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p r ac t i c e s o f ne o l i b e r a l i s m
also, and very importantly, external in the sense that interventions
from elsewhere aim to change practice by changing repertoires.
This is the essence of social engineering: neoliberal intervention
aims to destabilise existing habits (expressed within neoliberal
discourse as a hostility to bureaucracy and a desire for good gov-
ernance, for example) and to produce notions of conduct based
on efficiency, transparency and utility. It also aims to destabilise
existing conduct by producing values of efficiency, transparency,
value for money, and so on, within states that are likely to work
according to different forms of conduct (Bayart 1993). It also aims
to render some possible actions easier, more rewarding or more
obvious than others.
The argument here is that social practices in Africa have experi-
enced a tangible destabilisation as a result of neoliberal intervention
mainly but not exclusively aimed at the state. As a result, the ‘lived
history’ of neoliberalism – that which is realised through practices
of adaption, adoption, resistance and subterfuge – can be found in
the ways social practice has changed within those many African
states that have undergone decades of neoliberal intervention.
But one final question faces us before we move on: how do we
move from the meso to the macro? Or, more specifically, how do
we relate bundles of practice to the project of global neoliberalism?
The answer is, at best, suggestive, and cannot be more that that
without becoming (in my view at least) excessively deterministic
– a danger that is replete within studies of neoliberalism, as I have
already argued above. The nub of the issue resides in the bundling
itself: the intellectual effort to relate discrete practices in order to
think interpretively about the nature of those practices and the
kinds of change that they usher in. Again, this is a point made
strongly by Dewey in his efforts to distinguish pragmatism from
empiricism, and we can quote him at length:
There are specific good reasons for the usual attribution of acts to
the person from whom they immediately proceed. But to convert this
special reference into a belief of exclusive ownership is as misleading