Neoliberal Subjectivity

Neoliberal subjectivity finds its basis in the legal form of the corporation, an “artificial” person whose material structure permits the possibility of immortality. Should the corporation gain a monopoly position in a vital societal sector, the social necessity for the corporation’s ongoing existence, its having become “too big to fail,” can assure that the corporation will be given all the resources of the state to enable its survival under any circumstances.

Insofar as the neoliberal subject has as its goal infinite growth forever, the corporation’s access to immortality becomes the aspirational model for personhood. Under neoliberalism, certain human people begin to behave like corporate people, viewing their relations with others as opportunities to gain advantage, extract, subsume.

The anti-sociality of neoliberal subjectivity normalizes immiseration, the process by which the livelihoods of marginalized people are increasingly squeezed of energy and resources to enhance profitability for an ever-consolidating cabal of corporate shareholders. This anti-sociality is distributed throughout American culture as the predominant economic activity known as “work,” where the aggregate of workers battling to maintain their precarious earnings while being asked to offer escalating productivity leaves a lessening possibility of regenerative wellbeing in its wake; the teleology of neoliberalism is increasingly understood to be wholescale burnout.