This is a continuation of my previous post on a General Theory of Attrition.
If the attrition of human relationality is the defining mechanism of late-stage neoliberalism, then the most pressing theoretical and political question becomes: Can we recover or repurpose human relations themselves, not as nostalgic remnants of a pre-neoliberal past, but as counter-subjectivizing practices that resist economization from within? This is not merely a theoretical curiosity, but an existential imperative. For if our very capacity to relate, to touch, to be moved, to be held in relation, has been eroded, then the very conditions of our humanity have been slowly worn down. I want to first analyze what contemporary critical theorists have noted.
From the Individualized Subject to the Relational Field
We must begin by recognizing that the neoliberal subject is not merely an economic actor, but an ontological construction. As Foucault reminds us, the subject is shaped by forces and practices, rather than existing a priori. Subjectivity, then, is not a possession but a production. In this moment, it is produced through systems that reward performance and punish opacity. Credit scores, digital footprints, recommendation algorithms: these do not just interpret our behavior; they shape it.
Maurizio Lazzarato takes this even further. For him, the production of subjectivity is machinic. It is not only institutional but aesthetic, affective, sensorial. The self becomes a node in a network of flows,of signs, currencies, reputations. We live within an architecture of compulsive self-measurement. What is lost in this architecture is not simply authenticity, but relation. To be in relation is to be vulnerable to that which escapes representation. But in the neoliberal diagram, everything must be captured, coded, and ranked.
The Attrition of Relation and the Crisis of the Other
Byung-Chul Han’s concept of the expulsion of the Other offers a poignant image of this relational erosion. The neoliberal subject sees in others not alterity but utility. The friend becomes a connection, the beloved a data point, the neighbor a demographic. In this universe, difference is not encountered but managed. Algorithms smooth the rough edges of our relational lives. Spontaneity, contingency, interruption,these become inefficiencies to be filtered out.
Yet I contend that it is precisely in the slow collapse of these everyday relations that we can locate the outlines of resistance. Where neoliberalism demands clarity, relation insists on opacity. Where neoliberalism demands speed, relation offers delay. Where neoliberalism demands utility, relation gives the gift of wasteful presence. These are not accidental resistances; they are essential ruptures.
Marx, Mandel, and the Future of the Social Individual
When Marx envisioned the human as a species-being, he gestured toward a form of subjectivity grounded in our capacity to co-create the world in and through each other. Ernest Mandel warned that late capitalism would eviscerate the conditions for this mutual flourishing. And indeed, we see it: our relational labor is fragmented, commodified, and monitored. The zone of the social shrinks, while the zone of the economic expands to encompass even our dreams, our affections, our sense of time.
It is not that the economic has displaced the social. Rather, the economic has devoured it and now wears its skin. Our challenge is not to disentangle them cleanly, but to find fissures within this arrangement where something else,something irreducibly human,still breathes.
Toward a Relational Praxis of Resistance
Wendy Brown’s work teaches us that neoliberalism operates not simply through markets, but through the remaking of the soul. If the soul is that which exceeds the state, exceeds the market, exceeds the self, then perhaps it resides precisely in the moments that neoliberalism deems wasteful: idleness, care, dependency, affection.
Let us then propose that the subject is not simply constituted in relation, but through it. Subjectivity becomes not a container of identity, but a site of encounter. Resistance to attrition, then, is not the heroic assertion of the autonomous self, but the fragile and persistent reactivation of relation itself:
- Friendship that does not serve a function
- Love that is not optimized
- Community that does not scale
- Solidarity that is not brandable
These are not utopian demands. They are modest refusals. Their politics lie in their refusal to be useful.
Staying with Attrition: Repair without Restoration
At the very heart of my work on this topic is the following question – Can the neoliberal attrition of human relations to the world, and each other, be reversed? The metaphor itself resists this question. To reverse attrition is to undo time. But perhaps we can imagine another kind of relation to time, one that is durational, sedimented, patient. Eve Sedgwick’s reparative reading offers a helpful approach here: to repair not in order to restore, but to dwell, to witness, to nourish.
To stay with relation, in this sense, is to stay with decay. It is to remain in proximity to what is falling apart, not to fix it, but to tend it. This is a slow politics, an infrapolitics, one that resists the call to spectacle or scale. It does not aim to win. It aims to endure.
This is what it means to reclaim relation: not to make it profitable again, but to make it inhabitable.
Conclusion: The Subject as an Act of Relation
If neoliberalism has worn down the human through the slow erosion of relation, then the human might return, partially, provisionally, through the very act of relating. The relational subject is not an answer but a question: How do we live together in a world that has made togetherness so difficult?
To resist attrition is to risk relation. And in this risk, we do not find certainty or redemption, but perhaps a trace of what has been lost: the fragile, flickering condition of being with, being present, and remaining there.
References
Brown, W. (2015). Undoing the demos: Neoliberalism’s stealth revolution. Zone Books.
Foucault, M. (1988). Technologies of the self: A seminar with Michel Foucault. University of Massachusetts Press.
Han, B.-C. (2017). Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and new technologies of power. Verso.
Lazzarato, M. (2014). Signs and machines: Capitalism and the production of subjectivity. Semiotext(e).
Mandel, E. (1975). Late capitalism. Verso.
Marx, K. (1978). Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. In R. Tucker (Ed.), The Marx-Engels Reader (pp. 66-125). Norton. (Original work published 1844)
Sedgwick, E. K. (2003). Touching feeling: Affect, pedagogy, performativity. Duke University Press.
Social Science & Our Critical Times 