Beyond Verticality: Neoliberalism’s Making of ‘Achievement Violence’ Subjects

• In Event: Rethinking Neoliberalism: Concepts and Critiques

Abstract

This paper seeks to challenge the notion of verticality as it has often been deployed in critical literatures on the use and abuse of (neo)liberal subjects in late-modernity or post-capitalist societies. Several of these literatures have placed the emphasis on what they call “the vertical dimension” of space and life in order to resist the so-called flattening of space. The flattening of space, or the horizontal dimension, these texts suggest, prevents one from perceiving the social, economic, cultural, and political stratifications that create and reproduce multiple precarious conditions and vulnerable populations in late-modernity. It also steers the gaze away from the drive towards competition, upward mobility, or overcoming that is said to characterize neoliberal subjects and subjectivities. An emphasis on verticality, then, is supposed to provide a critical theoretical lens through which neoliberal precarities and the making of the (neo)liberal subject can be highlighted and targeted. Drawing on the recent work of Korean-German philosopher Byung-Chul Han, and borrowing insights from Gilles Deleuze’s essay on “societies of control,” this paper suggests that vertical perspectives are not always able to capture the specific traits of contemporary precarities and of the production of neoliberal subjectivities because they remain wedded to a binary axiological way of thinking that opposes verticality to horizontality. Put differently, the distinction today between verticality and horizontality is not as obvious as it may appear. The horizontal plane and the vertical dimension are often confused, undecidable, or indistinguishable from one another. Thus, many vertical structures and techniques today—from new skyscrapers in some urban settings to drone technologies of surveillance, destruction, or consumption—are designed in such a way that they enable and reproduce new forms of horizontality that help to further diffuse, both in space and time, the effects of neoliberal governance and violence. A case in point may be the recent design of new types of skyscrapers in Chinese metropolitan areas that are meant not just to be tall, but also to expand horizontally, and sometimes join adjacent buildings, about midway through the vertical axis so that some populations may “stretch” and enjoy horizontally designed “enclosed” spaces of relaxation and leisure (like parks), away from the horizontalities found on the ground where all sorts of “undesirable” populations reside and move about. In a post-disciplinary age when what Han calls “subjects of achievement violence” (perhaps characteristic of control societies) are not always distinguishable from “subjects of obedience violence” (typically associated with disciplinary societies), what I call neoliberal verticalities increasingly blur the horizontality/verticality divide. These neoliberal verticalities also need to be recognized as material and conceptual conditions of possibility for the violent making of neoliberal subjectivities.

Author

• Francois Debrix, Virginia Tech