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[...] 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.
oh shit, this is wild
(talking about management coaches and their attempts at co-linearisation)
[...] 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. [...]
most notably, the joy of doing something you believe in
[...] 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.
this aligns quite nicely with Piketty's views on meritocracy (note 2102)
[..] Life under the master-desire is exploited life. But in what sense exactly is it exploited? Probably not in the way Marxian theory imagines it. For exploitation in the Marxist sense of the term only makes sense in conjunction with a substantialist labour theory of value, according to which exploitation is the name of the capitalist appropriation of surplus-value, measured by the difference between the total product and the value-equivalent assigned to the reproduction of labour-power – what is paid out in wages. The definition of the value of the labour-power that must be reproduced is however among the most uncertain, and is in fact circular: instead of the objectively and independently calculated value of the labour-power that must be reproduced determining wages, the wages themselves indicate the actual value reserved for the reproduction of labour-power. The chief problem however is that in order to follow the Marxian definition of exploitation, one must accept a substantialist theory of value whose substance is the duration of abstract labour.
[...] in the Marxian definition exploitation is precisely the capture of surplus-value by capital, which consists in depriving the employees of a part of the value they have produced. It is not however the dispossession from that part of value in itself that turns it into exploitation, but its private appropriation by the capitalist. Were the surplus-value handed over, not to the capitalist but to the enterprise under total internal democratic control of the employees, or more accurately to the employees collectively, who would still think of calling it ‘exploitation’? Yet formally the employees would still be personally deprived of the surplus-value as the difference between the total value and the value of the reproduction of their labour-power. The ‘objective’ calculus of the labour theory of value, which supposedly entails a finding of exploitation, would be maintained, without however leading to that conclusion. Therefore, if exploitation there is, it falls under a political theory of capture more than under an economic theory of value. [...]
For this is indeed the task of capitalist epithumogenesis, to pull the legs of the employees, in all the senses of that expression. First, to get them to move, which means, returning to the basic significations of auto-mobility, to make them move themselves, and in the most mundanely physical sense: by getting them to put one foot before the other, as revealed by the striking spectacle of the daily migration towards factories and business districts, those large concentrations of capitalist passionate exploitation on which waves of conatus-vectors converge, aligned up to their correlation within the physical space of an underground train carriage, a great current of co-linearised powers of acting heading for the master-desire. [...]
great imagery here