Neoliberalism replaces class analysis with a cynical catechism of limitless self-transformation

Evidence

The neoliberal contempt for human categories has become well ensconced in everyday life in the last three decades. Whatever their predicament, whatever their station in life, everyone is encouraged to think they, too, can be Metis, unperturbed (or ignorant) that their fate is to be consumed by Zeus. Time and again, the supposed success of some teen idol or hedge fund manager or sports star is said to illustrate the tired platitude that “you can be anything that you want to be, if you want it bad enough.” This presumes a self that can incorporate any attribute, take up any challenge, transcend any limitation, and embody any quality. There are few neoliberal tropes more cynical, or incantations more convenient. This catechism of permanent metamorphosis has spawned a number of cultural devices that structure everyday neoliberalism. Here we will merely touch upon two: the modern disappearance of economic class as a serious taxonomy, and the hollowing out of the notion of “risk” when elevated to a general imperative of agency. — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 332

Categorization

• SEED: Article angle: ‘you can be anything you want to be’ as the operational ideology that disarms class critique — tracing its cultural devices from teen idol worship to hedge fund mythology.
• CANDY: The Metis/Zeus consumption metaphor is a vivid, shareable image for how market success stories eat their aspirants.
• XREF: connects to: Neoliberalism abolishes classes, the individual, and Lockean property in one move — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 164; Historical icons of neoliberal selfhood are largely manufactured retrofits — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 300; Neoliberalism transforms the self so that crises stop being read as system failures — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 302 (+20 more)

Broader Connections

• Neoliberalism’s ultimate ideal self is the autonomous self-made individual #expands (0.80) — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 430
• Neoliberal individualism is replacing group-based identity politics across society #expands (0.80) — Peter Morey, Islamophobia and the Novel, 199
• Neoliberalism transformed even the criteria for individual self-evaluation #expands (0.78) — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos, 747
• Neoliberalism absorbed countercultural self-fashioning into self-optimization via the neurochemical self #expands (0.75) — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 421
• Neoliberal rationality discursively erases stratification and power differences among speakers. #expands (0.75) — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos, 323
• Neoliberalism was an ideological veneer only loosely resembling actual capitalism #complicates (0.73) — Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism, 220
• Marx’s class-in-itself versus class-for-itself maps onto politicized identity #responds-to (0.72) — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 4417
• Neoliberalism operates through systematic contradiction and disavowal of its own practices #expands (0.72) — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos, 81
• Neoliberalism is a caricature of liberalism reduced to a theory of economic organization #contradicts (0.71) — Philip Mirowski & Dieter Plehwe (eds.), The Road from Mont Pèlerin, 2121