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ОглавлениеThe mystery is why the right is now where the real energy is in U.S. political life, why the conservative message seems so much more straightforward and stimulating, why they’re all having so much more goddamn fun than the left . . . That the U.S. left enjoyed this sort of energized coalescence in the 1960s and ’70s but has (why not admit the truth?) nothing like it now is what lends many of the left’s complaints about talk radio a bitter whiny edge.1
And that was before the crisis.
Starting from a heightened appreciation for the complexity and double truth of the neoliberal heritage, we can now make a fortified assault on this question: How did neoliberalism apparently come through the crisis unscathed?
Chapter 2 made the case that much hinges upon the interplay of the sociological structure of the Neoliberal Thought Collective built up around the Mont Pèlerin Society and the stratification of esoteric and exoteric doctrines, depending upon one’s location within or without the Russian doll. Briefly reiterating, different cadres are supposed to maintain different understandings of the “true” political implications of the neoliberal project, as one of the internal structural aspects of the project. However, I need to emphasize that, while a necessary precondition, this consilience of doctrine and function is not at all sufficient by itself to “explain” the modern success of the movement. All it accomplished was to help us identify its intellectual provenance and genealogy. The tenacity of neoliberal doctrines that might have otherwise been refuted at every turn since 2008 has to be rooted in the extent to which a kind of “folk” or “everyday” neoliberalism has sunk so deeply into the cultural unconscious that even a few rude shocks can’t begin to bring it to the surface long enough to provoke discomfort.
The relationship between culture and politics is an age-old topic that rarely commands much assent. Often one reads statements such as “Culture is now saturated with a market-oriented mentality that closes out alternative ways of thinking and imagining”; or, “The most fateful change that unfolded during the past three decades was not an increase in greed. It was the reach of markets, and of market values, into spheres of life traditionally governed by nonmarket norms.”2 That is not the claim being argued for in this chapter. Indeed, the impression that there exists a single coherent “market mentality” seeping into every pore turns out to be a big part of the problem. Neither has “governmentality” been as helpful a concept as it might have initially appeared. Martijn Konings has complained about recent work of a “constructivist” orientation that has not altogether escaped the dichotomy between government and a separate “market”:
[R]ecent work in political economy has taken up the theme of social construction in a somewhat abortive manner. Concerned not to end up in the muddy methodological waters of postmodernism, it has generally been reluctant to consider social construction as extending “all the way down” to the basic facts of economic life . . . It has tended to do so by retreating from the explanation of the internal structures and “technical” aspects of markets and focusing primarily on formal regulatory institutions . . . In this way, it has tended to employ a very restricted notion of construction, one that sees it as limited to the organizational environment of markets but does not really see it to be at the core of what our everyday experience of economic life is about. In the end, international political economy still presents us with a world of regulators and markets.3
It is not that many of these writers don’t realize that neoliberalism has become entrenched at a very personal level of existence: indeed, Foucault is often credited with having insisted upon that very notion. However, the proposition, if contemplated at all, has mostly been explored at an austere level of abstraction—for instance, Foucault himself comments upon the theoretical writings of Gary Becker and the German ordoliberals; he was seemingly uninterested in how the dynamics actually played out at ground level. One might have expected Foucauldians to pursue that option; the next section inquires why this apparently hasn’t happened. Consequently, as Konings suggests, it has not been the political theorists or philosophers who have made the greatest strides toward understanding everyday neoliberalism; rather, progress has been made by a motley clique from anthropology, business schools, marketing agencies, law schools, and cultural studies who have explored the contemporary contours of neoliberal consciousness.
It began more than three decades ago with a brace of studies concerned to understand creeping “commodification” of sex, children, body parts, and discourse itself.4 One strain of this discussion initially lost its way by stumbling onto a quest for some “correct” ontological/moral criteria for the objects in question to qualify for quarantine in “separate spheres” of human existence away from the “market.” In seeking to displace the vernacular revulsion concerning market encroachment on the sphere of the sacred with something else, many of these authors sought secular succor in social science, only quickly to encounter an obstacle in the shape of neoclassical economics, which by that time had pretty much dismantled any ontological distinctions between the “market” and the rest of social life. A sort of ineffectual disdain for economists combined with incongruous simultaneous recourse to their neoclassical concepts (“public goods,” “efficiency vs. equity”) grew up around some quarters, which only further induced ingrained misconceptions concerning political theory; subsequently, attempts to erect citadels against “market logic” then became bogged down and immobilized in the literatures of communitarianism and virtue ethics. I think it fair to say most of this literature had simply turned its back on the pertinence of the phenomenon of neoliberalism, which accounts for much of its ineffectual irrelevance.
Another, more productive line of inquiry eschewed spelunking the ontology of the commodity in favor of Radin’s astute observation that questions of commodification would themselves rapidly devolve into questions of the nature of personhood; and this resonated with all manner of feminist scholars, anthropologists, and cultural studies advocates. As this contingent pursued their empirical explorations of recent alterations in what it meant to be a free and autonomous agent in the modern world, they increasingly found themselves brought back into confrontation with neoliberal political economy. Their writing was pitched just about as far from formal disciplinary economics as it is possible to go in the contemporary academy; perhaps it was this fact that allowed them to more directly access accounts of the NTC as germane to their concerns. Once they made the connection, they uncovered all manner of unexpected facets of the new personhood. It is their work that provides the fabric and texture of the current chapter.
They, and we, do not treat this construction of the neoliberal self as a monolithic Weltanschauung or cultural iron cage or industrial-scale brainwashing. Many people are sufficiently reflexive that they can and do catch glimpses of worlds outside the neoliberal ambit; they often indulge in bricolage to refurbish neoliberal materials into something else entirely; and of course, not every innovation emitted from the NTC has panned out or avoided intended consequences. Nevertheless, bulletins from the home front of modern agency do suggest we currently inhabit a quintessentially neoliberal era. This is a fact, not some cry of despair. Certainly it would be wrong to retreat to the easy slogan “there is no alternative,” although the possibility of dereliction on the left is entertained later. Rather, we shall attempt in this chapter to explore the accretion of neoliberal attitudes, imaginaries, and practices that have come to inform everyday life in the first few decades of the new millennium.
It is predominantly the story of an entrepreneurial self equipped with promiscuous notions of identity and selfhood, surrounded by simulacra of other such selves. It tags every possible disaster as the consequences of risk-bearing, the personal fallout from making “bad choices” in investments. It is a world where competition is the primary virtue, and solidarity a sign of weakness. Consequently, it revels in the public shaming of the failed and the hapless. It replaces the time-honored ambition to “know yourself” with the exhortation to “express yourself,” with everything the bunco shift in verbs implies. It counsels you to outsource the parts of your life you find irksome. The effect of this congeries of technologies, entertainments, mobilizations, and distractions has been first and foremost to reinforce the exoteric version of the neoliberal self, but more important, has served to so addle and discombobulate the populace that they end up believing that adoption of neoliberal notions constitutes wicked rebellion against the powers that be, corporations, and a corrupt political class. The nimble trick of portraying a neoliberal world as an insurgency always on the edge of defeat, a roiling rage against the system, the rebel bloom of dissent from a stodgy cronyism of corporate and government governance, not to mention the epitome of all futuristic hope, is the secret weapon of the Russian doll structure, deflecting the gale-force winds of prolonged economic contraction. It offers more, better neoliberalism as the counter to a sputtering neoliberalism, all the while disguising any acknowledgment of that fact. It is the promotion of ignorance as the neoliberal first line of defense.
Discipline and Furnish: Foucault on Neoliberalism
One of the better ways to become aware of everyday neoliberalism is to approach it from a slightly oblique angle. Many works of art have set out to do just that; one of my favorites is Gary Shteyngart’s popular novel Super Sad True Love Story. The overarching narrative line of this vaguely futuristic novel involves the political collapse of the “American Restoration Authority” and a coup by a for-profit security firm, backed by Chinese investors in American government debt. But the author is less fixated upon such macro-level political science fiction than his plausible exaggerations of trends in the organization of everyday life. For instance, urban streets are equipped with “Poles” that give instant LED readouts of your credit ranking as you pass by, accompanied by personalized investment advice; the protagonist works for the Post Human Services Corporation, which provides unspecified rejuvenation services to those of advanced age (that is, over thirty) by means of prostheses. Everyone wears a device called an “apparat,” which continually streams data between people in near proximity, and allow the user to FAC (Form a Community) on the fly by scanning a standardized set of statistics concerning compatibility, income, and history:
Streams of data were now fighting for time and space around us. The pretty girl I had just FACed was projecting my MALE HOTNESS at 120 out of 800, PERSONALITY 450, and something called SUSTAINABILITY at 630. The other girls were sending me similar figures . . . The bar was now utterly aflash with smoky data spilling out of a total of fifty-nine apparati, 68 percent of them belonging to the male of the species. The masculine data scrolled on my screen. Our average income hovered at a respectable but not especially uplifting 190,000 yuan-pegged dollars. We were looking for girls who appreciated us for what we were.5
This might sound like a slightly less gloomy version of the Panopticon of Foucauldian fame; but in the novel, everyone just treats it as uninflected second nature, a logical pedestrian response to a set of desires that would naturally arise in any social setting. People are “free” to use the apparat or not; people are free to alter their personal peccadilloes that factor into the statistical summaries; people are even free to dissimulate and misrepresent their “true” selves, whatever those might be. Politics has become so outré that the possible impending collapse of the government is itself reduced to a set of abstract statistics, which the individual feeds into his strategic risk calculations on the apparat. Revolution is just another occasion for disaster porn and reshuffling the portfolio, rather than a transformation of history. Shteyngart does mention a few characters who recoil from using the apparat, but they are portrayed as backward Russians whose quaint obsessions date from a bygone era of buggy whips and communism.
I can imagine my reader poised to retort, “That was precisely Foucault’s point!” Power is not simply exercised between the ruler and the ruled; it has been integrated directly into the makeup of modern agency, it fills up the pores of our most unremarkable day; it is the default option of our reflex assumptions about what others think and do. It gets under our skin; which is one way to try to understand what Foucault meant by his seductive term “biopolitics.”6 Yet, as I have already hinted, leaning on Foucault as a guide to everyday neoliberalism can be a treacherous proposition, at best.
First, let us accord him his due. Foucault read some of the most important members of the NTC, from the ordoliberals to Gary Becker, when it was highly unfashionable to do so. He did not simply recapitulate their writings, but rather drew out a range of stunning implications that ventured far beyond the exoteric knowledge then being broadcast by the collective. Accomplishing this back in 1979, he was the first to appreciate the vaunting ambition of neoliberals to recast not just markets and government, but the totality of human existence into a novel modality, to be disciplined and punished by structures of power/knowledge. He also insisted, contrary to their deceptive assertions, that it was no “return” to classical liberal principles: “Neoliberalism is not Adam Smith; neoliberalism is not market society.”7 He transcended the moralism of those who denounced the commodification of everyday life. The fact that he pursued these insights in lectures that were not further developed into full-blown texts before his death in 1984 accounts for the long delay in cognizance of that fact. (The current Foucault renaissance dates from posthumous publication of the Collège de France lecture transcripts over the past decade.) His perspicuity takes on greater significance in retrospect, since it is conventionally said that the political ascendancy of the neoliberals dates from the early 1980s. Figure 2.4 in chapter 2 also demonstrates that interest in the neoliberals (outside of the thought collective itself ) was not widely common prior to that date. Thus, Foucault was reconnoitering a development in its infancy, one that most people in his circles had up till then ignored, and which has since proven to be far more consequential than it was in his own lifetime.
Let us venture even further in giving him his due. Foucault appears to have been the trailblazer when it came to insisting that power operates on the microlevel through the production of subjectivity in the multitude. He highlighted a number of phenomena characteristic of the neoliberal project that have since been topics of frequent commentary, when not taken as obvious. A short list (with citations to his lectures) would include:
A) The fragmentation of identity is attendant upon
an entrepreneurial version of the self.
The individual’s life must be lodged, not within a framework of a big enterprise like the firm, or if it comes to it, the state, but within the framework of a multiplicity of diverse enterprises connected up to and entangled with each other . . . [It] must make him into a sort of permanent and multiple enterprise.8
B) An entrepreneurial regimen for the self will eventually extend
the purview of its calculus to every conceivable social activity,
and not just those narrowly oriented to pecuniary profit.
This happens because it renders persons more susceptible to control, and not simply due to the profit motive. As Foucault put it, one extends the “grid, the schema, and the model of Homo economicus to not only every economic actor, but to every social actor in general inasmuch as he or she gets married, for example, or commits a crime, or raises children, gives affection and spends time with the kids . . . Homo economicus is someone who is eminently governable.” Entrepreneurship was insensibly downgraded as a narrow societal function and redefined as a set of character traits.9
C) A stance of cold calculation of interest will eventually be reprocessed as a new, warm, soulful form of moral economy. 10
Quoting Margaret Thatcher: “Choice is the essence of ethics; good and evil only have meaning insofar as man is free to choose.” In the neoliberal imagination, “faith-based charities” “were crowded out by the rise of the welfare state and would grow again . . . if government were to reduce its profile or remove itself entirely.”11
D) “The malleability of the self presumed by the theory of human capital investment will extend down to the most basic corporeal level, which will eventually mean investment in genetic manipulation.” 12
Foucault was the first to insist that Becker’s “human capital” was a first move in the neoliberal disintegration of the self. This race to the empty bottom is the terminal meaning of “biocapital.”
E) “The Entrepreneurial self cannot be passive, but must move strategically in a world rife with risk. Hence, reward and punishment are accepted by the agent as the outcome of calculated risks, not as the dictates of ‘justice.’” 13
Casinos are not cynical scams taking advantage of the naïve and improvident; they are the practice tables for life. Risk is the oxygen for the entrepreneurial self, but also the means through which failure is leached of its political valence. The failed should accept the verdict of the market without complaint or pleas for help. Insecurity is the incubator for risk-loving behavior. The birth of actuarial tables is the death of tragedy.
F) Ignorance is the natural state of mankind, and the guarantor of neoliberal order. The neoliberal self is comfortable with this ignorance.
“Everyone must be uncertain with regard to the collective outcome if this positive collective outcome is really to be expected. Being in the dark and blindness of all the economic agents is absolutely necessary . . . Invisibility is absolutely indispensable. It is an invisibility which means that no economic agent should or can pursue the collective good. But we must no doubt go further than economic agents; not only no economic agent, but also no political agent . . . You cannot because you do not know, and you do not know because you cannot know.”14 Ignorance as the linchpin of the neoliberal project was already stressed in the previous chapter. These quotes reveal that Foucault got there first.
There are undoubtedly further observations on the neoliberal approach to everyday life salted throughout the lectures; but these will suffice to demonstrate that Foucault was poised to elucidate the microstructures of a new sort of power. He was fascinated with the prospect that the classical liberal notion of a governmentalized “population” in a designated “territory,” the very calling card of the prince, was being downsized and recast by neoliberalism through its transformation of the disciplined body into an autogoverned federation of temporary investments. However, in stark contrast to his previous writings, he was not teasing out the operation of power on the ground and under the skin, so to speak; instead, he was extrapolating certain trends from the theoretical writings of some of the most prominent members of the Neoliberal Thought Collective. These lectures did not resemble his prior texts, usually amply stocked with anthropological nuggets from archival sources. The shift in register was a little odd. It was as if he had taken in his waning years to writing the ethnography of the twenty-second century by reading H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine.15 Or, to clumsily switch metaphors in midstream, it was as if Foucault were thumbing through an IKEA catalog, trying to decide what sort of deck chairs to order, without paying any attention to whether the furniture would come assembled, or indeed, whether he was furnishing the deck of the Titanic or the QE2. (Foucault compares governmentality to the piloting of a ship in The Birth of Biopolitics.)
I am not the first to demur that Foucault’s treatment of neoliberalism leaves something to be desired. It seems that a few scholars are coming around to the position that Foucault managed to be so very prescient with regard to everyday neoliberalism precisely because he took on board such a large amount of the neoliberal doctrine as a font of deep insight into the nature of governmentality. Although he would never have openly adopted the normative stance, he was converging on the assessment that it was “right,” at least as description of the contemporary dispositif.16 Again, to be clear, I am not accusing Foucault of being a member of the Neoliberal Thought Collective—an absurd counterfactual—but rather, suggesting that he shared quite a bit of common ground with their doctrines, and was coming to appreciate that incongruous fact toward the end of his life.
The main common denominator of the later Foucault and the neoliberals was located in the attitude toward economics. Earlier, in Les Mots et les Choses, Foucault had treated political economy as just another epiphenomenon of the episteme, on a par with philology and natural history.17 By the time we get to The Birth of Biopolitics, somehow the economy had become elevated as the privileged locus of the “site of truth”: the Archimedean point that allows a critique of autocratic state power. “The possibility of limitation and the question of truth are both introduced into governmental reason through political economy . . . it was political economy that made it possible to ensure the self-limitation of governmental reason.” And not just any old political economy. Supposedly lacking a market, Foucault denied that socialism had ever possessed its own governmentality or governmental rationality. It was not Marx, but Adam Smith and Röpke and Hayek, that Foucault identified as the key tradition in governmentality.18
One way to interpret this is to say that the cast of historical figures in capitalist societies operated within a regime of truth that elevated the construct identified as “the economy” to pride of place in their exercise of power; and further, the appeal to self-limitation was a means to their expansion of power; but that does not correspond to what appears in the lectures. Rather, Foucault seeks to interrogate government as the assemblage of techniques, beliefs, practices, and excuses that try to maintain order; but he leaves “the economy” as the independent Representative of the Real, a placeholder without interrogation or even any description. The market as portrayed by Foucault in his late lectures on neoliberalism is the sole legitimate site for the production of indubitable knowledge of the whole; in other words, an absent deity rendered in a manner no different from Hayek or Stigler or Friedman or Buchanan. The “market” (always referenced as a monolithic entity) provides the boundary condition for governmentality, because it alone knows things we can never know. It offers nonstop cogent critique of the pretensions of the state. Far from a ramshackle Rube Goldberg device, it is instead constituted as the Delphic Oracle, capable of interpreting our every dream. Apparently, by 1979 Foucault had abstained from casting his characteristic gimlet eye on the historical constructs that give our life meaning, at least when it came to the economy.
If I had to summarize where the otherwise prescient Foucault took a wrong turn, it was in too readily swallowing the basic neoliberal precept that the market was an information processor more powerful and encompassing than any human being or organization of humans. What Foucault missed were the critical notions of double truths outlined at the end of the last chapter. The neoliberals preach that the market is the unforgiving arbiter of all political action; but they absolve themselves from its rule. They propound libertarian freedoms but practice the most regimented hierarchy in their political organization; they sermonize about spontaneous order, while plotting to take over the state; they catechize prostration of the self before the awesome power of the knowledge conveyed by the market, but issue themselves sweeping dispensations. Most significantly, they reserve to themselves the right of deployment of the Schmittian exception. Their version of governmentality elevates the market as a site of truth for everyone but themselves. If Foucault had taken this to heart, he would have had to revise his portrait of how regimes of truth validate power.
I leave it to others to sort through the biographical record to try to figure out the motives and considerations that may have steered Foucault in the direction of the neoliberals.19 In this book, Foucault’s acquiescence in the neoliberal doctrine of the market as über–information processor renders him pretty useless for our discussions of the crisis. The point of relevance for our present concerns is that Foucault’s lectures reproduced an asymmetry between the “state” and the “market” that smacks far more of the exoteric caricature promoted by Mont Pèlerin, rather than its internal esoteric understanding. We who acknowledge his acuity and foresight should nevertheless doubt his understanding of everyday neoliberalism, precisely because of this drawback. As Tellmann puts it, in a further play on Foucault’s own evocation of the “invisible hand”:
Only that which does not exhibit its particularity can be assumed to be universal; only an invisible market can promise viable sight. The . . . invisibility of the market is directed against the very analytical perspective Foucault typically assumes, one aimed at detecting the instruments, positions and architectures that produce epistemological claims and privileges. A more typical Foucauldian approach would commence to undo the invisibility of the economy and the market as an invisible “telescope” and “information machine.” This would mean rendering visible the market’s own “machine of seeing,” rather than seeing like the unseen market itself. 20
This is how I would suggest we should read the disdain of authors like Clive Barnett concerning the way Foucault has been frequently married to critiques of neoliberalism in countless screeds.21 As we have observed, many authors of a Marxist bent want to portray neoliberalism as the simple deployment of class power over the unsuspecting masses, but encounter difficulty in specifying the chains of causality stretching from the elusive executive committee of the capitalist class down to the shopper at Wal-Mart. To paper over the gap, many reach for Foucault and “governmentality” to evoke how shifts from state to market are modulated in the microcontexts of everyday life. But of course, the later Foucault abjured their Marxism; and furthermore, his own appeals to the hard discipline of the market merely recapitulated the invisible hand jive of the neoliberals themselves. The incompatibility with Marxism should have been blindingly obvious, since dissolving all labor into entrepreneurialism of the self thoroughly undermines any Marxist concepts of exploitation and surplus value, and therefore, much else besides. In any event, Foucault disavowed any such use of his work for most of his career: “We must cease once and for all to describe the effects of power in negative terms: it ‘excludes,’ it ‘represseses,’ it ‘masks,’ it ‘conceals.’ In fact, power produces reality; it produces domains of objects and rituals of truth.”22 By the time of The Birth of Biopolitics, Foucault denied any efficacy to the modern conscious intent on the part of anyone to exert political power, because the market effectively thwarts it.23 This comes dangerously close to subsequent platitudes that the crisis was no one’s fault, because it was everyone’s fault. That train of thought just paralyzes analysis.
There is even a deeper reason to hesitate when it comes to biopolitics. Foucault also declines to allow that agents are somehow bamboozled by power/knowledge, since the market is posited to exist in a privileged epistemological space with special position in the regime of truth. The fact that neoliberal concepts such as human capital seep into the daily lives of those perched outside the NTC is just evidence that the entire system of power/knowledge works: autogovernance of the entrepreneurial self is not a puppet show, but rather the wherewithal of how modern agents bring the truth of the world into their own lives. Paraphrasing Walter Benjamin, modern neoliberal citizens must learn to forget about their “rights” and be given free rein to “express themselves,” especially through the greatest information-conveyance device known to mankind, the market. This is very nearly what Foucault himself believed:
People rebel, that is a fact. In this way subjectivity (and not just that of great men but of any given person) enters into history and breathes life into it. A prisoner sets her life against excessive punishment. A mentally ill person does not want to be incarcerated and robbed of rights. A people sets itself against a regime that oppresses it. In this way, the prisoner does not become innocent, the mentally ill person does not become healthy, and the people do not take part in the promised future. And no one must show solidarity with them. No one must believe that these voices might sing more beautifully than others and pronounce the final truth. It is enough that they are there and that everything attempts to silence them in order that it becomes meaningful to want to listen to them and understand what they say . . . Because such voices exist, the era of humans does not have the form of evolution, but of history.24
It is not so much that resistance is futile for Foucault, as it is that the audience for leftist rebellion is fickle. Truth is a mobile army of metaphors. Empathy has the half-life of the time it takes to click the remote control. And for recovering post-structuralists, things don’t really change.
Our approach in this volume will be different. We shall maintain there is no such thing as “the market” as monolithic entity, and in any case, it does not come equipped with supernatural powers of truth production. Markets don’t “validate” truth; rather, markets are the product of struggles over the truth. Furthermore, Foucault was just dead wrong about neoliberalism as fostering the autolimitation of state power. He bought into the exoteric doctrine that the market is the backstop of the state, keeping it in check. The state has not been limited in purview by the neoliberal response to crisis, but instead, has greatly expanded its role, in finance, in “picking winners,” and in the discipline of citizens through the further injection of neoliberal themes into everyday life. The Schmittian usurpation of power has been formidable. The jumble that gets lumped together as “the market” is constructed on the fly in such situations; and it is as much a bricolage as its counterpart, the neoliberal construct of the self. Both are not constructed top-down, from blueprints kindly supplied by Mont Pèlerin, nor bottom-up through the aimless evolution of the kosmos, but rather outward, in trial-and-error mutual adjustment of the politically fortified market and the everyday entrepreneurial self.
We take as our fugleman not Foucault but rather people such as Martijn Konings, Carolyn Sissoko, Yves Smith, and Christopher Payne, who insist that the crisis was not some aberration due to overenthusiastic deregulation, but instead the expression of intrinsic system pathologies. This chapter explores the way those pathologies were embedded in the very everyday neoliberalism that has become so prevalent since the 1980s. Foucault’s concentration on micropower had an unfortunate tendency to keep the noses of his followers too close to the ground, and hence to ignore how the entrepreneurial self was then recruited into all sorts of innovations that took place on the phenomenological level of markets. Exquisite discipline of the self was treated as hapless if it did not make money for someone even more entrepreneurial than you. The mechanisms that culminated in the crisis were built upon foundations of the entrepreneurial self, from exhortations to surrender to the risk of thrill-ride mortgages, capitulation to the financialization of everyday life, participation in virtual selves wending their way through the “weightless economy” on the Internet, day trading like the big boys, getting your information from Facebook and Fox and talk radio, to the indulgences of entertainment theology as Ponzi scheme, and recruitment into astroturfed politics to assist you in expressing your smoldering yet underappreciated individuality. Everyone strove to assume a persona that someone else would be willing to invest in, all in the name of personal improvement.
Found yourself in trouble? You could always sell a kidney or enroll in a drug trial . . . Maybe you could rent your body as surrogate mother, or maybe resort to just a little strategic intimacy, with discreet recompense on the side25 . . . Wait! Someone from India is already calling you on the phone to offer you an even more outrageously far-fetched baroque loan! And there’s an app for that . . . Just make the leap of faith . . . Make some money in your spare time! Unemployment is an unbidden golden opportunity to start anew with an entirely different life! Don’t let the moochers and complainers drag you down! Become your own boss, after you embrace the power of positive thinking . . . Didn’t you always want to start your own business, after working a quarter-century for corporations?
We will close with the ultimate in solipsism in promotion of everyday neoliberalism: Don’t like the way things are looking? Has the state of the world got you down? Then create your own personal solipsistic economy, a fit virtual abode for your own fragmented entrepreneurial identity.26 That’s the ultimate in self-reliance.
Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory of the Coming of the Galt
Foucault refuses to allow that people may be mired in “false consciousness,” or to concede that there are means by which they may become instilled with systematically distorted beliefs about both themselves and their place in the social order, distractions that work in regular ways against their own interests and welfare. There have been a fair number of writers who assert the contrary; one worth considering because he has been specifically concerned with political developments in the last three decades in the United States is Thomas Frank. In his breakthrough book What’s the Matter with Kansas? he posed the question in a rather American idiom: Why had the blue-collar working class abandoned the Democratic Party in favor of voting for snake-oil neoliberal salesmen who had demonstrated open contempt for their welfare? Or as he himself put it:
All they have to show for their Republican loyalty are lower wages, more dangerous jobs, dirtier air, a new overlord class that comports itself like King Farouk—and of course, a crap culture whose moral free fall continues, without significant interference from the grandstanding Christers whom they send triumphantly back to Washington every couple of years.27
Frank’s answer to his own question was, crudely, a version of “bait and switch” that subsequently gained a fair level of acceptance among circles of the U.S. left, at least before the crisis. He suggested that the working class had gotten distracted by a constant harping on a broad range of cultural and religious issues, fired up through talk-radio raving and local pulpits, and thus overlooked or displaced their more direct economic concerns: they were mesmerized by “cultural wedge issues like guns and abortion and the rest whose hallucinatory appeal would ordinarily be far overshadowed by material concerns.” In this diagnosis, the median voter mistook the froth of “values” for denunciation of sharp dealing dedicated to stealing away their livelihoods.28
There are all manner of reasons to be skeptical of the bait-and-switch account of “false consciousness” when it comes to the triumph of neoliberalism. The least of these caveats came when economists were promptly scandalized by the very notion that Homo economicus could ever suspend his assiduous calculation of economic advantage under any circumstances whatsoever, and therefore proceeded to deny there was any phenomenological world of values outside of the political marketplace; some rather unimaginative souls consequently engaged in all manner of statistical wizardry to demonstrate that true-blue American agents had never once disregarded their legitimate “economic” interests.29 Another, more pertinent complaint against Frank would be that the simplistic dichotomy of Republican vs. Democratic parties did not begin to capture the phenomenon beating at the heart of the transformation; Frank had himself admitted elsewhere that party affiliation does not easily translate into what he calls “market populism,” which has infected both parties (One Market Under God). The obsession with Red/Blue scores inside the Beltway tends to diverts us from the real issue of the cultural framing of political consciousness. And then there was the onset of the crisis itself: here was an economic catastrophe so great that no one, no matter how beguiled and hornswoggled, could long avert their eyes. And yet, with their minds focused forcibly on economic matters, still the electorate was persuaded to respond to it in ways reminiscent of the earlier decade: great masses of voters under the sway of the putative Tea Party had in 2010 voted in the most neoliberal Congress of all time.
Probably the best indication that the crisis has deep-sixed most simple “bait and switch” accounts of the success of neoliberalism is that Tom Frank himself had to walk back his earlier thesis in his postcrisis book Pity the Billionaire. By that, I do not intend to suggest Frank openly admitted he was wrong in Kansas, but rather, he did rather concede that the Tea Party and other redoubts of revanchism were avoiding issues of social conservatism in favor of defending “freedom” against creeping socialism. Frank in effect had to face up to the fact that his earlier book was incapable of addressing the nagging question that is also the topic of the current chapter: “What kind of misapprehension permits the newest Right to brush off truths that everyone else can see so plainly?”30
The problem with bait-and-switch accounts is that they compartmentalize everyday experience in a way that utterly misconstrues how neoliberalism works. Tom Frank in an earlier incarnation had seemingly understood this: “Making the world safe for billionaires has been as much a cultural and political operation as an economic one”; it was only when he artificially set them at odds that he attained best-sellerdom with Kansas, but at the price of losing his way. The core insight of the Neoliberal Thought Collective was that the cultural and the economic should not be treated as substitutes, much less discrete spheres of experience, but rather, as integrated into a virtuous whole: surrender your selfish arrogance and humbly prostrate yourself before the Wisdom of the Universe, as nurtured and conveyed by the market. “Be all you can be” had jettisoned the injunction to “know yourself” and replaced it with “Start your own business!” even if it only meant homeschooling your children. As religion took on more of the trappings of just-in-time provision of entertainment services, and “values” assumed the mix-and-match character of Do It Yourself bricolage, the materiality of rock-solid “interests” melted into thin air. After all, neoliberals deny that you are the unimpeachable judge of your own welfare, however much they worship at the altar of Freedom. The more the line between “The Sphere Previously Known as the Economic” and culture or religion was progressively obscured and erased, the more irreversible the neoliberal long march. Conversely, if citizens believed that the game was rigged and the fix was in, now the only way they could manage to express it would be with variants upon the dogma that the Government was encroaching upon the ever-flexible and blameless Me. Collective nouns were being slowly leached from usage in the language. The ideal neoliberal agent was a person who didn’t even need to know she was neoliberal, because the various aspects of her selfhood were conceived as being in natural harmony with the totality of the kosmos, whether she consciously aspired to be wicked vanguard rebel or placid conformist. As Foucault so aptly summarized it, “There is no first or final point of resistance to political power other than in the relationship of self to self.”31
This may explain why Frank’s Pity the Billionaire comes off as such a letdown: he senses that something deep and structural is permitting the neoliberals to escape scot-free from the crisis, and it possibly has something to do with general comprehension of everyday life, but the best he can muster is endless sneering jibes launched at Glenn Beck and Ayn Rand. He can’t be bothered to immerse himself in what the neoliberal theorists and right-wing economists have written, and consequently misconstrues neoliberalism as the most superficial “rollback of the state”; in the language of the previous chapter, he never gets beyond the exoteric doctrines of the thought collective. Worse, he then attributes the political strength of the neoliberal resurgence to the superficial facts that many in the Tea Party get their information only from Beck and Fox News, combined with the notion that hoi polloi expected some breast-beating and bankster-roasting after the crisis, but that the Democratic Party declined to provide it. He quotes, but does not take to heart, the ambition of the leader of the Koch-funded Freedom Works, Dick Armey, “not just to learn from their opponents on the left, but to beat them at their own game.”32
The Rise of the Neoliberal Agent is not very easy to gloss, by any means. Anytime one resorts to Belief/Action scenarios, three centuries of philosophical qualifications loom, not to mention social psychology as indicated in chapter 1, threatening to freeze the argument in its tracks. And then there are the various objections that harry the attempt to draw determinants from political considerations. There is the recurrent unwillingness in giving up hard and fast distinctions between the economy and the world of the spirit, as we have been describing. There is the crucial distinction between the esoteric and exoteric versions of neoliberal doctrine, as outlined in the last chapter. The average person may be encouraged to believe all sorts of things about the government that have no correspondence to the esoteric neoliberal playbook, or untethered from any facts, for instance, and this is a key aspect of the construction of a viable neoliberal self under the sway of the double-truth doctrine. The average citizen severely underestimates the amount of their livelihood that comes from the government; and are utterly deluded about their current place in the distribution of income and wealth. There is the wild card of globalization: How much of the outlines of neoliberal agency has been contingent upon the cultures of the hegemonic centers of capital, curious artifacts of the parochial peccadilloes of its incubators, and how much can be regarded as a new model for cosmopolitan existence in a world that persists in thinking it shrugs off the trappings of the nation-state? There is a literature, located particularly in anthropology, which preaches that cosmopolitan aspirations of neoliberal “reforms” are deceptive, because more often than not they are predicated upon minor reconfigurations of long-standing local practices.33 And then there is the difficult question of just to what extent these particular innovations in agency are relatively new, and how much they come lumbered with a long, hallowed heritage, which obviously intersects with the question of the extent to which the NTC can legitimately appeal to small-c “conservatism” in its older Burkean sense. Does the neoliberal self have an archetype, or a birthday? With everyone from Jesus CEO to the “Founding Fathers” undergoing retreads, facelifts, and résumé rewrites, challenging the historical authenticity of many of the icons of neoliberal selfhood could become a full-time operation on its own.
These questions are all important, and deserve serious consideration, but this chapter is not the place to attempt to settle them. Friedrich Hayek once claimed to be able to separate “true” liberalism from its “false” pretender; I have far less confidence in my own ability to accomplish anything similar for neoliberalism. My more limited goal here is to establish some of the most salient facets of neoliberalism with a human face in the early twenty-first century. It is far too premature to write the definitive biography of the neoliberal self, so in lieu of comprehensive cultural history, perhaps we can peruse a few quotidian snapshots from various angles and profiles. Think of it as Five or So Vignettes on the Life and Times of John Galt.
The proof of the project will not come in adherence to some Identikit notion of accuracy, but rather with personal recognition of the subconscious prompts that lurk in each of our own lives, the attitudes that have grown to be the unremarkable furniture of waking life, and their possible instrumentality when it comes down to acquiescence in the neoliberal wisdom of crowds. The advent of the neoliberal way of being quite literally transforms the subject, and consequently, inhibits all tendencies to interpret the crisis as a system-wide failure of economic organization.
Five Vignettes from the Life of John Galt
A) The Freedom That Comes from Fragmentation.
The Neoliberal Thought Collective, as suggested in the last chapter, interprets freedom in a largely negative fashion, while simultaneously elevating freedom as the ultimate value. While this observation has become commonplace in the literature on political philosophy, that commentary has been strangely silent on how neoliberals have come to abjure or otherwise avoid the salience of positive liberty. The key to comprehension of the neutralization of time-honored traditions of positive liberty comes with the progressive fragmentation of the self, both in economic theory and in everyday life. The moral quest to discover your one and only “true self” has been rendered thoroughly obsolete by the reengineering of everyday life, and that, in turn, is the fons et origo of most characteristics of everyday neoliberalism.
I start with the notion that definitions of private property are bound up with the presumed definition of the self. The classical liberal approach to this question has been admirably summarized by Margaret Radin:
I have used the term “personal property” to refer to categories of property that we understand to be bound up with the self in a way that we understand to be morally justifiable . . . Since personal property is connected with the self, morally justifiably, in a constitutive way, to disconnect it from the person (from the self) harms or destroys the self. The more something takes on the indicia of an attribute or characteristic of the self, or at least the self as the person herself would wish, the more problematic it seems to alienate it . . .34
Radin builds upon this observation to argue in favor of imposition of spheres of “incomplete commodification,” and to prohibit some markets altogether, such as the selling of human infants. The Rosetta Stone of neoliberalism rejects the basic premise of this version of liberalism, not only by denying that any such spheres should exist, but more important, insisting there is no self that is harmed by the creation and alienation of private property. Indeed, one might reasonably wonder if there is much of any Archimedean Self whatsoever in the neoliberal game plan. Absent such a self, there is nothing left of a “positive” notion of freedom to preserve and protect.
This analysis may seem incorrigibly bloodless and abstract, but it is not. The banishment of the core unified self is experienced daily in a thousand different ways by every single person who holds down a job, gets ejected from a job, gets sick, surfs the Internet, sits in a classroom, embarks on a love affair, watches a movie, emulates a celebrity, or starts a family. The news is brought home in most instances wherein someone is forced to juggle multiple roles in social situations, and discovers that the demands of one role contradict or belie those of another. Of course, the insight that the self may be internally conflicted is nowise new or deep; neither is the notion of adoption of multiple personas distinguished by context; nevertheless, the routinization and standardization of denial of a true invariant self has become a hallmark of modern life. It is the sheer ordinariness of the expectation that the self should provide no obstacle to success because it is supple, modular, and plastic that is the germ of everyday neoliberalism. The traces of the vanishing self are of course pervasive in economic life, but are by no means confined to it.
The fragmentation of the neoliberal self begins when the agent is brought face to face with the realization that she is not just an employee or student, but also simultaneously a product to be sold, a walking advertisement, a manager of her résumé, a biographer of her rationales, and an entrepreneur of her possibilities. She has to somehow manage to be simultaneously subject, object, and spectator. She is perforce not learning about who she really is, but rather, provisionally buying the person she must soon become. She is all at once the business, the raw material, the product, the clientele, and the customer of her own life. She is a jumble of assets to be invested, nurtured, managed, and developed; but equally an offsetting inventory of liabilities to be pruned, outsourced, shorted, hedged against, and minimized. She is both headline star and enraptured audience of her own performance. These are not effortless personas to be adopted, but roles to be fortified and regimented on a continuous basis. As Foucault insisted, the neoliberal self dissolves the distinction between producer and consumer. Furthermore, there is no preset hierarchy of resident personas, but only a shifting cast of characters, depending upon the exigencies of the moment. The summum bonum of modern agency is to present oneself as eminently flexible in any and all respects.35
This kind of everyday wisdom is so pervasive that one tends to notice it only in cases of extreme parody, such as that reported by Siva Vaidhyanathan:
In his manual for a better (or, at least, for his own) life, The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9–5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich, self-help guru and Silicon Valley entrepreneur Timothy Ferriss outlines his secrets to a productive and wealthy life. One of the book’s central tenets is to “outsource everything.” Ferriss suggests we hire a series of concierges to triage our correspondences, arrange travel and restaurant reservations, contact old friends, and handle routine support tasks in our lives. Ferriss contracts with concierge companies in India to handle much of his data flow. He suggests we hire local people to take our clothes to the cleaners, scrub our floors, and cook for us.
Ferriss has become a guru to the geek set, as I witnessed at the book-signing event for his hefty fitness manual, The 4-Hour Body, at the 2011 South by Southwest Interactive meeting in Austin, Texas. A line of more than one hundred remarkably unkempt, unfit young men waited to shake Ferriss’s hand and thank him for releasing them from the bonds of the full-time working grind. They can’t all be working four-hour weeks, I thought. My understanding of work life in the tech sector leads me to believe that retrieving the forty-hour week would be a major personal, if not indeed a political, victory. Ferriss greeted fanboys for more than an hour that day, leaving him a mere three more hours of actual work before the fun began. As if to emphasize his mastery over his life and the better times he had waiting for him upon his release from the event, Ferriss held hands with a striking young woman who looked as if she could not wait to be relieved of this duty to dazzle young men with whom she would rather not make eye contact. It was not clear if that young woman was part of Ferriss’s outsourced personal labor force. But she certainly did not seem thrilled to be part of his commercial branding effort.
Ferriss’s life is his brand, his data, his evidence, his project. In his books he shares—no, sells—every feature of his daily life, including details of ejaculations and defecations. Every aspect of Ferriss’s life is on the market, just as he engages with market transactions to advance many of his professional and personal aims.36
This was a quantum leap beyond the social psychology of an Erving Goffmann, merely the age-old challenge of the staged presentation of the self in everyday life. Living in the material world these days means that one must maintain a rather strained, distanced relationship to the self, since one must be prepared to shed the current pilot at a moment’s notice. Due to the shifting cast of characters with their complements of accessories, technologies, and emotional attachments, it is never altogether clear whom precisely is managing the menagerie. Outsourced components of the self still need to report to something more than a post office box on some distant offshore platform.37 Integration and coordination may sometimes need to take a backseat to innovation and appropriation. Self-care must be balanced against the dictum that bygones are bygones, or in more economic terms, sunk costs should never be entered into calculation of expected future revenues. The weight of history is more often than not considered a burden of little consequence for the entrepreneurial agent, something that can be repudiated and reversed. The stipulation of flexibility militates against treating any aspect of the self as indispensible; taken to extremes, this can resemble out-of-body experience or asomatoagnosia.
