‘People don’t fall for it any longer’: Reflections on ‘the system’, entrepreneurialism, and autonomy among young adults in Amsterdam’s Southeast district

This article explores how young adults’ perceptions of ‘the system’ challenge dominant scholarly conceptions of power technologies in neoliberal individualism. Drawing on one year of ethnographic fieldwork in Amsterdam Southeast district ‘the Bijlmer’ my collaborators show how notions of autonomy, entrepreneurialism and personal responsibility are mobilized in crafting agency. Looking at these attitudes through a phenomenological lens reveals a gap between intellectual conceptions of ideological individualism and emic processes of meaning making in the neoliberal welfare state. I argue that neoliberal ideology posits certain aesthetic dispositions that underscore the open-endedness of life itself. This future-oriented potential grants neoliberalism its narrational quality in which the possibility for heroism is offered. By turning life into a challenge of socioeconomic progress, ideology is configured into an existential proposition.