The Return of the Authoritarian Character? Crises of Neoliberal Biopolitics

Conference

Program: Hier…

1. Neoliberalism as Biopolitics
The project of neoliberal governmentality was to make use of the self-regulating powers of life. Central to it was the idea that the market has the capacity to dynamically reproduce itself. The task of politics consisted then in nothing less than to ‘imitate’ life, that is, to establish an immanent relationship to the spontaneous equilibria and disequilibria of natural (market) processes. This did not amount to a mere laissez-faire – made possible by the discipline of the body and the management of populations – as in classical liberalism. More than to simply let economic laws act for themselves, neoliberalism’s project was to actively ensure that the market’s self-regulating powers, driven by competition and entrepreneurship, were not only maintained but also extended to all areas of social life. The dynamics of life or the living became in this way the model for the political organization of society. Neoliberalism’s promise was that, by releasing the vital creative forces of the market, it would be possible to overcome the mechanical form of capitalism within capitalism itself. This project was matched by a new form of subjectivity, marked by the convergence of a neoliberal ‘entrepreneur of the self’ with a neo-romantic ‘artist of life’. Entrepreneurship and experimental self-discovery were then conceived as coextensive, as two aspects of one and the same individual self-regulating process. Their promised outcome was a successful subject both authentic and optimized, both emotionally communicative and flexibly adapted to ever-changing market conditions.

2. New Authoritarianism and the Crisis of Neoliberalism
The current escalation of authoritarian tendencies suggests that we are amidst a crisis of neoliberalism as a specific form of relationship between politics and life. The authoritarian crisis of neoliberalism is a crisis of the neoliberal politics of life. Two positions can be identified in this regard.

Authoritarianism as Loss of Vitality
According to the first position, the promise of neoliberalism as a politics of life was from the outset a mere promise, which to this day has not been implemented. Neoliberal government was accompanied by a strong state, which always had to be more than a mere enabler of vitality since it actually appropriated life from the outside. Autonomous self-government meant, in fact, just the heteronomy of an external capitalist coercion. The neoliberal state was always already authoritarian, destructive, and invasive. To this extent, the problem with the neoliberal politics of life is that it is not, after all, a politics of life. Contrary to what it promises, neoliberal biopolitics does not effectively connect to the immanent self-regulating dynamics of life. It would not really, or not yet, be a politics of life, but rather a power over life that subjects the latter to a mechanizing logic while purporting to imitate it. Against the mechanical character of capitalism, it would be necessary to effectively promote a life-affirming power, e.g., to assert the biopower of the multitude against the biopolitics of the Empire.

Authoritarianism as Excess of Vitality
According to the second diagnosis, the idea of a self-regulating power of life is as such problematic. The authoritarian crisis would be caused precisely by the lack of a reflexive distance toward life and the reduction of politics to an immanent administration of life-processes. Understood in this way, the new authoritarian tendencies find their grounds on the absense of a genuine political organization in relation and in difference to allegedly self-regulating natural processes. Instead of leading to a spontaneous self-constituted order, the waning of republican ideals of political integration actually weakens the possibility of a democratic regulation of society that could go beyond the mere reproduction of life itself. The neoliberal project results in an authoritarian “release of nature as it is” (Horkheimer) which increasingly limits its emancipatory aims to a form of “repressive desublimation” (Marcuse). Against the dedemocratizing logic of neoliberalism’s affirmation of vitality, it would be necessary to assert politics in its inherently tense relationship to life, promoting forms of democratic reflexivity that can never be fully reduced to a mere administration of natural processes.

3. Towards a Democratic Biopolitics
Both models entangle the concepts of politics and life in their crisis diagnoses. The first model aims at a critique of neoliberal regimes by asserting the potentials of life against their appropriation by invasive political techniques of governance. In contrast, the critique of the second model is grounded in the assumption of an irreducible tension between life and the normative claims of the political sphere, systematically distinguishing the latter’s ideal of autonomous self-determination from the function of self-regulating systems. What can be said on the basis of (and against) these crisis diagnoses with regard to the relationship between politics and life? How would a decidedly democratic politics of life be possible? In what way, for example, can the turn to a cult of authenticity be understood as a crisis of neoliberal modes of subjectivation? Is the currently observable boom in authoritarian regulatory regimes an expression of the end of neoliberalism or its consistent enforcement? Are we dealing with a novel kind of longing for authoritarianism or does the crisis of neoliberal governmentality signify a return to disciplinary techniques that were thought to have been overcome?

Please register for the event at crisisofbiopolitics@gmail.com