The concept of real fiction draws on Ian Hacking's 'making up people'—the sociological process through which new kinds of subjects are produced through classification, measurement, and institutional practice. The homosexual, the delinquent, the genius, the entrepreneur—each is a historically specific category that, once constructed, becomes available as an identity that individuals can inhabit, resist, or struggle with. The entrepreneurial self is a real fiction in Hacking's sense: a category that did not exist before the 1980s but that now organizes millions of lives, reshaping conduct through its mere availability as an evaluative standard.
Bröckling's innovation was to show how the real fiction operates at the level of everyday practice rather than merely as ideology. The entrepreneurial self is not an idea we hold in our heads. It is a set of practices we perform: the weekly review in which we evaluate our progress toward self-set goals, the networking event in which we position ourselves competitively, the coaching session in which we identify obstacles to our optimization and develop strategies to overcome them. Each practice reinforces the fiction by making it operational—by converting the abstract ideal into concrete behaviors that the subject can perform and be evaluated on. The fiction becomes real through the accumulation of these practices across millions of subjects performing them daily.
The gap between the real fiction and actual performance is not a design flaw. It is the mechanism through which the governing apparatus sustains itself. If the entrepreneurial ideal were achievable, subjects would achieve it and stop optimizing. The permanent tribunal's function is to ensure the ideal remains unreachable—recalibrating with each approach, raising the standard with each achievement. The twenty-fold multiplier documented in You On AI is a recalibration event: the subject's capacity expands dramatically, the ideal shifts proportionally, and the gap—the space of chronic inadequacy that drives the chronic self-improvement—persists unchanged.
The real fiction of the entrepreneurial self is structural optimism's shadow twin. Jean-Baptiste Say's circuit predicted that capability expansion would self-correct through demand creation. The real fiction predicts the opposite: capability expansion creates not abundance but intensified demand, because the governing apparatus that measures capability is designed to ensure that no expansion ever satisfies. The subject who can do more must do more, and the 'must' is experienced not as external compulsion but as the subject's own recognition of her potential—which is the regime's recognition of her obligation, internalized so completely that the difference between potential and obligation has dissolved.
Bröckling developed the concept in dialogue with Foucault's late work on governmentality and Judith Butler's work on performativity—the ways in which repeated performance of a norm produces the subject it appears merely to describe. The entrepreneurial self is performatively constituted: subjects do not become entrepreneurs by having entrepreneurial essence; they become entrepreneurs by performing entrepreneurial behaviors often enough that the performance consolidates into identity. The performance is voluntary—no one forces the coaching session—but the voluntariness is structured by conditions that make non-performance economically and psychologically costly.
The term 'real fiction' appears throughout Bröckling's work but receives its most sustained development in his analysis of resilience—another real fiction that governs contemporary subjects. Like the entrepreneurial self, the resilient self is an ideal no one embodies but everyone pursues. The pursuit produces real effects: subjects who interpret vulnerability as deficit, who treat adaptation as obligation, who experience the failure to bounce back as personal inadequacy. AI adds a new chapter to the real fiction's history: when tools make the fiction's demands technically achievable, the fiction does not dissolve into reality. It recalibrates, maintaining the gap that governs, ensuring the subject's pursuit never ends because the destination is designed to retreat at the rate of approach.
Never Embodied, Always Governing. The real fiction is an unreachable ideal that nevertheless structures conduct—subjects orient themselves toward it, measure themselves against it, experience shortfalls as personal failure.
The Gap Is the Mechanism. The distance between actual performance and the ideal is not a problem to be solved but the engine of self-optimization—chronic inadequacy drives chronic improvement.
Voluntary Subjection. Subjects pursue the ideal not through external coercion but through internalized aspiration—the regime governs through desire rather than through prohibition.
Recalibration Through Capability Expansion. When tools expand what subjects can do, the ideal shifts proportionally—maintaining the gap, ensuring the fiction remains fictional while its governing effects remain real.
Performative Constitution. Repeated performance of entrepreneurial behaviors (self-evaluation, goal-setting, networking, skill acquisition) produces the entrepreneurial subject as an identity rather than merely a role.