University of Amsterdam
Anti-Work Ethics and the Practice of Care
Phoebe Eccles
MA Thesis Comparative Cultural Analysis 10848959
Joost de Bloois June 2015
Table of Contents
Introduction 3
1. Self-Investment, Self-Cultivation 7
2. The Ethical Substance of Work/Post-Work 20
3. Precarious Ethics, Ethical Care 29
Conclusion 44
The recent UK general election saw avowals from all parties to protect the rights of “working people”. A moralizing discourse of work enabled the formulation of the platonic cast of the voter. It didn’t matter what your political leanings or socio-economic background were; as long as you were someone who “contributed”, you were someone who deserved to have their interests represented in parliament. Work was posited not as a necessity but as a choice. Furthermore, work was posited as an ethical choice, one that determined your value both as an individual and as a constituent part of a community.
Yet at one point does a person make such a choice? A key assumption of this thesis is that not only does the structure of work precede the subject, but it also informs the production of the subject1. Insofar as we partake in a life, we labour. By labour or work I do not just mean waged
activities, but also the work that is done so as to prepare oneself (or others) for waged activities. By work, I mean everything that enables us to be constituted as subjects whose actions can be justified solely through economic rationalizations. If the conditions of late capitalism entail, as David Harvey puts it, “a process of reproducing social life through commodity production” (The Condition of Postmodernity, p. 343), then identifying the point where life ends and work begins becomes a near impossible task. The neoliberal collapse of the distinction between private and public renders the horizon of meaning through which our lives are organized to be primarily structured by the logic of economic productivity.
There is, of course, a rich history of work refusal. In 1883, Paul Lafargue penned The Right to be Lazy, denouncing the “delusion [that] is the love of work, the furious passion for work, pushed even to the exhaustion of the vital force of the individual and his progeny”. This sentiment has, in various forms, continued to pulsate through various offshoots of Marxist thought since Lafargue’s demise. The situationist movement in 1960s France grounded their critique in a politics of everyday and sought to liberate humanity from work whilst simultaneously liberating the aesthetic. The Operaismo movement in 1960’s Italy augmented workers’ power through strike action. Feminist autonomists such as Silvia Federici sought out the root of the work ethic beyond the factory door and brought to visibility to unwaged
1 As Kathi Weeks writes, work is a way of producing “social and political subjects… Disciplined individuals, governable subjects, worthy citizens, and responsible family members” [CITATION Kat11 \p 8 \n \y \l 1033 ].
“reproductive” labour2, thereby enabling women to refuse a kind of life by refusing a kind of
work. With regards to these movements, Franco “Bifo” Berardi writes the following:
Refusal of work does not mean so much the obvious fact that workers do not like to be exploited, but something more. It means that the capitalist restructuring, the technological change, and the general transformation of social institutions are produced by the daily action of withdrawal from exploitation, of rejection of the obligation to produce surplus value, and to increase the value of capital, reducing the value of life [CITATION Fra03 \p 1 \n \y \l 1033 ].
To question why one must work is to embark on a train of thought that leads to a revaluation of the very tenets of everyday life. In this enquiry, I begin with work but often end up in places that wildly deviate from what appears to be the central problematic. This shows the impossibility of isolating the problem of work. It must be approached as part of a wider perspective.
From Michel Foucault, I take the idea of the modern subject as neoliberal homo-economicus. According to Foucault, homo-economicus is the subject whose actions can be analysable solely through an economic framework, thus rendering the very act of existing a form of work [CITATION Mic08 \p 268 \n \y \l 1033 ]. Whilst Foucault informs my investigation at every stage, I acknowledge that since his lecture series The Birth of Biopolitics (which took place in 1978-79), the conditions of neoliberalism have continued to shift. The recent financial crisis has caused unemployment levels to skyrocket3, creating a situation where the fetishisation of work
occurs in a context where it is seemingly impossible for everyone to partake in (paid) work. It is through a consideration of this current state of precarity that I revise Foucault’s ethics of care of the self, drawing from both the writings of Martin Heidegger and feminist critiques of labour.
Just as Foucault investigated the formation of the modern ethical subject who could be hermeneutically deciphered through a genealogical history of sexuality4, I use the problem of
work as a means of considering the more general ways that the modern subject is constituted as an ethical being (and how this ethicality, in turn, reinforces the necessity of work). Thus an ethics of care is not just a post-work imaginary but also a way of thinking about how we might formulate ethical relations that aren’t anchored within utilitarianism-based value systems.
2 Reproductive labour is that which enables waged labour to occur. Key examples would be housework, child-rearing and cooking.
3 Unemployment in the world’s major economies has increased by 85% [ CITATION Phi14 \l 1033 ].
In The Problem with Work5, Kathi Weeks concludes with an explanation as to why she
counters the work ethic with a post-work politics as opposed to a post-work ethics:
My preference for the political rather than ethical remedies might then be understood as a polemical defense of a certain kind of structuralist impulse, a way to keep our focus trained on collective rather than individual action and on the task of changing the institutions and discourses that frame individual lives and relations [CITATION Kat11 \p 228 \n \y \t \l 1033 ].
Whilst I agree with Weeks that political analysis should always register on a structural level, I also consider it important for structural analyses to be accompanied by what Michael Hardt calls accounts “from-below” [CITATION Mic15 \n \y \l 1033 ]. When work becomes politicized, the ethical justifications for work lose their self-evident character and become fragmented in the process. The plurality that tends to be assumed as existing in the political is often overlooked in the domain of morality- I would like to introduce an aspect of plurality or at least plasticity into the ethical, and, in doing so, also engage with the possibility of the formation of alternative ontologies6. Whilst everything is political (and if something appears not to be, then it is the task
of theory to question what or who is benefiting from these claims to neutrality), to posit an ethics of care as opposed to a politics of care is to refocus on affective aspect of work and proceed from there.
My first chapter begins with an explication of Foucault’s lectures on neoliberalism. It is from these that I consider homo-economicus and the phenomenon of human capital, and posit the concept of work as not a standardised form of waged activity but an all-encompassing mode of subjectivity. From Foucault’s analysis of the economic subsumation of the social sphere, I consider the paradoxes inherent within the neoliberal discourse of freedom. I then go on to consider Foucault’s “ethical turn” as directly in relation to this problematic, pinpointing an ethics of self-care as a starting point for the rest of my enquiry.
The second chapter considers some post-work politics that have come after Foucault, with a particular focus on neoliberal homo-economicus in the form of the “precariat”. Retaining the focus on ethics, I consider how the moral flesh of work is sustained by two seemingly unrelated domains: that of happiness and that of debt. By arguing that the utilitarian subject and
5 I should credit this text with first bringing to my attention the central issues addressed in this thesis.
Lazzarato’s homo-debitor share the same ethical substance, I pave the way for thinking about how these concepts may be reworked differently so as to offer a new modality of relating to the world, much in the same way as Foucault considers an ethics of self-cultivation as genealogically “within” the neoliberal framework of investing one’s human capital.
My third chapter shifts its focus from the political to the ontological. By revising the notions of the happy subject and the indebted subject through an orientation towards the concept of care, I sketch an outline of a care-based ethics that offers an alternative to the work ethic. I end with a feminist analysis of work that departs from Foucault’s concept of the sovereign self in that it locates the unknowability of the self as a site of ethical potentiality.
Whilst neoliberalism cannot be spoken about without reference to the processes of globalization and deterritorialization, I approach the problem of work from a specifically Western perspective. I have lived most of my life in the UK, and I am aware that I write from a privileged position. Although it is not a focus of this thesis, it is important to consider how work serves to desubjectify some at the same time as it subjectifies others. The abhorrent treatment of undocumented migrants around the world is continually justified through a rhetoric that marks work as a quantifiable and therefore limited resource whilst simultaneously positing it as something which must be partook in in order to qualify as a human with rights. As I hopefully show in my section of Judith Butler in chapter three, it is these issues that must be rendered visible through an ethics that replaces practices of work with practices of care.
1
Self-Investment, Self-Cultivation
The oeuvre of Michel Foucault can be read as a history of the process of subjectification. Or, in other words, a history of how we became subjects. Whilst subjectivity is by no means a homogenous phenomenon, it should still be understood as something that occurs on (and is produced by) a shared horizon of meaning in which we are situated. For the purposes of my enquiry, I wish to focus especially on the parts of this horizon that bring forth into being the subject who works, or, in more general terms, the subject that organises their life through a set of values determined by a narrative of economic productivity. In situating such an enquiry within the theory of Foucault, I approach the problem of work via a number of interrelated topics/concepts, including neoliberalism, ethics, and sovereignty.
The concept of sovereignty holds a multifunctional purpose in Michel Foucault’s oeuvre. On the one hand, it is a term used to explain particular modes of governmentality. On the other hand, it is a term loaded with wider significations relating back to ethical methodologies and the processes of subjectification. Whilst this distinction is somewhat crude, it enables Foucault’s writings on the practices of self-care in the age of classical antiquity to be grounded in, and understood through, his previous lectures on political economy, and what he titles the age of “critical governmental reason” [CITATION Mic08 \p 12 \n \y \l 1033 ]. By stressing the necessary relationship between Foucault’s work on the phenomenon of neoliberalism and his later ethical “turn”, it is my intention to frame the latter, to some extent, as a deliberate response to the former.
The productivity of studying the thread that runs between the neoliberal homo-economicus and the subjects of Ancient Greece and Rome cannot be properly elucidated without a comprehension of the genealogical method that structures Foucault’s entire body of work. To study the past genealogically is not to identify an overarching narrative of progress7 (as Foucault
accuses the historian8 of doing); it instead involves the study of discontinuities rather than 7 Such a narrative would have to rely upon a number of metaphysical presuppositions, which, due to their atemporal framing, Foucault expresses suspicion for.
8The figure of the historian, as it is evoked by Foucault in Nietzsche Genealogy History, is not intended to serve as a universal denouncement of all previously undertaken histories, but nevertheless is used as a means of summarizing problematic
continuities, and the identification of disparities as opposed to origins [CITATION Mic91 \p "77, 79" \y \l 1033 ]. As Colin Koopman emphasises, genealogies take the past as their object of analysis primarily as a means of articulating the problems of the present [CITATION Col13 \p 24 \n \y \l 1033 ]. These articulations are enabled by an enquiry into the conditions through which a certain savoir9is rendered possible by. In one of his final essays, Foucault explicitly links his methodology with Immanuel Kant’s, reworking the transcendental project10 so the critical
question becomes “In what is given to us as universal, necessary, obligatory, what place is occupied by whatever is singular, contingent, and the product of arbitrary constraints?” [CITATION Mic975 \p 315 \n \y \l 1033 ]. To ask this question is not to engage in the identification of ideologies11, nor is it to renounce the study of universals: instead it involves
“putting into play… these universal forms” in a matter that “is itself historical” [CITATION Mic976 \p 201 \y \l 1033 ]. Rather than using a notion of the subject as a grounding principle, the genealogical method attempts to dispel the subject from the analysis altogether. Although my own enquiry is not itself genealogical, I draw on the genealogical work of Foucault (and others) in order to historicize the working subject and, in doing so, challenge its authority.
The Market
Foucault’s genealogy of economic systems takes as its epistemological object the “market-place”
12 as a means of illustrating the shift in dominance of various governmental technologies, which,
tendencies that (re)occur in widely accepted narratives about the past. The figure of the historian is thus summoned as a means of, to a certain extent, defining genealogy through that which it is not. A similar dualism is found in Walter Benjamin’s
On the Concept of History, in which Historicism is contrasted with Historical Materialism in order to problematise the former.
9 Savoir refers to the domain of Knowledge/Truth. When Foucault employs the notion of “truth” , it is important to remember that he is treating this truth as historically situated insofar as he is seeking to show the moment in which something becomes ““marked by the articulation of a particular type of discourse and set of practices, a discourse that, on the one hand, constitutes these practices as a set bound together by an intelligible connection and, on the other hand, legislates and can legislate on these practices in terms of true and false” [CITATION Mic08 \p 18 \n \y \l 1033 ]
10 Kant’s transcendental deduction intended to set out the a priori conditions for the possibility of experience, thus establishing the necessary limits of philosophical enquiry. Koopman claims that to employ the genealogical method as
Foucault does is to predominantly take up Kant’s own methodology, only replacing the transcendental aspect with the historical aspect [CITATION Col13 \p 15 \y \t \l 1033 ]
11 On the whole, Foucault avoids ideological critique due to its method of presupposing a hierarchy in which ideology covers up a more authentic truth. When employing the notion of Savoir, Foucault is not suggesting that a truth or rationality is illusory, for the savoir that emerges through the interplay of a number of mechanisms exists as a reality insofar as reality itself emerges from these conditions of possibility.
12 When I say market-place here I am referring to the sphere of monetary exchange and all the relations that the functioning of such a milieu entails
in turn, enables the emergence of two distinguishable yet also fundamentally linked phenomena: liberalism and neoliberalism. The analysis serves as a means of showing how the market-place became ontologised to be a site of “truth” or “verediction” midway through the 18th century. Prior
to this13, Foucault claims that the milieu of monetary exchange existed in relation to the state as a
site of jurisdiction, insofar as it was regulated to ensure “on the one hand, a distribution of goods that was as just as possible, and then, on the other hand, the absence of theft and crime” [CITATION Mic08 \p 31 \n \y \l 1033 ]. This relationship shifted through an increasing tendency to discuss the market-place as if it was something which contained and followed “natural” or “spontaneous” mechanisms14 which permitted “the formation of a certain price which
will be called, metaphorically, the true price, and which will still sometimes be called the just price, but which no longer has any connotations of justice” [CITATION Mic08 \p 31 \n \y \t \l 1033 ]. As this price is constructed as something prior to the realm of the juridical, it is able to serve as a kind of reality principle through which the validity of government action is judged against- so the market-site as a whole becomes “a site of verification-falsification for governmental practices”, meaning that “to be a good government, government has to function according to truth” (that is to say, the truth that is enabled through the constitution of the market-place as a site of verediction) [CITATION Mic08 \p 32 \n \y \t \l 1033 ].
Foucault summarises the liberal art of government through the maxim of laissez-faire15: leave the market-place to its own devices and it will successfully govern itself via the processes of exchange. A shift in focus from processes of exchange to processes of competition, first seen in 20th century ordoliberal16 discourses, provoked the paradox in which minimum state intervention
is ensured through the careful cultivation of the conditions necessary for competition [CITATION Mic08 \p 112 \n \y \l 1033 ]. Insofar as the government continues to govern based on the truth of the market, it ceases to serve as a limitation of the market-place, and instead comes to be, to a certain extent, constituted by the market-place [CITATION Mic08 \p 112 \n \y \t \l 1033 ].
13 Specifically in the 16th and 17th century [CITATION Mic08 \p 31 \n \y \l 1033 ]
14 How these mechanisms were conceptualized can perhaps be better understood through recourse to Darwinian theory, which first gained popularity within this timeframe. Ideas of natural selection and survival of the fittest deeply influenced more general metaphysical notions with regards to how the world worked (see Schopenhauer).
15 “Let it be”.
Foucault’s analysis then shifts its focus to the emergence of American neoliberalism, which he claims to be “much more radical or much more complete and exhaustive” than German ordoliberalism [CITATION Mic08 \p 243 \n \y \l 1033 ]. This radicalness is, in part, constituted by a collapse of the distinction between the private and public sphere17 (and, in the turn, the
distinction between the private and public individual), which comes about through a total “inversion of the relationships of the social to the economic”, in which the market economy and the typical analyses of the market economy [are used] to decipher non-market relationships and phenomena which are not strictly and specifically economic but what we call social phenomena” (p. 240).
Whilst this gives rise to a number of previously unarticulatable relations18, it is important to
note that“the economic grid is not applied in this case in order to understand social processes and make them intelligible; it involves anchoring and justifying a permanent political criticism of the government” [CITATION Mic08 \p 246 \n \y \t \l 1033 ]. This is not just a market criticism that offers an alternative to political/juridical criticism: this is the former completely
superimposing/constituting the latter [CITATION Mic08 \p 246 \n \y \t \l 1033 ], and so “laissez-faire is turned into a do-not-laisser-faire government, in the name of a law of the market which will enable each of its activities to be measured and assessed” (p. 247).
The Paradoxes of Homo-Economicus
The subject implied by the generalization of market logic is the neoliberal homo-economicus19- a figure whom Trent Hamann summarises as “a free and autonomous ‘atom’ of self-interest who is fully responsible for navigating the social realm using rational choice and cost-benefit calculation to the express exclusion of all other values and interests”20[CITATION Tre091 \p 38 \n \y \l
2057 ]. Such a description should not be interpreted as anthropological; the term did not come into being as a means of diagnosing a pre-existing economic will of man [CITATION Mic08 \p
17 For more on the private/public distinction see The Human Condition [CITATION Han98 \y \t \l 1033 ].
18 Perhaps unarticulatable because they would not have previously “existed” in the same sense
19 Not a term coined by Foucault himself, but one he identifies as being used in a large number of economic doctrines in reference to “economic man”. How this economic man is characterised differs in liberal and neoliberal thought.
20 Perhaps it would be more fitting to replace the world “exclusion” with “subsumation”, for, as Foucault writes, under neoliberalism, everything becomes analysable in terms of it being a potential source of capital.
252 \y \l 1033 ]. Instead it signifies “the interface of government and the individual”. Bearing in mind that the government and the market-place are now a unified sphere [CITATION Mic08 \p 253 \n \y \t \l 1033 ], Homo-economicus is the individual who can be analysed solely in terms of how they allocate scarce means to alternate ends [CITATION Mic08 \p 222 \n \y \t \l 1033 ]. This figure draws a contrast with the liberal partner of exchange, in that he is more of a self-entrepreneur, “being for himself his own capital, being for himself his own producer, being for himself the source of [his] earnings” [CITATION Mic08 \p 239 \n \y \t \l 1033 ].
This idea of the economic subject being constituted through a process of self-investment complicates the Marxist analysis of labour, in which the worker is alienated from themselves through the selling of their labour power. [CITATION Mic08 \p 221 \n \y \l 1033 ]. Rather than being something that is necessarily externalised and thus divisive with regards to the subject, labour becomes merged with the subject, meaning that all behaviour can be interpreted as an investment of “human capital”. If the notion of income is to be generalized to the extent that everything can be a source of future income, then capital “is inseparable from the person who possesses it” [CITATION Mic08 \p 224 \n \y \l 1033 ]. Human capital can be innate (nature) or acquired (nurture). Social behaviour and relations, such as marriage and the raising of children21,
can be characterised as investments which are pointed towards reaping some kind of return[CITATION Mic08 \p 243 \n \y \t \l 1033 ].
Harvey describes neoliberalism as “a theory of political economic practices that proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade” [CITATION Dav07 \p 2 \n \y \l 1033 ]. A rhetoric that places the liberty of the human at the centre of all political concerns serves as the central defence and proponent of modern economic systems. Milton Friedman, one of the founders of the Chicago school of economics, founds his work upon the guiding question of “how can we benefit from the promise of government while avoiding the threat to freedom?” [CITATION Mil82 \p 2 \n \y \l 1033 ]. His answer: replace governments with markets and the subject need never be infringed upon. As long as the subject exists as an economic agent within the market-place, their liberty is
21 Foucault writes that mother-child relations (such as feeding, playing, generally spending time with child, etc) “all constitute for the neo-liberals an investment which can be measured in time”- investment into “the child’s human capital, which will produce an income” a salary when older. What the mother gets in return is a “psychical income” [CITATION Mic08 \p 244 \n \y \l 1033 ].
guaranteed. Here we see the notion of government acting almost as a Derridean supplement to the notion of “freedom”: It both serves as its antithesis and, through this, its guarantor. To a certain extent, this preserves the liberal concept of government, through which the sphere of individual freedom is located externally to the sovereign power. Homo-economicus is “free” insofar as the government exists to ensure its existence, its ability to be in the most basic sense of the word, and nothing more.
Neoliberalism adopts from liberalism the 18th century utilitarian subject22 “who pursues his
own interest, and whose interest is such that it converges spontaneously with the interest of others” [CITATION Mic08 \p 271 \y \l 1033 ]. This is the logic of Adam Smith’s “invisible hand”, whereby the collective good cannot be an objective as it is not economically calculable, and so homo-economicus must be “let alone” to follow their personal interests in order for economic processes to successfully function [CITATION Mic08 \p 271 \n \y \t \l 1033 ]. But as relations of the market come to constitute relations of everyday life, the legitimacy of applying the economic grid to the behaviour of the liberal subject is both established and normalised. Insofar as economic analysis is constituted by the “optimum allocation of scarce resources to alternative ends”, analysis can be extended to, as Foucault writes “any conduct which employs limited means to one end among others” [CITATION Mic08 \p 268 \n \y \t \l 1033 ], i.e. that which could be cast as “rational conduct”). Economist Gary Becker pushes this analysis even further, claiming that economic analysis can also be applied to irrational conduct, that it can in fact be anchored in any phenomenon as long as the individual in question responds to reality in a “non-random way” [CITATION Mic08 \p 269 \n \y \t \l 1033 ]. This means that:
[…] homo-economicus, that is to say, the person who accepts reality or who responds systematically to modifications in the variables of the environment, appears precisely as someone manageable, someone who responds systematically to systematic modifications artificially introduced into the environment. Homo-economicus is someone who is eminently governable [CITATION Mic08 \p 271 \n \y \t \l 1033 ].
Thus homo-economicus is someone who must be both left alone and respond to external stimuli, someone who must exercise their freedom within a space that is “the correlate of governmentality”. Insofar as “economic behaviour is the grid of intelligibility one will adopt on
22 The subject who is presupposed in particular in the work of John Locke and David Hume. I explore this subject in more detail in chapter two.
the behaviour of a new individual”, the individual “becomes governmentalizable… to the extent, and only to the extent, that he is a homo economicus” [CITATION Mic08 \p 252 \n \y \t \l 1033 ].
At the end of the first volume of The History of Sexuality, Foucault evokes the notion of sovereignty to explain the overarching problematic of the biopolitical23. Political sovereignty, he
acknowledges, is widely understood by historians as the “right to decide life and death” 24
[CITATION Mic782 \p 135 \n \y \l 1033 ]. This power was in fact dissymmetrical insofar as it worked only in relation to killing: “the right which was formulated as the ‘power of life and death’ was in reality the right to take life or let live” [CITATION Mic782 \p 136 \n \y \t \l 1033 ]. Since the classical age, modes of governmentality have radically altered:
“Deduction” has tended to be no longer the major form of power but merely one element among others, working to incite, reinforce, control, monitor, optimise and organise the forces under it: a power bent on generating forces, making them grow, and ordering them, rather than one dedicated to impeding them, making them submit, or destroying them. [CITATION Mic782 \p 136 \n \y \t \l 1033 ]
Milton Freidman claims that:
The preservation of freedom requires the elimination of such concentration of power to the fullest possible extent and the dispersal and distribution of whatever power cannot be eliminated- a system of checks and balances. By removing the organization of economic activity from the control of political authority, the market eliminates this source of coercive power [CITATION Mil82 \p 15 \n \y \l 1033 ].
Yet without an identifiable sphere of what Freidman claims is “coercive power”, one ceases to be able to act against power as it manifests itself via modes of governmentality. Jason Read writes that “as power becomes less restrictive, less corporeal, it also becomes more intense, saturating the field of actions, and possible actions”[CITATION Jas09 \p 29 \n \y \l 1033 ]. The economic framework of the market-place serves as a Kantian, a priori schema through which all phenomena must pass in order to become intelligible. The homo-economicus may indeed be
23 Biopower corresponds and interlinks with neoliberalism. Taking the population as its object, Biopower works upon the cultivation and maintaining of life.
24 “In a formal sense, it derived no doubt from the ancient patria potestas that granted the father of the Roman family the right to “dispose” of the life of his children and his slaves; just as he had given them life, so he could take it away” [CITATION Mic782 \p 135 \n \y \t \l 1033 ].
characterised as “free”, but only insofar as this freedom is predicated on a kind of conditionality which cannot be rejected as long as one is a subject. So, for example, homo-economicus is “free” to invest their human capital in the way that they most see fit, but not free to reject the proliferation of capital in the first place25. What this leads to is a somewhat ominous state of
affairs where one is “working” merely by virtue of one’s status of homo-economicus. Thus one cannot, if we follow the arguments of neoliberal economists to their logical conclusion, reject work and maintain one’s subjectivity. As there ceases to be a sphere that is separate to governmentality, capital comes to, as Mark Fisher puts it, “seamlessly occupies the horizon of the thinkable” (Capitalist Realism, p. 14).
Care of the Self
The way in which Foucault articulates notions of autonomy26 without presupposing a neoliberal
subject or falling into metaphysical speculation is by undertaking a genealogical study that employs periods of classical antiquity as its archive. Through the study of the process of how, in the West, “sexual behaviour [came] to be conceived as a domain of moral experience” [CITATION Mic902 \p 24 \n \y \l 1033 ], and how this determined an “ethical substance” that was hermeneutically decipherable, Foucault draws together processes of biopower and normalisation within the Victorian era with practices of “self-care” in Ancient Greece and Rome. The question of sexuality is therefore used to explore the question of subjectivity. Biopolitical regimes of governmentality produce neoliberal subjects. In shifting his focus from the modern era to times of classical antiquity, Foucault invites a reading in which ancient ethical systems serve as a kind of alternative or response to problems concerning the technologies and apparatuses of neoliberal governmentality. Yet, at times, his ethics of the care of the self echoes the neoliberal 25 To problematise the neoliberal discourse of freedom is not to claim that neoliberalism contradicts itself by predicating its theories through a justification of a freedom that it actually robs from its subjects. Discussing whether a subject is “more” or “less” free with regards to various systems or points in history is to presuppose a universal conception of liberty and thus abandon the genealogical method which must at all times be meticulously applied . Similarly, the question of quantifying freedom with regards to the subject runs into the error of presupposing a subject outside of the apparatuses which produce the processes of subjectification. This is not to say that the concept of freedom needs to be dropped entirely from analysis, just that it ought to be treated as a historical, flexible entity, something dependent on the conditions that enable the notion to come into being in the first place. Thus “freedom” must always be paradoxically treated as something dependent on external stimuli. Without content, the conceptual framework of freedom dissipates into nothingness.
discourse of self-investment. Whilst Foucault advices against seeking out simply solutions in the archives of history, there remains some deep critical appeal in examining what emerges as both a site of sameness and difference, insofar as it problematizes the homo-economicus whilst still remaining within a fore of intelligibility.
Foucault begins his The Hermeneutics of the Subject lecture series (which serves as a basis for the second and third volume of The History of Sexuality) with a comparison between the Ancient Greek principle of Epimeleia heautou (“care for the self”) and the Christian maxim of Gnothi seauton (“know thyself”) [CITATION Mic05 \p 2 \n \y \t \l 1033 ]. The main difference lies in the hermeneutical maxim of the former with regards to the possibility of self-knowledge. Whilst this is not implicit in the processes of self-care, Foucault does identify a “new attitude of severity” in the thinking of the philosophers and physicians in the first two centuries, insofar as the relations one held to oneself became intensified [CITATION Mic901 \p 41 \n \y \t \l 1033 ], eventually causing sexual behaviour to be constituted within an ethics of control as opposed to an ethics of style [CITATION Mic902 \p 250 \n \y \l 1033 ].
But prior to this, or at least at a more base level, the notion of care of the self stood, quite simply, for the principle that one must take care of oneself [CITATION Mic901 \p 43 \n \y \l 1033 ]. This “care” was not conceptualized in an abstract manner; instead it was enacted through a number of practical activities or routines, such as a combination of mental and physical exercise, which were often ascetic in character [CITATION Mic901 \p 51 \n \y \t \l 1033 ]. Through these, Foucault notes a gradual intensification of relations of self-care to the body as philosophy and medicine became almost interchangeable disciplines, linked primarily through the concept of pathos [CITATION Mic901 \p 54 \n \y \l 1033 ]:
A whole series of medical metaphors is regularly employed to designate the operations necessary the care of the soul: put the scalpel to the wound; open an abscess; amputate; evacuate the superfluities; give medications; prescribe bitter, soothing or bracing potions” [CITATION Mic901 \p 55 \n \y \t \l 1033 ].
Whilst the increasing focus upon the self did result in a number of new moral domains, the intended outcome of testing oneself was not to renounce oneself, as was the goal in Christian asceticism, but instead to generate a “conversion to the self” so as to “establish certain relations with oneself”. These valuable relations were characterised in a number of ways. Initially the turn
towards the facing of the self was articulated as a turn to a Platonic form, but gradually it was also conceptualized through a juridico-political model (“being sovereign over oneself, exercising perfect control over oneself, being fully independent, being completely ‘self-possessed’”), and, through this juridical form, an ultimately aesthetic model, characterised by a “possessive enjoyment: self-enjoyment, taking one's pleasure with oneself, finding all one's delight in the self.” [CITATION Mic05 \p 495 \n \y \l 1033 ]. As this pleasure is not placed outside the self, it is not precariously owned [CITATION Mic901 \p 66 \n \y \l 1033 ]. Living becomes akin to producing a piece of art, and so moral choices occur within the domain of aesthetics.
“Truth” or “true discourses” were to be found not through decipherment of an inner self but instead through a process of appropriation, by which one reflected upon their situation in the world and then attained logos based upon this situated-ness [CITATION Mic05 \p 498 \n \y \l 1033 ]. Plutarch employs metaphors such as that of a toolbox to explain how one utilized these logos. The toolbox is not found but appropriated, acquired from the external world [CITATION Mic05 \p 500 \n \y \l 1033 ].
Foucault reminds us that “This relation to self that constitutes the end of the conversion and the final goal of all the practices of the self still belongs to an ethics of control” [CITATION Mic901 \p 65 \n \y \l 1033 ]. The Victorian biopolitical model that is outlined in the first volume of The History of Sexuality can be seen as emerging from classical antiquity through the increasing emphasis on “the manifold ills that sexual activity can give rise to” and gradual universalisation of the principles of “nature and reason” [CITATION Mic901 \p 238 \n \y \l 1033 ]. What Foucault is ultimately underlining is that:
It is not the accentuation of the forms of prohibition that is behind these modifications in sexual ethics. It is the development of an art of existence that revolves around the question of the self, of its dependence and independence, of its universal form and of the connection it can and should establish with others, of the procedures by which it exerts its control over itself, and of the way in which it can establish a complete supremacy over itself [CITATION Mic901 \p 239 \n \y \l 1033 ].
However, as it is written in Nietzsche, Genealogy, History, a genealogical history can only emerge within spaces of rupture or discordance. “The continuity of the themes of this ethics is something very striking”, Foucault tells Dreyfus and Rabinow, “but I think that behind, below
this continuity were some changes, which I have tried to acknowledge” [CITATION Fou83 \p 230 \n \y \l 1033 ]. It is these changes that Colin Koopman grasps on when he suggests that Foucault’s genealogy of ethics is not only “responding to his earlier diagnostic problematizations” but also may function as “a serious alternative to the behemoth moral systems that have thoroughly dominated the ethical practices of our modernity” [CITATION Col13 \p 182 \n \y \l 1033 ]. As we have seen with regards to the homo-economicus, one’s being is only legitimized through a model of investment and return. Subjectivity is regulated via market mechanisms and thus, to a certain extent, becomes a homogenous multiplicity. Whereas for the Ancient Greeks, reflection on moral behavior was not a means of “formalizing general interdictions imposed on everyone; rather it was a means of developing- for the smallest minority of the population, made up of free, adult males- an aesthetics of existence, the purposeful art of a freedom perceived as a power game” [CITATION Mic902 \p 252 \n \y \l 1033 ]. In fostering relations with the self, one is not affirming oneself as a self-interested individual in relation to a mass, as is the case within the individualizing/totalising mechanisms of biopower. Care of the self, insofar as it was both a social activity and one that acknowledged one’s interrelated position in a community, always meant caring for others27 [CITATION Mic901 \p 51 \n \y \l 1033 ].
Hamann writes that “Whereas individuals were once urged to take care of themselves by using self-reflexive ethical techniques to give form to their freedom, modern biopolitics ensures that individuals are already taken care of in terms of biological and economic forms of knowledge and practice” [CITATION Tre091 \p 56 \n \y \l 1033 ]. Although many critics denounce Foucault’s ethics as lacking the critical acuteness that characterises the rest of his work28, others frame it as searing with utopian potential29. Yet the context in which the practices
of self-cultivation sketched above took place is fundamentally different to the context of today, and the overlaps between the discourse of improving the self in the early centuries and the neoliberal discourse of treating the self as a business which is improved by the constant investment of human capital illustrates the precariousness of utopian comparisons. As Hamann writes, “how can we distinguish the kinds of resistance Foucault was interested in from the endless calls to ‘do your own thing’ or ‘be all you can be’ that stream forth in every direction 27
28 See, for example, Martha C. Nussbaum’s claim that ‘The Use of Pleasure’ “is both mediocre and a departure from views about the inseparability of ideas from social institutions that have been his most valuable legacy to modern philosophy” (Affections of the Greeks, 1985).
from political campaigns to commercial advertising?” [CITATION Tre091 \p 57 \n \y \l 1033 ]. Even the rhetoric for caring for others through caring for the self is strikingly similar to Adam Smith’s argument about the invisible hand of the market. Foucault himself explicitly warns against care of the self being read as some forgotten answer, stating that “You can’t find the solution of a problem in the solution of another problem raised at another moment by other people” [CITATION Fou83 \p 231 \n \y \l 1033 ].
However, there is a reason that Foucault enacts a return to the times of classical antiquity in the context of the biopolitical. The overarching objective of the The History of Sexuality trilogy is a deconstruction of the “Christian/Freudian hermeneutic subject” [CITATION Dre84 \p 254 \y \t \l 1033 ]. The subject is not being deciphered but instead sort of shrunk to show that nothing lies beneath apart from a series of historical (dis)continuities. James Bernauer writes that “Parallel to the death of God was an absolutization of man. Claiming a firm knowledge of this figure, humanism made humanity’s happiness its ultimate goal, and man’s perfection its permanent project” [CITATION Jam90 \p 179 \n \y \l 1033 ]. Through removing a specific, singular locus of governmental power, neoliberal technologies enable a system in which sovereign power over the individual resides only within the individual, yet this sovereignty, belonging ultimately to the market-place insofar as the market-place constitutes government, can only be registered as long as the subject remains within the relations that regulate the market-place. In comparing the kind of sovereign power which worked through negation (one’s life was infringed upon by being taken away) to the biopolitical model in which power asserts itself positively through cultivating the conditions through which one lives, Foucault is pointing out that life no longer contains an element that is, by default, separate to the sphere of government. Foucault’s ethics could therefore be read as a means of reviving these distinctions through either considering how subjectivity may be conceptualized outside of the notion of sovereignty or (and I think this is more accurate) considering how one may become sovereign of oneself insofar as one is constituted through that which necessarily eludes the governmental.
Dreyfus and Rabinow write that “Foucault realizes that the discovery of the Greek ethical system radically different from our own yet in our tradition is an important advance, but his method does not allow him to say why” [CITATION Dre84 \p 261 \n \y \l 1033 ]. Foucault’s analyses always implicitly involve the identification of a danger, but then this danger cannot be
labelled as such as this would require employing tools other than those found in the genealogist’s box. For this reason Foucault’s has been read by some as holding a sympathetic or even advocatory position towards neoliberalism30.
Despite Koopman’s advocatory attitude towards Foucault’s ethics, he claims that they only hold value when they are gutted of content, leaving just the methodological bones. This, I think, oversimplifies what Foucault is trying to signify with the notion of care. As I will eventually argue in chapter three, an ethics of care that serves to protect the sovereign subject ultimately fails to adequately respond to modern homo-economicus and the forms of work that creates homo-economicus. Yet still the notion of care, as it reveals itself in the Greco-Roman context, resonates with some element of the problem with work as I see it as manifesting itself today. Various elements of Foucault’s ethics, including but not limited to his aestheticisation of the political, offer a springboard from which I would like to consider the subject of precarity so as to begin conceptualizing how care may offer an alternative ethical modality to that offered by the work ethic, which serves to justify neoliberal homo-economicus.
2
The Ethical Substance of Work/Post-Work
Having ended my overview of Foucault’s explication of neoliberal governmentality with the suggestion that an ethics of care might serve as a response to the problem of homo-economicus, I now wish to bring my enquiry back to the more particular problems concerning the ethico-political dimensions of the working subject in the specific context of today. More specifically, I wish to ask: in what ways can the modern subject, insofar as this subjectivity is discursively formed through entanglements with a number of specific apparatuses, reject/re-appropriate the identity of the worker?
As the previous chapter explored, the neoliberal reconfiguration of economic man as an entrepreneur of the self results in a conflation of the person who possesses capital and capital itself. The legitimization of applying economic analyses to domains previously understood as non-economic enables the emergence of the phenomenon of “human capital”, which, when defined as anything that may contribute to a future income, encompasses all aspects of living. Consumption, when conceptualized as a form of investment, becomes indistinguishable from production. Therefore to “opt-out” of the economic grid seems a perplexedly difficult task. However, as post-fordist conditions of production enact an acceleration of both time and space (Harvey, The Conditions of Postmodernity, 284), the conditions under which the working subject is produced continue to fluctuate. The paradox of homo-economicus working through merely existing, whilst simultaneously only existing through working, is further complicated by the recent emergence of the “precariat”. As unemployment rates escalate, new modes of work (such as zero hour contracts and temporary work) become normalised. If we are to maintain a narrow understanding of what it means to labour, then people are labouring less, but as productivity is increasingly exalted whilst that which is produced becomes primarily that of an immaterial and corporeal nature, it seems that periods of non-work hold the same relation to work as the undead (as opposed to the dead) holds to the living. The difficult task is therefore to render work visible and, through this, politicize it whilst simultaneously returning to the ethical dimension of the
working subject so as to consider how these ethical relations may be disentangled from the rarely articulated but ever present demand that we live a life composed by the tenets of work.
The End of Work?
In trying to (re?)31establish a separation between subject and work, it is worthwhile to take some
time considering how various post-work politics/imaginaries are devised and formulated. Writing in response to neoliberal reform but prior to the crash, Jeremy Rifkin offers a different perspective to Foucault by suggesting that homo-economicus will soon be extinct due to a state of worldwide unemployment created by a “technology revolution”32. By framing the end of work as
both inevitable and desirable, Rifkin opens up a space to theorize the sphere of “post-work”, which serves as a means of responding to “the question of the utilization of idle time” which he predicts will soon “loom large over the political landscape” [CITATION Jer95 \p 235 \n \y \l 1033 ]. Andre Gorz, like Foucault, also problematizes the legitimacy of considering the subject through a totalising economic lens, arguing (somewhat mystically) that “we have to re-learn that we are the subjects” [CITATION And89 \p 137 \n \y \l 1033 ]. By putting into focus the edges of a work-based society (Gorz through a genealogical history of work33, and Rifkin through
assuming its inevitable implosion), both theorists sketch out a picture of how people’s lives may be productively organised outside the limited framework of allocating scarce means to alternate ends for the maximal accumulation of capital.
Whilst their conclusions both include interesting theses on community and the notion of care, these post-work imaginaries over-rely on a concept of an autonomous subject that exists a priori to the apparatuses of work. Rifkin successfully writes about how the problems of value (both economic and non-economic), subjectivity and work all inform each other and proceeds through an attempted disentangling these concepts, yet his assumption that technology will soon create a work-free society fails to take into account new creations of work that are less about the production of objects and more about the production of subjects/relations/affects. His distinction 31 The question mark represents my unwillingness to sentimentalize Fordism/posit Fordism as a solution to the problems of post-Fordism.
32 A similar claim can be most famously found in John Maynard Keynes’ essay Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren.
33 In this genealogical study, Gorz claims work is a modern invention: invented and then generalized only with the coming of industrialism.
between labour and subject relies on the model of alienation that Marx uses, rather than perceiving the subject as a “profit stream”34. Although Gorz later shifts his position so as to take
into account the conditions of precarity brought about by the financial crisis35, in Critique of
Economic Reason he criticizes the labelling of that which traditionally is considered to constitute the private sphere as work on the basis that to do so furthers the phenomenon whereby “equity and economic logic appear to demand that everything people do be evaluated according to its exchange value on the market” [CITATION And89 \p 136 \n \y \t \l 1033 ]. He fails to understand what Federici understood before him when she demanded wages for housework: that capital is not just generated in the workplace, and to cover up this fact is to cover up the ways in which the worker may regain control of their situation. There is also that Gorz and Rifkin employ a concept of freedom that cannot exist without the concept of work serving as its binary. In a discussion about his ethics, Foucault states:
I have always been somewhat suspicious of the notion of liberation, because if it is not treated with precautions and within certain limits, one runs the risk of falling back on the idea that there exists a human nature or base that, as a consequence of certain historical, economical, and social processes, has been concealed, alienated, or imprisoned in and by mechanisms of repression [CITATION Mic971 \p 282 \n \y \l 1033 ].
By not defining liberty in concrete terms36, Gorz and Rifkin both suggest that it is something
that has merely been repressed by work and therefore does not need to be properly theorized. This leads to seeking out freedom in the places where work is still done, such as the domestic sphere. To avoid this mistake it is important to consider work in its specifically post-fordist formations.
Maurizio Lazzarato uses the term “immaterial labor” to express the shift in the form and object of work [CITATION Mau15 \n \l 1033 ]. Defining immaterial labour as “labor that produces the informational and cultural content of a commodity”, Lazzarato claims that it is “the investment of subjectivity” that now constitutes production, and it is social relations that are the object of management. What is produced is that which necessarily precedes the material product. These new dominant modes of production will not eventually be superseded by the technological,
34 Foucault’s words.
35 See Reclaiming Work: Beyond the Wage-Based Society.
36 To do so is perhaps an impossible task, and one that could be avoided altogether simply by not discussing freedom in relation to politics.
as Rifkin predicted, as they entail the direct use of immaterial human relations as the raw labor material. Because “life becomes inseparable from work” under these conditions, it is not enough to simply demand that the economic schema be kept to the public sphere; for, as Foucault demonstrates, this public sphere no longer exists. It is for this reason that Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri focus their analyses on late capitalism at the level of affect: Hardt writes that the third paradigm of capitalism37 involves “a process of economic postmodernization, or rather,
informatization”, whereby labour mainly consists of the providing of services such as information/communication management and affect control [CITATION Mic15 \n \y \l 1033 ]. In The Managed Heart, Arlie Hochschild draws attention to affective labour in the form of what she calls emotional labour, using the work of the air hostess as a guiding example. This “commercialization of feeling” produces gendered subjects, in that “women make a resource out of feeling and offer it to men as a gift in return for the more material resources they lack” [CITATION Arl03 \p 163 \n \y \t \l 1033 ]. Weeks similarly states that gender is “enforced, performed and recreated” through work [CITATION Kat11 \p 9 \n \y \l 1033 ]. When productivity is framed as an end in itself, it becomes a tactic of exploitation, as well as an arbitrary moral system that fails to justify its own tenets.
It is therefore important to consider subjectivity on the terrain of both the macro-economic and the everyday, from a biopolitical standpoint and “from below” [CITATION Neg99 \p 79 \y \l 1033 ]. The fetishisation of productivity that means that one must work in order to not work (take, for example, the processes one must go through in the UK to claim unemployment benefits38) leads to the necessitation of a counter-ethics or post-work politics that does not simply
consider labor in its most visible forms, but instead uses the phenomenon of everyday existence as its springboard.
Neoliberal Ethics: Happiness and Debt
As my overview of Foucault has hopefully already shown, to critically engage with a moral paradigm can give rise to new ways thinking through the ethical. If the working subject can also
37 The first two being the stages of agriculture (modernization) and industry (industrialization) respectively.
38 Such as when in the UK young people were made to work without wages in order to receive jobseekers allowance
be read as the ethical subject, then to what extent can we understand these forms of subjectivity as informing each other? How is the labouring homo-economicus constituted by domains that are seemingly unrelated to work?
In a lecture on liberalism, Foucault claims that “the problem of English radicalism39 is the
problem of utility” [CITATION Mic10 \p 40 \n \y \l 1033 ]. Utilitarianism should not, he stresses, be understood
as a philosophy or an ideology, but instead as “a technology of government” [CITATION Mic10 \p 41 \n \y \t \l 1033 ]. The eighteenth century saw a shift in the “raison d'être” of the government, during which the juridical function was subsumed under the concern of working with “interests”40. It is these interests that the homo-economicus must follow (i.e. their own,
self-concerning interests) so as to enable the successful working of Smith’s invisible hand of the market. Bringing together the liberal subject with neoliberal homo-economicus, Foucault writes the following:
What English empiricism introduces- let’s say, roughly, with Locke- and doubtless for the first time in Western philosophy, is a subject who is not so much defined by his freedom, or by the opposition of soul and body, or by the presence of a source or core of concupiscence marked to a greater degree or lesser degree by the Fall or sin, but who appears in the form of a subject of individual choices which are both irreducible and non-transferable [CITATION Mic10 \p 272 \n \y \t \l 1033 ].
According to David Hume, the irreducible element of a choice can be arrived at by questioning the reasons behind a choice until you stumble across something self-evident, that can no longer be further questioned. Hume demonstrates this element to always be pleasure or the absence of pain41. Such choices are non-transferable because you cannot transfer your feelings
onto another being, and are necessarily based on your own self-interest.
39 By “English radicalism”, Foucault means “a position which involves continually questioning government, and governmentality in general, as to its utility or non-utility” [CITATION Mic10 \p 41 \n \y \l 1033 ].
40 By “governing interests”, I mean the role of the government shifted from placing prohibitions upon what people wanted to maximising what people wanted.
41 “I will take Hume’s very simple and frequently cited passage, which says: What type of question is it, and what irreducible element can you arrive at when you analyse an individual’s choices and ask him why he did one thing rather than another? Well, he says: “You ask someone, ‘why do you exercise?’ He will reply, ‘I exercise because I desire health.’ You go on to ask him, ‘why do you desire health?’ He will reply, ‘Because I prefer health to illness.’ Then you go on to ask him, ‘Why do you prefer health to illness? He will reply, ‘Because illness is painful and so I don’t want to fall ill. And if you ask him why illness is painful, then at that point he will have the right not to answer, because the question has no meaning.”” [CITATION Mic10 \p 272 \y \l 1033 ]
Thus, one becomes the “eminently governable” homo-economicus through having and following interests that are based upon one’s own pleasure, which in turn are based on one’s empirical reality [CITATION Mic10 \p 277 \n \y \t \l 1033 ].
Weeks takes as a starting point for her critique the self-evident nature of the work ethic, which she puts into question through a genealogical enquiry [CITATION Kat11 \p 37-78 \n \y \l 1033 ]. In the same way, Sarah Ahmed undermines “philosophy’s foundational tautology” of “what is good is happy and what is happy is good” [CITATION Sar10 \p 202 \n \y \t \l 1033 ] by pointing out that happiness has held contradictory significations throughout history: previously it was used to express good luck or fortune, rather than something we orient ourselves towards through particular life decisions. [CITATION Sar10 \p 22 \n \y \t \l 1033 ]. Returning to Hume’s “irreducible aspect” of choice, Ahmed writes that “Happiness provides us with a full stop, a way of stopping an answer from being a question” [CITATION Sar10 \p 203 \n \y \t \l 1033 ]. That which is defended by claims to happiness ceases to be an object that is politically accountable, and the value system of the happy subject is neutralized by being posited as an absolute. In an era where ethics holds a normalizing form, this means that “happiness is used to redescribe social norms as social goods” [CITATION Sar10 \p 2 \y \t \l 1033 ].
The extent to which this concept of happiness is bound up with economic productivity becomes evident when considering the moral injunction implicit in the demand that we strive towards happiness. Like Hochschild, Ahmed claims that happiness is subsumed into the commodity sphere, a prime example of this being the recent popularity of the self-help genre [CITATION Sar10 \p 10 \n \y \l 1033 ]. The happiness levels of different countries are somehow quantified and then pitted together in the same way that macroeconomic data is42. Distinctions
between higher and lower forms of happiness can be traced back to work values: the more immaterial happiness is, the greater worth it holds, claims J.S. Mill43. That “some forms of
happiness are read as worth more than other forms of happiness, because they require more time, thought and labour” [CITATION Sar10 \p 12 \y \t \l 1033 ] is symptomatic of the phenomenon of subjectivity investment. The ways in which are ascribed to be happy correspond with how we are expected to behave as workers.
42 See Forbes’ list of “The World’s Happiest Countries” [ CITATION Chr13 \l 1033 ]
Ahmed concludes by describing happiness as something that “may hold its place only by being empty, a container that can become quite peculiar as it is filled with different things”[CITATION Sar10 \p 202 \n \y \t \l 1033 ]. The paradox here is structured just as the paradox of neoliberal homo-economicus is, and similarly relies on another empty signifier- the concept of freedom. Lauren Berlant describes the relationship that modern subjects hold towards the future as one of cruel optimism; “cruel” because “the object that draws your attachment actively impedes the aim that brought you to it initially” [CITATION Lau11 \p 1 \n \y \l 1033 ]. Ahmed writes that “The idiosyncratic nature of happy object choices, the intimacy of recognizing each other’s likes, is how we share a horizon… The very diversity of happy objects helps create happiness as a field of choice (do you like this, or that, or whatever), as an illusion of freedom” [CITATION Sar10 \p 202 \n \y \l 1033 ]. That which enables us to constitute ourselves as sovereign subjects, as subjects who are able to determine their futures, ultimately serves to bar us from what we understand as sovereignty in the first place, whether that be because work is no guarantee of security (economic or otherwise), or because the happy objects that we orient ourselves towards are actually subscribed as happy by a minority group of which we are not part of. Yet this is a structure that hides from both us and itself, meaning that we cannot identify why we may not be feeling happy when we are doing that which is prescribed to us- namely being productive through hard work.
The utilitarian subject who strives towards a certain future through hard work is also governed through monetary debt. Lazzarato argues that debt is not an impediment to economic growth, but instead a strategy at the heart of neoliberal politics [CITATION Mau11 \p 25 \n \y \l 1033 ]. If the market-place first functioned through exchange, and then investment, it is now primarily built upon credit deficits. By perceiving finance as a necessarily asymmetrical power balance between creditors and debtors [CITATION Mau11 \p 97 \n \y \t \l 1033 ], Lazzarato renames Foucault’s homo-economicus as homo debitor (indebted man), showing that “the debt economy is an economy that requires a subject capable of accounting for himself as a future subject, a subject capable of making and keeping a promise, a subject that works on the self” [CITATION Mau11 \p 88 \n \y \t \l 1033 ]. Debt is ontologised, becoming the basis of relations to others and to the self.
Responding to Foucault’s claim that neoliberal policy displaces sovereign power onto the market-place, Lazzarato argues that “the debt economy reconfigures State sovereign power”, in that the response to the financial crisis was the State bailing out the banks [CITATION Mau11 \p 99 \n \y \t \l 1033 ]. By nationalizing private debt, the relations of debt become projected upon the individual, who must labor in order to “pay off” a singularized portion of the economy. Lazzarato notes that this results in what he calls a “debt morality”: “The couple ‘effort-reward’ of the ideology of work is doubled by the morality of the promise (to honor one’s debt) and the fault (of having entered into it)” [CITATION Mau11 \p 30 \n \y \t \l 1033 ]. The freedom of homo-economicus is therefore further complicated by the deeply ethical dimension of their relation to the future, which administers how one must act (and, through this, who one must be), by the maxim that one must pay off their debts through work.
Foucault’s analysis of homo-economicus juxtaposes the neoliberal discourse of absolute freedom with the particular conditions that must be met in order for this absolute freedom to be realised. Ahmed endeavors to show that the concept of happiness is formed through a structure of privilege which then masks itself as being available to all. Berlant describes optimistic attachments to the future as being manifested as a promise, a promise that ends up being cruel because of the disparity between our hopeful expectations and the reality of the economic climate that subsumes crisis into the ordinary [CITATION Lau11 \p 20 \n \y \l 1033 ]. This configuration of happiness shares the configuration as debt: both form a structure that is promise-like in that it is always temporally “ahead” of itself; an elite and unobtainable horizon that is posited as always just out of grasp (for one must always have debts to pay if one is to be an economic agent, and, as we have seen, one cannot not be an economic agent if one is to be a subject). The rhetoric of happiness often encourages a person to “be themselves” or “follow their dreams”, yet such commands always relay back to a state of affairs whereby one is governed by a debt relation that necessitates their productivity. The future manifests itself as a horizon of “happy objects” from which we can choose, and yet to engage in choice-making activity one must co-opt a certain structure of existence, namely that of being in debt. The imperative to be happy enables the governing of oneself, and this governing and managing of the self becomes increasingly particularized through debt morality. The ethical command here is that one must work upon oneself.
Foucault succeeds in problematizing homo-economicus by outlining an ethical system substantially different to the one that is normalized via neoliberal governmentality. However, as both Lazzarato and Berlant show, the problem of work today is not so much to do with the investing of human capital, but more to do with the sustaining of human capital. It is this relation to the self that Lazzarato highlights as holding the character of precarity:
By capping wages (through wage deflation) and drastically reducing public spending, neoliberal policies produce human capital and ‘entrepreneurs of the self’ who are more or less in debt, more or less poor, but in any case always precarious. For the majority of the population, becoming an entrepreneur of the self is restricted to managing, according to the terms of business and competition, its employability, its debts, the drop in wages and income, and the reduction of public services [CITATION Mau11 \p 94 \n \y \l 1033 ].
As we have seen, there is a danger in positing the self in a post-work milieu without first pointing out the extent through which the self is enmeshed in work, the extent through which the everyday reveals itself as work. It is this incongruity between actuality and possibility (a temporal dissonance which eternally repeats itself) that must now be addressed when
3
Precarious Ethics, Ethical Care
Having explored what it means to labour in the context of today, and how this intimately informs the process of subjectification, I now intend to return to an ethics of care as a way of thinking about how one may constitute oneself as a subject without the all-encompassing narrative of work. Just as Foucault’s ethics of self-cultivation retains elements of neoliberal self-fashioning so as to show how one may (and did) arise from the other, I appeal to feminist critiques of work so as to consider how care might be positively constructed from conditions of precarity. Hardt and Negri suggest that it is the incorporation of affect into the political economy that enables the revolutionary to be conceptualized within the context of the biopolitical [CITATION Neg99 \p 88 \n \y \l 1033 ]. Although this is a claim that, as I explore later, proves to be problematic, it remains a useful starting point for the consideration of an anti-work ethics.
Ontology
In revising Foucault’s ethics of care, I have shifted my focus slightly in order to consider some elements of the writings of Martin Heidegger. In doing so, I have placed my enquiry on what could perhaps be described as an ontological terrain. Such a move does not rub against the
