Coming of Age in Times of Uncertainty. Harry Blatterer

ideology under which individualization accelerates: neoliberalism. For Foucault, government includes both the sense of “governing others” as well as “governing the self,” and with his concept of “governmentality” he seeks to establish the interpenetration of systemic power relations and subjective self-regulation. In his rendering of Foucault's lecture on neoliberal governmentality, Lemke (2001: 201) unwittingly gives political-ideological context to Beck's nonpartisan circumscriptions:

      The strategy of rendering individual subjects ‘responsible’…entails shifting the responsibility of social risks such as illness, unemployment, poverty, etc., and for life in society into the domain for which the individual is responsible and transforming it into a problem of ‘self-care.’ The key feature of the neo-liberal rationality is the congruence it endeavours to achieve between a responsible and moral individual and an economic-rational actor. It aspires to construct prudent subjects whose moral quality is based on the fact that they rationally assess the costs and benefits of a certain act as opposed to other alternative acts. As the choice of options for action is, or so the neo-liberal notion of rationality would have it, the expression of free will on the basis of a self-determined decision, the consequences of the action are borne by the subject alone, who is also solely responsible for them. This strategy can be deployed in all sorts of areas and leads to areas of social responsibility becoming a matter of personal provisions.

      Individualization is thus not simply a historical process devoid of power play. Rather, freedom and control are two sides of the same coin. Control, though, is more effective if beliefs give credence to freedom while discrediting notions of control and limitation. The proliferation of options in all spheres of life is a case in point.

       Options and Futures