Neoliberal self-entrepreneurship destabilizes the fixed boundaries of personhood
Evidence
The fact that somatic selfhood can be sliced, diced, and reshuffled in such dramatic fashion in a relatively short time frame only goes to show that once we submit to a regime of entrepreneurship of the self, then the Archimedean fulcrum of personhood starts to slip rather perilously. — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 418
Categorization
- DEEPTHINKING: The insight that commodifying bodies across categories dissolves the stable ‘Archimedean fulcrum’ of personhood is the chapter’s conceptual core, linking legal category shifts to identity itself.
- XREF: connects to: Entrepreneurship became a generalized ideal pervading personal identity and relationships; Silicon Valley’s self-image elevates entrepreneurship as society’s universal problem-solving model — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity,…, 713; Neoliberalism replaces labor with human capital and dissolves the stable self — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 162 (+13 more)
Broader Connections
- Neoliberalism absorbed countercultural self-fashioning into self-optimization via the neurochemical self
#expands(0.85) — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 421 - Neoliberalism’s ultimate ideal self is the autonomous self-made individual
#corroborates(0.82) — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 430 - Individualization as a modernization outcome differs sharply from neoliberal individualism and psychological individuation
#qualifies(0.78) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 103 - Neoliberal entrepreneurship rhetoric masks a reality of collective corporate effort
#complicates(0.78) — Dieter Plehwe, Quinn Slobodian & Philip Mirowski (eds.), Nine Lives of Neoliberalism, 306 - Neoliberalism exists to reverse modernity’s claims to self-determination
#contradicts(0.72) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 116 - Social fragmentation liberates while cultural fragmentation frustrates self-development
#qualifies(0.72) — Georg Simmel, on individuality and social forms_…, 104