Language, (em)power(ment) and affective capitalism: the case of an entrepreneurship workshop for refugees in Germany

Abstract

Abstract This paper seeks to advance research on the nexus of language, work-related training and affective capitalism by focusing on an entrepreneurship workshop organized for newly arrived refugees in Germany. Despite the occupational orientation, the primary objective of the workshop was not establishing a business but “empowering” the participants by guiding them to adopt “an entrepreneurial mindset”. To delve deeper into this ‘will to empower’, the study brings together the perspectives of governmentality studies, ethnography, discourse studies and affect studies. To investigate in more detail the evocation of the ‘entrepreneurial mindset’, the study draws on ethnographic data collected in the context of the workshop and focuses on a particular discursive resource, the genre ‘elevator pitch’. The analysis examines how this genre operated as a technology of government by allowing an attempt at modulating the affective states and attachments of the participants so as to evoke an affective configuration characterized by hardness, resilience and diligence, but above all by aspiration, optimism and confidence: faith in oneself, and a horizon of hope that the possibility of self-employment created. The concluding section discusses this subjectification regime as a manifestation of contemporary affective capitalism, in the context of forced migration and beyond, in the light of recent social and sociolinguistic research.