Friday, September 28, 2012

Yourself-Control

[Neo-liberal forms of government] characteristically develop indirect techniques for leading and controlling individuals without at the same time being responsible for them. The strategy of rendering individual subjects responsible entails shifting the responsibility for social risks such as illness, unemployment, poverty, etc. into the domain for which the individual is responsible and transforming them into problems of self-care...

In this way, the angle of possible political and social intervention changes. It is not socio-structural factors which decide whether unemployment, alcoholism, criminality, child abuse, etc. can be solved, but instead individual-subjective categories. Self-esteem thus has much more to do with self-assessment than with self-respect, as the self continuously has to be measured, judged, and disciplined in order to gear personal "empowerment" to collective yardsticks...

What were previously extra-economic domains are now rendered economic and are colonized by criteria of economic efficiency; this enables a close link to be forged between economic prosperity and personal well-being. As regards labor relations, for example, this means that work and leisure time are no longer inimical opposites, but tend to supplement each other...

Neo-liberalism is a political rationality that tries to render the social domain economic and to link a reduction in state services and security services to the increasing call for "personal responsibility" and "self-care". In this way, we can decipher the neo-liberal harmony in which not only the individual body, but also collective bodies and institutions (government, universities, corporations) have to be "lean", "fit", "flexible", and "autonomous": it is a technique of power.
-Thomas Lemke