Abstract
The question of neoliberal life is, as Sam Binkley’s insightful book makes clear, the question of a life that is worth living: it is the question of the temporality of happiness, of the communities in which its habitual forms are realised, and of the strategies of governance through which the happiness of human beings is coordinated with their power to capitalise the world in which they live.
Binkley’s contention is that the neoliberal regime, as it has evolved in advanced industrial societies, has performed a miracle: the pursuit of happiness has been totally integrated into the systems of hyper-productivity and hyper-consumption that are the drivers of the global economy. Each one of us has become a nodal point in the protentive organisation of social, economic and political institutions; each one of us is locked into a system of isolated, egoistic self-improvement (being thinner, or more muscular, or better in bed, or publishing more, or moving to a better area) whose strategic significance lies in the indefinite extension of individual desire. Binkley contends that this discursive construction of happiness as remorseless self-improvement should be conceived as constituting the subjective space, or fold, through which the dynamics of capitalisation have transformed the world.
Binkley’s analysis presents a detailed re-reading of Michel Foucault’s account of biopower, which focuses on the way in which disciplinary practice has mutated into a technical discourse through which the body and its organic satisfactions have been colonised by political and economic strategies. The state no longer controls the populace through direct coercion and repressive surveillance; the desire of its subjects has been dispersed across an infinite plurality of schemes, projects and life choices that arise from the evolving relationship between capitalism and biopower. The ‘re-timing’ of the body that the state achieved as a prelude to the emergence of the commodity form, therefore, has been transformed by the neoliberal organisation of the market around the constant extension of individual desire. The state is no longer the explicit form of the habitus that is realised in the institutional body of society: it has become a mechanism whose primary function is to protect the emotional, physical and cognitive resources that are mobilised in the pursuit of an infinitely futural happiness.
This task is, as Binkley points out, an impossible one. The ethos of neoliberalism demands non-interference in the life of the individual: each of us has an absolute right to pursue our dreams in any way we see fit, as long as those dreams are not socially damaging, perverse or self-destructive. Without this, the neoliberal doctrine of happiness is nothing, for its power to mobilise human capital would be lost to the inertial effects of culture, history and reflection. And so the functions of the state are reduced to framing strategies that fit with the neoliberal demand for ceaseless performativity: fitness for all, healthy eating for all, lifetime learning for all, extended working life for all. It is this double bind, this complicity of governance with the discourse of happiness through constant self-improvement, which threatens the asphyxiation of life under the neoliberal regime. For once the pulsions, affects and intentions that constitute the fold of human subjectivity have been made to respond only to the codes of economic performativity, the way to happiness also becomes the way to isolation, anxiety and depression.
Binkley’s analysis therefore returns us to the question of what constitutes a life worth living – a life that could resist the double bind in which the subjective economy of reason, representation and affect has been colonised by the regime of hyper-performativity. If there is a ‘politics’ that arises from this asphyxiation of life, it is, for Binkley, grounded in the somatic experience of social strangulation: ‘the gentle tightening around the windpipe that many feel but few can name’. This experience is an effect of the constant re-timing of the body performed within the networks of the neoliberal regime: the constant pressure to attain the optimal modification of the self to the techno-economic demands of the market gives rise to events of somatic convulsion, whose affective violence threatens the smooth reproduction of biopolitical capital. Such events, in other words, belong to the finitude of the subject; they come from the primordial experience of being a ‘self’ whose integrity is always threatened by new developments in the ‘science’ of happiness (dietetics, self-help psychologies, fitness regimes etc). And so while it is true that the ‘becoming’ of the individual that is demanded by neoliberal societies is ‘increasingly contained mapped and scripted’, the self remains a site of unpredictable convulsion: a ‘gap’ in the system of programmatic growth through which ‘government is perpetually thrown out of kilter, however temporarily’.
Binkley’s book presents the genealogy of a catastrophe, in which all of the resources of social habitus (its mores, traditions, affections, hospitalities, etc.) have been lost to a ‘scientific’ organisation of self and community whose operative principle is the constant acceleration of production. Foucault recognised the origin of this tendency in The History of Sexuality. He argued that the practices of self-governance that were constitutive of the polis depended on a worldview in which ‘community’ was conceived as a living form, or physis, whose substance is realised through the activity of free citizens. The way to modernity was opened by a transformation that began in Classical civilization itself: reason (logos) emerged from Socratic philosophy as a machinery that questioned all of the implicit forms of ethical life and all of the affective satisfactions of love, sex, family and nature. What Binkley’s Foucauldian genealogy does, therefore, is to chart the effects of this analytical approach on the institutional forms of habitus: the ways in which the logos has become a machinery that constantly invades the folds of ethical life which sustain the happiness of human beings.
Perhaps, then, the strength of Binkley’s project is also its weakness. His analysis presents the chance of resistance to the performative obsessions of neoliberalism as a technical possibility. The historical memory of an affective life not ruled purely by the demands of efficiency is conceived as the basis of strategic interventions that may briefly destabilise the temporality of the neoliberal machine. This approach, however, leaves little room for the difference of affective life – its description of the possibility of resistance shies away from, in particular, Deleuze’s attempts to mobilise the haecceity of the body as an unpredictable power that can give rise to creative transformations in ethics, politics and aesthetics. Thus what we have in Binkley’s essay on neoliberalism is a brilliant provocation to rethink the concepts of immanence, transcendence and intensification that haunt the experience of life in late capitalist societies.