The Regime Under the Microscope (the final installment!)

Part 2.5: Neoliberal Ideology and Bullshit

A bit of cultural theory

To prepare you for this sixth and final post scrutinizing the Regime, I’ll simply remind you of two key terms.  Both are handy to keep in mind whenever exploring the intricacies of culture.

IDEOLOGY:

“Ideology represents the imaginary relationship of individuals to their real conditions of existence.” —Louis Althusser (see my post of 7 June 2023)

BULLSHIT:

“For the bullshitter...he is neither on the side of the true nor on the side of the false.  His eye is not on the facts at all, as the eyes of the honest man and of the liar are, except insofar as they may be pertinent to his interest in getting away with what he says.  He does not care whether the things he says describe reality correctly.  He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose.” —Harry Frankfurt (see my post of 24 May 2023)

Applying this bit of cultural theory

The basic tenets of neoliberal ideology-bullshit are as follows: in the name of “individual freedom” the entrepreneur in us all must be realized.  We all must set loose our inner-tycoons within an institutional framework upholding free markets, free trade, and private property rights.  Most of all, the engine of our well-being is the competitive market.

At this point we’re all supposed to pump a fist in the air and shout Huzzah!!!

However, as we’ve seen in the prior four posts taking a hard look at neoliberalism, within the economic and social conditions fostered by this worldview, two pretty bad things happen.  One, capital has more freedom than people.  Two, money is sucked ruthlessly to the top to end up in the bulging pockets of the fabulously rich.

How does this bamboozling occur?  In a word: individuality.

We as Americans are so endlessly sold on the concept of rugged individualism that—yes, like a bunch of very non-individualist sheep—we all come to hold dear the same cherished belief: The American Dream.  “Hard work” is all you need to get ahead.  “Pulling yourself up by your bootstraps” defines our national character (rather than being an act in Cirque du Soleil).  All ideological happy noise that anyone who has ever set foot outside of a suburb recognizes instantly as gross oversimplification if not palpable nonsense.

Well—surprise, surprise—the cultural myth of the American Dream plays right into the hands of neoliberal ideology.  Therefore, “individuality” is the single-most pernicious slinging of neoliberal bullshit that needs to be debunked.

So let’s debunk some bullshit!  Hey, what else is Cultural Studies for?

Memorably, Michel Foucault characterizes the danger to the citizen living under modern panoptic discipline as “Visibility is a trap” (see my post of 16 August 2023).  That is, in our current social structure, we are so watched so constantly in so many ways that, from an early age, we learn to self-discipline—that is, conform to the standards of behavior and belief dictated by those who hold greater social power.

I think a related principle can be applied to our living within the neoliberal regime of power, namely: Individuality is a trap.

In the employment-insecure, no safety-nets, we’re-all-in-this-alone economy of neoliberalism, everyone is exhorted—in that unmistakable American-Dream-like way—to cultivate Brand You to be peddled on a precarious and merciless job market.  While such rugged individualism holds an heroic charm that’s easy for privileged white males to imagine about themselves (that is, most white guys believe their “success” results from their singular glorious genius alone), the untold reality of this fanatic singularity is that it makes You extremely tractable—not to mention vulnerable.

More than being mangled into a wage-slave (Marx) or disciplined into a subject (Foucault), life under our present-day neoliberal hegemony exposes us, as well, to new and potentially overwhelming techniques of power.

If you’re afraid that I’m about to unleash the social theories of yet another French guy at you, well, your fears are well-founded.

The social theories of yet another French guy

French philosopher Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995) theorizes that Foucault’s “discipline” society has developed one step more into a “control” society.  Whereas Foucault’s carceral-based panoptic discipline molds, concentrates, bureaucratizes, and fixes identity and relationships within the modern state, and thus confines the individual, Deleuze’s concept of control modulates, disperses, shifts, and monitors identity and relationships, and thus puts the individual to additional and particular uses within the modern state.

Allow me to elaborate.

Surveillance is the crucial mechanism in the operation of both social orders, so the function of Deleuze’s control society builds upon that of Foucault’s discipline society.  But Deleuze points out new methods and outcomes of surveillance that have changed the face of political economy.  Writing in 1990, he cites the innovations of a new “generation of machines, with information technology and computers” as a technological development “deeply rooted in a mutation of capitalism” (180).  With regard to outcomes, Deleuze indicates how late 20^th-century capitalism is no longer directed toward production, but “toward metaproduction”; that is, what capitalism “seeks to sell is services, and what it seeks to buy, activities.  It’s a capitalism no longer directed toward production but toward products, that is, toward sales or markets” (181).

As we read his words in the year 2024, all we can say is: Well, duh.

Deleuze was spot-on in his predictions of what the new digital tech would do to us.  As factories gave way to businesses, we’ve been put under the thumb of corporate culture saturating us in the marketing ventures of capitalism.  Observes Deleuze:

Marketing is now the instrument of social control and produces the arrogant breed who are our masters.  Control is short-term and rapidly shifting, but at the same time continuous and unbounded, whereas discipline was long-term, infinite, and discontinuous.  A man is no longer a man confined but a man in debt.  (181; emphasis added)

As discussed in recent posts, Richard Dienst asserts that a neoliberal “regime of indebtedness” operates to transfer wealth upward to a class of creditors engaged in free-wheeling finance capitalism.  Working from Deleuze’s theories, Dienst finds that, “In the current moment, indebtedness supplements and overtakes enclosure to become the crucial apparatus of control” (121).

AND HERE IS THE CRUX OF THE MATTER.  NEOLIBERALISM IS ALL ABOUT THE  MANIPULATION AND MISTREATMENT OF THE INDIVIDUAL BY MEANS OF CHAINING US TO DEBT.

Debtors Prison

Neoliberalism talks a big game about giving us our individual liberties.  Neoliberalism glorifies the supposed economic bounty to be enjoyed by all within a “Free Market” guided by the invisible hand of God.

BUT THESE CLAIMS ARE BULLSHIT.

In fact, the neoliberal individual—far from finding herself living in a utopia of personal liberties spurred on by the ubiquity of market transactions—exists instead in a meat-grinder of privatization, deregulation, personal debt, slow growth, and cycles of financial crashes then bank bailouts (Dienst 58-61).

Here is how the mechanisms of neoliberal control make our individuality a trap.

From individual to dividual to derivative

Also using Deleuze as his starting point, Arjun Appadurai takes this victimization of the individual one step further, showing how we have become the products of neoliberal marketing as well.  This exploitation is accomplished by way of the informational fragmentation of the individual.

Again, allow me to explain.

Deleuze asserts that in the control society, “We’re no longer dealing with a duality of mass and individual.  Individuals become ‘dividuals,’ and masses become samples, data, markets, or ‘banks’” (180).  A dividual is something that is separate and distinct, something divisible and divided.  Deleuze suggests that, in the control society, individual people repeatedly are being broken down and divided into their component statistical parts that are then put to use not only by the state but particularly in the fluctuating markets of business and finance.

In other words, we’re all being fragmented into little chunks of politically and financially usable data.  Our cherished American “individuality” is thrown out the window by neoliberal practices.  Instead of being distinct people and free citizens, we’re turned into so much grist for the political-economic mill of the rich and powerful.

Appadurai elaborates on Deleuze’s idea of the dividual by showing how this partitioning of the individual is a crucial link between the practices of Big Data and the financial form of the derivative.  With our new and remarkable technologies of communication—the internet, laptops, tablets, smartphones, and so forth with their many applications—being used as sophisticated instruments of panoptic observation producing massive inventories of data that can be analyzed in any number of ways, contemporary Western individuals have been rendered subjects of a vast array of data search, collation, pattern-seeking, and exploitation.  Argues Appadurai:

The most critical implication of these new forms of data gathering and analysis ... is the ways in which they atomize, partition, qualify, and quantify the individual so as to make highly particular features of the individual subject or actor more important than the person as a whole.  (109; emphasis added)

In short, we are turned from persons into consumer purchases, credit scores, health profiles, educational test scores, and the like in such a way that renders the ordinary life experiences of individuals the highly valuable statistics of dividuals.  And, wouldn’t you know it, at this point steps in the deregulated mechanisms of neoliberal finance to screw us over.

Here’s how.

From dividual to derivative to debt

So what’s happening with all this Big Data being collected from us?  In a nutshell: our data is being used by rich people to make more money for themselves.

In my last post (24 April 2024), we discussed neoliberal financial practices and especially the dodgy fiscal instrument of the derivative.  You’ll recall that a derivative is a bet on a future outcome that can turn into an increasingly long and unstable chain of other bets on other future outcomes.  Moreover, as this chain extends, what is being betted upon becomes ever more separated from actual things and real commodities.  In this way, derivatives disappear into the ether of what Appadurai calls the “financial imaginary” (126).  For a quick example: the house you buy becomes a mortgage; the mortgage becomes an asset; the asset becomes part of an asset-backed security, the asset-backed security is exchanged as a debt-obligation, and so on (108).

Well, to make a long and horrifying story short, what better abstract thing to wager with than Big Data—that is, with all of those billions of chunks of dividual us?

Appadurai names this formula for combining Big Data with derivatives as predatory dividuation and contends that it is an ideal tool for the masking of inequality.  The technique multiplies obscure profit-making financial instruments that escape audit, regulation, and social control.  Concludes Appadurai: “In short, the dividualism that financialization both presumes and enhances is counter to the interests of the large majority of society” (101-102; emphasis added).

How so?

Since the simultaneous rise of the digital age and of the derivative form since the 1970s, the genuine risks of ordinary individuals in an uncertain world have been turned into, more and more, the secondary risks of speculators and traders in a fiscal world invented for their use, controlled for their profit, and indecipherable to outsiders.  The everyday individual citizen, then, becomes the risk-bearer for the endless risk-taking and profit-making of the financial industry.

And here we are back to Deleuze’s key feature of the control society: “a man in debt.” 

The genuine risks we take as ordinary individuals come primarily in the form of taking on debt.  Our real-world debts (which are basically bets on future payment) then become the secondary risks (bets upon bets) of speculators playing within the financial imaginary of the derivative market.  In the neoliberal economy, unless one is extremely wealthy, it is all but impossible not to incur debt of some kind: house, car, credit card, business, education, health, and more.  That the common person’s debt has become the gain of the elite signals a new form of capitalism has emerged—one that advertises “individuality” but constructs our faceless servitude.  Appadurai characterizes the situation thus:

From this point of view, the major form of labor today is not labor for wages but rather labor for the production of debt.  Some of us today are no doubt wage-laborers, in the classic sense.  But many of us are in fact debt-laborers, whose main task is to produce debt that can then be further monetized for profit by financial entrepreneurs who control the means of production of profit through monetizing debts.  (127-128; emphasis added)

Neoliberal ideology promises, as an imaginary world to live in, individual liberty and a free-market ladder-to-success available for all to climb.  Neoliberal real conditions of existence, however, turn us into debt-mules who are always on the precipice of economic failure or ruin.

Neoliberal bullshit now debunked, let me propose a motto for our Regime:

Debt, Dividuation, Derivatives Über Alles!

Neoliberal Debtors Prison?

Welcome to Surveillance Capitalism

Recently, social psychologist and Harvard Business School professor of Business Administration, Shoshana Zuboff, has warned that a caustic new economic formation threatens our humanity in the same way unchecked industrialization threatens our planet.  Zuboff calls this arrangement Surveillance Capitalism, a practice that “unilaterally claims human experience as free raw material for translation into behavioral data” (8).

Pioneered by Google and taken up with a vengeance by companies such as Meta (aka Facebook), Microsoft, Amazon, and others, surveillance capitalism transforms the personal data collected from individual users of digital technology into what Zuboff terms “prediction products.”  These products are then traded in a new kind of marketplace: the “behavioral futures markets.”  Companies eager to understand and thereby predict the likes and dislikes of potential customers purchase such behavioral products.

More than predicting consumer behavior, however, Zuboff shows in her study how the practice of surveillance capitalism has turned to shaping consumer behavior.  It is far more efficient—and profitable—to modify behavior rather than just keep an eye on it.  Notes Zuboff: “With this reorientation from knowledge to power, it is no longer enough to automate information flows about us; the goal now is to automate us.”  This business practice, “instrumentarianism,” is a new kind of power “that knows and shapes human behavior toward others’ ends” (8).

As you can see, as a mechanism of control, surveillance capitalism is Deleuze on crack.

Likewise, as a technique of enrichment, surveillance capitalism performs, in the most efficient manner yet devised, the cardinal neoliberal function of channeling capital upward—that is, accumulation by dispossession.

Regular people are not involved in any value exchange of products and services.  Instead, we are lured into having our personal information wrung from us over the internet to be packaged and sold without benefit to ourselves.  We are not the customers of surveillance capitalism; we are its raw material.  Explains Zuboff: “Surveillance capitalism’s actual customers are the enterprises that trade in its markets for future behavior” (10).

As is the norm for capitalism, the means of production rests in the hands of the wealthy few while the rest of us seemingly have no choice but to participate in their self-enriching mechanisms.  By now the internet has become an essential instrument for social participation of all kinds.  That instrument is saturated with commerce, and that commerce is dominated by surveillance capitalism.  According to Zuboff, resisting our dividuation appears to be a hopeless task, and so we suffer from “a psychic numbing that inures us to the realities of being tracked, parsed, mined, and modified.”  This attitude of defeat in turn prompts us “to stick our heads in the sand, choosing ignorance out of frustration and helplessness” (11).

Our vulnerability is a master stroke of neoliberal doctrine, neoliberal ideology, and neoliberal bullshit.

Not only are we wage-slaves, not only are we debt-slaves, but under surveillance capitalism we have become existence-slaves as well.  Our very being as humans is now used against our health, happiness, and prosperity.

So what?

It’s taken me six lengthy, probably too intricate, and definitely quite depressing posts to put The Regime under the microscope of cultural criticism and analysis.  The least I can do in conclusion is attempt to summarize, as best I can and in my opinion, our social moment as it stands in May 2024.

To summarize:

Whereas neoliberalism is evasive about its authoritarian proclivities, stressing instead a libertarian fantasy that we are all equal individual actors in a free and fair economic arena, neoconservatism is unabashed about its imposition of authority.  Neocons in the U.S. favor corporate enterprise and the restoration of class power in ways entirely consistent with neoliberal mistrust of democracy and protection of market freedoms.

However, American neocons also push beyond purely neoliberal principles to insist on what they see as a necessary pair of social glues.  Namely, 1) an overweening Christian morality and 2) white supremacy.  Such a neocon-neoliberal worldview advocates and works toward an America characterized by self-absorption, conceit, bellicosity, ignorance, fear of diversity, and minority rule.

In other words, a Regime possessing all the traits of a bully and of a bullshitter.

To opine:

It very much strikes me—and in this viewpoint I am by no means alone—that in the past presidency and the current presidential candidacy of Trump, all of these bully-bullshitter’s traits have found their political apotheosis.  Both the pride and the fear of a Dictator resonate ominously in the single slogan “Make America Great Again.”

However, along with neoliberal bald-faced greed and neoconservative bare-knuckled militarism, Trump brings to the table as well his unique, bizarre, eclectic, and apocalyptic mixture of alt-right bigotry, faux-populist posturing, chronic and brazen lying, deep and cultivated obliviousness, abject immorality, and reckless narcissistic amateurism when it comes to policy foreign or domestic.

The guy is the total fucking train wreck.

To tap one last time into his in-depth historical perspective and astute social criticism, David Harvey remarks: “Neoliberalism in its pure form has always threatened to conjure up its own nemesis in varieties of authoritarian populism and nationalism” (81).  As the neoliberal state inevitably corrodes all social fabric of the democratic state, the backlash will be an impoverished populace seeking a “strongman” figure to save the day.

The MAGA movement is such a backlash.  And very strangely, Trump—although a self-obsessed, New York City trust-fund dandy—has been elevated into an all-American incarnation of such a anti-elitist strongman figure: the businessman despot.   

Weird and alarming as this all is, even more distressing to witness are Republicans—as the stewards of the neoliberal-neoconservative hegemony—attempting to ride herd on the populist Frankenstein monster they’ve created.  Behind the cover of Trump and MAGA, they still hope to fulfill their conservative agenda of more tax cuts for the wealthy, more voter suppression, more stacking the judiciary (especially the Supreme Court), more restrictions on abortion, more white Christian nationalism, more strangulation of the American democratic ambition.

In other words, Republicans want to keep grinding away at the Regime they’ve been constructing for the past 40-plus years—a Regime based in bullshit and operating entirely for their own personal benefit.

Yeah, I know how demoralizing our social moment is and how this all sucks.  But remember a few well-documented features of culture and history.

Social structure is never set in stone.

Power is an ever-ongoing game.

Most of all, Regime change is up to us—individuals working together.

Works Cited and Consulted

(For a close discussion of the concept of the dividual, see in particular Appadurai’s chapter 7, “The Wealth of Dividuals.”) 

Appadurai, Arjun.  Banking on Words: The Failure of Language in the Age of Derivative Finance.  University of Chicago Press, 2016.

Deleuze, Gilles.  “Postscript on Control Societies.”  Negotiations, 1972-1990, translated by Martin Joughin, Columbia UP, 1995, pp. 177-182.

Dienst, Richard.  The Bonds of Debt: Borrowing Against the Common Good.  Verso, 2011.

Harvey, David.  A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford University Press, 2005.

Zuboff, Shoshana.  The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power.  PublicAffairs, 2019.

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