would have helped to have more information about ‘how to run a freelance business, with yourself as the product, which is what we are’. Business language, crucially, was used in several contexts and one participant who discussed her experiences as a black musician referred to her skin colour as her ‘USP’, her unique selling point (Susan). According to Gershon (2011: 539), the view of oneself as a business designates a ‘move from the liberal vision of people owning themselves as though they were property to a neoliberal vision of people owning themselves as though they were a business’. This changes the relationship of the self to the self where ‘one becomes a subject for oneself’ (Rose, 1990: 240). By relating to itself as a business, the entrepreneurial subject establishes a distance to its self and can subsequently work on it. The resulting work on the self took on various dimensions. Julianna stated: ‘I try to well, eat well, exercise, meditate – basically work on myself’. Similarly, Kim stated that ‘you have to take care of your mental health, and if you’re down, you’ve got to just work through it’. This work on the self was constructed as an on-going activity. Resonating with Bröckling’s (2005) argument that the entrepreneurial self is in a constant mode of becoming, Janine told me that there were ‘no limits’ to self-improvement. These statements demonstrate that the self as business needs constant attention, and that various aspects of the self – physical, mental and spiritual – are worked upon for optimisation.
the feeling that ‘if you are not at the top then you’re in danger of losing a livelihood’. Here, insecurities about one’s performance are connected to fears about one’s livelihood. Anxieties become prevalent, resonating with Tyler’s (2013: 7) argument that neoliberal democracies ‘function through the generation of consent via fear […]’. In the absence of narratives that highlight the impact of socio-economic structures on individual lives, and in a context where work is experienced as precarious, anxieties and self-doubt seem to prevail. Competing with the self Many commentators have pointed out that the entrepreneurial subject is competitive and that it ‘relates to others as competitors’ (McNay, 2009: 64; see also Mirowski, 2014: 92). Resonating with this claim, the research participants described the classical music world as ‘very competitive’ (Kerry). Interestingly though, they simultaneously emphasised their dislike for competition. Holly said that the profession ‘can be quite competitive. And I don’t like that and I try to remove myself from that as much as possible’. Equally, Judith felt that musicians should ‘support each other’ instead of engaging in competition. In distancing themselves from competition, some research participants drew on an artistic discourse and claimed that competition was ‘uncreative’ (Sonja) or ‘incompatible with music’ (Clarissa). As aforementioned, entrepreneurial rhetoric intersects with other discourses and therefore does not hold absolutely. Indeed, the research participants’ reluctance to engage in competition seems to break with the entrepreneurial logic of constant competition and suggests a rupture in the performance of entrepreneurial subjectivity.