“Retail Therapy in the Dragon's Den”: Neoliberalism and Affective Labour in the Popular Culture of Ireland's Financial Crisis

Abstract

A range of scholars embrace the concept of economic subjectivity in their analysis of relations of economic power and knowledge. They tend to do so, however, in a way that focuses on the inculcation of norms of individual accountability and self-empowerment. Addressing cases drawn from Irish ‘Reality TV’ programming in the context of the current financial crisis, this article seeks to expand our understanding of the stakes of economic subjectification by looking at the importance Reality TV also ascribes to capacities of affective labour. The article borrows from Foucault, as well as several autonomist Marxist sources, to make an argument that these cases indicate not only the subsumption of a wide swathe of social life into the domain of neoliberal governmentality but also the self-conscious turn towards affective labour as a way of refloating the Irish economy. Such a move is significant insofar as it suggests the reinvestment of subjects in a regime of valorisation that has proven to be emotionally and financially oppressive, not to mention unstable, all at a time when the capacity of the institutions of the Irish state to equitably distribute social wealth has been called into question.

Introduction

In the 2010 series of the Irish business-oriented ‘Reality Television’ (Reality TV) show, Retail Therapy, host Feargal Quinn spends time with Kim Buckley, a florist working from a location in the heart of the Liberties district of Dublin, one of the oldest and most storied parts of the city. Quinn is a senator in the national parliament and the former owner of the Superquinn brand of grocery stores, a brand synonymous with quality and customer care in the Republic. Having founded Superquinn in the 1980s, at the height of an economic recession, Quinn is today a paragon figure in Irish retail, known as the “pope of customer service.”¹ Buckley, on the other hand, is a fourth-generation flower seller trying to get by in the middle of what the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has recently termed the greatest economic dislocation “of any economy since the Great Depression.”² As the show portrays it, Kim's self-esteem is as run down as her shop, and the deepening crisis is testing the limits of her will and her retail expertise alike. While poor, the people of the Liberties district are considered to be hardy and true. Indeed, we are told, Kim is of the area's “old stock,” following in the footsteps of her great-grandmother, Biddy McGrail. In honour of this legacy, Kim tells us, she has never deviated from her core values, delivering quality over volume. It is hard times now, however, and the more volume-centric competitors that emerged in the fresh flower sector during the good times are now snapping at her heels. Valentine's Day transactions were down 40% this year, and she is falling heavily into debt.

Kim believes she has a quality product. Quinn believes so too. But Kim's spirit is broken. She says she is shy and doesn't have the confidence to go after the corporate contracts that she needs in order to survive long term. Quinn tells her the shop needs a “wow” factor, and her delivery van needs a professional livery. Above all, however, says Quinn, Kim needs to recognise the important place of her own self-esteem in the branding of her product. By way of explaining this to Kim, and to the audience at home, Quinn takes her to meet Terry Prone and her son, Anton Savage, two of the nation's leading experts in personal branding. Prone is co-owner of the “Communications Clinic,” a Dublin-based public relations firm with an established reputation among Irish politicians. The duo specialise in political speechwriting and “spin” control, but they are also quite well known as media commentators among the Irish public in general, and they are no strangers to controversy.³ Prone focuses on Kim's lack of confidence, suggesting that her nerves appear so shaken it is as if she “wants to have a catastrophe.” Kim needs to realise that she is not just selling a thing, she is “selling a relationship.” With Kim's very subjectivity thus now established as the root of the problem, Quinn takes Kim to a local bingo hall in her area and arranges for her to be the host for a portion of the evening. (Regular viewers will learn that Quinn has a tendency to reminisce fondly about the jobs he held as a young man, and how they helped to teach him the basics of customer service. Calling bingo numbers was in fact the first job he ever held, working for his dad at the camping caravan resort he ran in Skerries.)⁴ Quinn returns to the shop again a month later to see how Kim is getting on. He discovers that the shop has been transformed (out of her own pocket) and that she is getting ready to give a major corporate presentation. The new Kim exudes confidence. After her pitch, we get to meet one of her potential new clients, a manager of the local Jury's hotel franchise. The manager is effusive: “Kim herself is the reason you want to shop here, because you care about her … She will succeed because she believes in herself. People like Kim can change Ireland.”

If the above example is any indicator, the capacity to be confident and build relationships of care with customers is understood to be of central importance in Ireland's strategy for economic recovery. But what does it mean to premise an economic strategy on the ability to make people like you as much as, if not more than, the product you are trying to sell? Recent research into the role of affect and emotionality in contemporary political economy has brought attention to the symbiosis between governmental imperatives and affective dispositions across a gamut of social domains.⁵ Perhaps more interestingly, it has also shown how neoliberal capitalism's expansion of “human capital” to encompass affective and linguistic capacities of production has radically shifted the locus of labour and, consequently, decentred the coordinating or “command” function of production.⁶ For Hardt and Negri, contemporary production tends increasingly to involve the manipulation of symbolic resources, and thus requires of the worker a certain capacity for independent, non-linear thinking. This tendency in production is not necessarily new, they note, but it is today greatly intensified, implying a shift in the locus of value production “outside the factory” to a significant degree.⁷ Thus, paradoxically, we find that customers are increasingly implicated in the process of valorisation, blurring the line between production and consumption. However, capitalism today actively seeks out the deep capacities of its subjects, especially those capacities relevant to subjectivation, such as the ability to solicit compassion and empathy, not only to generate surplus capital from them but also to sustain their emotional investment in a whole way of life. In a sense, then, to borrow from Read, we live in an era in which capitalism's political reproduction is predicated upon “the production of subjectivity by subjectivity.”⁸

This article marks an attempt to grapple with the idea of what we might call affective subjectification and its place in relation both to capitalism's strategies of re-valorisation and its political longevity, in the context of the current financial crisis. A range of scholars embrace the concept of economic subjectivity in their analysis of the relations of economic power and knowledge. They tend to do so, however, in a way that focuses on the discourses of economic neoliberalism, and the way it promotes the development of impulses of self-government and accountability. Neoliberal theory, they note, is premised on an imagining of the free market as an exemplary technology of the self, and therefore necessary in the essential task of producing a population that is ever mindful of the “transactional reality” of its existence, and thus willing to accept the need for austerity in times of crisis. Approaching this matter from a Foucauldian perspective, for example, Hay suggests that Reality TV presents us with something of a laboratory for appraising the “dispersed micrologics and microphysics of the knowledge-power nexus” of contemporary neoliberalism.⁹ However, while Hay discusses “human capital” and other important concepts constituting the vocabulary of neoliberalism's “positive” strategies of neoliberal subjectification, he offers little to help us understand the significance of a case such as the one noted above, where the entrepreneur is also subject to the moral expectation, in the name of “doing her part” to sustain a nation's economic recovery, not only to be a self-disciplined and dynamic entrepreneur but also to be adept in the art of creating value through leveraging the emotions of others.

Pushing beyond Hay's analysis of the semiotic content of Reality TV's exemplary neoliberalism, then, this article marks an attempt to investigate how entrepreneurial Reality TV shows solicit the development of emotional valorisation from their participants. The article focuses on the Irish case specifically because it presents an interesting opportunity to examine these two aspects of contemporary economic subjectification operating in tandem. As I argue below, the Irish population has been acquiescent in accepting the terms of the austerity package that the government is implementing currently, as a condition for receipt of funds from the so-called ‘Troika’ (a partnership of the EU, IMF and European Central Bank) in the mission of recapitalising the nation's banks. Affirming Hay's argument, the first case study, Dragon's Den, presents an interesting example of a popular show that works to naturalise the ideal of transactional subject and model its behaviours so that the viewers at home might be able to replicate them. Beyond Hay, however, the second case examines Retail Therapy, the show mentioned in the case above, which draws our attention to the quotidian struggles and sacrifices of Irish retailers as they seek to create and sustain emotional relations with their consumers, bespeaking in the same moment the struggle of contemporary capitalism to sustain value, especially in times of crisis. Combined, the two cases are of no small significance in our understanding of the function of popular Irish economic culture in times of austerity. They indicate not only the explicit normalisation of neoliberal responsibility but also the self-conscious turn towards affective labour as a way of reinvesting the desire of the Irish population in an emotionally and financially oppressive mode of capitalist valorisation, all the while deflecting attention away from questions concerning the responsibility of the institutions of the Irish state to manage the country's wealth in a just and democratic manner.

Situating Reality TV in Crisis Ireland

The theme of responsibility has loomed large in mainstream accounts of the Irish crisis, both in terms of explaining its origins and, more recently, in justifying the strategies necessary for its resolution. At the EU level, figures like Angela Merkel have spoken openly of the duty of the “good European” to practise tough love, condemning a culture of profligacy on the periphery which she believes has now placed the euro itself “in danger.”¹⁰ Mainstream debate in Ireland has shown little if any deviation from this line, turning on a discourse of good citizenship, delineated in terms of economic responsibility and moral courage. Politicians and public figures regularly decry the hedonism which they believe was characteristic of the so-called “Celtic Tiger” years, with Minister of Finance Brian Lenihan going so far as to declare in a primetime news interview that the crisis was nobody's fault in particular because, as he put it, “we all partied.”¹¹ Elsewhere, editorialists like Mary Kenny, someone who has long lamented the deleterious effects of consumerism on the nation's moral fabric, wrote hopefully of austerity as a mechanism that would auger the restoration of Ireland's traditional Catholic values.¹² Importantly, such discourse makes for a radical change in tone from that which circulated as common sense during the boom. Back then, the “Tiger” was seen not only as a vital remedy to Ireland's long-running economic impasse but as testament to the maturity and sophistication of a people determined to escape their traditional place on the margins of Western prosperity.¹³

In the context of their overwhelming support for the status quo explanation of the Irish financial crisis, it is apt to consider the ways in which the Irish public has been led to understand its relationship to economic necessity. After all, the roots of the Irish crisis can quite plausibly be traced back to poor planning decisions in the state's early economic history, not to mention the successive waves of neoliberal or “supply-side” deregulation in global finance, dating back at least as far as the 1970s.¹⁴ Moreover, such reforms have hardly been unique to the Irish context. They constitute an important part of the backdrop for what is now a long string of financial crises around the world, from Argentina to Southeast Asia.¹⁵ And, indeed, as the IMF has effectively conceded, the strategies pursued thus far in the hope of fixing the economy, all modelled on the neoliberal austerity approach, are not turning it around. To the contrary, even after four years of crippling austerity, the crisis is the “costliest … in advanced economies since at least the Great Depression.”¹⁶ These terrible costs acknowledged, however, it cannot be gainsaid that Ireland's elites have been able to palm off their lopsided solutions to the crisis with relative ease. In February 2011, in the middle of what some have suggested to be the greatest crisis since the nation's founding, a general election in Ireland revealed massive support for centrist, pro-market political parties, all more or less committed to the austerity regime and one of the most spectacularly unjust, and undemocratically decided, transfers of wealth from the taxpayers of an advanced Western nation to foreign bondholders (in this case German, British and French banks) in history.¹⁷

In the below I focus on the Reality TV genre as just one vector through which the nation's pro-market predilections have been instilled. While hardly a phenomenon unique to Ireland, Reality TV shows are hugely popular with Irish audiences, and this is especially true for those that deal with the subject of entrepreneurialism. According to the website of Radio Telefís Éireann (RTÉ), the largest domestic TV network in the country, which is also government owned and operated (although, unlike the BBC, does still depend on commercial advertising for much of its revenue), last year's second series of Dragon's Den attracted an average of more than 409,000 viewers per week, across the eight episodes of the series. Similarly, Feargal Quinn's Retail Therapy ended its first season as a huge ratings winner: “An average of 453,000 viewers tuned in every week to watch the retail mastermind advise independent shop owners around the country how to improve their businesses, all of whom were battling to survive the economic downturn.”¹⁸

Irish audiences will of course have been familiar with the Reality TV genre prior to the current recession. Indeed, at the height of Ireland's “Celtic Tiger” years, a homegrown Irish version of The Apprentice: You're Fired (featuring Bill Cullen, a well-known entrepreneur, in the place of Donald Trump) was already pulling in half a million viewers for the country's newest indigenous station, TV3.¹⁹ Yet the marketing for the more recent shows has been quite explicit in situating them as germane “entertainment-pedagogy” products in relation to the crisis. As Steve Carson, RTÉ's Director of Television, has commented:

It's entertainment with a purpose. In Dragon's Den, these are real businesses, which are receiving real money in what is, unfortunately, a very real recession. Feargal Quinn's wealth of experience in Retail Therapy delivered advice and insight to struggling businesses which had a direct impact on their bottom line. That both series are such a strong draw for audiences is the icing on the cake.²⁰

The rhetoric here is, of course, transparently exceptionalistic. Nevertheless, in a country whose entire population is no more than 4.5 million, that Dragon's Den could draw 550,000 viewers for the first episode of the 2011 season suggests that the show resonates strongly with Irish viewers.

How might we appraise the significance of such resonance? As Weldes notes, cultural “texts,” the artefacts yielded to us by popular culture, “are never read in isolation.” Weldes is here focusing specifically on Science Fiction (SF) television programming, but the point is relevant for Reality TV too. As she puts it, “SF texts repeat and rework generic conventions, and readers bring knowledge of these conventions, their generic expectations, to their consumption and appreciation of any particular text.”²¹ These conventions, unconscious expectations or “myths” are the undisclosed assumptions about the world that allow theory to make sense of the world. They constitute the “unconscious ideologies,” or the silent, sub-textual pillars that media texts must draw upon and reproduce if readers are to be able, on the one hand, to recognise the “truth” of what they are consuming and, on the other, to be instructed about the emergence of new problems and solutions over time.²² In this sense, for Weldes, pop culture texts are actually “intertexts,” or transmission belts, relaying social energies back and forth between the real and the imagined.²³ In similar spirit, we assume that entrepreneurial Reality TV programmes in Ireland also contain scripts, and that these can function to buttress prevailing social power relations through a kind of economic pedagogy, tacitly modelling and progressing the expectations of normal social behaviour upon which the population's economic imaginary is founded.

The production values of the shows examined in this article do clearly embrace aspects of the fictional. While they are not formally scripted, the interactions they portray are structured by a set of pre-imagined rules, staged as they are around the interactions of pre-selected “real” entrepreneurs as they pitch ideas to “hardened veterans” of the Irish business world. Within this “game show” structure, the majority of the dialogue is unscripted. Yet the participants must govern themselves according to this structure, even when the cameras are not rolling. Indeed, it is this intense focus of the shows on the behaviour of their participants which makes them so compelling, and tells us much about the nature of the intertext they constitute, between the imagined world of Irish commerce and the quotidian endeavours of participants in the real Irish economy. Notwithstanding the fact that the successes and failures of the shows are quite real (in the second season, 13 enterprises were supported by the dragons, with a sum of over €350,000 pledged across the series),²⁴ the scenarios they present are consciously intended by their producers to be homologous to the real life predicaments that Irish entrepreneurs might encounter, and to have instructive value insofar as they can explain or reveal aspects of reality that viewers might not otherwise be sensitive to. We see, therefore, a certain self-conscious sense of mission in these shows and, as such, we are alerted to their potentially constitutive role in the Irish culture and the diverse ways in which the “real” world of the Irish economy is itself a produced, textual affair.

Of course, Reality TV is not merely a constitutive force. It is itself a cultural product situated at the intersection of an array of historically specific discursive and technological forces. In a useful study, Ouellette and Hay describe two of these forces. First, the “reinvention of government,” or the emergence of neoliberal ideology and the attendant shift it has overseen, since the 1970s, of a range of governmental responsibilities from the state to the individual. Second, the “reinvention of television,” its technological “convergence” with a range of newer and older media, “books, magazines, the web and mobile media,” and the increasing potential these developments afford for viewers to participate in the shows they are watching.²⁵ With these changes has come a reimagining of the viewing subject at home and, by consequence, a reimagining of the educational potential of television. One specific development within this context has been the emergence of new “lifestyle streaming” networks, epitomised in the US market by channels like the Home and Garden Network, the Food Network, the Fine Living Channel, Fit TV and the Do-It-Yourself Network. These networks are remarkable for the finessed manner in which they create brand awareness and blend product marketing with entertainment. For Ouellette and Hay, the popularity of these networks has placed Reality TV in a preeminent position as “an integral relay” for a politics of “self-actualisation,” wherein citizens are not merely produced but are recruited as partners in the much more reflexive task of producing and assessing themselves.²⁶ Ouellette and Hay are adamant that this is not merely a false consciousness or an ideological façade: “The citizen is now conceived as an individual whose most pressing obligation to society is to empower her or himself privately. TV assists by acting as a visible component of a dispersed network of supporting technologies geared to self-help and self-actualization.”²⁷

To what extent can such a politics of responsible, neoliberal citizenship also be said to play out on Irish television? It is important to recognise the locally specific conditions with which neoliberalism must contend in Ireland, as it struggles to gain traction. To wit, Irish neoliberalism is a historically specific phenomenon, one that must be understood as taking place within “a particular political culture and system inflected by the long history of Anglo-Irish relations and the country's emergence as an independent postcolonial state.”²⁸ In this sense, neoliberalism in Ireland has followed a somewhat uncharacteristic path, needing to contend with, for example, the national tradition of government-coordinated wage deal “partnerships.” For Kitchin et al., the result has been a counter-intuitive process of “path amplification” wherein such local conditions, which might at first appear to serve as barriers, reveal themselves on closer inspection to encourage “responsible” self-government, serving therefore as “catalysts, lubricants, and wellsprings for neoliberal reforms.”²⁹ As we will see below, this paradoxical tendency is clear in the case of RTÉ, the producer and broadcaster of the two shows under scrutiny here. Established by The Broadcasting Act of 1960, RTÉ is a state-supported independent broadcasting authority, funded by a combination of user-paid television licence fees and advertising revenues. For this reason, as Sheehan observes, RTÉ has traditionally enjoyed a measure of structural freedom to focus on public service broadcasting, though not without a certain anxiety about how it would pay its own way. Despite its status as a “state institution,” then, its production values have tended to be more conservative and, as such, while early programming displayed a degree of technical innovation, content managers have tended over time to favour historical and moral themes in their programming decisions, eschewing the sort of social realism and reportage that might have brought into relief something of the dynamic changes the country was experiencing.³⁰

Of course, there are ambiguous moments in RTÉ's development as a relay of neoliberal ideology. In the 1970s, Gay Byrne's long-running (and hugely popular) The Late Late Show introduced many viewers to progressive themes, often stirring up great controversy in the process. So it is perhaps with some justification that Corcoran, himself a former RTÉ chairman (1995–2000), argues that we should avoid understating the preeminent historic position of RTÉ in shaping Irish culture:

[RTÉ] has played a major role in dominating the symbolic environment in which Irish people construct their sense of identity and weave the “common sense” that underpins the everyday life of the community. RTÉ's social role has been to find ways of “narrating the social” that makes sense of their society for viewers and listeners, by drawing from the available stock of frameworks and narratives and marking the boundaries of what is permissible.³¹

However, even if this is perhaps an idealisation of RTÉ's preeminent role as an agent of citizenship production in the 1970s, it is unclear how the statement could be applied to the broadcaster as it evolved into the coming decades. By the 1980s, trouble in the global economy had catalysed a significant reimagining of the moral purpose of Irish broadcasting. One key discursive turning point for RTÉ was the publication in 1985 of a government-mandated report by consultancy firm Stokes Kennedy Crowley. Using language that made no provision for any specific pedagogical function for public broadcasting, speaking of viewers not as citizens but as consumers, the report had dire results for the funding of homemade content, setting off a trend that would continue into the next two decades at least.³²

By the 1990s, RTÉ was facing significant increases in production costs and a changing competitive environment brought new players with much greater economies of scale into the market. The Broadcasting Act of 2001 created the Broadcasting Commission of Ireland, which licensed a slew of new, foreign television services via cable and satellite channels, allowing them to penetrate deeply into, and further divide, the advertising market. Since then, as Corcoran observes, RTÉ has had its hands largely tied in terms of its ability to respond to these newcomers, mandated as it is to direct any increase in licence funding to domestic production (whereas foreign channels are under no such obligation). Moreover, under the current regime of “light touch” regulation, newer local stations like TV3 have not been required to hold up fully to commitments to Irish production (TV3 gives merely 20% of its broadcast time to Irish produced material whereas RTÉ gives 50%, meaning it is a vital fiscal source for sustaining domestic media production).³³ With all these players seeking to minimise costs, not just in Ireland but elsewhere as well, “localisation” has become increasingly common. Referring to practices wherein global show franchises provide “do-it-yourself” kits and re-usable sequences for companies in different countries showing versions of the same show, localisation signals the emergence of transnational “reality” texts inflected with local “accents.”³⁴ RTÉ first adopted this approach in 1997 when it developed and aired Treasure Island, a Survivor-style show, itself originally modelled on a Swedish show, sharing the same production location with an Australian show of the same name. Since then a litany of Reality TV shows have appeared, from local iterations of more globally known franchises like The Apprentice, MasterChef and The Secret Chef to more homegrown ideas like Fáilte Towers and Celebrity Bainisteoir.

Certainly one can agree with Hay and Ouellette that the emergence of Reality TV has been a good “fit” with Irish neoliberalism. However, while much of the Reality TV programming in Ireland (as elsewhere) rotates more explicitly around themes to do with musical entertainment, sports and fitness or home improvement, and can certainly be said to share in this neoliberal fascination with self-transformation and management, the shows discussed here establish a much deeper connection, speaking directly to the fact that Ireland is in the midst of a terrible financial crisis, and situating the cause of this crisis in an insufficiency of the popular economic will. If, as per Kitchin et al., Irish neoliberalism is best characterised as “ideologically concealed, piecemeal, serendipitous, pragmatic, and commonsensical,”³⁵ the discussion below will demonstrate the importance of Reality TV in providing cues through which key neoliberal norms are modelled while criticism of the state is marginalised.

Dragon's Den as Neoliberal Governmentality

Based on an originally Japanese hit show, Dragon's Den has since travelled to countless markets around the world. The basic structure of the show is straightforward enough. Budding entrepreneurs are admitted into a room and “pitch” their ideas for a product to a panel of hardened business veterans. The entrepreneurs are looking for a sum of money to help further their project. After the pitch, the dragons must decide whether or not to invest some of their own money into the project. There is time for the dragons to cross-examine the entrepreneur for details and clarifications, and then, should any of them be interested, they can make an offer in exchange for a degree of equity in the profits of the business. Often none of the dragons will be interested, and the “contestant” goes home with merely the memory of the dragons' caustic remarks as a reward for their time. In Ireland the show has gained a significant following, dramatically boosting the media profile of its “dragons,” who have not hesitated to exploit their newfound status as entrepreneurial icons to support a range of personal endeavours, including their own private consultancy ventures, business-oriented talk radio programming, news appearances and campaigns for the presidency.

Importantly, as dragon Sean Gallagher has commented in a radio interview, the show is completely unscripted (Mooney Show, RTÉ Radio 1, 2 November 2011). Yet it appears that the dragons do adopt personas to some extent, as the show progresses. Indeed, part of the narrative structure of the show is the dragons' “hard core” attitude. For example, one dragon may be interested in a product concept but may press his or her advantage as the sole bidder by raising the equity stake, sometimes to rather high levels. Consider the case of “Izzy's Chocolates” from the first episode of Season 3, where the dragons more or less unanimously agree that while the product is of very high quality, it is a disaster in terms of its marketing strategy. The contestant, Izzy, is presented to the dragons as a recently retrained recession victim, having lost her job to the recession the previous year. Izzy is now a qualified chocolatier, supplying 40 stores in County Cork. She came onto the show looking for €20,000 to expand her product line and purchase display stands for the stores. In exchange for the money she is offering 20% of the business. She will also keep her own salary capped at the minimum wage level until such time as the business can be deemed a success. However, while the majority of the dragons are leery, one—Niall O'Farrell, himself a successful clothing retailer—does step in to make an offer: the full sum sought in exchange for 50% of the business. In the “narrative” structure of the show, the producers choose to present this as a dramatic moment. The music becomes tense, and the camera zooms in to show the anxiety on Izzy's face. As contestants may ask for a moment to reflect once a final offer has been made, Izzy chooses to take advantage of this. The camera tracks her as she walks into an alcove at the back of the room, purposely designed for this purpose, and backlit to silhouette the contestant as she paces back and forth. Returning to the centre stage, Izzy announces that she will accept the offer.

As per the show's convention when a contestant accepts a deal, she shakes the hand of the new investor and exits the stage. However, while not typical, during the contestant's exit there can be some banter between the dragons. In this instance, the other dragons seem rather shocked by the high equity stake that O'Farrell has eked from Izzy. But O'Farrell laughs this off, declaring that he was in fact acting providentially: “I like to give back.” This judgement of Izzy is a figurative moment, suggesting something of the occasionally condescending and duplicitous nature of the show. In this instance, the show's producers had chosen to present Lizzy to the viewers as a victim of the recession who, despite bad fortune, was returning to the marketplace as someone embodying the virtue of hope and determination in the pursuit of self-transformation. In the end, however, her efforts fall short to some extent. She succeeds in obtaining her funding but fails to fight for the better deal which, from the reaction of the other dragons, was clearly a possibility.

This “Gordon Gecko-esque” mantle is something that dragons seem happy to wear on occasion, and the producers make it a point to play it up. Throughout the show each dragon is shown with tidy stacks of cash piled on small tables positioned beside their chairs. It is not clear whether these piles are literally the dragons' money or merely dramatic props. But the camera periodically draws our attention to them, especially at tense moments. Similarly, the promotional materials for the show all feature the dragons in business attire, glaring with wilful intensity into the camera or staring pensively into the distance. The show's opening credits feature various dramatic shots of the dragons on a dock in Dublin's Grand Canal Basin, itself something of a symbolic “ground zero” for the entire Celtic Tiger phenomenon, the area having undergone significant redevelopment since 2000 as part of the Dublin Docklands area renovation project. Clearly they are not called “dragons” for nothing. And, true to form, this “ideal type” emerges forcefully when multiple dragons express an interest in a project. In the widely watched first episode of Season 3, the presenter of the “Savvy Bear” project seemed to really pique the dragons' attention. The product was an online learning environment for young children, where each child would have a cartoon-style bear avatar they would have to guide through various tasks. After a flurry of competitive, but only partial, bidding between recruitment and training specialist Gavin Duffy and the token female dragon of the show, magazine publisher Norah Casey, Niall O'Farrell makes a full bid for 30%. Not to be outdone, however, Casey responds with a full bid for 24%, a move that prompts Duffy to draw the contestant's attention to the significance of the event as a kind of teaching moment: “Do you see what's happened here? Without so much as taking a breath, Norah has just sunk a knife in Niall O'Farrell!”

In this instance, the lesson is that it is sometimes important to be aggressive. And the show is replete with such moments. Yet one would not want to come away from these anecdotes with the impression that the ideal-type evangelised in Dragon's Den is incapable of subtlety. To the contrary, the dragons seem at pains to emphasise that they are human beings, after all. Invited to guest host the well-known daily current affairs programme, the Matt Cooper Show, on Ireland's Today FM radio station, Dragon's Den presenter Richard Curran was emphatic that the successful Irish entrepreneur is someone who knows how to balance an outward appearance of success with a certain modesty (22 March 2010). On the show's car talk slot, with regular guest motoring expert Anton Savage, the topic was raised as to what car a young entrepreneur should be seen driving. According to Savage, it would have to be a car that would say the dragon was “successful” and had “made it” without screaming that he or she was an arriviste, an image that would not go down well in the context of the financial crisis. Hummers and Ferraris were considered excessive, but an Alfa Romeo 8C, Ferrari-manufactured but not labelled as such, was acceptable. Interestingly, Savage himself is son of Tom Savage, chairman of Irish state broadcaster RTÉ, and Terry Prone (discussed above), a well-known public relations consultant in Ireland. He is also the presenter of the Irish version of The Apprentice.

In the context of an ongoing economic crisis, Dragon's Den models an idealised entrepreneurial subject capable of calculating the relative utility of different types of behaviour in the marketplace. To gain a better purchase on the significance of the show in this sense, we might turn briefly to Foucault's discussion of governmentality, a term he coined to speak not only to “the way in which one conducts the conduct of men” but also to the creation of “an analytical grid” for assessing the efficacy of this conduct.³⁶ As I use the term here, governmentality refers to the relationship between power and the conduct of subjects, both in terms of the body of knowledge that provides criteria for the behaviour of the ideal subject and the way that the actual subject is then led to self-assess and govern itself, relative to these criteria. As a form of critique, then, Foucault's theory of governmentality allows for a kind of indirect analysis of social institutions, focusing less on the form of this or that institution and more on the abstract “technology of power” embedded in this practice of self-assessment, which gives it its functional coherence.³⁷ Such a technology can be quite widely distributed, manifesting itself in the operations of a host of institutions, including the state itself, all of which could thus be said to share a common genealogy vis-à-vis the efforts of a social formation to assess and manage certain problems. Of course, the history of specific modalities or iterations of such governmental regimes is vast and by no means exhausted by those discussed here. For the purposes of this article, however, we can focus specifically on Foucault's discussion of the emergence of political economy as a discourse capable of modifying practices of government, a development which he proposes was well and truly in place by the eighteenth century.³⁸ To be sure, this development changed the nature of government in the formal sense, but it also had ramifications for the way individuals perceived the range of ethical choices they had at their disposal in the task of their own self-management.

As Foucault tells it, the early modes of political economy had ambivalent understandings of their own need to intervene upon the subjectivity of their populations. The more contemporary “neoliberalism,” however, has a fairly explicit understanding of the market as an essential technology of subjectification, allowing for “the strategic programming of the individuals’ activity.”³⁹ On this reading of neoliberalism, every facet of social life is encompassed as an ostensibly market-based interaction. This understanding is made possible through neoliberalism's theory of human capital, or the idea that all labour, not just waged labour, can be understood as a voluntary investment or entrepreneurial activity carried out in the individual pursuit of some sort of future return or surplus benefit.⁴⁰ As a result, economic analysis can be applied to almost any form of social activity: marriage, parenting, discrimination, education, fertility, population growth, crime and punishment, addiction, and even insanity. That is, any activity that involves “substitutable choices” or the application of a “limited means to one end among others.”⁴¹ In this sense, the human being is fundamentally enjoined with his capacities as a kind of assemblage with a dynamic productive potential. Foucault goes so far as to suggest that neoliberalism appraises man in the market as a “machine-stream ensemble” or even a “capital-ability.”⁴² Neoliberalism is thus a theory that normalises this idea that the subject ought to direct his or her life in a manner consistent with the strictures of the market.

If neoliberalism seeks to normalise the responsibility to develop one's life in accordance with the norms of the market, the role of Dragon's Den as a confessional aid becomes clear. While the ultimate test of the neoliberal subject is the market itself, what Dragon's Den offers is a series of actual entrepreneurial encounters wherein viewers can see, as in the case of Izzy, for example, just how damaging a poor investment choice might be. The fact that so many of the entrepreneurs invited onto the show are victims of the recession in Ireland, and that they have worked to reskill themselves and forge new paths in their career, says much of their commitment to adaptation. This is consistent for, as Foucault reminds us, in neoliberalism the worker is in a very real sense “an active economic subject,” not just while on the job but in terms of his disciplined attitude towards the entirety of his own life, treating every facet of his or her being as a potential source of capital.⁴³ This is significant, as Foucault notes, because other historical imaginings of the market have taken it merely as a space where a “process of exchange” takes place. The neoliberal entrepreneur, however, is actually an “entrepreneur of himself,” constantly balancing costs and benefits, and constantly careful of the material impact of choices, even in seemingly non-economic spheres. The universality of this subject consists in the fact that he will, out of hope for some sort of return, pursue his own transformation into a useful form of capital, through enhancement of his basic physical capacities, mental skills and general attitude.⁴⁴

The significance of Dragon's Den is that it presents us with a celebration of this managerial disposition towards oneself and makes this explicit within the context of the Irish financial crisis. As Foucault tells us, neoliberal governmentality works through the “market milieu” to create incentives and disincentives, shaping how entrepreneurs think and act towards others and themselves. By this account, to the extent that the neoliberal subject is expected to subscribe to any particular norms of behaviour, he is asked simply to be a participant in this milieu, guided by his own substitutable tastes. By showcasing real life entrepreneurial encounters in an actual marketplace context, Dragon's Den models for audiences just how the market functions as a technology of the self, and the sort of emotional resolve and discipline with one's very self that might be required in order to succeed in it. In this sense we might say shows like this function alongside the market, or as a pedagogical complement to it. Now, Foucault does not quite seem to develop the broader social implications of this universal yet contingent “subject-as-capital” but, as I will elaborate below, if we apply this category of human capital to currently existing capitalist techniques of value production, it is clear that neoliberalism makes a substantive difference within the history of governmentality precisely because it takes the subject not simply as something that must be produced but something that is also in fact itself productive, in a very broad sense.

Retail Therapy, Affective Command

If Dragon's Den shows us how better to govern ourselves as neoliberal subjects, as creatures who must know precisely when to be conniving and when to hold back in the market of life, it is Feargal Quinn's Retail Therapy which shows us how to survive, and thrive, in an affective economy. Analogous in some respects to the American TV show Home Makeover: Extreme Edition, this show eschews the Dragon's Den-style “game” format in favour of a more straightforward self-improvement or self-actualisation documentary approach. Named, somewhat ironically, after the psychological disorder of “oniomania,” where one pursues the consumption of high fashion goods in order to forget or dissipate feelings of anxiety or depression, this show revolves around one of Ireland's best-known retailers, Senator Feargal Quinn, founder of the prestigious grocery store Superquinn, as he takes six small-time, recession-hit retail operations under his wing and tutors them in the subtle arts of remaining viable in a bearish market. Comparable to Dragon's Den in terms of viewership, Retail Therapy makes a concerted effort to avoid its more sensational affectations. Nevertheless, unlike the dragons, Quinn has a long-established, cult-like popularity among discerning grocery shoppers in Ireland. As an elected member of the Irish Senate, he also uses his status in the media to offer views on the nature of the financial crisis. His constant mantra in the show is that retailers can beat the crisis, but only if they become better at developing the emotional connection of the customer to the experience of buying. As with Dragon's Den, the producers are keen to point out the crisis-focused, pedagogical mission of the show, showing retailers how to “battle the downturn and remain relevant in a cut-throat and over-crowded market.”⁴⁵

Renowned for being one of the first to bring contemporary retail techniques to the Irish market, Quinn's soft-spoken style puts a far gentler accent on Irish capitalism than that of the dragons. He became a millionaire in the deep Irish recession of the 1980s by, in his own account, putting the customer first. Quinn is known for what he calls the five lessons in humility: “My customers know more than I do. My employees know more than I do. Neither my employees nor I can be creative all of the time. What I knew yesterday is not enough for today. I'm not responding fast enough for my customer.”⁴⁶ In interviews, Quinn often repeats the story of his experience growing up on his father's “camping-caravanning” site. The customers were paying up front, he recalls, so one had to be constantly focused on ensuring that they had a good experience, thereby ensuring that they would come back the following year. This experience led Quinn to develop on his first lesson, which he calls the “boomerang principle.”⁴⁷ That is to focus, in every deed, on persuading the customer to return to the store. Key to this idea is the principle that, even though it may not be quantifiable to the accountants, the customer's emotional experience is essential to making a profit. For example, in order to curry favour with mothers of young children, Quinn has prohibited the sale of sweets and candies at his stores' checkout counters. “They kick up blue murder until the mother buys them something from the display of goodies,” he observes. And while his accountants might object, he believes that it is worth it in order to avoid the possibility that mothers might leave the store feeling harassed. Passing up on the opportunity to sell sweets to kids might seem like folly, he notes, but “it requires courage to take the unquantifiable option.”⁴⁸

The story of Retail Therapy is as much about the wisdom gleaned from Feargal Quinn's success in an affective economy as it is about the predicaments of the stores he visits. He constantly returns to the theme of the non-quantifiable nature of successful retail. To make this point he often cites the old Irish proverb, “Listen to the sound of the river if you want to catch a salmon.” And it is this message that he takes to the operations he visits on the show, which appear to be chosen precisely because of their current ignorance of this valuable message. Above, we discussed the case of Quinn's 2010 visit with Kim Buckley, the fourth-generation inner-city Dublin flower seller, whose retail technique was pretty much identical to that used by her great-grandmother. Identical, that is, until Quinn introduced her to public relations professionals who revealed to her the importance of her ability to insert her own self into her sales technique. In other words, put “her heart” into it. But it must be emphasised that these moves to embrace affective sales techniques often come at tremendous material and emotional cost to the subject. In another episode, for example, Quinn meets Fionnuala Law and her husband, equal partners of X-IT Department Store in Dublin. The business is on its knees. A small, 18-year-old discount store operation, the firm has never put much effort into keeping up appearances. Quinn was suggesting that Law invest €10,000 in giving the store a complete makeover, but Fionnuala wanted to invest it in stock. The show includes emotional scenes in the couple's kitchen at home as they fight over the cost of Quinn's recommendations, and the fact that, if they follow through, there will be no going back to the comfortable existence they knew before. Indeed, interestingly, despite the warmth of Quinn's general approach, there are moments when the show's producers are unafraid to hint that the participants may need to be disciplined for their lack of commitment to the mission. Thus, when Quinn visits Burgess's in Athlone, which at 170 years old is Ireland's oldest continuously run department store, he finds a small, family-run business that is being put under huge pressure by larger, foreign-owned operations. He assigns an international retail store expert from Madison Avenue as an advisor. Dramatic scenes follow as the store's relaunch day approaches, however, as the owners are making only slow progress, and the expert threatens to quit in order to sanction them for their lack of discipline. After all, it is her reputation on the line too.

Understood in the context of the Foucauldian arguments presented above, the narrative structure of Retail Therapy insinuates the importance of skills of emotional labour in the turn towards human capital. But this premium attached to emotional labour should also give us pause to reflect on our understanding of what it is exactly that is in crisis in the first place. Consider, for example, Hardt and Negri's understanding of affective labour as a key pillar in their thesis that contemporary globalisation has achieved a certain political autonomy, over and above its various constituent elements. Referring to this mode of globalisation as “Empire,” they note the preeminent role played in its development not just of neoliberal idealisations of the subject but of practices of communicative and “immaterial” labour. “Empire,” they declare, “takes form when language and communication, or really immaterial labor and cooperation, become the dominant force.”⁴⁹ The advent of this type of global communicative capitalism bespeaks, for Hardt and Negri, what they refer to as the passage to “real subsumption.” Whereas in the era of classical imperialism nation-based European capitalism expanded to enshroud the entire world, thereby also expanding the political forms of European modernity, real subsumption suggests a shift away from the economic modernisation of the industrial era towards socialisation, or a change in quality of labour itself, as labour reconcentrates around the production of information goods and physically intangible “service” goods.

In a sense, Hardt and Negri are here elaborating on the implications of the hegemony of the neoliberal theory of human capital, as discussed by Foucault, above. For them, “real subsumption” in the contemporary capitalist conjecture is intimately connected to the creative potential of human capital. They agree with Foucault that neoliberal discourse idealises the subsumption of every form of social activity, from the household to the schoolyard to the family doctor's office to the university, making them accountable to metrics of behaviour determined by the rationality of the market. What they add, however, is a concern that the turn towards human capital has in practice also radically changed the stakes of capitalist life. That is, that the turn towards immaterial and affective production has created an indeterminacy in the location of capitalist command. As Negri observes, today, because capacities for producing and managing value are sourced in the non-linear creativity of the human being as opposed to the worker as traditionally conceived, “the factory spreads throughout the whole of society … production is social and activities are productive.”⁵⁰ Capacities of intuition and care that were once more or less irrelevant to the mundane tasks of industrial production are now referred to as indispensable forms of human capital, and are today directly implicated in the production process. Beyond this, however, Hardt and Negri are preoccupied with the basic political significance of these novel forms of labour insofar as they have a kind of ontological power, too. That is, by virtue of the way capitalism extracts surplus today, through the production of knowledge, desires and affects, the question of power is not simply a question of the production of this or that type of subjectivity but, rather, a question of the real and intense ways in which the “commanding heights” of the economy have become immanent through the hegemony of immaterial labour. In this sense, then, contemporary capitalism is staked upon a mode of control that is essentially immanent. That is, as Read puts it, the basic organisation of power in our era is staked upon “the production of subjectivity by subjectivity.”⁵¹

If Dragon's Den highlights anything about the current Irish situation, it is the normative expectation of a “hard core” attitude towards oneself, and one's position in the market. Retail Therapy, on the other hand, points us towards the precise kinds of skills and competencies that Irish subjects are being led to recognise as necessary in producing value. Even in the absence of a crisis, such skills would of course be at a premium. In Retail Therapy, however, the advice for surviving the downturn is to “double down” on affective labour. For Hardt and Negri, this would suggest a certain desperation on the part of capitalism. Indeed, to them, as they discuss in recent work, what the crisis really indicates is the incommensurability of the traditional capitalist institutions for measuring and allocating wealth with the new realities of capitalist valorisation. Hardt and Negri offer the example of rent in an actual city to illustrate the point. Here, real estate agents pitch the value of high-value properties on the strength of their proximity to zones of affective intensity, the “cool” and “chic” parts of town. What they fail to see, however, is that the additional value of the property over and above its bricks and mortar is linked to an external “common work” of the crowd.⁵²

Rental properties situated close to such zones of “common work” are capable of generating tremendous wealth. The rub, however, is that once the zones become unpopular, the source of value disappears. And this is precisely the analysis that Hardt and Negri bring to the current financial crisis. Whereas goods might once have retained their value through the means of relative scarcity, thus allowing for the possibility of garnering surplus through the surreptitious withholding of profit from the worker, today capitalism's surplus is extracted through means of rent, from almost everyone.⁵³ No wonder, then, that with the neoliberal abandonment of the institutions of care previously guaranteed by the welfare services of the state, the subject of indebtedness has become the key figure of the current financial crisis. That this figure emerges in the context of the new regime of valorisation is no accident, as Marazzi argues, for capitalism is today desperate and necessarily must stoop to make “raw life a source of profit.”⁵⁴ In this sense the world's financial system is both an affective phenomenon, an “enormous engine of abstraction” and the “paradigmatic economic instrument” of biopolitical capitalism's exploitation.⁵⁵ As much is clear in the narrative structure of Retail Therapy which, as we have seen, rests not only on the premise that affective labour is a necessary part of the process of running a successful retail operation in crisis Ireland. Rather, the necessity Feargal Quinn articulates is one of taking great risk and “digging deep” in one's human capital if the country is to be saved, costs to one's bank balance and psychological wellbeing notwithstanding.

Conclusion

Autonomist Marxists have taken an interest in the predatory rent economy of contemporary capitalism not only because it speaks to the fragility and cynicism of capitalist valorisation today but also because it explains to some extent the counter-intuitive return, and re-legitimisation, of the state. As Lazzarato argues, in the financial crisis, the state has emerged anew: “not a minimal state, but a state free from the control of workers, the unemployed, women, the poor.” Here, both governmentality, “the ‘management’ of the population,” and representative democracy “become definitively integrated in the economy in so far as they are reshaped as devices of neoliberal governance.”⁵⁶ The Irish case would appear to be a particularly powerful example of this phenomenon, with the results of the last election attesting to the degree to which the population has internalised the status quo explanation of the reasons for the crisis. As noted above, Irish elites often try to narrate the Irish financial crisis as a uniquely homegrown problem (“we all partied”), having no necessary relationship either to elite behaviour or even the contemporaneous crises experienced in Greece, Spain or elsewhere. Sanctioning the austerity regime through the ballot box, the Irish have acquiesced in accepting this status quo account not only of the place of their own subjectivity in the destruction of their country's economy but of the role of their own state as nothing more than the manager-in-chief of the necessary dismantling of their country's welfare system.

Irish Reality TV programming partially explains the attractiveness of these choices. Its “heroes” are those who have been confronted by the harsh logic of the nation's economic woes but who nevertheless have eschewed protest and accepted instead that their economic fate is up to them. They are those who have been willing to take the risk of investing anew in their own “human capital” and returning to the marketplace. To viewers at home, Dragon's Den and Retail Therapy offer the promise that, by taking their message seriously, the subject can succeed, even in the midst of a terrible recession. Moreover, in narrating a linkage between these successful figures and the country's chances for economic recovery, they suggest that becoming entrepreneurial is a moral responsibility for the people of Ireland. In so doing, however, they also affirm the status quo account of what caused the Irish crisis in the first place, directing attention away from social explanations and encouraging Irish entrepreneurs to dig deep into their “human capital,” often at great expense to themselves, as necessary penance for the excesses of the Celtic Tiger years.

About the Author

Nicholas J. Kiersey is Assistant Professor in Political Science at Ohio University's Chillicothe campus. His recent publications address the question of the status of power as a concept in “world state” theory, the “debate about Empire” in International Relations, and Foucault's understanding of the place of economic thought in the globalisation of liberal discourses of government. He recently co-edited the volume Battlestar Galactica and International Relations with Iver Neumann (Routledge, 2013). He is currently writing a book exploring the cultural political economy of the Irish financial crisis.

Notes

1. Molly Labarre, "Leader—Feargal Quinn", Fast Company, October 2001, available: <http://www.fastcompany.com/43805/leader-feargal-quinn> (accessed 16 September 2012).

2. Antoinette Kelly, "Ireland's Economic Collapse Worst Global Crash since the Great Depression", IrishCentral, 2 July 2012, available: <http://www.irishcentral.com/news/Irelands-economic-collapse-worst-global-crash-since-the-Great-Depression-161058395.html> (accessed 16 September 2012).

3. Daniel O'Carroll, "Irish TV Boss in Hot Water over Notorious Rté Documentary 'Mission to Prey'", IrishCentral, 2 July 2012, available: <http://www.irishcentral.com/story/news/danny_boy/irish-tv-boss-in-hot-water-over-notorious-rte-documentary-mission-to-prey-157188465.html> (accessed 17 September 2012).

4. See also his remarks in Labarre, op. cit.

5. See, for example, Bob Jessop and Stijn Oosterlynck, "Cultural Political Economy: On Making the Cultural Turn without Falling into Soft Economic Sociology", Geoforum, No. 39 (2008), pp. 1155–1169; Maxime Oulette, "Cybernetic Capitalism and the Global Information Society; from the Global Panopticon to a 'Brand' New World", in Jacqueline Best and Matthew Paterson (eds.), Cultural Political Economy (New York: Routledge, 2010), pp. 177–196; Andrew A.G. Ross, "Coming in from the Cold: Constructivism and Emotions", European Journal of International Relations, Vol. 12, No. 2 (2006), pp. 197–222.

6. See, for example, Nick Dyer-Witheford and Greig de Peuter, Games of Empire (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2009); Wanda Vrasti, "How to Use Affective Competencies in Late Capitalism", Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the International Studies Association, New Orleans, LA, 17 February 2010.

7. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Commonwealth (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Harvard, 2009).

8. Jason Read, The Micro-Politics of Capital (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2003), p. 18.

9. James Hay, "Too Good to Fail: Managing Financial Crisis through the Moral Economy of Reality TV", Journal of Communication Inquiry, Vol. 34, No. 4 (2010), p. 386.

10. “Merkel Says EU's Future at Stake in Greek Crisis”, The Local, 5 May 2010, available: <http://www.thelocal.de/politics/20100505-26981.html> (accessed 30 June 2010); “Merkel: Crisis-Hit Europe Needs ‘New Stability Culture’”, EUbusiness, 19 May 2010, available: <http://www.eubusiness.com/news-eu/finance-economy.4t5/?searchterm=None> (accessed 20 May 2010).

11. Brian Lenihan, “We All Partied”, Prime Time, 24 November 2010, available: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YK7w6fXoYxo> (accessed 18 March 2013).

12. Mary Kenny, “Ireland Faces a Choice between Lucre and Liberty”, The Guardian, 25 May 2012, available: <http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/may/25/ireland-faces-choice-lucre-liberty-eu/print> (accessed 19 June 2012).

13. See David McWilliams, The Pope's Children: The Irish Economic Triumph and the Rise of Ireland's New Elite (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2005).

14. See Conor McCabe, Sins of the Father: Tracing the Decisions that Shaped the Irish Economy (Dublin: The History Press Ireland, 2011).

15. See Joseph E. Stiglitz, Globalization and Its Discontents (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2002).

16. Kelly, op. cit.

17. See David McWilliams, "Bailout Will Sink Ireland before We Can Even Swim", Irish Independent, 1 December 2010; Fintan O'Toole, "The People Must Act or We Will Remain Irrelevant", Irish Times, 23 November 2010.

18. "Real Entrepreneurial Stories Dispel Recessionary Gloom for Huge TV Audiences", RTÉ Press Release, 19 April 2010, available: < http://www.rte.ie/about/en/press-office/press-releases/2010/0419/292815-dragonsden18042010/> (accessed 17 September 2012).

19. Melanie Finn, "Celebrity Apprentice Fired before First Day", Evening Herald, 6 March 2010, available: <http://www.herald.ie/entertainment/tv-radio/celebrity-apprentice-fired-before-first-day-2091083.html> (accessed 31 August 2012).

20. "Real Entrepreneurial Stories", op. cit.

21. Jutta Weldes, "Popular Culture, Science Fiction, and World Politics", in Jutta Weldes (ed.), To Seek out New Worlds: Exploring Links between Science Fiction and World Politics (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), p. 13.

22. Cynthia Weber, International Relations Theory: A Critical Introduction (London: Routtledge, 2009), p. 2.

23. Weldes, "Popular Culture", op. cit., p. 15.

24. "Real Entrepreneurial Stories", op. cit.

25. Laurie Ouellette and James Hay, Better Living through Reality TV: Television and Post-Welfare Citizenship (New York: Blackwell, 2008), p. 2.

26. Ibid., p. 31.

27. Ibid., p. 3.

28. Rob Kitchin, Cian O'Callaghan, Justin Gleeson, Karen Keaveney, and Mark Boyle, "Placing Neoliberalism: The Rise and Fall of Ireland's Celtic Tiger", Environment and Planning A, Vol. 44, No. 6 (2012), p. 1305.

29. Ibid., p. 1308.

30. Helena Sheehan, "Irish Television Drama in the 1960s", RTÉ, 2001, available: <http://webpages.dcu.ie/~sheehanh/60s-itvd.htm> (accessed 1 August 2012).

31. Farrel Corcoran, RTE and the Globalisation of Irish Television (Bristol: Intellect Books, 2004), p. 1.

32. Helena Sheehan, "Irish Television Drama in the 1980s", RTÉ, 2001, available: <http://webpages.dcu.ie/~sheehanh/80s-itvd.htm> (accessed 17 September 2012).

33. Corcoran, op. cit., p. 214.

34. Ibid., p. 200.

35. Kitchin et al., op. cit., p. 1306.

36. Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics; Lectures at the Collège De France, 1978–79 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), p. 186.

37. Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population; Lectures at the Collège De France, 1977–1978 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), p. 111.

38. Ibid., p. 107.

39. Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, op. cit., p. 223.

40. Ibid., p. 224.

41. Ibid., pp. 222, 268.

42. Ibid., p. 225.

43. Ibid., p. 223.

44. Ibid., pp. 226–229.

45. "Feargal Quinn's Retail Therapy", RTÉ, 15 March 2010, available: <http://www.rte.ie/tv/theafternoonshow/2010/0315/fearghalquinnsretailtherapy884.html> (accessed 17 September 2012).

46. Labarre, op. cit.

47. "Crowning the Customer with Feargal Quinn", Business of Success Podcast, 19 February 2006, available: <http://businessofsuccess.typepad.com/business_of_success/2006/02/crownting_the_c.html> (accessed 17 September 2012).

48. Labarre, op. cit.

49. Hardt and Negri, Empire, op. cit., p. 385.

50. Antonio Negri, "Interpretation of the Class Situation Today: Methodological Aspects", in Werner Bonefeld, Richard Gunn and Kosmas Psychopedis (eds.), Open Marxism, Vol. 2: Theory and Practice (London: Pluto, 1992), p. 85.

51. Read, op. cit., p. 18.

52. Ibid., p. 155.

53. Ibid., p. 139.

54. C. Marazzi, Capital and Language; from the New Economy to the War Economy (Cambridge MA: The MIT Press, 2008), p. 33.

55. Hardt and Negri, Commonwealth, op. cit., pp. 157, 258.

56. Maurizio Lazzarato, “Governmentality in the Current Crisis”, Generation Online, March 2013, available: <http://www.generation-online.org/p/fp_lazzarato7.htm> (accessed 18 March 2013).