Our society of constant (self-) evaluation

If anyone ever wondered what Foucault’s description of modern, “disciplined” society as one structured by “hierarchical observation”, “normalising judgement” and the “examination” amounts to in contemporary terms, they should read Renata Salecl’s intriguing book, Choice (2010). Salecl provides a reconstruction of the social scene of today in which one can inscribe Foucault’s insights, in the process extending their illuminating reach.

The guiding thread of her book is the idea of “choice”, which, although unavoidable to every person, has become something comprehensively obligatory, hanging like a sword of Damocles above one’s head in every situation, concomitantly giving rise to an inordinate amount of anxiety in people. Moreover (pp. 22-23): “The times we live in are dominated by impatient capital. There is a constant desire for rapid returns. But it is not only corporations and financial services that are pressured to manage every risk and to maximize returns. We are all encouraged to act like corporations: to make a life-plan of goals, make long-term investments, be flexible, restructure our life’s enterprise and take the risks necessary in order to increase profits … Evaluation is the ultimate buzzword of today’s employment culture. In British universities teachers spend half their time writing reports on students, programmes or academic colleagues.”

This is not restricted to universities (worldwide, including South Africa), but extends to multinational corporations, where there is a to-and-fro process of evaluation (of bosses by employees, and vice-versa, as well as of employees by themselves) going on all the time. On the one hand, this is characteristic of Foucault’s “disciplined society”, and of what Deleuze called “societies of control”, but on the other hand it is an extension of those, and a deepening of their effects on individuals — as Salecl aptly remarks, the ubiquitous self- and other-monitoring, which may have its place in industrial production, has been internalised as a means of “controlling” our own behaviour.

To be sure, this much was already evident from Foucault and Deleuze’s work. But, on the other hand, as a pattern of control it has become so pervasive that it pops up in the most unexpected places, from the discourse of “remodelling” yourself, to that of “re-training” and “re-schooling” or (“re-skilling”), and further afield in a wide variety of “advice-discourses”, all of which are placed under the regime of “rational mastery” with a view to living a more “profitable” life. Small wonder that there is so much stress and anxiety around, which, of course, plays right into the hands of the most exemplary agents of this “advice culture”. When a crisis arises in a marriage, for instance, Salecl points out (pp. 25-26): ” … the marriage counsellor suggests that a couple needs to search for the help of an adviser such as him [Willard F Harley], who will help them to restructure their emotional investment banks and rebuild their funds … No one can deny that marriages work better if the partners spend time together, and that sometimes this requires compromise on shared activities. But today’s advice culture seeks to depict love and emotions as elements of life that we can rationally master, even though this is the domain where unconscious impulses and feelings are at their most powerful. There is thus a desire now to master these unconscious impulses, to find a way to alter uncomfortable feelings as well as to control the nature of attraction. With the ever dominant idea that life outcomes are simply a matter of choice and that it is up to us to decide how we want to live, love and sexuality are made to seem as easily manageable as, say, a career or choosing a holiday.”

One need not be a student of psychoanalysis to know that it is self-deluding to believe that the domain of desire and (unconscious) sexual motivations is subject to rational control, and anyone who believes that it is, comes up against the limits of rationality sooner or later. But what is more pertinent for the moment, is taking note of how far the “ideology of choice” has penetrated into our personal lives, including even our ideas of sexual fulfilment, which is supposedly always susceptible to improvement, as long as we are willing to spend money on the appropriate sources of advice or counselling. Not only is there help available in the shape of “sex management”, or “anger management”, but “management” is supposed to extend to every corner of human existence, with the implicit promise of a better, more “profitable” life.

Salecl’s earlier reference to “impatient capital” already indicates that this way of living is inextricably connected with the economic system that organises our lives — a system where competitive individualism, further spurred by the demand for comparative, hierarchising evaluation, is at the basis of a society constructed like a pyramid, with the most “successfully competitive” closer to the apex. I put “successfully competitive” in scare quotes because “success” does not here denote a neutral, innocuous process, but one where ruthless, overtly or covertly antagonistic rivalry rules, something that is even valorized in television programmes promoted by tycoons like Donald Trump, making of our society the embodiment of economic “survival of the fittest”.

It does not require a genius to realise that this implies less solidarity and supportive, reciprocal social relations the higher up you go. Small wonder that solidarity is greatest at the lower levels on the social pyramid, among the workers, for instance (or among those who experience solidarity because of common oppression, as recently evident in Egypt and other Arabic countries). Even at school level the inculcation of values such as sympathy and kindness stands in stark contrast to what is simultaneously, and increasingly held up to our children (through evaluations and all manner of normative judgement) as the desirable life, namely one of merciless competition.

Here we come to the crux of the matter. Whether it is in the guise of “(self-) management”, “(self-) evaluation”, “(self-) help”, “rational choice”, or buying into the “culture of advice”, it all amounts to the same thing, which is not really different from what Foucault saw as the “docile (but economically productive) bodies” produced by the three mechanisms of discipline referred to at the beginning (hierarchical observation, etc.). The culture of evaluation and of advice (or counselling) is one predicated on the implicit (mostly unconscious) belief that all of these psychological mechanisms produce social and economic subjects who behave in an economically competitive, but politically orderly, docile and passive manner, which suits the dominant societal sphere, the economic, down to the ground. After all, subjects “constructed” by these customary behavioural trends, evident in the kind of things mentioned earlier (like repeated evaluations, such as audits and reviews) are bound to be economically productive and obedient, not given to rocking the boat. (Except for those who know what it takes to be relatively autonomous — and there are comparatively few of us around.)

It is no accident that Salecl makes the following observation (p. 42): “Although we may feel overwhelmed by consumer choice and the pressure to turn our life into … a well-run enterprise, we should remember that the problem today is not that choices are available to us in the developed world. Rather, the problem is that the idea of rational choice, transferred from the domain of economics, has been glorified as the only kind of choice we have.”

I would go further than Salecl here by arguing that choice is, by its very nature, not rational — “rational choice” is an oxymoron. What it really means is that a certain “rational” outcome or preferential indication follows from, for example, a set of calculations, or a statistical tendency, and is (or should supposedly be) automatically selected in preference to other possibilities, which putatively makes of it a ‘rational’ choice. “Choice”, strictly speaking, always presupposes alternatives which are not necessarily (in fact, seldom) rationally transparent, and for that very reason requires a decision, a choice, in the face of uncertainty. One makes such a decision precisely because one does not “know” what will prove to be (or have been) the best option in the future. Selecting something from among a variety of alternatives or options in a rationally predictable way (as it supposedly happens on the stock market), makes of it the outcome of a kind of algorithmic procedure, which human beings are not privy to. The transfer of “rational choice” from the current economic system to the position of dominance in society is therefore underpinned by an erroneous, misguided anthropology, which secretly reduces human beings to algorithmically governed automata. Small wonder that there is so much anxiety around, because we are not machines.

There is a story about the famous Jewish philosopher, Martin Buber, which illustrates this well. Sitting in a restaurant with friends one evening, Buber was approached by a man who exclaimed that he had looked for the philosopher everywhere, because only such a wise person could help him in his predicament. When Buber asked what the problem was, the man explained that marriage had been proposed to his daughter by two young men — a lawyer and a medical doctor — and that Buber was the only person he knew who would be able to indicate, with certainty, which young man his daughter should marry. Predictably, Buber — who was a philosopher, after all — shook his head sadly and told the disappointed man that no mortal could tell him with certainty whom she should marry, and that the choice was ultimately hers.

It was an instance of what Sartre calls “our terrible freedom”. Why terrible? Because even when the world around us would have us believe in the ideology, that there is an algorithmically guaranteed way of living and “choosing” (modelled on the market), we remain human, and therefore fallible. We are subject to unavoidably, but freely, choosing. As Socrates observed, the only thing of which we can be sure, is how little we know. This is why choice, with its consequences, is inevitable. But we remain free, and if we choose to “go with the flow” in the culture of bewildering “choice”, of profit-driven competition, of evaluation, of buying into advice of various stripes, we do so freely and must live with the consequences.