Neoliberal fetishism: the language learner as homo œconomicus

Abstract

The neoliberal era is often surmised as the extension of the free market, increasing privatisation, and the commodification of everything. A large body of work has shed much light on the way in which during the neoliberal period, a discursive shift has taken place whereby language is increasingly seen in instrumental terms of profit rather than in ethno/national pride. Though such work engages with language as a commodity within discourse, the view that language and languages themselves are literally commodities remains problematic. It is argued in this article that in the case of private commercial language schools known as eikaiwa in Japan, what is produced and consequently on sale, is not language itself, but rather the lesson. What this article offers, is an example of how commodity fetishism plays out in relation to language education, and how the commodity comes to be divorced from its production and its producers, in the recontextualization of the lesson in advertising. In contrast to previous work on eikaiwa advertising which focusses on depictions of exotic and eroticised white native English-speaking Others, the analysis here finds that representations of teachers, is largely absent. The article argues that this erasure of labour (teachers), and the foregrounding of the student in advertising, illustrate a form of commodity fetishism particular to the neoliberal period, where the student as neoliberal homo-œconomicus–producer of her own desire - comes to the fore.