The Everyday Life of the Neoliberal Subject: The Interplay of Macro and Micro Ideological Structures

Abstract

Neoliberalism can be understood both as a practice of governance organized around economic norms of competition, flexibility and risk calculation, and as a technique of shaping and transforming modes of subjectivation. These two interpretations are closely intertwined: the institutions that capture neoliberal discourses become the starting point for the formation of a particular subjectivity known as human capital. At the same time, labour is understood very broadly: even pre-reflexive behavioural practices (e.g., sleep) are included in the idea of human capital. The purpose of this article is to analyse and criticise the neoliberal subject’s image of the life-world. The life-world is understood as an area of everyday human activity within which the pre-predicative resources of “common sense” are at work. The author takes an integrative approach, combining ideological theory and the study of everyday life. M. Foucault’s series of lectures, ‘The Birth of Biopolitics’, is used as the main source of content for the theory of neoliberalism. The critique of the neoliberal subject’s life-world is carried out through the ontological argumentation of the Ljubljana School of Psychoanalysis. The imperative of neoliberal ethics calling for unlimited pleasure is clearly evident in the mode of existence of consumer products. A certain commodity exists as a negation of its own idea: non-alcoholic wine, for example, is a negation of the idea of wine itself. In this sense, pleasure is stripped of any barriers, but just as importantly, the process of its reception becomes a meaning-in-itself that is institutionally supported. Pleasure is linked to the structurally constitutive absence of the object of desire. Thus, a critical analysis of ideology actualises the category of alienation. The overcoming of neoliberal subjectivity is only possible through the acceptance of a fundamental rupture (alienation) as the ontological basis of identity, a position that has been called an object-disoriented ontology.