ABSTRACT
Recognising that the discipline of architecture has become entangled with – and compromised by – the political and economic power shifts of the last forty years, architects and academics have responded with calls for strategies of engagement with some of the major actors in neoliberal capitalism. Several of these propose tactical performances and the enactment of subjectivities that leverage the disruptive potential of the entrepreneur, either stealthily, or directly by taking a seat at tables of power in order to conduct critique, or affect change.
Using ethnographic research in organisational management on the formation of subjectivity in high-tech companies, I argue that entrepreneurial subjectivity is constituted through the production of affects, experiences and desires in ways that compromise ideas of radical autonomy. Further I consider the act of ‘getting engaged’ in order to bring about change in an institution, corporation or system, a type of labour – specifically, through Arlie Russell Hochschild’s concept of emotional labour. Revealing the vulnerabilities and costs of such emotion work, I point towards existing situated ethical practices in architecture that forge communities of care, over the individualised, and ultimately precarious ‘CEO’ of the self.
