On the Unbearable Lightness of John Key

Abstract

The neoliberal reforms of the 1980s produced, going into the new millennium, a contradiction within capitalism that is illuminated by the unprecedented popularity of John Key as prime minister. This contradiction concerns an impasse in political economy that develops as a consequence of capital’s inability to create experiences of self required for its own reproduction. In short, the contradiction signals a crisis in the social reproduction of capital, a crisis in the reproduction of capitalist subjectivity. The requirement upon people to become ‘entrepreneurs of the self’ or units of self-actuating ‘human capital’ produces insufficiently coherent experiences of selfhood, accompanied by a widespread development of compensatory states of narcissistic grandiosity. Different social formations produce particular kinds of subjectivity, and come to privilege specific public figures as ideals of the psychological traits favourable to the efficient operation of the prevailing social order. That order, in our case, is neoliberal capital of an increasingly authoritarian populist kind, and Key exemplifies its ideal subject. Resistance to the logics by which a given social order is functioning turns, in part, upon the dislocation of its central figures. Against the individualistic contentedness projected by the figure of Key, a need arises to imagine how a collective, cooperative, subject might form anew in this situation. This essay will move towards Jodi Dean’s discussion of the party form to think through what such a project might entail.