°Entrepreneurialism and experiment
Eric Beck, “Respecting the Middle: The Wire’s Omar Little as Neoliberal Subjectivity“:
What’s often elided in accounts of neoliberalism is the way that its axiomatic and stratic transformations are responses to, even accommodations of, workers’ and dissidents’ demands. There’s no need to be sad that capital has been able to incorporate and profit from them, just as there’s no need to despair when protest is met with silence or disregard. That’s what capitalism always does, and using its response as a measure not only ensures defeat from the outset but has nothing to do with political desire. None of this is to deny that neoliberalism presents new challenges. As this essay has tried to show, the colonization of nonwork life by the axioms of labor has had a suffocating effect, and neoliberalism’s axioms regarding freedom have made organizing a more delicate and dangerous proposition. Despite this, neoliberalism still has not solved capitalism’s fundamental problem: It requires for its substratum a subjectivity that is independent of it.
Political movements that take comfort in this brute fact, however, are not worthy of the name. Omar Little prefers his space in the middle, but not because it allows him a respite from the dangers of life. Guarantees in The Wire exist only for the molar strata. Instead, the middle permits the most room to create and experiment. And that, in the contemporary conjecture, is a good start.
:: trackback url | permanent link | comments (1)
'
