excerpt Mbembe

The vision that defines the neoliberal moment is one according to which “all events and situations in the world of life can be assigned a market value.”11 The process is also characterized by the production of indifference; the frenzied codification of social life according to norms, categories, and numbers; and various operations of abstraction that claim to rationalize the world on the basis of corporate logic.12 Capital, notably finance capital, is haunted by a baneful double and defines itself as unlimited in terms of both ends and means. It does more than just dictate its own temporal regime. Having taken as its responsibility the “fabrication of all relations of filiation,” it seeks to reproduce itself  “on its own” in an infinite series of structurally insolvent debts.13 There are no more workers as such. There are only laboring nomads. If yesterday’s drama of the subject was exploitation by capital, the tragedy of the multitude today is that they are unable to be exploited at all. They are abandoned subjects, relegated to the role of a “superfluous humanity.” Capital hardly needs them anymore to function. A new form of psychic life is emerging, one based on artificial and digital memory and on cognitive models drawn from the neurosciences and neuroeconomics. With little distinction remaining between psychic reflexes and technological reflexes, the human subject becomes fictionalized as “an entrepreneur of the  self.” This subject is plastic and perpetually called on to reconfigure itself in relation to the artifacts of the age.14 This new man, subject to the market and to debt, views himself as the simple product of natural luck.

He is a kind of “ready- made abstract form,” characteristic of the civilization of the image and of the new relationships that it establishes between fact and fiction, and capable of absorbing any content.15 He is now just one animal among others, lacking an essence of his own to protect or safeguard. There are no longer any limits placed on the modification of his genetic, biological structure.16 The new subject differs in many ways from the tragic and alienated figure of early industrialization. First and foremost, he is a prisoner of desire. His plea sure depends almost entirely on his capacity to reconstruct his private life publicly, to turn it into viable merchandise and put it up for sale. He is a neuroeconomic subject absorbed by a double concern stemming from his animal nature (as subject to the biological reproduction of life) and his thingness (as subject to others’ enjoyment of the things of this world). As a human-thing, human-machine, human-code, and human-in-flux, he seeks above all to regulate his behavior according to the norms of the market. He eagerly instrumentalizes himself and others to optimize his own pleasure. Condemned to lifelong apprenticeship, to flexibility, to the reign of the short term, he must embrace his condition as a soluble, fungible subject to be able to respond to what is constantly demanded of him: to become another. Moreover, in the era of neoliberalism, capitalism and animism— long and painstakingly kept apart from each other— have finally tended to merge. The cycle of capital moves from image to image, with the image now serving as an accelerant, creating energy and drive.

       Achille Mbembe