[...] Already little inclined to think of themselves as determined, desiring individuals are even more disposed to consider themselves the origins of their desires when both the complexity and the evanescence of the causal process that would have to be grasped make it particularly easy for them to remain unconscious of their desire’s determination. Here there is neither localised amorous dependence nor personalised affective mimetism, but the unremitting process of innumerable exposures to social influences, at times infinitesimal, at times brutally decisive (experienced as a ‘revelation’), for the full length of a trajectory of existence. By a truncation that optimises the cognitive economy, the fact of the felt desire imposes itself, alone, on consciousness, allowing the imagination to yield to the illusion of self-determination and the originary will. Those who love an activity – sales (‘for the contact with clients’), auditing or financial analysis (‘for the precision’), services (‘for the relational quality’) – or a sector – oil prospecting (high-risk venture), aviation (high tech), civil engineering (working outside) – or who seek the prestige of business accomplishments – success as measured by the job status, the monetary reward, or the executive lifestyle (burning the midnight oil, travel, sharp suits, deluxe accessories) – always speak of ‘my choice’, what ‘I enjoy’, ‘my’ lifelong vocation, and it matters little that the accumulation of affect-imbued images that constituted these things as objects of desire, and determined the enlistment through these choices of employment, came entirely from outside. The fact remains that these desires, induced from outside but turned into authentic internal desires, determine joyful commitments when they are given an opportunity for satisfaction by the line of employment that corresponds to them. In an expression that is now common despite meaning nothing at all, individuals ‘fulfil themselves’, which really means that they fulfil their desires. [...] Having incurred this desire – evidently tailored for the organisation but now made their own – the individuals ‘consent’, and set themselves in motion joyfully, of their own accord.

[...] It is a safe bet that if one day, following a change in customs and regulations, prostitution leaves the underworld to become an official trade, any company entering that market will expect its employees to kiss, and then to love, for real. Neoliberal capital is the world of the girlfriend experience.

[...] Performance artist Julien Prévieux provides a fine example with the letters of non-application that he sends in response to job offers: ‘I write to you following your ad in the journal Carriers and Jobs. I swear I never did anything wrong … I don’t do drugs. I love animals. I don’t steal. I buy mass-produced goods like everybody else. I exercise to keep healthy. Later I would like to have a kid or two and a dog. It is also my intention to become a property owner and buy stocks. I have witnesses who saw me not doing anything. I don’t know what I’m guilty of. I don’t know why you want to punish me with forced labour on databases … I kindly ask you not to hire me.' [...] It is worth noting that, except for the punch line, Prévieux’s letters of non-application are less the declaration of a specific interest than the affirmation of an overall social normalisation, put forward as a generic predisposition to the life of employment, incidentally an illustration of the congruence between employment for wages and an entire social order. We do not live merely in a capitalist economy, but in a capitalist society.

[...] Those who consent are no freer than anyone else, and are no less ‘yielding’ than the enslaved; only, they have been made to yield differently and thus experience their determination joyfully. There is no consent, in the same way that there is no voluntary servitude. There are only happy subjections.

[...] What makes the constructivist agency a focal point for very intense affects of hate is the possibility of ascribing the conditioning to a local, identifiable cause, one that is thought to be free (the Party, the State, the Central Planning Committee), and to which a contingent intentionality can be imputed. In contrast, capitalism’s market forces, despite grinding people down no less violently, appear as a ‘systemic effect’, thus unassignable, without a centre and without deliberate design behind them; they seem almost like a necessity, which for Marx was the essence of commodity fetishism, and thereby conducive to all the rhetorical strategies that depoliticise things by naturalising them.

[...] it would be quite something if at the end of the introspective analysis of their ‘lack of empathy for subordinates’, difficulty in ‘managingit would be quite something if at the end of the introspective analysis of their ‘lack of empathy for subordinates’, difficulty in ‘managing relations with superiors’, ‘difficulties communicating’ or ‘stepping up to meet challenges’, the long process of ‘self-improvement’ brought some coachees to the critical realisation that the situations in which they had been put were at times simply impossible, so that – the ultimate failure of coaching – they would turn against the capitalist enterprise when the goal was only to turn them inward.

[...] As if to confirm the hypothesis of universal passionate servitude, the most surprising thing is that companies (sometimes) open their doors to cameras, no doubt because the filmmakers were persuasive enough, but also under the effect of a kind of perfectly innocent good conscience, whose source is management’s own straightforward assent to what they do – unaware of any blatant affective instrumentalisation or mental manipulation, thus seeing no reason to dissimulate. This primary adherence reveals how much the conditioners are themselves conditioned and steeped in the same imaginary and the same passionate universe as those on whom they impose their desire, thus providing another powerful illustration of Bourdieu’s remark, that the dominators are dominated by their very domination.

[...] Yet co-linearisation, especially when it is as marked with intentionality as neoliberal alignment is, can never fully dodge its saddening part, not so much because of the initial heterogeneity of desires and the fact that one desire aims at pulling the other in its direction, as because this reduction of one desire to the other does not take the form of a ‘free’ proposition, but always relies on an impending threat. Of course employees can be induced or led to be passionate about management auditing, the sale of forklifts, or catalytic cracking; of course they can seize all the opportunities for joy that the enterprise takes care to present them with – promotion, socialising, or the promise of ‘self-fulfilment.’ Yet despite all that, every now and then they can harbour other thoughts.

The main stake of domination is distributive. To mix Weber’s language with Spinoza’s, one could say that its object is the distribution of the chances for joy. To put it this way is to point out both how far the spectrum of the joys of employment extends beyond the purely monetary – job titles, recognition, friendly socialising at work – and simultaneously how relatively narrow it is, limited to only those things that employees could in principle strive after in the context of their professional lives, not to mention outside it. The dominant distributive regulation that produces these adjusted desires and convinces the dominated that beyond these limits their ambitions are hopeless therefore requires, lest it degenerate into frustration, a continuous work of enchantment whose purpose is to persuade employees that their humble joys are ‘really’ great joys, in any case perfectly sufficient joys – for them. This work is all the more necessary since it must contend with the excesses of envy that the spectacle of the social world incessantly stokes and the imatatio affectuum that this spectacle never fails to induce: visibly, the great enjoy having certain things, which must therefore be very desirable, thus subject to the imitation of desire. Symbolic violence consists then properly speaking in the production of a double imaginary, the imaginary of fulfilment, which makes the humble joys to which the dominated are assigned appear sufficient, and the imaginary of powerlessness, which convinces them to renounce any greater ones to which they might aspire. [...]

[...] With the eras of aristocratic and plutocratic legitimacy gone (at least in their pure forms), the contemporary mythogenesis of the university degree, as Bourdieu repeatedly insisted, struggles to hide its own indifference to content and its only true mission, which is to certify ‘elites’, namely, to provide alibis to the distribution of individuals within the social division of desire.