Real Fiction

A real fiction, in Bröckling's framework, is a normative model that no one fully realizes but that nevertheless governs behavior with the force of reality. The entrepreneurial self is the paradigmatic real fiction of neoliberal governance: the ideal of a subject who optimizes every dimension of existence, competes perpetually, treats every skill as human capital, and experiences self-exploitation as self-realization. No one achieves this ideal—the permanent tribunal ensures the ideal remains unreachable—but everyone is measured against it, and the measurement produces real effects. Subjects who fall short experience the shortfall as personal inadequacy requiring remedy through further optimization. The fiction is 'real' not because it describes how people actually live but because it structures how people evaluate themselves and each other. AI intensifies the real fiction by making its demands technically feasible: when execution costs collapse, the gap between what the entrepreneurial ideal demands and what the subject can actually produce narrows—not because the ideal becomes achievable but because the subject's capacity expands to approach