This paper examines recent developments in discourses and practices of human capital, specifically their impacts on pedagogies in schools and more broadly. Following Wallerstein (1998) and Harvey (2010), we argue that we live in dark historical times of the erosion of capital’s expansionary capacities, putting the sustainability of capital’s accumulation logic under question. At the same time, much ideological work promulgates a pervasive sense that there can be no alternative to capitalism (Fisher 2009), even as we witness its contradictions and breakdowns rendering life more difficult for most. With the rise of neoliberalism, human capital has become a pervasive mode of subjectivity tied to the continual self-appreciation of one’s value (Feher 2009; Lazzarato 2013). For many, this has become a matter of ‘staying afloat’, or accepting downward mobility (Brown et al. 2010), rather than ‘getting ahead’. However, a sense of optimism that things will get better still animates the human capital project of self-appreciation: a form of ‘cruel optimism’ that enables people to go on in detrimental conditions (Berlant 2011).

The paper is framed by critical theories that mobilise the concept of affect to examine social and subjective effects of capitalism’s contemporary developments. Human capital has been part of the equation of political economy since the work of Adam Smith. Over time it has taken on different connotations in different historical contexts. Current conceptions can be traced to the work of Chicago school economists in the 1950s and 1960s. During the 1990s and 2000s, valuable dimensions of the human described by the concept expanded into affective domains, linked to the rise of cognitive capitalism, affective labour and emotional capital (Hardt 1999; Illouz 2007). This is the significant change in human capital discourses and practices that we analyse in the paper.

The self-appreciation of human capital now involves the cultivation of dispositions favourable to employment and productivity, such as persistence, optimism and low time preference (i.e. willingness to defer rewards). Self-appreciation thus has a pedagogical dimension that is evident in a wide array of social spaces and cultural practices, from the self-help titles in airport bookshops to early childhood education programs focused on emotional development and regulation. In what Bernstein (2001) characterised as the totally pedagogised society, we can see self-appreciation as intensely active in multiple social sites aimed at enculturing ‘valuable’ dispositions or so-called ‘non-cognitive’ skills. This paper will ask: What kinds of pedagogical effects are generated by recent intensifications of the ‘humanisation’ of ‘capital’?

The paper will attend to how new discursive forms of economic and psychological theory, and their translations into government policy terrains, put emphasis on cognitive and, particularly, emotive dispositions as expansive domains for individuals to build their human capital, particularly through compulsory and ‘lifelong’ education. We explore how this may, and may not, intersect with recent social-theoretical trends towards affect theory (Clough 2007; Gregg & Seigworth 2010). We will also consider the conceptual tools that affect theory offers for critical analysis of the cultural phenomenon in which human capital discourse newly extends into dispositional and emotive domains of human life.

While the logic of capital in a Marxist or Bourdieusian sense involves the substantial accumulation of manipulated scarcities of power-invested commodities, as human capital is pushed into new affective domains it operates according to a contradictory logic of plenitude. In this context, we must consider the normative and governance functions of human capital promises, which link future rewards to the cultivation of optimistic dispositions as ‘sustainable’ resources that both compensate for capital’s exhaustion of other value sources and enable people to go on amidst the fallout of this exhaustion.

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