The Energy Equicrat: Neoliberal Subjectivity “After” Neoliberalism

ABSTRACT: Many theorists and pundits contend that neoliberalism is on the “decline,” citing shifts in political opinions and policies. I argue that these analyses overstate this decline by rendering neoliberalism as a circumscribed ideology that subjects knowingly embrace or repudiate. As a corrective, this article argues that we must apprehend neoliberalism not simply in terms of “political will” or the “war of ideas,” but also as a spatialized, habituated, and affective phenomenon that exceeds any conscious ideological agenda. Toward this end, I explore neoliberal efforts to equitably decarbonize energy infrastructure. Drawing from two years of ethnographic research on sustainable energy development in New York City, I contend that subjects who consciously repudiate neoliberal governance often unwittingly reproduce it through their day-to-day practices—even when they posit those practices in opposition to neoliberal governance. I attribute this unwitting work to the spatiality and materiality of solar infrastructure and energy efficiency upgrades. Specifically, I suggest that the decentralized landscape of sustainable energy enfolds both grassroots activists and leftist technocrats into the workings of neoliberal markets in spite of their conscious opposition to market logics. This distributed spatiality also broadens the range of subjects who participate in electricity governance, diluting the normative ideological poles that have traditionally divided these subjects, as the technocrat and the activist, the corporate worker and the anti-capitalist, coalesce through infrastructural transformation. I conceptualize this boundary-blurring subjectivity as the equicrat, short for the equity-minded technocrat, to call attention to the counterintuitive compatibility of equitable, grassroots governance and rule by experts in the neoliberal landscape. In theorizing this compatibility, the equicrat heuristic illuminates the performative terrain through which subjects at once reject and reproduce neoliberalism.