The idea of a ‘free, competitive market’ is managed by logistical capitalism, transforming from production to organization.

**language edits with strikethrough, replacements in [brackets]

1. The neoliberal discourse

As always, everything depends on the angle chosen to represent things. It is even the case when the crisis of the representation regime, as it stands nowadays, is profound, and the winning instance is that of presenting live the dynamics of reality, in absolute immanence.

The neoliberal discourse has been dominant since the eighties and is capable of producing subjectivations adapted to the global transformations of capitalism. It is also a way of representing the ontology of the present, highlighting the individualistic and deconstructed fragmentation that makes it governable in the neoliberal modus. The latter in fact responds to a reality that it helps to define, based on risks or potential, from the perspective of governability. Governance, or rather regulation, is held together with the incoherent fragmentation as its presupposition.

A giant governmental device organizes coexistence through a double clasp that is blatantly contradictory. On the one hand, it exerts a government – in the name of efficiency and production optimization – which is evidently active. This is so especially in the Ordoliberal version, which regulates the space of coexistence in an alternative to market competition, directing it in a functional way to the growth of capitalist profits that will assumedly benefit subordinates. On the other, it is by withdrawing from the social and protective functions of work in favour of the unequal productive potentialities of social powers. Upstream, it shifts control to the processes of subjectivation of the living. The typically liberal thrust to self-realization is oriented towards an ethic of competitive performance and accountability over its fate. We are, therefore, talking about a singular self-government that enters into an imitative-competitive relationship with others. The inequality of social powers and subjectivities is interpreted as an index of dynamism and is functional to the competition itself, which is the principle intended to organize it. It constitutes – if we can say so – the positive horizon endorsed ontologically by the inequality of biological and genetic heritage, of cultural investment, of performance commitment that legitimizes and confirms it (Burchell, 1996; Arienzo, 2007).

Since the eighties and under the pressure of euphoric globalization, once identity belonging has been declassified, neoliberal governmentality manages this double instance – government and self-government – through a functional, operational organization, based on an unlimited inclusiveness of principle that is however regulated and made selective through the universal law of competition. Everybody, regardless of identity connotations, can participate in the competition and the economic valorization that are the distinctive signs of the market, of doux commerce, in spite of the rigidity and the violence of borders and political and state territorialization. The anarchy that is generated, which is a harbinger of productivity and creativity, is organized in the market model (Miller & Rose, 2008).

This social coexistence without substantialistic boundaries assumes and exalts the differentiation as the key to society. It is in harmony with the libertarian thrust, in defence of the differences of the sixties/seventies, marked by the antiauthoritarian claim and by the refusal to be represented by abstract institutions such as the state, the union, the parties, the church and the family, which govern and endorse the anarchic individuality of the wishing-being.

Naturally, that powerful destructive libertarian push refused (and rejects, in its recurrence even today) all forms of evaluative comparison. This referred to a Spinozian and Deleuzian legitimacy and value of everything that exists: life, or rather lives, is a norm in itself.

It dissolves the ontological consistency of the subject in an essence opératoire (Deleuze, 1986), defined in the flow of its actions and choices. Post-Fordist capitalism, which in the eighties radically revolutionizes its productive mode, collects it and completes it through an organization by reversing its original meaning. The disjunction and the anarchic, which is destitute of roles and an identity subject, become functional to the transformation of the new globalized and digitized capitalism. It is not possible to fully understand the unfolded power of the neoliberal revolution that began in the eighties and that was pushed dramatically into the decades that followed if we do not fully grasp the depth of change that affects the production system. And this is not because neoliberal governmental reason is reducible to capitalism –in function of which it models its exquisitely political action–, but because the new spirit of capitalism produces forms of life that are extended to fields that were removed from economic management, in a corporatization of the whole human existence (Chicchi, 2012).

In this dynamic, it is interesting to underline how the axis of profit moves more and more in recent years from production to the organization as a lever of the increase in value. Production, albeit creative, immaterial and communicative, had characterized the new artistic spirit (to use the term of Boltaski and Chiapello (1999)) creative of capitalism of the last years of the millennium. The logistic organization, along with transnational chains of valorization of products that use territorial differences and disparities of work, and of political and social conditions; taken this, as we shall see, immediately allows us to identify the ambiguity that gives the title to this essay and the function of current territorializations as internal to the system.

The centrality of this type of organization, as a primary source of value, signals the difficulty of class division based on the primacy of production, on the work goods in its material and physical dimensions, which had been the reference of political struggles until the seventies. This change too was reported early by Deleuze (1990) in his writings on controlling companies.

2. Selective inclusion: selection criteria

Let us try to deepen the fragments of this discourse.

For neoliberal governmentality, organizing the differences after having freed the individual entrepreneurship with respect to one’s life, means subjecting them all and in every domain, to the evaluative hierarchy whose model is the market – obviously understood in an abstract sense that is neither historical nor concrete. The generalized inclusion that acts as a premise to the market space – especially to that of work – is constitutively selective, regulated by an economic-organizational ethos: optimization through competition. The modal nature that makes it extensible to non-economic fields supersedes the other logics: not only procedural, legal-administrative, political and media, but also affective, educational. The objective of increasing profit (or rather, of increasing value, of empowerment both of people and of goods) opens up a generalized and incessant competition and offers itself to the logic of managerial governance (Bazzicalupo, 2016, pp. 36-48).

The latter is not limited as in the past to organizing corporate frameworks and workers’ people to produce that plus that marks the capitalist mode of production, but generates surplus value by working on algorithmic aggregations of data and on strictly mathematical differentials of valuation, that are blind [ignorant] to lives themselves. It is a paradoxical outcome of a process of a biopolitical nature, and therefore concrete, embodied, and embedded, which had invested the traditional forms of modern, abstract and blind [ignorant] powers with vital differences. It leads to an algorithmic and impersonal management of the lives of producers, consumers, and prosumers de-subjectivized, decomposed into aggregates of data that are relevant only for specific processes of increasing value. The living persons whose subjectivity breaks down into segments of preferences, risk, potential, habits, long polarisations that are conflicting with each other – their eventual denunciation of unease or voices of protest become evanescent and ghostly.

It is obviously a matter of political management, which exalts the administrative tendency of modern power, but disconnects it from its original drive to manage the populations in order to strengthen them. Rather, it organizes and hierarchizes – coordinating it along processes of increasing value – a differentiation not of law but of fact. It no longer works to improve but to profit on differences, creating a mobile hierarchy with varying criteria of inclusion, sectoral and specific in its application, which crosses and divides the subject from himself (Deleuze spoke of a dividual that takes the place of the much-exalted individuality). In any case, it is always hard and marginalizing for the losers (or for the losing part of the Self) of the competition. On the mythology of human capital and the individual entrepreneur of himself – mythology made of creativity that emerges out of nothing, out of creative innovation –, the filter hinges on the relays of competition: in a trivialized reading of sociobiological Darwinism, the universal law of the living human being. In both stories, that of the individual as a creative entity responsible for himself [themselves] and that of the law of competition, we find the naturalistic-biological basis that is typical of biopolitical devices, subtracting spaces of revisability and contingency to political action.

But it is not of nature, but of politics: no debate on the veracity of nature has been and is, as we know, of support to the acceptability of a political organization, whether it is to be claimed or guarded and defended. All modern government devices, starting from the biopolitical turn of power, pivot on a marked naturalization of the human, which determines a naturalistic policy in accents (thus defending the natural inequalities of endowment, talent, entrepreneurial skills, appropriate investment, and adjustable iuxta propria principia through the law of Darwinian-like competition), but it mentally governs in the organization of the same inequalities: strong and intrusive – differently from what is trivially believed in regard to liberalism – which not only takes on the task of guaranteeing a market that is not at all natural, rather a model of competitive play, but makes competitive regulation the guarantee of political democracy. This is because it extends the competitive management to social and solidarity institutions that would be foreign to it, such as health, education, social policies.