TheSyllabus

It is a complex assemblage. There is no textbook definition, but I understand neoliberal subjectivity through Foucault. Crucially, the neoliberal subject is not a subject who is fully subsumed into neoliberalism, but a subject who has to deal with neoliberalism and its regime of truth. In my research, I have looked at how individuals in different spaces negotiate with neoliberalism’s main codes and norms. In doing so, they develop a subjectivity that in many cases includes both elements derived from the canon of neoliberal philosophy and some elements that try to challenge that canon ­– although this challenge, of course, itself originates within the space of neoliberalism.

If I had to highlight one fundamental trait of neoliberalism, it would be that the individual is the foundational unit of the world. Individualism means, on the one hand, pursuing one's individual interests – this is the economic understanding of individualism. But it also, and more interestingly, means the idea that there is a self, and that that self is very important. The idea of the good life within neoliberalism is to be understood as the result of the expression of the self. The more you unpack and unfold and realize your self, the happier you will be. This is what you can do for society: be yourself. If you become the best individual you can be, then you have done your share of good.

The main category through which this unfolding is meant to happen is by means of the enterprise, of the entrepreneurialization of the self. By looking at yourself as a form of capital, you are able to invest this capital and get a return on it. This return does not only take a monetary form, but also appears as happiness and satisfaction and fulfillment. So, there is a superimposition of the res economica and the res existentiales: an economic understanding gets extended to questions about the meaning of life. This is another core aspect of neoliberalism.

There is a sense that the word neoliberalism might not be fully accurate anymore. The term was developed to capture and describe society during the ’80s and ’90s, starting with the Reagan and Thatcher era. Foucault wrote The Birth of Biopolitics at the beginning of this period. But a lot of things have happened in the meantime. To describe society now, the term neoliberalism is not fully accurate. It does not capture some of the main threads that are defining the zeitgeist and driving current affairs.

First of all, I'm thinking of the problem of sustainability and the threat of extinction. These were not present in the paradigm of neoliberalism, which was and still is a humanistic paradigm, which puts trust and faith in the individual as well as in the economy. The good old years of the End of History included the illusion that there would be continued growth.

I'm afraid that now, even for the most uber-capitalist subject, it's difficult to keep the same faith. The spirit of the times is quite marked by this malaise, this sense that we are living right before the apocalypse. This is a change in the subjectivity of what some call the Anthropocene. The unsustainability of the way we live is not fully captured by a more traditional understanding of neoliberalism. I think this is the main motivation for those attempts to challenge parts of the juncture of neoliberal architecture. But that does not mean that neoliberalism is something that is in the past, and that we are now somewhere completely new that is no longer neoliberal.

It also depends on what one means by post-neoliberalism. If it means that neoliberalism is completely in the past, and we no longer have anything to do with it, then I don't think this is true at the cultural level. I'm not even entirely sure that I know what post-neoliberalism means. Some people say we are no longer in neoliberalism but in neofeudalism, or postindustrial modernity, or even something else.

I'm a cultural scholar. I'm not an economist or a sociologist. And I'm also talking from a situated position. I'm Italian and I live in London, so my research is very Western-based. But in the cultural discourses I study, the focus on the individual is definitely still there. As is the idea of the self as something that needs to be unpacked and developed and realized, as well as the superimposition of economic categories onto all of existence. If we take these as the defining traits of neoliberal subjectivity, then it's still present.

But at the same time, we are also living in a moment of cultural transition, in which some of the pillars of neoliberalism are crumbling and people are trying to find new codes, new ways to deal with the dilemma. We are in a moment that will be defined by attempts to go beyond some of the dead ends – some of the malaise and dilemmas – that decades of neoliberalism have produced. I think this is especially clear with contemporary, Western subjects who are part of Generation Z.

Does this mean that we are post-neoliberal? No. Does this mean that we can be satisfied with an understanding of neoliberalism that dates back 20 years? No. We are intra-neoliberal, pushing at its boundaries. What will happen? I'm not sure what it will mean to be post-neoliberal. I see the challenge. I see the degree of disenchantment, the fact that we are in a society in which the malaise of neoliberalism is fully visible where it wasn't before.

Now, these are antagonistic processes. People are trying to find new ways because they are unhappy with the society that neoliberal politics and policy have created. Yet, at the same time, they still operate within that world. It's this process of negotiation and creative reassembling that I'm interested in.

It is no accident that love and work are two of the horoscope categories. These are quite important dimensions in the construction of a subjectivity. But more than anything else, the common thread across the areas that I've looked at is how people negotiate with dominant technologies and discourses in order to try to solve cultural dilemmas.

With social entrepreneurship, I wanted to look at how people were combining the ethos of the social with the logic of the entrepreneur. What kind of an assemblage comprises a social enterprise and social entrepreneurship discourse? What underpins it? How can we account for a subject who decides to express their values by means of a business? What is the genealogy of this way of thinking? And what kind of a utopia does it produce?

All of this has to do with a sense of discontent with aspects of neoliberalism. Virtually everyone I interviewed in my research on social entrepreneurship was dissatisfied with the prioritization of profit and money. You could be cynical and say my subjects were lying, or self-branding, or displaying false consciousness, but I personally think it is epistemological and ethically problematic to make this sort of moral judgment in relation to participants. So, I take the fact that there is this rhetoric – even if it is just rhetoric – as part of what led quite a few people to give up profitable endeavors and well-paid jobs to invest all that they have into enterprises that, in most of the cases I looked at, were zero-capital, one-person enterprises with a very low statistical probability of success.

Because of the ethical return on their identitarian investment. The thinking is, "I want to do something good because I cannot stand just waking up and going to work for a company that I despise, for a company whose values, rules, and narratives are alienating on an ethical and political level." There is one critique of the shortcomings of the neoliberal regime of truth, which is based on work and making money and doing business, but also the rejection of society. 

In its textbook, Thatcherite definition, neoliberalism asserts that there is only the individual. But the dimension of the social was very embedded within the sphere of social entrepreneurs and changemakers. At the very least, they were attempting to reinvent it. They think, "There is a society and it needs us. We want to do something to fix it." They call this social impact. That's where I identify the greater challenge to a neoliberal ethos in social entrepreneurship.

At the same time, what is the action connected to this critique? Well, to set up a business, as an entrepreneur. So, in this respect, social entrepreneurship replicates the idea that the only action possible is the action that can be taken by an individual within their personal sphere of influence. If you want to fix society, you choose one thing that is very proximate to you, and then you do something that has a visible, immediate impact.

But this entrepreneurial ethos forecloses the space for systemic and structural analysis. It collapses the political and ethical levels back into the sphere of the individual; ethics and politics become something else that the individual needs to unfold. That's the ambivalence: on the one hand, there’s the critique of neoliberalism, and the attempt to go beyond it; then, on the other hand, there are the same consequences of living in the world that we live in.

It is very difficult to understand how to live a life that is ethical and sustainable today. This is what I mean when I say we live in a pre-apocalyptic era. I'm not saying there is 100 percent going to be an apocalypse, but this is one of the prominent emotional tonalities. We live this life, and we know that it is unsustainable, but then what the fuck can we do? We tweet about it, but it gets even worse. We try to eat quinoa instead of chicken, but then it turns out that quinoa is bad, too.

In a broad sense they are quite similar. The co-working spaces I looked at were Impact Hubs, which back then were explicitly addressed to changemakers. However, looking at the element of co-working itself, it does come with a specific kind of ethos, a particular code of conduct. Again, you can see the attempt to say, "We are done with the corporate world of work, with the whole white-collar imaginary associated with it." The co-working space is an attempt to escape that drudgery and alienation, and an attempt to create a new aesthetic and a new ethic – like the focus on community. Community is one of the most widespread signifiers in the scene of co-working spaces.

Of course, one could say this does not fit a traditional sociological understanding of community. And the case has been made that this is not a community at all. These are not the people you call at 3:00 in the morning when your car breaks down. It's an instrumental community, a network: these are the people you expect to call you when there’s a gig coming up. But at the same time, there is another new focus on collaboration. My co-authors and I have written about something we called collaborative individualism. It comes from the idea that you don't want to be the isolated freelancer, that you recognize the need for others, and that you want these others to embody and reflect your ethical values – that you want to work with like-minded people. This is all to feel better about yourself, and to try to ease this guilt of destroying the planet by the very act of breathing.

Yet all of this collaboration and these ethical values are channeled into what ultimately needs to be your career as an individual – as a creative entrepreneur, or whatever else the case may be. So again, there is this attempt to hold together the two opposites. With social entrepreneurship, it's this spectacular marriage between the logic of profit and social consciousness. Within co-working spaces, it's this idea of collaboration and community balanced against individual careerism, as these people are ultimately trying to make a living.

Co-working spaces also offer an identitarian return. They signify the values of diversity, inclusivity, and, most of all, sustainability. This set of ethics is very strong, and at the same time as it provides this identitarian return, it also creates a barrier of access. It is an ethos that you have to develop if you want to be part of the community, which is how you can build your career as a freelance photographer in a city like Florence or Milan. So, these ethical codes are absorbed and displayed in an instrumental way.

But I wouldn't say that the instrumental is the true dimension, and the ethical dimension is just ideology. I see it more as a horizontal assemblage. It might be a clumsy mix, but it's a mix driven by people's conflicting needs, by the unsolvable dilemmas society poses all the time.

I have been looking at online dating to try to map the emerging structure of feelings when it comes to love and sex. I'll start by making a bold claim: we are experiencing a second sexual revolution. Love and sex have been very much politicized and moved to the center of cultural debates – this is because love and sex as we have known them are good no more. We need to find new ways to love, and new ways to have sex; we need a new ethics of sex and love, which I call the post-romantic. I'm not sure about the post-neoliberal, but I think we live in the post-romantic.

The post-romantic emerges from the disillusionment with the ideology of romance – and especially heterosexual romance – as it has been developed within hetero-patriarchal capitalism. Here, again, there has been the realization of the malaise induced by a certain culture and its codes. And what I'm trying to ask is, what goes into this new subjectivity that is being produced? Is it utopian or dystopian? Does it have emancipatory potential?

Let’s start with the critique of the older order of things: the first sexual revolution of the 1960s and 1970s. Its purpose was to liberate sex from the grip of the family and religious morality – from traditional society, as Anthony Giddens would say – and we are fortunate that it did succeed in doing so. But quite quickly, this freedom was subsumed by the freedom of the neoliberal subject. The whole point of the first sexual revolution was to liberate sex and romance, but nonetheless, at the mainstream level, what was liberated got reorganized and subsumed within the larger market. Sexual freedom became semantically reabsorbed into the freedom of choice. That is a very neoliberal, economic notion of freedom. Freedom of choice has been one of the main devices that we were given to navigate what I call this realm of “neo-liberated” sex and love.

The best place to look is "hookup culture," which is a term that has been especially used in the US, but has permeated most Western countries since the 1990s. Hookup culture is defined by the imperative to have a lot of sex with whomever with no strings attached, in order to accumulate experience and be cool. This culture also arrives at the moment of post-feminism, which popularized this almost phallic version of the woman, what Angela McRobbie called the “top girl,”  who, it’s said, turns out not to have emotions after all. It's a simplification, but to an extent, this is what happened.

So, the expectation is lots of sex with no strings attached, but also that you will finally find your real love afterward. Only after you have accumulated all this experience will you be able to choose whom to love, because this capacity of choice is something that needs to be trained. And this love is still very romantic – forever love, love with family, love with monogamous cohabitation. I'm still talking about the mainstream attitude about love, as it was represented in virtually every Hollywood rom-com.

Again, you see that there are these two very conflictual demands. On the one hand, yes, it's about fucking around, but on the other hand, you need to find absolute love. And this must be done without renouncing anything as an individual because we are in a time of neoliberalism, in which the worst thing is to compromise the realization and expression of your individuality.

Eventually, this tension reveals its shortcomings and its ideological nature. Hookup culture has created brutal patterns of exclusion and marginalization – especially but not only for women, through the politics of heterosexual relationships. The sex that was so liberated from traditional morality was not fully liberated from patriarchal, misogynistic codes. This is something that has been made very evident by the #MeToo movement, which was the spark for the post-romantic flame.

The #MeToo movement openly said that sex – or sex as it has been so far – is not good. It called for new ethical codes, like consent, the best-defined one produced so far. This disenchantment with casual sex as a way to express a liberated self goes hand-in-hand with the disillusionment with what Eva Illouz calls the romantic utopia. This is the idea that you can find that person and be happy with them forever; and that, if it doesn't work, it's your fault, because you made the wrong choice. After decades of these kinds of underpinning imperatives, people are finally rejecting it. They are saying that it's fucked up, that it doesn't work, that it's not true. They are recognizing the malaise, and rejecting the patriarchal, commodified codes of sex and love.

But then, what do we do? This second sexual revolution is marked by the attempt to reveal the new moral foundations for sex. If the first sexual revolution was determined by the desire to break the rules, to use sex as a means of transgression, this time around – after decades of hookup culture and commodified romance – the sexual revolution is about rewriting rules for sex and love. We want to create a new ethics.

In Roland Barthes' Fragments of a Lovers' Discourse, love is all about losing the self; it's all about suffering and crying and being exposed, in order to transcend the boundaries of the self. All of this comes with risk. But post-romantic love rejects all of that. It rejects the experiential value of suffering and the existential value of pain. It seeks love and sex that do not hurt – what Alain Badiou would call “love without the fall.” We don't want to get close to anything that could be a trap for the integrity of the self.

Instead, post-romantic love deploys a diagnostic ethos to talk about sex and love. Look at how widespread therapy-speak has become: terms like toxic relationships, gaslighting, and trauma are very popular. These are the categories of the post-romantic because they are categories that seek to diagnose the illnesses of relationships, and then try to extirpate them. As if it could be possible to be cured or healed, and achieve a domain of romance and sex and love characterized by full transparency, zero risk, and complete certainty. There is this reduction of the existential dimension to the pathological.

Dating apps are promoted as efficient solutions to the mess of finding love or sex. Think of Tinder's tagline: match, chat, date. It tries to reduce the complexity of the romantic or sexual encounter to a three-step procedure. But that is not at all possible. My research has shown that dating apps, in fact, don't work. All they can do is reproduce the mess – the fundamental uncertainty that cannot be avoided when we talk about encountering someone else.

Dating apps are narrated as efficient, but they aren't. They aren't efficient means or tools for finding love and sex – or at least no more efficient than hopping on a train or going to a gig and talking to someone next to you. However, what dating apps do is create this utopia of efficiency: a lot of people are on these apps expecting them to be efficient. They aren't, but then it becomes a psychodrama of whether it's your fault or the fault of the app. Where is the algorithm? What does the algorithm think about me?

Maybe this is true of every generation, but as a Millennial, I feel like I'm stretched between two eras. This also applies to our relationship with technology, because we were born without the technology we have today. I'm one of those who can wax nostalgic over a glass of wine, thinking about the good old days of the landline. We millennials are caught in between, because we remember our experience as young adults without the smartphone, we remember road trips without Google Maps.

But in a way, the younger generations, who were basically born with an iPad in their hands, are even more anxious about technology than we are. They have an even deeper relationship to digital devices; for them, these devices are what D.W. Winnicott would call a transitional object. Gen Z has this deeper, emotional, affective relationship with technology. They know it much better, and far more intuitively, than we do it – and it gets under their skin.

I've been teaching digital culture for quite a long time now. Thirteen years ago, when you would talk about privacy and compulsory enjoyment, my students were like, "Really?" They were a bit naive. Now there is this hyper-consciousness about technology. Is hyper-consciousness emancipatory in itself? Maybe not, but it's there. They are hyper-conscious about everything, from the malaise of capitalism and the unsustainability of their lifestyles to the need for a new ethics of love. But this hyper-consciousness ultimately works as a screen more than as a dispositive for action.

Think about what it means to live a life as a young adult after the 2008 financial crisis. Say you're like me. You grow up with these ideas of finding yourself, studying abroad, landing your dream job, doing what you love. Since primary school, you're told that everything will be fine, that the Cold War is over, that Europe is going to make it, that we all love each other. It's the time of the United Colors of Benetton and Jovanotti.

But then you arrive in London, and there's the financial crisis, and then Brexit, and now Covid. You realize that your pension is eroding and the world is ending. The vision of the world you have now is much, much darker in every respect. You realize that the dreams that you had – your ideal of the good life – were unsustainable and are now unobtainable. But you're not fully clear as to what is to be done. This is the ethical paralysis facing Millennials.

But we need to dwell on the ambivalence. As intellectuals, I think we need to respect the space for the subject's agency. If you look at tactics of micro-resistance on social media or dating apps, young generations are again expressing their awareness of the shortcomings of the regime of patriarchal capitalist culture. That is reason enough for optimism.

But I do still think the alternative is not clear. Where do we go? Where is the beyond? I really cannot get over this hurdle. Mark Fisher was right. We are imagining the end of the world – we are, we actually are – because we can't exactly imagine the end of capitalism. Maybe there can be a post-neoliberalism, but it's still hard to see where that gets us.