TheSyllabus

Many of us are using “neoliberalism” to capture something that is very hard to describe. In my view it’s probably the best term around at the moment, but that's not to say it's perfect. I used to be one of those people who, 20 years ago, used the word globalization more than neoliberalism. We would talk about globalization as the march of capital and the transnational movement of money. But I think that “neoliberalism” captures both the structural effects of a global market-based society as well as its seepage into everyday relationships. So an additional focus of neoliberalism is on its deadening effects, for politics, for creativity, for imagination, and for culture. Of course, my interest is how the spread of neoliberalism is moved along through the instrument of communication.

Instead of invoking the term “post-neoliberal,” in my book on neoliberalism and PR I refer to first-, second-, and third-wave neoliberalism to map the movement of meaning over time. To me, there's a lot of synergies between third-wave neoliberalism and post-neoliberalism as they both attempt to capture what is happening beyond economic policy settings in contemporary contexts. The third-wave, like post-neoliberalism, can be traced to the financial crisis around 2008, and the social contradictions that arose from “the winners and losers of globalization” –  an idea that sociologists like Ulrich Beck, Scott Lash, and John Urry posited in the late 1980s and 1990s with great foresight. 

So, while globalization policies in the 1970s, or the second wave of neoliberalism, were lauded by business and government as lifting many people out of extreme poverty globally, this shift had profound effects in industrial states in the US, in Australia, and in Europe. The deindustrialization of towns and cities in these places slowly saw a change in fortune as unemployment, urban decay, and disadvantage became entrenched. The future felt bleak. This third-wave or post-neoliberal period can be understood as giving public expression to the growing resentment towards these conditions, aggravated by austerity measures in response to the financial crisis. At that point, you also had the rise of social media and this ability to share discontent online. So, this third wave of neoliberalism began to be characterized by alt-right groups and populism seeking to reinstate the “authority” of the market as a solution.

I had something new to say. Over time, I had noticed the gradual infiltration of PR’s distinctive vocabularies and ideas into more and more domains. Journalists, politicians, activists – both from the left and right – media commentators, public sector leaders, and even academics were smoothing out contradictions, harmonizing language, and invoking terms like “key messages,” “talking points,” and “optics.” These terms used to be quite discreet, within the occupational confines of PR as the tool of big business. But then they started creeping out – metastasizing – into our everyday language. The whole of society started to absorb this market-based vernacular. And it really surprised and worried me. It seemed like PR had erupted from its occupational confines to saturate the whole world, without people even noticing. It was almost unstoppable.

Public relations is thickly entwined with neoliberalism, but seemingly, not many have explored this relationship or given it much weight. PR is not only an instrument for big business to build consent or erode resistance to its activities, but it is founded on a social contradiction. In practice it is used as an intervention in democratic deliberations, so it is always (to a greater or lesser extent) political. It is not benign. It is not harmless. It is not simply “spin.” The erasure of social contradictions from public debates has had a profound and enduring effect on politics, the environment, culture, and the social imagination. 

As a field, PR came to prominence in the 1920s in tandem with conditions giving rise to “mass communication.” Around this time, we see some thinkers like Walter Lippmann exploring the idea of “public opinion” in democracy, and Gustave Le Bon seeking to explain the “collective mind” and the phenomena of “The Crowd.” 

Edward L. Bernays, a key figure in public relations, took some of these ideas one step further to show how public language in mass communications could be harnessed and instrumentalized to benefit business. An American “public relations counselor,” Bernays was also the nephew of Sigmund Freud, which may explain the esteem in which psychology was held in public relations theory. He wrote a number of books that laid the foundation for the new hybridized occupation in the 1920s. Leveraging the work of Lippmann, Bernays latched on to this idea of the limitations of democracy, which he referred to as an “unworkable fiction” and which justified an “invisible government” working behind the scenes to cue, guide, and control the public’s thinking on matters of importance.  

In a democratic society, it is assumed citizens adhere to principles and precepts, like one vote, one value. But for big business, it was crucial to work quietly in the background to depoliticize the public. So, they turned to PR to do this work. This was managed through an elite group in public relations “who pull the wires which control the public mind” – another one of Bernays' sayings. They wanted to understand what people were reading and listening to, and what was influencing their opinions – in the mass media – so they could change or influence them. 

Now you'll be thinking, “Oh, this sounds like soft propaganda," and indeed Bernays’ 1928 book was called Propaganda. But he abandoned that term and instead adopted “public relations.” He meant for public relations to assist big business in fending off criticism and promoting that climate for growth. The roots of public relations were always wedded to the very idea of big business unfettered by regulation and constraint. Bernays’ theorizing about how public language could be put in service of capitalism coincided with the 1929 Wall Street crash – a time of great uncertainty in the market economy, which also marks the beginning of the first wave of neoliberalism.

Of course, the 1930s were the time of the Great Depression and the rise of Keynesian economics – and with it came ideas of the collective, of government spending being needed to grow the economy. Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal put these policies into place in the United States, and they were incredibly successful and popular. But before they could be implemented, he had to use publicity to sell these ideas to the public. This was a form of capitalism that was the antithesis to neoliberalism: it depended on the government listening to social needs and building programs to address them. The publicity machine for FDR’s New Deal was prodigious but using my definition it was not PR, rather public communication, because it was not founded on an antithetical social contradiction and working from that as a “corrective.” 

Public relations, as I define it, became a counterpoint to this activity. Big business mobilized in the 1930s under the National Association of Manufacturers. The NAM tipped huge resources into countering these ideas which they feared were gaining traction. At the same time as it aggressively promoted small government and opposed regulation, it propelled a vision of business as upholding moral attributes like truth. 

So, we can already talk about public relations at this time as a backlash against the collectivist ideas of Keynesian economics, which continued on until World War II. During this time, it embedded this idea of the virtue of a free market in all sorts of submerged ways, through popular culture like radio plays, pamphlets, and even children’s books; as well as through more traditional methods like political lobbying, networking, and the press. 

But it's in the postwar period where things start to get really serious with public relations. That cultural marker is an important point not just in the growth of public relations, but also the explosion of big business.

The tobacco industry in the 1950s set the groundwork for the sorts of public relations templates that have been used time and time again. During the postwar period, there was a lot of science saying that tobacco products were harmful and killing people, a view that was gaining traction in popular publications like Reader's Digest. By 1953, tobacco barons were actually thinking that their time was up. 

But then they called an emergency meeting to deal with all the negative publicity. One of the attendees was John W. Hill, of the public relations firm Hill+Knowlton. Hill developed potent strategies to fight this criticism in the popular press – strategies that were so successful that they have been rolled out to industry after industry after industry. Hill knew that to influence public opinion vested interest had to be invisible; as he would say, “the best public relations leaves no fingerprints.”

What people like Hill did for the tobacco industry in the 1950s, bypassing democratic channels, is precisely what climate denialists have been doing in recent years. They created the science. They created doubt. They built the think tanks – the private research foundations like the Tobacco Industry Research Committee – that produced the findings they wanted. These could then be disseminated via tax-exempt educational foundations, like the Foundation for Economic Education. They used their corporate muscle and their advertising dollars, their influence on the mass media and the press. These were all part and parcel of how they could get their sticky, braided messages out across the US to counter the science that was telling the public cigarettes were harmful. 

And they were incredibly successful in working outside politics. A climate of consent emerged, and in that they released new products, like the filtered cigarette, which people then thought were okay. So long as the tobacco industry could delay the onset of a restrictive legislative agenda that would thwart their business model, it was succeeding in both making a profit and building new markets, much like the fossil fuel industry today.

The Mont Pèlerin Society society, founded in Switzerland in 1947, was a group of intellectuals, Austrian economists, and businesspeople from Europe and the US who got together to oppose these ideas of collectivism. They recognized its credibility, but also that it was succeeding in embedding the idea of an alternative future, and they knew they had to find a counterpoint to it. They wanted to put the brakes on “authoritarian collectivism” and this form of social capitalism.

The intellectual leaders of the Mont Pèlerin Society were Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises. They didn't want to be seen as some hokey propagandists; they wanted to be taken seriously, to be seen as offering a credible, intellectual counterpoint in the “battle of ideas.” The last thing they wanted was to associate themselves with something as naff as public relations. So, public relations was kept at bay, but I argue that it was really working on another level within that debate. The whole point was to keep public relations submerged, out of the picture, while letting it do its invisible work selling these ideas. This submergence of public relations in the postwar period is crucial.

You have to create the groundwork in order for the neoliberal project to work within a capitalist system; it doesn't come out of nowhere. You've got to create those dispositions towards neoliberal ideas in people, so that they are willing to listen, willing to be malleable, passive, and trusting – instead of being active citizens who are engaged, questioning, and critical. This is a long game that requires public relations to work within that system.

But there are particular discursive structures working dynamically in and with public relations, and that's where this idea of plastic worlds comes in. It's not my theory but Uwe Pörksen's, who explains how certain words have developed the ability to structure the language conditions supporting neoliberalism. We use plastic words all the time without realizing they are loaded. They sound very benign. In fact, they actually sound quite empty. But they have this way of leading us into a market-based view of the world. So, by using them in our everyday language, we start to gradually shift into a worldview where a market-based society seems like the only kind we can have. They stop us from thinking beyond this.

Pörksen developed a list of about 50 or 60 words. Not all of them resonate with me, but there's some that really do. One is the word communication. It's not just the amorphous nature of this word – what does it really mean? – but also how it is infused with a technocratic instrumentalism. This is what closes down our eyes or our thought to other realities. It means that we can only see things through that frame. And plastic words, which PR propels on an industrial scale, appear to be ethically neutral: they don't offend. They don't seem to do anything, but they actually are trundling us along towards a very limited kind of social imagination.

I am of the view that, while the Habermasian public sphere can be criticized as an ideal, we do still need ideals. Where would we be without ideals? Habermas never imagined his theory of the public sphere wouldn't be criticized, but I think he meant for it to describe a way we might aspire to live. There's huge value there.

But other people who have done a lot of work around neoliberalism, like Jodi Dean, are quite critical of Habermas. Dean gives the example of the war in Iraq, where everyone did the right things. People mounted arguments and marched in the streets, protesting against the war, saying, "No, this is not right. We shouldn't go to war in Iraq. There isn't enough evidence." All these arguments were laid down in a Habermasian manner, and yet it still didn't work. In that example, it didn't matter what people did: nothing worked.

So, is the whole thing outdated? Is it redundant in today's conditions? Look, there's clearly something to work with there, but there is also the legitimate criticism to make: it isn't working; we're still struggling. We shouldn't be at the point we're at if what Habermas described is actually possible in a modern society. So, yes and no is my answer.

I don't have a magic wand, but I do have some thoughts. They have to do with de-privileging public relations. We can't really see any other ways to communicate at the moment. Yet, when I did my first book, I looked at political communication by three different grassroots activist groups who were mounting campaigns against risk-producing industries here in Australia. All three groups communicated and used public language in a very different way to PR, yet for the most part this is undescribed as an alternative mode in today’s cultural conditions. These activists were able to engage with the public sphere in a values-based way and build community participation, political engagement, and rich and nuanced deliberations about complex policy matters. 

But we don't provide a platform to discuss such alternative approaches today. We don't have many words for other styles of communication, since in post-neoliberal conditions they just don't seem relevant. So, we need to de-privilege public relations. It's not entitled to do the things that it does. There are other ways. We need that broader context, and to really make these other communicative modes visible. And we do need to look at the power that PR has got, and hold it to account. We've got to describe the impacts of PR, but not just as “spin.” It's not just coming from business in post-neoliberal contexts; it's also coming from governments, the public sector, activists, and individuals and groups, who might be from the left or the right. 

We need to start this process of de-privileging public relations as a dominant discursive mode in order to disempower it. And I think we can do this, in part, by shining a light on it. The champions of public relations have kept it deliberately in the dark. John W. Hill knew that it worked best this way. As an occupational site it is commonly derided as “spin" or the “dark arts.” These supposedly derogatory terms, which might be thought to constitute a social critique, are not; they actually just allow it to carry on unchecked. To counter this complacency, we've got to really look at PR critically and take it seriously.

Robert Brulle, a US sociologist, has identified public relations as a far more significant factor behind the failures in climate change policy than people realize. And I totally agree. Public relations is more complex and dangerous than what people think. And frustratingly, the critique that seems to suffice for many  – as spin –  doesn't even touch its side. So, yes, there's been challenges to the neoliberal order in the last ten or 15 years, but we are still no closer to really understanding what's going on in my view. To make an impact, it will take the stripping away of assumptions about the primacy of economic and political drivers of neoliberalism, and really looking at the communicative relationships linked to this growth. This decentering puts a greater focus on PR, its social impacts, and the contexts that have allowed it to wield such engulfing discursive power today.

I know what you mean. But Pörksen really differentiates plastic words by applying three criteria. Firstly they are words that reify. They create reference points for knowledge formation. That's their purpose. So, they are defined by their function, not their content. He talks about plastic words being carriers of meaning, and, once you start to use these words, you're on tram tracks that will inevitably take you to their destination. But why they're neoliberal – and why they're different from clichés and other kinds of tired phrases that just get recycled – is that they are always leading us towards market-based ideas. 

So, secondly, they speak to the future in this particular utopian way, conjuring it as a better and brighter tomorrow. In that sense, plastic words are instrumental, but this instrumentalism is hidden. Take the word “development,” for example. When we use the word “development," we're actually talking about economic development. But it appears neutral; you've got to scratch to find the real meaning, which you don't even realize is present when you use the word. 

Lastly, here's also an ahistorical aspect to plastic words. We often understand one thing in relation to another, and yet Pörksen shows that these words are modular – they don't seem to reference anything else, but rather flatten out meaning, and in the process evoke this illusion of ethical neutrality. So, when we talk about “development” – or “planning,” or “information” – we don't have any particular ethical associations.

Yes, the uptake of PR in sites like activism is typical in post-neoliberal society. I think progressives are embedding neoliberal culture in very subtle, submerged, and counterintuitive ways. I've recently written about deep canvassing in the US, a communication strategy used by activist groups in the leadup to the 2020 election, and previously around LGBTQI issues. While located in civil society, deep canvassing is all about persuasion, using the logic and language of PR – so, for me, it's located within the family of public relations. 

There might be a whole range of reasons to justify this in contemporary US politics. However, Habermas’ work helps make sense of these new expressions of activism, which use PR machines to produce “empowering stories” and “compelling messages.” He argues that there are various models of democracy, so while advocating from a progressive stance – whether the Greens, or climate activists, or whatever – these groups may well be moving activist culture towards a market-based ideal of democracy, rather than one that is more deliberative or based on republican ideals. While they might not think so, they may be moving us towards a neoliberal future, where the dominating idea of the market limits ways to talk, think, and imagine.

I talk about a discursive formation called neonarratives, which is the assembly of plastic words within the coherence of a story, founded on a social contradiction that business forces are seeking to ameliorate. This narrative formation has become a very powerful way of framing things and moving along meaning as a political intervention. In this a braided form of neoliberal logic is laid down in multiple ways, retold and co-created over time, and with vast resources pushing them along, they just build and build and build. 

Public relations as a genre with specific characteristics is very interested in compressing, reducing, and simplifying meaning. The narrative form is one of the simplest ways in which we learn as young children. If you reduce everything into a formulaic kind of story, which positions us in opposition to something – as heroes on a quest – then over time, this becomes the overarching structure that journalists use without reflection or critique. These narratives can be repeated by multiple narrators, over and over again, and work to break down resistance at the same time as they comfort us with a semblance of symmetry and harmony.

I believe that's the case with climate change denial. That's a neonarrative that has been around for about 50 years. Denialists have developed a story around nature's bounty, and our entitlement to that bounty, and the kind of happy future that that will bring. Those are the sorts of ideas that you hear again and again – in different words, but with the same structure, the same actors, the same storylines, the same plot. The neonarrative of denialism prevented a richer public debate about energy, which in turn led to inertia and policy stagnation. Neonarratives are always a way of building in the meaning that pushes us along towards market-based rationality.

AI is continuing the monetization of our human interactions and emotions. Our thoughts, our conversations, our gestures – all those sorts of things are already monetized on Facebook and other social media. There is no domain of human activity which isn't being mined for its economic potential. AI applications like ChatGPT are another frontier in that vein, if you like, in extracting economic benefits from the very humanness of asking questions and interacting to build understanding and knowledge. I've only just started to get my head around generative AI models with human-like chat bots, where conversations are really key to their appeal. All the intimate ways in which we interact as humans are being monetized.

The term “post-neoliberalism” is interesting. It's a bit like postmodernism. The term “post” is always connected to something – but also builds something new. It's a portmanteau that puts the old and the new together. But I do think post-neoliberal is a term which captures something startling that's happening today. Neoliberalism is morphing – it is in motion and we need to understand this. Like any other term, it'll have its limitations, and it shouldn't constrain our thoughts, but at least it gives us a foothold. 

We started this discussion by saying neoliberalism as a term and a concept isn't perfect, but it seems to be the best we've got at the moment. Where does it go from here? I seriously hope people start to pay attention to what's going on in the communicative realm. Public language is the means to our social formation, but so frequently we are debasing it in ways that we're not even aware of. There are not many areas where “critique” does the opposite to what is intended, but when PR is dismissed as “spin” or as an outdated or obsolete business practice, it serves to entrench its ambiguity and further its power.