The Embodied Rhetoric of Cognitive Labour
Abstract
This dissertation traces the roots of neoliberal selfhood to the rationalist ontology of modernity in the 1600s. The historical tension between materialism and immaterialism is expressed in the historicisation of work into Fordism and post-Fordism where embodied factory toil is apparently replaced by immaterial work, recalling Descartes’ mind-body split. If post-Fordist work addresses the Marxist critique of alienation in its emphasis on entrepreneurial inner selves, it does not explain the post-Fordist preoccupation to efficiently “Taylorise” the body through obsessive productivity. I argue that the factory prevails in the entrepreneur’s adoption of factory efficiency as a learnt behaviour from the Fordist era to enable perpetual self-fashioning, creating a productively pliant body to aid in self-discovery – an embodied rhetoric of cognitive labour. This follows the rationalist tenet of a rational mind ordering the causal body. Descartes and Marx converge as both the cogito and the commodity-form are retroactively rediscovered as essence. Both the cogito and the commodity-form are arrived at while the body is doubted, and the production process is mystified respectively. The entrepreneurial goal is the achievement of selfhood that is financially verifiable. Neoliberalism is capitalism’s version of humanism, allowing for self-actualisation, but rationalised by market forces.
Rationalism, negating contingent, embodied contexts, remade reality in negative terms that is measurable. The fallible body, in the face of the mind, became a site of deficiency to be transcended, recalling Original Sin. This state of deficiency provided the scarcity paradigm that justified endless capitalist growth. In the scarcity paradigm, the neoliberal individual must overcome indebtedness – student loans, housing mortgages – to achieve a redemptive financialised oneness. However, indebtedness in anarchist societies did not carry guilt but was instrumental in creating lasting bonds, notes David Graeber. Debt as transgression has not only created entrepreneurship under punitive market forces, it corresponds to negative freedom – reinterpreted by Eva Illouz as negative relationships – the freedom from bonds. This also has consequences for the environment as ecomodernism views modernity unbonded from nature which needs technocratic reordering to solve climate change. My project examines the material consequences of the Cartesian cogito and a way out of growthism through care economies.