Neo-liberal capitalism decentralizes authority yet intensifies domination.

Evidence

Revealing that the brain is neither a rigid structure nor a centralized machine is not enough to stave off the threat of alienation. In fact, neo-liberal ideology today itself rests on a redistribution of centers and a major relaxation of hierarchies. Domination and the crisis of centrality, in a merely seeming paradox, are perfectly matched with each other. The restructuring of capitalism (post-Fordist capitalism of the second industrial revolution) was accomplished at the price of substituting control by self-organization for planning decided and overseen by a formal centralized authority within the company. — Catherine Malabou, What Should We Do with Our Brain?, 141

Categorization

• XREF: Reverses the reader’s initial framing that decentralization liberates; parallels Boltanski and Chiapello’s ‘new spirit of capitalism’ and could connect to the docility-as-flexibility critique the reader is tracking. — connects to: Monopoly capitalism replaces liberal-legal institutions with irrational totalitarian authority — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History…, 402; Neoliberalism weaponizes its own rebellious aesthetic to absorb anti-system dissent. — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 257; Neoliberalism today operates through dispersed outer-ring institutions rather than a core membership — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 509 (+7 more)
• DEEPTHINKING: The claim that crisis-of-centrality and domination are ‘perfectly matched’ — that relaxed hierarchy is itself the form of neo-liberal control — is a dense, paradigm-shifting reversal worth sitting with.