Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste

by Philip Mirowski

  This is how I would suggest we should read the disdain of authors like Clive Barnett concerning the way Foucault has been frequently married to critiques of neoliberalism in countless screeds.21 As we have observed, many authors of a Marxist bent want to portray neoliberalism as the simple deployment of class power over the unsuspecting masses, but encounter difficulty in specifying the chains of causality stretching from the elusive executive committee of the capitalist class down to the shopper at Wal-Mart. To paper over the gap, many reach for Foucault and “governmentality” to evoke how shifts from state to market are modulated in the microcontexts of everyday life. But of course, the later Foucault abjured their Marxism; and furthermore, his own appeals to the hard discipline of the market merely recapitulated the invisible hand jive of the neoliberals themselves. The incompatibility with Marxism should have been blindingly obvious, since dissolving all labor into entrepreneurialism of the self thoroughly undermines any Marxist concepts of exploitation and surplus value, and therefore, much else besides. In any event, Foucault disavowed any such use of his work for most of his career: “We must cease once and for all to describe the effects of power in negative terms: it ‘excludes,’ it ‘represseses,’ it ‘masks,’ it ‘conceals.’ In fact, power produces reality; it produces domains of objects and rituals of truth.”22 By the time of The Birth of Biopolitics, Foucault denied any efficacy to the modern conscious intent on the part of anyone to exert political power, because the market effectively thwarts it.23 This comes dangerously close to subsequent platitudes that the crisis was no one’s fault, because it was everyone’s fault. That train of thought just paralyzes analysis.

  There is even a deeper reason to hesitate when it comes to biopolitics. Foucault also declines to allow that agents are somehow bamboozled by power/knowledge, since the market is posited to exist in a privileged epistemological space with special position in the regime of truth. The fact that neoliberal concepts such as human capital seep into the daily lives of those perched outside the NTC is just evidence that the entire system of power/knowledge works: autogovernance of the entrepreneurial self is not a puppet show, but rather the wherewithal of how modern agents bring the truth of the world into their own lives. Paraphrasing Walter Benjamin, modern neoliberal citizens must learn to forget about their “rights” and be given free rein to “express themselves,” especially through the greatest information-conveyance device known to mankind, the market. This is very nearly what Foucault himself believed:

  People rebel, that is a fact. In this way subjectivity (and not just that of great men but of any given person) enters into history and breathes life into it. A prisoner sets her life against excessive punishment. A mentally ill person does not want to be incarcerated and robbed of rights. A people sets itself against a regime that oppresses it. In this way, the prisoner does not become innocent, the mentally ill person does not become healthy, and the people do not take part in the promised future. And no one must show solidarity with them. No one must believe that these voices might sing more beautifully than others and pronounce the final truth. It is enough that they are there and that everything attempts to silence them in order that it becomes meaningful to want to listen to them and understand what they say . . . Because such voices exist, the era of humans does not have the form of evolution, but of history.24

  It is not so much that resistance is futile for Foucault, as it is that the audience for leftist rebellion is fickle. Truth is a mobile army of metaphors. Empathy has the half-life of the time it takes to click the remote control. And for recovering post-structuralists, things don’t really change.

  Our approach in this volume will be different. We shall maintain there is no such thing as “the market” as monolithic entity, and in any case, it does not come equipped with supernatural powers of truth production. Markets don’t “validate” truth; rather, markets are the product of struggles over the truth. Furthermore, Foucault was just dead wrong about neoliberalism as fostering the autolimitation of state power. He bought into the exoteric doctrine that the market is the backstop of the state, keeping it in check. The state has not been limited in purview by the neoliberal response to crisis, but instead, has greatly expanded its role, in finance, in “picking winners,” and in the discipline of citizens through the further injection of neoliberal themes into everyday life. The Schmittian usurpation of power has been formidable. The jumble that gets lumped together as “the market” is constructed on the fly in such situations; and it is as much a bricolage as its counterpart, the neoliberal construct of the self. Both are not constructed top-down, from blueprints kindly supplied by Mont Pèlerin, nor bottom-up through the aimless evolution of the kosmos, but rather outward, in trial-and-error mutual adjustment of the politically fortified market and the everyday entrepreneurial self.

  We take as our fugleman not Foucault but rather people such as Martijn Konings, Carolyn Sissoko, Yves Smith, and Christopher Payne, who insist that the crisis was not some aberration due to overenthusiastic deregulation, but instead the expression of intrinsic system pathologies. This chapter explores the way those pathologies were embedded in the very everyday neoliberalism that has become so prevalent since the 1980s. Foucault’s concentration on micropower had an unfortunate tendency to keep the noses of his followers too close to the ground, and hence to ignore how the entrepreneurial self was then recruited into all sorts of innovations that took place on the phenomenological level of markets. Exquisite discipline of the self was treated as hapless if it did not make money for someone even more entrepreneurial than you. The mechanisms that culminated in the crisis were built upon foundations of the entrepreneurial self, from exhortations to surrender to the risk of thrill-ride mortgages, capitulation to the financialization of everyday life, participation in virtual selves wending their way through the “weightless economy” on the Internet, day trading like the big boys, getting your information from Facebook and Fox and talk radio, to the indulgences of entertainment theology as Ponzi scheme, and recruitment into astroturfed politics to assist you in expressing your smoldering yet underappreciated individuality. Everyone strove to assume a persona that someone else would be willing to invest in, all in the name of personal improvement.

  Found yourself in trouble? You could always sell a kidney or enroll in a drug trial . . . Maybe you could rent your body as surrogate mother, or maybe resort to just a little strategic intimacy, with discreet recompense on the side25 . . . Wait! Someone from India is already calling you on the phone to offer you an even more outrageously far-fetched baroque loan! And there’s an app for that . . . Just make the leap of faith . . . Make some money in your spare time! Unemployment is an unbidden golden opportunity to start anew with an entirely different life! Don’t let the moochers and complainers drag you down! Become your own boss, after you embrace the power of positive thinking . . . Didn’t you always want to start your own business, after working a quarter-century for corporations?

  We will close with the ultimate in solipsism in promotion of everyday neoliberalism: Don’t like the way things are looking? Has the state of the world got you down? Then create your own personal solipsistic economy, a fit virtual abode for your own fragmented entrepreneurial identity.26 That’s the ultimate in self-reliance.

  Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory of the Coming of the Galt

  Foucault refuses to allow that people may be mired in “false consciousness,” or to concede that there are means by which they may become instilled with systematically distorted beliefs about both themselves and their place in the social order, distractions that work in regular ways against their own interests and welfare. There have been a fair number of writers who assert the contrary; one worth considering because he has been specifically concerned with political developments in the last three decades in the United States is Thomas Frank. In his breakthrough book What’s the Matter with Kansas? he posed the question in a rather American idiom: Why had the blue-collar working class abandoned the Democratic Party in favor
of voting for snake-oil neoliberal salesmen who had demonstrated open contempt for their welfare? Or as he himself put it:

  All they have to show for their Republican loyalty are lower wages, more dangerous jobs, dirtier air, a new overlord class that comports itself like King Farouk—and of course, a crap culture whose moral free fall continues, without significant interference from the grandstanding Christers whom they send triumphantly back to Washington every couple of years.27

  Frank’s answer to his own question was, crudely, a version of “bait and switch” that subsequently gained a fair level of acceptance among circles of the U.S. left, at least before the crisis. He suggested that the working class had gotten distracted by a constant harping on a broad range of cultural and religious issues, fired up through talk-radio raving and local pulpits, and thus overlooked or displaced their more direct economic concerns: they were mesmerized by “cultural wedge issues like guns and abortion and the rest whose hallucinatory appeal would ordinarily be far overshadowed by material concerns.” In this diagnosis, the median voter mistook the froth of “values” for denunciation of sharp dealing dedicated to stealing away their livelihoods.28

  There are all manner of reasons to be skeptical of the bait-and-switch account of “false consciousness” when it comes to the triumph of neoliberalism. The least of these caveats came when economists were promptly scandalized by the very notion that Homo economicus could ever suspend his assiduous calculation of economic advantage under any circumstances whatsoever, and therefore proceeded to deny there was any phenomenological world of values outside of the political marketplace; some rather unimaginative souls consequently engaged in all manner of statistical wizardry to demonstrate that true-blue American agents had never once disregarded their legitimate “economic” interests.29 Another, more pertinent complaint against Frank would be that the simplistic dichotomy of Republican vs. Democratic parties did not begin to capture the phenomenon beating at the heart of the transformation; Frank had himself admitted elsewhere that party affiliation does not easily translate into what he calls “market populism,” which has infected both parties (One Market Under God). The obsession with Red/Blue scores inside the Beltway tends to diverts us from the real issue of the cultural framing of political consciousness. And then there was the onset of the crisis itself: here was an economic catastrophe so great that no one, no matter how beguiled and hornswoggled, could long avert their eyes. And yet, with their minds focused forcibly on economic matters, still the electorate was persuaded to respond to it in ways reminiscent of the earlier decade: great masses of voters under the sway of the putative Tea Party had in 2010 voted in the most neoliberal Congress of all time.

  Probably the best indication that the crisis has deep-sixed most simple “bait and switch” accounts of the success of neoliberalism is that Tom Frank himself had to walk back his earlier thesis in his postcrisis book Pity the Billionaire. By that, I do not intend to suggest Frank openly admitted he was wrong in Kansas, but rather, he did rather concede that the Tea Party and other redoubts of revanchism were avoiding issues of social conservatism in favor of defending “freedom” against creeping socialism. Frank in effect had to face up to the fact that his earlier book was incapable of addressing the nagging question that is also the topic of the current chapter: “What kind of misapprehension permits the newest Right to brush off truths that everyone else can see so plainly?”30

  The problem with bait-and-switch accounts is that they compartmentalize everyday experience in a way that utterly misconstrues how neoliberalism works. Tom Frank in an earlier incarnation had seemingly understood this: “Making the world safe for billionaires has been as much a cultural and political operation as an economic one”; it was only when he artificially set them at odds that he attained best-sellerdom with Kansas, but at the price of losing his way. The core insight of the Neoliberal Thought Collective was that the cultural and the economic should not be treated as substitutes, much less discrete spheres of experience, but rather, as integrated into a virtuous whole: surrender your selfish arrogance and humbly prostrate yourself before the Wisdom of the Universe, as nurtured and conveyed by the market. “Be all you can be” had jettisoned the injunction to “know yourself” and replaced it with “Start your own business!” even if it only meant homeschooling your children. As religion took on more of the trappings of just-in-time provision of entertainment services, and “values” assumed the mix-and-match character of Do It Yourself bricolage, the materiality of rock-solid “interests” melted into thin air. After all, neoliberals deny that you are the unimpeachable judge of your own welfare, however much they worship at the altar of Freedom. The more the line between “The Sphere Previously Known as the Economic” and culture or religion was progressively obscured and erased, the more irreversible the neoliberal long march. Conversely, if citizens believed that the game was rigged and the fix was in, now the only way they could manage to express it would be with variants upon the dogma that the Government was encroaching upon the ever-flexible and blameless Me. Collective nouns were being slowly leached from usage in the language. The ideal neoliberal agent was a person who didn’t even need to know she was neoliberal, because the various aspects of her selfhood were conceived as being in natural harmony with the totality of the kosmos, whether she consciously aspired to be wicked vanguard rebel or placid conformist. As Foucault so aptly summarized it, “There is no first or final point of resistance to political power other than in the relationship of self to self.”31

  This may explain why Frank’s Pity the Billionaire comes off as such a letdown: he senses that something deep and structural is permitting the neoliberals to escape scot-free from the crisis, and it possibly has something to do with general comprehension of everyday life, but the best he can muster is endless sneering jibes launched at Glenn Beck and Ayn Rand. He can’t be bothered to immerse himself in what the neoliberal theorists and right-wing economists have written, and consequently misconstrues neoliberalism as the most superficial “rollback of the state”; in the language of the previous chapter, he never gets beyond the exoteric doctrines of the thought collective. Worse, he then attributes the political strength of the neoliberal resurgence to the superficial facts that many in the Tea Party get their information only from Beck and Fox News, combined with the notion that hoi polloi expected some breast-beating and bankster-roasting after the crisis, but that the Democratic Party declined to provide it. He quotes, but does not take to heart, the ambition of the leader of the Koch-funded Freedom Works, Dick Armey, “not just to learn from their opponents on the left, but to beat them at their own game.”32

  The Rise of the Neoliberal Agent is not very easy to gloss, by any means. Anytime one resorts to Belief/Action scenarios, three centuries of philosophical qualifications loom, not to mention social psychology as indicated in chapter 1, threatening to freeze the argument in its tracks. And then there are the various objections that harry the attempt to draw determinants from political considerations. There is the recurrent unwillingness in giving up hard and fast distinctions between the economy and the world of the spirit, as we have been describing. There is the crucial distinction between the esoteric and exoteric versions of neoliberal doctrine, as outlined in the last chapter. The average person may be encouraged to believe all sorts of things about the government that have no correspondence to the esoteric neoliberal playbook, or untethered from any facts, for instance, and this is a key aspect of the construction of a viable neoliberal self under the sway of the double-truth doctrine. The average citizen severely underestimates the amount of their livelihood that comes from the government; and are utterly deluded about their current place in the distribution of income and wealth. There is the wild card of globalization: How much of the outlines of neoliberal agency has been contingent upon the cultures of the hegemonic centers of capital, curious artifacts of the parochial peccadilloes of its incubators, and how much can be regarded as a new model for cosmopolitan existence in a world that
persists in thinking it shrugs off the trappings of the nation-state? There is a literature, located particularly in anthropology, which preaches that cosmopolitan aspirations of neoliberal “reforms” are deceptive, because more often than not they are predicated upon minor reconfigurations of long-standing local practices.33 And then there is the difficult question of just to what extent these particular innovations in agency are relatively new, and how much they come lumbered with a long, hallowed heritage, which obviously intersects with the question of the extent to which the NTC can legitimately appeal to small-c “conservatism” in its older Burkean sense. Does the neoliberal self have an archetype, or a birthday? With everyone from Jesus CEO to the “Founding Fathers” undergoing retreads, facelifts, and résumé rewrites, challenging the historical authenticity of many of the icons of neoliberal selfhood could become a full-time operation on its own.

  These questions are all important, and deserve serious consideration, but this chapter is not the place to attempt to settle them. Friedrich Hayek once claimed to be able to separate “true” liberalism from its “false” pretender; I have far less confidence in my own ability to accomplish anything similar for neoliberalism. My more limited goal here is to establish some of the most salient facets of neoliberalism with a human face in the early twenty-first century. It is far too premature to write the definitive biography of the neoliberal self, so in lieu of comprehensive cultural history, perhaps we can peruse a few quotidian snapshots from various angles and profiles. Think of it as Five or So Vignettes on the Life and Times of John Galt.

  The proof of the project will not come in adherence to some Identikit notion of accuracy, but rather with personal recognition of the subconscious prompts that lurk in each of our own lives, the attitudes that have grown to be the unremarkable furniture of waking life, and their possible instrumentality when it comes down to acquiescence in the neoliberal wisdom of crowds. The advent of the neoliberal way of being quite literally transforms the subject, and consequently, inhibits all tendencies to interpret the crisis as a system-wide failure of economic organization.