Global Futures in East Asia: Youth, Nation, and the New Economy in Uncertain Times (Contemporary Issues in Asia and Pacific) by Unknown Read Free Book Online

an anticorruption reformer. Hence we see here the articulation of external forces of global governance and internal forces of political liberalization.
    As an “unemployed highly educated worker,” Song describes how she herself became caught up in the paradoxes of this articulation. Hired on as a part-time researcher investigating the problems of homeless people, she became both an agent and a beneficiary of Kim’s workfare policies. She describes with devastating detail her discomfort with her growing awareness of the forms of discrimination embedded in these policies in which homeless women are made invisible as subjects deserving social support. Song’s chapter resonates strongly with Inoue’s reflections on how discourses of welfare reform work through the medium of neoliberal speech acts to make gender inequality invisible. In the case of South Korea, these speech acts took on the guise of “family breakdown,” “the deserving poor,” and “empowerment,” and their illocutionary effects turned liberal projects of social redistribution into neoliberal projects of self-responsibilization by making invisible the structural causes of women’s homelessness.
    Conclusion
    The authors of these chapters bring ethnography to bear on what it does best by exploring the complex relationships between macrolevel processes working globally with the everyday practices of building a life in an economic landscape that has been dramatically altered. They demonstrate the value of grounded ethnographic work in exploring the processes of subject formation within locally specific conditions of possibility. Neoliberal subjecthood is not entirely the result of a process of top-down human engineering but is also the result of transnational cultural flows in which ideals of the enterprising self take shape in locally specific forms that define what it means to be competitive and forward moving.
    But this volume was also conceived with a hope that these projects of life-making can be connected across national boundaries to become part of a New International already in formation. Capitalism’s strategy of segregating high- and low-value subjects by means of a global division of labor has recreated the struggle at a global level: “Intensifying the integration of the world market has made channels for unprecedented connections between different value subjects; it has formed a new, and militant industrial proletariat in new planetary zones” (Dyer-Witheford 2002: 30). The self-enterprising subjects produced by capitalism’s efforts to externalize its costs may instead engage in life-making projects that lie outside the circuit of capital accumulation altogether. In a global regime that constantly undercuts the value of the enterprise of the self, the imperative of building new economies from the ground up outside the speculative logics of global capitalism may indeed open a path to a future. 15
    Notes
    ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
    This introduction emerged out of countless conversations with Andrea G. Arai whose intellectual collaboration has taken the form of teaching together as well as co-editing this volume. Our other volume coeditor Hai Ren and Stanford University Press editor Stacy Wagner also contributed invaluable input, which has helped shape it into its final form.
    1 . NHK.
Friita—Genryuu—Monozukuri no Genba de
(From the Worksite: A Story of the
Freeter
). Documentary, aired February 2005.
    2 . For a historical overview of neoliberalism, see Harvey 2005. For discussion of neoliberalism as a problem of government, see Foucault 2008 and Lemke 2001.
    3 . “Spatiotemporal fix” is a phrase taken from Harvey 2003. It is a spatial movement in that capitalism seeks geographical regions where there are large pools of cheap labor. It is a temporal move because it seeks these new conditions of doing business in areas that are “behind” in terms of capitalist development.
    4 . See Mike Davis’s discussion (2011) of the collision course of