Five Vignettes from the Life of John Galt
A) The Freedom That Comes from Fragmentation.
The Neoliberal Thought Collective, as suggested in the last chapter, interprets freedom in a largely negative fashion, while simultaneously elevating freedom as the ultimate value. While this observation has become commonplace in the literature on political philosophy, that commentary has been strangely silent on how neoliberals have come to abjure or otherwise avoid the salience of positive liberty. The key to comprehension of the neutralization of time-honored traditions of positive liberty comes with the progressive fragmentation of the self, both in economic theory and in everyday life. The moral quest to discover your one and only “true self” has been rendered thoroughly obsolete by the reengineering of everyday life, and that, in turn, is the fons et origo of most characteristics of everyday neoliberalism.
I start with the notion that definitions of private property are bound up with the presumed definition of the self. The classical liberal approach to this question has been admirably summarized by Margaret Radin:
I have used the term “personal property” to refer to categories of property that we understand to be bound up with the self in a way that we understand to be morally justifiable . . . Since personal property is connected with the self, morally justifiably, in a constitutive way, to disconnect it from the person (from the self) harms or destroys the self. The more something takes on the indicia of an attribute or characteristic of the self, or at least the self as the person herself would wish, the more problematic it seems to alienate it . . .34
Radin builds upon this observation to argue in favor of imposition of spheres of “incomplete commodification,” and to prohibit some markets altogether, such as the selling of human infants. The Rosetta Stone of neoliberalism rejects the basic premise of this version of liberalism, not only by denying that any such spheres should exist, but more important, insisting there is no self that is harmed by the creation and alienation of private property. Indeed, one might reasonably wonder if there is much of any Archimedean Self whatsoever in the neoliberal game plan. Absent such a self, there is nothing left of a “positive” notion of freedom to preserve and protect.
This analysis may seem incorrigibly bloodless and abstract, but it is not. The banishment of the core unified self is experienced daily in a thousand different ways by every single person who holds down a job, gets ejected from a job, gets sick, surfs the Internet, sits in a classroom, embarks on a love affair, watches a movie, emulates a celebrity, or starts a family. The news is brought home in most instances wherein someone is forced to juggle multiple roles in social situations, and discovers that the demands of one role contradict or belie those of another. Of course, the insight that the self may be internally conflicted is nowise new or deep; neither is the notion of adoption of multiple personas distinguished by context; nevertheless, the routinization and standardization of denial of a true invariant self has become a hallmark of modern life. It is the sheer ordinariness of the expectation that the self should provide no obstacle to success because it is supple, modular, and plastic that is the germ of everyday neoliberalism. The traces of the vanishing self are of course pervasive in economic life, but are by no means confined to it.
The fragmentation of the neoliberal self begins when the agent is brought face to face with the realization that she is not just an employee or student, but also simultaneously a product to be sold, a walking advertisement, a manager of her résumé, a biographer of her rationales, and an entrepreneur of her possibilities. She has to somehow manage to be simultaneously subject, object, and spectator. She is perforce not learning about who she really is, but rather, provisionally buying the person she must soon become. She is all at once the business, the raw material, the product, the clientele, and the customer of her own life. She is a jumble of assets to be invested, nurtured, managed, and developed; but equally an offsetting inventory of liabilities to be pruned, outsourced, shorted, hedged against, and minimized. She is both headline star and enraptured audience of her own performance. These are not effortless personas to be adopted, but roles to be fortified and regimented on a continuous basis. As Foucault insisted, the neoliberal self dissolves the distinction between producer and consumer. Furthermore, there is no preset hierarchy of resident personas, but only a shifting cast of characters, depending upon the exigencies of the moment. The summum bonum of modern agency is to present oneself as eminently flexible in any and all respects.35
This kind of everyday wisdom is so pervasive that one tends to notice it only in cases of extreme parody, such as that reported by Siva Vaidhyanathan:
In his manual for a better (or, at least, for his own) life, The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9–5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich, self-help guru and Silicon Valley entrepreneur Timothy Ferriss outlines his secrets to a productive and wealthy life. One of the book’s central tenets is to “outsource everything.” Ferriss suggests we hire a series of concierges to triage our correspondences, arrange travel and restaurant reservations, contact old friends, and handle routine support tasks in our lives. Ferriss contracts with concierge companies in India to handle much of his data flow. He suggests we hire local people to take our clothes to the cleaners, scrub our floors, and cook for us.
Ferriss has become a guru to the geek set, as I witnessed at the book-signing event for his hefty fitness manual, The 4-Hour Body, at the 2011 South by Southwest Interactive meeting in Austin, Texas. A line of more than one hundred remarkably unkempt, unfit young men waited to shake Ferriss’s hand and thank him for releasing them from the bonds of the full-time working grind. They can’t all be working four-hour weeks, I thought. My understanding of work life in the tech sector leads me to believe that retrieving the forty-hour week would be a major personal, if not indeed a political, victory. Ferriss greeted fanboys for more than an hour that day, leaving him a mere three more hours of actual work before the fun began. As if to emphasize his mastery over his life and the better times he had waiting for him upon his release from the event, Ferriss held hands with a striking young woman who looked as if she could not wait to be relieved of this duty to dazzle young men with whom she would rather not make eye contact. It was not clear if that young woman was part of Ferriss’s outsourced personal labor force. But she certainly did not seem thrilled to be part of his commercial branding effort.
Ferriss’s life is his brand, his data, his evidence, his project. In his books he shares—no, sells—every feature of his daily life, including details of ejaculations and defecations. Every aspect of Ferriss’s life is on the market, just as he engages with market transactions to advance many of his professional and personal aims.36
This was a quantum leap beyond the social psychology of an Erving Goffmann, merely the age-old challenge of the staged presentation of the self in everyday life. Living in the material world these days means that one must maintain a rather strained, distanced relationship to the self, since one must be prepared to shed the current pilot at a moment’s notice. Due to the shifting cast of characters with their complements of accessories, technologies, and emotional attachments, it is never altogether clear whom precisely is managing the menagerie. Outsourced components of the self still need to report to something more than a post office box on some distant offshore platform.37 Integration and coordination may sometimes need to take a backseat to innovation and appropriation. Self-care must be balanced against the dictum that bygones are bygones, or in more economic terms, sunk costs should never be entered into calculation of expected future revenues. The weight of history is more often than not considered a burden of little consequence for the entrepreneurial agent, something that can be repudiated and reversed. The stipulation of flexibility militates against treating any aspect of the self as indispensible; taken to extremes, this can resemble out-of-body experience or asomatoagnosia.
Ethnographers of everyday life have noted these effects in societies that have been severely disrupted by economic down
sizing and roiled by neoliberal modernization. For instance, those seeking employment must learn to regard themselves as a “bundle of skills” for which they bear sole responsibility. Over time, the language of “skills” has transmigrated away from older notions of craft mastery, and toward a vague set of “life skills,” “communication skills,” and a range of related euphemisms for amenability to enter into temporary alliances with others, and to accept all forms of supervision. “Soft skills discourses are largely about persuading workers that these skills are what they are made of.” One no longer simply contracts to supply quantities of abstract labor; rather, one commits to a willingness to alter one’s very quiddity in an ongoing adjustment of agency to the requirements of social and physical adaptability to shifting market forces. Emily Martin has demonstrated how such techniques are inculcated in management training, while Barbara Ehrenreich documents the ways that the recently unemployed are exhorted to forget their past and become a different person. The mortal sin denounced by unemployment counseling is to blame your status on some immotile attribute of the self, even one that might seem impervious to change, such as chronological age. She quotes the counselor at a boot camp for the white-collar unemployed: “It’s all internal—whether you’re sixty-two or forty-two or twenty-two . . . It’s never about the external world. It’s always between you and you.” Unless you can be split in twain and still discern your center of gravity, the “internal” threatens to become unmoored from any coordinates whatsoever.38
In Alcoholics Anonymous, one is taught to chant: “God, give us the grace to accept with serenity the things that cannot be changed, courage to change the things which should be changed, and the wisdom to distinguish the one from the other.” Neoliberals go Niebuhr one better by deleting the first and last clauses as superfluous. This is illustrated by interviews conducted with corporate counselors by Elaine Swan:
I don’t think there is such a thing as a false self . . . It’s [instead] expanding their choices and options. So there’s no false self. There’s just limited awareness and the options we have at any one time . . . It’s not false, it’s out of date. So they just come in for an upgrade. My job is to create an upgrade of their life that is structured in such a way—if I use that computer metaphor—that it will have an inbuilt self-updating ability.39
These technologies of the self are drilled into every supplicant from something as small as how you arrange your dress and grooming to something as large as how you “choose” to invest your life with meaning. A major technology for self-constitution can be something as simple as how you dress: “Proper management of one’s external appearances simply signals to one’s superiors that one is prepared to undertake other kinds of self-adaptation.” At the other end of the scale, espousal of a religion of well-entrenched denomination is treated as one of the best techniques for demonstrating self-care and willingness to refashion one’s identity. One of the most effective means of networking with other itinerant entrepreneurial selves is through vaguely denominational prayer meetings for businessmen. As for laborers in the service sector, the “feminization” of the workforce through part-time casualized work with erosion of seniority and benefits has been recast as a “blending of service, shopping and religion”; the imposition of personal flexibility in organizations such as Wal-Mart is rendered bearable as a commitment to “family values.” Rehab, retreats, and five-step programs are on offer for people who lose their bearings in juggling and altering their multiple selves, as we will observe below. The most common prescription for identity breakdown is—what else?—yet more intensified entrepreneurialism of the self.40
The plasticity of the self is not only demonstrated in employment settings, but also in the so-called private sphere of everyday life. Arlie Hochschild describes a smorgasbord of possibilities in her Outsourced Self. Some more entertaining examples of self-outsourcing include: hiring a “nameologist” so you won’t inadvertently give your offspring monikers that condemn them to lives of “weight problems” or “poverty syndrome”; spending dough on a “coordinator” for your child’s fifth birthday party so kindergartners won’t get bored; paying a “wantologist” to help you align your perceived needs to what you can afford; and handing over $2,000 to a consulting outfit called Family/360 that rates your parenting skills on a scorecard and then draws up an action plan of “best practices” to help you create more positive “family memories” for your children. You can pay someone to look in on your elderly father at the nursing home, and you can pay someone else to provide a personally tailored funeral for him after he goes—such as a Nascar-themed casket “or a biodegradable one, for the environmentally conscious.” Too busy or too lazy to scatter your departed father’s ashes into the ocean yourself ? Maritime Funeral Services on Long Island will do that for you. But these still reside in the more conventional realm of the service economy.
One of the most studied examples of the rise of neoliberal agency is the behavior of people while surfing the Internet. The popular press has been besotted with notions that the Web has turned the provision of information upside down, and in the process has altered our humanity. Horror stories of online characters misrepresenting their identity are rife in our culture; but one needs to get past the simplistic moralism to discover that the Internet has become a testbed of simulation practice for the modern fragmented self. It is not just that on the Web no one knows whether you’re a dog; it is that most people have embraced this technology to give them the sense of what it feels like to mimic a convincing canine. Starting with rudimentary chat sites, and moving on to the Game of Life, Second Life, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and the rest, one can experience the thrill and the danger of tailoring one’s identity to the fleeting demands of the moment.41
There are so many different instrumentalities of simulation and dissimulation on the Web that they cannot be comprehensively surveyed here. To offer just a truncated indicator, we can point to the neoliberal technology par excellence, Facebook. Facebook is the ultimate in reflexive apparatus: it is a wildly successful business that teaches its participants how to turn themselves into a flexible entrepreneurial identity. Even though Facebook sells much of the information posted to it, it stridently maintains that all responsibility for fallout from the Facebook wall devolves entirely to the user. It forces the participant to construct a “profile” from a limited repertoire of relatively stereotyped materials, challenging the person to somehow attract “friends” by tweaking their offerings to stand out from the vast run of the mill. It incorporates subtle algorithms that force participants to regularly change and augment their profiles, thus continuously destabilizing their “identity,” as well as inducing real-time metrics to continuously monitor their accumulated “friends” and numbers of “hits” on their pages. It distills the persona down to a jumble of unexplained tastes and alliances, the mélange of which requires the constant care and management by an entity that bears some tenuous relationship to the persona uploaded, but who must maintain an assured clear distance from it. Facebook profiles then feed back into “real life”: employers scan Facebook pages of prospective employees, parents check the pages of their children, lovers check Facebook pages for evidence of philandering. As the consequences of multiple personas of indeterminate provenance proliferate, the solution for Facebook problems is always more tinkering on Facebook.42 If you don’t like the profile you made, you can attempt to erase it, but with only indifferent success. It is a scale model of the neoliberal self, and most instructively, it makes a profit.
As Turkle so deftly puts it, on the Internet, in solitude, one discovers new intimacy; and in prior intimacies, the Internet offers new solitudes:
Brad says, only half jokingly, that he worries about getting “confused” between what he “composes” for his online life and who he “really” is. Not yet confirmed in his identity, it makes him anxious to post things about himself that he doesn’t really know are true. It burdens him that the things he says online affect how people tre
at him in the real. People already relate to him based on things he has said on Facebook. Brad struggles to be more “himself” there, but this is hard.43
Contemporary fascination with the virtual online world may foster the impression that the neoliberal demolition of the self is primarily notional or psychological, happening only in cyberspace; but that would be an unfortunate error. Modern culture is, if anything, even more obsessed with the reconfiguration and dismemberment of the physical body than it is with the reformation of the soul. The corporeal self should be rendered as plastic and malleable as “skills” or “attitudes” if it is yield to the entrepreneurial gaze. The endless exhortation to undergo self-improvement extends not just to raiment and grooming, but cuts to the corporeal level. Everyone is of course prodded to lose weight and redistribute body mass; but if that isn’t sufficient, then there begin the intrusive procedures of liposuction, botox, plastic surgery, and implants. While the quest for a pleasing demeanor is ancient (including piercings and primitive tattoos), and many cosmetic surgical practices were innovated in reconstructive surgery dating from the nineteenth century, the treatment of the body as raw material for the sculptor’s knife in pursuit of a different self is relatively recent, and its credibility heavily indebted to neoliberal notions of self-improvement. The inducements to carve the body in the name of speculative enhancement serves to teach many people the basic principles of neoliberalism at a visceral level, people who might otherwise never give a second thought to political theory or economic imperatives. Furthermore, corporeal reconstruction of the self is not skin-deep, but extends down to the organs and very cells, as we discuss in section E. Tom Frank extracted the eventual terminus of this logic from an article in Forbes: “Cannibalize yourself.”44
Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste Page 15
