Neoliberal abstractions and microhistorical illuminations: dispatches from Cape Town

Abstract

This thesis portrays neoliberalism as a political technology that removes economic life from plural deliberation by administering regimes of selective legibility and occlusion. Situated within a longer history of racial capitalism, it shows how claims of efficiency and neutrality depend on the ongoing colonial erasure of relational epistemologies. This erasure produces zones of nonlight, mediated through abstracting devices—such as prices, ledgers, and labour metrics—that function as empty carriers within chains of extractive efficiency, rendering heterogeneous lives and material entities commensurable. Bringing the intellectual genealogies of spontaneous order—particularly its elaboration by Friedrich Hayek—into critical relation with microhistories of everyday practice in Cape Town, the thesis mobilises a counter-aesthetic of material residues and visual methods. This approach foregrounds sensory, material, and affective dimensions that persist beyond market legibility and its systemic occlusions. Sensory fragments are deployed as analytic interruptions, with the thesis structured through a montage-like method that brings together microhistorical registers, visual analysis, and ethnographically inflected observation, treating chapters as analytic dispatches rather than elements of a cumulative argument.