Disciplinary Neoliberalism and the Simulation of Freedom

If we take seriously François Debrix’s position in Re-Envisioning Peacekeeping that it is the “disciplinary” part of disciplinary neoliberalism that matters, then we can turn our attention to something that is still largely missing in studies of neoliberalism: an examination of neoliberalism, not on the level of the state and its actors, but on the level of the day-to-day minutiae of neoliberal subjects. Drawing from Baudrillard, Foucault, and Althusser, Debrix uses simulation, discipline, and ideology as analytics through which we can make sense of hegemonic world orders like neoliberalism. He offers provocation and destabilization as methods for disrupting hegemony when he reads the real/visual as simulation rather than as representation. This essay will focus in particular on Debrix’s use of simulation, ideology, and discipline to consider how his deployment of these analytics can help us examine neoliberal subjectivity and its everyday practices understood as freedom. And I will consider the productive and disruptive paths that Debrix’s deployment of visual simulation and destabilization can offer critical IR studies and political theory. I suggest here that we need to consider the ways in which neoliberal subjects do the work of neoliberalism, often understood as techniques or strategies of the state, as they simulate a core requirement of disciplinary neoliberalism: freedom.