We must stop thinking of the advent of neoliberalism in exclusively negative fashion – as a dismantling of existing rules, a narrowing of states’ room for manoeuvre, a reduction in the sovereignty of a now drastically shrunken nation-state, or as a malfunction of liberal democracy. What must be analysed is the actual modus operandi of a positive, original mode of power, composed of political and financial institutions and equipped with legislative means and administrative mechanisms. This system coordinates between national spaces, contains levers for transforming societies and ensures the worldwide preservation of a certain public order. The political economy of neoliberalism is characterized not by the passivity of the political sphere, its minimal character and circumscription, but by continuous government intervention, yielding a new order. This kind of interventionism must be understood for what it is: a set of policies both conditioned and conditioning, dependent on and creative of a system.
Neoliberalism has become an institutional and normative system in which incentivizing governmentality and disciplinary logic are mutually supportive. The neoliberal world system is inseparable from ‘globalization’. As a set of rules, institutions and norms, it has facilitated the expansion of trade, the internationalization of production and the liberation of capital flows. This normative and regulatory ensemble has been constructed through international treaties, pacts and agreements and international commercial law, with the encouragement and under the supervision of international bodies (WTO, OECD, IMF, World Bank, European Commission, etc.) and private ratings agencies, whose economic policing role has continued to expand in recent years.1
The ‘globalization of markets’ is far from being some generalized chaos or anarchy, whose characteristics are exclusively negative by comparison with the preceding global public order, structured by the states’ rights of sovereignty. The rules and norms underpinning globalization create a particular space, where a game unfolds that places its own constraints on actors. We must stress the strategic position occupied by multinational firms, as the main drivers of globalization. In fact, it is they who are responsible for the growing global fragmentation of production processes, which today take highly complex forms: hyper-globalization of finance, extension of outsourcing to the service sector, and partial relocation of certain productive activities in the vicinity of markets.2
The rules and norms of globalized space are, more precisely, those of competition between large financial and productive enterprises. Real competition is a ferocious struggle for market power waged by global oligopolies. We should recall that competition can take two forms: price and innovation.3 Neoliberal capitalism typically favours innovation, while utilizing the complementary character of the two kinds of competition. This is significant given that these two modes determine two logics in organizing production that are profoundly imbricated today.4 The first is the ‘cognitive division’ of labour predominant in leading sectors (biotechnology, pharmaceuticals, electronics, computer science, etc.). Here production is organized in accordance with the segmentation of relatively homogenous blocs of knowledge (such as R&D or marketing). The second is the ‘Taylorist’ division of labour, which has not been abolished by the first but reactivated. It is characterized by fragmentation of the production process in accordance with the imperative to minimize costs and delays, the better to compete on price.
Consequently, we must dispense with economic orthodoxy’s idealized conception of competition as an interplay between supply and demand ‘naturally’ tuned to benefit the consumer, who can choose between producers. We have known since the 1930s that competition between large enterprises in real markets is ‘imperfect’. Contrary to what is claimed by many of neoliberalism’s critics, in practice it does not represent the application of the unrealistic neo-classical view of the atomistic market (many suppliers and many purchasers), but the application of a revised economic theory wherein limited competition between oligopolies, while restricting consumer choice, ultimately serves the ‘general welfare’ of consumers thanks to the economies of scale achieved. This revision is not nugatory: it denies one of the most basic principles of neo-classical doctrine – namely, that individual preference alone is rational in the market.5 It is therefore not so much the doctrine of competition that is demoted to the rank of ideological accessory, as Colin Crouch puts it, as the idea that all markets should be atomistic.6 The relevant, effective competition has, as it were, been transferred from the national to the global level.
This struggle does not end with the institutions of the capitalist economy. It involves inciting competition between labour forces, social and tax systems, political institutions and, ultimately, societies themselves. It requires that capital not be controlled or taxed, but protected through strengthened and expanded property rights, subsidized, and ‘attracted’ by plentiful inducements. It is not so much the market in itself that must be free but capital, discreetly dubbed ‘savings’. Such is the basis of the supply-side policies followed by all governments today in the context of globalization. But of much greater import than its doctrinal basis is that this kind of policy is imposed by the situation itself – by the functioning of competition between capitals worldwide – and that it benefits capitalists as a whole, especially the wealthiest among them. This ‘system’ is not a closed set of elements, but the overall effect of a set of practices, mechanisms and institutions that have progressively framed and limited the range of choice and action open to states, economic and social organizations, and individuals themselves. It is therefore nothing other than a crystallized set of norms and rules which has acquired such coherence that actors are led to act in conformity with it. This is what, in economics, is called path dependence.
The system does not merely reproduce itself. It expands and reinforces itself through the constraints it imposes on private and public actors, which normalize it, routinize it, perfect and extend it by way of repeated crises and disequilibria. This does not mean that this system of power tends to become increasingly harmonious; that everything in it becomes ‘functional’; that it absorbs all differences and smothers all conflict. It simply means that the potent systemic effects influencing actors (states, enterprises, individuals, etc.) lead them to reinforce the system in which they are trapped by their conduct. This is precisely what we observe in the salience of the schema of competitiveness, which at one pole of power becomes a quasi-constitutional principle of public institutions, and at the other a model for individual behaviour. Having become an unofficial principle of the new public law, competitiveness, as a higher norm with which laws, reforms and government dispositions are aligned, leads to effectively transforming fields of activity and institutions by subjecting them to a logic of competition that is designed, in and of itself, to produce competitiveness, in an unbroken circle.
More generally, the private and public actors engaged in the struggle for economic power themselves created, little by little, the operating rules of the competitive system – rules that in their turn have become a variably constraining framework for those actors. A range of standard texts, including the famous ten propositions of the ‘Washington Consensus’ of the late 1980s, have served as references for financial institutions and governments in pursuing a policy geared to exports, openness to foreign capital, reduction of public services, and privatization. What was initially a summary of the drastic conditions laid down by the IMF for agreeing loans by public and private investors in the context of ‘structural adjustment programmes’ during the debt crisis in the South has, over time, become a general normative framework conditioning access to financial markets and more favourable borrowing terms for all countries. This normative framework has never been the subject of a ‘consensus’ other than between the IMF, the World Bank and the US Treasury. In the wake of crises, it was imposed by the most powerful countries of the ‘centre’ on the countries of the ‘periphery’, and then step by step on the totality of participants in the global competitive game – especially the member-states of the European Union.
It will be appreciated that such a system cannot be straightforwardly deduced from the self-development of capital, inexorably generating its effects like some autonomous motor of history. The normative logic that ultimately prevailed emerged amid initially uncertain battles and policy experiments. The neoliberal society we live in is the fruit of a historical process that was not entirely programmed by its pioneers. Its elements were often assembled piecemeal, interacting with and reinforcing one another. Just as it is not the direct outcome of a homogenous doctrine, so it is not the reflection of a logic of capital creating the social, cultural and political forms conducive to it as it expands. The classical Marxist explanation ignores the fact that, far from being the crisis of capitalism tout court, the accumulation crisis to which neoliberalism is a response is specific, in that it is bound up with the institutional rules which had hitherto framed a certain type of capitalism. For the originality of neoliberalism is precisely that it creates a new set of rules defining not only a different ‘regime of accumulation’, but, more broadly, a different society. In the Marxist conception, capitalism is above all an economic ‘mode of production’ which, as such, is independent of law and generates the juridico-political order it needs at each stage in its self-development. Yet far from pertaining to a ‘superstructure’ bound to express or fetter the economic, the juridical from the outset pertains to the relations of production, in that it informs the economic from within. The ‘economists’ unconscious’, as Foucault put it, which is that of every economism whether liberal or Marxist, is precisely the institution; and it is precisely to the institution that neoliberalism, especially in its ordo-liberal version, aims to restore a decisive role.
For ordo-liberalism, the point is to determine the possibility of capitalism surviving its crises – a possibility which (as we know) was yet again a subject of debate at the height of the November 2008 crisis. If we adopt a Marxist perspective, the unique, necessary logic of capital accumulation determines the unicity of capitalism: ‘There can only be one capitalism since there is only one logic of capital.’7 The contradictions manifested by capitalist society in all periods are the contradictions of capital ‘tout court’. For example, if we follow the analysis in Volume One of Capital, the general law of capitalist accumulation results in a tendency to the centralization of capital where competition, along with credit, is the main lever. The tendency to centralization is therefore inscribed in the logic of competition as a ‘natural law’ – that of ‘the attraction of capital by capital’.8 But if, like the ordo-liberals, we consider that the current avatar of capitalism, far from being directly deducible from the logic of capital, is only ever a historically specific ‘economic-institutional figure’, we must accept that the form of capitalism and crisis mechanisms are the contingent effects of certain legal rules, and not the necessary consequence of the laws of capitalist accumulation. Therewith they are open to being overcome through juridico-institutional changes, which fully justifies the legal interventionism demanded by neoliberalism. Once we are dealing with a specific capitalism, it becomes possible to intervene in it so as to create another capitalism, different from the first, which will itself represent a particular configuration determined by a set of juridico-political rules. Instead of an economic mode of production whose development is governed by a logic operating like some implacable ‘natural law’, capitalism is an ‘economico-juridical complex’ that can take a multiplicity of specific forms. This is also why we must refer to neoliberal society, not simply neoliberal policy or neoliberal economics. While undeniably a capitalist society, this society is a particular form of capitalism that needs to be analysed as such, in its irreducible specificity.
In some ways, Thomas Piketty’s analysis in Capital in the Twenty-First Century resembles the Marxist account in its most mechanistic version, even though it has been subjected to the severest criticisms from Marxist economists. In it the marked rise in disparities of inheritance and income since the late twentieth century is essentially explained by the divergence between the growth rate of national income and the rate of returns on capital. Mechanically explicable, inexorable, spontaneous factors generate this long-term inegalitarian tendency. Periods of reduced inequalities are not attributable to social and ideological struggle, still less to political action, but to the ‘exogenous shocks’ represented by world wars and crises. Mechanics ultimately prevails over politics. Some passages are quite explicit: ‘The return to a structurally high capital/income ratio in the twenty-first century, close to the levels observed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, can therefore be explained by the return to a slow-growth regime.’9 So the key factor is ‘historical laws’ that are largely independent of social and political relations. Public action is regarded as essentially reactive, never creative. As a result, the final part of the book, with its policy proposals (including a global tax), sits awkwardly with the whole preceding argument.10 Thus, well may Piketty wish to ‘supersede’ Marx, but he shares with Marxist economists an unfortunate tendency to forget politics and its real effects on the economy and on social structures.11
To understand the crystallization of neoliberalism, we must above all avoid reducing the crisis of the 1960s and 70s to an ‘economic crisis’ in the traditional sense of the term. For neoliberalism responded not only to a crisis of accumulation, but also to a crisis of governmentality, which itself pertained to a severe crisis of hitherto dominant forms of power. Foucault’s special merit was to situate the advent of a new way of conducting individuals in this context – a way that claimed to satisfy aspirations to freedom in every sphere, sexual and cultural as well as economic. Against economism, he grasped that the workers’ struggles cannot be isolated from those of women, students, artists or patients. He glimpsed the way in which the reorganization of methods of governing individuals in various social sectors, and reactions to social and cultural struggles, were assuming a coherence with neoliberalism that was at once theoretical and practical. His analysis was nevertheless limited in two respects, clearly identified by Wendy Brown when she refers to Foucault’s ‘relative indifference’ to capital and democracy. On the one hand, he fails to take account of capitalism as a form of social domination; on the other, he does not analyse the effects of neoliberal rationality on democracy – its imaginary, principles, values and institutions.12 No doubt this is a result of his choice of method. Focusing on governmental rationality, he aimed to explore new possibilities of ethical and political self-subjectivation in the spaces of freedom on which this rationality played.13 If this limitation is to be remedied, by expanding the angle of reflection – that is, by trying to articulate neoliberal reason with the logic of capital – it can only be done by extending Foucault’s examination of forms of governmentality.
In this regard, the key thing to understand is that in each of its previous phases the historical instantiation of capital has presupposed symbolic formatting and institutional application. In itself, at its highest level of abstraction, the logic of capital signifies nothing more than ‘production of surplus value’.14 However, this logic does not represent some ‘essence’ of capitalism from which all social relations derive by dint of ‘immanent’ laws. Symbolic representation, repeated, coherent political interventions, and an abundant ‘economico-juridical’ output were indispensable in constructing this ‘world of capital’ or (as we have called it) the becoming-global of capital. The latter signifies that capital now knows no geographical bounds or separations between social spheres. A logic of limitlessness moves to impose itself in every domain.15 Every individual is enjoined to become ‘human capital’; every element of nature is regarded as a productive resource; every institution is considered an instrument of production. Natural and human reality is fully transcribed in the mathematical language of economics and management. This is the imaginary mainspring of neoliberalism, become self-evident, a necessity, reality itself. However, the metamorphosis of the world into capital no more pertains to an ‘endogenous’ law of economics than it does to some destiny of Western metaphysics. It is the historical result of a formidable mutation in the way of governing human beings and societies; it is the product of an institutional transformation whose potent social, subjective and environmental effects we are beginning to appreciate.
How is this logic of limitlessness imposed on nature? We inhabit a ‘finite, completely known and occupied planet’, and yet commodity logic can only live off its infinite expansion.16 There are virtually no virgin spaces left; the fiction of terra nullius17 is hard to mobilize, which rules out reproducing the logic of the ‘New Frontier’ that presided over the conquest of the West. As we have learnt from history, however, a frontier is posited by capital only to be crossed. And this occurs through the creation of norms and institutions. We can identify two novel forms of this implacable logic.
The prospect of the exhaustion of fossil fuels in the near future has prompted some states to encourage a veritable race to appropriate outer space. On 25 November 2015, a few days before the opening of COP21, Barack Obama signed a law – HR 2262 – authorizing such an appropriation, without undertaking a formal revision of the legal status of outer space.
Since the early 1960s, international law has cited ‘the common interest of all mankind’ in advocating the use of outer space for peaceful ends. The initial two articles of the 1967 space treaty fixed its legal status. The first recognized the right of every country to use outer space, implying equal accessibility. The second stipulated that ‘outer space, including the Moon and other celestial bodies, is not subject to national appropriation by claim of sovereignty, by means of use or occupation, or by any other means.’ Both these aspects – usage open to all and non-appropriability – refer to the only subjects recognized in international law, namely, states: ‘national appropriation’ is appropriation by states, and non-appropriability is non-appropriability by states.
It is precisely this limit that the law signed on 25 November 2015 very adroitly exploits. Its name says it all: Competitiveness Act. In one of its provisions, it vests a US citizen engaged in commercial recovery of a resource located on an asteroid or in space with the right to own, possess, transport, use and sell the resource obtained in accordance with existing law. This amounts to granting US companies a formal property right, with all its exclusive, absolute character.18 Yet the law adopted by Congress denies claiming direct territorial sovereignty over what will be open to being appropriated thus: the occupation and appropriation are not the deed of the USA as a state.19 Thus we have an act of state sovereignty that circumvents the proscription of appropriation by state sovereignty without formally violating it. It involves a kind of ‘delegation’ whereby the state grants its citizens a legal title that it denies itself, the better to guarantee it to those to whom it has delegated it. But the loophole in the 1967 treaty is only asking to be expanded still further: what is not appropriable by states becomes terra nullius for private companies. Thus the government of Luxemburg has created a structure equipped with a budget – SpaceResources.lu – intended to give private operators confidence in their right to appropriate the scarce minerals extracted from asteroids.20
A second form of the logic of limitlessness is to be found in the financialization of biodiversity. The marketization of nature is justified in the name of what must now be called ‘biodiversity compensation’.21 This does not mean that we do not have the right to destroy biodiversity, but that we have this right on condition of replacing what we have destroyed. For example, we have the right to destroy ten hectares of forest here so long as we plant ten hectares elsewhere, with the excuse that in thirty years’ time, when the trees have grown, it will make no difference. However, to effect this compensation, the amount of the loss to be compensated must first be assessed. It is therefore necessary to assign a value to what is not a product of labour – for example, the pollination of trees and flowers by bees.
The notion of ‘services’ rendered by nature, susceptible to economic valuation, thus tends to become established. Biodiversity had hitherto been presented as a set of resources consisting in separate elements (genes, species, reserves, etc.) that could be possessed, bought and sold. In this classical form, marketization still involved the idea of the intrinsic value of biodiversity. Now we hear talk of ‘ecosystemic services’, consisting in flows from a stock of natural capital which, when combined with human industrial activities, creates human welfare.22 Therewith the intrinsic value of biodiversity is erased in favour of the value attributed to the flows generated by natural capital, to the point where some do not shy away from the conclusion that the entire biosphere must be securitized as ‘natural capital’. The significance of this alteration may be summarized thus: ‘Inclusion of the biosphere in the market sphere does not simply take the form of merchandise (logic of the sale of wood and industrial capitalism, marketization of “biological resources” and gene patents, etc.), but also and especially assets (i.e. securities creating an entitlement to future income, in the financial logic of profit).’23 In this transition from the commodification of nature to its financialization, a frontier has been extended which is no longer spatial: that of valorization.
The same logic of valorization is to be found at the very heart of neoliberal subjectivation. This is because such subjectivation is, in its way, a financial one. As a particular historical form of capitalism, neoliberalism comprises an essential imaginary dimension. Or rather, it is constituted and maintained solely by this dimension. Without it, it would be incapable of not merely surviving the gravest crises, but actually becoming fortified by them. Now, this imaginary is basically an entrepreneurial imaginary and not a market imaginary. If we do not grasp this, we shall be condemned to impotence. Endlessly to bang on about the need to counter neoliberal policies with a Keynesian, redistributive economic policy is to fail to understand that neoliberalism can only be fought by opposing an alternative imaginary to its imaginary – an imaginary commensurate with the one it seeks to supplant in offering a desirable way of life. Nothing short of the power of an imaginary can create the desire to change the world. Allowing ourselves to be imprisoned in a discussion about the economic ‘feasibility’ of some particular proposal is to have lost the game in advance. For it is the neoliberal imaginary that compels people to situate themselves on this terrain. And since that imaginary is what gives neoliberalism its incomparable power, we need to examine whence its attraction, even to the worst-off, derives. In other words, what, in its content, makes it seem like the bearer of a promise of freedom within reach of every individual?
To assess the attraction and influence of neoliberalism, we must obviously decline to be taken in by the contemporary infatuation with training methods such as Cross Fit, modelled on US Navy exercises.24 There is no doubt that such methods, which introduce the challenge and performance culture into the sphere of leisure activities by urging their adepts to continually ‘surpass themselves’, form part of the activity of neoliberal normativity. It is no less certain that they might satisfy the need for confidence on the part of stressed managers girding themselves to face a gamut of situations. And few will dispute that the fashion for a coach in ‘personal branding’, or self-marketing, is a further symptom of the neoliberalization of subjects. But such methods, even when combined with one another, even when widespread, do not create a social imaginary capable of accessing the internal self of every individual.
It is much better to turn to the model for people’s lives represented by the corporation in itself. We then perceive a kind of co-extensiveness of life and corporation by dint of which the latter emerges less as a judicial construct than as a fully-fledged life-form. Such are the words of Marie-Vorgan Le Barzic, delegate general of NUMA (the association of innovative and start-up enterprises) on 10 November 2014, during the social entrepreneurship week organized by the newspaper Libération: ‘Today, all citizens are taking control of their lives like a company’ – before proceeding to correct herself: ‘not yet all’.25 In its very ingenuousness, the declaration is significant: each citizen’s relationship to her life is analogous to the relationship between an entrepreneur and her business. Not that life itself is a business. Rather, one’s conduct of life is analogous to the conduct of a business. Aside from the fact that the claim decks itself out in the best of intentions by constantly invoking the ‘social’, the most interesting thing is the stress on the notion of ‘entrepreneurship’. Entrepreneurship goes far beyond the status of entrepreneur, which is necessarily limited to a minority of citizens. In fact, it constitutes a ‘form of citizenship’, portending a ‘renewal of democracy’.26
It would be wrong to assimilate this claim to the discourse of Nicolas Sarkozy or Christine Lagarde vaunting the merits of being a ‘self-entrepreneur’. That involved diffusing the enterprise culture throughout society by encouraging a race to the bottom at the expense of skilled artisans. The praise of ‘entrepreneurship’ goes much further. Not only because the status of self-entrepreneur is still a legal one, but more fundamentally because, with entrepreneurship, the individual’s entire existence is annexed by the logic of business, to the point of becoming the training ground for what should be called an ‘entrepreneurial democracy’. ‘Citizenship’ itself is therefore no longer a matter of legal or political status. It is no longer a matter of rights and duties. It becomes conflated with each individual’s management of her own existence. In this sense, ‘entrepreneurial democracy’ goes far beyond the political sphere proper. It is democracy placed, as it were, within easy reach – a non-delegable, non-representative democracy, since it is a matter of everyone’s relationship to themselves, of the choice of oneself, and hence of autonomy and responsibility. Everyone becomes responsible for how they lead their life. This does not make everyone an ‘entrepreneur’, at least in the statutory sense of the term. But, it will be asked, how can someone who is not an entrepreneur conduct her life like an enterprise? If in order to be an ‘entrepreneur’ it is necessary to own an enterprise, to participate in ‘entrepreneurship’ it is sufficient to be an enterprise. The ‘citizen’ in ‘entrepreneurial democracy’ is herself an enterprise, so that this democracy is not so much that of the citizen-entrepreneur as that of the citizen-enterprise. This is why she runs her life ‘in the manner’ of an enterprise – in the way she would run an enterprise if she had one. Here democracy consists in giving everyone the chance to conduct the enterprise they themselves are in whatever way they wish, making them wholly responsible for this conduct and its results, failures and successes alike.
To understand this decisive point, it is worth pausing over the theory of ‘human capital’ developed by American neoliberalism.27 Its originality consists in completely reversing the relationship between the subject and her work as conceived by a certain tradition of political economy in the wake of Marxism. Marx famously distinguished between labour and labour-power, and between labour-power and the person of the worker. Of these three concepts, labour-power is unquestionably the key one. The worker possesses a labour-power, composed of aptitudes and skills, which is nothing other than a commodity with a determinate value. In selling this commodity to the capitalist, the worker cedes the use of it for a specified duration in exchange for a wage. Labour, or the activity of labour, consists in an expenditure of labour-power for a quantitatively specified period of time. In this perspective, labour counts as ‘abstract labour’ – that is, labour rendered homogenous by what the market determines as socially necessary for the production of some particular commodity. In other words, the labourer has a labour-power, which she expends during the labour process; her main concern is the value at which she sells her labour-power to the capitalist. The activity of labour itself is simply the application of this power in conditions decided by the capitalist.
The inversion operated by American neoliberals consists in adopting the standpoint of the subject who is in the process of working, or in regarding the worker as an ‘active economic subject’, dispensing altogether with the concept of labour-power. Labour will be broken down into capital and income: the worker’s aptitude or skill will be regarded as a particular type of ‘capital’ and the wage as the ‘income’ of this capital. It will then be said that the worker derives a certain income from her skill-capital, or that this income is the product of, or return on, that capital. Any source of future income is a capital, but skill-capital differs significantly from other forms of capital – those invested in an enterprise by its proprietor. What is special about skill-capital is that it cannot be separated from the very person of the worker – hence its utter difference from labour-power. Whereas labour-power can be ceded or ‘alienated’ because it can be separated from the person of the labourer, skill-capital cannot be ‘alienated’ because it cannot be separated from the person of the labourer. It is not something ceded temporarily via a work contract, but coextensive with the whole life of the worker qua worker. It comprises both innate elements and acquired characteristics, primarily education and training. That is why it warrants being called ‘human capital’. Labour-power is a commodity one possesses without being it, whereas skill is a capital which one does not possess but is. While people can always separate themselves from what they have, they can never separate themselves from what they are. The labourer is thus her own capital, since she is the source of her income. In this sense, she is an ‘entrepreneur of herself’.28
The significance of this idea of enterprise, erected into a model for subjects of the relationship to the self, cannot be overstated. Everyone is a form of capital – a value to be ever more valorized throughout one’s life, by means of investment. We know that money relates to itself in the mode of self-valorization (M-M' is the formula for financial capitalism).29 It might be said that the subject who relates to herself in the manner of self-valorization (S-S') is the subject who has become financial capital for herself or financial capital made subject, capital itself as a form of subjectivation. And it is precisely in this sense that we may refer to neoliberal subjectivation as financial subjectivation. It may not be the promise of universal enrichment made by Plutus to the citizens of Athens in Aristophanes’ comedy. But universal extension of the enterprise in the form of an unlimited multiplication of self-enterprises is a subjective spring that should not be ignored.
This is firstly because, despite everything, the big corporation as an institution still plays the role of model here, and it is therefore its logic which is, as it were, internalized by subjects, even though its gigantic size and character as a collective actor render it inaccessible to the individual subject. The self-enterprise has the subject internalize the logic of competition, especially via innovation, by making it her duty to maximize her gains and thereby ‘self-maximize’. None of this results from the operation of the spontaneous laws of capital accumulation. On the contrary, it is the outcome of power mechanisms constructed by targeting individuals.
Secondly, and consequently, on this new terrain the ‘accumulation drive’ finds material for self-development in a novel way. It has rightly been noted that big corporations opened up a new space for the tendency to unlimited accumulation, which assumed an anonymous and systemic character, by taking the separation between owner and manager already identified by Marx very much further.30 Neoliberal financialization has made the corporation the maximizing institution par excellence, one whose logic is to some degree independent of the individual capitalist’s desire for enrichment. At the same time, however, with financial subjectivation the ‘accumulation drive’ tends to be generalized to all individuals, opening up a new field for the operation of the tendency to limitlessness. For the limitlessness of accumulation is far from ruling out any form of pleasure. Against an idyllic view of the original capitalist as completely abstinent, Marx himself relativized the conflict between ‘pleasure drive’ and ‘accumulation drive’. At a certain stage of development of his capital, the capitalist ‘can … live a more jolly life, and at the same time show more “abstinence”’.31 But he extended the analysis by asserting that the industrial capitalist becomes more or less incapable of performing his role ‘as soon as he wants the accumulation of pleasures instead of the pleasure of accumulation’.32 We must attend to the rhetorical figure of chiasmus: it signifies that the enjoyment which makes capitalism wholly fit for its social purpose is not of the order of consumption; that enjoyment is not the end to which the accumulation of value aspires. The capitalist imperative is not ‘accumulate in order to enjoy’, or ‘enjoy while accumulating’, but ‘enjoy accumulating’ – that is, ‘enjoy the production and expansion of value’.33
If we take the trouble to translate this injunction in terms of subjectivation, we obtain an identification of the subject with the expansion of her own value. Capitalist discourse, in its neoliberal form at any rate, does not so much dangle the promise of a saturation of desire through consumption as that of a plenitude achieved in unlimited expansion of the value which the subject represents for herself. Herein lies the truth of ‘human capital’: the value that is ever more valorized is no longer simply the means to enjoyment, it becomes the object of enjoyment. The self-enhanced subject is one who enjoys the value that she is for herself.
In what sense should we take this promise of enjoyment? The term is to be understood in its Lacanian sense: enjoyment is not pleasure, which is still of the order of limits in that it is the satisfaction of a tendency, but beyond pleasure in that it is self-enjoyment exceeding any limit.34 That is why it pertains to the impossible. How can the neoliberal condition be represented as attained and accomplished? Martin Crimp is the author of a remarkable play, In the Republic of Happiness, which may be regarded as a peerless dramatization of the imaginary of performance/enjoyment.35 The closing third act is likewise entitled ‘In the Republic of Happiness’. In fact, it is only now that we are truly in the Republic of Happiness. So says the character Uncle Bob, who clarifies the condition of citizens in this strange republic. Bob tells Madeleine that he does not remember what he said a moment ago and that he cannot recall how she is either. Along with memory, it is the world itself that is fading: ‘the landscape is indistinct’, ‘the room is completely empty’, there are no more ‘citizens’. Loss of memory and loss of the world are the price to be paid for unlimited enjoyment: where plenitude in the relationship to self is supposed to prevail, there is no longer any alterity, either in oneself or outside oneself. The truth is that there is no ‘good limitlessness’. There is a shared human condition only in the sense of limitation. The terrifying promise of the neoliberal Plutus is a happiness impossible to share. The ‘Republic of Happiness’ is the impossibility of self-enjoyment, and the limitlessness of self-enjoyment is the graveyard of political democracy.