Value-neutral technique claims foreclose contestation over norms and ends.

Evidence

In short, best practices represent not merely the intimacy, but the consolidation of government, business, and knowledge endeavors into a market episteme that subtly banishes nonmarket values and aims. As best practices imbricate the formerly distinct purposes and ends of business, government, and knowledge in neoliberal regimes, they neuter or deflect normative challenges to neoliberal reason precisely through this imbrication. How do you contest a winning practice that claims (by virtue of being only a practice) value neutrality? How would you do so in the name of a (nonmarket) value or purpose that the practice spurns or does not recognize? It is through carrying market values while claiming only to be techniques that best practices promulgate certain norms and foreclose arguments about norms and ends. — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos, 272

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The core maneuver of soft power: how claiming value-neutral technique forecloses normative contestation. Central to the whole book’s thesis about depoliticization.
• XREF: Connects to Habermas on technocratic legitimation and the colonization of the lifeworld by systems imperatives. — connects to: Herding forecloses action alternatives to move behavior toward near-certain outcomes remotely. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 922; Legal critique often masks a disagreement over underlying value judgments. — Ruggero J. Aldisert, Agatha D. Aldisert, Logic for Lawyers- A Guide to Clear…, 451; Investor-style valuation techniques now shape public policy with coercive force — Ève Chiapello, Financialisation of Valuation, 108 (+1 more)

Broader Connections

• Investor-style valuation techniques now shape public policy with coercive force #exemplifies (0.82) — Ève Chiapello, Financialisation of Valuation, 108
• Herding forecloses action alternatives to move behavior toward near-certain outcomes remotely. #exemplifies (0.80) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 922
• Legal critique often masks a disagreement over underlying value judgments. #expands (0.78) — Ruggero J. Aldisert, Agatha D. Aldisert, Logic for Lawyers- A Guide to Clear…, 451
• Value-at-risk regulation indirectly pressures banks into forced selling #exemplifies (0.70) — Donald MacKenzie, An Engine, Not a Camera, 1050