Multi-Level Marketing: Juice Plus as Enterprise and Self-Improvement as a Manifestation of Neoliberal Psychology

I recently found myself in the uncomfortable position of having to unfriend someone I know on Facebook due to her ceaseless advertising of the Juice Plus dietary supplements she had been duped into selling. These products aren’t to be found in stores, and have little to no actual health benefits. Crucially, they are pitched not only as life improvement in a pill, but also as an enterprising opportunity for the users in themselves. By encouraging users of the product to become distributers, Juice Plus both sell more of their products and help cement their relationship with existing customers.

Officially known as ‘Multi-Level Marketing’, these types of business models are effectively pyramid schemes, which have been heavily criticised as unsustainable and exploitative. This is because they rely on each customer buying much more stock than they sell, and as the available market isn’t large, distributers can only hope to make a profit by selling in bulk to their customers, encouraging them to sell the products, becoming distributers. The new distributers soon realise this, and so convert whomever they can into distributers to satisfy their orders. These pills, tropes of self-improvement, slide down the pyramid, passed from distributer to distributer, the only profits going to those at the top. Looking at the company holistically shows us that neoliberal ideals are alive and well in the business world, however looking at the agents in these schemes tells us something unique about the neoliberal psyche in all of us.

To better understand why, we will examine some of Foucault’s criticisms of the modern psychological disciplines, as well as what he called dispositifs – the apparatus by which agents in a system are disposed to act. Sam Binkley does both of these in his paper ‘Psychological life as enterprise: social practice and the government of neo-liberal interiority’ linking changing psychological norms with neoliberal psychology. Beginning with the observation that the neoliberal system not only offers freedom but actually obliges it, we see the way states enforce this freedom on its subjects. Collectivism and regulation are abandoned, replaced with insentivisation, privatisation, and marketisation, the old principals cast as dependant or deficient. This change of values incentivises the individual agents to competitive differentialism and opportunism, as they can no longer be dependent on community or collectivism to become successful. This change in the individual was what Foucault called subjectification, meaning the construction of a subject (by the state). The means with which this is done by, he names the dispositif; a structure that promotes a way of thinking that enhances and maintains the excise of power. An example could be austerity; the more a government curtails its own apparatus for control in the name of austerity, the more likely the circumstances of individuals in the system arise that help to normalise the neoliberal psyche that champions individualism, and so repudiates social government.

Psychological disciplines had a homologous shift toward the individual along with neoliberalism, focussing on self-optimisation as psychological well-being. Unlike Freudian psychoanalysis that centred on familial relations as the cause of any characterological abnormalities and attempted to contemplate these reasons by examining the past, the anti-Oedipus school focussed on self-optimisation by acting, not reminiscing, which they thought depressive and dangerous. Binkley makes the point that this competitive self-optimisation in a neoliberal world is a manifestation of self-interest and individualism. He relates this to the modern ‘self-help book’, which as well as championing action-based optimism, denunciates expertise in the field, and so psychologists are in part replaced by ‘life-coaches’.

Relating both neoliberal subjectification and the evolvement of psychological disciplines to Juice Plus, we can see it as an extension of both the self-optimising and individualistic enterprising values discussed. The dietary pills are not only a means to achieve the better self, but also act as the subject for that better self to then become enterprising, which is in part why the self-improvement was required. This duality of purpose captures neoliberal psychology in an almost pedantic light, the only disparity being that it is the body as well as the mind that Juice Plus claims to improve. In addition, the business model relies on distributers both selling to, and making distributors out of, friends and family, perhaps the epitome of the marketisation of social relationships discussed by Foucault. Though this particular fad may pass, the underlying causes are systemic. The devaluation of companionship, cohesion, collectivism and community, perpetuates the subjectification of agents in the system by the neoliberal state today.

Bibliography

Sam Binkley - “Psychological life as enterprise: social practice and the government of neo-liberal interiority” 2011, History the Human Sciences, Vol 24, No.3 pp83-102

Michael Foucault - “Discipline and Punish” 1975

Simon Woof-Dwight