Foucault and Neoliberal Society: The Worker as "Entrepreneur of Self"

Author: Mari Galdas (summary/essay; presented by Mauricio Pelegrini)
Year: 2017 (Escola da Cidade, CT Conselho Técnico)
Source type: article/essay
Raw file: raw/articles/galdas-2017.md

Summary

An exposition of Foucault's account of neoliberal governmentality and its production of a new subjectivity — the worker/individual as "entrepreneur of self." Drawing on The Birth of Biopolitics (1978–79) and Gary Becker's human-capital theory, it shows how neoliberalism extends economic analysis into every domain and converts each individual into a "human capital" that must be administered, invested in, and competitively positioned. Against this, it proposes Foucault's "critical attitude" and "counter-conducts" as ways of inventing an ethics not reducible to the entrepreneurial self.

Key Claims

• Governmentality and critique: government "is to steer conduct"; governmentality is "the set of many policies of the State that seek to steer the conduct of its citizens." Foucault's "critical attitude" is "the art of not being governed like that" — a permanent questioning/movement of restlessness against any determined form of steering.
• Counter-conducts: movements that seek "a different form of conduct ... to escape direction by others and to define the way for each to conduct himself" — "tasks that are at once ethical and political," ways of inventively constituting subjectivity against neoliberal forms of control.
• Neoliberalism as a grid of total social intelligibility: following Foucault, neoliberalism (esp. the American/Chicago School variant) is not merely economic but "the extension of economic analysis into a previously unexplored domain" — "a strictly economic interpretation of a whole domain previously thought to be non-economic," covering criminality, family, marriage, the sexual division of labor.
• Human capital and the entrepreneur of self: via Becker, labor is reintroduced into economics from the worker's standpoint; the worker is "an active economic subject" who owns human capital (innate and acquired elements) and must "administer, promote and increment" it to improve revenue. "Workers are entrepreneurs of the self, capitalists who administer their own capital," positioned as "unit-companies" in direct competition.
• Individualization of responsibility: "all responsibility for a subject's successes or failures become individualized"; unemployment or low "market value" is read as the result of one's own choices — "no possible link of solidarity."
• Dardot & Laval on the enterprise-form: "neoliberal rationality encourages the ego to act to strengthen itself so as to survive competition"; the enterprise is "not in the first instance a site of human flourishing, but an instrument and space of competition."
• The critical response: against the entrepreneur-of-self and competitive sociability, counter-conducts (Occupy, indigenous resistance, feminism, anti-racist and LGBTQ movements) affirm "ethical subjectivities not submitted to existing models" and "delegitimize ... business-subjectivity."

Connections

Concepts: Entrepreneur of Self · Neoliberal Metropolis · Ideology · Noopolitics
Authors: Mari Galdas
Debates: Critical vs. Projective
Related source notes: The Architecture of the City (Bismarck) · Capitalist Realism (Fisher)

Direct Quotes

"The worker comes to be seen as an active economic subject."

"[W]orkers are entrepreneurs of the self, capitalists who administer their own capital and obtain revenues according to investments made."

"[All] responsibility for a subject's successes or failures become individualized."

"[N]eoliberal rationality encourages the ego to act to strengthen itself so as to survive competition." (Dardot & Laval, as quoted)

Open Questions

• Does the "entrepreneur-of-self" (Foucault via Becker) name the subjectivity that parametricism/neoliberal architecture both presupposes and produces (cf. Spencer, Schumacher, Hopkins)?