The Global Ecological Crisis and Modes of Resistance
The current and accelerating scale with which the global capitalist system ravages
ecosystems is staggering as it transgresses various ecological planetary boundaries, from massive
species extinction and ocean acidification to climate change, radically threatening life on this
planet. This ecological destructiveness is endemic to the functioning of capitalism, a crisisridden system increasingly characterized by deepening financialization, virulent debt and
austerity, and accelerating semiotic flows that progressively penetrate lifeworlds. This paper
analyzes the intersections of the global ecological crisis and the production of subjectivity
through the operations of power constitutive of the dominant regime of neoliberal
governmentality. In what ways and by which processes does power irrigate the social body,
permeating individuals and formulating subjects who are systematically disposed to perpetuating
rather than confronting the cascading series of ecological crises? This paper seeks to provide a
brief survey of the neoliberal subject who is increasingly hegemonic across the globe, though
most fully developed and pronounced in advanced capitalist states. Only by beginning to
understand the constitution of subjectivity under neoliberal governmentality do horizons
tentatively open onto approaches to address the planetary emergency through fostering
cooperative spaces to incubate alternative subjectivities capable of collectively reimagining
social values and our relationships with one another and the earth.
I.
Planetary Emergency
The depth and scale of anthropogenic impacts on global ecosystems and the overlapping
crises these pressures are precipitating present humanity with the grave and urgent need to
radically reconstitute society as a whole in order to reconfigure our relationship with the planet
on which we depend. Scientists have identified nine planetary boundaries within which humans
have evolved and can safely operate—related to stratospheric ozone layer; biodiversity;
chemicals dispersion; climate change; ocean acidification; freshwater consumption and the
global hydrological cycle; land system change; nitrogen and phosphorus inputs to the biosphere
and oceans; and atmospheric aerosol loading. Transgressing one or more of these planetary
boundaries risks “crossing thresholds that will trigger non-linear, abrupt environmental change
within continental- to planetary-scale systems.”i Humans have already crossed three of the
boundaries—for climate change, rate of biodiversity loss, and changes to the global nitrogen
cycle—and are at risk of breaching four others if actions are not taken to reverse these trends.ii
To illustrate, the world’s oceans have become 26% more acidic since the beginning of the
industrial revolution—a rate of change faster than at any time in the last 300 million years—
making ocean water increasingly corrosive to the shells of marine organisms and threatening the
viability of coral reefs. By 2100 ocean acidity will have increased 170%, which scientists
predict will result in at least a 30% loss of ocean biodiversity.iii Moreover, the global population
of phytoplankton, which forms the foundation of the ocean food chain, has decreased 40% since
1950, which scientists believe is due to rising sea temperatures.iv Additionally, we are currently
experiencing the sixth mass extinction in planetary history with between 150-200 species going
extinct daily; this rate is 1,000 times greater than the “natural” or “background” rate.v
And arguably the most threatening of the myriad crises we face is global climate change.
The most recent 2013 report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the
authoritative (though conservative) international scientific body on climate change, indicated that
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1
in order to have a 66% chance of avoiding catastrophic climate change in excess of 2°C, carbon
emissions since the beginning of the industrial revolution cannot exceed 1,000 gigatons of
carbon (GtC), or 800GtC when accounting for warming effects caused by non-carbon
greenhouse gases.vi In the last century, anthropogenic-induced climate change has caused the
planet to warm by 0.7°C; this amount is especially troubling against the backdrop of a growing
chorus of respected scientists, including NASA’s James Hansen, who argue that the evidence
suggests that not 2°C but 1°C of warming is the maximum we can afford before tipping points
are triggered that lock in irreversible catastrophic climate change.vii As of 2011, humans had
already emitted 531 GtC, leaving roughly 269 GtC left to emit (assuming the carbon budget
associated with keeping warming under 2°C).viii Compare this quantity to the world’s known
fossil fuel reserves, which amount to 2,860GtCO2, meaning that only between 10-20% of these
known reserves (a large proportion of which fossil fuel companies already count as assets
contributing to their valuation on the world’s stock exchanges) can be burned without exceeding
2°C of warming.ix
Notwithstanding the incredible scientific consensus and the dire urgency of required
radical reductions in carbon emissions, global emissions increased by 2.1% in 2013 (which
makes for a 61% increase since 1990).x If emissions continue at current levels, the IPCC
estimated that we will reach the 800GtC limit by 2040,xi though other likely “business as usual”
scenarios suggest this limit would be reached by 2032.xii Also, the IPCC’s estimates do not
consider the effects of potential increases in other non-carbon greenhouse gases, which tend to
be more difficult to predict. A 2013 study published in the reputable journal Nature argues that a
release of 50Gt of methane from thawing Arctic permafrost beneath the East Siberian Sea is
“highly possible at anytime,” which, because methane’s warming effect is more potent than CO2,
would be the equivalent of at least 1,000Gt of carbon dioxide.xiii
Taken together these cascading crises will have a profound impact on our species and the
entire living world. The window for even radical action is rapidly closing, and we need to
understand the relations of power that constitute individuals in a way that inhibits the kind of
resolute, meaningful action necessary to avert planetary collapse.
II.
Governmentality, Neoliberalism, and Subjectivities
Michel Foucault’s concept of governmentality, especially when applied to understand the
prevailing neoliberal political rationality colonizing the earth, provides an indispensable
analytical tool with which to examine power relations and the formation of the individual as
subject. From this mode of analysis the possibility emerges, albeit tentatively as the intellectual,
interpretative analyst does not make prescriptions from a position exterior to power, to begin to
discern forms of resistance or counter-conduct that do not inadvertently serve to reconstitute the
very power dynamics they seek to subvert or transcend.xiv Government here is used in its
historical, comprehensive sense, which prevailed well into the 18th century, wherein government
was not understood restrictively as solely control by the state or administration, but in a much
more expansive sense as also extending and relating to problems of self-control, health, life
expectancy, management of families and children, administering households, etc. Thus,
Foucault defined governmentality in its most general sense as the attempt to regulate the conduct
of individuals’ conduct through structuring the field of possible actions of subjects, a
conceptualization of government as extending deep into the fabric of the social body, applying
both to the governance of others and to the governing of the self.xv
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Governmentality involves the dynamic, and at times complementary and conflicting,
intersection of techniques of domination of individuals over others and processes through which
the self is constituted or modified by oneself in accordance with an underlying political
rationality.xvi As such, governmental techniques do not primarily (or exclusively) depend on
repression, violence, or consent as means for regulating autonomous, apparently free subjects,
but rather are oriented towards controlling and structuring the relations through which such
supposed free and autonomous subjects are constituted.xvii Governmentality, in addressing the
conduct of conduct, identifies the inextricable link between mechanisms of power and processes
of subjectification.xviii We are accustomed to the view of power as that force which is external to
the actor and impinges on, constrains, represses, or subordinates her actions. However,
following Foucault and subsequent theoreticians, power is that which also forms and formulates
the subject, providing the conditions for her existence and orienting the vectors of her desires.xix
A normative discourse concerning, for instance, gender, homo oeconomicus (on which
more below), or heteronormativity— always and everywhere already invested with power
relations—only persists as a norm to the extent that it is (re)produced through its instantiations in
subjects acting out this idealization in social practice. This is how subjects are both the effect
and vehicle of power. The norm is reproduced through the acts of subjects that seek to
approximate it, through the normalizing idealizations concretized in and through these acts.xx
Discursive regimes and normative constraints are not external to individuals, but are guaranteed
by subscribing to them and reproduced through being subjected by them; hence, neither is there
an exterior position in relation to power. The operation of power through subjectification and
subjects in turn self-activating these mechanisms of power occlude power relations and
dominance, rendering them difficult to perceive because we, in apparent freedom, participate in
their (re)production in the ways we relate to and govern ourselves and our bodies.xxi
From this analysis, the biopolitical nature of this paradigm of power emerges. Biopower
is this form of power that analyzes, interprets, and rearticulates individual and social life,
interiorizing the regulation of social life. Power can infuse and achieve effective control “over
the entire life of the population only when it becomes an integral, vital function that every
individual embraces and reactivates of his or her own accord.”xxii In this society of control,
power mechanisms become immanent to the social field, enacted and reinscribed constantly
through their diffusion throughout the consciousnesses and the bodies of the population across
the whole of social relations.xxiii Biopower’s force consists precisely in defining reality while
also producing it, and the concept of governmentality can be employed to analyze the specific,
material mechanisms by which this reality is produced. Discursive regimes and cultural
practices produce both objectification and subjectification, as these practices are normalized and
assume an apparent totalizing naturalness while individuals are subjected through reacting to,
refracting, or (re)producing these terms as originary and immutable. Therefore, any proffered
solution that takes for granted these elements, even as it strives to resist or oppose them, will
contribute to strengthening the hold of biopower.xxiv
Through the analytical lens of governmentality the operation of the political rationality
informing neoliberalism and its dissemination throughout individual and social life can be
scrutinized. Neoliberalism is typically understood as a particular historical form of capitalism,
often contrasted with Keynesianism, which rationalizes a set of economic policy goals and
interventions centered on a commitment to a radically free market characterized by maximal
competition, deregulation, removal of barriers to trade, frictionless movement of capital, and
privatization. Much has been written detailing the vast inequality, depredations, and
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deracination these policies generate, while enriching corporations and a small elite minority.xxv
This account, notwithstanding neoliberal rhetoric’s preoccupation with the economy and free
market, fails to capture neoliberalism’s more salient and insidious nature as a political rationality
that seeks to colonize the entirety of the social world. As a form of governmentality, neoliberal
rationality strives to extend and disperse market values and forms of analysis to all institutions,
individual actions, and social relations.xxvi
All aspects of existence—across the political, social, economic, psychological spheres—
are subjected to economic rationality and calculus, and homo oeconomicus, as “economic
human” exhaustively conceived as an entrepreneur of herself, emerges as the dominant subject of
contemporary global capitalism.xxvii Neoliberal governmentality demands submitting all
dimensions of human life to market rationality, vital to which is “the production of all human
and institutional action as rational entrepreneurial action, conducted according to a calculus of
utility, benefit, or satisfaction against a microeconomic grid of scarcity, supply and demand, and
moral value-neutrality.”xxviii The universalization of the competitive enterprise becomes the
model form to be assumed by individuals, states, and the conduct of social relations. According
to neoliberal political rationality, however, the market and competition are not natural features of
human life, but instead are constructed, requiring active and thorough cultivation by the state
through techniques of government—institutional and legal forms, policy interventions,
normalizing discourse, work on the self, etc. As Foucault notes, for neoliberals “a permanent
and multiform social interventionism” is required as a social and historical precondition for the
possibility of a market economy, which depends on the proper operation of the mechanism of
competition as the regulative principle necessary for the functioning of the market; anticompetitive tendencies within individuals and across the social body must be actively
nullified.xxix
Neoliberal governmentality, thus, constitutes and interpellates individuals as competitive,
entrepreneurial agents in all dimensions of their lives. Neoliberalism equates moral
responsibility with rationally calculated action, thereby recasting moral autonomy solely in terms
of the rational evaluation of costs, benefits, and consequences. In this way, the self-interested
subject rationally evaluates alternative courses of action, makes choices, and bears full
responsibility for the results of these choices irrespective of the complex web of structural
constraints she may face in terms of, for instance, lack of education or skills, discrimination, or
diminishing access to welfare services.xxx This enables the state to guide and control subjects
without being responsible for them, as subject-entrepreneurs are completely responsible for their
well-being, and citizenship withers to the mere performance of this entrepreneurship
successfully.xxxi Interests, investments in the self, and competition appear as the primary
operation of governmentality, rather than through rights and obligations, where the state simply
directs streams of interest and desire by rendering desirable activities inexpensive and
undesirable activities costly, relying on rational subjects to calculate and be governed by their
interests. As such, neoliberal governmentality paradoxically appears to govern without
governing, through enabling subjects to function with a wide latitude of freedom.xxxii Market
freedoms are integral to this form of governmentality, which functions by producing a
proliferation of freedoms—freedom of the market, free exercise of property rights, free trade,
free capital flows, freedom to consume, free competition, and so forth—then acts on the
conditions of actions, the conditions in which freedom is exercised.xxxiii Thus while, on the one
hand, power operates less in terms of restricting and repressing action, it simultaneously
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undergoes intensification, as power comes to saturate the field of actions and possible
actions.xxxiv
This condition of apparent freedom disguises mechanisms of control embedded within
the technicalities of social relations and enacted by subjects floating in the neoliberal sea of
precariousness. The freedom associated with independence and self-entrepreneurship—the
seductive promise held out in neoliberal discourse—manifests in actuality as a form of
enslavement to following a functional path of self-investment and risk management in order to
make oneself compatible with the competitive ensembles of productive relations in which
responsibility for oneself is ruthlessly demanded.xxxv The radical responsibilization for one’s
own conduct, at once occluding and supervening any causal role played by systemic social and
economic factors, dramatically depoliticizes these broader social and economic causes, greatly
reducing the capacity for collective organizing and political action, and significantly reinforcing
highly individualized orientations and voluntaristic modes for addressing collective problems.
Reciprocally, culpability for being unemployed, impoverished, or otherwise disadvantaged is
individualized as symptoms of entrepreneurial failure and a “mismanaged” life, which echoes
this depoliticized reality.xxxvi Thus, at the same time and in inverse proportion to the state
everywhere reducing or privatizing (usually both) social services, welfare provisions, and all
other forms of collective social support, as a function of the state’s considerations of economic
rationality and market imperatives, the individual bears drastically heightened responsibility for
her own actions and well-being.
This is evidenced in the trend towards converting long-term employment contracts into
short-term, flexible, temporary contracts, which serves both as an effective economic strategy for
corporations to become more competitive by shedding costly health care and other benefit plans,
and as an effective strategy of subjectification. This phenomenon of precarization sees workers
reconceived (by self and society) as untethered from dependence on employers and unleashed as
free and autonomous entrepreneurial atoms solely responsible for their self-maintenance and risk
management in an accelerating and interconnected world.xxxvii As such, workers are increasingly
not disposed to relate to one another in terms of solidarity or view themselves collectively as
“workers” in a political sense, but instead simply as individual enterprises.xxxviii The hyperindividualization attendant with this subjectification effaces exploitation, domination, ecological
degradation, and other forms of inequality as social and political phenomena, rendering them
individual phenomena for the individual to rationally manage through forms of self-help.xxxix
As an entrepreneur of the self, neoliberal governmentality also reconfigures the
individual exhaustively as a site of human capital. Human capital is comprised of two
components: “an inborn physical-genetic predisposition and the entirety of skills that have been
acquired as the result of ‘investments’ in the corresponding stimuli: nutrition, education, training
and also love, affection, etc.”xl Thus, individuals are transmogrified into “abilities-machines,”
and wages or salaries are reconceptualized as revenue or income earned on an initial investment,
that is an investment in one’s skills or abilities.xli In this way, an individual’s choices, from
enrolling in a computer software class to going tanning to spending time with one’s child or
lover, become mediated as rationally calculated self-investments to improve one’s stock of
human capital to increase the opportunity to earn income and to produce satisfaction.xlii This
constitutes an intensification of the neoliberal analytic matrix as it colonizes lifeworlds,
penetrating bodies through cosmetic surgery as an investment in human capitalxliii and even
extending to the genetic level.xliv
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Viewing oneself as a repository of human capital illustrates the subjectification and total
penetration of capitalistic economic value. Conceiving oneself as human capital constitutes the
impregnation of the individual by capitalist value relations, causing her to view herself and the
rich, dense embodiment of values she represents, solely in terms of her instrumental economic
value as human capital that earns a particular return in the market as a configuration of genes and
skills and abilities. This is the quintessential form of capitalist subjection, as the constituted
subject sees herself and acts exclusively as a vehicle for capital accumulation and her own
production of satisfaction through consumption.xlv
Finally, an important corollary of the generalization of homo oeconomicus across the
population is the extension of market rationality to the political sphere, whereby the state
evaluates its policies and assesses its success based on its ability to secure the flourishing of the
market and, in turn, the state’s legitimacy is conceived in terms of ensuring such flourishing.xlvi
Economic rationality animates the state’s policies and, beyond orienting its decision-making
around cost-benefit analysis, the state must not only concern itself with the functioning of the
market, but must itself function as a market actor. Therefore, economic health and growth
“expresses the principle of the state’s legitimacy and the basis for state action—from
constitutional adjudication and campaign finance reform to welfare and education policy to
foreign policy, including warfare and the organization of ‘homeland security.’”xlvii
III.
Modes of Resistance
As can be seen from the foregoing analysis of governmentality, crucial to confronting and
addressing the terrifying inertia and paralysis of action in the face of intersecting ecological
crises—particularly terror-inducing given the virtually unparalleled level of scientific consensus
surrounding the gravity and imminence of the threat of climate change—is an understanding of
the manner in which power constitutes the self-producing subject who appears impervious to the
profound dangers posed by the global ecological crisis. Thomas Lemke suggests that the
theoretical importance of the concept of governmentality lies in its capacity to reveal
neoliberalism as not merely an ideological framework or a description of the political-economic
sphere, but predominantly a comprehensive normative project attempting to call into being and
construct a social reality that it descriptively claims already exists—maintaining that competition
is the basis of social relations while actively cultivating those same relations.xlviii Accordingly,
forms of resistance must appreciate that mere criticism (no matter how well-founded) of
neoliberalism’s limited conception of social existence is insufficient; instead, we must take
seriously that “the fundamental understanding of individuals as governed by interest and
competition is not just an ideology that can be refused and debunked, but is an intimate part of
how our lives and subjectivity are structured.”xlix Such recognition orients us towards the urgent
need to cultivate cooperative social relationships and common spaces to counter neoliberal
subjectification and to enable the flourishing of the collective radical imagination to expand the
possibility space for action to move beyond the totalizing univocity of capitalist value that
ensures the continued accelerating despoliation of the earth’s ecosystems.
The prevailing paradigm of cost-benefit calculations by fundamentally self-interested
individuals inhibits any program for the collective transformation of existing conditions, not
because such actions are proscribed or restricted by a sovereign or disciplinary power but
because they are not considered possible, foreclosed by a society comprised of atomized
individuals.l Power relations operate to structure the field of possible actions, the scope of
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imagined possibility. Hence, privatization is more than an economic strategy, as it also applies
to individuals as a method to individualize and isolate, effacing the “public” sphere, and
depoliticizing social and economic problems, removing them from the realm of collective
solutions and couching them in terms of individualized and market-based solutions.li Thus,
ecological problems are recast in terms of individual actions and proposed solutions mediated by
the market, and this must be countered to re-politicize the collective nature of such problems and
the commensurate collectivized responses required. Ecological thinking concerns interdependent
relationships, the structures and flows among them, and a holistic perspective capable of
capturing the interconnections of overlapping systems required for life’s persistence; these
modes of thinking are precluded by the neoliberal mode of subjectivity.lii Confronting power,
though such confrontation is situated by and within power, then entails working at the level of
subjectivities to expand the imagined range of possible actions beyond the constrained horizons
of possibilities which governmental forms of power seek to enact through us.liii It is a bursting of
the (self-fashioned and therefore nearly transparent) enclosures of the imagination, enabling
alternative possibility spaces to be revealed and excavated and alternative relationships with
ourselves, others, and the non-human world to emerge and be nurtured.
This resubjectification and incubation of the radical imagination must center on exploring
alternative terrains of value for veins that are more precious than that which currently traffics
under the sign of value under capitalism. The generalized application of the analytic matrix of
homo oeconomicus to an expanding domain of social life corresponds with and extends the
reductionist logic of capital relentlessly striving to transmogrify the dense universe of
heterogeneous, non-fungible human and ecological values into the smooth monolithic texture of
economic value. Capital, as a pure economic logic, abetted and intensified by neoliberalism,
strives to reformulate social, political, ecological, aesthetic, moral, and community values as
economic values. Through this process, capital serves to shape our actions and how we imagine
our relationships with one another and the ecosystems that support us, as well as mediates how
we cooperate together to reproduce the world.liv This reconfiguration of personal and social life
in strictly economic terms obliterates a whole ecosystem of values which are foundational to the
continued maintenance of life on this planet.
The “dialectic of value and imagination,” as Max Haiven calls it, describes the mutually
constituting process whereby we individually and collectively construct social values that inform
how we reproduce our world.lv Values are social fictions, placeholders for the process by which
we collectively negotiate the dynamic patterns of social reproduction by determining the
nebulous, always-provisional relative importance of actions, persons, things, ideas, etc. Through
ongoing “social feedback loops” in this iterative cycle, social values shape our subjectivities
which then guide how we act, how we cooperate and to what ends, and these actions, in turn,
contribute to the perpetual (re)negotiation of the web of social values.lvi The key then to
confronting the global ecological crisis is through our capacity to employ our collective radical
imagination to redefine value to take into account and embrace the rich multiplicity of social
values—ecological, moral, aesthetic, etc.—that constitutes the architecture of human life. This
laborious and uncertain process must proceed by seeking to foster cooperative social
relationships, spaces, and networks to work to cultivate counter-subjectivities to that of the reign
of neoliberal governmentality’s homo oeconomicus. Only through understanding how we are
both the effects and vehicles of forms of power that deform our collective imagination and lives
and that progressively threaten the world with global ecological catastrophe can we begin to take
Skye Bougsty-Marshall, 2014
7
the necessary and urgent steps to reorganize the social and economic order to save ourselves and
the planet.
Rockström, J., et al., “Planetary Boundaries: Exploring the Safe Operating Space for Humanity,” Ecology
and Society 14(2): 32 (2009), available at http://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol14/iss2/art32/.
ii
Ibid.
iii
Matt McGrath, “Emissions of CO2 Driving Rapid Oceans ‘Acid Trip,’” BBC (November 17, 2013),
available at http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-24904143; Susannah Cullinane, “CO2 Causing Oceans
to Acidify at ‘Unprecedented’ Rate, Scientists Warn,” CNN (November 13, 2013), available at
http://www.cnn.com/2013/11/14/world/ocean-acidification-report/.
iv
Lauren Morello, “Phytoplankton Population Drops 40 Percent Since 1950,” Scientific American (July 29,
2010), available at http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/phytoplankton-population/.
v
Dahr Jamail, “The Coming ‘Instant Planetary Emergency,’” The Nation (December 17, 2013), available at
http://www.thenation.com/article/177614/coming-instant-planetary-emergency#.
vi
See IPCC, “Summary for Policymakers,” Climate Change 2013: The Physical Science Basis. Contribution
of
Working Group I to the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
[Stocker, T.F., D. Qin, G.-K. Plattner, M. Tignor, S.K. Allen, J. Boschung, A. Nauels, Y. Xia, V. Bex and P.M.
Midgley (eds.)] (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), available at
http://www.climatechange2013.org/images/report/WG1AR5_SPM_FINAL.pdf.
vii
James Hansen, et al., “Assessing ‘Dangerous Climate Change’: Required Reduction of Carbon Emissions
to Protect Young People, Future Generations and Nature,” PLOS ONE (December 3, 2013), available at
http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0081648.
viii
Roz Pidcock, “Carbon Briefing: Making Sense of the IPCC’s New Carbon Budget,” Carbon Brief
(October 23, 2013), available at http://www.carbonbrief.org/blog/2013/10/carbon-briefing-making-sense-of-theipcc%E2%80%99s-new-carbon-budget/.
ix
Carbon Tracker, Unburnable Carbon 2013: Wasted Capital and Stranded Assets (2013), 4, available at
http://www.lse.ac.uk/GranthamInstitute/publications/Policy/docs/PB-unburnable-carbon-2013-wasted-capitalstranded-assets.pdf.
x
Ben Garside, “Global Carbon Emissions Rise to New Record in 2013: Report,” Reuters (November 18,
2013), available at http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/11/19/us-global-carbon-emissionsidUSBRE9AI00A20131119.
xi
Justin Gillis, “U.N. Climate Panel Endorses Ceiling on Global Emissions,” New York Times (September
27, 2013), available at http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/28/science/global-climate-changereport.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0.
xii
Kelly Levin, “World’s Carbon Budget to be Spent in Three Decades,” World Resources Institute
(September 27, 2013), available at http://www.wri.org/blog/2013/09/world%E2%80%99s-carbon-budget-be-spentthree-decades.
xiii
Dahr Jamail, “The Coming ‘Instant Planetary Emergency,’” The Nation (December 17, 2013), available at
http://www.thenation.com/article/177614/coming-instant-planetary-emergency#. Methane is twenty-three times as
powerful as CO2 per molecule on a 100-year timescale, and 105 times more potent when it comes to heating the
planet on a twenty-year timescale. Ibid.
xiv
Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1983), 202-203. Foucault makes an important contribution in analyzing the mutually
constituting relationship between knowledge and power. Knowledge or truth is not external to power, but
knowledge is an indispensable component to the operation of power. Foucault strove to expound the material
i
Skye Bougsty-Marshall, 2014
8
interconnections between power and knowledge and to elucidate the manner in which the two are mutually
produced. Ibid.
xv
Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978-79, trans. by Graham
Burchell, (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 186; Thomas Lemke, “‘The Birth of Bio-politics’: Michel
Foucault’s Lecture at the Collège de France on Neo-liberal Governmentality,” Economy and Society 30.2 (May
2001), 191; Thomas Lemke, “Foucault, Governmentality, and Critique,” presented at Rethinking Marxism
Conference, University of Amherst (MA), September 21-24, 2000, 3, available at
http://www.andosciasociology.net/resources/Foucault$2C+Governmentality$2C+and+Critique+IV-2.pdf .
xvi
Michel Foucault, “About the Beginning of the Hermeneutics of the Self: Two Lectures at Dartmouth,”
Political Theory, Vol. 21, No. 2 (May 1993), 203-204.
xvii
Isabell Lorey, “Governmentality and Self-Precarization: On the Normalization of Cultural Producers,”
Transversal (January 2006), available at http://eipcp.net/transversal/1106/lorey/en.
xviii
Thomas Lemke, “‘The Birth of Bio-politics,’” 191.
xix
Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 2.
xx
Judith Butler, Undoing Gender (New York: Routledge, 2004), 48.
xxi
Isabell Lorey, “Governmentality and Self-Precarization: On the Normalization of Cultural Producers,”
Transversal, (January 2006), available at http://eipcp.net/transversal/1106/lorey/en.
xxii
Michael Hardt & Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), 24.
xxiii
Ibid.
xxiv
Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, 203.
xxv
See e.g., Henry A. Giroux, Against the Terror of Neoliberalism: Politics beyond the Age of Greed (Boulder
CO: Paradigm, 2008); David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005);
Wendy Brown, Edgework: Critical Essays on Knowledge and Politics (New Jersey: Princeton University Press,
2005), 37-59.
xxvi
Wendy Brown, Edgework: Critical Essays on Knowledge and Politics, 40.
xxvii
Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978-79, 226.
xxviii
Wendy Brown, Edgework: Critical Essays on Knowledge and Politics, 40.
xxix
Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978-79, 186.
xxx
Wendy Brown, Edgework: Critical Essays on Knowledge and Politics, 42-43.
xxxi
Ibid.; Thomas Lemke, “‘The Birth of Bio-politics,’” 201.
xxxii
Jason Read, “A Genealogy of Homo-Economicus: Neoliberalism and the Production of Subjectivity,”
Foucault Studies, No. 6 (February 2009), 29.
xxxiii
Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978-79, 63.
xxxiv
Jason Read, “A Genealogy of Homo-Economicus: Neoliberalism and the Production of Subjectivity,” 29.
xxxv
Franco “Bifo” Berardi, The Soul at Work from Alienation to Autonomy (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2009),
192.
xxxvi
Wendy Brown, Edgework: Critical Essays on Knowledge and Politics, 42-43.
xxxvii
Trent H. Hamann, “Neoliberalism, Governmentality, and Ethics,” Foucault Studies, No. 6 (February
2009), 43.
xxxviii
Jason Read, “A Genealogy of Homo-Economicus: Neoliberalism and the Production of Subjectivity,” 30.
xxxix
Wendy Brown, Edgework: Critical Essays on Knowledge and Politics, 42-43; Trent H. Hamann,
“Neoliberalism, Governmentality, and Ethics,” 43.
xl
Thomas Lemke, “‘The Birth of Bio-politics,’” 199.
xli
Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978-79, 226-227.
xlii
Jason Read, “A Genealogy of Homo-Economicus: Neoliberalism and the Production of Subjectivity,” 28.
xliii
Cho Joo-hyun, “Neoliberal Governmentality at Work: Post-IMF Korean Society and the Construction of
Neoliberal Women,” Korea Journal (Autumn 2009), 17, available at
https://www.ekoreajournal.net/issue/index2.htm?Idx=426#.
xliv
Foucault envisions genetic engineering as a means to augment the value of human capital. Michel
Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978-79, 228.
xlv
Ibid. at 226.
xlvi
Ibid. at 246.
xlvii
Wendy Brown, Edgework: Critical Essays on Knowledge and Politics, 42.
Skye Bougsty-Marshall, 2014
9
Thomas Lemke, “‘The Birth of Bio-politics,’” 203; Jason Read, “A Genealogy of Homo-Economicus:
Neoliberalism and the Production of Subjectivity,” 30.
xlix
Jason Read, “A Genealogy of Homo-Economicus: Neoliberalism and the Production of Subjectivity,” 3435.
l
Ibid. at 36.
li
Wendy Brown, “American Nightmare: Neoliberalism, Neoconservatism, and Democratization,” Political
Theory, Vol. 34, No. 6 (2006), 704.
lii
Joel Kovel, The Enemy of Nature (London: Zed, 2002), 90-91; Scott F. Gilbert, Jan Sapp and Alfred I.
Tauber, “A Symbiotic View of Life: We Have Never Been Individuals,” The Quarterly Review of Biology, Vol. 87,
No. 4 (December 2012), 325-341.
liii
Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1983), 221.
liv
Max Haiven, “The Financial Crisis as a Crisis of Imagination,” Cultural Logic (January 2012), 7, available
at http://clogic.eserver.org/2010/Haiven.pdf.
lv
Max Haiven, “Finance as Capital’s Imagination? Reimagining Value and Culture in an Age of Fictitious
Capital and Crisis,” Social Text, Vol. 29, No. 3 (Fall 2011), 93.
lvi
Max Haiven, Crises of Imagination, Crises of Power (London: Zed, 2014), 43; Max Haiven, “Finance as
Capital’s Imagination? Reimagining Value and Culture in an Age of Fictitious Capital and Crisis,” Social Text, Vol.
29, No. 3 (Fall 2011), 97 (citing Anita Nelson, Marx’s Concept of Money: The God of Commodities (London:
Routledge, 1999), 50-51; Massimo De Angelis, The Beginning of History: Value Struggles and Global Capitalism
(London: Pluto, 2007), 24-28).
xlviii
Skye Bougsty-Marshall, 2014
10