The “self-made speaker”

This chapter examines how neoliberal rationality is constructed, supported and disseminated in higher education, and illustrates this process with an analysis of the accounts offered by Madrid university students of their experiences in language and communication. Focusing on the power techniques exercised, the chapter explains how neoliberal rationality connects external and internal forms of governance, shaping subjectivities. The students describe how they manage language capital and competences, calculate costs and benefits, render accounts, and at the same time seek “self realisation” and hence security and self satisfaction. Two overlapping elements are revealed through this analysis: on the one hand, a particular model of speaker, the “self-made” speaker, which is the linguistic correlate of the neoliberal subject (or entrepreneurial subject); and also, the conceptualisation of language as a personal investment rather than a shared “common” instrument of communication. However, it is precisely the self-made speaker model, which articulates the intersection between the domination exercised by others and that exercised on oneself, that defines governmentality. Finally, this chapter first shows how the neoliberal governmentality produces specific types of subjects, and then how consent and thus governmentality can be eroded by developing with speakers tools to examine the extent to which neoliberalism drains their subjectivity.