The suburban “good life,” in both actual practice and idealized representations, functions as a vanguard to the neoliberal order by effectively removing the suburbs as a site for critical politics and revolutionary activities. The suburbs were created as political sterilized locations of hegemonic interests and most suburban politics are self-interested politics involving taxes, property values, and local schools. In fact, the history of suburban politics are largely related to protecting their own interests, whether that is preventing black homeownership, or insisting on better quality local education for their children.
The suburban life pacifies and disciplines the exploitable subject while also orienting the suburban subject towards economically productive ways of life that further the perceived universal rationality of neoliberal discourse and embed a distractive and self-interested characterization within suburban life (Foucault, 1977). Although the suburban subject has long been subject to the logic of consumerist society and private property ownership under capitalism, current digital and neoliberal conditions reveal an increasingly durable and obdurate subjectivity specifically centralized and anchored through the trifecta of “home, family, and career” as a primary rubric of self-optimization.
This structural precedent creates a subject who is further removed from the worsening societal situation, who deal in digital images of their own evidence of a “good life,” while simultaneously and more quietly experiencing growing precarity and instability as a class behind the digital visibility of their lives (See: the double meaning of the freedom in labor/capitalist relations, Marx, [1867] 1990).
Considering the present diagnostics of our critical times which I have been writing about, I would argue that the historical source of the postwar American illusion of the “good life” and the means of dream-making are found within the suburban apparatus as a technology of capital. From the advent of television and mass production to today’s digital society, suburbs have played a crucial role as the imaginary space for the American Dream as a universal claim to the “good life” (Baumgartner, 1988; Baxandall & Ewen, 2000).
However, it is essential to recognize that the “good life” is not solely created within the suburbs but is constructed through a mutual relationship with society, resulting in a feedback loop between image and reality. The suburban apparatus, aligning with Foucault’s notion of technological apparatuses and adjacencies (Foucault, 1980), serves to actualize, activate, and embody the illusory portrayals of the “good life.” The suburbs then function as the field in which the attempted practices and habits occur that promote this image of the “good life” through the suburbanite and all that this identity believes and upholds (Kenny, 1996).
So to summarize, both the suburban “good life” and its idealized representations of the American dream contribute to the current neoliberal order by distancing the suburban subject from critical politics and revolutionary notions. This has been the historical function of the suburban image since WWII. The suburban apparatus in day to day life plays a crucial role in actualizing the illusion of the “good life,” through the subjective embodiments of the suburbanite, that inflects the feedback loop between ideal images of the “good life” and the present neoliberal reality.
This constitutive dynamic aligns with Foucault’s notion of neoliberal technological apparatuses and adjacencies, and can help demonstrate how the suburban apparatus serves as a disciplinary political force that shapes suburban subjectivity and perpetuates today’s neoliberal values by embedding its values, modes, and beliefs, through both generative and restrictive means, within the very lives of the suburban subject (Foucault, 1977; 1980).
Social Science & Our Critical Times 