The end of the welfare state and decline of symbolic eficiency may appear to usher in a new era of freedom from rigid norms and expectations. But the fluidity and adaptability of imaginary identities is accompanied by a certain fragility and insecurity. Imaginary identities are incapable of establishing a firm place to stand, a position from which one can make sense of one's world. Moreover, their very mutability and normative indeterminacy ·configure imaginary identities as key loci for operations of control (rather than internalized discipline), particularly those operations afiliated with desire and fear as they promise and provide enjoyment. The flip side of the multiplicity of imaginary identities, then, is a reduction and congealing of identity into massive sites or strange attractors of afective investment.
S T RAN G E AT T RA C T O RS
The idea of the decline of symbolic eficiency enables us to read Passavant's "consumer/ criminal doublet" as a specific figuring of enjoyment, as a site of phantasmic investment specific to neoliberalism as an ideological formation. Whereas the Keynesian welfare state produced the symbolic identities of consumers, workers, citizens, and prisoners (among others), neoliberal governmentality relies on the convergence of imaginary identities around the strange attractors of the consumer and the criminal. The consumer figures the possibility of enjoyment promised by neoliberalism. Consumption provides the terrain within which my identity, my lifestyle, can be constructed, purchased, and made over. Yet consumption is more than a terrain-the consumer is commanded to enjoy, compelled by the impossible demand to do more, be more, have more, change more . . . not in step with the latest fashion but in advance of it not looking at what's new but at what's coming up next. 51 The consumer today is imagined as excessive, extreme, and unregulated. She is imagined, in other words, as a composite of the neoliberal market itself. Correspondingly, the criminal figures the ever present threat of loss, the losing that the fantasy of free trade disavows. Insofar as the criminal serves as the site of displaced anxiety over such loss and losing, he is the intolerable monster, the one who stands for the Real of violence and whose expulsion and eradication mobilize neoliberal governmentality.52 The obverse of the frenzied, out of control consumer, the monstrous criminal must be controlled completely, for life, or better, to death.
FREE TRADE
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