Self-Appreciation; or, the aspirations of human capital

Public Culture

Volumn 21, Issue 1, 2009, Pages 21-41

  Feher, Michel ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 70249122780     PISSN: 08992363     EISSN: 15278018     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/08992363-2008-019     Document Type: Note

References (22)

1. Michel Foucault, "Power and Sex," in Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings, 1977-1984, ed. Lawrence D. Kritzman, trans. Alan Sheridan et al. (New York: Routledge, 1988), 115-16.
2. Karl Marx, "The Sale and Purchase of Labour-Power," chap. 6 of A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1 of Capital, trans. Ben Fowkes (New York: Vintage, 1977).
3. See David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 1.
4. While the history, structure, and modes of exploitation specific to neoliberalism have been well documented by now (be this the decline of Fordism and the corollary crisis of trade unions, the subjection of industrial to financial capital and the increasing control of corporate governance by shareholders, or the deregulation of markets and the privatization of public goods and services), the type of subject that is both constituted by this regime and tasked with upholding it has been rather less studied. To a large extent, neoliberalism's detractors merely focus on its promotion of individual responsibility (which justifies the dismantling of social protection) and on its tendency to reduce the status of citizen to that of a consumer who is financially solvent (such that financial insolvency results in a loss of citizenship). Described as such, however, the neoliberal subject is merely a liberal subject deprived of the safety net distinctive of the welfare state's embedded liberalism. (There are, of course, a number of authors, for the most part nourished by Foucault's approach to neoliberalism, whose work contradicts this self-serving claim: to name only a few, Wendy Brown, Barbara Cruikshank, Thomas Lemke, and Nikolas Rose.)
5. Theodor W. Schultz, "Reflections on Investment in Man," Journal of Political Economy 70 (1962): 7.
6. According to Fisher, the income produced by a capital is its "service," which can be monetary, material, and/or psychic. For instance, the income or service of a house can be rent, shelter, and/or a sense of comfort. Fisher adds that psychic incomes ultimately subsume the monetary and material kinds, while monetary incomes ultimately measure the material and psychic kinds. See Irving Fisher, The Nature of Capital and Income (New York: Kelley, 1965), 106.
7. Regarding Fisher's influence on the inventors of the concept of human capital an influence widely recognized by neoliberal economists, including Schultz see Annie L. Cot, "L'économie hors d'elle-même: Essai sur le néoutilitarisme" (PhD diss., Université de Paris I, Pantheon-Sorbonne, 1988), 123-87.
8. Gary S. Becker, Human Capital: A Theoretical and Empirical Analysis with Special Reference to Education, 3rd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 15-16.
9. It may seem unfairly harsh to accuse major economists of the Chicago school such as Becker and Schultz of not being neoliberal enough. In their defense, one should recall that they developed the concept of human capital in the 1960s, at a time when global, unregulated financial markets and their effect on corporate governance were hardly foreseeable. However, even in his most recent books such as Social Economics: Market Behavior in a Social Environment (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000).
10. coauthored with Kevin M. Murphy, in which he deals with the notion of social capital Becker largely remains a neoliberal theorist trapped in a utilitarian imagination. Thus his relationship to the neoliberal condition may one day be described as that of G. W. F. Hegel to Marxism or, for that matter, as that of Moses to the Promised Land.
11. Michel Foucault, Naissance de la biopolitique: Cours au Collège de France, 1978-1979 (The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978-1979) (Paris: Gallimard/Seuil, 2004), 273-74
12. As a major cultural phenomenon, preoccupation with self-esteem peaked in the 1980s and 1990s, which partly explains why Foucault did not take it into account. However, the connection between self-esteem and neoliberalism can be traced back to the late 1960s. Indeed, one of the first popular and influential books on self-esteem was Nathaniel Branden, The Psychology of Self-Esteem: A New Concept of Man's Nature (Los Angeles: Nash, 1969).
13. At the time, Branden was known as the former lover and protégé of Ayn Rand as well as a coauthor of Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, a book written with Rand, Robert Hessen, and... Alan Greenspan. About twenty years later John Vasconcellos, the California lawmaker responsible for the creation of the California Task Force to Promote Self-Esteem and Personal and Social Responsibility, proved worthy of Branden's pioneering work when he stressed the task force's economic importance by claiming that "people with selfesteem produce income and pay taxes, [while] those without tend to be users of taxes" (quoted in Roy Baumeister, ed., Self-Esteem: The Puzzle of Low Self-Regard [New York: Plenum, 1993], viii).
14. Regarding the California Task Force on self-esteem as exemplary of neoliberal governmentality, see Barbara Cruikshank's compelling essay "Revolutions Within: Self-Government and Self-Esteem," in The Will to Empower: Democratic Citizens and Other Subjects (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1999), 87-103.
15. Debates about prostitution are typically predicated on this distinction: while advocates of the abolition of prostitution understand sexuality to be part of what a subject is, of what makes a human being a subject, rather than something that can be owned and traded in the marketplace, supporters of the regulation of prostitution claim that a free subject owns his or her body and is thus entitled to rent out, as labor power, whatever bodily service that he or she chooses. Though the two camps disagree on what constitutes "alienation," both their positions pertain to C. B. McPherson's definition of the liberal condition, namely, "possessive individualism." (A neoliberal take on prostitution, by contrast, would consider prostitution in terms of how selling sexual favors affects the self-appreciation of the human capital engaged in such activity.)
16. Even consumers as such should be perceived as producers. According to Becker, and contrary to the fears expressed by Daniel Bell in The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism, the subjects of mass consumption are not these complacent and infinitely demanding human beings who threaten the enterprising and ascetic spirit of capitalism. Instead, they should be perceived as the producers of their own satisfaction: indeed, the latter is defined as a set of commodities "produced by the consumer unit itself through the productive activity of combining purchased market goods and services with some of the household's own time." See Gary S. Becker, The Economic Approach to Human Behavior (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), 134.
17. Ordoliberalismnamed after the journal Ordo, founded in 1948 refers to a group of scholars, such as the economists Walter Eucken and Alfred Müller-Armack and the legal scholar Frantz Böhm, whose doctrine shaped the economic policies of the German Federal Republic after World War II. See Foucault's analysis of their perspective in Naissance de la biopolitique, 77-191.
18. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (New York: Viking, 1977).
19. See in particular Michel Foucault, Sécurité, territoire, population: Cours au Collège de France, 1977-1978 (Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977-1978) (Paris: Gallimard/Seuil, 2004).
20. See in particular Mario Tronti, Operai e capitale (Workers and Capital) (Turin: Einaudi, 1977).
21. Antonio Negri, Marx oltre Marx: Quaderno di lavoro sui "Grundrisse" (Marx beyond Marx: Lessons on the "Grundrisse") (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1979).
22. Neoliberal governmentality, so far, has recognized and addressed this concern more readily than has its leftist opposition, and it has responded to it by inviting stakeholders to go "to the other side" that is, to treat the acquisition of property as the preferred path toward self-appreciation. Such a strategy has obviously been very successful, at least until the recent real estate crisis, since when stakeholders behave as future owners or shareholders, they end up working against the conditions of their current well-being all the more so if they hope to quickly join the ranks of the propertied.