6.2 The “Self” and Liberal Governance
The individual and its spiritual corollary, the “self”, are a key site of struggle, legitimacy, reflection, and value in capitalist modernity, and the fundamental unit upon which an assemblage of legal, economic, and political strategies unfurl, ranging from the right to property, vote, and self-expression to consumerism and lifestyle politics. Yet the self is a construction that does not exist prior to its articulation and discursive foundation in modes of socialization and social contexts generally (Skeggs, 2013). If someone is forced to spend their whole life in an empty, white-walled room, this person would develop a very diferent self than most people. In conditions of social interaction, the articulation of the self is contingent on variables including class, ethnicity, gender, bodily ability, and educational background, among others; as these variables are enacted in these conditions, they define what the boundaries of the permissible, the expected, and the possible are for individuals and social groups. The claiming of the self, then, involves the implicit or explicit negotiation, transgression, or submission to these boundaries, and enacts an (always re-shapable) subject position that provides particular vantage points from where someone views their place in society. Furthermore, the self, as Skeggs argues, is part of a system of social exchange “in which classed personhood is produced through diferent technologies” (2013: 5, emphasis added). Skeggs uses the concept of technology in the Foucauldian sense, which implies a form of power that aims to mark and produce individuals in ways that are compatible with the broader political and economic reproduction of society (Behrent, 2013: 82). In political contexts, where the “self” assumes prominence, such technologies are socially difused, crossing over state and market rationalities, including government policies, such as introducing audits in workplaces to make the work environment more competitive, or media representations, such as the promotion of particular notions of success. For instance, to avoid being perceived as unsuccessful, a person may strive to accommodate to prevalent norms about success, including in work, family, and love relationships, and would thus shape their selves according to this striving. Norms are then shaped by technologies of power and are themselves subject to change and diversification. A social technology exercises soft power, that is to say power via which a population is questioned by diverse and often competing expert authorities (the food expert, the psychology expert, the fashion expert, and so on). In the context of the therapeutic, while these authorities suggest the proper ways of conducting and managing the conflicting and always negotiable borders between the normal and pathological (“it is normal” to have negative emotions, asserts Castillo [2022e]), they intensify a preoccupation with the problems around the self, instead of, say, social inequality and power relations, and thus authorize governable subjects in neoliberalism.
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Cultures of Platform Capitalism