Culture,Politics,and Governing : Contemporary Ascetics and the Pecuniary Subject

In Culture, Politics, and Governing, the study of contemporary ascetics provided me with a way to approach the practice of knowledge production and its intersection with cultural production that was able to take into account the institutionalization of authors and artists and the ways in which their practices were both governed and governing, often through valorization. My contention in that study was that it is important to understand the ways in which, as the production of ontological bases for action, cultural production also functions as a form of knowledge production. Written between 2007 and 2014 as I moved between university systems in North America and New Zealand, this book focused on academics and artists as governed subjects who also contribute to or resist contemporary relations of governing. In order to understand these intersections of ascetics and governing, I turned to Max Weber, Michel Foucault, the Frankfurt School, and to later critical theorists whose work could be situated at the intersection of critical cultural and political theory.

Recently, I have worked to extend this framework to settings that are less obvious as sites for the production of governing knowledge: what Max Weber (2002) and Foucault (2005) discussed as ascetics, generated through what Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno (1989) called the culture industry. The contemporary culture industry produces an art of living genre that encourages pecuniary subjects who treat the self as a site for the production of value from which to practice valorized ascetics (Nickel, 2016). My thoughts about the pecuniary subject were inspired by William Leach’s (1993) notion of ‘pecuniary space’. Leach (1993) uses ‘pecuniary space’ to describe Times Square after it was transformed into a commercial arena.

Although I take care to distinguish my view of the subject from Thorstein Veblen’s (see Nickel, 2016), the modifier pecuniary, in the tradition of Veblen, helped me to understand pecuniary relations more generally. It was the intersection of this exploration of the art of living genre with my thinking on ascetics and governing that led me to the notion of the pecuniary subject.

The political significance of the ‘art of living’ was detailed in Foucault’s (1992) inquiry into ‘the use of pleasure’ and ‘the care of the self’. The contemporary art of living genre includes the technologies of the self promoted through circuits such as HGTV’s House Hunters, where homes are profit-generators, the BBC’s Come Dine with Me, in which dinner parties are competitions, or web portals such as Goop, which instructs us in how to ‘shop, go, be, do, see, make, get’. The conduct encouraged by scenes of pecuniary achievement – ‘winning’ dinners, ‘exclusive’ purchases, and promoted-personas – hints at the way in which the contemporary art of living genre centers value as a source of self around which to develop a domain of pecuniary practices. To criticize such practices is not to find fault with those who want to eat a pleasant dinner or live in a comfortable home. However, the political implications of these practices remain uncontested to the extent that they are successfully embedded as an ascetic fitting for the contemporary needs of governing. These theaters of conduct collapse the pursuit of value and the pursuit of the self and thus foster both a ‘pecuniary aesthetic’ (Leach, 1993: 39) and a pecuniary ascetic: a guide to the art of living and a guide to the ethic of the self, both of which are often embedded in hierarchies (Nickel, 2016). While many recognize these productions as fictional forms of entertainment – what Timothy W. Luke (2002) calls entertainmentality – they are nonetheless important targets of critique because our conduct in relationship to pecuniary aesthetics is precisely what is at stake in governing.

My hope is that this conceptualization might focus new critical attention on those political aspects of subjectivity that exceed the neoliberal framework. As Johanna Oksala (2015) argued, ‘it is imperative to also theorize these new forms of the subject and the political potential they hold for radical social transformation’. Although I have focused much of my own energy on neoliberalism and still consider it to be an important focus of critique, neoliberal subjectivity increasingly seems to me to be unable to fully account for the subject of knowledge/culture production who practices resistance. As Terry Flew (2015) points out, neoliberalism explains some things, but it cannot explain everything; nor, as Oksala points out, does it exhaust the question of subjectivity. The immutability of the neoliberal subject is challenged not only by practices of resistance but also by the fact that even the so-called ‘utility function’ cannot fully account for the ‘philanthropic subject’ who practices acquiescence under the guise of resistance (Nickel, 2016).

In my reading of Foucault, governing depends upon more than the self-interested neoliberal subject because governing depends upon more than ‘economic science’ (Foucault, 2008: 286). The ‘Zen consumers’ cultivated by Goop are not actively practicing, nor fully governed, by the singular logics of homo economicus or homo juridicus (Foucault, 2008: 276). In the tradition of Foucault, as well as Weber, the Frankfurt School, and later critical theorists, I am interested in investigating under what conditions a particular subjectivity becomes valuable as individuals practice an ascetic that encourages a hierarchy of subjectivities (e.g. good homeowners, savvy shoppers, healthy eaters, self-aware beings), which often is a form of practice that contributes to the maintenance of the present pecuniary ontology (i.e. well-being is achieved through the production and promotion of valued-selves in the market). In its production of a pecuniary subjectivity, the art of living genre stabilizes an ascetic that, to the extent that it is not resisted, restricts the opportunity for most people to live in a manner that does not involve the production of value for others.