But as Kathleen Stewart (2007, 1–7) reminds us, “bottom-line arguments about ‘bigger’ structures and underlying causes” are hindrances more often than helps when critics take cracks at maneuvering their intellectual rovers over the alien terrain of ordinary affective life. To be sure, neoliberalism may be a useful shorthand for indexing the uneven distributions of precarity, vulnerability, exploitation, and violence that make up our historical present. (This, too, may be student debt.) As Lauren Berlant (2011) wisely puts it,Ĭritics interested in the ways structural forces materialize locally often turn the heuristic ‘neoliberalism’ into a world-homogenizing sovereign with coherent intentions that produces subjects who serve its interests, such that their singular actions only seem personal, effective, and freely intentional, while really being effects of powerful, impersonal forces. Indeed, one wonders among other things why the signifier neoliberalism should deserve so much credit even as students are given so little. That Kelley’s finger should end up wagging at an old feminist chestnut might give us pause. What the kids need to get through their heads, writes the radical public intellectual, is that “the personal is not always political” (13). For Kelley, neoliberalism abridges volumes of structural violence into pamphlets of personal pain, with the result that where Kelley’s generation critiqued the system and fought the power, today’s students just complain about having their feelings hurt. This sinister new vocabulary list risks, even invites, ensnarement in that tangle of neoliberal logics (diversity, multiculturalism, inclusion) that have crept like ivy into the American university over the past few decades. Among the newest generation of student activists, Kelley writes: “Words such as trauma, PTSD, micro-aggression, and triggers have virtually replaced oppression, repression, and subjugation” (14). Radical historian Robin Kelley (2016), for instance, has recently given students a talking-to in the Boston Review. As it happens, this fashionable genre of cultural criticism-which Sara Ahmed (2015) has deftly described as “a moral panic about moral panics”-is hardly limited to a sententious liberal commentariat.
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These particular kids-these-days are shrill, needy, vindictive tripwires who love hashtags and hate free speech. First in line to be thrown under the bus in articles like this are university students, whom the genre routinely paints with its distinctive blend of sanctimonious alarm and zoological fascination (see Lukianoff and Haidt 2015). You can’t swing a dead Enlightenment philosopher around the public sphere these days without hitting an opinion piece lamenting the coddling of the American mind.
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