Hi everyone.
I start this podcast with a quick nod to the recent decision on student debt, and move pretty quickly from there to some of the reading I am doing right now on the various forms of transmission leading from schools of management, think tanks and various other organs of neoliberal thought, to actual processes of discipline that happen at work. These ideas have to come from somewhere, right? This to me is one is the most fascinating of all topics, and it exposes this really deep (and probably irresolvable) contradiction between the exhortation to embrace risk, to cultivate an entire self open to the possibility of a future that is totally uncertain (on the one hand), and the equally powerful forms of discipline discouraging certain risk forms of “experiments in living” (usually ones that take the hedonic impulse too far). I refer to a recent article1 that examines the “self actualization” language among managers, and then I zoom out to look at how utterly different specifically liberal forms of governmental reason were, compared to neoliberal ones. The former were oppressive and repressive, but at least they had a material referent. The latter is derealized to the point that we must act with an awareness that there are no safeguards to social life, maybe even no social life at all (Thatcher’s point). The ideological language of “YOLO” and “Living my Best Life” has become intensified in a precisely inverse relation to this underlying dystopia.
Thomas Anderssson, “Personal Growth and Sensitivity Training as Fashions in Management and Management Research,” in International Studies of Management & Organization , Summer, 2008, Vol. 38, No. 2, Trends and Fashions in Management Studies (II): Mutual Influences (Summer, 2008), pp. 71-96. I also reference a book that never leaves my side, Boltanski and Chiapello’s The New Spirit of Capitalism (Verso Press, 2005).
Discourses of Discipline