by the pretense of choice. The pretense of choice, its formalistic possibility, concerns the partial parameters facing those for whom the conditions enable choices freely to be made. This pretense of choice perfectly characterizes the neoliberal condition. It is choice within the limits of one’s means and networks, one’s inheritance and education, one’s class and gender, all of which are racially marked if much less deeply and directly determined than under apartheid. While hardly a perfect analogy, it is perhaps revealing to note that one can move through South African society today marked by race to something like the extent citizens were mobile in midtwentieth-century America marked by religion. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1599

Categorization

• DEFINE: Introduces ‘the pretense of choice’ as a precise characterization of the neoliberal condition — formally free choice bounded by privately held resources.
• QUESTION: The analogy of race-marked mobility in SA versus religion-marked mobility in mid-20th-century America is intriguing — worth chasing whether Goldberg develops it further in later chapters.
• XREF: connects to: The ideal neoliberal subject is a self-sufficient entrepreneurial risk-taker — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity,…, 36; Neoliberal freedom is confined to market-compatible choices within a predetermined margin; Neoliberalism frames free choice as exercised through secured commercial interaction. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 1788 (+1 more)