## Neoliberalism, subjective clout, and the libidinal economy of being seen
*Clout Economics — clouteconomics.org*
### I. From the worker to the profile
Neoliberalism does not merely reorganise the economy. It reorganises the subject who must live inside it.
Its most consequential operation is not the privatisation of public goods, the deregulation of markets, or the retreat of the welfare state considered separately. It is the extension of economic calculation into the constitution of subjectivity itself. The individual is increasingly invited to understand their life as a portfolio of investments, their personality as a bundle of marketable attributes, their relationships as networks of opportunity, and their future as a return on present expenditure.
The subject is no longer simply someone who sells their labour. The subject becomes someone who must continuously produce the conditions of their own marketability.
Education becomes human capital. Friendship becomes networking. Cultural participation becomes personal enrichment. Political conviction becomes a reputational signal. Leisure becomes recovery in the service of productivity. Even failure is returned to the individual as an entrepreneurial opportunity: a lesson, a pivot, a rebranding exercise.
The market is no longer merely somewhere the subject goes to exchange goods. It becomes a model for how the subject is expected to relate to itself.
Clout emerges within this transformation as a particularly revealing form of subjective capital.
It names the capacity to attract attention, to make one's presence consequential, to influence the circulation of value without necessarily owning the means through which that value is produced. It is a form of power that can be converted into employment, money, institutional access, cultural authority, political influence and the appearance of social importance.
But clout is not simply capital in digital clothing. It is also a relationship to the possibility of being recognised.
The clout-bearing subject does not merely want to possess something. They want to be perceived as someone who possesses something worth wanting.
This distinction is fundamental. The object of desire becomes inseparable from the public legibility of the person who desires it. One does not simply have taste; one has taste that distinguishes. One does not simply know; one knows in a manner that can be recognised as knowing. One does not simply oppose injustice; one must negotiate the social meaning of being someone who opposes injustice.
Neoliberalism produces the conditions under which existence itself begins to resemble a performance review.
Clout is the imaginary dividend paid on the successful management of the self.
### II. The subject as an enterprise
Michel Foucault's lectures on neoliberalism, particularly *The Birth of Biopolitics*, offer a point of departure. In his account of American neoliberal thought, the individual is reconceived as an entrepreneur of themselves, bearing and developing their own human capital. The subject's capacities, education, health, skills and experiences become investments whose future returns must be cultivated.
The importance of this formulation lies in its account of how economic rationality travels beyond the narrowly economic sphere. The subject learns to interpret themselves through the categories of investment, risk, competition and return.
But the contemporary subject faces an additional problem: capital must now be made visible.
Competence that cannot be communicated may fail to register as competence. Taste that cannot be distinguished may fail to confer distinction. Political knowledge that does not circulate may have little effect on one's public standing. The capacity to do something becomes entangled with the capacity to make others aware that one can do it.
The enterprise of the self therefore acquires a publicity department.
The subject must produce not only value but evidence of value. They must continuously generate signs that their life is moving in the correct direction: the credential, the publication, the photograph, the invitation, the association, the achievement, the correct opinion at the correct moment.
The self becomes both the commodity and its advertising campaign.
This is not to claim that every act of self-presentation is neoliberal or that individuals have become identical. Social recognition long predates digital capitalism. What is historically distinctive is the extent to which platforms, labour markets and institutions increasingly make visibility measurable, comparable and convertible into opportunity.
The contemporary subject must manage a double existence: the life they live and the life that can be demonstrated to have value.
The discrepancy between these lives becomes a source of anxiety.
What am I if nobody knows what I have done? What is my knowledge worth if it produces no recognition? What is my experience worth if I cannot translate it into an advantage? What if the person I am becoming has no audience?
These are not merely narcissistic questions. They are questions generated by a social order that increasingly makes recognition consequential to material survival.
The cruelty of the entrepreneurial self is that it must experience structural insecurity as a personal development problem.
### III. The clout subject: recognition as speculative capital
Clout is speculative because its value depends on anticipated recognition.
A follower count, a reputation, an institutional affiliation or a viral post has no fixed value independent of the social relations through which it circulates. Its worth depends on who recognises it, what that recognition can be exchanged for, and whether it can be converted into future opportunities.
The clout subject therefore lives in anticipation.
They produce signs of relevance in the hope that those signs will attract attention, and attract attention in the hope that attention will generate further relevance. Visibility becomes both the product and the advertisement for its own future production.
This produces a recursive structure:
1. The subject anticipates the gaze of an audience.
2. They modify their conduct to make themselves legible and compelling to that audience.
3. The resulting visibility is interpreted as evidence of their value.
4. That evidence increases the pressure to remain visible.
5. The subject becomes increasingly dependent on the audience whose recognition was supposed to confirm their independence.
The apparent reward is sovereignty. The actual result is conditionality.
One appears powerful because others are watching, but one must continue to behave in ways that keep them watching. The subject who acquires attention discovers that attention has acquired a claim on the subject.
This is the central contradiction of subjective clout: **the more one's identity is validated by public recognition, the more one's identity becomes vulnerable to the conditions of recognition.**
The clout subject does not necessarily believe the audience is always right. They need only believe that the audience's response has consequences.
Consequently, even contempt can become a form of dependence. The subject who claims not to care what others think may organise an extraordinary amount of conduct around proving that indifference. The subject who despises popularity may seek distinction through being unpopular in the correct way. The subject who refuses mainstream taste may become dependent on a smaller, more exclusive audience capable of recognising the refusal.
The content changes. The relation persists.
### IV. The libidinal economy: why the subject wants the scoreboard
A purely economic explanation cannot fully account for clout.
If visibility were only a means to income, we would expect the subject to pursue it when it produces material returns and abandon it when it does not. Yet people continue to monitor, refresh, compare, post and compete in circumstances where the material benefit is negligible or uncertain.
Clout must therefore be understood not only as a resource but as an object of libidinal investment.
The term *libidinal economy* directs attention to the way social arrangements organise desire, anxiety, aggression, identification and pleasure. The subject does not merely calculate whether attention is useful. They become emotionally invested in the experience of being attended to.
The notification offers a small reprieve from uncertainty. The rising number offers a provisional answer to the question of whether one matters. The hostile reply confirms that one has become consequential enough to provoke. The viral post supplies a temporary fantasy of having crossed the distance between private existence and public significance.
These satisfactions are unstable. They must be renewed.
This instability is not a defect accidentally introduced into the system. Where attention is scarce, competitive and measurable, the desire for recognition can be continually activated without ever being conclusively satisfied.
There is always another person with more followers, another post with greater circulation, another cultural scene in which one's distinction fails to register. There is always a more important audience before whom one has not yet been recognised.
The scoreboard produces the desire to improve one's position while ensuring that the position can never become final.
The subject is thus attached to the very uncertainty that makes them miserable. Anxiety becomes a motor of participation. Envy becomes a source of information. Humiliation becomes a demand for renewed performance.
This is one reason that telling people to stop caring about social media is inadequate as a political response. The desire is not simply an individual weakness. It is organised by institutions in which visibility can affect employment, cultural access, social belonging and the distribution of opportunity.
The subject has reasons to care. The problem is that those reasons are arranged so that caring can become inexhaustible.
### V. The gaze and the fantasy of sovereignty
A psychoanalytic account complicates the entrepreneurial model.
The subject does not first exist as a complete individual and then seek recognition as an optional supplement. Subjectivity itself is mediated by others: by language, social expectations, norms of intelligibility and the imagined judgments through which a person comes to understand themselves.
The desire to be seen is therefore not reducible to vanity. Recognition participates in the formation of the social self.
But recognition is never entirely under the subject's control. The other can misunderstand, reject, ignore or recognise something different from what the subject intended to present. No amount of self-management can guarantee a final coincidence between the image one projects and the meaning others assign to it.
Clout promises to manage this uncertainty by making recognition measurable. The number appears to replace the unknowable judgment of the other with an apparently objective indicator.
Yet the metric does not resolve the problem of recognition. It displaces it.
The subject no longer asks only, *What do they think of me?* They ask, *How many people have responded, how quickly, and in what direction is the number moving?*
An ambiguous social relation becomes a quantified one. But quantification does not eliminate ambiguity; it gives ambiguity a dashboard.
This is where the fantasy of sovereignty enters. The clout subject imagines that enough visibility will produce independence from the gaze. If enough people recognise the subject as significant, the subject will no longer need to wonder whether they matter.
But the desire for recognition cannot be satisfied by a quantity alone, because the question is not merely how many people are looking. It is what their attention means.
A million indifferent views may matter less than one response from the person or institution whose judgment the subject has invested with authority. A hostile audience may confer visibility while withholding the kind of recognition desired. A successful performance may intensify the fear of being unable to repeat it.
Clout cannot abolish dependence on the other. It can only make that dependence more measurable.
The sovereign self becomes a speculative proposition, perpetually awaiting confirmation.
### VI. From symbolic distinction to the democratisation of humiliation
The clout economy does not eliminate older hierarchies of class, caste, race, gender or institutional authority. It reorganises their expression and sometimes provides new routes through which they operate.
Pierre Bourdieu's work on cultural and symbolic capital is useful here, even if a theory of clout cannot be reduced to it. Cultural competence and social connections remain unequally distributed, while the ability to convert attention into durable power depends on resources that are not equally available.
Not everyone can afford to be constantly visible. Not everyone can turn a viral moment into a career. Not everyone can survive reputational damage. Some people possess the financial security to treat controversy as play; others face consequences that cannot be converted into cultural distinction.
The appearance of a level playing field conceals these differences.
What has changed is that the performance of distinction is increasingly exposed to mass comparison. The audience can witness elite privilege, ridicule elite pretensions and temporarily elevate figures who violate established codes. This can unsettle institutional authority. It can also turn humiliation into a mass entertainment.
The populist clout subject is often produced through this contradiction. They experience themselves as excluded from a system of recognition and interpret that exclusion as evidence that the system is illegitimate. They seek to overthrow the authorities who determine value while demanding recognition from the same social order.
The injury is real. The political interpretation of the injury is not predetermined.
Humiliation can generate a demand for equality. It can also generate a demand that somebody else be humiliated in one's place.
The distinction matters enormously. A politics organised around dismantling unequal conditions asks why dignity and resources are distributed unequally. A politics organised around resentment asks who should be deprived of the recognition one believes oneself to deserve.
The second can look radical while leaving the structure of competition untouched.
Indeed, the most successful populist may be the person who transforms collective humiliation into a personal brand, presents their own visibility as the restoration of the people's dignity, and turns the audience's resentment into a renewable source of authority.
The people are invited to experience the leader's clout as their own.
But the conversion is unequal. The leader accumulates power; the audience supplies attention.
### VII. Slopulism: politics after the distinction between content and circulation
If neoliberalism makes the self into an enterprise, platform culture makes the enterprise increasingly dependent on circulation. In this environment, the distinction between political substance and attention-generating performance becomes unstable.
A claim may circulate because it is true, because it is false, because it is offensive, because it confirms an audience's assumptions, or because rebutting it generates further circulation. Its capacity to command attention is not a reliable measure of its political or epistemic value.
We might call the resulting formation *slopulism*: a mode of political circulation in which the production of recognisable signals, repeatable antagonisms and emotionally charged content can become more important than the coherent programme those signals supposedly represent.
Slopulism does not mean that all mass politics is empty or that popular communication is inherently inferior to elite discourse. It names a condition in which circulation begins to substitute for the difficult work of political articulation.
The subject does not necessarily need to understand a programme, much less participate in its construction. They need to recognise the signal, identify the enemy, repeat the gesture and experience themselves as part of an audience that knows what is going on.
Politics becomes an economy of affiliation.
The subject receives a temporary identity by demonstrating that they recognise the correct villains, possess the correct contempt and understand the joke before it has to be explained.
This is where shitposting becomes politically interesting. The shitpost can puncture the authority of solemn institutions, reveal the absurdity of dominant narratives and create forms of collective intelligence that escape official channels. But it can also reduce every political question to a competition in recognisability, where the sharpest formulation wins regardless of whether it explains anything.
The question is not whether a political statement is funny, viral or theoretically sophisticated.
The question is what relation it produces between the subject, the audience and the object of its critique.
Does it expose a structure? Does it make a contradiction intelligible? Does it create a capacity for action? Or does it offer the subject the pleasurable sensation of having defeated an opponent in the symbolic arena?
A politics can be oppositional in content and entirely competitive in form.
The enemy is condemned. The metric is preserved.
### VIII. The critique subject: how opposition becomes a commodity
There is no guarantee that critical consciousness produces emancipatory practice.
The critic can acquire distinction by identifying the ideological limitations of everyone else. The intellectual can convert radical vocabulary into evidence of superior perception. The satirist can become dependent on the people whose stupidity supplies the material for the satire.
The more sophisticated the critique, the more difficult it can become to distinguish the desire to transform a condition from the desire to be recognised as the person who understands it.
This is not an argument that all critique is insincere. It is an argument that sincerity does not determine the social function of a practice.
A person may genuinely oppose capitalism while benefiting from the prestige of articulating that opposition. A publication may genuinely challenge hierarchy while reproducing unequal relations of access. A website may expose the absurdity of the clout economy while acquiring attention through that exposure.
There is no magical exemption for critical intention.
Indeed, critique can become especially valuable as a form of distinction precisely because it allows the subject to appear above ordinary competition. The critic does not merely possess cultural capital. They possess the capacity to identify cultural capital in others.
The claim to have seen through the game becomes a move within the game.
This is the reflexive trap of Clout Economics itself. To theorise clout is to risk converting the theory into a credential. To denounce attention-seeking is to seek recognition for one's refusal of attention-seeking. To expose the marketisation of culture is to produce another cultural object that may circulate within that market.
The answer cannot be to withdraw into an imagined position of purity. Such a position would simply reproduce the fantasy of sovereignty at the level of critique.
The answer is to make the contradiction analytically productive.
If critique produces prestige, we should ask how that prestige is distributed, what it enables, what it conceals and whether the practice creates capacities beyond the recognition it accumulates.
The relevant question is not whether the critic benefits from critique. It is whether the benefit becomes the final purpose of the critique.
### IX. The clout subject is not a narcissist
It is tempting to explain the clout economy through the psychology of individual vanity. The person who posts constantly is narcissistic; the influencer is shallow; the politician is egotistical; the intellectual is self-important.
Such explanations may occasionally describe individual behaviour, but they do not explain the systematic organisation of recognition.
A social order that makes visibility consequential will generate subjects who pursue visibility. A labour market that rewards personal branding will encourage people to brand themselves. Institutions that distribute opportunities through networks will encourage networking. Platforms that reward emotional intensity will select for performances capable of generating it.
The resulting subject may experience these practices as expressions of a personal identity. But their repetition is also structured by incentives, constraints and forms of competition.
The neoliberal subject is not simply someone who loves themselves too much. It is someone who has been made responsible for continuously producing evidence of their own worth under conditions where that worth remains insecure.
Narcissism, in this account, is too often a moralising diagnosis of a structural predicament.
The subject's apparent self-absorption may coexist with profound dependence on external recognition. Their self-promotion may coexist with a fear of being socially irrelevant. Their performance of confidence may conceal the absence of any stable criterion by which they can know whether they are enough.
The point is not to excuse every behaviour. It is to understand why the behaviour is reproducible.
The subject must be criticised without being reduced to a pathology. Otherwise, the analysis reproduces the individualising logic it claims to oppose: the system remains intact, and the person becomes the problem.
### X. What would it mean to escape the economy of clout?
There is no return to an unmediated self who exists before recognition, and no cultural practice that can simply step outside markets, institutions and audiences. A theory that promises such an escape would be selling sovereignty in another form.
Nor can we treat invisibility as inherently emancipatory. Marginalised people have often been denied recognition, representation and public voice; the demand to be seen can be a demand for rights, safety and political agency. To romanticise obscurity is to forget that invisibility is not distributed equally.
The task is not to abolish recognition. It is to distinguish recognition as a condition of social participation from recognition as a competitive measure of personal worth.
The task is not to abandon platforms. It is to ask how their infrastructures distribute attention, how that attention becomes economically valuable, and who has the power to determine its terms.
The task is not to purify critique of self-interest. It is to build practices in which the value of critique is not exhausted by the prestige it confers on the critic.
This requires more than individual mindfulness or a declaration of indifference to metrics. It requires changes in the material organisation of cultural and political life: more equitable access to resources, less dependence on precarious reputational competition, institutions accountable to the people who sustain them, and forms of collective work whose success can be measured by what they enable rather than how much attention they attract.
It requires asking what we could make if we did not have to demonstrate, at every moment, that making it was worth watching.
Perhaps the most radical possibility is not to become indifferent to the gaze, but to refuse to let the gaze determine the value of what we do.
To make something that does not need to go viral to matter.
To sustain a relationship that cannot be converted into an advantage.
To think without immediately turning thought into a performance of intelligence.
To organise without confusing the visibility of the organisation with the power it possesses.
To criticise without making the humiliation of an opponent the principal source of satisfaction.
These are not personal virtues sufficient to overcome neoliberalism. They are practices whose emancipatory significance depends on the relations in which they are embedded.
The alternative to the entrepreneurial self is not a perfectly authentic individual. It is a social world in which the conditions of living do not require each person to become the relentless manager of their own recognisability.
### Conclusion: We want to matter without having to win
Clout is the promise that the problem of being a subject can be solved by becoming an object of attention.
It promises that visibility will deliver recognition, that recognition will deliver value, and that value will deliver independence. But the subject remains dependent on the unstable relations through which attention is produced and interpreted.
The more clout becomes the measure of significance, the more significance becomes something one must continually prove.
The subject is trapped not because they are uniquely vain, but because they are invited to experience social existence as an endless competition whose rewards are both consequential and insecure.
Clout Economics begins from this contradiction. It does not ask us to pretend that we do not want recognition. It asks why recognition has become so entangled with competition, why public attention is so readily converted into private advantage, and why the appearance of power can become more desirable than the collective capacity to change the conditions under which power operates.
We do not propose a politics without desire. We propose a politics that refuses to let the market have the final word on what desire is for.
We do not propose a subject without an audience. We propose a world in which an audience does not function as a tribunal of personal worth.
We do not propose the abolition of influence. We propose asking what influence is for, whom it serves, and what it makes possible.
The ultimate question of Clout Economics is not how to accumulate more clout, nor how to become morally superior to those who do.
It is this:
**What would it mean to matter without having to win?**
And what kind of world would we have to build for that question to cease sounding absurd?