They ignore the bio-political ordering of society through culture and technology – turns the AFF and creates cognitive capitalism

This claim, however, is questioned by scholars who note how considering human creativity as free-floating means overlooking the role of precarious work conditions and prescriptive cultural and organizational models of fulfilment, achievement, reward and orientation to client demand (Dardot & Laval, 2014). These objections can be extended to the emancipatory force of nonhuman labour. The more the economic value of ecosystem services is recognized, the more the self-organizing, regenerative capacities of nature become the object of appropriation and commodification. ‘Valuing nature’ may be a complex and controversial endeavour, yet this is not hampering the expansion of the ecosystem services economics (Robertson, 2012). Celebrating today the self-normativity of life means downplaying how capital is ever-more committed to directly extracting value from reproductive forces, including gamete donation, gestational surrogacy and other forms of ‘clinical labour’ (Cooper & Waldby, 2014) where the human (especially female) body becomes itself a ‘service’. Nor do unpredictability and surprise, usually taken as expressions of the unbounded creativity of life, represent anymore hindrances to accumulation, as financial derivatives on weather instability testify (Cooper, 2010). Degrowth theory gets caught up in similar problems. Prefigurative activists may be more or less happy with being associated with it, yet there are undeniable affinities between the type of initiatives enlisted in prefiguration and degrowth scholars’ case against endless value extraction and commodification of human and nonhuman pro- ductive and reproductive forces, and for a downscaling of production and consumption aimed at improving social equality, human well-being and ecological conditions. Part of degrowth theorization, however, has increasingly emphasised that scarcity is socially produced. Not that physical limits to growth are now deemed inexistent. The claim is rather that their relevance in the socio-ecological crisis should not be overestimated, not type of micro-politics, rather than undermining capitalist relations, may, unintentionally, (re)produce exclusionary relations and strengthen the consumer paradigms it aims to oppose. Activists, in other words, worry that their ‘constructive resistance’ (Sørensen, 2016) ends up being nothing more than ‘simulation exercises’ (Blühdorn, 2017) – lifestyle choices which are harmless to capitalism or even welcomed by it as being lucrative, and which, by divault energies away from open contestation, are post-political in outcome, if not in purpose. The above does not necessarily mean that the fate of prefiguration is sealed; yet, in order to assess its emancipatory capacity, more attention needs to be paid to the features of the power with which it is confronted. In this regard Foucault and governmentality studies are instruc- tive. They have extensively accounted for how, since the dawn of the liberal state, the sovereign power of ‘taking life or letting live’ has increasingly been complemented by the biopolitical power of ‘making live or letting die’. The latter, instead of prohibiting and destroying, seeks ‘to incite, reinforce, control, monitor, optimize and organize the forces under it, [. . .] making them grow, and ordering them’ (Foucault, 1990, p. 143). This variety of power characterizes the neoliberal way of governing to the extent that neoliberal thinking traces the whole of human life to the market- and homo economicus-form, making it governable through the promotion of a relentless drive to self-valorization within a setting dominated by uncertainty and insecurity (Dardot & Laval, 2014; Foucault, 2008; Rose, 1998).