The figure of the participatory biocitizen sketched out above embodies a tension in this emerging economy of voice. On the one hand, neoliberal norms of individual choice, responsibility and optimisation come to frame and shape how ‘good’ citizen-subjects are recognised and can participate, potentially expanding possibilities for voice. On the other, as both Puar and Illouz (Illouz, 2007; Puar, 2009) have noted, capitalist narratives of progress are increasingly linked to an exposure to, and narration of, vulnerability. In this context, recognition contains a kind of polarising quality with competing tendencies towards narratives of productivity on the one hand, and narratives of subjugation or victimhood on the other. These conflicting tensions are also exemplified by lifestyle-based reality television shows like The Biggest Loser15 where contestants navigate the demands of
this cultural conjuncture. The emergence of reality television as a global project, for instance, has long been understood as a particular neoliberal phenomenon (Couldry, 2008), one which also exemplifies this commodification of speech and opinion, at the same time celebrating ordinary people’s participation in the media space. The performance of self- development in these shows becomes a therapeutic and enterprising pursuit emerging through the recognition frames of emotional capitalism and the participatory biocitizen. These kinds of narratives are made intelligible through what Puar (Puar et al., 2012: 153) provocatively describes as a “liberal eugenics of lifestyle programming”. In the case of
TBL, access to recognition is contingent upon individual identification with a neoliberal
framing of obesity - one that denies the broader patterns of social disparity in the determinants of health, and instead recasts these conditions as a problem of the will, or lack of individual self-control. This frame of recognition both privileges and rewards narratives encompass and celebrate these values and norms.
There have been several critiques of this format from the perspective of neoliberal biopolitics and governmentality, especially in relation to the ‘war on fat’ and the ‘obesity epidemic’ in the West (Greenhalgh, 2012; Sender and Sullivan, 2008; Silk et al., 2011). Taking a different approach, Couldry has suggested that such programs operate on the
15 The Biggest Loser (2004-current) is a reality television format that started in the United
States and has subsequently been franchised globally, including Australia. Overweight contestants compete for prize money given at the end of the series to the person who loses the most weight. Each week, contestants are subject to a series of gruelling exercise regimes, personal challenges (often including the temptation of unhealthy food) and weekly weight-loss goals. The drama is constructed through pitting contestants against each other, as well as often
promise of recognition but instead provide “distorted recognition” (Couldry, 2010: 82). The terms ‘distorted’ recognition or misrecognition go some way to describing the frame through which subjects are rendered intelligible; yet the values of enterprise,
entrepreneurship and individual responsibilisation embedded in such neoliberal
restructuring of recognition continue to shape and condition the possibilities for voice. A focus on distorted recognition can pull attention away from the uncomfortable moral economy that these neoliberal frames of recognition produce. Attached to the values of individual optimisation and enterprise, recognition begins to align lifestyle and identity politics through mechanisms of the market. Contestants who are recognised to participate in the ‘right way’ are given a platform - albeit a tightly constrained one - to ‘tell their story’, but the discursive tools of feminism which were used to critique power have now also been incorporated into neoliberal narratives of self-regulation and enterprise. I see this economy of recognition as being connected to the rise of the i-voice and emerging modes of speech I theorised in Chapter Three, where the norms of recognition condition how contestants occupy particular subject formations to give account of themselves.
Further, and in a broader context, by framing recognition of subjects as ‘participants’ (or recognition in terms of participation) and activating a whole series of biopolitical acts of self-craft and control (techniques of incorporation), issues of class, gender, education, race etc. are subsumed and amalgamated within one continuous project of individual enterprise. Just as listening is implicated in a politics of inclusion that inverts the exclusionary forces that position subjects outside the mainstream, these forms of recognition recast ‘non- participation’ or resistance as non-recognition, and issue a subsequent refusal or social invalidation. Non-participation - or not participating in the ‘right way’ - is recognised only insofar as it brings with it consequences - be they material, social or political. The rhetoric of free will, responsibility and choice frames this participation discourse, and yet
recognition is conditioned by and contingent upon not exercising the ‘wrong’ choices. Equally, subjects must not be too wilful, nor should they have a lack of will, as Sara Ahmed (2014) has elegantly shown in her excavation of the history of wilfulness. So this economy of recognition works to regulate affective surplus through emotional governance. At the same time, it activates a ‘moderate’ wilfulness only insofar as it is directed toward self- development and market optimisation or productivity, rather than a challenging of the norm.
Challenging or altering the terms of recognition not only requires a kind of linguistic capacity, or an ability to actively leverage existing power and redirect its flow; it also comes with the risk, and consequences, of moving outside of the frames which govern whose voices matter and whose don’t. Non-participation in this economy of voice means recognition is withheld or extinguished. To move outside this economy of recognition involves risk and exposure to the violent rhythms of other neoliberal forces, including disciplinary and punitive responses to this unruliness. To question the terms of recognition - drawing attention to the objects of value that now form the horizon of what is rendered visible and accorded value within this economy of voice - is reframed as non-participation. In this sense, neoliberal recognition is implicated in the reproduction of the categories of disposability and precarity that Butler is concerned about, as well as categories based on the circulation of economic objects of value.