An excerpt from an article by Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval
By everywhere establishing competitive situations between subjects, by inciting them to become the winners of a universal competition, by imposing controls and surveillance and, above all, by pushing subjects to self-control by making performance the ruler of each person's life, this system has the impact of constructing a new subject, a "neo-subject," as some psychoanalysts call it.
Such a normative logic, in fact, relates just as much to one's relationship with oneself as to one's relations with others. It is as subjective as it is political. That's what makes it so strong and difficult to erase. Whether one considers the department head who takes herself for a "modern manager," the employee subject to the guilt-inducing procedures of the "evaluation," the consumer whose desires are harnessed by the hope of ineffable joys acquired at a good price, the student invited to confuse the progress of knowledge with the individual growth of "human capital," it's every subjectivity that, from some specific angle, is led to conform to the imperative of no limitations. To exceed oneself, to go beyond one's bounds, such is the maxim of capitalist subjectivity.
Capital accumulation has become the principle of individual operation, as though it were necessary for existence to be indexed to the life of finance, as though each individual must regard himself as a "self-company": the "always more" hoped for by consumers (enjoyment) answers the "always more" required of workers (performance). Still worse, enjoyment of the self is supposed to be experienced by smashing all limits. So, it is appropriate to speak of a performance-enjoyment apparatus.
Three decades of capitalist government deliver this lesson: No extension of capital is possible without the transformation of man. Consequently, it's a matter not only of proletarianizing populations to the ends of the earth, of increasing the inequalities between rich and poor, but also of "dynamizing" subjects by making every employee a calculating, maximizing individual, an "entrepreneur of one's self." Mrs. Thatcher, faithful to the Puritan ethos, found the formula: "Economics are the method, the object is to change the soul."
Changing the soul is a fine project that requires multiple disciplines to effect. The general diffusion of the techniques of individual quantitative evaluation, the boom in "personnel development" methods, the omnipresence of marketing in human relations, the promotion of competitive sports as a model for one's relationship to oneself, the submission of politics to the logic of management: these apparatuses make a system and tend to impose a certain form of existence.
via www.truthout.org
When Dardot and Larval argue that "it's a matter not only of proletarianizing populations to the ends of the earth, of increasing the inequalities between rich and poor, but also of "dynamizing" subjects by making every employee a calculating, maximizing individual, an "entrepreneur of one's self" are they perhaps inverting the underlying direction of repositioning of the populations' structural position within late capitalism? Indeed, isn't what they are arguing here a de-proletarianizing of whole populations into 'collectively individual' petit bourgeoisie subjects: everyone is now required to be an 'entrepreneur' (even as they are still subjected to the expropriation of relative surplus-value, while also engaging in it - proletarians with a deluded petit bourgeois subjectivization), a consequence of neo-liberalism's radical colonization - the parasitical and libidinal replication of Business Ontology into all areas - of the culture and into all levels of the psyche - the insistent, totalitarian demand that every single activity must justify itself in terms of economic utility? The 'real subsumption' of all labour and biopolitical production by capital?
Interestingly, in his recent post on Economism, Shaviro [http://www.shaviro.com/Blog/?p=793] indirectly points to a similar confusion in his criticism of Hardt and Negri's contention that "biopolitical labor is increasingly autonomous" when he argues that "Hardt/Negri can thus be denounced as guilty of the old Marxist sin of “economism”, to the extent that they seem to argue that the advance of capitalist exploitation, in itself, somehow objectively leads to a situation in which the multitude (proletariat) becomes autonomous and is able to take the production and reproduction of life into its own hands."
Posted by: Padraig | October 01, 2009 at 07:34 AM