Wendy Brown

The new form of power orchestrating the conduct of subjects—and the importance of governance in activating this power—is apparent in the grammar used to describe and enact it. The ugly words “flexibilization” and “responsibilization” have their roots in human capacities associated with modest autonomy. To be flexible or responsible is to have capacities for adaptation or accountability that, as Nietzsche and not only Kant remind us, are nominative signs of sovereignty: only a moral agent understood as willing its actions can bear responsibility for itself. But when the act of being responsible is linguistically converted into the administered condition of being responsibilized, it departs from the domain of agency and instead governs the subject through an external moral injunction—through demands emanating from an invisible elsewhere. The word “responsibilization” takes a step further this move from a substance-based adjective to a process-based transitive verb, shifting it from an individual capacity to a governance project. Responsibilization signals a regime in which the singular human capacity for responsibility is deployed to constitute and govern subjects and through which their conduct is organized and measured, remaking and reorienting them for a neoliberal order. Again, governance facilitates and imposes responsibilization, but the powers orchestrating this process are nowhere in discursive sight, a disappearing act that is both generic to neoliberalism and particular to responsibilization itself. Responsibilization is not an inherent entailment of devolution; there are decidedly more empowering and more democratic potentials for devolved decision making. Demands for local authority and decision making, it is well to remember, may emanate from both the Right and the Left, from anarchists or from religious fundamentalists. However, when conjoined, devolution and responsibilization produce an order in which the social effects of power—constructed and governed subjects—appear as morally burdened agents. Through this bundling of agency and blame, the individual is doubly responsibilized: it is expected to fend for itself (and blamed for its failure to thrive) and expected to act for the well-being of the economy (and blamed for its failure to thrive). Not only, then, are Greek workers, French pensioners, California and Michigan public employees, American Social Security recipients, British university students, European new immigrants, and public goods as a whole made to appear as thieving dependents operating in the old world of entitlement, rather than self-care, they are blamed for sinking states into debt, thwarting growth, and bringing the global economy to the brink of ruin. Perhaps most importantly, even when they are not blamed, even when they have comported properly with the norms of responsibilization, austerity measures taken in the name of macroeconomic health may legitimately devastate their livelihoods or lives. Thus, responsibilized individuals are required to provide for themselves in the context of powers and contingencies radically limiting their ability to do so. But devolution and responsibilization also make individuals expendable and unprotected. This turn in neoliberal political rationality signals more than the dismantling of welfare-state logic or even that of the liberal social contract: once more, it expresses its precise inversion.

Wendy Brown