Neoliberalism absorbed countercultural self-fashioning into self-optimization via the neurochemical self

Evidence

From this baseline, all that was required to activate the neoliberal playbook was to reorient these attitudes and practices from a feckless narcissism to a conviction that one was engaged in concerted self-modification to propitiate a market rationality far more omnipotent than anything promoted by any counterculture. One way this happened was a progressive shift in emphasis to the image of a “neurochemical self,” itself a bubbling brew of neurotransmitters and electrolytes, which required pharmaceutical management and enhancement. Both pharmaceutical companies and the neuroscience community promoted a doctrine of the brain as the primary corporeal organ responsible for conferring identity and selfhood. This heightened academic activity in turn attracted the attention of the economics profession, always on the lookout for any nouveau trend in the physical sciences to co-opt and absorb (not to mention new funding sources to tap). Hence another neoliberal development has been the rise of subfields of “neuroeconomics” and behavioral economics, which purport to reconcile the insistence of older neoclassical economics upon the irreducible rationality of the self with the newer neoliberal imperative to optimize the self on a daily basis. — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 421

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s interest in how the ‘thought collective’ propagates itself by co-opting trends — the economics profession absorbing neuroscience parallels Mirowski’s wider thesis about market rationality absorbing critique. — connects to: Neoliberalism replaces labor with human capital and dissolves the stable self — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 162; Neoliberalism replaces class analysis with a cynical catechism of limitless self-transformation — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 332; 1960s psychedelic drug culture prefigured the neoliberal plastic self — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 420 (+17 more)
• SEED: Potential angle: how ‘neuroeconomics’ and behavioral economics function as a case study of the thought collective absorbing and neutralizing rival paradigms rather than confronting them.

Broader Connections

• Neoliberalism transformed even the criteria for individual self-evaluation #expands (0.75) — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos, 747
• Neoliberalism displaces race into market-mediated commodified self-presentation #expands (0.72)
• The self is posited to unify otherwise divergent plastic brain processes #corroborates (0.72) — Catherine Malabou, What Should We Do with Our Brain?, 191