CLINICAL AND POLITICAL EFFECTS OF NEOLIBERAL GOVERNMENTALITY: A PSYCHOANALYTIC ESSAY

ABSTRACT.

Moved by Foucault’s methodological proposition of a ‘history of the present’ and its contributions, this work aims to problematize the emergence of the entrepreneurial pragmatic and technological knowledges as the neoliberal governmentality’s tools in the construction of the Homo Oeconomicus as a ‘subject entrepreneur of himself’, as well as to debate its effects for the subject and the contemporary subjectivities. Through a bibliographic review, we start from a possible dialogue between the foucauldian discussion and the lacanian constatation of the operation of capitalism’s discourse and its clinical and political effects, that range from the adoption of apoliticism’s pragmatism to the limit of the subject’s desubjectivation. We emphasize that the neoliberal discourse promoted a deterritorialization of the modern transcendent ideals and offered, as a space for reterritorialization, the market as the big Other (A), where the Real of the class conflict is erased in the name of an ideal in which the subject claims its right to an unlimited jouissance. In this scenario, we trust in a subversive and averse position for the subject in front of the capitalist discourse’s strategies; such a position that can act as a model of resistance against the worse.

Keywords:
Neoliberalism; subject; politics

RESUMO.

Motivados pela proposição metodológica foucaultiana de uma ‘história do presente’ e suas contribuições, este trabalho visa problematizar a emergência dos saberes pragmáticos e tecnológicos empresariais como ferramentas da governamentalidade neoliberal na construção do Homo Oeconomicus enquanto ‘sujeito empresário de si’, assim como debater seus efeitos para o sujeito e para as subjetividades contemporâneas. Através de uma revisão bibliográfica narrativa, partimos de uma possível interlocução da discussão foucaultiana com a constatação lacaniana do funcionamento do discurso do capitalista e seus efeitos clínicos e políticos, que vão desde a adoção de uma pragmática do apoliticismo até o limite da dessubjetivação do sujeito. Ressaltamos que o discurso neoliberal promoveu uma desterritorialização dos ideais transcendentes modernos e ofereceu como espaço de reterritorialização o mercado enquanto grande Outro (A), onde o real da luta de classes é apagado em nome de um ideal em que o sujeito reclama seu direito a um gozo ilimitado. Nesse cenário, apostamos numa posição subversiva e avessa para o sujeito frente às estratégias do discurso capitalista, posição esta que pode atuar como um modelo de resistência ao pior.

Palavras-chave:
Neoliberalismo; sujeito; política

RESUMEN.

Motivado por la propuesta metodológica foucaultiana de una ‘historia del presente’ y sus contribuciones, este trabajo tiene como objetivo problematizar el surgimiento del conocimiento empresarial pragmático y tecnológico como herramientas de gubernamentalidad neoliberal en la construcción del Homo Oeconomicus como un ‘sujeto de autoemprendimiento’, así como para debatir su efectos para el sujeto y para las subjetividades contemporáneas. Mediante revisión bibliográfica, partimos de una posible interlocución de la discusión foucaultiana con la observación lacaniana del funcionamiento del discurso del capitalista y sus efectos clínicos y políticos, que van desde la adopción de un apolitismo pragmático hasta el límite de la desubjetivación del sujeto. Hacemos hincapié en que el discurso neoliberal promovió una desterritorialización de los ideales modernos trascendentes y ofreció al mercado como un gran Outro (A) como un espacio para la reterritorialización, donde el real de la lucha de clases se borra en nombre de un ideal en el que el sujeto reclama su derecho a un disfrute ilimitado En este escenario, apostamos por una posición subversiva y opuesta para el sujeto en relación con las estrategias del discurso capitalista, una posición que puede actuar como modelo de resistencia a lo peor.

Palabras clave:
Neoliberalismo; sujeto; política

Introduction

Liberalism is not what accepts freedom. Liberalism is what proposes to fabricate it at every moment. (Foucault, 2008, p. 88).

What effects did the installation of neoliberal discourse in the contemporary world produce on the subject and subjectivities? What are its political and clinical consequences? Or yet, how to understand that an apparently economic-political discourse can produce such implications in supposedly heterogeneous spaces such as clinical practice and politics? And what can we do in both spheres to resist or subvert such effects?

In order to understand the scope of this insertion of neoliberal discourse and its variety of consequences, we have to consider some notions and definitions to go beyond the established discursive thresholds. Few authors serve us as much for this task as Foucault, and, in this specific case, his notion of ‘governmentality’ (Foucault, 2007, 2008). We will propose and work considering that neoliberalism is not only an ideological current or a political and economic discourse. We follow Dardot and Laval (2016, p. 07) when they define it as not only an ideology, a type of economic policy but as “[...] a normative system that has extended its influence to the entire world, extending the logic of capital to all social relations and all spheres of life”. Further on, they add: “The characteristic of neoliberal rationality is the generalization of competition as a rule of conduct and the company as a model of subjectivation” (Dardot & Laval, 2016, p. 17).

Based on the reading of the ‘political economics of jouissance’ established by Lacan (2008), we add an important aspect to this definition: in addition to a normative system, it is also a discursive composition that affects the libidinal economy or, if you like, the economy of jouissance of the subject (Lacan, 2008). Because it is an arrangement of discourses, it is also an ‘apparatus of jouissance’. This is the aspect that psychoanalysis introduces: the intrusion of jouissance into politics (Lacan, 1992). In any case, this conceptual designation is the result of the new neoliberal rationality committed to going beyond the economy and reaching private life, as well illustrated by Margareth Thatcher’s emblematic phrase: “[…] economics is the method. The object is to change the soul” (Dardot & Laval, 2016, p. 331).

A relevant point of this discussion is to consider the emergence of a new discourse by merging psychology and economics (Dardot & Laval, 2016). Not coincidentally Foucault (2008) located the birth of biopolitics in the rise of US neoliberalism, the cradle of pragmatist psychotherapies and management psychologies. The psychologies that emerged in this context were at the service of business logic, aimed at producing and appeasing tensions between employees and bosses. North American psychological currents (behavioralism and humanism), in this sense, collaborate with the capitalist social enterprise without intending to question and subvert its operation (Illouz, 2011).

The 20th century presents a gradual link between psychological and economic knowledge, generating in the 1960s and 1970s suggestive techniques such as business coaching and Neurolinguistic Programming (NLP), respectively. The coach, a classic figure in the sports world, was appropriated by companies and individual life to ensure performance for productivity. In turn, NLP emerged as a technique based on the principle of equivalence between subjectivity and computer programming. Today, the rise of these technologies of the self are presented as seductive marketing products that capture the subject with the promise of financial success, hiding, however, their fallacies.

These discussions about subjectivation and ‘neoliberal psychology’ drive our hypotheses and propositions, about the constitution of a converging field of pragmatic, technological, and methodological knowledge, destined for the production of a successful entrepreneurial ‘Self’: the self-help literature, the various types of coaching (personal, professional, ontological, neurocoaching), brain gymnastics and NLP, Transactional Analysis (TA), the use of drugs for high performance (Ritalin, Vyvanse), among others (Dardot & Laval, 2016; Illouz, 2011). Along the same line, new therapies are emerging with the guarantee of total effectiveness: Neurofeedback and mindfulness, not to mention the resurgence of hypnotic practices.

Also composing this field, mutual help groups (Alcoholics Anonymous, Narcotics Anonymous, Debtors Anonymous, Overeaters Anonymous, Neurotics Anonymous, Smokers Anonymous, and Women Who Love Too Much) seem to emerge as failure fixers of experiences of excess. Anonymous groups are constituted around an excess (one more) - the categorical definition of jouissance by Lacan (2008) - whose effect is to reaffirm an addictive position. Despite the emphasis on spirituality and anonymity as an ‘emptying of the self’, the reference to pragmatic knowledge predominates among these groups, characterized by a set of techniques of abstinence from the object.

In this device, a self-entrepreneur subject is manufactured from pragmatic, technological knowledge, characterized by the use of their vocabulary, amalgamating computational, neurological, business, and pragmatist terms. A common mark in this tangle of technological practices is the centrality of the subject’s perspective as a self-manager based on the use of suggestive techniques. The implication of this is that underlying the miraculous techniques that guarantee happiness and success, there are always gurus, best-selling authors, specialized companies, and itinerant courses, that is, a true technology market that increasingly seduces its consumers.

Lebrun’s observation (2006) about the rise of a new techno-scientific language is becoming more and more concrete. The search for a pragmatic and technological form of textual communication is producing a ‘newspeak’ (predicted in the dystopian fiction of Orwell (2009)) restricted in its written texture (like the limited characters of Twitter) and averse to poetic versatility. Technoscientific newspeak indicates a weakening of the symbolic in favor of the imaginary use of abbreviated and mechanical words in the virtual world.

Therefore, the notion of ‘neoliberal governmentality’ and its main consequence, what Foucault (2008) called homo oeconomicus produced by US neoliberalism, will be how we will seek to articulate and problematize such effects in the fields of politics and clinical practice, based on the works of Dardot and Laval, but also using propositions from psychoanalytic theory and clinic, especially from the works of Lacan and Zizek.

Homo oeconomicus and neoliberal subjectivation

Starting with a warning from Foucault, who at the same time already defines some terms. He recalls that neoliberalism should not be considered simply as a resurgence of the old forms of liberal economics in the 18th and 19th centuries. What is presented now is much more than leaving the market free, with the State as its supervisor - characteristic of modern liberalism. Today, it is the idea of the market that must serve as a form and model for the State and for society as a whole (Foucault, 2008). The socio-political and subjectivating rationality of culture is now based on the business model and all its (boring...) ‘management’ discourses.

To justify his warning, Foucault clarifies that American neoliberalism founded an entire application of economic analysis to a series of objects, fields, behaviors, and conducts, such as education, marriage, criminality, etc., producing what he calls homo oeconomicus, the model for which all rational conduct would result from something like an economic analysis (Foucault, 2008). This aspect is observed in the way in which the logic of management, planning, and entrepreneurship are present not only in the policies and functioning of the State but also in the discursive every day of subjectivities. In the words of Foucault: “Homo oeconomicus is an entrepreneur, and an entrepreneur of himself. […] being for himself his own capital, being for himself his own producer, being for himself his own source of his earnings” (Foucault, 2008, p. 311). This notion indicates that the neoliberal perspective is established as a rationality. The very perspective of society becomes a set of small business units, not to mention business-institutions. Here there is a homogenization of business logic in social and individual life.

The notion of ‘microenterprise of the self’ as a social ideal has the function of appeasing the contradictions of capitalism centered on the logic of consumption (Safatle, 2015). In this way, the function of the neoliberal doctrine is to conceal the capitalist structure anchored in the expropriation of surplus value. The worker now named as a partner, or collaborator, seems to be deceived by this illusory condition since they have their body and soul formatted by neoliberal rationality.

A problem that arises from then on is the concern with investments in the improvement and development of innate and acquired human capital. Investment in raising children, for example, must come from the good human capital of parents. At the same time, government policies in the educational, social, and cultural spheres are structured with a focus on quality of life, well-being, birth rates, and deaths (Foucault, 2008).

Not by chance, this mechanics adapts so well to the behavioral economics methods and techniques, which subtract meaning from conduct, restricting itself to a strictly normative and economic analysis of behavior (Foucault, 2008), with its rewards, reinforcements, and punishments. As we have seen, Foucault (2008) situates psychology, specifically American psychotherapies, as techniques consistent with neoliberalism by using economic logic in the study of behavior and in adapting the subject to reality.

Another of the main characteristics of this homo oeconomicus concerns the fact that it goes beyond the modern conception of the ‘subject of law’, born in the French Revolution, and still governed by a collective logic of rights and duties, very typical of a Kantian ‘practical reason’. Its operation is no longer based on the great modern ideals, nor is it directly concerned with the collective good. It is a ‘subject of interest’ that no longer obeys the mechanics of the subject of law based on the waiver and limitation of these private interests (Foucault, 2008). The idea of a political and collective totality is lost, making people believe that each one turning to their own interests, in the end, the ‘invisible hand’ of the market ties the two ends together: the private with the collective. It is, therefore, a supposedly autonomous subject, directed by his private interests, whose market model contaminates his socio-symbolic relations. From here, private law should supplant a concern for the collective. We are here facing the genesis of the subject of capitalism...

Deleuze (1992) in his already classic text Postscript on the societies of control already denounced this new postmodern logic, where the business model replaced the industrial-disciplinary model. If the disciplinary-industrial society described by Foucault (2014) had industry and prison as its institutional and control model, respectively, the new society of control - which emerged from the 1970s onwards - uses business and mall as a control model. Obviously, this is not a question of a dissolution of power, but of another strategization of its logic. Control is the effect of homogenization and genealogical installation of discipline and biopolitics in culture. All the old social institutions today follow the business model: the State, the School, Religion, social and sexual relations, based today on judicial and marketing contracts, among others.

Therefore, the strategic, pastoral, and governmental logic (Foucault, 2008) have to be considered, which these technologies of power adopt so that they can become immanent. They establish a torsion and no longer present themselves as ‘from the outside’, but in their immanence in the form of a ‘governmentality’. What characterizes this governmentality is that its mechanisms are ‘positive’ - in the Foucauldian sense -, that is, they produce subjectivities, in a way that they do not require a disciplinary imposition, but it is the subject who is invited to exercise this control over himself.

Evangelism, for example, is nothing more than introducing this logic of entrepreneurship to the low-income population. As much as it permeates all social classes and politicized and politicizing movements are observed in the evangelical milieu, its logic, and its great diffusion have fundamentally centered on the low-income population. Eminently mundane issues, to which the logic of Christianity did not apply - such as financial problems - are openly resolved by an evangelical ‘session’ for this purpose. We are facing what Boltanski and Chiapello (2020) called the New spirit of capitalism. If the Protestant ethic served the spirit of capitalism with its logic of worldly salvation and production, as described by Weber (2004), today, in a different way, certainly, evangelism catechizes subjectivities through the neoliberal spirit.

This is, therefore, an attempt to rationalize desire, involving the subject of desire in professional activity, constituting an army of ‘entrepreneurial subjects’ (Dardot & Laval, 2016), so that they feel responsible for the precariousness of the social and subjectivating conditions produced by neoliberal logic. An ascetic and pragmatic proposal for managing the soul is for sale. As Dardot and Laval (2016, p. 344) state, “[…] it is not about applying psychological knowledge or ethical issues to the world of business. On the contrary, it is about building, with the help of psychology and ethics, self-government techniques that are an interested party of the company’s governance”.

This effect can be illustrated by the logic of medicalization, self-diagnosis, and segregation that is observed in a dominant way nowadays. The subjects themselves demand medicalization or even self-medicate, or self-diagnose, making use of this segregative logic that founded psychiatry. The walls of disciplinary psychiatric institutions have fallen, but psychiatric power has expanded to all spheres of human life.

The pragmatics of apoliticism

Foucault (2008) places the discussion about work as a decisive moment. Unlike the classical economic theory based on the triad of income, land, and work, the neoliberal heralds of the Chicago School, based on the theory of human capital, began to study work as a practice that must be rationalized and calculated. A paradigm shift introduced would be to measure the worker not by the workforce he offers in the market, but by his ‘capital-competence’.

In this perspective, the subject would be his own capital, which consists of “[…] everything that can be [...] a source of future income […]”, or even, “[…] the set of all physical and psychological factors that make a person capable of earning this or that salary” (Foucault, 2008, p. 308). The effect of this is the non-differentiation between the subject and its capital. Thus, there is an inseparable relationship between the worker and the machine, the latter understood not in its external and alienating connotation, but in its positive, productive meaning, in the case in question, of income flows.

Another requirement addressed to the business subject is full responsibility for the success or failure of his ‘microenterprise of the self’. Faced with job instability and insecurity, in the name of flexibility and innovation, there is a constant feeling of risk, an intrinsic fact of competitiveness. At all times, according to the logic of performance ascesis, competition presents itself as the entrepreneur’s attitude towards himself. Thus, the bond with the other becomes guided by the ‘common perversion’ (Lebrun, 2008) being objectified, making the transaction worthwhile instead of the relationship.

However, the effects of this neoliberal rationality do not only affect the worker’s subjectivity. It also has dramatic consequences for society and politics as a whole. Reflecting from this broader perspective, in the 1980s there was a greater boom in this type of rationality, with the business being seen as a vector of all social progress. Indeed, the cult of business and the entrepreneur was not an exclusive consequence of a campaign filled with doctrinal lobbies. In fact, it is a cult that is celebrated every day and in almost every country by economists, journalists, management specialists, and political authorities. Therefore, we are facing a broader movement of resignification of the public and private fields. In this scenario, the idea of the social welfare State falls into disrepute and is interpreted as a burden and a true source of ineffectiveness (Dardot & Laval, 2016).

This attempt to delegitimize the field of the social welfare State gave rise to a specific set of beliefs and practices that we can call managerialism. Such managerialism seeks to be a kind of universal antidote for all the ills of society, which are reduced to pure questions of organization. The means used to solve this problem are a whole technical apparatus that has the value of efficiency as its final horizon and, logically, the agent in charge of operationalizing these techniques is the figure of the administrator (Dardot & Laval, 2016).

At the core of this new style of governance is the understanding that private management is more effective than public administration. Such private management would stand out for being more specialized, less subject to statutory rules, and more flexible. In addition, the organizing element of this superiority would be the existing disciplinary effect in stimulating competition, which would work as a fundamental trigger for good performance (Dardot & Laval, 2016).

Historically this managerialism imposed itself as being ideologically neutral, arrogating to itself the idea that the resulting operations would be carried out insofar as they would be beneficial actions for all. Therefore, from a technical and tactical perspective, there was a reinterpretation of what public management would be, which would now be fundamentally mediated by disciplines and whole rationality from the private sector. The consequences of this new type of functioning of the state machine are the reduction of the budget, the suppression of public agents, or even the weakening of the unions. Therefore, it is a transformation project that encompasses a series of spaces (Dardot & Laval, 2016). In this scenario, the political field is reduced to a board of directors’ debate that focuses on budgetary and financial issues. This economic pole then guides and regulates all other aspects of social life (Gaulejac, 2007).

About this amplitude that technology and this knowledge (S2) impose on the ‘control of the real’ - here understood in the Lacanian sense of the term - Badiou (2017) supports the idea that today any discussion related to the real is only sustained to the extent in which it establishes a relationship with economics. In this perspective, it is economics that holds knowledge about the real, it is it that can give the coordinates to read its mysteries. This belief in economics, however, seems to operate without any kind of empirical data to support it, after all, the recent global economic crises were in no way foreseen by the so-called economists. How, then, do they promote the idea that such professionals would be equipped with more accurate knowledge about the economic processes that cross our public and private relations?

Still on the influences of neoliberal rationality in the field of politics, Gaulejac (2007) argues that what we have as a result of this relationship is a split between the concrete life of the population and the vocabulary and techniques that politicians use to deal with the elementary problems of this life. In this sense, a resident of a poor community can speak of their despair and their conditions from a unique perspective, anchored in their experience, while politicians tend to respond to these appeals from an abstract level that considers only figures and indicators.

These two elements will mediate communication between citizens and the institutions that represent them, as it is through these paradigms that neoliberal rationality will seek its legitimation. However, there is a problem here, as these discussions do not address the meaning of such indicators or even what they forget to measure. The number is seen by the number, the figures assume a self-referential legitimation and the quantitative comes into play to the detriment of qualitative aspects. There is, therefore, an abysmal distance between citizens and the institutions that represent them.

This gap created promotes a movement of depoliticization of the subjects, which can be better represented through what Zizek (2016) called the ‘postmodern post-politics’, that is, a form of denial of the political that is not about a mere movement of repression of this dimension, but of a true foreclosure. In this scenario, the conflict between different visions materialized in the struggle between parties opens room for the collaboration of enlightened technocrats and liberal multiculturalists. From the relationship between these two agents, we find today the solutions and established consensus for the problems that afflict our societies.

The performance/jouissance device and the split of the neoliberal normative system

Now it is possible to converge on the problematization of how all these discursive, historical, political, subjectifying, and desubjectifying movements affect the subject. These political and clinical effects are believed to be established in at least two ways, which are obviously not mutually exclusive: through processes of subjectivation, through a ‘neoliberal governmentality’, which implies a different relationship with ‘knowledge’ and through a body/jouissance pathway, altering the subject’s ‘economics of jouissance’ (Lacan, 2008), determining new configurations of topological movements between the real, the symbolic and the imaginary. Therefore, two structural poles - knowledge and jouissance - through which the subject discursively deals with the body and with the other in the social bond.

Concerning the field of jouissance, Dardot and Laval (2016), continuing the Foucauldian research, situate the self-government techniques involved in this production of the ‘neoliberal subject’, within the scope of what they name as ‘performance/jouissance device’, as a new device in which the subject is required not only to produce more but to demand more and more jouissance. It is a discursive logic, very close to what Lacan called the capitalist discourse, in which a socio-symbolic regulation of drives is abdicated, in favor of their stimulation, letting their borders and limits be determined by particular and individual wills.

In this same perspective, Danziato (2010) also proposed we are experiencing the overcoming, even not completely, of the modern device par excellence, the one described by Foucault (2020) as the ‘device of sexuality’, which constitutes the modern subject - a subject of desire, subjectivated by sexuality - by another that he calls the ‘device of jouissance’. What sustains this proposal is Lacan’s main thesis on capitalism, that is, that capitalism seeks a ‘recovery of plus-de-jouir’, the jouissance homologous to surplus value, the surplus of body experiences, which is never enjoyed, but which can enter into the calculations of the subject’s economics of jouissance based on the misleading proposal of recovery:

[...] contemporary capitalism transforms what should be an impossibility and a renunciation of jouissance into a possible recovery, through the offers of concrete objects - imaginary in Lacan’s description. More than that, it dissolves the symbolic reinvestment of surplus value in the social bond, which remained at the origins of capitalism. What is observed now is a reinvestment in the abstract logic of the financial market, whose ghost operates with the stated function of recovering plus-de-jouir (Danziato, 2010, p. 434).

Thus, the main aspect of this new device of jouissance is its effect of desubjectivation, as a result of experiences of jouissance, which by definition carry the condition of erasure, of aphanisis of the subject (Lacan, 2005), at the punctual moment of these bodily experiences.

Suffering the effects of desubjectivation is not the problem. Lacan, from the beginning of his work, points to a division of the subject that manifests itself in the phantom ($ <>a), exactly between the pole of the subject and that of the object, which implies that the desubjectivation and jouissance process is part of the common functioning of the structure since subjectivation and desubjectivation incarnate the bipolarity of this matheme. The language structure should allow the subject to resubjectify himself before the real effects of the jouissance experience.

Note that what we are calling ‘split’ is something else: it is a phenomenon, observable in the clinic and in culture, where the postmodern space of meaning no longer has the symbolic competence to recompose the place and function of the subject, to allow him a resubjectivation. The subject, then, enters into an endeavor of jouissance and is no longer able to withdraw from it. Then, it works like drug addicts, who, due to this split between the symbolic and the real, are unable to withdraw from this dystopia of jouissance in which they have become involved. Generalizing, we could assume that, due to a collapse or a narrowing of the symbolic field in culture, characteristic of what Badiou (2006) calls the ‘atonal world’, we are not managing to promote utopian or non-utopian solutions for the political framework from which we suffer.

Also, in Agamben (2009), a conception of ‘device’, specifically contemporary devices, is described from their ‘desubjectivation’ effects. Resuming the path of Foucault’s work, Agamben (2009) proposes a new reading for the concept, thus trying to elaborate an original perspective that harmonizes with a more contemporary reading of the processes of subjectivation existing in our time. In this new reading, the device would basically be anything with the ability to capture, control, model, determine, and ensure the gestures, conduct, opinions, and discourses of living beings.

Thus, the devices now include not only the already established institutions of Foucauldian studies, such as prisons, factories, and asylums but can also encompass the most prosaic or complex objects and phenomena of our everyday reality such as the pen, the language, agriculture, the computer, cell phones, and television (Agamben, 2009).

However, in our time, the devices would not act creating processes of subjectivation. Thus, Foucault’s classic reading of disciplinary technologies and their devices does not account for the specificity of our time. Every process of subjectivation indeed implies a process of desubjectivation, but the question is that today the devices impose a regime in which the processes of subjectivation and desubjectivation have become reciprocally indifferent, not giving rise to the subsequent recomposition of a new subject, as in the classic confessional device. Subjectivation and desubjectivation seem to become mutually opaque, indifferent to an active position of recomposition, which leads to subjects formed by a kind of spectral image, with a reduction of the subject to a mere functional dimension of his existence, lost in an amorphous mass (Agamben, 2009).

Thus, ‘apolitical biopolitics’ designates today, therefore, a discursive context in which devices no longer generate subjects, but only work from a logic of administration and regulation of the bare lives of individuals. In a society of this type, a phenomenon of political eclipse can be perceived, as social actors can no longer take an active position in processes of broad transformations since their engagement is blocked. The government here only wants its own reproduction (Agamben, 2009).

The articulation between jouissance and performance determines a profoundly individualized, psychologized, and apolitical discursive logic, which withers institutional frameworks and subjectivizes symbolic structures. It embraces the ideology of choice, of the right for jouissance, to live as one wishes, at the mercy of personal desires. On the other hand, it makes the subject responsible for the harmful effects of neoliberal competitiveness, making them consider such effects as personal failures. It is not necessary to go very far to deduce some important clinical consequences such as the corrosion of character, the bonds of values and references; work psychopathologies, depression, suicide; the various vices - suggested by the logic of performance - the stigmatization and segregation of failures, old people, immigrants, among others (Dardot & Laval, 2016).

This is a whole technological endeavor that promises a better quality of life, increased productivity, self-esteem, creativity, and emotional intelligence, and presents itself to the subject as a capital gain in the constancy of the ‘investment in oneself’, of someone who ‘works for himself’. They are, however, illusory practices, since individual productivity is at the service of capital. What these authors denounce is that the greatest effect of this alienation of the subject to the business Other is this belief in the position of the employee who works for himself. The new psychopathologies will therefore be the opposite of the ideals of performance and functionality.

Here is the double face of neoliberal governmentality: the triumphant face of shameless success; and the “[…] depressed face of deleterious failure” (Dardot & Laval, 2016, p. 373). This double aspect is considered as a split in this neoliberal normative system, a ‘bipolar split’, very clear in the logic of the discourses, which is presented in the antagonism between, on the one hand, an incessant coercion of this imperative of performance and effectiveness, and on the other hand, paradoxically, an invitation to jouissance, apathy, desubjectivation, and destruction.

Could we not also consider these effects as consequences of what Lacan (1978) called the capitalist discourse? One of its characteristics is to dissolve the impossibilities of discourses. The four other discourses he called ‘radicals’ bear that name because they would be subjected to two impossibilities of reality inherent to the language structure: impotence and impossibility, understood here in their logical sense. Now, these impossibilities tie the discourses to reality and the social bond. Without them, the subject floats without gravity in a joyful range of pseudo-bonds. Without them, the real is without moorings and the possibility of an edge, dissolving the limits.

Within this same logic, it is also appropriate here to apply the Deleuzian proposition that capitalism performs a ‘deterritorialization’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 2010) in culture, subtracting its ‘symbolic effectiveness’ and promoting a ‘reterritorialization’, even though what it offers is not equivalent in its symbolic pertinence to what it had deterritorialized. Explaining: modern capitalism deterritorialized the traditional sovereign world - the patriarchal big Other (A) - and offered a reterritorialization via industrial capitalism, but which maintained the great symbolic ideals gestated in the French Revolution - equality, freedom, and fraternity. Hegel and Kant were the operators of this passage. These ideals, however, still retained a traditional trait, since they were produced in the genealogy of Christianity.

Final considerations

Therefore, with the so-called postmodernity and ‘financial capitalism’, with neoliberalism and the effects of these new technologies, we are experiencing a second deterritorialization, this time of modern ‘transcendental’ ideals. What is offered as a space for reterritorialization is exactly the market as the big Other (A) with its neoliberal and university discourse - in the Lacanian sense of university discourse.

In other words: reterritorialization via the market and neoliberal discourse is a fraud that has to be denounced. This discursive farce does not allow considering, in the order of discourses, the reality of the class struggle. For this very reason, we are no longer able to create a new political utopia, not even great symbolic ideals. We live in times of scientific-technological dystopia and their obscene jouissance. Life floats, and the body loses its gravity. The effect of this could only be the return of raw and systemic violence.

There is, therefore, more than a contradiction in capitalist-neoliberal governmentality, which is why we call it a split, because if, on the one hand, we are facing a power that produces entrepreneurial neoliberal subjectivities, on the other hand, that same power, or at least its effects and ‘unspoken’, produce a mass of beings who live on the edge of language and who could well adapt to what Agamben (2008) called ‘Muslims’: beings who suffer from a ‘language breakdown’. Often entire nations collapse because they cannot be part of this radical process of globalization.

Also because of this failure of the subject of desire, psychoanalysis in this neoliberal context of commodification of knowledge is labeled as old, backward, or expensive when not capitalized by motivational literature and also by skillful companies selling courses and titles. However, the analyst’s discourse is one of the ways of opposing the neoliberal jouissance imperative by betting on the subject and his ethical and aesthetic uniqueness. The statement of Melman (2009) is precious: the greatest subversion of psychoanalysis consists, in this context of extreme capitalization, in refusing a place of mastery power.

The overwhelming presence of neoliberal rationality in the governmental political field is daily seen as the salvation of the intercurrent crises of capital. Interestingly, while the image of party politics is one of dirt and corruption, companies present themselves as clean, ecological, and sustainable. In collusion, Brazilian conservatism invokes the outdated illusions of salvationist militarism and the ascendant segregating evangelism. Thus, we have the realization of a neoliberal project that relies on the disbelief of the State, party politics, and the democratic vote.

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Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  10 Nov 2023
• Date of issue
  2023

History

• Received
  07 June 2020
• Accepted
  11 Nov 2021