'Ain't Nobody's Business If I Do': Mobile Disobedience in a Neoliberal World

Millette, Holly-Gale (2014) 'Ain't Nobody's Business If I Do': Mobile Disobedience in a Neoliberal World. Centre for Applied Philosophy, Politics, and Ethics (CAPPE): Neoliberalism and Everyday Life, University of Brighton, Brighton, United Kingdom. 03 - 05 Sep 2014. p. 23 . (Submitted)

Abstract

There are more boats and ‘live-aboard’ boaters on the inland waterways of Great Britain than there were in the late nineteenth century. The everyday history of boaters, and their representative history in the public realm, experienced seismic shifts throughout the twentieth century, but most recently competitive and corresponding desires, primarily concerned with funding imperatives, and external to their own lived history have manipulated their past and contested their future. In short, neoliberalism has noticed them. Thinkers such as Wendy Brown account for neoliberalism’s insidious attack on subjectivities. But boaters exist outside of the ‘catchment area’ of, what remains of the polis, and are thus, a disruption to its ideology. Carter defines this as a freedom, but it can be seen as a disobedience: if they are not already antagonistic to neoliberalist ideology, their mobilities mark them as such.

This paper considers a marginal people who have, for over 150 years, suffered a falsity of perception and paucity of representation within both the public sphere and the consciousness of history. This schism of truth is not uncommon with mobile peoples, and the laziness of false truth in subjectivity can be discussed from Wittgenstein forward. Theirs is a various and vacillating unofficial history that forms the very rhetoric through which they communicate and celebrate their communal identity. Much of this community is engaged in a continued act of self-care in the way Heidegger considered it, and this too is misbehaves as a threat.

My argument is that their future histories are being imposed as dissident and resistant, by a charitable organisation and ‘big society’ rhetoric. Economists and political philosophers know that charity does not equate to justice. Now, in the neoliberal world it rather equates to ‘responsibilisation’ and ‘erradication’ of the subject – two things that these mobile peoples would view as both a threat to their inherent freedom, as Hobbes considered it, and as an injustice to their way of life as Article 8 of the European Court of Human Rights and legal scholars configure it.

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Contributors

Author: Holly-Gale Millette

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