Personhood and Performance: Managerialism,Post-Democracy and the Ethics of 'Enrichment'

Abstract

Managerialism is not mere ideology, a concatenation of ideas subsisting in an epiphenomenal superstructure (Überbau) that mirrors economic relations (Base) and masks interests, but a set of practices that, as an extreme manifestation of human resources management (HRM), seeks to constitute the life-world (Lebenswelt) of participants in many sectors of society. Increasingly, it is those at the extremes of elite wealth and marginal poverty who may fall outside its remit and become free to think beyond its parameters. As inheritor of personnel management, HRM as practice and ideology fills a societal vacuum and comes to exercise the power of totalizing social construction. In an integral performance culture the Performative Absolute emerges in the imaginary; it is an immanent sublime that instantiates and regulates the social being of the individual. This apotheosis of the 'manager's right to manage' overrides boundaries between public and private spheres and dissolves the separation of powers. As 'human resource', the employee is subject to living sacrifice; this is an oblation that demands ethical and theological critique.