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February 4, 2017 at 9:24 am #64798
wvParticipant“…The Discourse of Employability.
The official discourse of employability can be traced back at least as far as 1998, when the UK government’s Department for Education and Employment commissioned a think-tank to write a report documenting the significance of this emerging term. Employability is defined here, within the context of the end of job security, as ‘the capability to move self-sufficiently within the labour market to realise potential through sustainable employment’. In the new environment of flexible work, the report suggests, individuals should be ready to move regularly between jobs and roles, and be able to manage their own ‘transitions’ by using their ‘employability assets’ effectively.This definition of employability is framed by a corporate/governmental duty to institutionalise and formalise insecurity as a positive development and as the only possible way forward. Stable employment, the report implies, is simply a thing of the past, as obsolete as the age of steam, incompatible with the realities of a globalised and virtualised economy. Years later this story is wearily familiar. Precarious working conditions are conflated with technological progress and must be embraced, like it or not. Objections to these conditions are viewed as nostalgic weakness or intransigence, an inability or unwillingness to move with the times.
The power of capitalism is inextricably linked to this need for the business-owning and political class to maintain its own security by engineering insecurity in its proletarian labourers, through an economic system in which survival is reliant upon the indefinite surrender of one’s ‘assets’. After industrialization and post-Fordism, the emphasis upon employability as a form of empowerment and self-management, signifying both personal responsibility and individual fulfilment, is the latest configuration of the ruling ideology. Self-employment and entrepreneurship have filled the void left by the hollowing out of occupational or union identity. Connectivity, epitomised by the mobile phone, has replaced collectivity, the personal narrative has replaced history. Class conflict is displaced onto individual anxiety and peer competition, enabling a relation of frictionless exploitation.
Whereas in the past workers would identify themselves as a group and the employer would stand out as a singular focus of hostility, now this arrangement has been mystified or even reversed. While the worker is isolated, with co-workers positioned as rivals rather than colleagues, the boss is dispersed across a whole network of abstract institutions: not just employer but recruitment agency, welfare advisor, landlord, credit card company… all of which are combined in an internalised virtual authority which oversees and audits one’s attempts to act as a responsible, hard-working, ‘employable’ citizen. Under such conditions, workplace resistance becomes impossible. Complaints bounce back off sealed administrative entities onto the individual; dissent is fatal; industrial action is merely self-destructive.
The actual attributes required of the employable candidate in this environment are 24/7 flexibility and unquestioning positivity, and the rise of employability might be viewed as crucial in the legitimising not only of precarity but also of emotional labour as a form of social control. The UK government report mentioned above identifies three types of ‘assets’ needed by the employable individual: ‘knowledge, skills and attitudes’; and then goes on to explicitly compare the development and presentation of these assets to the process of ‘production, marketing and sales’. Simple possession of knowledge and skills is no longer enough: self-sufficient individuals also need to promote these qualities competitively, to ‘exploit their assets, to market them and sell them’.
So, the key to employability is literal self-exploitation. Knowledge and skills have been separated from the old, obsolete model of work and redefined as human capital. The third asset, ‘attitude’, is perhaps the most significant in engineering this change, as it dissolves the boundary between the internal and external or work and non-work areas of the employable worker/candidate’s life. Attitude can no longer be held back by the worker but must now be brought to market and sold to the capitalist, in manual as well as service jobs. The employee has a duty to show enthusiasm, to express personal interest in the success of the business and suppress signs of boredom, to convey a positive outlook regardless of the actual conditions of work, because the attitude (or a convincing performance of that attitude) is part of the job description and often indistinguishable from other core duties. In terms of selling oneself in competition with other equally qualified/desperate candidates and effecting smooth ‘transitions’ between roles, this attitudinal packaging attracts continual scrutiny: a moment’s hesitation, the slightest glitch in the performative display, can turn an asset into a liability.Full article:http://www.dropbox.com/s/zx37ommsm5nd3c1/against-employability.pdf
February 4, 2017 at 10:10 am #64809February 5, 2017 at 5:06 am #64891
MackeyserModeratorI agree… Foucault that mess. And Foucault those corporate douchebags who think we have to market ourselves in order to further our existence.
Sports is the crucible of human virtue. The distillate remains are human vice.
February 5, 2017 at 11:25 am #64922
znModeratorI agree… Foucault that mess. And Foucault those corporate douchebags who think we have to market ourselves in order to further our existence.
Foucault this: it;s Foucauldian to look at how a particular discourse and practices add up to a particular active ensemble, all oriented toward disciplining the masses.
Hence the discourse of employability.
Just some random writer on this:
Foucault’s focus is upon questions of how some discourses have shaped and created meaning systems that have gained the status and currency of ‘truth’, and dominate how we define and organize both ourselves and our social world.
February 5, 2017 at 12:13 pm #64926wvParticipantSome Foo-ko
The last quote is by far my favorite.
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“The strategic adversary is fascism… the fascism in us all, in our heads and in our everyday behavior, the fascism that causes us to love power, to desire the very thing that dominates and exploits us.”
― Michel Foucault“Schools serve the same social functions as prisons and mental institutions- to define, classify, control, and regulate people.”
― Michel Foucault“The real political task in a society such as ours is to criticize the workings of institutions that appear to be both neutral and independent, to criticize and attack them in such a manner that the political violence that has always exercised itself obscurely through them will be unmasked, so that one can fight against them.”
― Michel Foucault, The Chomsky – Foucault Debate: On Human Nature“A critique does not consist in saying that things aren’t good the way they are. It consists in seeing on just what type of assumptions, of familiar notions, of established and unexamined ways of thinking the accepted practices are based… To do criticism is to make harder those acts which are now too easy.”
― Michel Foucault“From the idea that the self is not given to us, I think there is only one practical consequence: we have to create ourselves as a work of art.”
― Michel Foucault“The first task of the doctor is … political: the struggle against disease must begin with a war against bad government.” Man will be totally and definitively cured only if he is first liberated…”
― Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception“The necessity of reform mustn’t be allowed to become a form of blackmail serving to limit, reduce, or halt the exercise of criticism. Under no circumstances should one pay attention to those who tell one: “Don’t criticize, since you’re not capable of carrying out a reform.” That’s ministerial cabinet talk. Critique doesn’t have to be the premise of a deduction that concludes, “this, then, is what needs to be done.” It should be an instrument for those for who fight, those who resist and refuse what is. Its use should be in processes of conflict and confrontation, essays in refusal. It doesn’t have to lay down the law for the law. It isn’t a stage in a programming. It is a challenge directed to what is.”
― Michel Foucault, The Essential Foucault: Selections from Essential Works of Foucault, 1954-1984“There are more ideas on earth than intellectuals imagine. And these ideas are more active, stronger, more resistant, more passionate than “politicians” think. We have to be there at the birth of ideas, the bursting outward of their force: not in books expressing them, but in events manifesting this force, in struggles carried on around ideas, for or against them. Ideas do not rule the world. But it is because the world has ideas (and because it constantly produces them) that it is not passively ruled by those who are its leaders or those who would like to teach it, once and for all, what it must think.”
― Michel Foucault“power is tolerable only on condition that it masks a substantial part of itself. Its success is proportional to an ability to hide its own mechanisms.”
― Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction“Education may well be, as of right, the instrument whereby every individual, in a society like our own, can gain access to any kind of discourse. But we well know that in its distribution, in what it permits and in what it prevents, it follows the well-trodden battle-lines of social conflict. Every educational system is a political means of maintaining or of modifying the appropriation of discourse, with the knowledge and the powers it carries with it.”
― Michel Foucault“Prefer what is positive and multiple, difference over uniformity, flows over unities, mobile arrangements over systems. Believe that what is productive is not sedentary but nomadic.”
― Michel Foucault“We must uncover our rituals for what they are: completely arbitrary things, tied to our bourgeois way of life; it is
good-and that is the real theater-to
transcend them in the manner of play, by
means of games and irony; it is good to be dirty and bearded, to have long hair,
to look like a girl when one is a boy (and vice versa); one must put “in
play,” show up, transform and reverse
the systems which quietly order us about.”
― Michel Foucault“Nietzsche was a revelation to me. I felt that there was someone quite different from what I had been taught. I read him with a great passion and broke with my life, left my job in the asylum, left France: I had the feeling I had been trapped. Through Nietzsche, I had become a stranger to all that.”
― Michel Foucault“Parrhesia is a kind of verbal activity where the speaker has a specific relation to truth through frankness, a certain relationship to his own life through danger, a certain type of relation to himself or other people through criticism (self-criticism or criticism of other people), and a specific relation to moral law through freedom and duty. More precisely, parrhesia is a verbal activity in which a speaker expresses his personal relationship to truth, and risks his life because he recognizes truth-telling as a duty to improve or help other people (as well as himself). In parrhesia, the speaker uses his freedom and chooses frankness instead of persuasion, truth instead of falsehood or silence, the risk of death instead of life and security, criticism instead of flattery, and moral duty instead of self-interest and moral apathy”
― Michel Foucault“This book first arose out of a passage in [Jorge Luis] Borges, out of the laughter that shattered, as I read the passage, all the familiar landmarks of my thought—our thought that bears the stamp of our age and our geography—breaking up all the ordered surfaces and all the planes with which we are accustomed to tame the wild profusion of existing things, and continuing long afterwards to disturb and threaten with collapse our age-old distinction between the Same and the Other. This passage quotes a ‘certain Chinese encyclopaedia’ in which it is written that ‘animals are divided into: (a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) suckling pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (l) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way off look like flies’. In the wonderment of this taxonomy, the thing we apprehend in one great leap, the thing that, by means of the fable, is demonstrated as the exotic charm of another system of thought, is the limitation of our own, the stark impossibility of thinking that.”
― Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human SciencesFebruary 5, 2017 at 1:31 pm #64933znModeratorCritique doesn’t have to be the premise of a deduction that concludes, “this, then, is what needs to be done.” It should be an instrument for those for who fight, those who resist and refuse what is….It doesn’t have to lay down the law for the law. It isn’t a stage in a programming. It is a challenge directed to what is.”
I agree with that.
One small step for man. Endless critique for mankind.
February 5, 2017 at 1:52 pm #64936wvParticipantCritique doesn’t have to be the premise of a deduction that concludes, “this, then, is what needs to be done.” It should be an instrument for those for who fight, those who resist and refuse what is….It doesn’t have to lay down the law for the law. It isn’t a stage in a programming. It is a challenge directed to what is.”
I agree with that.
One small step for man. Endless critique for mankind.
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Ok, but in that post what i hear is how
much you LOVE Hillary.Thats what i hear.
w
vFebruary 5, 2017 at 2:28 pm #64938 -
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