Neoliberal citizenship replaces battlefield sacrifice with silent endurance of economic suffering.
Evidence
Today, as economic metrics have saturated the state and the national purpose, the neoliberal citizen need not stoically risk death on the battlefield, only bear up uncomplainingly in the face of unemployment, underemployment, or employment unto death. The properly interpellated neoliberal citizen makes no claims for protection against capitalism’s suddenly burst bubbles, job-shedding recessions, credit crunches, and housing market collapses, its appetites for outsourcing or the discovery of pleasure and profit in betting against itself or betting on catastrophe. This citizen also accepts neoliberalism’s intensification of inequalities as basic to capitalism’s health — comprising the subpoverty wages of the many and the bloated compensation of bankers, CEOs, and even managers of public institutions and comprising as well reduced access of the poor and middle class to formerly public goods, now privatized. This citizen releases state, law, and economy from responsibility for and responsiveness to its own condition and predicaments and is ready when called to sacrifice to the cause of economic growth, competitive positioning and fiscal constraints. — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos, 431
Categorization
- SEED: An essay could examine how contemporary ‘resilience’ discourse — stoic endurance training, mindfulness at work — functions as the new form of the demand to bear up uncomplainingly.
- XREF: connects to: Austerity transforms neoliberal rationality from freedom toward sacrifice. — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s…, 135; Neoliberal citizenship permits being shed or sacrificed in austerity — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s…, 141
Broader Connections
- Neoliberal citizenship permits being shed or sacrificed in austerity
#corroborates(0.88) — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos, 141 - Austerity transforms neoliberal rationality from freedom toward sacrifice.
#expands(0.85) — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos, 135