Wanda Vrasti How to Use Affective Competencies in Late Capitalism

Abstract: This paper brings together writings from political sociology, the New Left, and Italian autonomist thinking to contribute to the on-going conversation on the relation between governmentality and the spirit of capital. I argue that the function of neoliberal government is to produce types of subjects and social relations that are congruent with the logic of flexible accumulation. But I take issue with the idea that, in doing so, neoliberalism extends economic rationality to all areas of life. This model of subjectivization tends to exaggerate the role of rationality in producing entrepreneurial forms of being. It neglects the fact that the knowledge economy relies in equal measure upon innovation, accountability, spontaneity, cooperation, and mobility to generate value. I provide examples from three areas of contemporary life (i.e., the transformation of work, the global passion for compassion, and the cosmetics of existence) to demonstrate how affective competencies are conducive to entrepreneurial action.

In the opening pages of Jonathan Franzens The Corrections (2001) the readers are introduced to Chip Lamberts failures in critical pedagogy. Thirty three and well-published, Chip is hired by a small college with elite reputation on a five-year tenure-track position to teach undergraduate courses in literature and cultural studies (ibid. 38). For the last meeting of Consuming Narratives, a first-year core course in cultural studies, Chip asks his students to watch a soap opera about women struggling with breast cancer. The show is produced by a major high-tech corporation, which has donated more than $10 million to the American Cancer Foundation for research purposes (ibid. 45-6). Evidently, a critical (correct) reading of the show would take issue with the fact that the corporation producing it exploits womens fear of breast cancer and sympathy for cancer victims to emotionally invest them in purchasing their IT products and services. But to Chips dismay his students disagree:
Excuse me, Melissa said, but that is just such bullshit. What is bullshit? Chip said. This whole class, she said. Its just bullshit every week. Its one critic after another wringing their hands about the state of criticism. Nobody can ever say what's wrong exactly. But they all know it's evil. They all know corporate is a dirty word. And if somebody whos having fun, or getting rich is disgusting! Evil! And it's always the death of this and the death of that. And people who think they're free aren't really free. And people who think theyre happy aren't really happy. And it's impossible to radically critique society anymore, although what's so radically wrong with society that we need such a radical critique, nobody can say exactly. It is so typical and perfect that you hate those ads! [] Here things are getting better and better for women and people of color, and gay men and lesbians, more and more integrated and open, and all you can think about is some stupid lame problem with signifiers and signifieds. [] OK, Chip said. On that note. Youve now satisfied your Cultural Studies core requirement. Have a great summer. (2001:50-1)

The argument that, as earlier modes of critique have been co-opted or recuperated by the dominant mode of rule (Frank 1998; Boltanki and Chiapello 2005) there is no longer an

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outside to capital, is by now a familiar lamentation of the left. Confronted with a spirit of capitalism that is more savvy, seductive, and satisfying than anything predicted by the traditional Marxist narrative of tensions and contradictions, the phrase the end of capitalism (as we knew it) makes sense only to the extent that it announces the beginning of a more tolerable, equitable, and pleasurable phase/face of capitalism. As the above passage shows, to take issue with a mode of social organization that is increasingly inclusive, open, and integrated, is not just logically impossible, but comical. It is ridiculous, outlandish even, to criticize a system of profitable enjoyment/joyful profit that can improve the lives of those marginalized on account of their gender, race, and sexually. It has become easier to imagine the end of the earth and of nature than the end of capitalism (Jameson cited in Giroux and Szeman 2001:95) because critique has been reduced to a comical farce, the necessity of which can only be maintained through increasingly dangerous acrobatics. This paper is an acrobatic exercise of this sort. Its aim is to show how we have become emotionally invested in the present structures of government. This is not to say that, like Chips students, we have sold out to or been duped by a system of material profitability and libidinal enjoyment, or that we have to shake off this false consciousness in exchange for something purer. We have never been untouchable to begin with. But it is neither meant to say that engaging in a hermeneutics of ourselves, our passions and complicities as an exercise in self-care or a Socratic dialogue, perhaps is a waste of our energies. To what do we owe the uncontested moral consensus around capitalist practices, instruments, and ambitions? Why has it become enjoyable, admirable even, to contribute to the reproduction and innovation of its ethos? What kind of moral legitimating structure does the spirit of capitalism rely on that makes critique appear so amusing and/or exasperating? Finding answers to these questions will not help resuscitate earlier forms of political analysis, identity, and hope (what J.K. Gibson-Graham (2006:5) and Wendy Brown (1999) call left melancholia). The aim of this paper is far more modest: to question our most intimate and pleasurable attachments to capitalist forms of labour, identity, aesthetics, and community. Contemporary critical inquiry has not remained oblivious to the above aporias. Specifically, Slavoj Zizek (1999), Wendy Brown (2003), Hardt and Negri (2000, 2004), and Boltanski and Chiapello (2005) have tried to make sense of the increasingly sophisticated and seductive logic of capitalism by connecting Marxian analysis with theories of governmentality, psychoanalysis, political sociology, and cultural studies. Although they work within distinct theoretical parameters, what all of these writers share in common is the idea that contemporary capitalism is more concerned with the social reproduction of its ethos than with producing goods and services. Far from being a self-sufficient machine that operates according to some larger-thanlife internal logic, capitalism is conceived as an almost fragile mode of social organization, the perpetuation of which depends on the existence of hospitable life forms (e.g. bodies, subjectivities, social relations, material processes, desires, and fantasies). This is especially true for late (aka flexible or communicative) capitalism which requires subjects to act like virtuosos of entrepreneurship (Virno 2004). It is not the case that social reproduction is a novel dimension of

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capitalism, but that the production of social relations [has become its] immediate end/goal (Zizek 2005). Trying to make sense of the new spirit of capitalism an ideological amalgam that, simultaneously, invests capitalism with a moral justification and subjects it to normative scrutiny (Boltanski and Chiapello 2005) leftist writers supplemented historical materialism with theories of social construction, textuality, and psychoanalysis instead. In particular, Foucaults analytics of government and his later Collge de France lectures (2007, 2008), where he describes modern government as the extension of economic rationality to all areas of life, proved helpful in showing how neoliberal government mobilizes freedoms and responsibilities to produce subjectivities, social relations, and modes of conduct conducive to capitalism. The arranged marriage between Marx and Foucault reached its limits, however, as soon as it overemphasized the extent to which the modern narrative of accumulation relies on rationality and its related tropes, like economic calculations, private interests, competition, masculinity, and hyperindividualism. The entrepreneurial orientation of late capitalism is not exhausted through rationality. Instead, the hegemony of late capitalism is being fought on territories which used to be ornamental or external (if not outright inimical) to the operation of capitalism, such as the personal, the affective, and the aesthetic. The emotive dispositions and qualifications mobilized in flexible accumulation (e.g. innovation, compassion, and indulgence) may not be structurally different from rationality, but they at least demonstrate that economic calculability is no longer sufficient for navigating our uncertain social landscape. A series of affective competencies must be mobilized to ensure the spontaneous and enthusiastic participation of individuals and, ultimately, to invest capitalism with a moral ethos that will conceal its tensions and postpone its crises. The contribution of this paper is, first, to summarize, converge, and advance what otherwise looks less like a comprehensive critique of capital and more like a series of disparate texts. At least three strands of literature hinge on the crossover between capitalism and government: research in political sociology on government as it applies to areas traditionally imagined to be outside the purview of power (Rose 1991; Rose and Miller 1992; Barry et al. 1996; Lemke 2001, 2007); New Left writings interested in the production and reproduction of life forms hospitable to the capitalist logic of accumulation (Zizek 1999; Brown 2003; Boltanski and Chiapello 2005; Dean 2006, 2008, 2009; Michaels 2008); and Italian autonomist thinking on the immaterial and affective aporias of post-Fordist modes of organization (Lazzarato 1997; Hardt 1999; Negri 1999; Hardt and Negri 2000, 2004; Virno 2004; Bifo 2009). Unfortunately, to this date, there is no consistent dialogue between these camps or comprehensive overview of their overlaps and disparities. The second objective of this paper is to present an overview of three areas of contemporary everyday life in which these transformations are most evident, namely, in the transformation of work, the global passion for compassion, and the cosmetics of existence. Although these are merely heuristic categories, it is useful to pull out these examples from the hands of pop sociologists and journalists (Brooks 2001; Florida 2002; Bolz 2009) to expose the disquietudes they harbor. What this paper cannot offer, however, is a definitive answer to the question tearing up the heart of contemporary capitalist critique. It remains unclear to me

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whether politics needs to use the communicative instruments of late capitalism (as they are manifested in identity politics, immaterial labour, networked communication, etc.) to advance radical action (Brown 1999; Hardt and Negri 2004) or whether these should be refused on the grounds of their emotional and libidinal complicity with power (Zizek 2005, 2009). Before we can proceed, however, a word of warning is in order. The inherent danger in trying to make sense of the new spirit of capitalism is that dwelling on the novelty of this ethos implies a radical temporal rupture in the history of capitalism. We need to refrain from or, at least, be cautious about locating the origins of flexible capitalism in the neo-conservative reforms that swept across the Anglo-American space in the early 70s. Although the demise of the BrettonWoods system has had a significant impact upon the way in which finance capital, public institutions, social services, human resources, and consumer behavior are organized, the logic of market rationality has remained constant since the days of Adam Smith. Locating contemporary capitalism in a separate temporal ontology is tempting, but it is ultimately a debilitating strategy. It invites a presentist reading of history that ignores the fact that, it is not so much the grammar of capitalist production that has changed than the techniques of social reproduction. Reversely, we cannot lock time out of this enquiry by ignoring the distinctly innovative trends in social organization, professional development, lifestyle choices, and personal conduct announcing a shift in the operationalization of capitalism. Although we have not entered a new era of capitalist production, the strategies and technologies we use to sell our labour, buy commodities, and organize communities are increasingly more subtle and more astute. They penetrate deeper into the crevices of our lives blending value production with personal selfesteem and intimate desire with worker discipline. Market rationality continues to be about the realization of private interests through competition. The only difference is that this logic now reaches into our intimate lives, our feelings, desires and aspirations, forcing us to realize that all areas that seemed quintessentially personal are in fact intensely governed (Rose, 1991:1). Neoliberal Government Revisited Why is it that, just as government control is withdrawing from the market, we are being confronted with more and more disciplinary injunctions for how to conduct ourselves? This is the double movement to which the term neoliberal government seeks to provide an explanation. This somewhat oxymoronic phrase expresses our confusion but does little to explain the sources responsible for our current predicament. To resolve the philosophical tension between its Marxian and Foucaultian etymology, we need to revisit both terms separately (neoliberalism and government). Neoliberalism, in its most popular usage, refers to a free market economy which operates smoothly and harmoniously without state intervention. From the classical liberalism of Adam Smith and David Ricardo all the way to the Chicago School of economic theory, the liberal doctrine presupposes the relative autonomy of the economic from the political sphere. The

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market is conceived as an autonomous and self-regulating entity functioning according to the naturalist rules of competition. Government in this equation is a spatial-cum-institutional container (Walker 1991:450) charged with overseeing but never creating or interfering with these mechanics. The events that shook the economies of the Global North during the 70s and their political repercussions led many to believe that neoliberalism is liberalism with a vengeance. The story goes like this: The demise of the Bretton Woods system of trade and exchange in 1973 culminated in the removal of capital controls in 1974 in the US and in 1979 in Britain. Faced with floating currencies and unhindered exchange of goods, services, and finance across borders, advanced industrial nations entered a series of de- and re-regulation waves that had a profound political impact (Olssen 2006:217). National healthcare schemes were privatized; educational reforms were introduced to increase competition between higher learning institutions; the public sector was modeled after the private one; and new forms of expertise, accounting, and communication emerged to make all forms of social organization leaner, flatter, and more flexible (Isin 2000:154). In response to these changes the ReaganThatcher Right introduced a pure market economy that corroded the structures of social democracy and brought about the end of politics (Lemke 2007:16). Convincing as this account of neoliberalism may be, it rests on two factually incomplete and methodologically flawed assumptions. The first of these assumptions is that government institutions speak with one voice and act upon a coherent volition. Similar to a conspiracy theory, the Reagan and Thatcher administrations are accused of opposing liberal democracy ex officio and wanting to put an end to it at all cost. Although various neo-conservative regimes have been elected since the 70s all across the AngloAmerican space, they lacked a clear and coherent political response to the economic crises they were faced with. As policy solutions were devised to address problems in finance, capital, and trade, these were codified under the rubric of neoliberal government, which is not so much the retrenchment of the state than the state refocusing its strategies and priorities. Empirical data shows that despite severe cutbacks across the public sector, government spending as GDP percentage has been on the rise since the 70s. The irony that should not be lost on anyone is that neoliberal regimes have enacted more legislation and regulation than social democratic ones (Isin 2000:162). Neoliberal government is not about less government, but about governing more efficiently with other rationalities, programs, and means. It is about shifting the focus and priorities of government, not about pushing government out of the equation. The market reforms introduced across the Anglo-American space (and beyond) since the 70s onwards produced flatter and faster state organizations, rather than plain weaker ones. Ultimately, liberal democratic states may have regained some of their historic strength as a result of these neoliberal disciplining processes (ibid. 154-5). The second misconception is a methodological one. It assumes that global economy and national sovereignty are two separate and mutually exclusive sites tied in a zero-sum game: when one is on the rise, the other is on the fall, and vice versa (Sassen 2000:372). Whether the state is viewed as a barrier to economic profit (like in liberalism) or a protector of collective

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rights and benefits (as in Marxist and communitarian critiques of globalization), the idea that a strong government can limit the legroom of transnational capital and that, reversely, expansive transnational forces risk corroding national sovereignty is widely propagated. Hence, all the nostalgic talk about the retrenchment or demise of the nation state in times of neoliberal globalization. This not only an ontologically impossible proposition, it also exaggerates the autonomy of the economic from the political. Globalization notwithstanding, market economy depends upon certain state-sanctioned conventions regarding money, labour power, and the value of commodities. Even keeping state regulation and protection at a bare minimum, markets still rely upon business-friendly fiscal, monetary, and social policies (Brown 2003:3). Thinking that the global and the national form an ontological duality prevents us from seeing how government stands to gain from defying the classic spatio-temporal coordinates of territorial sovereignty by creating new zones of profitability and authority beyond the container of the state (ibid.). Contrary to these ideas, neoliberalism is neither the ideology of neo-conservative policy-makers, nor a historical period marked by the withering away of the state at the hand of a global market economy. It is neither an ideology nor a worldview, but [] the name we give to a way of thinking about the objects, targets, mechanisms, and limits of government (Isin 2000:164). In Foucaults (2008) conception, neoliberalism is a mode of social organization wherein the rationality of economic calculation is exported to all areas of life, from macroeconomic policies, to public policy, education, recreation, and personal conduct. Foucault traces this alternative notion of neoliberalism back to the post-war German economic school of Ordoliberalen. Against 18th and 19th century liberalism, the Ordoliberalen, also known as the Freiburg School, dismissed the laissez-faire approach to economic thinking as nave naturalism. The driving principle of the market, they argued, was not the exchange of good and services, but competition. It is the principle of competition that produces goods, sets prices, and extracts value (Foucault 2008:118-20). Different from exchange, which was said to respond to the spontaneous needs and demands of free individuals, competition is not a natural occurrence. It is a carefully orchestrated activity to be nurtured and sustained through conducive policymaking. Competition is [] an historical objective of governmental art and not a natural given that must be respected (ibid. 120). The neoliberal doctrine of the Freiburg School expanded the responsibility of government from the passive task of writing legislation conducive to market competition to the active duty of making sure that all social realms are hospitable to the implementation of market mechanisms. The purpose of responsible government is to promote cultural and moral orders that are conducive to entrepreneurial behavior and oppose all forms of life that stifle competition (Olssen 2006:218). It is also the responsibility of government to operate according to the same principles of efficiency and calculability as the market to avoid the disastrous effects of strong government intervention associated both with the Weimar regime and National Socialism (ibid. 220). This way, the Ordoliberalen were the first to charge the state and its agencies of power with the social reproduction of capital.

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Neoliberalism, then, is a type of government, whereby government is not the concretization of legal and administrative codes in the form of a state or a set of institutions, but rather a political rationality that renders social reality understandable and programmable. Government has both an epistemological and a moral function: it tells us something about the nature of the objects to be governed and it indicates the proper way to govern these objects by designating the authorities in charge, the instruments of power, the problems to be addressed, and the programs to be pursued (Rose 1991:42). Government, in this sense, is a method of exercising power and structuring social reality, rather than a specific political program. It does not acquire a life of its own until it can sketch out who should govern, what is to be governed, by what means, and to what effect. The answer to these questions has varied throughout history. In ancient and medieval times, for instance, the king, prince, or pope had a relationship of externality and transcendence to those it governed, hence maintaining an (arbitrary) right to take life or let live over their subjects. With the advent of popular democracy, following the rise of the third estate in 1789 and the plebeian revolutions of 1848, government enters a relation of immanence with its population, whose welfare it suddenly has a responsibility to protect and foster. In modern times, the rationality of government becomes biopolitical: to regulate and optimize the livelihood, productivity, and longevity of a population. The numbers and complexity of the body politic being constantly on the rise, this is realized by extending economic principles to all areas of social life all the way into the deepest corners of personhood. At the end of the 18th century, political economy, rather than philosophy, religion, or military strategy, becomes the knowledge necessary to distribute resources, calculate maximum returns, fulfill certain rational targets, and maximize the wealth and happiness of the population (Foucault 2007:91-106). In conclusion, what is known as neoliberal government today is not an economic theory (the repudiation of state intervention from market economy), a political regime (a form of government concentrated in bureaucratic institutions and territorial jurisdictions), or a historical period (the effect of economic globalization upon national sovereignty). It is a mode of social organization whose biopolitical ambition is realized through a distinctly liberal economic rationality. Most critical discussions on biopolitics apply the term to discuss violent interventions in the biology of life and reproduction, the surveillance of public space, or the control of mobility across borders. These analyses focus exclusively on the emergency and exceptionality of biopolitics as if the biopolitical rationality of government manifested itself only in the absence of normal liberal democratic politics (Neal 2008), when in fact it is the mundane fabric that sustains it. Biopolitics is present not only in exceptions to the law or violations of our human rights. It is also active in producing a healthy, productive, and fulfilled workforce. The positive, if not outright utopian, content of biopolitics rests in its ability to (re)produce subjective forms (i.e. modes of conduct, affects, attitudes, social relations, and lifestyles) that are congruent with the capitalist logic of accumulation and competition. Every mode of production necessarily presupposes and reproduces particular forms of sociality and subjectivity (Read 2003:135). The question we need to ask ourselves is: what types of subjects and social relations does a flexible mode of accumulation require?

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The (Seemingly) Schizophrenic Subject of Neoliberal Government Let us return to the original problem of neoliberal government: Why is it that, just as government control is withdrawing from the market, we are being confronted with more and more disciplinary injunctions for how to conduct ourselves? To better answer this question its variables must be slightly modified. First, the flexible structures of accumulation (Harvey 1990) (i.e. finance capital, networked communication, immaterial labour, timely production, and personalized consumption) are less a manifestation of market deregulation or the withdrawal of state authority, than the product of technological advancements in communication and transportation (Catells 1996). Second, it is not government per se its agencies, policies, or bylaws that seeks to affect our conduct, but a general imperative for autonomous citizens that do not rely too heavily on external provisions (Ilcan and Basok 2004:130). With these corrections in mind, the question can be rephrased as follows: Why is it that, just as strategies for capitalist accumulation have become more flexible, individuals are being asked to assume increasing responsibility for their actions? In this latter formulation, the answer seems obvious. The only way for flexible capitalism to work without distorting or destroying the equilibrium of the market is for all institutions and social action to assume the model of market rationality. Only when the state learns to think and conduct itself like a market organ, will its rule not be considered an intrusive interference (Brown 2003:13). Only when individuals understand the moral consequences of their financial, professional, and domestic responsibilities, will they stop relying upon welfare provisions, union benefits, and other types of bailout and realize the full potential of their productivity. Only when the market stops being an entity external to the body politic, but becomes part and parcel of our professional development, domestic arrangements, lifestyle choices, consumer behavior, and personal appearance, can it function smoothly, almost spontaneously. The task of neoliberal government is to make sure that the appropriate forms of life, action, and sociality are in place for a flexible market economy to operate effortlessly. (The 2008-2009 economic downturn proved that capitalist tensions continue to exist despite careful biopolitical intervention.) As the literature on neoliberal (alternatively known as advanced) government shows, the key to this objective is to extend the rationality of economic calculation to all modes of life through mechanisms that foster and enforce individual responsibility, privatized risk-management, empowerment techniques, and the play of market forces and entrepreneurial models in a variety of domains (Lemke 2007:3). Following the model of the homo oeconomicus, neoliberal subjects must know how to assess their choices, make decisions, and bear the consequences of their actions to give their lives a specific entrepreneurial form (Lemke 2001:202 cited in Brown 2003:17). They are free to organize their lives only as long as this freedom expresses the rationality of economic calculation that already permeates the entire structure of government. Their actions are moral only if they are informed by rational choice calculations of risks, benefits, and consequences (ibid. 15).

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It is true that with most of the safety nets guaranteed through welfare provisions and trade unions gone, individuals must take a preventive and proactive approach to their health, education, profession, and finances. But this model of subjectivization tends to exaggerate the role of economic rationality for producing entrepreneurial forms of being. It seems to imply that neoliberal government produces nothing but a series of Patrick Bateman-like figures obsessed with assessing their bank accounts, credentials, looks and body count, to the exclusion of all social, moral, and affective considerations. It assumes that, to perform as a responsible and selfreliant agent, individuals need to behave like individualistic, hypermasculinist, and even violent capitalist predators. This establishes a causal homology between liberalism and capitalism that ignores their respective histories (Isin 2000:153) and presents Foucaultian theories of government in an uncharacteristically dogmatic light. The enduring mantra of Foucaults Collge de France lectures is not that the effects of the economy are extended across all of society, rather it is an economic perspective, that of the market, that becomes coextensive with all of society (Read 2009:32). The spirit of capitalist is not exhausted in narratives of rugged individualism, ruthless competition, and excessive consumption. In a sense, these are of capitalist tropes of the 80s, which continue to linger on in our theoretical accounts. The flexible economy we are confronted with today is in many ways a lot more rewarding, compassionate, and creative than the rationalist story of neoliberal government would allow. It is an economy where capital travels through financial mechanisms, labour is immaterial, casual, and precarious, production happens just-in-time, consumption is ready-to-assemble, and virtually every form of communication can generate economic value. Hence, it is also an economy where innovation, accountability, spontaneity, communication, cooperation, mobility, and general intellect are key elements of the entrepreneurial spirit (Holmes 2002). As accumulation strategies are gaining in elasticity, the model of political subjectivization is also becoming more ambiguous. At the risk of oversimplifying matters, it can be said that the neoliberal model of subject formation has shifted from homo oeconomicus to homo sociologicus, or from the (wo)man of reason to the (wo)man of affect. It is no longer sufficient for neoliberal individuals to navigate their social surroundings using only rational choice and cost-benefit calculations to the exclusion of all other social and moral considerations (Read 2009; Bolz 2009). As capitalism became more savvy and micropolitical over the last few decades to include networked structures, flexible accumulation and distribution mechanisms, and more democratic and rewarding production techniques, the homo oeconomicus model of conduct had to accommodate a range of affective competencies. Instead of the rational, calculated, and cold-blooded American Psycho we now have the compassionate entrepreneur, the workaholic with a social conscience, the innovative worker, and the frugal consumer. Instead of Patrick Bateman we have the ambitious yet sensitive young businessperson facing a swiftly changing and increasingly ruthless economy (Kuczynski 1998). Tackling the challenges of todays (and tomorrows) flexible capitalism involves a desire for social change, an ability to operate in distant and diverse settings, and an interest in experimenting with ones self and the world around it (see www.fastcompany.com). It is not the case that rationality, calculability, and good-ol fashioned competency no longer

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play a part in neoliberal government, but the Protestant ethic of capitalism (i.e. work, prudence, frugality, moderation, reliability, and sobriety) has been complicated by the avant-garde values of artists and activists (i.e. authenticity, trustworthiness, transparency, social responsibility, sustainability, fairness, respect, care, and civility) (Bolz 2009). As a result, the criteria for becoming subject in late modernity have shifted from a focus on market rationality to a focus on emotionality, creativity, and mobility. Unfortunately, critical scholarship has paid very little attention to these advancements, exceptions being Isins neurotic citizen (2004) governed through fear and anxiety and Fortiers affective subject (2010) meant to recover citizens capacity for cohesion and interaction. But it was pop sociology that took this unprecedented zoon politikon most seriously. David Brooks calls this new specimen the bourgeois-bohemian. Returning to the US after a 5year long absence, Brooks is confronted with a series of peculiar juxtapositions:
WASPy upscale suburbs were suddenly dotted with arty coffeehouses where people drank little European coffees and listened to alternative music. Meanwhile, he bohemian downtown neighbourhoods were packed with multimillion-dollar lofts and those upscale gardening stores where you can buy a faux-authentic trowel for $35.99. (2000:9)

In the newly revamped spaces of urban rejuvenation, a new political animal is moving about, reborn from the ashes of antecedent bourgeois and bohemian class distinctions. Significant changes in professional conduct, leisurely habits, and moral codes during the 90s, have reconciled the rebel and the yuppie. Tyler Durden and Patrick Bateman co-exist quite peacefully and productively, often even within the same person. It is now impossible to tell an espressosipping artist from a cappuccino-gulping banker, is Brooks bewilderment (ibid. 10). The individuals walking the line between these older identity categories, those who can combine a bourgeois work ethic with a bohemian desire for sensorial experimentation, those who can channel play, pleasure, and passion into productive work and use information, emotions, and interpersonal relations to generate economic value, that will thrive in the current information and knowledge economy (ibid. 10-1). Richard Florida, the author of several nightstand bibles for urban designers, public policy makers, and start-up entrepreneurs, dwells on the same phenomena, when he announces with a lot more glee than Brooks, that the rise of the creative class is the result of a big morph between the Protestant work ethic and the bohemian spirit (2002:192). His bestselling book The Rise of the Creative Class and How Its Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life (ibid.) argues that we have entered a new organizational phase, where the main economic driving forces are no longer technological (land, resources, manpower), but human hence the importance of creativity. Florida gives us a meticulous account of the spending patters and lifestyles of a select few, but nowhere does he define the content of creativity or explain its value. The little we know about the creative class is that it rejects both the austere conformism of Whytes organization man and the conspicuous consumerism of Veblens leisure class.

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Norbert Bolz (2009) picks up on these pseudo-sociological observations and connects them to the history of capitalism. If 200 years ago it might have seemed paradoxical for the author of The Wealth of Nations to also be the person behind a Theory of Moral Sentiments, as capitalism is being re-anchored in social and moral principles, this is no longer surprising. Drawing inspiration from Ronald Ingleharts post-materialism thesis (1977), Bolz argues that, as our economic wellbeing is becoming increasingly secure, we are free to dedicate ourselves to noneconomic pursuits, such as social and moral values, the search for meaning and recognition, and the other side of reason (stories and emotions). The effect is a so-called caring capitalism where the greatest economic success is to be enjoyed by those who perform on the market against the market, those who take their business model from non-governmental and non-profit organizations, along with those who discover the profitable potential of social capital (trust, commitment, responsibility) and civic virtues (charity, volunteering, activism). Spending the surplus value generated in such caring and responsible ways requires as much imagination as producing it. The new elites must find ways to spend their riches in non-ostentatious ways: they drink water that is as expensive as wine, wear clothes that look leisurely but are made of incredibly costly material, on eco-holidays that guarantee they will be the only tourists for miles around. The labour and consumption habits of new elites help them develop a theatrical relation to themselves (what Bolz calls die Kosmetik der Existenz) that allows them to stage their lives as an oeuvre, on the one hand, and covers their wealth in a cloth of simplicity, on the other. As is to be expected, Zizeks account of neoliberal subjectivity is the most spirited one. What Zizek calls liberal communists are individuals who claim that we can have the global capitalist cake, i.e., thrive as profitable entrepreneurs, and eat it, too, i.e., endorse the anti-capitalist causes of social responsibility and ecological concerns (2008:16). These are celebrity figures like Soros or Gates who have earned their fortunes through a stroke of entrepreneurial genius and now dedicate their time to sharing their wealth in a way that can appease the crises of capitalism they themselves created and benefited from (ibid. 23). Liberal communists are the people from Porto Davos who use digital communication, social media, transparency, and networking to achieve increasingly contradictory goals. Worried about populist fundamentalists and irresponsible, greedy capitalist corporations, their goal is not to make money by changing the world, but to earn money as an unintentional, almost accidental, sideeffect of doing good works (ibid. 20). They are the radical entrepreneurs who are reinventing their work to help save the world [because] going good can mean more than volunteering and philanthropy; earn[ing] our living can actually become the way we give back (Moulden 2008:3, original emphasis). They are the environmental pragmatists who understand that [i]n a marketplace where other points of competitive differentiation, such as capital or labour costs, are flattening, going green is the way to gold (Esty and Winston 2006:4). They are the selfnegating entrepreneurs whom the growing expanse of self-help/business literature speaks to.

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While we cannot deny that these texts measure the pulse of the times we live in, the problem is that their business-friendly style and pop sociological observations resemble too closely the selfhelp manuals and philantrepreneurial guides of the new-economy era (Peck 2005:741). Only Zizeks account makes an exception, but it too turns out to rely too heavily on anecdotal evidence to allow serious political engagement. Yet these are the only writings to have drawn attention to the therapeutic relationship emerging between ethical responsibility and economic productivity. The problem with academic writing on the subject is that it keeps repeating that neoliberal government reduces personal responsibility to economic calculations of risks, benefits, and profits, and it ignores how affective literacy has become a prerequisite for economic entrepreneurship. The seemingly schizophrenic portrayals of the bourgeoisbohemians or the liberal communists suggest that the parameters of economic rationality are wider than the scholarly literature would allow us to imagine. Neoliberalism is not a universe of coolheaded calculations, dispassionate assessments, and hyperindividualistic action, but it allows enough room for and sometimes even demands innovation, rebellion, and compassion. The questions that arise from these observations are: Why has emotional literacy become a requirement for economic proficiency? And how will this shift rearrange the organization of neoliberal government? Enter Emotions It is not entirely clear why emotionality has come to generate so much attention in recent years (whether it is because structuralist and behavioralist theories of the social have become increasingly unsatisfactory or due to psychoanalysis arrival on the scene of critical inquiry), but the scholarship on structures of feeling (Williams 1977), structures of desire (Brown 1999), and habits of feeling and judgment (Connolly 2002) has been sprawling in a variety of directions (see Grossberg 1992; Terada 2001; Connolly 2002; Massumi 2002; Sedgewick 2003; Edkins 2003; Ahmed 2004; Ngai 2005; Ticineto Clough 2007; Ticineto Clough et al. 2007). Two of the most prominent roads taken by this literature, roads which eventually crossed in a heated debate, focused on the distinction between emotions, defined as body- and situation-specific consequences of experience, and affect, understood as an autonomous non-corporeal potential for change and variation. Emotions are sociolinguistic fixings (e.g. love, hate, envy, pity, etc.) belonging to persons, groups, events, or memory and narrativized through stories and images (Massumi 2002:28). Affect, on the other hand, are virtual impulses that do not express an experiential or sensorial condition, but the transition from one state of being to another (Massumi 1987:xvi). While Massumi, following Spinoza and Deleuze, has been fairly adamant about keeping the two categories apart, Sara Ahmed (2004) has remained indifferent to this conceptual order. For Ahmed, emotions are circuits or pathways that travel between bodies, connecting, excluding, or sticking to them, helping bodies extend into space and change their shape (ibid. 4). She rejects the idea that emotions are private possessions that either should (like in psychoanalysis) or should not be aired in public (see Arendt 1990). Emotions do not reside within subjects and

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objects; they describe a relation between bodies. The aboutness and towardness of emotions suggests a world-making quality: emotions help subjects feel their way through the world by apprehending and taking a stand to it (Ahmed 2004:7). The difference between Ahmed and Massumis contributions is not how little value the former places on the conceptual distinction between emotions and affect compared to the latter, but how Ahmed makes affective economies central to social and cultural practice. In Ahmeds work, emotions are no longer ornamental (like in rationalist approaches to social analysis) or unoperational (like in Massumis virtual cartography), they become essential and practical tools for understanding how we become invested in particular structures of power (ibid. 10, original emphasis). Chip Lamberts student, quoted in the opening section, is emotionally and libidinally invested in the mechanisms of a global market economy because, unlike critique, capitalism promises to create a more equitable and rewarding social structure. Flexible accumulation, with its sprawling non-profit charitable organizations, mobile and playful types of employment, and selfactualizing forms of action and consumption, functions according to the normative principles of liberal democracy freedom, representation, and accountability (Marcuse 2007[1964]:5; Zizek 2005; Dean 2006:101-2). The technological and semiotic advancements of capitalism are such that it can afford to extend its commodities and comforts to all members of the polity. The proletariat is morphed into a well-fed, well-dressed, well-supplied middle class that loses its distinct form of consciousness and historical force (Brown 2003:4). Without any material struggles left to fight, what people can wish for is more tolerance, cultural diversity, and compassion for the less fortunate, all of which can be solved with the help of affective competencies like benevolence, sympathy, and charity without having to change a thing about our mode of economic organization (Michaels 2006). Flexible capitalism contains the solution to the threats it poses (Zizek 2005). For every moment of exploitation, inequality, marginalization, or alienation, capitalist production offers twice as many outlets for freedom, equality, care, compassion, beauty, and happiness. Unfortunately, we lack a serious history of co-optation (Frank cited in Holmes 2002:5) to explain why the refusal to go along [has come to] appear neurotic and impotent (Marcuse 2007[1964]:12). The closest we come to explaining how the democratic excess of the 60s has become the revitalization of capitalism in the 90s is the work of Boltanski and Chiapello. In The New Spirit of Capitalism (2005) they distinguish between two types of anti-capitalist critique: a social critique, that attacked the injustices attached to material inequality and exploitation, and an artistic critique, which took issue with the inhumane and alienating effects of a capitalist society. The latter used to be a minor, literary affair, which only gained ground with the democratization of higher education and the rise of a professional class (Holmes 2002:6). Its nemesis was the new anthropological type, the obedient, square, and frigid corporate subject produced by the military-industrial complex. The man in the grey flannel suit was at the center of militant texts like Adorno et al. Authoritarian Personality (1950), Marcuses One-Dimensional Man (1964), William Whytes Organization Man (1956), Sartres portrait of the serialized man, and Cornelius Castoriadis critique of bureaucratic productivism (ibid. 4). (Pop culture

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manifestos like Bret Easton Ellis American Psycho (1991), Chuck Palahniuks Fight Club (1999), Frdric Beigbeders 99 Francs (2000), Michel Houellebecqs Platform (2001), Victor Pelevins Babylon (2000), and Gary Shteyngarts The Russian Debutantes Handbook (2002) are belated examples of 50 years of artistic critique adapted for the economy of images and signs.) So-called caring capitalism is an answer to the anti-establishment critique of the 50s and 60s. It is capitalism trying to recuperate the democratic distemper of the previous era (at least some of it) to make the drive for accumulation tolerable again (Holmes 2002) without having to address its impolite and outrageous sister, the social critique. The greatest merit of Boltanski and Chiapello is to have shown that critique is immanent to capitalist production. Critique is not a force that resides outside of capitalism, but a necessary and intrinsic part of capitalism. Far from destabilizing capitalism, critique helps it incorporate some of the values in whose name it was criticized (ibid. 28). The same can be said about emotions. Emotions are a type of reason and vice versa. Both are discursive articulations of experience aimed at helping us navigate the various challenges posed by our social landscape (see Hirschman 1997). There is less of a difference between emotion and reason than there is between emotions that are conducive to entrepreneurial action and those that are not. The affective competencies solicited and mobilized by neoliberal government (e.g. autonomy, adaptability, spontaneity, compassion, care, pity, generosity, philanthropy, self-fulfillment, enjoyment) are not external or inimical to economic rationality, they are not bad for business; on the contrary, they draw upon repertoires that used to be ornamental or external to economic calculation, such as affect, aesthetic, and intellect, to solidify our investment in capitalist social structures. Just because neoliberal government treats emotional literacy as a prerequisite for economic proficiency, does not mean that we have entered a phase of caring capitalism. Rather, the advent of emotionality underscores the truly normative dimension of biopolitics, namely, the ambition to use the entrepreneurial form as a way to realign the life and conduct of a population with democratic principles of social order, justice, and autonomy. Examples In this final section I survey three fields of action (work, community, and consumption) to consider the kinds of subjects and social relations made possible through the circulation of neoliberal affective economies. A. Work It is perhaps less neo-conservative economic reforms than innovations in telecommunications and transportation technology that are responsible for giving us the post-industrial, communicative, and networked capitalism we are moving through today. Nowhere is this transformation more visible than in our work, where the increasingly intolerable boredom and alienation of bureaucratic structures were replaced with more humane and gratifying work. Whether this trade-off is forceful, like in the case of low-skilled workers whose jobs have been outsourced to less regulated zones, or self-inflicted, like with cultural producers who prefer self-

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affirming to secure work, it has resulted in a vertiginous rise in precarious work work that is atypical, irregular, part-time, short-term, deterritorialized, and product-oriented (Papadopoulos et al. 2008:226-7). Employment conditions that were once associated with the lower echelons of skilled and expert work factory workers, domestic workers, migrants, and temps are spreading out to all types of labour (Ross 2009). But rather than glamorizing mental or creative labour, we need to keep in mind that the velocity, casualization, and exploitation characteristic for the digital economy continuities the modern sweatshop formula for work (Terranova 2000:33). The result is a tension between mourning the disappearance of real jobs and the revolt against work. While some individuals continue to long after the work for life formula, others are prepared to sacrifice the benefits of this social contract for jobs that are creative, fun, and fully unleash their potential (Holmes 2002). It is the latter individuals, those who do not insist on separating work time from free time (playbor) and do not have trouble combining production with consumption (prosumers) who stand out as eminent neoliberal subjects (Couldry 2004). Different from the modern narrative of labour, where work represented a painful affair to be managed through leftist struggles or eliminated through technological progress, in flexible capitalism, work has no outside. Although automatization, outsourcing, and immaterial production seem to be indicating that work is running out, we spend more and more time at work. There is not a single relationship or activity that cannot be subsumed to its logic. Strangely enough, there is remarkably little resistance to this trend. If the person in the grey flannel suit (like the prototypical factory worker before that) had to set aside a chunk of free time to relax or pursue extracurricular activities, the so-called knowledge worker the mobile, skilled, affluent, independent, hard-working, ambitious, environmentally conscious, people who can trade on their skill, expertise, and social capital (Leadbeater cited in Brown et al. 2004:19) can no longer distinguish between servitude and artistic self-expression (Terranova 2000:35). Aside from innovations in digital communications and human resource management, changes in the material configuration of the workplace also helped incite an ecstatic new work ethic (Hymnowith 2001). The Google headquarters (Googleplex) in Mountain View, California are a perfect example for a workplace clothed in the comforts of home and the pleasures of leisure ideal for combining playful exuberance [] with a zealous work ethic (ibid.). The facility boasts 20 buildings hosting several thousand employees and their pets; an organic garden; hundreds of community bikes and plug-in hybrid electric vehicles; beach volleyball courts, two heated endless pools, and four gyms; state-of-the art architectural designs; solar energy panels, sustainably harvested wood, efficient yurt-inspired rooms, LEED certified furniture, and recyclable materials (Google 2009). Although there is no sign of actual work at the Googleplex (as most YouTube posts on the video note), working for Google implies a notion of risk, speed, and performance that is anything but leisurely. But it also promises some of the craft, camaraderie, and "soulfulness" originally associated with the tactile pleasures of manual work in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (Pirsig 1974) and later mourned in Shop Class as Soulcraft (Crawford 2009). The neoliberal narrative of work celebrates those who view their livelihood as well as their personhood to be dependent upon their work performance and productivity. Although

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flexible capitalism is not exclusively an economy of images and signs (Holmes 2008), the men and women burning the midnight oil in creative industries are exemplary figures of neoliberal government in their willingness to combine self-sacrifice with self-worth. This debilitating ethos is what allows even the most precarious of workers to keep afloat amidst waves of global economic volatility without making excessive demands upon either state or corporate structures. It is also what makes traditional worker struggles, like protests and strikes, seem impossibly juvenile and boring (Ross 2008). B. Community There are over 1 million charitable organizations in the United States today, double the number five years ago; the sector employs 6.9% of the total American workforce and pays 8.11% of wages and salaries in the US; in 2007 charitable donations reached an all-time high of $314 billion, which dropped only by 2% during the 2008 economic downturn (National Center for Charitable Statistics 2008; National Philanthropic Trust 2009). After the end of the Cold War, giving was democratized from the hands of a few wealthy donors (e.g. Rockefeller, Carnegie, Ford, MacArthur, Kellogg, and Mellon) to include a variety of civil society outlets. Between 1993 and 2003 the number of foundations in the US increased by 77% (Hudson Institute 2006:20). Corporate charity rose at an unexpected rate teaming up either with business moguls like Gates, Soros, or Bloomberg or celebrities like Bono and Geldof. And private and voluntary organizations (PVOs) recruited $4 billion worth in volunteering hours (ibid. 26). The literature on government through community attributes the rise in civil society associations to the vacuum left by the demise of big government (Rose 1999; Dean 1999; Isin 2000; Ilcan and Basok 2004). But we are dealing here less with a departure than with a crowding out of state agencies from social and development work. In the United States, at least, government social services and foreign aid are considered remnants of an outdated and inefficient measure of [] generosity (Hudson Institute 2006:6), still visible on the old continent or in UN corridors, which ignores that private philanthropy, corporate investment, and celebrity endorsement are better suited at helping the poor generate prosperity (ibid. 12). One agency which understands that poverty-reduction depends on exporting entrepreneurial values across borders is USAID, whose new program, the Global Development Alliance, requires government funds to pass a market test before they can be used in programs designed by private foundations and corporations (ibid. 44). Public-private partnerships such as these allow government agencies to still have a say in affairs from which they have been banished because of a reputation of corruption, inefficient spending, and red tape. The advantage of nongovernmental organizations is precisely their distance from politics because, while politics has increasingly become a dirty word, voluntary organizations have impressed through their grassroots approach, foundations have been celebrated for their fellow-mindedness, and corporations have come to embody new standards of public accountability. But maintaining a distance from politics is only a blessing in disguise. It creates a false dichotomy between politics, as a realm torn apart by power struggles and conspiracy theories, on the one

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hand, and community, as a vulnerable pre- or non-political site threatened by poverty, crime, infectious disease, immigration, and even terrorism, on the other (Ilcan and Basok 2004). Governing through non-governmental organizations seems to be quicker and more honest only because community is portrayed as a quasi-natural socio-geographic scale that has a natural propensity for peace and harmony, with the exception of a few bad causes that can be solved with good intentions. What is being ignored here is that affective competencies, such as care, pity, generosity, and capaciousness have become a prerequisite for disseminating entrepreneurial forms of being and action. In the scramble to become a philanthrepreneur Bono got foreign aid, Bob Geldof got famine relief, Brad Pitt got Katrina, Angelina Jolie got refugees, George Clooney got Darfur, Oprah got Africa (Traub 2008) and American Express, Apple, Converse, Emporio Armani, Motorola, Hallmark, Dell, and Microsoft got Product Red (Richey and Ponte 2008). The merit of the global passion for compassion mobilized in the non-profit sector is to postpone the crisis of a system of capitalist production which would otherwise become intolerable (Hutnyk 2004). It empties human suffering of its political and historic content and prevents us from seeing the double strategy of capitalist expansion to extract wealth and control, on the one hand, while giving out aid and advice, on the other (what Zizek calls chocolate laxative). C. Consumption Consumption is perhaps the most evident realm of everyday life where affect is deployed to produce subjects and social relations that feel good about their participation in capitalism. This is both because the history of consumer boycotts and anti-logo activism is a rich one and because there are more and more forms of consumption matching democratic ideals of community, difference, and autonomy. From established anti-consumerist campaigns like Buy Nothing Day or TV Turnoff Week to culture jamming forums like Adbusters, Billboard Liberation Front, Reclaim the Streets, and various other flash-mob-like groups, expressing ones identity through consumerist goods has become increasingly suspect, almost in bad taste. If there is anyone courageous enough to sport a Tommy Hilfiger outfit or drive a Hummer, it is most likely inner-city blacks and immigrants of various origins, who have not yet got wind of what white people like. As the eponymous blog shows, white people like farmers markets and food co-ops, vintage, Toyota Prius, public radio, and the great outdoors (http://stuffwhitepeoplelike.com/). The liberal, urban, and professional classes like to know where their products come from, how they are discarded, and where the money goes to. But the critique of consumption is hardly only about race and class identity. Using lifestyle and aesthetic choices to demonstrate a commitment to transparency, diversity, frugality, and an overall progressive political orientation does not necessarily indicate economic or racial privilege. I would speculate that for a majority of people shopping at Whole Foods is still a luxurious exception. Privatized sensoriums and consumerist sensibilities are less a testimony of economic success rather than a promise of future accomplishment. The entrepreneurial form is stretched to include consumer skepticism because an increased awareness of emerging social, cultural, environmental allows consumers the necessary freedom to come up with solutions that will channel these sensibilities into monetary flows.

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Increasingly, citizens want to participate in producing the goods and services they attach themselves to, be it through DIY practices like making, improving, or repairing things without expert help or through prosumer contributions, such as blogging, posting, uploading, and file sharing. Especially in the case of digital economy, fans and audiences are cast as drivers of wealth production making it hard to understand whether their participation is a matter of entertaining play or exploitative labour. This is most likely a two-edged sword: on the one hand, user-created content fosters a sense of a personal agency and community that fulfills the prophecy of democratic means of communication and, on the other hand, it prevents the professional creatives to break out from their precarious working conditions. While a few winners can be identified, notably, Google, Yahoo!, and Sony, most prosumers, whether voluntary or professional, remain flexible and replaceable drones, who can only stand out by honoring the demands of communicative capital with unprecedented zeal and spontaneity (Banks and Deuze 2009:421). Conclusion The affective competencies demanded by flexible capital in terms of labour, community, and consumption do not undermine the principles of accumulation and competition. Affect is not a final bastion of authenticity (recently) incorporated by the ever-expanding spirit of capitalism. Rather, affect has always and already been constitutive of the entrepreneurial mode of action. Different from rationality, which has been rendered increasingly suspect through Marxist critiques, pop culture hacks, and economic shocks, affect has the advantage of being a more subtle and pleasurable process of producing subjects and social relations conducive to the accumulation of capital (Terranova 2000; Boltanski and Chiapello 2005). The advantage of a governmental regime that relies upon affect, autonomy, and innovation, as opposed to one that draws exclusively upon calculation, rationality, and discipline, is that, in the case of the former, political subjects submit to its directives spontaneously. A governmental logic that relies upon emotionality no longer needs to stifle or integrate resistance in its ranks because critique is already immanent to its operation. As such, the leftist quest for a right path to radical action persists. Rendering the present visible is a necessary but not sufficient step for finding a way out of this current predicament. In fact, as government is becoming increasingly humane, versatile, and autonomous, taking seriously the necessity for resistance or refusal becomes increasingly exasperating.

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