| Abstrakt: |
As the financial crisis has progressed from its immediate origins in 2008 as a US-based credit crunch to a global economic emergency, Constructivist IPE scholarship has turned to social norms and expectations not only as variables explaining its origins, but also as factors constraining its resolution. In this article I suggest that while such work does usefully identify the role of 'everyday' values, and struggles, in shaping the game of contemporary financial life, it avoids discussing the fundamental role of capitalist practices of valorisation in sustaining this life. To make my case I invoke Foucault's discussion of neoliberal 'crisis subjectivity' and the closely attendant notion of human capital, suggesting a need to examine neoliberal technologies of the self. However, I expand on Foucault's arguments in this respect to show how his comments on neoliberalism posit not only a 'positive' ontology of subjectification but also make strong hints towards a theory of immanent social control through the market, akin to that outlined by Deleuze. In more recent formulations of the crisis, such as in Hardt and Negri's Commonwealth, this mode of control is posed as the only such mode adequate to a regime of capitalist valorisation that is itself premised on the productive potential of the common. This move allows Hardt and Negri, rightly, to associate today's crisis with a more profound, ontological crisis, grounded in the relative autonomy of labour from contemporary capitalist command. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] |
