In the wake of Europe's turn towards austerity, scholars from a range of perspectives are debating the role of neoliberal economic theory in the management of the global economy. For some, the power of neoliberal theory is demonstrated clearly by the fact that, despite its obvious failure to anticipate the global financial meltdown of 2008, key policymakers around the world have remained loyal to many of its key technical stratagems, including that of expansionary fiscal consolidation (Soros, 2008; Blyth, 2013; Krugman, 2013). Surveying the sites and scenes of the current European crisis, these ‘Constructivist’ critics present neoliberal theory as a powerful mechanism of cultural normalization, describing and prescribing the norms and values which not only lured thinkers, policymakers and practitioners to endorse market deregulation in the first place, but which induce in them even now a confidence that the path to recovery is one not of re-regulation or systemic change, but one rather of austerity. Problematically, however, this argument appears to be premised on a rather narrow understanding of the domain of neoliberal power. Implicit in its framing is the expectation that, once the elites who propagate these ideas have been dispatched, we shall naturally resume or rediscover a more authentic relation with capitalist valorization. In this sense, as plausible as it may seem, the theory offers little by way of an account of the intimate or everyday cultural mechanisms by which austerity sustains its grip on the popular imagination.
Others balk at the idea that austerity is even remotely connected to neoliberalism. Not only are self-declared ‘neoliberals’ a rare phenomenon, they say, but the principles of neoliberalism have been applied unevenly, and have shifted over time (Birch, 2015). Provocative as this response may be, however, the present chapter argues that it is important not to restrict our understanding of neoliberalism solely to its technical strictures. To the contrary, considered as a kind of popular intuitive sensibility, neoliberalism continues to command mass popular support. To make sense of this, a potentially more useful account of neoliberalism comes from work inspired by the French theorist, Michel Foucault. Invoking Foucault's notion of biopolitics, and the closely associated concept of neoliberal subjectivity, this body of scholarship argues that neoliberalism is actually much more than a system of technical rules. Rather, it is something more like an everyday ideology, which simultaneously both reduces the complexity of human life to market-based interaction, and advocates for the application of marketprinciples to an ever-expanding range of traditionally non-market spheres. Setting aside the internal diversity of elite debates and intrigues, then, the perspective advanced in this chapter appraises neoliberalism as a regime of everyday subjectification or, in Dardot and Laval's terms, ‘practical normativity’ (2014: 9).
Nevertheless, questions arise as to how much insight even this Foucauldian line of thinking can give us into the means of neoliberal mass alignment. Contemporary Foucauldians tend to focus solely on questions of epistemic power, defending this move as a corrective to the more reductionist tendencies they perceive in Marxist approaches. Of course, given the unstinting nature of Foucault's critique of Structuralist theory, this move is understandable to a certain degree (see Springer, 2012). But there is a danger in reading neoliberalism solely on its own terms. The epistemological stance on biopolitical economy, useful insofar as it reveals the anthropological ambition of neoliberal theory, or the imaginary of what Mirowski (2013) terms the ‘neoliberal thought collective', tends nevertheless to accept the neoliberal defense of austerity at face value, thereby reducing it to nothing more than a naïve error of thought, a move which runs contrary not only to Foucault's more bodily ontology of subjectivity, but which also ignores the basic asymmetry of power inherent in the allocation of capitalist wealth (Piketty, 2014).
The present chapter thus makes a partial departure from this preoccupation with the discourse of neoliberal elites. It seeks instead to explore the arguments of scholars like Konings (2015a) and Lazzarato (2014) concerning the constitutive autonomy of capitalist money, and the extent to which austerity's paradoxical longevity might also be attributed to non-discursive forms of power. To make this argument, the chapter starts with an attempt to fill in some of the puzzling institutional ‘blanks’ of Foucault's reading of neoliberalism. Crucially, the only evidence we have of any sustained commentary by Foucault on the topic of neoliberalism are the transcriptions of his 1978–79 lecture series, published as The Birth of Biopolitics (2008). These lectures are hugely important, in so far as they offer insights about the economistic nature of biopolitics, adding considerable nuance to one of the most frequently-cited concepts of his formally-published works. Yet, neoliberalism was but a fledgling political project at the time of Foucault's engagement with it, and so his lectures could have anticipated neither the intensification of money's power as a force of subjectification under neoliberal financialization, nor the extent to which subjectivity itself has become a stake in contemporary capitalist valorization.
Foucault's lectures, in this sense, leave a good deal of room for misinterpretation. To remedy this, I invoke Konings’ (2015a) argument that neoliberalism cannot itself be comprehended without a reflection on the paradoxical role of capitalist money as a mechanism of pre-subjective orientation, circumventing the conscious mind to reattach the subject continuously to the task of economic speculation. Far from being the imposition solely of a ‘neoliberal thought collective’ (Mirowski, 2013), then, the willing subject of contemporary austerity is merely the most extreme expression to date of a mode of social power which, while it predates neoliberalism, functions nevertheless as the affective precondition of neoliberalism's recent success. Concluding, however, the piece argues that, on its own, Konings; theory leaves us with little or no sense of the place of even this wider understanding of subjectivation within contemporary capitalist reproduction. Thus, it turns to Lazzarato's machinic theory of capitalist power in order to see not only how labouring bodies (disavowed in neoliberal theory) are implicated in austerity, but in order to gain a better analytical grasp on the stake of austerity itself; namely, capitalism's deepening dependency on these bodies, in its neverending quest to expropriate surplus value. The chapter ends, therefore, with a brief discussion of a number of possible strategies of ‘cyborg’ labor as it seeks to resist the non-discursive elements of austerity's power.
Constructivist scholars of International Political Economy (IPE) have devoted attention to a range of areas where ‘everyday’ ideas about how markets function, and how they ought to function, appear to have influenced the development of the financial crisis. Questions investigated by Constructivists include how ‘theory-driven’ financial innovation drove the development of the esoteric products that actually collapsed in the meltdown (Wigan, 2010), how epistemic frames helped select instruments for assessing performance in the market (Langley, 2010), and how everyday expectations shaped welfare trade-offs in subprime mortgage market regulation (Seabrooke, 2010). Outside of academia, the best-known Constructivist critic of the crisis is probably Mark Blyth, star of a fairly prominent YouTube video (http://youtu.be/FmsjGys-VqA). Uploaded in September 2010, and with over 68,000 views to date, the video gives us about five and a half minutes of a tweed-vested Blyth, accompanied by dancing chalkboard-style graphics and symbols, expositing on the difference between debt and leverage. He argues that, while a ‘balancesheet’ perspective on the events of 2008 would suggest that it ought principally to be worries over sovereign debt that is keeping us up at night, we should be wary of what he terms ‘the fallacy of composition'. As he notes, just because one sector in an economy is facing the need for cut-backs, it does not follow that cut-backs are necessarily a good thing across all sectors – this being especially true during a global recession.
Expanding on these arguments in a subsequent book, Blyth (2013) suggests that a full accounting of the turn to austerity requires an understanding of the political power of neoliberal ideas. Economic theory, he says, is not just a ‘correspondent reflection’ of the world we live in; it is a constitutive force within it (2013: 39). To be sure, the 1999 repeal of the Glass-Steagal Act made possible a panoply of new, complex financial instruments. But the core issue was the ‘epistemic hubris’ of the US bankers who failed to see the obviously mounting risk in their portfolios (2013: 91). In this manner, however, Blyth appears to suggest that the crisis was essentially an accident. It was caused neither of a lack of regulation, nor of moral hazard, but of a mistaken way of thinking. Similarly, by way of a solution, European policymakers appeared at first to embrace Keynesian theory. Blyth suggests, however, that this was mainly because the crisis had left most of the world's neoliberal economists in a state of shock, with many more or less having fled the field of debate (2013: 54). Meanwhile, in key institutions, like the European Central Bank (ECB) and the German government, a particular ‘Ordoliberal’ strand of neoliberal thought remained popular.
‘Ordoliberals', says Blyth, distinguish themselves by their deeply cautious approach to economic governance, and a particular sensisitivity on the topic of inflation. More precisely, they are advocates of a Sozialmarktwirtschaft model, where the state may intervene to regulate, and provide social safety nets, but only in so far as this might further the ‘framework conditions’ that ‘make the market possible’ (Blyth, 2013: 57). Thus, on account of the influence of Ordoliberal thinking, order and stability became the premium values guiding ECB policy during the crisis. Despite being overshadowed temporarily by the rather more Keynesian perspective of the US Treasury at the outset of the crisis, the German view reasserted itself in 2010. Indeed, by summer of that year, ‘growth friendly fiscal consolidation’ had become the watchword among op-ed writers and in statements from the world's key financial institutions. With debt-to-GDP ratios soaring on the European periphery, especially in Greece, the emerging consensus among members of the G20 was that a fire sale was in the offing. This is unfortunate, Blyth notes, because with the exception of Greece, there was nothing necessarily catastrophic going on among the so-called PIIGS (Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece, Spain). At the end of the day, they were all cases of banking crises causing sovereign debt crises (2013: 73). In an ideal world, the solution would simply have been to write down the debts. In other words, for the PIIGS to have started printing money. Bound to the common currency, however, their hands were tied, and the reticence of key European partners meant that fiscal support would not be forthcoming.
So how, against the weight of evidence, did this German account gain saliency in the first place? Blyth traces the genealogy of expansionary fiscal consolidation to the so-called ‘Bocconi Boys', Alberto Alesina and Silvia Ardagna. It was later popularized by the influential economists, Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff. Studies carried out by these prominent scholars warned of the growth-suppressing effects of high debt-to-GDP ratios. Moreover, they drew on examples, like Ireland's recovery from recession in the late-1980s, as evidence demonstrating the synergistic effects of combining cuts to expenditure, with wage moderation, and currency devaluation. Blyth cites a barrage of research to debunk these theories, nothing ultimately that they conflate correlation with causation. When the ratings agency Standard and Poor's decided on August 5, 2011, to downgrade US debt, for example, the effect was not to chase up the country's bond yields. To the contrary, it was equities that took the hit (Blyth, 2013: 3). Thus, far from a concern about government spending, what markets were essentially signaling was an anxiety about prospects for growth. The point, says Blyth, is not that debt does not matter. Rather, it is that the resolution of debt is contingent upon the vicissitudes of the business cycle, and has very little to do with the deficit (2013: 12).
For Blyth, then, an erroneously confident understanding of the risks of financial deregulation was at the very heart of the crisis. ‘Neoliberalism', he suggests, not only played a major role in causing the crisis but, regrettably, prevails even today as the basic paradigm for many of the world's most powerful economic decision-makers. Yet, while one can certainly appreciate how the work of key academic theorists might come to exert a major influence on the mindsets of policymakers, it is another question entirely as to how neoliberal principles might willingly be internalized by the populations they govern. Blyth, for his part, certainly understands that neoliberal norms can be transmitted into the domain of everyday life. After all, as he notes in his YouTube video, austerity has a ring of virtuous commonsense about it; after a decade or more of debt-fueled growth, recession is all too easily palmed off as the ‘pain after the party', recalling to us the true cost of the goods and services we enjoy so much. Cuts in government spending, in this sense, are lived as a kind of economic cold turkey. ‘Austerity is painful, yes', goes the refrain of this morality play, ‘but it is as natural as a hangover'. Blyth unfortunately delves no further into these insights. Austerity for him is merely the unhappy side-effect of elite epistemic hubris. And the question of how austerity has come to be embraced in an everyday sense is left unaddressed.
By contrast, a recent Foucault-inspired strain of analysis goes beyond the technical perspectives of key elites and intellectuals, and instead looks at austerity as part of a wider political program. Crucially, this work marks an interesting expansion of the sorts of questions that Foucauldian scholarship has traditionally been disposed to ask. In International Relations and IPE at least, such scholarship has tended to fall into one of two categories. One, so-called ‘global governmentality’ studies, deals specifically with issues of visibility and measurement in regional and global institutions (see Kiersey and Weidner, 2009; Joseph, 2010). The other, featured mainly in the field of Security Studies, takes its cue principally from Giorgio Agamben's reinterpretation of Foucault, and explores the War on Terror as a case of the ‘eternal return’ of the logic of sovereign exceptionalism (Dillon and Reid, 2001; The Editors, 2013). In the wake of the financial crisis, however, a rather different understanding of biopolitics has emerged. Taking its cue from Foucault's Birth of Biopolitics lecture series (2008), wherein he explores the emergence of liberal political economy, this literature recognizes Foucault as possibly the first theorist to grasp the full breadth of neoliberalism's anthropological ambition. That is, in Mirowski's terms, its commitment to using markets and governance to completely recast ‘the totality of human existence into a novel modality, to be disciplined and punished by structures of power/knowledge’ (2013).
Might this concern with neoliberalism's anthropological ambitions help us to better appreciate austerity's longevity? To answer this question, we should first look at a seminal aspect of the broader historical development of contemporary political power. Specifically, the discovery of something called political economy. The basic blueprint of the modern mode of power is to be found in the early Christian pastoral, the advent of which is, for Foucault, ‘one of the decisive moments in the history of power in Western societies’ (2007: 185). But where the Christian pastoral pursued the selfdirection of the subject through a training in the values of divine asceticism, contemporary governmentality intends for the development of an economic subject. The ideal of this subject makes its first appearance in the sixteenth century, roughly around the same time that we see the emergence of the territorially administrative state. At this time, commentators begin discussing a proliferating series of objects, including something referred to as the population, which they take somehow to be a naturally existing phenomenon, present in the state of affairs. Accordingly, much as in the Christian pastorate, we see a certain naturalization of ‘men in their relationships with things like customs, habits, ways of acting and thinking’ (Foucault, 2008: 96). What distinguishes them is that, where that older mode of government obtained around a spiritual field of intervention, the ‘level of reality’ or ‘field of intervention’ for the administrative state would be something called the economy (2008: 95).
Yet, as Foucault portrays it, if the sixteenth century sees the emergence of the economy as the essential object of governmental activity, by the eighteenth century political economy has become the ‘major form of knowledge’ through which government knows and assesses the performance of human life (2008: 108). No longer the container or vessel of a soul that must be directed towards heaven, the subject is now a creature of economic interests, a homo economicus. Thus, suggests Foucault, we find ourselves in the era of Classical Liberalism, where the success of government is deemed contingent in large part on its ability to ‘cut out or contrive a free space of the market', wherein man's naturally-utilitarian competitive impulses might be better expressed (2008: 131). The idea is that there are now certain things which government ought not to do if the state is to be economically successful. In this sense, says Foucault, liberal political economy drives ‘a formidable wedge’ between the powers of the state and the sphere of daily human life (2008: 17).
Over time, however, this idea of a naturally-existing, naturally-competitive homo economicus becomes unconvincing, and the era of classic ‘laissez-faire’ Liberalism recedes. Neoliberalism, its contemporary iteration, founds itself on a rejection of the natural existence of economic man. Instead, it imagines the need to anticipate specific kinds of governance structures which will encourage the emergence of a new kind of subject, the ‘entrepreneur of oneself'. That is, one who is constantly, consciously, balancing the costs and benefits of action not only in economic life, but even in seemingly non-economic spheres. In Foucault's own lifetime, this view reaches its maximum expression with the American anarcho-liberal strain, associated with the Chicago School. And it is here that we can see most starkly how neoliberalism is founded on something of a paradox. For while anarcho-liberalism begins by positing that practically every social activity may be read as an ostensibly market-based form of interaction, it understands equally that not every human will accept its own nature, as an economic subject.
Critically, neoliberalism attempts to resolve this paradoxical formulation by posing the neoliberal subject as the bearer not of some natural or unitary economic identity but, rather, of something called human capital. According to this theory, because everybody's body is understood as naturally possessing a certain capacity for generating wealth, any kind of activity that involves ‘substitutable choices', or the application of a ‘limited means to one end among others’ (Foucault, 2008: 222, 268), should be comprehended as labor and, thusly, investment. The scope of such labor includes not only the traditional ‘job', therefore, but also any kind of activity where the pursuit of some sort of surplus value or future return can be imagined to be taking place (2008: 224). As a result, economic analysis can be applied to activities in a wide range of social arenas: marriage, parenting, discrimination, education, population growth, crime, and even insanity. The upshot is that, while the neoliberal individual cannot by any means be claimed to be rational, human capital stands in as a kind of leverage point for the modulation of its behaviour, via the manipulation of market parameters. Despite the fact that it might not know what it is, then, homo economicus is enjoined in a kind of assemblage with its wealth-generating capacities. It is a productive potential, an ‘enterprise unit', a ‘machine-stream ensemble’ or even a ‘capital-ability’ (2008: 225). The question for policy is how this proto-subject can be made to ‘accept’ itself for what it is (2008: 269).
Thus, to borrow from Lemke, the paradox is that neoliberalism ‘endeavors to create a social reality that it suggests already exists’ (2001: 203). The expectation that the proto-subject is governable is premised on the belief that it is already capable – out of hope for some form of return, and in response to a diversity of incentives – of consciously recognizing the need for its own self-direction, and of undertaking the improvement of its own basic physical capacities, mental skills, attitudes, and so forth (Foucault, 2008: 226, 229). Emphasizing this, Foucault suggests that neoliberals approach the study of economics as nothing less than the ‘analysis of the internal rationality’ by which individuals come to their own conscious determination as to how they should develop themselves (2008: 223).1
Yet there does also an understanding that the subject might not wish to cooperate with this plan. Neoliberalism is aware, for example, as Foucault notes, that competitive ambitions might need to be restrained, once in place; that the entrepreneurial self might choose to take too much risk, and ‘live dangerously’ (Foucault, 2008: 66). For this reason, neoliberalism can be said to have a ‘consciousness of crisis’ (2008: 68); ‘freedom’ is taken to be an intrinsically unstable good, and one which must be constantly monitored, directed, and insured against, if social life is to function optimally (2008: 65).
Foucault recognizes, in this sense, the political implications of neoliberalism's desire to protect against the risks associated with entrepreneurial impulses. Curiously, however, nowhere in his lectures does he appear to elaborate upon the possibility that neoliberal securitization might be conscious of other threats to its hegemony. Lazzarato (2009), by contrast, suggests that neoliberals will also regard as anathema any such New Deal-style innovations as may block the potential of the market for ‘insecuritization'. That is, they will want to destroy any lingering institutions of socialism or collective determination which may promulgate false or unproductive senses of security, or otherwise discourage individuals from taking risks individually. Thus, while human capital allows neoliberals to present the market as the superlative mechanism of government, giving it the capacity to create subjects, and to direct the entirety of social life, from the margins, it has a clear interest in preventing the emergence of any contravening accounts of what human life is, or what it is for.
Some have read Foucault's stance on neoliberal insecurity as an equivocation, or even an indication that he may have harbored some admiration for the theory. Mirowski, for example, argues that while it would be ‘an absurd counterfactual’ (Mirowski, 2013: 97) to claim that Foucault was himself a neoliberal, he nevertheless ‘too readily swallow[ed] the basic neoliberal precept that the market was an information processor more powerful and encompassing than any human being or organization of humans’ (Mirowski, 2013: 97–98). This position is endorsed also by Zamora (2014), among others (e.g., Behrent, 2009), who claims that while Foucault self-consciously refused to advocate neoliberalism, he nevertheless ‘adopt[ed] all of its critiques of the welfare state'. Indeed, Zamora cites a case where Foucault expressed concern about the perverse effects of welfare: ‘on the one hand, we give people more security, and on the other we increase their dependence'. Thus, he suggests, Foucault's writings on state services ‘actively contributed to [their] destruction', in a manner that was ‘entirely in step with the neoliberal critiques of the moment'.
Of course, the ideal of a single essential or ‘true’ reading of any thinker is one to be avoided. Yet, as Kelly (2014) observes, Zamora's argument is based more on conjecture than fact. Indeed, he notes, while the argument that Foucault was somehow a neoliberal or crypto-conservative dates back some decades now, it overlooks the simplest of Foucault's teachings about social life, ‘that human actions at a micro level combine together at a macro level to produce effects that may be unintended by the participants, but nevertheless shape our society and our lives'. True, the lectures reveal to us perhaps a more diagnostic Foucault than usual, making it seem perhaps that he has no political stake in what he is discussing. Yet it is important to remember that nowhere in his work did he back off or retreat from this core intellectual commitment, or suggest that it might not also apply to neoliberalism. Less an opponent of welfare, then, Foucault was arguably encouraging us to try to think beyond the blackmail of having to choose between government by the market, or by the state (Frase, 2014). Indeed, it is worth remembering, Foucault cites this very reason as the basis of his claim that a true socialist governmentality had yet to be ‘invented’ (2008: 94).
As noted above, Constructivists like Blyth appraise neoliberalism as a discourse of legitimation, placing it therefore as a central ideological variable explaining both the origins of the 2008 crisis, and why austerity has become the tool of choice in its resolution. Foucauldian critics, for their part, tend to be more interested in the theory's anthropological ambitions. The subject of neoliberal governance, as Foucault hinted, is highly plastic, but it is also a creature that bears a certain ethical responsibility. In Wendy Brown's terms: ‘As human capital, the subject is at once in charge of itself, responsible for itself, yet an instrumentalizable and potentially dispensable element of the whole’ (2015: 38). The political project of neoliberalism, in this sense, is perhaps nowhere better captured than in Margaret Thatcher's famous axiom, ‘Economics are the method but the object is to change the soul’ (cited in Hilgers, 2012: 82). Neoliberal theory thus expresses the fantasy ideal of an order spontaneously self-organizing around the principles of the market, but the austere methods of neoliberal practice also bear a pedagogical significance, oriented as they are to the realization of that fantasy.
This idea of neoliberalism as a ‘political project’ is ubiquitous in governmentality literature (Larner, 2003; Davies and Mills, 2014), and it clarifies the approach's methodological contrast with Constructivism. In Mirowski's terms, neoliberalism cannot be explained by the mere ‘consilience’ of neoliberal ‘doctrine and function’ (2013: 89). Rather, through governmental processes, neoliberalism has become ‘integrated directly into the makeup of modern agency', and ‘fills up the pores of our most unremarkable day’ (2013: 129). In this sense, the critical project of what we might call ‘biopolitical economy', per Jessop's definition, is to address the problem of ‘a political project that is justified on philosophical grounds and seeks to extend competitive market forces, consolidate a market-friendly constitution and promote individual freedom’ (Jessop, 2013: 70). Assessing everyday neoliberal practice as well as discourse, in other words, Foucauldian IPE distinguishes itself from Constructivism by taking neoliberalism seriously as a vision of government. Yet, as we will examine in the next section, what remains unclear in this account is the extent to which we are supposed to understand this governmental vision as one of capitalist provenance or, indeed, as having any relationship to capitalism at all.
If Foucauldian IPE can be said to unify in and around the argument that neoliberalism is more than merely a technical economic theory, it is not without its share of internal disagreements. At least two controversies emerge at this point. The first is to do with scale, and the consistency of neoliberalism's global distribution. Echoing themes in the so-called ‘Varieties in/of Capitalism’ debate (Bruff and Ebenau, 2014), some argue that the idea of a monolithic, globe-spanning neoliberalism stretches Foucault's method inappropriately. Indeed, for this very reason, Joseph (2012) argues that Foucauldian methods on their own are not sufficient to the task of analyzing power relations in global political economy, and suggests instead that we alloy these methods with those of Antonio Gramsci. For Joseph, while the micro-level operations that promote the rationalized individual conduct of neoliberalism may be observed at work in certain Western states, it remains the case that the biopolitical affect reaches its limits in the unevenspatial logic of global capitalism's distribution of power. Championed by the US, Western states seek to promote the American model of production around the world, but they will tend to foist this model on subject nations in instrumental fashion, drawing on a range of heterodox methods to achieve their goal.
The second challenge is more chronological in nature. Reviewing the substantial record of neoliberal policy, and noting its immense internal diversity on key issues, including the relative merits of corporate monopolies, it asks ‘at what point in history do the specifically neoliberal technologies of power and accompanying rationalities kick in, as it were?’ (Birch, 2015). Situating ‘neoliberalism’ historically, then, this approach seeks to comprehend how specific local knowledges have influenced the pathways of its development, thereby detotalizing our understanding of its power to determine outcomes (Larner, 2003). Thus, limited on one side by the uneven global logic of neoliberalism's spatial distribution and, on the other, by the internal diversity of neoliberalism's genealogy, it begins to appear that the thesis of biopolitical economy carries an impossible explanatory burden. Yet, while these critiques occasion further reflection on the applicability of Foucauldian methods to the connections between neoliberal thought and more context-specific variables, it is worth noting how they can also function to foreclose a number of critical research questions.
On the topic of scale, for example, a number of scholars insist that the Foucauldian model of power, properly understood, can easily encompass the possibility of a globe-spanning assemblage of capitalist production. Here, critically, the Foucauldian method does not suddenly ‘stop’ at the hard limits of capitalism's distribution (Legg, 2008; Vrasti, 2013; Bailey, 2014). To the contrary, capitalism itself is biopolitical, generating the deep emotional connections from which neoliberal governmentality, in turn, draws its fuel (Konings, 2015a). Conversely, on the question of neoliberalism's genealogical diversity, it bears noting how this argument appears to be motivated, at least partly, by a conscious desire to avoid any kind of economic reductionism in our understanding of what neoliberalism actually is. Larner, for example, cautions that many critical accounts of neoliberalism remain problematically ‘embedded in Marxist or Neo-Marxist theoretical traditions’ (2003: 511). Mirowski, similarly, objects that ‘Marxist concepts of exploitation and surplus value’ can have no place in Foucauldian political economy (2013: 100).
Mirowski's conclusion is problematic, however. It rests on the unelaborated assumption that Foucault was indeed an unstinting critic of Marx, and that the lengthy description of neoliberalism's genealogy proffered in his lectures can be read only as an endorsement of this view. Yet, this is a dubious representation of Foucault's work, with analytically-constraining effects (see also Springer, 2012). Moreover, it is an account in which the category of the body is conspicuously absent, a neglect which runs against the grain of Foucault's work, and which renders Mirowski incoherent on the question of how austerity ‘gets into our heads, becomes part of our identity, disposition, and desires, our basic sense of self’ (Konings, 2015a: 28). With Mirowski, it is neoliberalism's influence among economic elites which must be demonstrated, in order for it to count as a political variable. Yet the means by which its logic is transferred to the subject is completely overlooked. Thus, as with Constructivism, it becomes very difficult to connect the theory with an understanding of the intense emotionality of our connection to core neoliberal values, like austerity. Scholars may claim, as Mirowski does, that the point of governmentality studies is to go beyond mere discourse, and address actual practices of social reproduction, but the basic puzzle of austerity's resilience throughout the crisis remains unresolved. The result, then, as Konings argues, is a paradoxically economistic account. Despite its discursive methodology, it amounts to little more than a reproduction of Polanyi's characterization of autonomous money as a cold, instrumentalizing abstraction: a ‘fiction that exists only by virtue of all-too-human irrationality’ (Konings, 2015a: 4).
Critics of Foucauldian IPE, then, whether they be concerned primarily with questions of scale or time, display a tendency to ignore the lived, bodily experience of capitalist existence. To borrow from Jason Read, they foreclose on any analysis of neoliberalism's double nature. On the one hand, as he puts it, neoliberalism ‘is an ideology that refers not only to the political realm, to an ideal of the state, but to the entirety of human existence. It claims to present not an ideal, but a reality; human nature.’ On the other, it is also an ideology that ‘is generated not from the state, or from a dominant class, but from the quotidian experience of buying and selling commodities from the market’ (Read, 2009: 26). In this sense, while exploration of the internal diversity of neoliberal theory might reveal much about its intellectual breadth, it is less clear how much it can tell us about the influence of this generative, asignifying aspect of market-based life. Foucault's narrative suggests that the discovery of the market, and the realization of a need for an autonomous development of wealth, drove a ‘wedge’ between the powers of the state and the populations it seeks to govern (Foucault, 2008: 17). But, as Konings teaches us, it was ‘iconic’ money which secured the continuity of the abstract mode of power developed in the Christian pastoral. Disdainful of idolatry, Christianity developed in its place the icon, a ‘mundane technology’ of abstract representation, which invited the subject not so much to worship a truth but to develop an intuitive, metaphor-based relationship to an infinite, and ultimately unknowable god (Konings, 2015a: 45). Capitalist money, despite its socially-constructed nature, functions by the same paradoxical mechanism, sustaining emotional investment, or faith, in the redemptive potential of a life in infinite speculation.
Following Konings, then, we can grasp something of the non-conscious capitalist orientations that coexist with neoliberal discourse, and its vision of a morally redemptive mode of economy. Critically, Konings rests his argument upon a more finely-grained understanding of the process of subjectification than that merely assumed in the governmentality scholarship discussed above. While the operation of modern societies is premised on the internalization of norms and values, he cautions, this is not a straightforward process. Rather, it is one that develops in the context of networks of engaged social action. Over time, we develop a repertoire of ‘meaningful practices and connections’ in and around icons, the non-signifying nodal points of these networks (2015a: 38). Icons are produced through metaphor and, as such, they are metonymic devices; they mediate symbolic content, the singular, irreducible diagrams of meaning, between different spheres of social activity. In this sense, they are paradoxical phenomena. Icons, says Konings, begin life as speculative, actively-produced symbolic condensations, which must struggle on the field of discourse to achieve dominance as the moral indexes by which we orient our daily interactions. But successful icons are more than the sum of such condensation. They are in fact those signs which have, over time, become the short-hand, self-evident signals which ‘the autonomous regions of the brain’ can recognize quickly, and which have therefore become capable of guiding our pre-conscious, instinctual behaviors as we go through our daily lives (Konings, 2015a: 57). Indeed, because of their established, intuitive capacity for translation between our various networks of activity, they are the mandatory passage points through which we must work if we are to advance our subjective interests. All our activities and performative roles must be narrated in relation to them.
Icons are thus ‘generated through and connected to our everyday life; immanent yet generative, embedded yet autonomous’ (Konings, 2015a: 38). They function to orient our lives, but precisely in the sense described by Lazzarato (2014: 41), as ‘asignifying semiotics'. That is, they are akin to moral traffic lights, their power as signs being linked to their capacity to bypass our conscious minds, tap directly into our nervous systems, and trigger autonomic responses. One upshot of this capacity is that icons are possessed of a certain plasticity, remaining coherent even as they connect networks of tremendous relational complexity. Money is the quintessential example of the plastic icon; having no relation to objective value, it is possessed nevertheless of such intuitive rationale that it functions as the principle symbolic passage point of our time. Money emerged first as one of a number of possible ways of mediating relations of debt and credit between different spheres of action, making possible the ‘carry over’ of meaning between them (Konings, 2015a: 60). In our capitalist economy, however, money has gained tremendously in its metaphorical power, and confronts us now, for all intents and purposes, as an autonomous force, the very index of value, but also as a passport allowing us ‘access to difference’ (2015a: 61). Such a claim is not to deny that ‘a dollar is a dollar', as Cooper and Konings cite Negri (2015: 4). Rather, it is to acknowledge this paradoxical unity of money, which encompasses both its practical translational capacity and, as such, its affective power to dispose subjects to continuously reinvest themselves it its accumulation.
Once set in motion, Konings notes, the capitalist logic of money is, of course, problematic in all kinds of ways; the ‘chrematistics’ it unleashes run contrary to the spirit of our emancipatory hopes and dreams. But we should not conflate these forces with capitalist ‘economy', a term which Konings uses in the pre-modern sense, as akin to Foucault's notion of governmentality, referring to the field of ‘attitudes, affinities, and routines that sustain order in quiet and unseen ways’ (2015b: 90). Economy, therefore, is not the narrow, technocratic governmental discourse that scholars like Blyth associate with neoliberalism. Rather, it is a double phenomenon, combining the iconoclastic spirit first modeled in the Christian pastoral with a relentless emotional investment in money. Indeed, this is precisely the paradox captured by notions like Adam Smith's hidden hand; money is merely a convention, an arbitrary sign, but one which has the power, if acknowledged in a non-idolatrous manner, to auger a regime of immanent morality and sociality. On the one hand, then, autonomous money constitutes an affective condition of possibility for the redemptive spirit of capitalist economy. On the other hand, the subjective demands it triggers are nowhere more starkly delineated than in neoliberalism, which imagines the ‘faithful engagement of economic signs’ as the principal normative mechanisms of the Good Life (Konings, 2015a: 11).
To conclude this section, then, regardless of the internal diversity of neoliberalism's discursive record, or the contradictory nature of the linkages between some of its strands and specific policy formulations, it is clear that, as an ideology advancing the cause of financialized life, neoliberalism strives to effect a global regime of power that leads subjects to accept, in deed if not in word, the ideals of human capital discussed above. To attribute a measure of neoliberalism's success in this endeavor to our experience of everyday life in a world of capitalist money, however, gives us a chance to comment on what is perhaps an overlooked aspect in our discussion of Foucault to date. To wit, a principal foundation of Foucault's approach to power is that it only ‘holds good’ to the extent that it ‘induces pleasure’ (2000: 120). The contribution of Birth of Biopolitics is that it lays out the discourses of neoliberal economics that imagine the market explicitly as a technology of security, targeting the minds and bodies of subjects to effect in them the moral sensibility of the marketplace. Yet, as Read notes, to be methodologically consistent with Foucault's formally-published works, the lectures in Birth of Biopolitics would have to focus on neoliberalism's ‘existence as a practice and not just a theory diffused throughout the economy, state, and society’ (2009: 30). Positing capitalist money as a confessional technology in this sense suggests it may be a key condition of possibility for the governmentality of austerity, sustaining the affective orientation required for the reproduction of everyday neoliberal logics.
The critique of capitalist money does not necessarily exhaust our critique of capitalist power, however. For Konings (2015a), the goal of an immanent critique of political economy is to comprehend how the elaboration of capitalist institutions and symbols become central to the organization of meaning-making – that is, how life becomes attached to capitalist power. In his analysis, however, the capture of desire in capitalism takes on something of a tragic or accidental character, epitomized by the rise of populist neoliberal movements like America's Tea Party. Here, the paradox of capitalist money is pivotal. Precisely because it is nothing, an unknowable god, our relationship to money is immanent, or confessional. In a capitalist society, we are charged to engage with money in a non-idolatrous fashion, respecting its ability to convey value, while suppressing our hope for ‘magic’ redistributions of wealth (2015a: 49). In this manner, despite its unattainability as a goal, we are compelled to pursue our moral perfection before money. The consequence of our investment in this paradoxical logic becomes especially manifest in times of crisis and anxiety, and is expressed in our narcissistic ‘doubling-down’ on the logic of money; we embrace preacarity as if it were our salvation, demanding ever-more vigilance and self-control on the parts of ourselves and others.
As today's plethora of ‘self-help’ manuals and ‘reality’ television programs on the topic of entrepreneurship will attest, conscious ideological expressions of neoliberal values are a regular feature of contemporary popular culture, encouraging us to equate iconophilia with maturity, and equivocation with weakness and victimhood. Such artifacts distill something of the ‘sadistic streak’ of contemporary capitalism's ethos, facilitating the:
…disavowal of our complicity in the production of suffering, while allowing us to claim responsibility for our fortune; it urges us to feel responsible for things that we have little influence on while letting us off the hook when it comes to things we are responsible for (Konings, 2015a: 111).
In this sense, the non-conscious aspect of capitalist money fuels a logic of wounded attachments, an ‘alchemy of trauma and faith’ (2015a: 117). It drives a narcissistic tendency in capitalism, says Konings, compressed in recent times by the normalization of perpetual, revolving debt. In the face of declining real wages, working people in many parts of the developed world have embraced debt as ‘a source of income’ (2015a: 117). Banks make profits from this, of course, but entrepreneurial subjects are expected to maintain a reflexive attitude to their debt, keeping it high enough to sustain a credit rating, but not so high as to imply they were taking it for granted.
The pre-conscious orientations of capitalist money thus combine with the more direct, consciousness-targeting operations of popular culture, along with newer technologies of veridiction, such as financial indices and ratings, as the moral metrics by which we are to hold ourselves to account. Summarized, therefore, Konings’ argument might best be described as a claim that, through the iconic power of money, financial indices have achieved a kind of tragic moral autonomy over our minds and bodies. Now, in our quest to reckon with the paradox of austerity's continued popularity, such an understanding is certainly a contribution. Nevertheless, it is unclear how this critique of what is essentially a kind of capitalist ‘false consciousness’ is supposed to connect with the struggles of those whose lives have been materially subjugated under austerity, and for whom questions of ‘wounded attachments’ are doubtless a very distant concern. While a more complex ontology can arguably help increase our awareness of affective investment as a condition of neoliberalism's paradoxical longevity, to conclude that austerity is merely the consequence of an affectively-entrenched misapprehension of the world risks obscuring the very real – and often brutal – ways in which those aforementioned chrematistical forces confront the subjects of capitalism. Neoliberal desire functions not only to sustain the disciplinary demands of austerity, but it legitimizes an expropriative mechanism which prioritizes the ever-increasing wealth of a tiny handful of individuals at the expense of the dignity and wellbeing of the vast majority of humans on the planet, as well as that of the planet itself. Our analysis must prioritize such facts.
Such claims would not strike Foucault as especially controversial. As he once wrote, ‘power is tolerable only on condition that it masks a substantial part of itself’ (1990: 86). He was clear, too: notwithstanding neoliberalism's celebration of the universal entrepreneurialism of homo economicus, biopolitics had played a key historical role in the development of capitalist “valorization” (1990: 140–141). Thus, because of this amnesiastic element in neoliberal reason, progress in our analysis of austerity may require a repudiation of the anti-Marxism of Foucauldian IPE. In 1548, Etienne de La Boétie used the term ‘voluntary servitude’ to explore how it is that the masses are moved to pursue their enslavement as if it were their freedom. Applying this term to the plight of contemporary labor, however, Frédéric Lordon reminds us that for many workers, choice is so limited that questions of pre-conscious attachment are somewhat beside the point. True, per Spinoza, human beings by nature seek joy. In this sense, it is equally true that all ‘social structures find expression as configurations of desires and affects, and thus have their own specific imaginary’ (Lordon, 2014: 49). Yet, no regime is purely confessional. To the extent that they feature something like a ‘boss’ figure, who captures and expropriates ‘powers of acting passionately’ in order to convert ‘labor-power into labor', confessional regimes always encorporate a measure of vertical governance (2014: 121).
To grasp the significance of austerity from this perspective, it may be helpful to consider the arguments of a number of Autonomist Marxist scholars, and their research on Post-Fordist accumulation. In Hardt and Negri's terms, capitalism in recent decades has adopted a number of productive tendencies intended to draw surplus from the domain of what they term the common. Citing Marazzi, they suggest that this Late Capitalist, or ‘Post-Fordist', style of accumulation is most forcefully exemplified in the regime of contemporary financialization which, while it often appears to us as an ‘enormous engine of abstraction', is premised nevertheless on a very real ‘social wealth’ (Hardt and Negri, 2009: 157–158). That is, a wealth constituted by the ongoing social creativity we find in the sphere of the common. Of course, we are already familiar with the idea of a ‘common wealth’ of the natural world, in so far as we might speak of a common ownership of the air we breathe, or the oceans in which we fish. The implication of the common in the production of value, however, bespeaks the deepening dependency of capital on practices of social labor, as it embraces the production of communicative goods and services. The work involved in such production can be considered social, or taking place ‘in common', in so far as its raw materials, ‘knowledges, languages, codes, information, affects’ (2009: viii) and the like, are crowdsourced, originating not in the economic sphere, but in that of the reproduction of life itself.
If capitalist valorization is becoming dependent on the laboring subject's capacities for non-linear creativity, care, and the like, then the stakes of this transformation are perhaps nowhere more forcefully demonstrated than in the emergence of the so-called ‘gig’ economy, with its social network-based forms of pseudo employment, like the taxi company Uber (Srnicek, 2017). Here, on the one hand, the drivers ostensibly work for themselves, driving often as a ‘side gig’ to earn a ‘piece-wage’ supplement to a minimum-wage job, yet fulfilling tasks far surpassing those of the traditional taxi driver. On the other hand, the company itself practically disappears, operating on an algorithmic basis, with radically outsourced overheads, and drawing its profit solely from a ‘rent’ charged to the driver for the use of its network.
In the story of Post-Fordism's cynical mode of production, then, rent is a central element of the plot. As ‘self-employed’ workers in the gig economy, we pay rent in the form of platform fees. In the same breath, to compensate for austerity's reduced wages, the interest we pay on our credit cards constitutes yet another rent.
If one doubt's the cynicism of this mode of accumulation, it is worth pausing to consider its reliance on confessional technologies, as it makes ever-greater emotional demands of its workers. ‘Epithumogenesis', as Lordon puts it, or the task of aligning the worker's desire with those of the firm, has become a paramount concern for managers, who must now deploy ‘managerial methods of enlistment’ to solicit the total investment of the worker in his or her job (2014: 52). The upshot is that, whereas the Fordist worker could go to the factory, and fantasize about a ‘real life’ that was somehow ‘elsewhere’ (2014: 52), today's post-Fordist worker is called on to make ‘an unlimited commitment of the self’ (2014: 38). Living in austere times, ‘elsewhere’ thus becomes a concept which necessarily haunts the ‘self-employed’ Uber driver, as nothing more than an opportunity cost. Today, everything is work.
To borrow again from Jason Read, then, the reproduction of Post-Fordist value depends on life itself, or the ‘productive power of subjectivity’ (Read, 2003: 153). Critically, however, this is not a production enjoined by equals. As Lordon argues, capitalism today features a particularly cruel division of desire, where capacities for autonomous creativity are promoted as never before, but where the fullest possibilities for expression of these capacities are reserved only for those who can afford them. Leaving aside for a moment the question of how an unlimited form of work might ever be conceived as adequately remunerated, the point here is simply to indicate the expropriation of autonomous desire as a stake of contemporary capitalist valorization; even in those rare cases where Post-Fordist workers might be well paid, they suffer still the total subsumption of their poetic autonomy within ‘the master-desire’ of the boss (2014: 118). Thus, in Lordon's poignant terms, financialized capitalism is ‘the world of the girlfriend experience’ (2014: 84).
In this sense, we can begin to draw some conclusions both about the nature of the 2008 crisis, and the function of austerity today. For Lazzarato, the events of 2008 marked ‘above all a crisis of the neoliberal subjective model embodied by “human capital”’ (2015: 14). That is to say, the bubble of neoliberal financialization ran afoul of the affective limits of Post-Fordist bodies. In this light, as with Blyth, the neoliberal preoccupation with sovereign debt may be considered a political diversion. In contrast with Blyth, however, a breakdown in Late Capitalism's mode of subjective expropriation was also a factor. Post-Fordism invested its surplus primarily into capital securities, with a view to ‘renting’ it back to workers. Triggered by the failure of the US banking system, however, the collapse of credit-based expropriation has catalyzed a shift into a new mode of expropriation, from rent to taxation. Austerity policies, as Lazzarato observes, are thus:
in reality policies for multiple ‘forced’ levies, running from taxes per se to cut backs in wages … decreases in welfare-state social spending … and income deductions through price-raises … [as] countries have auctioned off ‘public’ property to the private sector. (2015: 39)
Post-Fordism's confessional mode of valorization thus appears to be transforming into something altogether more disciplinary. Like Konings, Lazzarato argues that the relative autonomy of financialized money is indicative of a ‘dual regime of subjectivity’ in capitalist production today (2014: 34). However, whereas Konings draws on affect to explain our tragic embrace of debt, for Lazzarato the focus is on bodies, which are now leverage for the emergence of a new, disciplinary mode of capitalist expropriation, with taxation being the key measure or ‘barometer’ of its deployment (2015: 36).
If we can claim, then, that the secret of Post-Fordism was the marketization of the common, today that secret is out in the open. The economy is being refloated via a radical externalization of the risks of capitalist chrematistics onto the crowd, revealing an intensification of discipline in capitalist command. For Lazzarato, this shift bespeaks a machinic turn in the nature of capitalism. Value, he explains, is today drawn from the interface between conscious and non-conscious labor, exceeding thereby any quantifiable relation to the value of the labor time necessary for its manufacture (2014: 43–45). To demonstrate this, Lazzarato offers the example of the unemployed, who are subjected to ‘dispotifs’ of austerity which surveil and adjudicate over their performance, and which have the power to determine their ‘possible or probable action’ in non-obvious ways (2009: 111). On the one hand, lingering elements of neoliberal governmentality may call on the unemployed to become better confessional subjects of the market, subjecting themselves to further education, unpaid internships, and the like. On the other hand, however, government databases constitute non-discursive systems which simultaneously render unemployed bodies as mere technical quantities, a mass of ‘deindividualized component parts', reduced to a measure of the national labor force's quality and cost, submitting them to a kind of activity that ‘no longer has anything to do with labor’ but which is productive of value nevertheless (Lazzarato, 2014: 47–48).2
The machinic nature of austerity thus speaks to a shift in the balance between confessional and disciplinary techniques, and evokes the idea of a computerized or algorithmic capitalist command, akin to Deleuze's (1992) concept of the society of control. For Lazzarato, one of the reasons machinic command is so central to the dynamics of contemporary capitalist valorization is that neoliberalism's regime of conscious subjection has started to fail. The financial crisis in the West has revealed the magical thinking behind neoliberalism's emancipatory promise and, as a result, its ability to marry the ‘production of subjectivity’ with ‘production’ is now slipping (2014: 53). Like Lordon, then, Lazzarato seeks to disabuse us of the notion that capitalist subjectivities are today merely ‘willing slaves'. While epithumogenesis remains a vital pillar of capitalist reproduction, austerity bespeaks a cynical shift towards other, non-conscious means for expropriating value from human beings. This is perhaps, then, the crucial statement concerning the stakes of austerity; in so far as its asignifying systems function to discipline the material possibility of departing from the axiom of autonomous money, causing us thereby to hunker down and surrender our ‘future’ (Lazzarato, 2015: 70), austerity is a mode of capitalist rule, in its own right.
As Dardot and Laval argue, one of Marx's greatest intuitions was his recognition that capitalism was also a system of ‘anthropological “production”', and not just ‘a system of economic production’ (2014: 25). Marx was interested in how the reproduction of capitalist valorization presupposed a government of man's very species being, in terms not only of his brain but also of his body. To evoke the body in this context is not to reduce representation to epiphenomenon, however. Rather, it is to depart somewhat from a concern with discourse and subjectification, and to join instead with Konings, Lazzarato, and others, in a reflection on the importance of affect and bodily subjugation in the reproduction of capitalism. As a regime of power, austerity targets the body just as much as it does the subjective. What we must keep in sight today is the shift from Post-Fordist rent to austere taxation. If, in its unequal division of desire, Post-Fordist capitalism externalized an ever-greater share of the cost of production onto the realm of ‘living work’ (Lucarelli, 2010: 137), austerity amplifies the structural element of this double-bind, cynically exploring the extent to which the subject can be bypassed altogether.
What is to be done? One source of hope might be found in Deleuze and Guattari, who argue that desire is ‘neither attributable to individuals nor overcodable by collective signifiers’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 241). Desire is a phenomenon of the body, whether collectively or individually conceived and is, as such, irreducible to the assemblage. In this sense, it may also produce energetic ‘lines of flight’ which the assemblage cannot capture. Applied to our context, as Hardt and Negri put it, the expropriation of the common is not the simple upshot of the traditionally-conceived ‘technical composition’ of capital, where labor is considered a subservient organ in the overall development of productive processes (2009: 142). To the contrary, soliciting the knowledge and techniques of emotional labor and communication, Late Capitalism presupposes what Virno (2002) refers to as ‘mass intellectuality', a development which portents possible dangers for capitalism. The shift towards machinic control, while pernicious, nevertheless presupposes the recruitment of such intellectuality, and is thus still bound by the conditions of its own possibility to provide a wide-enough degree of freedom that labor can self-organize, or ‘produce cooperation autonomously’ (Hardt and Negri, 2009: 140). Certainly, it is right to speculate as to what impact future autonomous machines might have for capitalist dependency on the labouring subject (Frase, 2016). For now, however, mass intellectuality remains a factor and, because the assemblages of capitalist desire are now transnational in nature, they exhibit no obvious ‘center’ of command. In this sense, as Timothy Luke suggests, the potential for resistance confronts capitalism simultaneously, ‘from everywhere and nowhere’ (2001: 125).
The creative potential of globalized mass intellectuality is not yet fully known. The point, however, as Donna Harraway puts it, is not to rediscover a newly empowered proletariat, or other pre-given subject of anti-capitalist resistance. Rather, it is to claim that the cybernetic laborers of capitalism's machinic control may be more like illegitimate children, ‘often exceedingly unfaithful to their origins’ (Harraway, 1990: 67). Conceding that austerity's longevity is rooted in the realm of desire as well as consciousness, then, it is clear that anti-capitalist strategy must go beyond the level of merely waging an insurgency against the performance of neoliberal subjectivity. Anarchist-infused strategies, like Occupy Wall Street and 15-M, seek to disrupt efforts to suture hegemonic discourse by seizing the public squares and raising consciousness. They have been relatively unsuccessful to date, however. And, as Christaens puts it, this is likely because ‘they do not speak the language’ of the financial sector, and so their insurgent truths have trouble gaining legitimacy (Christaens, 2016: 10). Yet, anti-austerity strategies need not bind themselves solely to the terrain of the discursive. Departing from the contestation of neoliberal subjection, other movements seek instead to engage directly with the asignifying algorithms of capitalism. The notorious Yes Men, for example, have managed periodically to throw figurative spanners in the works of the global financial assemblage, by feeding it false data, and triggering glitches in its signaling regime (2016: 10). Other groups take this disruptive strategy even further, provisioning for more sustained departures from the transmission belts of capital's machinic axioms, through the creation of parallel socialist economies (Holland, 2011).
Such parallel economies bespeak ‘exodus'-style strategies, eschewing traditional state-focused hegemony in favor of material ruptures wherein imaginative cyber-nomadic potentialities can take flight. The complexities of global capitalism are such, however, that politically significant degrees of rupture will likely be impossible to accomplish without the embrace of some measure of state capacity. The question, therefore, is to balance the goal of provisioning for the movements of exodus, and all the creative, disruptive subjectivities they can generate, with that of a state-oriented hegemonic strategy (Arditi, 2014). Indeed, such concerns have been at the center of recent left-‘exit’ debates in Europe. Arguing against the case for a ‘Grexit’ from the euro, for example, Gindin and Panitch (2015) and Gourgouris (2015) suggested that the goal of provisioning for the Greek movements be approached with a degree of cautious realpolitik. Given the complete unreadiness of the Greek economy for life outside the euro, and the deep unpopularity of the idea in Greek polls, they insisted, the cause of exodus would be better served were the Greek state to take up the margin of freedom remaining to it within the eurozone system to create spaces for democratic production to flourish, and were the movements of Greece to mobilize in holding the state accountable to this goal.
The critique of biopolitical austerity is the basis thus not of an idealist demand. Pace Blyth, it refuses capitulation to the complacent, ever-delayed promises of liberal reformism. But neither does it call for vengeance upon the expropriators, with a view to reuniting the working class with some or other exact measure of alienated value. As Lordon advises, the history of socialist strategy attests to the inadequacy of the critique of fetishization as the basis of any emancipatory struggle; the objects of our love will always be externally determined for us, no matter how many class enemies we destroy (2014: 94). Instead, it is a critique which takes seriously Late Capitalism's cruel and antidemocratic division of desire, and its recent, cynical embrace of austere taxation. Hitherto actually existing socialisms, Foucault pointed out, have always been forced into the blackmail of having to mimic the governing logics either of liberalism, or of sovereign totalitarianism. For this reason, he concluded, a real left governmentality had yet to be ‘invented’ (Foucault, 2008: 94). Lordon is surely right, in this sense, when he suggests that the task of the communist today is to experiment, and to work towards effecting more democratic divisions of labor, premised on ‘equal participation in the determination of a shared collective destiny’ (2014: 131).
1. This is in contrast to Ordoliberalism, which Foucault discusses as a separate, more interventionist branch of neoliberalism that takes competition as a ‘principle of order’ for the organization of a secure life, but not fully a ‘principle on which one could construct society as a whole’ (2008: 248).
2. Indeed, this example seems to capture the essential controversy of Ireland's JobBridge program, introduced under the guidance of the European Troika, wherein unemployed young Irish workers are stricken from the national register while they pursue ‘experience’ by taking non-salaried six-month positions, all while still drawing welfare (see IMPACT, 2015).
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