“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
