Foucault Studies - 6 (2009)

SverreRaffnse,AlanRosenberg,AlainBeaulieu,SamBinkley,SvenOpitz, JensErikKristensen;withMorrisRabinowitz&DitteVilstrupHolm2009 ISSN:18325203 FoucaultStudies,No6,pp.
14,February2009
EDITORIAL NeoliberalGovernmentality SverreRaffnse,Alan Rosenberg, Alain Beaulieu,Sam Binkley, Sven Opitz, Jens Erik Kristensen;with MorrisRabinowitz&DitteVilstrupHolm. It is with great pleasure that we introduce issue 6 of Foucault Studies, which is a themed issue on neoliberal governmentality that has been guest edited by Sam Binkley from Emerson College, Boston, USA. This is the first special topicoriented issue of Foucault Studies, but we are eager to do more special topic issues in the coming years, and thus invite our readers to proposesuitabletopicsandguesteditors. Before introducing the articles in this issue, we would like to share some news about the recentdevelopmentofFoucaultStudies.Relaunchingthejournalin2007/2008wasnotwithout itsproblems,causingdelaysandalevelofcommunicationbelowourintendedstandards.The Journal is experimental in its format as we are striving to make it the best publication on Foucaults thinking, but unfortunately our ambitions have not always met our or our contributorsexpectations.However,weareconfidentthattheproblemsoflastyeararenowa thing of the past, as we have developed new administrative procedures and secured a renewedanddedicatedEditorialTeam. First of all, we welcome as CoEditors of Foucault Studies Sam Binkley from Emerson College, Boston, USA, and Sven Opitz from University of Basel, Switzerland. They join the Editorial Team of Sverre Raffnse, (EditorinChief); Alan Rosenberg (Managing Editor and Book Review Editor), Alain Beaulieu (CoEditor), Jens Erik Kristensen (CoEditor), and Morris Rabinowitz(CopyEditor). Furthermore, we are pleased to introduce our new Journal Administrator, Ms. Ditte Vilstrup Holm, who will assist the Editorial Team in the continuing development of Foucault Studies. She has previously worked with journal publishing at Blackwell Publishing, managing and developing editorial offices of scientific journals. Already, we are excited to announce that EBSCO Publishing has agreed to include Foucault Studies in their library products. EBSCO Publishingistheleadinginternationalelectronicreferencesourceownedbyacademiclibraries andwillthussecureaneffectiveexposureofarticlespublishedinFoucaultStudies.
Raffnse,Rosenberg,Beaulieu,Binkley,Opitz,Kristensen,withRabinowitz&Holm:Editorial
We invite you to visit our new and improved website www.foucaultstudies.com and sign up for Ealerts to receive news of upcoming issues being published and Calls for Papers for special issues of Foucault Studies. All articles in Foucault Studies continue to be published with openaccess,andwearealwaysinterestedinreceivinghighqualityarticleswithinthescopeof the journal. We strongly encourage our readers to submit articles that explore Foucaults conceptuality, comparative works involving Foucaults thought, critical essays studying the impactofFoucaultonvariousfieldsofstudy,empiricalworksusingsomeofFoucaultsideas, as well as critical works that involve material recently published, such as Foucaults seminars attheCollgedeFranceorFoucaultscomplementarythesisonKant. Foucault Studies is a forum committed to new approaches to Foucaults thoughts, and thus we are especially interested in attracting young, promising scholars to publish their articles in the Journal. When the Journal was launched in 2004, one of its intended purposes was to create a forumforthephilosophicaldiscussionofFoucaultsthinkingthatwouldalsoserveasamotor for driving the interest of young philosophers towards Foucault as they now had a forum in whichtopublish.ThiscontinuestobeoneoftheambitionsofFoucaultStudies. The current issue of Foucault Studies includes works organized around the concept of neoliberalgovernmentality.Thisnotiontodayappearsbothtimelyandoddlydated.While scholars have for many years responded to Foucaults provocative treatment of neoliberalism, it is only with the recent publication in English of Foucaults lectures of 197879, The Birth of Biopolitics, that English language scholars now have direct access to his most succinct statements about this term. Therein we find perhaps the most contemporary face of Foucault scholarship, one uniquely appropriate to the most current formations of power, to modes of subjectivity we readily identify in our own lives, and to proposals for resistance that have already been taken up by the global left. At the same time, access to these pages occurs at an odd moment, just as the broader global economic formation known as neoliberalism enters into a convulsive spasm few had anticipated even a year earlier. As this issue goes to press, newspapers openly declare the End of American Capitalism, the New Depression and heap scorn on the policies of deregulation that produced the financial crises of 2008. Thus, the timing of Foucaults neoliberal engagement is doubly ironic. Foucault began this discussionwellbeforetheneoliberalismweknowtodayhadcomeintoexistencebefore,for example, Margaret Thatcher famously shut her eyes to society, seeing only individuals and families, or before Ronald Reagan introduced us to his nine least favorite words; Im from the government and Im here to help. Our reception of Foucaults theoretical apparatus for the study of neoliberal governmentality may be too late, appearing on the scene, like another owlofMinerva,onlywhentheactioniswellover. Whether this is really true, of course, remains to be seen. Yet the excitement generated by Foucaults engagement with neoliberalism is apparent in the four papers comprising this themed issue, as it was at the conference from which these papers were solicited the Fifth annual meeting of the Social Theory Forum at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, in April 2008. This event, titled A Foucault for the 21st Century: Governmentality, Biopolitics and
FoucaultStudies,No6,pp.14.
Discipline in the New Millennium, organized by Sam Binkley and Jorge CapetilloPonce, was marked by the presence of this new economic Foucault, whose character and contemporaneity we have still to explore. The four works comprising this themed issue present only a critical opening on this project. First, Ute Tellman offers a broad and inclusive treatment of the theme of economy in the works of Foucault, and comes away with a critical viewofthelimitationsofFoucaultstreatmentoftheproblem.Providing,amongotherthings, ausefulsynthesisofFoucaultsvariousframingsofeconomyinhisearlierarchaelogicalworks and in his works of the late 1970s, Tellman points to the limitations of his approach, which derive from Foucaults failure ultimately to deliver the promised goods in his analysis of the economicfieldasaterrainofdynamicpowerrelations.Foucaultsaccountoftheinvisibility ofthemarket,Tellmannwrites,asaremedytotheinterventioniststrategiesofthedisciplinary state (long a justification invoked by liberal governments),fails to account for the manner in which market mechanisms operate outside and beyond domains marked by the epistemologiesofstateinstitutions. Next, two articles, by Jason Read and Trent Hamann, provide treatments of neoliberal governmentality as aspects of the production of subjectivity through everyday economic, political and cultural life, particularly where these practices open themselves up to programs of resistance and critique. Jason Read discusses Foucaults lectures of 197879, drawing key insights into the analysis of neoliberalism as a mode of governmentality, as a means by which subjectivity is inscribed and produced as a mode of conduct. This analysis benefits, in Reads paper, from its encounter with other authors, specifically Brown, Harvey, Negri and others. The discussion moves beyond mere theoretical reconstruction to arrive at current critical and political questions regarding the critique of neoliberalism, as theorized in various camps. Similarly, the domain of neoliberal governmentality is taken up by Trent Hamann as one linking the production of subjectivity with the problematics of economy. Hamann supplies a rich empirical context to the discussion of the governmentality of neoliberal subjects, drawing not only from a range of policy debates but also technological developments effecting everyday conducts and the production of atomized selfhood through the reconfiguration of distinctions between public and private space. Against the backdrop of conditions of atomization, responsibilization and globalization, Hamann proposes linkages between the analysis of neoliberal governmentality and contemporary challenges to global capitalism. Finally, taking up the thread of subjectivation, Sam Binkley offers a genealogical account of the specific practices of neoliberal governmentality as an undertaking in daily life. Binkley seeks to broaden the palette typically employed in governmentality research, by addressing the multidimensional undertaking of selfgovernment, understood as the work of governmentality. This entails an analysis of the objects of neoliberal governmentality itself the resistant matter within embodied conduct upon which the work of governmentality is performed. Taking as an example a popular selfhelp manual and visiting Jacques Donzelots analysis of the origins of social government Binkley argues a view of neoliberal governmentalityasanactiveandpracticalundertakingofsubjectivation.
Raffnse,Rosenberg,Beaulieu,Binkley,Opitz,Kristensen,withRabinowitz&Holm:Editorial
Following these articles are thirteen book reviews, providing a wide survey of recent publications in the field of Foucault studies. Book Reviews continues to be a vital part of Foucault Studies and we invite our readers to suggest publications that would be of interest to the readers of Foucault Studies. On our website www.foucaultstudies.com we list books that we want to have reviewed, and we invite all those interested in reviewing for the Journal to consultthislistandcontactAlanRosenberg. In the Editorial Section of issue 5, we announced our intentions to organize an international conference in Copenhagen, but we have not been able to secure the resources for this conference. Instead we ask our readers to look forward to our upcoming issues, which include: Foucault Studies 7 (September 2009), a general issue featuring new scholarship in Foucault studies, and a special issue centered on comparative and critical dialogues between the theoretical legacies of Michel Foucault and Norbert Elias. This issue will be guestedited byStefanieErnst(UniversityofHamburg,Germany).
Ute Tellmann 2009 ISSN: 1832-5203 Foucault Studies, No 6, pp. 5-24, February 2009
ARTICLE
Foucault and the Invisible Economy

Ute Tellmann, Universitt Basel ABSTRACT: This paper discusses the extent to which governmentality provides a critical visibility of the economy beyond its liberal imaginary. It argues that Foucaults conceptual and historical understanding of liberal governmentality has two traits that encumber a de-centering of the economy from a Foucauldian perspective. The first obstacle results from a persistent asymmetry of the concept of governmentality as it remains solely geared towards replacing the monolithic account of the state. Governmentality is therefore in danger of rendering the economic invisible instead of advancing an analytics of power appropriate to the specificity of this field. The second impediment relates to how Foucault reads the invisibility of the economy asserted in liberal discourse. While Foucault emphasizes how the invisible hand imparts a critical limitation towards the sovereign hubris of total sight, the paper unearths a more complex politics of truth tied to the invisible economy. Drawing on selected historical material, the papers shows that the liberal invisibility of the economy rather functions as a prohibitive barrier towards developing novel and critical visibilities of the economy. A Foucauldian perspective on economy, the paper concludes, benefits from piercing through this double invisibility of the economy.
Key words: liberalism, governmentality, invisible hand, economy, Foucault.
I.
Promises of Governmentality
A profound re-articulation of the political and economic realm lies at the heart of the notion of governmentality. Through the lenses of governmentality, the economy appears as an inextricable part of modern political rationalities. Foucaults aspiration to deconstruct the cold monster of the state led himhowever inadvertentlyto engage simultaneously with notions of the market, the economy and economic man. In doing so, he changed the very nature of these categories. Divested of their epistemological claims, these categories become intelligible as elaborations of liberal political
Tellmann: Invisible Economy
rationalities of governing. In effect, Foucault has taken up two cold monsters at the same time: the economy and the state. This article focuses on the simultaneous undoing of the inherited discourses on the economy and the state that Foucault proposes. It takes the crossing of boundaries between the economic and the political to be one of the most innovative and intriguing aspects of the concept of governmentality. It is not doubted that Foucault offers powerful tools and tremendous insights for posing and commencing such a simultaneous de-centring of the state and the economy. But how far, this paper asks, does the concept of governmentality answer to the insightful theoretical agenda it implicitly and explicitly contains? Is the concept of governmentality useful for challenging the prevalent conceptualization of the economy to the same extent as that of the state? Unfortunately, as this article seeks to demonstrate, governmentality does not keep the promise to undo both of these cold monsters at the same time. In crucial ways, the conceptual architecture of governmentality stays strongly wedded to the de-centring of the state, while the economy remains shielded from becoming the proper object of a Foucauldian analytics of power. 1 The economy becomes therefore, as it will be argued, in an important and critical sense analytically invisible. 2 Despite Foucaults critical re-reading of economic discourse, the market ultimately remains for him, as for liberalism itself, a space of invisibility, populated by interested subjects, who are governed by the conditioning of their choices. One hopes in vain for an analytics of the malleable forms of temporality, spatiality and valuation inherent in the economic; Foucault provides us with no Economic Order of Things, which would follow the epistemological authorities, legal frames and spaces of comparison, which organize sociality through objects and money. Instead, the governmental re-articulation of the economy ultimately leads us back to what turns out to be a familiar liberal imaginary of the market. 3 The vantage point for measuring and problematizing the contended invisible economy is provided by Foucaults ethos of investigation itself. As is well known, this ethos of investigation furthers two related analytical tasks: to pierce through the
1
For Foucaults uses of this notion see Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality. An Introduction. Volume I (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 82. This article takes the two lecture courses, Security, Territory, Population and The Birth of Biopolitics as its main references, for the simple reason that they feature most prominently the question of economy as part of an analysis of relations of power (Michel Foucault: Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collge de France 1977-78. (Houndsmill, ENG: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008) and Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics. Lectures at the Collge de France 1978-79 (Houndsmill, ENG: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008)). For the necessity of probing deeper into Foucaults account of economy and liberalism see also William Walters, Decentering the Economy. Economy and Society, 28, 2 (1999): 312-323. His argument concentrates more on how governmentality fails to properly account for the birth of the economy as a distinct field of reality. Ricardo, rather than Adam Smith, should be the proper anchor for such a discursive emergence.
Foucault Studies, No 6, pp. 5-24.
systems of veridiction and to unfold a novel and critical visibility of the social, in which the lines of force and their fragility are brought to the surface. 4 By calling himself a cartographer, Foucault emphasizes the importance of producing novel and critical visibilitiesa status which Gilles Deleuze affirms in his homage to his friend. 5 As such, Foucault exposes a profound commitment to visibility, understood as the effect of a critical operation. 6 The following argument takes this ethos of investigation and this quest for critical visibility as its vantage point for problematizing the protracted invisibility of the economy within governmentality. The argument pursued here contains two parts, both of which deal with the question of how the economy and its discourse are opened to an analytics of power and contextualized within a politics of truth through an analytics of governmentality. 7 Throughout, the particular articulation of the political sphere and economic discourse is paramount for understanding the invisibility of the economy.
The relevant part reads as follows: Dchiffer une strate de ralit de manire telle quen mergent les lignes de forces et de fragilit; les points de rsistance et les points dattaques possible, les voies traces et les chemins de traverse. Cest une ralit de lutes possible que je cherche faire apparaitre. (Michel Foucault, Dits et crits II, 1976-1988 (Paris: Gallimard, 2001), 633). See also Wendy Browns account of genealogy for a discussion of this understanding of knowledge-production (Wendy Brown, Genealogical Politics, in The Later Foucault: Politics and Philosophy, ed. Jeremy Moss (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1998), 45). He does so in an interview with Les Nouvelles Littraires titled Sur la sellette, in March 1975 (Michel Foucault, Dits et crits I, 1954-1975. (Paris: Gallimard, 2001), 1588). Deleuzes account of Foucault centers on this cartographic project. He speaks of making see and making hear what is determining our regimes of visibility and sayability (Gilles Deleuze, Foucault (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1986), 42). That Foucault wanted the knowledge he produces to have a tactical and strategic use and had thus to present strategic links and accounts of forces is a persistent theme in his interviews, lectures and writings. See, for example, the lecture of January 7 in his lecture course Society must be defended (Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collge de France, 1975-76, ed. Mauro Bertani and Alessandro Fontana, (New York: Picador, 2003). The argument against the hermeneutics of suspicion as marshaled by Paul Ricoeur is based on showing and exposing the superficiality of things in an overview, from higher and higher up, which allows the depth to be laid out in front of him in a more and more profound visibility; depth is resituated as an absolutely superficial secret, as Foucault put it in an early work, Nietzsche, Freud, Marx (Foucault 1967, cit. in Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow. Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics. Second Edition. With an afterword by and an interview with Michel Foucault, (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 107). Foucault defined his form of doing philosophy as analyzing the politics of truth: However, in one way or another, and for simple factual reasons, what I am doing is something that concerns philosophy, that is to say, the politics of truth, for I do not see many other definitions of the word philosophy; apart from this (Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, 3).
The first part argues that the economy remains invisible because a persistent asymmetry in the concept of governmentality privileges the state vis--vis the economy as the object of a Foucauldian critique. The economy never becomes an object of analysis in its own right; therefore the mediation of relations of power through money and objects drops from view. Consequently, the specificity of this distinct, yet impure form of ordering, that we refer to as economic, disappears. Despite the aspiration of governmentality to a simultaneous examination of the reciprocity and coconstitution of economic and political discourses, the concept of governmentality itself remains asymmetrical in its aim and critical weight. The first reason, then, for the persistent invisibility of the economy within governmentality research, derives from the failure of the concept to properly address the political within the economic. The second reason for the lack of critical visibility of the economy leads us to a discussion of how Foucault understands the politics of truth implied within economic discourse. The main point of contention is Foucaults reading of the invisible hand. According to this reading, the liberal understanding of the invisible economy amounts to an epistemological limit posited against the aspiration of an economic sovereign: it disturbs critically any presumption to see a social totality from a single vantage point. 8 This reading of the invisible market has its merits, but attends only insufficiently to the political problematique at stake in seeing the market as a space of invisibility. The pervasive trope of invisibility is equally invested in regulating the regimes of visibility circulating throughout the social body itself, determining what can legitimately be rendered visible, and how. A more thorough genealogy of this trope demonstrates that liberalism itself is in fact divided in respect to the politics of visibilitya point that largely escapes Foucaults genealogy of liberalism. Foucault, who is usually inclined to demonstrate the dispersion and minute deviations underneath a unified tradition, has unwittingly glossed over these differing liberalisms and the multiple politics of invisibility. 9 Too quickly, the invisibility of the economy is taken as a tool for the criticism of reality, 10 rather than as a machine for seeing, whose epistemological privileges, lines of exclusion and technologies of knowledge need to be dissected.
II.
Asymmetrical ViewsSeeing like a State
In a sense, Foucaults account of the economy has never outgrown the reluctance with which he engaged this issue. Questions of economy were never Foucaults primary concern; he rather aimed at circumventing and disturbing them. Since his early
8 9
10
Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 283. Michel Foucault, Nietzsche, Genealogy, History. In Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews by Michel Foucault, ed. Donald Bouchard (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), 146. Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics. 320.
writings, the struggle against the dominance of a Marxist form of economism led him to establish his project to study power, conduct, subjectivity and truth as a field clearly distinguishable and set aside from the study of economic relations proper. 11 Of course, he never denied that relations of power should not be understood as an additional layer within the socio-economic field. 12 They reside instead in the very interstices of other relations: Mechanisms of power are an intrinsic part of all these relations []. 13 Nevertheless, such relations continue to possess their own density and distinctively non-economic imperatives as they are directed to shape the conduct of conduct, and call forth their own struggles and resistances: These revolts of conduct have their specificity: they are distinct from political or economic revolts in their objective and form. 14 Whenever Foucault uses the notion of economy himself, this usage is usually a quite deliberate and strategic transposition of its meaning into the field of power, playing with and countering the Marxist tradition: hence, he speaks of the economy of power 15 or power as a political economy of the body as in Discipline and Punish. 16 The materialist anchor usually associated with the economy is transposed into the notion of the governing of lifepresented as a governmental rather than an economic problematic. 17 It is thus in a way apt to say that Foucault circumvents rather than takes up the issue of economy in his attempt to dislodge the economistic and totalizing strands of the Marxist tradition. The lectures at the College de France, in which he developed his notion of governmentality, continue with this strategic evasion. As indicated before, this time the circumvention led paradoxically into the heart of economy. Transposing the question of the state into a question of rationalities and technologies of governing entangled his argument in economic discourses. Instead of the commonly assumed quasi-ontological difference between the economy and the political horizon, Foucault suggests that an unbroken plane of governmental strategies and reflections envelop both spheres. Hence, he firmly treaded onto the territory of the economy itself, with the consequence of disturbing its shape. It is therefore justified to say that governmentality, however unwittingly, proposes a simultaneous reading of the constitution of both the economic and the
11 12
13
14 15 16
17
Foucault, Dits et crits II, 629. Michel Foucault, The Subject and Power, in ed. Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, Second Edition (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 218. Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, 2. See also his elaborations of his analytics of power in an interview with Pasquale Pasquino in 1978 Precisazioni sul potere. Riposta ad alcuni critici (Foucault, Dits et crits II, 625ff.). Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, 196. Foucault, Dits et crits II, 631. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage Books, 1995). See paradigmatically the last chapter in Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 140f.
political. In this respect, Foucault comes close to a certain theoretical program for which Bruno Latour has long argued, which asks for going beyond the traditional divisions assumed by modernity by unearthing their common and entangled constitution. 18 What Latour suggests in respect to the division between society and nature, Foucault suggests implicitly for the economic and the political sphere. 19 But while Foucault might pose the question of the symmetrical making and envisioning of economy and politics, his concept of governmentality retains a thoroughly asymmetrical structure. For understanding this asymmetrical nature and the limits it entails, we need to briefly revisit the basic elements of Foucaults discussion of economy from the perspective of governmentality. Foucault suggests that the emergence of the modern meaning of economy as a level of reality should not be understood as the mere effect of a presumed differentiation of the economy into a functionally coherent subsystem of society. 20 Instead, it belongs to a political problematization of a particular rationality of governing that aims at the social body as a whole. Foucault thus sees the conceptualization of economy as part of the episode in the mutation of technologies of power and an episode in the instalment of this technique of apparatuses of security that seems to me to be one of the typical features of modern societies. 21 These technologies take the population as their main target of intervention. 22 Security, Population and Government this series defined modern politics for Foucault. The knowledge and rationalities of economy prominently underlie this series. 23 The novel conceptualization of economy as a self-regulated reality and the birth of the new collective subject of the population are, Foucault maintains at various points, inextricably tied together in their common function of framing new objects, technologies and techniques of governing. 24 Evolving in tandem, the modern concept of economy divests the object of population from the cameralist techniques of the policey, with their administrative logic of minute control and encyclopaedic
18
19
20 21 22 23 24
Bruno Latour, "Postmodern? No, Simply Amodern! Steps Towards an Anthropology of Science," Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science, 21, 1 (1990): 145-171. Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 13ff. Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, 95. Ibid., 34. Ibid., 64f; 95. Ibid., 76f. The differentiation between the notion of technique and technologies in Foucault is notoriously indeterminate. In his lecture-course, Foucault suggests understanding technologies of power as the very complex edifice or system of correlation, in which different specific techniquesas for example the disciplinary techniques of putting someone in a cellare aligned. While the history of techniques is precise and long-winded, the history of technologies is the more fuzzy history of correlations defining the dominant feature (Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, 8).
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knowledge. 25 At the same time, the concept of population pushes the meaning of economy outside of the narrow confines of the household. No longer referring to the proper administration of the oikos or the prudential advice of saving on means, economy projects a new social ontology: a plane of circulatory flows, naturalness and internal forces, forging a complex causal intermeshing between a milieu and its population. 26 It is therefore the problem of circulation and causality that is at stake in this notion of milieuThe milieu, then, will be that in which circulation is carried out. The milieu is a set of natural givensrivers, marshes, hillsand a set of artificial givensan agglomeration of individuals, of houses, etcetera. The milieu is a certain number of combined, overall effects bearing on all who live in it. 27 Very prominently, the notion of the milieu and its circulatory structure articulate the population as a composite figure comprising natural circumstances, habits, urban settings or laws inter alia. Political economy thus appears as a form of knowledge integral to a new dispositif, whose outlines ignore the usual division maintained between the economy and the political sphere. The conception of economy is thus firmly positioned within the field of governmental reason and technique. To what extent does this transposition allow a conceptualization of the economy and economic practicesnow loosely referring to the specificity of modes of ordering which rest upon the mediation through by money, objects, valuationsas framed and shaped by a security-dispositif? Asking this question is not a play on words, rather it posits and tests the viability of the securitydispositif to function as a symmetrical analytical device capable of equally dislodging both the state and the market. In other words: Does the discourse on economy succeed only in elaborating the new dispositif of power, being itself exclusively geared toward the re-articulation of the state? Or does it allow the development of a challenging analytical perspective on the economy capable of addressing it in its specificity? Resolving this question requires a discussion of Foucaults somewhat incomplete analysis of the technologies and techniques of the security-dispositif. 28 The outline, he presents, juxtaposes the security-dispositif with disciplinary techniques in terms of their organization of space, time and norms. 29 The space of the securitydispositif is no longer organized within the cells and grids of discipline, neither does
25 26 27 28
29
Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 323f and 328. Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, 94; 30f; 45. Ibid., 21. The cursory explication of the security-dispositif by Foucault has given rise to the complaint that Foucaults analytical strategies focus too much on purely theoretical or textual material (Pat OMalley, Lorna Weir and Clifford Shearing, Governmentality, Criticism, Politics, Economy and Society, 26, 4 (1997): 501-517). The question posed here has a different concern: it inquires about the fecundity of inspiration, which Foucaults analysis contains for developing a richer, more detailed or more material account. Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, 44f.
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it rely on the temporality of homogeneous units of time, or impose the norms of disciplinary conduct on the individual body. Instead, it assumes a given milieu of circulation, it assumes the aleatory occurrences of events, and it derives its norms from statistical regularities calculated on the level of the population. It is, Foucault concludes, an idea of a government of men that would think first of all and fundamentally of the nature of things and no longer of mens evil nature. 30 Foucaults analysis of this dispositif is not comparable to the dense materiality and detail he marshalled in describing the dispositif of sexuality or the disciplinary arrangements of visibility, knowledge and sanctions. Still, his cursory remarks on this subject are inspiring because they call attention to the ordering of spatiality, temporality and norms as unique aspects of economic regimes of circulation. But despite his invocations of the economic as modulated by a specific dispositif of organizing time, space and economic norms, this line of research is not pursued consistently through his investigations. The analytics of the security-dispositif are not geared towards understanding the circulation of things and money. They do not point towards unearthing what might be called an economic order of things in its epistemic, juridical, spatial and strategic dimensions, and in terms of their unique effects. Today, as genetic engineering, intellectual property regulation, derivatives and techniques of transplantations refashion the very ontology, obligations and measurements tied to the order of things, the omission of these orders becomes even more accentuated. Instead, Foucault directs our attention to the interplay between a milieu and the wills and interests of the subjects by which one tries to affect the population. 31 Certainly, as Foucault states, within the security-dispositif, the multiplicity of individuals is no longer pertinent, the population is. 32 However, the individual still plays a decisive role in his analysis of the economic government of population to the extent that, properly managed, maintained and encouraged, it will make possible what one wants to obtain at the level that is pertinent. 33 Although the population had been introduced as a composite figure including things and spatial settings, this figure becomes more and more a composite of sentient, willing and interested individuals responding with their calculations to given incentives. 34 The conduct of conduct through the manipulation of interest becomes the single most
30 31 32 33 34
Ibid., 49. Ibid., 21. Ibid., 42. Ibid. Stuart Elden has discussed how territoriality has elapsed from the analytical perspective, while being so prominently featured within the very title of the lecture-course: Security, Territory, Population. He argues that this omission might be remedied within the very framework proposed by Foucault, but remarks nevertheless this curious obliteration, at the cost of an exclusive account of population analytically separated from territoriality (Stuart Elden, Government, Calculation, Territory, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 25 (2007): 562-580).
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important key for rendering this dispositif analytically intelligible. As a consequence, the analytical visibility given to the market-economy in Foucaults perspective increasingly resembles the well-known outlines of the prevalent liberal understanding of the economy. Sifting through his lectures, one finds the following all too familiar imaginary of the (market) economy as part and parcel of the governmental rearticulation: it is a bounded space of circulation, it answers to the forces of reality itself, it is regulated through incentives. It is about exchange or competition and it is situatedrepeating the usual oppositionsvis--vis the interventionist welfare state. Traditionally, Foucaults genealogies and archaeologies have drawn their analytical power from a disruption of the known oppositions and options, already prefigured at the surface of dominant discourses. In respect to the question of economy, governmentality appears to fall short in attaining this expected Foucault-Effect. It seems, then, that one is confronted with an asymmetrical conceptual anatomy of the security-dispositif: the discourse on economy elucidates a specific rationality of the security-dispositif, which contains plausible suggestions for thinking of the state without entrails, while the elaboration of this dispositif fails to elucidate the order of the economic itself, or, as I have tentatively put it, the economic order of things. A limit appears in how the elaboration of the techniques of governmentality can indeed function as a complete heuristic to displace effectively and productively the implicit universality of both the state and the marketwhich is not to say that it does not re-articulate the economy to a certain extent. Detecting these specific governmental strategies in different lieux sociaux, including firms, consumer programs or bureaucracies, exposes how deeply this type of power is enmeshed within economic forms. Nevertheless, Foucaults approach is capable of identifying only those strategies of governing that operate through incentives, without successfully conceptualising the economy beyond its liberal imaginary. Wendy Browns statementthat the governmental account of neo-liberal strategies is not about the economywhile foregrounding the market, is more fitting than one might have hoped. 35 At the end of the two courses at the Collge de France, Foucault summarizes his interpretation of liberalism as having pointed out those types of rationality that are implemented in the methods by which human conduct is directed through a state administration. 36 It is certainly surprising and misleading that Foucault restricts the scope of his analysis to state administration. But Foucaults approach signals the awareness of the specificity of governmentality as it remains geared toward dissecting the modes of seeing like a stateborrowing here somewhat polemically the famous title by Scott. 37 Given that technologies of governing emanate
35
36 37
Wendy Brown, Neo-Liberalism and the End of Liberal Democracy. Theory and Event, 7, 3 (2003). http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/tae/v007/7.1brown.html#copyright (accessed June 16, 2008). Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 322. James Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have
13
throughout the social body, this allegation is misleading. But it captures nevertheless the asymmetrical weight of the concept of governmentality. The point of contention in respect to how Foucault draws the question of economy into the orbit of political reason is not directed against the political horizon he spans over the economy. The point of contention I am advancing here lies in how he does it: unearthing the political in economic forms of ordering could and should mean, from a Foucauldian perspective, the development of an analytics of power appropriate to the specificity of this field. But within governmentality, it means to excavate the economic, with neither the mediations of relations through money or objects being fully addressed. It is in this sense that the economy remains invisible within the political perspective of governmentality.
III.
Tropes of InvisibilitySeeing like a Market
The invisibility of the economy is not only an unwitting effect of Foucaults elaboration of the security-dispositif, it is also explicitly encoded within the genealogy of the economic discourse that Foucault presents in his analysis. The invisible hand plays a paramount and paradigmatic role in Foucaults account of the liberal politics of truth: key to this governmental interpretation of the invisible hand is the dispersion of the epistemological authority it enforces, and its effect in undermining the authority of the sovereign. But Foucaults reading fails to account fully for the political problematique of visibility and invisibility in the social body; hence only a partial and onesided genealogy of the invisible hand emerges, one which privileges the critical function of the invisible hand while underestimating the limitations imposed by this trope. The question of what is determined as invisible or visible in respect to the social body, and to whom such visibility is accorded, has a far wider political texture than Foucault is capable of conveying in his lectures. Furthermore, this wider political texture correlates with the inner differences of the liberal traditiona tradition that, as McClure exemplifies in respect to John Locke, has always been guided and disquieted by questions of knowledge and criteria of judgement. 38 Liberalism itself is not unified in respect to the politics of truth inscribed within the visible hand. In order to draw out these intrinsic differences within what passes as a purportedly unified liberal tradition, the following discussion draws, if only cursorily, on historical select material. On the one hand, it takes up the short-lived radical democraticliberal thought of the eighteenth century (exemplified by Thomas Paine or Marquis de Condorcet), and, on the other, it refers to the work of Friedrich A. Hayek, who presents an important strand of liberalism prominent since the nineteenth century. This division between strands of liberalism are not reducible to the historical gap
Failed (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998). Kirstie McClure, Judging Rights: Lockean Politics and the Limits of Consent, (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996), 63; 69.
38
14
that divides them. Neither do these strands correlate with the distinction between liberalism and neo-liberalism that Foucault discusses more prominently. Rather, they foreground a difference within the politics of truth implicit within the liberal tradition that has becomes particularly virulent at the end of the eighteenth century, but exceeds this historical moment. Still, incorporating this particular historical moment is instructive, as Foucault knew, when he chronicled the break between the classical and modern episteme at the turn of centuries in The Order of Things. Curiously, for his account of liberal governmentality, this break plays no role. What he disperses in The Order of Things, notably the discursive shifts in political economy, remains surprisingly unified in the genealogy of the liberal account of economy he offers in his studies of governmentality. 39 Pinpointing these inconsistencies is not merely an exercise in scholarly erudition: these differences correlate with differences in the politics of truth contained in the liberal tradition itself, and for this reason their absence constitutes critical omissions. In order to recover these differences, an explication of the trope of the invisible hand, as seen through Foucaults limited analysis, is required. The question of visibility and its related epistemology is central to how Foucault related the concept of economy to the liberal rationalization of government. Foucault sought to understand the very boundary between the spheres of politics and economy as a specific epistemological construction: Political economy was important, even in its theoretical formulation, inasmuch as (and only inasmuch as, but this is clearly a great deal) it points out to the government where it had to go to find the principle of truth of its own governmental practice. 40 The decisive issue is not this or that particular economic theory or fact, nor does this truth exist within the heads of economists. 41 Instead, of paramount importance is the very structure of association established between political reason and truth. Political reason and the sphere of politics are within liberalism, according to Foucault, tied to the market as a court of veridiction. The link established by liberalism between the truth of the market and the rationalities of governing does not constitute a straightforward relation. Key to liberal39
40 41
Adam Smith, who assumed in the former account a middling position between the modern and the classical age, turns later into a paradigmatic figure for the modern liberal political rationality. Also, the modern finitude of men Foucault diagnoses in the Order of Things is not properly translated into his account of governmentality. Attending to this shift towards finitude might help to provide answers to the question of the relation between biopolitics and economywhich is not sufficiently addressed by Foucault. See Ulrich Brckling, Menschenkonomie, Humankapital. Eine Kritik der biopolitischen konomie, in Disziplinen des Lebens. Zwischen Anthropologie, Literatur und Politik, ed. Ulrich Brckling et al. (Tbingen, GER: Gunter Narr Verlag, 2004) for an argument about the missing link between biopolitics and economy. Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 32. Ibid., 30.
15
ism is the paradoxical nature of this relation as it refers political reason to an object of knowledge that remains invisible. The economy, in other words, defies the aspirations to know, resulting in a paradoxical epistemological ground. Paradigmatically, the invisible hand of Adam Smith stands for this disruption of the authority of a sovereign vision; it articulates the impossibility of seeing the whole of society from a single vantage point. The singular most important point in respect to this invisibility is the limit of power it produces, according to Foucault. The following words, which Foucault puts into the mouth of the homo oeconomicus in a fictitious dialogue with the juridical sovereign, nicely exemplify this stance: He also tells the sovereign: You must not. But why must he not? You must not because you cannot. And you cannot in the sense that you are powerless. And why are you powerless, why cant you? You cannot because you do not know and you do not know because you cannot know. 42 Therefore, the figure of the invisible economy has a pivotal role for the discursive initiation of these limits and their governmental effects. Foucault distinguishes on this ground between liberal political rationality proper and its Physiocratic predecessor. The Physiocrats, Foucault emphasizes, referred political reason not to an invisible economy, but, on the contrary, they procured a tableau conomique, which enabled a sovereign vision over the whole. The truth of the socioeconomic body, transparent to sovereign eyes, was to guide the decision of the sovereign, without dislodging him. Liberalism proper, on the other hand, according to Foucault, begins by asserting a barred vision of the social body. 43 At several places throughout these lectures, Foucault describes economic thought as the very discursive stronghold that establishes such limits, which is in fundamental ways also an epistemological limit. Hence, in contrast to the wisdom of political philosophy, Foucault thus ties liberalismin its essential aspectsnot to the form of law, but to the discourse on economy. 44 The heretics of the police-state with its megalomaniacal and obsessive fantasy of a totally administered society 45 were, he points out, the economists as they posed a reality, which had its own density and naturalness: [] It was the conomistes who mounted a critique of the police state in terms of the eventual or possible birth of a new art of government. 46 The discourse on economy, with its attending notions of circulatory flows, milieus, interests and aleatory occurrences,
42 43 44
45
46
Ibid., 283. Ibid., 285f. To be precise, one has to add that Foucaults argument here is strictly historical, as political economy as a form of knowledge is not liberal either by virtue or nature (Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 321). For a more extensive discussion of the relation between law in its function as a limit and the interpellation of the economy as a natural limit, see the lecture from 17 January 1979 (Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics). Nikolas Rose and Peter Miller, Political Power beyond the State: Problematics of Government, British Journal of Sociology, 43, 2 (1992): 189. Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, 347.
16
defies any aspiration to govern directly, minutely and en detailto the same extent that it made the sovereign vision over these processes impossible: The possibility of limitation and the question of truth are both introduced into governmental reason through political economy: 47 I think that fundamentally it was political economy that made it possible to ensure the self-limitation of governmental reason. 48 We have thus arrived at the heart of Foucaults reading of the trope of the invisibility of the economy: The essential and politically relevant understanding of the famous invisible hand centres on the very restriction it imposes on the sovereign hubris to know and to rule the whole of society and its economy from a central position. With an almost surprising verve, Foucault elaborates this point after having drawn parallels between the limits Kant imposed on the proper uses of pure reason on the one hand, and the self-limitation of political reason enacted by political economy on the other: 49 Thus the economic world is naturally opaque and naturally non-totalizable. It is originally and definitely constituted from a multiplicity of points of view [] economics is an atheistic discipline; economics is a discipline without God; economics is a discipline without totality; economics is a discipline that begins to demonstrate not only the pointlessness, but also the impossibility of a sovereign point of view over the totality of the state he has to govern. 50 It is the invisible economy that provides the tool for this limitation. This account of the invisibility of the economy as an impossibility of a sovereign perspective is certainly kindred to the critiques of modern epistemological authority and claims to universality presented by post-structuralism, feminism and post-colonial theory. The sovereign view from nowhere is de-authorized by reference to the multifarious and limited perspectives within the depth of the social body. Hence, a certain proximity and fondness colours Foucaults account of the trope of
47 48 49
50
Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 17. Ibid., 13. The comparison reads as follows: Kant too, a little later moreover, had to tell man that he cannot know the totality of the world. Well, some decades earlier, political economy had told the sovereign: Not even you can know the totality of the economic process. There is no sovereign in economics. There is no economic sovereign. This is a very important point in the history of economic thought, certainly, but also and above all in the history of governmental reason(Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 283). Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 282. The invisible hand is thus essential to liberalism, which is, Foucault contends, pre-occupied with the question of limited or frugal government and can be defined as a technology of government whose objective is its own selflimitation [] (Ibid., 319). It is haunted by the constant question of why to govern at all and subjects itself to the incessant critique of its own, [...] I would be inclined to see in liberalism a form of critical reflection on governmental practice (Ibid., 321). The theme of limited government and the motif of critique circumscribe, according to Foucault, the Janus face of liberalism: as an elaboration of mostly indirect forms of rule - which might paradoxically turn out to be quite extensive - and as a tool for the criticism of reality(Ibid., 320).
17
invisibility. This fondness might never have stopped him from telling a story of liberalism that chronicles the mechanisms undercutting this announced ethos of delimitation. But the present argument is less concerned with the merits of Foucaults analysis of liberalism tout court, than with the particular reading of the invisibility of the economy and its theoretical effects and omissions. That this reading omits decisive aspects can be perceived by revisiting the historical record. A reworked genealogical perspective provides the clues for unearthing a much wider political problematique of visibility than Foucaults narrative presents. Emma Rothschilds history of Economic Sentiments draws our attention towards the contested tropes of invisibility at the end of the eighteenth century. It is a time at which, she emphasizes, the boundaries between the economic and political spheres were far from clearly drawn. 51 The turn towards the nineteenth century, in the wake of the French Revolution, was rife with intense contestations of how and to whom the social was visible. The political problematique at stake revolved in a much more general sense around the uncertainty of vision within a situation defined by the intense questioning of inherited structures of authority at a time of political upheaval. In contrast, if one follows Foucaults account, one would expect the major difference within the liberal tradition to reside between the nineteenth century and the neoliberalism of the twentieth century respectively. But a more careful genealogical account, which intends to uncover the contestations, struggles and the appropriations of vocabulary, 52 would find rather, that such fissures were pertinent and present around 1800, when economic reason did not yet pose a strict limit for the exercise of its counterpart. 53 Sheldon Wolin has remarked how easily these differences in liberalism seem to slip from attention. 54 But around the time of the French Revolution, they came to the fore in an intense contestation about the questions of seeing and knowing the socio-economic body. The following historical ma-
51
52
53 54
Emma Rothschild, Economic Sentiments. Adam Smith, Condorcet, and the Enlightenment, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), 50. Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, and Michel Foucault, Nietzsche, Genealogy, History, 154f. Rothschild, 38f. Sheldon Wolin, Politics and Vision: Continuity and Innovation in Western Political Thought. Expanded Edition, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 263. Sheldon Wolin is more inclined to take such differences not as internal to liberalism, but as signaling two different traditions easily lumped together: democratic radicalism and liberalism. Thomas Paine would belong to the former, whereas Adam Smith to the latter. Emma Rothschild tries to draw out the differences between Adam Smith and the liberalism of the nineteenth century, which was ever more inclined to secure the foundations of unquestioned (epistemological) order. These differences are here accounted for as they help to distinguish the differences in respect to the politics of visibility or invisibility. But of course, it is important to keep in mind that Adam Smith and David Humes skepticism towards the democratization of judgment was profound.
18
terial does not only refer back to the end of the eighteenth century, it uses this moment to illustrate differences within liberalism between, on the one hand, thinkers such as Thomas Paine, Condorcet and to some extend Adam Smith, and on the other, Friedrich von Hayek. We learn from the historical record that the socio-economic body was not only, deemed invisible to the sovereign: the invisibility of society and its correlate blindness were also prominently attested to those newly attending the political stage, those who had but a limited private stock of reason, as Edmund Burke famously put it. It was allegedly they who could not see and to whom societal necessities and impending structures remained essentially invisible. Jacques Necker, Minister of Finance at the time, maintained that the people are like children, acting without reflection, only enlightened by their instinct, as in all this immense space which is called the future they never see more than tomorrow. 55 Similarly, Adam Ferguson complained that every step and every movement of the multitude are made with equal blindness to the future. 56 Only guided by the immediacy of their own perceptions and failing to take the socio-economic rules properly into view, their political utterances lacked the intelligibility and vision necessary. The mob, as the famous scholar of population and economy Thomas Robert Malthus has put it, was goaded by resentment for real sufferings but totally ignorant of the quarter from which they originate. 57 For that reason, they were easily led to follow the chimeras of thought and flights of the imagination and were easily deceived by appearances. But of course, so were the philosophers and radical liberals, such as Thomas Paine, who has shown himself totally unacquainted with the structure of society. 58 Visibility and sight, blindness and ignorance, virtues and vices were attributed variously among the sovereign, the people, and those who allegedly deceived them with their theories. Hence, even such limited historical snapshots draw attention to the multiple, highly debated and heavily charged allegations with respect to claims of knowledge. Foucault himself has suggested that any writing of the genealogy of knowledge in this period has to do away with the binaries of enlightenment posed between blindness and sight, night and day, knowledge and ignorance. Rather, it should comprehend the extended struggle, not between knowledge and ignorance, but between different forms of knowledge. 59 Following these lines of conflict, even
Cit. Rothschild, 39; 23. Ibid., 123. Thomas Robert Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population. Sixth edition (London: William Pickering, 1986), 501; 494. Malthus, 526; 505. Foucault elaborates this in a discussion about philosophy and science and the disciplining of knowledge. See the lecture of February 25 in the lecture course Foucault, Society must be Defended.
55 56 57
58 59
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minimally, shows that undoing the hubris of sovereign knowledge and asserting a structural invisibility are two distinctive moves associated with invisibility and with different effects. One can observe a profound discursive break between the radical democratic liberals of the eighteenth century such as Thomas Paine or Condorcet and the subsequently dominant form of liberalism since the nineteenth century. 60 To the latter, the social body appeared frighteningly complex and uncertain in all its overlapping relations. 61 This socio-economic ontology of countless interdependencies defied the transparent tableau conomique, just as Foucault would have expected. Yet, early liberal political thought was busy producing certain forms of knowledge about the socio-economic body that would answer to this complexity. Condorcet coined the social mathematics in order to retrieve a probable truth amidst the uncertain and changing opinions, while always remaining cautious in respect to proposing a truth of society. 62 Thomas Paine was equally busy determining a calculative and political knowledge about shares of civilisation to be distributed. It would be the task of a more thorough historical epistemology to unpack the politics of truth associated therewith. But more important for this discussion was the mere fact that neither a general nor structural invisibility of society was asserted, nor was a secure position from which to judge and to know ever assumed. They projected a fatherless worldusing a term Rothschild coinedof unfounded and uncertain epistemological authority, but did not assume a barred vision in respect to the socio-economic complexity. Even Adam Smith, whose scepticism led him to assume that politics is the folly of man, 63 did not venture to maintain the impossibility of any form of theoretical visibility of the socio-economic. As Rothschild argues convincingly, the assertion of the invisible hand had no deep prohibitive structure of vision in Smith. For Smith, as for Condorcet, Rothschild argues, the enlightened disposition was an uncertain condition. While no certain epistemological ground was to be had, it entailed theorization and envisioning. 64 The fatherless world of uncertain judgements offered no sovereign or certain vision, but neither did it impose any specific prohibition on rendering the economic visible per se. But the trope of invisibility did turn into a prohibitive bar to the envisioning of the socio-economic world later on. The liberalism of the nineteenth century, filtered through the work of classical economists, was much more invested in estabWolin and Rothschild. Antoine-Nicolas de Condorcet, Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind. (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1955), 131. Johan Heilbron, The Rise of Social Theory, (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), 168, and Rothschild, 178f. Albert Hirschman, The Passions and the Interest: Political Arguments for Capitalism Before its Triumph, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 104. Rothschild, 123.
60 61
62
63
64
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lishing unquestioned foundations of order. Hayeks liberalism, harking back more to Edmund Burke than to Thomas Paine (contrary to what Foucaults historical narrative makes believe) is paradigmatic for the simultaneous assertion of invisibility and foundation: 65 it is the very invisibility of the whole which demands, according to Hayek, submission to those rules of conduct that we have never made, and which we have never understood. 66 It is, he concedes, a bitter necessity, which is not easily accepted by a hubristic reason. 67 The decisive moment of submitting to the assumed rules and regularities of the given is founded on the grounds of this essential invisibility. 68 The extended order of the market answers to that which far surpasses the reach of our understanding, wishes and purposes, and our sense perceptions, and that which incorporates and generates knowledge which no individual brain or any single organisation, could possess or invent. 69 Economics is for Hayek a meta-theory about the dispersal of information 70 and hence it is the only form of knowledge that informs us of our own limits to know in productive ways. Hayek ties the impossibility of knowing the economy from a sovereign position to the prescription of economics as the viable form of self-consciousness about this state of being; he intimately conjoins seemingly critical reflections about the limits of reason what Foucault associates with a Kantian operationwith a proscriptive ban on theorization, that is, with the prohibition to envision the extended order (Hayek) in a different light. The paradox of the essential invisibility he posits lies not only in the wagering between a critical impossibility to see and its prohibition. It also lies in the very
65
66 67 68 69 70
For the relations between the founder of conservatism Edmund Burke and the form of neo-liberalism Hayek stands for, see Hayeks own identification as an old Whig, drawing parallels to Edmund Burke in the postscript The Constitution of Liberty titled "Why I Am Not a Conservative." (Friedrich A. Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960), 399f, 409). This title is misleading. Hayek argues against a conservatism that is indistinctively reluctant to any change. Thus, he attempts to distinguish himself, as well as Edmund Burke from a type of Tory-conservatism that tends to allow less experimentation than he would embrace. I am as little a Tory-conservative as was Edmund Burke (Friedrich A. Hayek, The Mysterious World of Trade and Money, in The Fatal Conceit. The Errors of Socialism. The Collected Works of Friedrich August Hayek, Vol 1. (London: Routledge, 1988), 53). For the intimate links between a form of political conservatism and this strand of liberalism, see also William Scheuerman, The Unholy Alliance of Carl Schmitt and Friedrich A. Hayek, Constellations, 4, 2 (1997)) and also John P. McCormicks discussion of this type of conservatism (John P. McCormick, Carl Schmitts Critique of Liberalism: Against Politics as Technology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 303f). Hayek, The Mysterious World of Trade and Money, 14. Ibid. 64; 76. Ibid., 77. Ibid., 71. Ibid., 88.
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reversal of the subject-positions of knowledge, which it effects. The general indictment of the effort to see beyond the reach of ones own interest has, as its underside, the construction of the market as a site where the social body becomes legible: It is more than a metaphor, asserts Hayek, to describe the price system as a kind of machinery for registering change, or a system of telecommunications []. 71 In Hayeks account, it turns into a transmission belt for information, producing the amount of knowledge functional to the whole. 72 The whole acts as one market because their limited individual fields of vision sufficiently overlap so that through many intermediaries the relevant information is communicated to all [] The most significant fact about this system is the economy of knowledge with which it operates, of how little the individual participants need to know . 73 Thus, the market is like a telescope, a tool for knowing the relevant, but it is itself neither understood, nor to be revised. 74 Without letting the market assume this epistemological position, Hayek threatens, we might develop a different type of civilization, like that state of termite ants 75 or will simply sacrifice the nourishment of the existing multitudes of human beings. 76 Within this discursive construction, the market becomes the sole site legitimately producing this knowledge of the whole. The invisibility of the market and the construction of its epistemological authority go hand in hand. We have stumbled upon a familiar construction: Only that which does not exhibit its particularity can be assumed to be universal; only an invisible market can promise viable sight. In this context, the invisible hand is not just about defying the hubris of economic sovereignty, as Foucault put it. It is more about defying the forms of critical visibility commonly associated with Foucaults work. The invisibility of the market is directed against the very analytical perspective Foucault typically assumes, one aimed at detecting the instruments, positions, and architectures that produce such epistemological claims and privileges. A more typical Foucauldian approach would commence to undo the invisibility of the economy and the market as an invisible telescope and information-machine. This would mean rendering visible the markets own machine of seeing, rather than seeing like the unseen market itself. In sum: omitting the dispersion within the discourse of liberalism may have led Foucault to embrace the invisibility of the economy with too much fondness. Attending to the different politics of truth related to the invisible economy requires simply a more extended Foucauldian genealogy. But it also requires an emphasis of
71
72 73 74 75 76
Friedrich A. Hayek, The Use of Knowledge in Society, in The American Economic Review, Vol. 35(4), 1945: 527. Hayek, The Mysterious World of Trade and Money, 94. Hayek, The Use of Knowledge in Society, 526f. Hayek, The Mysterious World of Trade and Money, 104. Hayek, The Use of Knowledge in Society, 528. Hayek, The Mysterious World of Trade and Money, 100.
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the lines of exclusion present in a discursive order, which Foucault is sometimes less adamant about. 77 Searching for the political element within these figures of economic discourse involves relating the surface of discourse itself to the positions and forms of seeing they provide. Governmentality is right for deciphering the political within the economic; it is right for positing a co-constitution of the world of politics and of economic categories and practices. But the task of deciphering the political and of understanding this common constitution exceeds the reach of this concept.
IV.
Epilogue
The foregoing discussion sought to engage the unfulfilled promise of governmentality. The concept of governmentality promises to displace the hypostatizing categories of politics and economics with the critical visibility of the lines of force and the politics of truth. However inadvertently, it drew the economy into the orbit of its critical reach. But while it engaged profoundly with economic discourse in this vein, it had the paradoxical effect of excluding the economy from its critical operation. The economy remains invisible if measured against the critical visibilities Foucault has elsewhere produced. Two reasons for this invisibility have been singled out. The first consists in the persistent asymmetry ingrained within the concept of governmentality itself. While economic discourse is de-essentialized in the governmental account of the state, the economy does not become the object of an analytics of power in its own right. Of course, the proliferation of strategies of conducting conductwhich work through techniques of responsibilization, evaluation, and choicecan be detected within the public and private realm alike. This is not, however, equivocal to understanding the artifice of economic forms, which produce spatialities, temporalities and epistemologies of valuation. The second argument about the invisibility of the economy within governmentality has concerned itself with Foucaults reading of the invisible hand. The liberal trope of the invisible economy, as it turns out, answers to different politics of truth. While it might have effectively barred economic sovereignty, it has also been invested with a prohibition to envision and to theorize, however uncertain and contested. In this regard, Foucault accepts and operates within this view of the market as the paramount and invisible machine of knowledge production.
77
For remedying this aspect, Judith Butler has always argued that the orders of discourse need to be prominently related to what is undone in their midst (Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex. (New York: Routledge, 1993), 8). Very similarly, Jacques Rancire stressed the divisions between what is rendered intelligible and what is delegated to mere noise. The political artifice resides in creating these divisions and orders of the sensible, as he phrases it (Jacques Rancire, Ten Theses on Politics, Theory & Event, 5, 3 (2001). http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_and_event/v005/5.3ranciere.html (accessed June 16 2008)).
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If one were not afraid of overstating ones case, one could say that the concept of governmentality has to be guarded against the double danger of seeing like a state and of seeing like a market. Fortunately, Foucaults toolbox offers the appropriate safeguards itself.
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Jason Read 2009 ISSN: 1832-5203 Foucault Studies, No 6, pp. 25-36, February 2009
ARTICLE
A Genealogy of Homo-Economicus: Neoliberalism and the Production of Subjectivity

Jason Read, The University of Southern Maine ABSTRACT: This article examines Michel Foucaults critical investigation of neoliberalism in the course published as Naissance de la biopolitique: Cours au Collge de France, 1978-1979. Foucaults lectures are interrogated along two axes. First, examining the way in which neoliberalism can be viewed as a particular production of subjectivity, as a way in which individuals are constituted as subjects of human capital. Secondly, Foucaults analyses is augmented and critically examined in light of other critical work on neoliberalism by Wendy Brown, David Harvey, Christian Laval, Maurizo Lazzarato, and Antonio Negri. Of these various debates and discussions, the paper argues that the discussion of real subsumption in Marx and Negri is most important for understanding the specific politics of neoliberalism. Finally, the paper argues that neoliberalism entails a fundamental reexamination of the tools of critical thought, an examination of how freedom can constitute a form of subjection. Keywords: Foucault, Neoliberalism, Governmentality, real subsumption, subjectivity. In the opening pages of David Harveys A Brief History of Neoliberalism we find the following statement Neoliberalism... has pervasive effects on ways of thought to the point where it has become incorporated into the common-sense way many of us interpret, live in, and understand the world. 1 While Harveys book presents a great deal of research on neoliberalism, presenting its origins in such academic institutions as the Chicago School, its spread in the initial experiments in Chile, and its return to the countries of its origin through the regimes of Reagan and Thatcher, as well as its effects on China and the rest of the world, the actual process by which it became hegemonic, to the point of becoming common sense, is not examined. While it might be wrong to look for philosophy in a work which is primarily a work of history, a brief history at that, aimed at shedding light on the current conjuncture, it is worth
1
David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 3.
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Read: A Genealogy of Homo-Economicus
pointing out this lacuna since it intersects with a commonly accepted idea about neoliberalism, that it is as much a transformation in ideology as it is a transformation of ideology. Neoliberalism, in the texts that have critically confronted it, is generally understood as not just a new ideology, but a transformation of ideology in terms of its conditions and effects. In terms of its conditions, it is an ideology that is generated not from the state, or from a dominant class, but from the quotidian experience of buying and selling commodities from the market, which is then extended across other social spaces, the marketplace of ideas, to become an image of society. Secondly, it is an ideology that refers not only to the political realm, to an ideal of the state, but to the entirety of human existence. It claims to present not an ideal, but a reality; human nature. As Fredric Jameson writes, summing up this connection and the challenge it poses: The market is in human nature is the proposition that cannot be allowed to stand unchallenged; in my opinion, it is the most crucial terrain of ideological struggle in our time. 2 A critical examination of neoliberalism must address this transformation of its discursive deployment, as a new understanding of human nature and social existence rather than a political program. Thus it is not enough to contrast neoliberalism as a political program, analyzing its policies in terms of success or failure. An examination of neoliberalism entails a reexamination of the fundamental problematic of ideology, the intersection of power, concepts, modes of existence and subjectivity. It is in confronting neoliberalism that the seemingly abstract debates of the last thirty years, debates between poststructuralists such as Michel Foucault and neo-Marxists such as Antonio Negri about the nature of power and the relation between ideologies or discourses and material existence, cease to be abstract doctrines and become concrete ways of comprehending and transforming the present. Foucaults lectures on neoliberalism do not only extend his own critical project into new areas, they also serve to demonstrate the importance of grasping the present by examining the way in which the truth and subjectivity are produced.
Homo Economicus: The Subject of Neoliberalism

The nexus between the production of a particular conception of human nature, a particular formation of subjectivity, and a particular political ideology, a particular way of thinking about politics is at the center of Michel Foucaults research. As much as Foucault characterized his own project as studying the different modes by which, in our culture, human beings are made subjects, this process has always intersected with regimes of power/knowledge. 3 Thus, it would appear that Foucaults
Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism; Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991), 263. Michel Foucault, The Subject and Power, Afterward to Michel Foucault: Beyond Structu-
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work takes up exactly what writers on neoliberalism find to be so vexing: the manner in which neoliberalism is not just a manner of governing states or economies, but is intimately tied to the government of the individual, to a particular manner of living. However, it is well known that Foucaults research primarily views this relation from ancient Greece through the nineteenth century, leaving modern developments such as neoliberalism unaddressed. While this is the general pattern of Foucaults work, in the late seventies he devoted a year of his lectures at the Collge de France to the topic of neoliberalism. These lectures, published as The Birth of Biopolitics, are something of an anomaly in part because of this shift into the late-twentieth century and also because unlike other lecture courses, at least those that have been published in recent years, on abnormals, psychiatric power and the hermeneutics of the subject, the material from these lectures never made it into Foucaults published works. In order to frame Foucaults analysis it is useful to begin with how he sees the distinction between liberalism and neoliberalism. For Foucault, this difference has to do with the different ways in which they each focus on economic activity. Classical liberalism focused on exchange, on what Adam Smith called mankinds tendency to barter, truck, and exchange. It naturalized the market as a system with its own rationality, its own interest, and its own specific efficiency, arguing ultimately for its superior efficiency as a distributor of goods and services. The market became a space of autonomy that had to be carved out of the state through the unconditional right of private property. What Foucault stresses in his understanding, is the way in which the market becomes more than just a specific institution or practice to the point where it has become the basis for a reinterpretation and thus a critique of state power. Classical liberalism makes exchange the general matrix of society. It establishes a homology: just as relations in the marketplace can be understood as an exchange of certain freedoms for a set of rights and liberties. 4 Neoliberalism, according to Foucault, extends the process of making economic activity a general matrix of social and political relations, but it takes as its focus not exchange but competition. 5 What the two forms of liberalism, the classical and neo share, according to Foucault, is a
ralism and Hermeneutics, ed. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 208. As Foucault writes on this point: The combination of the savage and exchange is, I think, basic to juridical thought, and not only to eighteenth century theories of rightwe constantly find the savage exchange couple from the eighteenth century theory of right to the anthropology of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In both the juridical thought of the eighteenth century and the anthropology of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the savage is essentially a man who exchanges.(Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collge de France, 1975-1976, trans. David Macey (New York: Picador, 2003), 194) Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collge de France, 1978-1979, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 12.
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general idea of homo economicus, that is, the way in which they place a particular anthropology of man as an economic subject at the basis of politics. What changes is the emphasis from an anthropology of exchange to one of competition. The shift from exchange to competition has profound effects: while exchange was considered to be natural, competition is understood by the neo-liberals of the twentieth century to be an artificial relation that must be protected against the tendency for markets to form monopolies and interventions by the state. Competition necessitates a constant intervention on the part of the state, not on the market, but on the conditions of the market. 6 What is more important for us is the way in which this shift in anthropology from homo economicus as an exchanging creature to a competitive creature, or rather as a creature whose tendency to compete must be fostered, entails a general shift in the way in which human beings make themselves and are made subjects. First, neoliberalism entails a massive expansion of the field and scope of economics. Foucault cites Gary Becker on this point: Economics is the science which studies human behavior as relationship between ends and scarce means which have alternate uses. 7 Everything for which human beings attempt to realize their ends, from marriage, to crime, to expenditures on children, can be understood economically according to a particular calculation of cost for benefit. Secondly, this entails a massive redefinition of labor and the worker. The worker has become human capital. Salary or wages become the revenue that is earned on an initial investment, an investment in ones skills or abilities. Any activity that increases the capacity to earn income, to achieve satisfaction, even migration, the crossing of borders from one country to another, is an investment in human capital. Of course a large portion of human capital, ones body, brains, and genetic material, not to mention race or class, is simply given and cannot be improved. Foucault argues that this natural limit is something that exists to be overcome through technologies; from plastic surgery to possible genetic engineering that make it possible to transform ones initial investment. As Foucault writes summarizing this point of view: Homo economicus is an entrepreneur, an entrepreneur of himself. 8 Foucaults object in his analysis is not to bemoan this as a victory for capitalist ideology, the point at which the ruling ideas have truly become the ideas of the ruling class, so much so that everyone from a minimum wage employee to a C.E.O. considers themselves to be entrepreneurs. Nor is his task to critique the fundamental increase of the scope of economic rationality in neo-liberal economics: the assertion that economics is coextensive with all of society, all of rationality, and that it is economics all the way down. Rather, Foucault takes the neo-liberal ideal to be a new regime of truth, and a new way in which people are made subjects: homo eco6 7 8
Ibid, 139. Ibid, 235. Ibid., 226.
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nomicus is fundamentally different subject, structured by different motivations and governed by different principles, than homo juridicus, or the legal subject of the state. Neoliberalism constitutes a new mode of governmentality, a manner, or a mentality, in which people are governed and govern themselves. The operative terms of this governmentality are no longer rights and laws but interest, investment and competition. Whereas rights exist to be exchanged, and are some sense constituted through the original exchange of the social contract, interest is irreducible and inalienable, it cannot be exchanged. The state channels flows of interest and desire by making desirable activities inexpensive and undesirable activities costly, counting on the fact that subjects calculate their interests. As a form of governmentality, neoliberalism would seem paradoxically to govern without governing; that is, in order to function its subjects must have a great deal of freedom to actto choose between competing strategies.
The new governmental reason needs freedom; therefore, the new art of government consumes freedom. It must produce it, it must organize it. The new art of government therefore appears as the management of freedom, not in the sense of the imperative: be free, with the immediate contradiction that this imperative may contain[T]he liberalism we can describe as the art of government formed in the eighteenth century entails at its heart a productive/destructive relationship with freedom. Liberalism must produce freedom, but this very act entails the establishment of limitations, controls, forms of coercion, and obligations relying on threats, etcetera. 9
These freedoms, the freedoms of the market, are not the outside of politics, of governmentality, as its limit, but rather are an integral element of its strategy. As a mode of governmentality, neoliberalism operates on interests, desires, and aspirations rather than through rights and obligations; it does not directly mark the body, as sovereign power, or even curtail actions, as disciplinary power; rather, it acts on the conditions of actions. Thus, neoliberal governmentality follows a general trajectory of intensification. This trajectory follows a fundamental paradox; as power becomes less restrictive, less corporeal, it also becomes more intense, saturating the field of actions, and possible actions.10 Foucault limits his discussion of neoliberalism to its major theoretical texts and paradigms, following its initial formulation in post-war Germany through to its most comprehensive version in the Chicago School. Whereas Foucaults early ana9 10
Ibid., 63. Jeffrey Nealon has developed the logic of intensification in Foucault, arguing that this can be seen in the transition from disciplinary power to biopower; the former operates through specific sites and identities, while the latter operates on sexuality, which is diffuse throughout society, coextensive with subjectivity (Jeffrey T. Nealon, Foucault Beyond Foucault: Power and its Intensification Since 1984 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press), 2008, 46). A similar point could be raised with respect to neoliberalism.
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lyses are often remembered for their analysis of practical documents, the description of the panopticon or the practice of the confessional, the lectures on neoliberalism predominantly follow the major theoretical discussions. This is in some sense a limitation of the lecture course format, or at least a reflection that this material was never developed into a full study. Any analysis that is faithful to the spirit and not just the letter of Foucaults text would focus on its existence as a practice and not just a theory diffused throughout the economy, state, and society. As Thomas Lemke argues, neoliberalism is a political project that attempts to create a social reality that it suggests already exists, stating that competition is the basis of social relations while fostering those same relations. 11 The contemporary trend away from long term labor contracts, towards temporary and part-time labor, is not only an effective economic strategy, freeing corporations from contracts and the expensive commitments of health care and other benefits, it is an effective strategy of subjectification as well. It encourages workers to see themselves not as workers in a political sense, who have something to gain through solidarity and collective organization, but as companies of one. They become individuals for whom every action, from taking courses on a new computer software application to having their teeth whitened, can be considered an investment in human capital. As Eric Alliez and Michel Feher write: Corporations massive recourse to subcontracting plays a fundamental role in this to the extent that it turns the workers desire for independenceinto a business spirit that meets capitals growing need for satellites. 12 Neoliberalism is not simply an ideology in the pejorative sense of the term, or a belief that one could elect to have or not have, but is itself produced by strategies, tactics, and policies that create subjects of interest, locked in competition. Because Foucault brackets what could be considered the ideological dimension of neoliberalism, its connection with the global hegemony of not only capitalism, but specifically a new regime of capitalist accumulation, his lectures have little to say about its historical conditions. Foucault links the original articulation of neoliberalism to a particular reaction to Nazi Germany. As Foucault argues, the original neo-liberals, the Ordo-liberals, considered Nazi Germany not to be an effect of capitalism. But the most extreme version of what is opposed to capitalism and the marketplanning. While Foucaults analysis captures the particular fear of the state that underlies neoliberalism, its belief that any planning, any intervention against competition, is tantamount to totalitarianism. It however does not account for the dominance of neoliberalism in the present, specifically its dominance as a particular technology of the self, a particular mode of subjection. At the same time, Foucault offers the possibility of a different understanding of the history of neolibe11
12
Thomas Lemke, Foucault, Governmentality, and Critique. Rethinking Marxis, 14, 3 (2002), 60. Eric Alliez and Michel Feher, The Luster of Capital, trans. Alyson Waters, Zone, 1, 2, (1987), 349.
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ralism when he argues that neoliberalism, or the neo-liberal subject as homo economicus, or homo entrepreneur, emerges to address a particular lacunae in liberal economic thought, and that is labor. In this sense neoliberalism rushes to fill the same void, the same gap, that Marx attempted to fill, without reference to Marx, and with very different results. 13 Marx and neo-liberals agree that although classical economic theory examined the sphere of exchange, the market, it failed to enter the hidden abode of production examining how capital is produced. Of course the agreement ends there, because what Marx and neo-liberals find in labor is fundamentally different: for Marx labor is the sphere of exploitation while for the neo-liberals, as we have seen, labor is no sooner introduced as a problem than the difference between labor and capital is effaced through the theory of human capital. 14 Neoliberalism scrambles and exchanges the terms of opposition between worker and capitalist. To quote Etienne Balibar, The capitalist is defined as worker, as an entrepreneur; the worker, as the bearer of a capacity, of a human capital. 15 Labor is no longer limited to the specific sites of the factory or the workplace, but is any activity that works towards desired ends. The terms labor and human capital intersect, overcoming in terminology their longstanding opposition; the former becomes the activity and the latter becomes the effects of the activity, its history. From this intersection the discourse of the economy becomes an entire way of life, a common sense in which every action--crime, marriage, higher education and so on--can be charted according to a calculus of maximum output for minimum expenditure; it can be seen as an investment. Thus situating Marx and neoliberalism with respect to a similar problem makes it possible to grasp something of the politics of neoliberalism, which through
13 14
15
Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 221. In The Birth of Biopolitics Foucault argues that Marx filled this void with an anthropology of labor. This is similar to the critique that Foucault develops in Truth and Juridical Forms, in which he argues that Marx posited labor as the concrete essence of man. As Foucault writes: So I dont think we can simply accept the traditional Marxist analysis, which assumes that, labor being mans concrete essence, the capitalist system is what transforms labor into profit, into hyperprofit or surplus value. The fact is capitalism penetrates much more deeply into our existence. That system, as it was established in the nineteenth century, was obliged to elaborate a set of political techniques, techniques of power, by which man was tied to something like labora set of techniques by which peoples bodies and time would become labor power and labor time so as to be effectively used and thereby transformed into hyper profit (Michel Foucault, Truth and Juridical Forms, in Power: Essential Works of Michel Foucault, 1954-1984: Volume Three, trans. Robert Hurley et al. Ed. James D. Faubion (New York: New Press, 2000), 86). This idea, of capillary power relations that turn man into a subject of labor, is an idea which Foucault sometimes develops as a critique and at other times attributes to Marx, see for example Les Mailles du pouvoir, in Dits et crits Tome IV: 1980-198, ed. D. Defert and F. Ewald (Paris: ditions Gallimard, 1994) and less explicitly Discipline and Punish. Etienne Balibar, Masses, Classes, Ideas: Studies on Politics and Philosophy Before and After Marx, trans. James Swenson (New York: Routledge, 1994), 53.
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a generalization of the idea of the entrepreneur, investment and risk beyond the realm of finance capital to every quotidian relation, effaces the very fact of exploitation. Neoliberalism can be considered a particular version of capitalism without capitalism, a way of maintaining not only private property but the existing distribution of wealth in capitalism while simultaneously doing away with the antagonism and social insecurity of capitalism, in this case paradoxically by extending capitalism, at least its symbols, terms, and logic, to all of society. The opposition between capitalist and worker has been effaced not by a transformation of the mode of production, a new organization of the production and distribution of wealth, but by the mode of subjection, a new production of subjectivity. Thus, neoliberalism entails a very specific extension of the economy across all of society; it is not, as Marx argued, because everything rests on an economic base (at least in the last instance) that the effects of the economy are extended across of all of society, rather it is an economic perspective, that of the market, that becomes coextensive with all of society. As Christian Laval argues, all actions are seen to conform to the fundamental economic ideas of self-interest, of greatest benefit for least possible cost. It is not the structure of the economy that is extended across society but the subject of economic thinking, its implicit anthropology. 16
Resisting the Present: Towards a Criticism of Neoliberalism

Neoliberalism is thus a restoration not only of class power, of capitalism as the only possible economic system, it is a restoration of capitalism as synonymous with rationality. Thus, the question remains, why now, or at least why over the last thirty years has capitalism taken this neo-liberal turn? If Foucaults invocation of the specter of Nazi Germany is insufficient to account for the specific historical formation of capitalism, the opposition to Marx does little to help clarify the dominance of neoliberalism now. Somewhat paradoxically this question can be at least partially answered by looking at one of the few points of intersection between Marx and neoliberalism. In the Grundrisse, Marx does not use the term human capital, but fixed capital, a term generally used to refer to machinery, factories, and other investments in the means of production to refer to the subjectivity, the subjective powers of the worker. In general Marx understood the progression of capital to be a process by which the skills, knowledge, and know-how of workers were gradually incorporated into machinery, into fixed capital, reducing the laborer to an unskilled and ultimately replaceable cog in a machine. This is proletarianization the process by which capitalism produces its gravediggers in a class of impoverished workers who have nothing to lose but their chains. In the Grundrisse, however, Marx addresses a fun16
Christian Laval, Lhomme conomique: Essai sur les racines du nolibralisme (Paris: Gallimard, 2007), 17.
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damentally different possibility, capitals exploitation of not just the physical powers of the body, but the general social knowledge spread throughout society and embodied in each individual. This is what Marx refers to as the general intellectthe diffused social knowledge of society. This knowledge, the capacity to use various languages, protocols, and symbolic systems, is largely produced outside of work. As Marx writes: The saving of labor time is equal to an increase of free time, i.e. time for the full development of the individual, which in turn reacts back upon the productive power of labor as itself the greatest productive power. From the standpoint of the direct production process it can be regarded as the production of fixed capital, this fixed capital being man himself. 17 Marxs deviation from the standard terminology of his own corpus, terminology that designates the worker as labor power (or living labor), the machine or factory as fixed capital, and money as circulating capital, is ultimately revealing. It reveals something of a future that Marx could barely envision, a future that has become our present: the real subsumption of society by capital. This subsumption involves not only the formation of what Marx referred to as a specifically capitalist mode of production, but also the incorporation of all subjective potential, the capacity to communicate, to feel, to create, to think, into productive powers for capital. Capital no longer simply exploits labor, understood as the physical capacity to transform objects, but puts to work the capacities to create and communicate that traverse social relations. It is possible to say that with real subsumption capital has no outside, there is no relationship that cannot be transformed into a commodity, but at the same time capital is nothing but outside, production takes place outside of the factory and the firm, in various social relationships. Because of this fundamental displacement subjectivity becomes paramount, subjectivity itself becomes productive and it is this same subjectivity that must be controlled. For Antonio Negri there is a direct relationship between real subsumption as a transformation of the capitalist mode of production and neoliberalism as a transformation of the presentation of capitalism. It is not simply that neoliberalism works to efface the fundamental division between worker and capitalist, between wages and capital, through the production of neo-liberal subjectivity. After all this opposition, this antagonism has preexisted neoliberalism by centuries. Neoliberalism is a discourse and practice that is aimed to curtail the powers of labor that are distributed across all of societyat the exact moment in which all of social existence becomes labor, or potential labor, neoliberalism constructs the image of a society of capitalists, of entrepreneurs. As production moves from the closed space of the factory to become distributed across all of social space, encompassing all spheres of cultural and social existence, neoliberalism presents an image of society as a market, effacing
17
Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, trans. Martin Nicolaus (New York: Penguin, 1973), 712.
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production altogether. 18 This underscores the difference between neoliberalism as a form of power and the disciplinary power at work in the closed spaces of the factory. If disciplinary power worked by confining and fixing bodies to the production apparatuses, neoliberal power works by dispersing bodies and individuals through privatization and isolation. Deregulation, the central term and political strategy of neoliberalism, is not the absence of governing, or regulating, but a form of governing through isolation and dispersion. 19 As more and more wealth is produced by the collective social powers of society, neoliberalism presents us with an image of society made up of self-interested individuals. For Negri, neoliberalism and the idea of human capital is a misrepresentation of the productive powers of society. The only problem is that extreme liberalization of the economy reveals its opposite, namely that the social and productive environment is not made up of atomized individualsthe real environment is made up of collective individuals. 20 In Negris analysis, the relation between neoliberalism and real subsumption takes on the characteristics of a Manichean opposition. We are all workers or we are all capitalists: either view society as an extension of labor across all social spheres, from the factory to the school to the home, and across all aspects of human existence, from the work of the hands to the mind, or view society as a logic of competition and investment that encompasses all human relationships. While Negris presentation has an advantage over Foucaults lectures in that it grasps the historical formation of neoliberalism against the backdrop of a specific transformation of capital, in some sense following Foucaults tendency to present disciplinary power and biopower against the backdrop of specific changes in the economic organization of society, it does so by almost casting neoliberalism as an ideology in the pejorative sense of the term. It would appear that for Negri real subsumption is the truth of society, and neoliberalism is only a misrepresentation of that truth. As Thomas Lemke has argued, Foucaults idea of governmentality, is argued against such a division that posits actual material reality on one side and its ideological misrepresentation on the other. A governmentality is a particular mentality, a particular manner of governing, that is actualized in habits, perceptions, and subjectivity. Governmentality situates actions and conceptions on the same plane of immanence. 21 Which is to say, that any criticism of neoliberalism as governmentality must not focus on its errors, on its myopic conception of social existence, but on its particular production of truth. For Foucault, we have to take seriously the manner in which the fundamental understanding of individuals as governed by interest and competition is not just an ideology that can be refused and
18
19
20 21
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, The Labor of Dionysus: A Critique of the State Form (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota, 1994), 226. Antonio Negri, The Politics of Subversion: A Manifesto for the Twenty-First Century, trans. James Newell (Oxford: Polity Press, 1989), 99. Ibid., 206. Lemke, 54.
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debunked, but is an intimate part of how our lives and subjectivity are structured. Despite Negris tendency to lapse back into an opposition between labor and ideology, his object raises important questions echoed by other critics of neoliberalism. What is lost in neoliberalism is the critical distance opened up between different spheres and representations of subjectivity, not only the difference between work and the market, as in Marxism, but also the difference between the citizen and the economic subject, as in classical liberalism. All of these differences are effaced as one relation; that of economic self-interest, or competition, replaces the multiple spaces and relations of worker, citizen, and economic subject of consumption. To put the problem in Foucaults terms, what has disappeared in neoliberalism is the tactical polyvalence of discourse; everything is framed in terms of interests, freedoms and risks. 22 As Wendy Brown argues, one can survey the quotidian effects or practices of governmentality in the manner in which individualized/market based solutions appear in lieu of collective political solutions: gated communities for concerns about security and safety; bottled water for concerns about water purity; and private schools (or vouchers) for failing public schools, all of which offer the opportunity for individuals to opt out rather than address political problems. 23 Privatization is not just neoliberalisms strategy for dealing with the public sector, what David Harvey calls accumulation by dispossession, but a consistent element of its particular form of governmentality, its ethos, everything becomes privatized, institutions, structures, issues, and problems that used to constitute the public. 24 It is privatization all the way down. For Brown, neoliberalism entails a massive de-democratization, as terms such as the public good, rights and debate, no longer have any meaning. The model neoliberal citizen is one who strategizes for her or himself among various social, political, and economic options, not one who strives with others to alter or organize these options. 25 Thus, while it is possible to argue that neoliberalism is a more flexible, an open form of power as opposed to the closed spaces of disciplines, a form of power that operates on freedoms, on a constitutive multiplicity, it is in some sense all the more closed in that as a form of governmentality, as a political rationality, it is without an outside. It does not encounter any tension with a competing logic of worker or citizen, with a different articulation of subjectivity. States, corporations, individuals are all governed by the same logic, that of interest and competition. Foucaults development, albeit partial, of account of neoliberalism as governmentality has as its major advantage a clarification of the terrain on which neo22
23
24 25
Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: Volume 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1978), 101. Wendy Brown, American Nightmare: Neoliberalism, Neoconservatism, and Democratization, Political Theory, 34, 6 (2006), 704. David Harvey, 154. Wendy Brown, Neoliberalism and the End of Liberal Democracy, in Edgework: Critical Essays on Knowledge and Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University, 2005), 43.
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liberalism can be countered. It is not enough to simply oppose neoliberalism as ideology, revealing the truth of social existence that it misses, or to enumerate its various failings as policy. Rather any opposition to neoliberalism must take seriously its effectiveness, the manner in which it has transformed work subjectivity and social relationships. As Foucault argues, neoliberalism operates less on actions, directly curtailing them, then on the condition and effects of actions, on the sense of possibility. The reigning ideal of interest and the calculations of cost and benefit do not so much limit what one can do, neoliberal thinkers are famously indifferent to prescriptive ideals, examining the illegal drug trade as a more or less rational investment, but limit the sense of what is possible. Specifically the ideal of the fundamentally self-interested individual curtails any collective transformation of the conditions of existence. It is not that such actions are not prohibited, restricted by the dictates of a sovereign or the structures of disciplinary power, they are not seen as possible, closed off by a society made up of self-interested individuals. It is perhaps no accident that one of the most famous political implementers of neoliberal reforms, Margaret Thatcher, used the slogan, there is no alternative, legitimating neoliberalism based on the stark absence of possibilities. Similarly, and as part of a belated response to the former Prime Minister, it also perhaps no accident that the slogan of the famous Seattle protests against the IMF and World Bank was, another world is possible, and it is very often the sense of a possibility of not only another world, but of another way of organizing politics that is remembered, the image of turtles and teamsters marching hand and hand, when those protests are referred to. 26 It is also this sense of possibility that the present seems to be lacking; it is difficult to imagine let alone enact a future other than a future dominated by interest and the destructive vicissitudes of competition. A political response to neoliberalism must meet it on its terrain, that of the production of subjectivity, freedom and possibility.
26
Maurizio Lazzarato, Les rvolutions du capitalisme (Paris: Le Seuil, 2004), 19.
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Trent H. Hamann 2009 ISSN: 1832-5203 Foucault Studies, No 6, pp. 37-59, February 2009
ARTICLE
Neoliberalism, Governmentality, and Ethics Trent H. Hamann, St. Johns University

ABSTRACT: This paper illustrates the relevance of Foucaults analysis of neoliberal governance for a critical understanding of recent transformations in individual and social life in the United States, particularly in terms of how the realms of the public and the private and the personal and the political are understood and practiced. The central aim of neoliberal governmentality (the conduct of conduct) is the strategic creation of social conditions that encourage and necessitate the production of Homo economicus, a historically specific form of subjectivity constituted as a free and autonomous atom of self-interest. The neoliberal subject is an individual who is morally responsible for navigating the social realm using rational choice and costbenefit calculations grounded on market-based principles to the exclusion of all other ethical values and social interests. While the more traditional forms of domination and exploitation characteristic of sovereign and disciplinary forms of power remain evident in our globalized world, the effects of subjectification produced at the level of everyday life through the neoliberal conduct of conduct recommend that we recognize and invent new forms of critique and ethical subjectivation that constitute resistance to its specific dangers. Key words: Foucault, neoliberalism, governmentality, biopolitics, homo economicus, genealogy, ethics, critique.
Introduction
In his 1978-1979 course lectures at the Collge de France, The Birth of Biopolitics, 1 Michel Foucault offered what is today recognizable as a remarkably prescient analysis of neoliberalism. In the thirty years since he gave these lectures their pertinence and
Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collge de France, 1978-1979, translated by Graham Burchell, edited by Arnold I. Davidson (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). Henceforth, BB, with page numbers given in the text.
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Hamann: Neoliberalism, Governmentality, and Ethics
value for a critical understanding of contemporary forms of political governance in the United States have grown. As I illustrate below, everyday experiences reflect a neoliberal ethos2 operative within almost every aspect of our individual and social lives with consequences that are dire for many and dangerous for most if not all of us. Indeed the central aim of neoliberal governmentality 3 is the strategic production of social conditions conducive to the constitution of Homo economicus, a specific form of subjectivity with historical roots in traditional liberalism. However, whereas liberalism posits economic man as a man of exchange, neoliberalism strives to ensure that individuals are compelled to assume market-based values in all of their judgments and practices in order to amass sufficient quantities of human capital and thereby become entrepreneurs of themselves. Neoliberal Homo economicus is a free and autonomous atom of self-interest who is fully responsible for navigating the social realm using rational choice and cost-benefit calculation to the express exclusion of all other values and interests. Those who fail to thrive under such social conditions have no one and nothing to blame but themselves. It is here that we can recognize the vital importance of the links between Foucaults analyses of governmentality begun in the late 1970s and his interest in technologies of the self and ethical self-fashioning, which he pursued until the time of his death in 1984. His analyses of government or the conduct of conduct bring together the government of others (subjectification) and the government of ones self (subjectivation); on the one hand, the biopolitical governance of populations and, on the other, the work that individuals perform upon themselves in order to become certain kinds of subjects. While the more traditional forms of domination and exploitation characteristic of sovereign and disciplinary forms of power remain evident in our globalized world, the effects of subjectification produced at the level of everyday life through the specifically neoliberal conduct of conduct recommend that we recognize and invent commensurate forms of critique, counter-conduct and ethical subjectivation that constitute resistance to its dangers. 4
Andrew Barry, Thomas Osborne, and Nikolas Rose have observed that for Foucault liberalism (and, by extension, neoliberalism) indicate something like an ethos of government rather than a specific historical moment or single doctrine. See their introduction to Foucault and Political Reason: Liberalism, Neo-liberalism and Rationalities of Government, edited by Andrew Barry, Thomas Osborne, and Nikolas Rose (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1996), 8. Foucault defines governmentality as an apparatus of administrative power that has the population as its target, political economy as its major form of knowledge, and apparatuses of security as its essential technical instrument. See Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collge de France, 1977-1978, translated by Graham Burchell, edited by Arnold I. Davidson (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 108-9. Henceforth, STP, with page numbers given in the text. Throughout this paper I will follow the distinction made by Alan Milchman and Alan
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I.
Neoliberalism as Everyday Experience
One of the significant developments in contemporary life that might fall under the heading of neoliberalism can be recognized through the various ways that the traditional distinctions between the public and the private on the one hand, and the political and the personal on the other have been gradually blurred, reversed, or removed altogether. The exposure of formerly private and personal realms of life has occurred not only through the more striking examples of growing government and corporate surveillance (think of the telecoms and the warrantless monitoring of electronic communications paid for with taxpayer dollars or the growing use of human implantable radio-frequency identification [RFID] microchips), but, more subtly and significantly, the extent to which activities of production and consumption typically practiced in public spaces are increasingly taking place in the home, a space once exclusively reserved for leisure time and housework. It has become more and more common to find such activities as telecommuting, telemarketing, and shopping via the Internet or cable television taking place within the home. Nearly ubiquitous technologies such as the telephone, home computers with worldwide web access, pagers, mobile phones, GPS and other wireless devices have rendered private space and personal time accessible to the demands of business and, increasingly, the interests of government. To put it simply, it is no longer true, as Marx once claimed, that the worker is at home when he is not working, and when he is working he is not at home. 5 Reality television, social networking sites, personal webcams and confessional blogging have all contributed toward exposing the private realm in ways unforeseen by the well-known feminist adage from the 1960s: the personal is political. Within this formerly public realm we now find that private interests or public/private amalgams have gained greater control and influence. In major urban areas Business Improvement Districts (BIDs) have appropriated many traditional
Rosenberg between 1) subjectification (assujettissement) or the ways that others are governed and objectified into subjects through processes of power/knowledge (including but not limited to subjugation and subjection since a subject can have autonomy and power relations can be resisted and reversed), and 2) subjectivation (subjectivation) or the ways that individuals govern and fashion themselves into subjects on the basis of what they take to be the truth. Subjectivation can take either the form of self-objectification in accord with processes of subjectification or it can take the form of a subjectivation of a true discourse produced through practices of freedom in resistance to prevailing apparatuses of power/knowledge. See Alan Milchman and Alan Rosenberg, The Final Foucault: Government of Others and Government of Oneself (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, forthcoming 2008). Henceforth, FF. Karl Marx, Estranged Labor, in The Economic & Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, edited by Dirk J. Struik (New York: International Publishers, 1964), 110.
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governing functions from financially strapped municipalities including taxation, sanitation, and policing. For years the U.S. federal government has given away traditional public goods such as parklands, water, and the airways to profit-making businesses, often in exchange for shallow and unfulfilled promises to serve the public interest. Many formerly public or government institutions such as hospitals, schools, and prisons are now managed privately as for-profit corporations as increasing numbers of people go without healthcare, education levels drop, and prison populations increase. An ongoing effort has been made to further privatize if not eliminate traditional social goods such as healthcare, welfare, and social security. In addition, problems once recognized as social ills have been shifted to the personal realm: poverty, environmental degradation, unemployment, homelessness, racism, sexism, and heterosexism: all have been reinterpreted as primarily private matters to be dealt with through voluntary charity, the invisible hand of the market, by cultivating personal sensitivity towards others or improving ones own self-esteem. Corporations, churches, universities and other institutions have made it part of their mission to organize the mandatory training of employees in these and other areas of personal development and self-management. Just as illness and disease are more often addressed in the mainstream media as a problem of revenue loss for business than as an effect of poor environmental or worker safety regulations, corporations have stepped up the practice of promoting full worker responsibility for their own health and welfare, offering incentives to employees for their participation in fitness training, lifestyle management and diet programs. We can also find a sustained expansion of self-help and personal power technologies that range from the old think and grow rich school to new techniques promising greater control in the self-management of everything from time to anger. 6 These and many other examples demonstrate the extent to which so much that was once understood as social and political has been re-positioned within the domain of self-governance, often through techniques imposed by private institutions such as schools and businesses. On a broader scale, there is clear evidence that government policymaking has increasingly fallen under the influence of private corporate and industry interests, for whom the next quarters bottom line routinely trumps any concern for the long term common or public good. Transnational organizations such as the World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and the World Trade Organization commonly use their global reach in order to dictate what are often austere social policies through Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs), practices that have been linked to the ongoing expansion of slum populations worldwide. 7 While the various discourses of ownership and the like have promoted the populist ideals of choice, freedom, autonomy and individualism, the reality is that individuals worldwide are more and more subject to the frequently harsh, unpredictable, and unforgiving demands of
6 7
See Binkley, this volume. See Mike Davis, Planet of Slums (New York: Verso, 2006).
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market forces and the kinds of impersonal judgments that evaluate them in terms of a cost-benefit calculus of economic risk, financial burden, productivity, efficiency, and expedience. The recent collapse of the U.S. housing market, the rising costs of fuel and food, and record-breaking increases in unemployment rates perhaps illustrate, not the failure of what sometimes has been called the ownership society, but rather its success in instituting a moralizing principle of punishing those who havent amassed sufficient human capital. Examples such as these do suggest that, to at least some extent, the neoliberal strategy of infusing market values into every aspect of social life and shifting responsibility onto individuals has succeeded.
II.
Neoliberalism As Governmentality
In his 1978-79 course lectures, Foucault analyzed liberalism as a historical form of biopolitical governmentality, that is, as a form of political rationality concerned with the government of populations and the conduct of individual conduct in accord with the internal rule of maximum economy (BB, 318). His genealogical analysis of liberalism led him to examine the West German Ordo-liberalism of the period from 1942 to 1962 and the American neoliberalism of the Chicago School, which developed later on. Foucault noted that both forms of neoliberalism were conceived from the very beginning as interventionist and critical responses to specific forms of governmentality. For the West Germans, who were faced with the daunting task of building a new state from scratch it constituted a critique of the excessive state power of Nazism and for the Americans it was a reaction to the overextended New Deal welfare state and its interference in market mechanisms. In this regard both schools were linked from the start to classical liberalism insofar as they were forms of critical governmental reason, or political rationality that theorized government as immanently self-limiting by virtue of its primary responsibility for supporting the economy. Whereas the pre-modern state had utilized the economy to serve its own ends, the emergence of political economy within the liberal reason of state reversed the traditional relationship between government and economy (BB, 12-3). What fascinated Foucault about the American neoliberals in particular, and distinguished them from the West German Ordo-liberals, was their unprecedented expansion of the economic enterprise form to the entire social realm. The Americans sought to extend the rationality of the market, the schemes of analysis it offers and the decision-making criteria it suggests, to domains which are not exclusively or not primarily economic: the family and the birth rate, for example, or delinquency and penal policy (BB, 323). Government is also reconceived as an enterprise to be organized, operated, and systematically critiqued according to an economic positivism (BB, 247). Within the reason of state of American neoliberalism, the role of government is defined by its obligations to foster competition through the installation of market-based mechanisms for constraining and conditioning the actions of individuals, institutions, and
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the population as a whole. In fact, the governments ability to operate under the cost-benefit rule of maximum economy while simultaneously hard selling this way of doing things becomes its one and only criterion of legitimacy (BB, 318). Another significant feature of neoliberalism is its explicit acknowledgment of the fact that neither the market nor economic competition between individuals is a natural reality with self-evident or intrinsic laws. Rather, the rationality of neoliberalism consists of values and principles that must be actively instituted, maintained, reassessed and, if need be, reinserted at all levels of society (BB, 120). While neoliberal governmentality seeks to minimize state power as much as possible, it also recognizes that the market can only be kept viable through active governmental and legal support. Likewise, it explicitly acknowledges that competition between individuals can only be fostered through social mechanisms that are exclusively encoded, ordered and reassessed by market values. The point here is that within the rationality of neoliberal governmentality8 it is clear that Homo economicus or economic man is not a natural being with predictable forms of conduct and ways of behaving, but is instead a form of subjectivity that must be brought into being and maintained through social mechanisms of subjectification. As I will illustrate below, economic man is a subject that must be produced by way of forms of knowledge and relations of power aimed at encouraging and reinforcing individual practices of subjectivation.
III.
Homo Economicus as Everyday Experience

Governing people is not a way to force people to do what the governor wants; it is always a versatile equilibrium, with complementarity and conflicts between techniques which assure coercion and processes through which the self is constructed or modified by himself. 9
Foucaults analysis in The Birth of Biopolitics notes that one of the concerns of the neoliberals was with identifying the reasoning involved in leading an individual to dedicate his or her lifes finite capacities and limited resources toward pursuing one goal or agenda rather than another. Referring to the work of the economist Gary Becker, Foucault discussed the neoliberal theories of human capital and criminality, both of which focus on economic principles of rationality for determining decisionmaking processes and action. For example, instead of interpreting the wage earner as an individual who is obliged to sell his or her labor power as an abstract commodity, neoliberalism describes wages as income earned from the expenditure of hu8
Here and for the remainder of this article my discussion of neoliberalism will refer primarily to the historical and contemporary American variant. Michel Foucault, About the Beginning of the Hermeneutics of the Self: Two Lectures at Dartmouth, Political Theory, 21, 2 (May 1993), 203-4.
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man capital, which consists of both an individuals innate genetic qualities as well as his or her acquired skills, abilities, tastes, and knowledge. This accumulated human capital is interpreted as the result of prior and ongoing investments in goods like education, nutrition, and training, as well as love and affection. In this reconstruction of the wage earner, workers are no longer recognized as dependent on an employer but instead are fashioned as free and autonomous entrepreneurs fully responsible for their presumably rational self-investment decisions. Foucault notes that this definition of economics gives itself the task of analyzing a form of human behavior in terms of its internal rationality. Economics is no longer viewed as the analysis of processes but rather, as the analysis of the strategic programming of individuals activity (BB, 223). For Pierre Bourdieu, the institution of these new forms of entrepreneurial activity has meant that levels of competition traditionally characteristic of relations between businesses and corporations are now deeply entrenched at the level of the workforce itself:
Competition is extended to individuals themselves, through the individualization of the wage relationship: establishment of individual performance objectives, individual performance evaluations, permanent evaluation, individual salary increases or granting of bonuses as a function of competence and of individual merit; individualized career paths; strategies of delegating responsibility tending to ensure the self-exploitation of staff who, simple wage laborers in relations of strong hierarchical dependence, are at the same time held responsible for their sales, their products, their branch, their store, etc. as though they were independent contractors. This pressure toward self-control extends workers involvement according to the techniques of participative management considerably beyond management level. All of these are techniques of rational domination that impose over-involvement in work (and not only among management) and work under emergency or high-stress conditions. And they converge to weaken or abolish collective standards or solidarities. 10
Within the apparatus (dispositif) 11 of neoliberalism every individual is considered to be equally unequal, as Foucault put it. Exploitation, domination, and every other form of social inequality is rendered invisible as social phenomena to the extent that each individuals social condition is judged as nothing other than the effect of his or her own choices and investments. As Wendy Brown has pointed out, Homo economicus is constructed, not as a citizen who obeys rules, pursues common goods, and addresses problems it shares with others, but as a rational and calculating entrepreneur
10
11
Pierre Bourdieu, The Essence of Neoliberalism, translated by Jeremy J. Shapiro, Le Monde diplomatique (December 1998), http://mondediplo.com/1998/12/08bourdieu (accessed April 30, 2008). Henceforth I will refer to this or that apparatus, insofar as I read Foucaults term dispositif to indicate the set-ups or apparatuses of knowledge-power-subjectivity that condition, shape, and constrain our everyday actuality.
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who is not only capable of, but also responsible for caring for him or herself. 12 Brown points out that this has the effect of depoliticizing social and economic powers as well as reducing political citizenship to an unprecedented degree of passivity and political complacency. She writes:
The model neoliberal citizen is one who strategizes for her- or himself among various social, political, and economic options, not one who strives with others to alter or organize these options. A fully realized neoliberal citizenry would be the opposite of public-minded; indeed, it would barely exist as a public. The body politic ceases to be a body but is rather a group of individual entrepreneurs and consumers . . . (E, 43).
Within this practically Hobbesian (anti-)social landscape the responsibility of individuals constitutes a form of market morality 13 understood as the maximization of economy through the autonomous rational deliberation of costs and benefits followed by freely chosen practices. Neoliberal subjects are constituted as thoroughly responsible for themselves and themselves alone because they are subjectified as thoroughly autonomous and free. An individuals failure to engage in the requisite processes of subjectivation, or what neoliberalism refers to as a mismanaged life (E, 42), is consequently due to the moral failure of that individual. Neoliberal rationality allows for the avoidance of any kind of collective, structural, or governmental responsibility for such a life even as examples of it have been on the rise for a number of decades. Instead, impoverished populations, when recognized at all, are often treated as opportunities for investment. 14 On June 15, 2006 the UN released a report, State of the Worlds Cities 2006/7, on the alarming worldwide growth of urban slum dwellers. 15 The report
12
13
14
15
See Wendy Brown, Edgework: Critical Essays On Knowledge and Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005). Henceforth, E, with page numbers given in the text. I use the term morality here in the formal sense used by Foucault. Generally speaking it is the code (or codes) that determines which acts are permitted or forbidden and the values attributed to those acts. These codes inform the ethical relationship one has to ones self. See Michel Foucault, On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of Work in Progress, in Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 237-8. Henceforth, OGE, with page numbers given in the text. We see this, for example, in the high interest rates increasingly attached to micro-credit issued to poor entrepreneurs in the developing world. Viewing poverty as an invest ment opportunity also frequently leads to other problems such as forced evictions when lands are appropriated for commercial development. Examples of this can be found everywhere from New Orleans to Nairobi. The full report State of the Worlds Cities 2006/7 press release, and other related docu-
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estimated that by the year 2007 the majority of human beings would, for the first time ever, be living in cities. One third of those city dwellers, that is one billion of them, will live in slums. The report also projected that the growth in slum populations will amount to twenty-seven million people per yearan increase that will continue for at least the next two decades. In 1996 one hundred and seventy-six leaders from around the world met at the World Food Summit and pledged to cut the number of undernourished and starving people in half within twenty years. 16 Over a decade later, the number of people going hungry around the world has increased by eighteen million, bringing the worldwide total to eight hundred and fiftytwo million, with an average of six million children dying of hunger each year. In the United States, there has been a dramatic increase in the number of homeless individuals in the last twenty-five years, attributable mainly to an increase in poverty and a growing shortage of affordable rental housing. 17 Although the nature of homelessness makes it difficult to obtain accurate and timely statistics, it is estimated that an average 3.5 million people experience homelessness annually with the fastest growing segment of this population being families with children. As of 2003 the number of homeless who are children under the age of 18 is nearly 40%. In New York City children constitute nearly half of the homeless population while children and their families make up 75% of the total. And although we sometimes hear of employment figures going up across the United States, so too has the number of working poor and those forced to work multiple jobs without adequate healthcare and other benefits. The neoliberal approach to dealing with growing poverty, unemployment, and homelessness is not simply to ignore it, but to impose punitive judgments through the moralizing effects of its political rationality. For example, the former Commissioner of the NYC Department of Homeless Services, Linda Gibbs famously vowed to change the meaning of homelessness by emphasizing better management and client responsibility.18 My expectation she stated is that you can actually manage this in a way that people change their behavior. Of course, what never factors into this construction of client responsibility are any of the structural constraints imposed by the citys endemic social problems, such as unfair housing practices or the lack of adequate education and employment opportunities. Instead,
ments can be accessed in PDF format at the UN-HABITAT webpage: http://hq. unhabitat.org/content.asp?cid=3397&catid=7&typeid=46&sub MenuId=0 (accessed April 30, 2008). I have not found an updated version of this report at the time of this writing. See Phillip Thorntons article, More are Hungry Despite World Leaders Pledge, The Independent/UK, October 16, 2006. All statistics, facts, and figures on homelessness are taken from the National Coalition for the Homeless publications website: http:://www.nationalhomeless.org/publications/facts.htm (accessed April 30, 2008). Linda Gibbs, as quoted by Robert Kolker in his January 6, 2003 New York magazine article: Home for the Holidays.
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18
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one of the Commissioners greatest concerns, as she put it, was that the city has to be careful that people dont abuse the system. Another example of punitive subjectification is the criminalization of homelessness. A joint report issued at the beginning of the year in 2006 by the National Coalition for the Homeless and The National Law Center on Homelessness & Poverty described the growing practice of criminalizing the homeless in urban America even while homelessness increases and cities are consistently unable to meet the heightened demand for more shelters. As the report indicates:
An unfortunate trend in cities around the country over the past 25 years has been to turn to the criminal justice system to respond to people living in public spaces. This trend includes measures that target homeless people by making it illegal to perform life-sustaining activities in public. These measures prohibit activities such as sleeping/camping, eating, sitting, and begging in public spaces, usually including criminal penalties for violating these laws.
In a nation with the highest worldwide rate of incarceration of its citizens, this means increased profits for the corporate owned prison industry.19 Treated as criminals by the police for their desperate efforts to keep themselves alive, the homeless, who are arguably the most vulnerable segment of the population, have more and more frequently found themselves the target of violent attacks that have resulted in injuries and in many cases death. 20 A report by the NCH in 2005 found that in a recent period of four years, homeless deaths had increased by 67% while non-lethal attacks increased by 281%. Living and dying in accord with the neoliberal rule of maximum economy, the homeless find themselves subject to the harshest and cruelest effects of its domestic governance. They are the disowned of the ownership society. Neoliberalisms rationality treats criminality in a manner that departs from previous disciplinary (human or social science-based) analyses of crime. Here again, the criminal is subjectified as a free, autonomous, and rationally calculating subject who weighs the uncertain risk of having to pay a cost in the form of punishment against the generally more certain benefits of crime. As the story goes, Gary Becker hit upon this notion one day when he was confronted with the choice of either parking his car illegally, and thereby risking getting a ticket, or parking legally in an inconvenient spot. After carefully calculating his options he opted for the former criminal choice. As Becker himself has pointed out, this rational choice approach to criminality fails to acknowledge any significant difference between a murder and a
19
20
See the February 29, 2008 Washington Post article New High in U.S. Prison Numbers, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wpdyn/content/story/2008/02/28/ST2008022803016.htm l (accessed April 30, 2008). See the press release entitled: Hate Crimes and Violence Against Homeless People Increasing, http://www.nationalhomeless.org/hatecrimes/pressrelease.html (accessed April 30, 2008).
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parking offence. Or, at best, and since crime is identified as any action that makes the individual run the risk of being condemned by a penalty (BB, 251), the difference between committing a murder and parking illegally is nothing other than the kind of penalty one risks incurring. In its attempt to displace legal judgments in favor of economic ones, this approach to human behavior rules out any possibility for an ethical evaluation of actions that would extend beyond simply judging them as unfortunate miscalculations in light of what is expedient.
IV.
Foucault and Neoliberalism TodayThree Concerns
While quite a number of scholars and critics have used Foucaults toolbox to great advantage in describing and analyzing many of the same trends I have discussed above, 21 a number of questions have been raised about the viability or effectiveness of doing so. I will briefly describe three of what I take to be the most significant concerns here as a means toward developing my own attempts to address them, albeit somewhat indirectly, in the remainder of this paper. The first concern is that the use of the concept of neoliberalism as a descriptive term in a critical analysis of contemporary society might be insufficiently genealogical. 22 That is, it seems to claim a birds-eye view of things, it tends to generalize too much, and it consequently moves too quickly in reaching conclusions. In other words, it risks bypassing the kind of patient and detailed genealogical analyses that would give us insightful descriptions of the specific local forms of power and knowledge that are to be found at work in our everyday lives. I have already gone some way towards offering empirical descriptions of contemporary experiences that reflect neoliberal governmentality at work. In the next section I will offer a brief genealogy of neoliberalism that begins by noting the specificity of Foucaults own analysis within an examination of liberalism as the framework of intelligibility of biopolitics. A second and closely related concern is that by focusing on neoliberalisms economization of society and responsibilization of individuals some critics have mistakenly offered it up as a new paradigm of power that would supersede older forms just as disciplinary power is sometimes mistakenly thought to have entirely replaced
21
22
In addition to Wendy Brown, cited above, see for example Jeffrey T. Nealons Foucault Beyond Foucault: Power and its Intensifications Since 1984 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008), and the work of Nikolas Rose, in particular his Powers of Freedom: Reframing Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). While he does not raise the problem specifically in relation to neoliberalism, Todd May expresses a similar concern about the use of the concept of globalization to describe our present. See his article Foucault Now? in Foucault Studies, 3 (November 2005). Also see the last chapter, Are we still who Foucault says we are? in his book The Philosophy of Foucault (Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 2006), 132-59.
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sovereign power in one great historical shift. 23 Careful readers know that Foucault warned against making this kind of mistake by indicating the complex ways in which different forms of power have co-existed and complimented one another. 24 One can point, for example, to the alarming explosion of U.S. prison populations and the worldwide escalation of the use of surveillance technologies as contemporary manifestations of disciplinary and panoptic forms of power. Likewise the open acknowledgment of the use of torture by the U.S. government can be recognized as one of the signal characteristics of sovereign power. In the next section I will offer examples of the presence of sovereign, disciplinary, and panoptic forms of power in neoliberal governmentality while also noting what I find to be significant differences or modifications. A third and final concern is that Foucaults emphasis on the care of the self and aesthetics of existence in his later works lends itself quite nicely to neoliberalisms aim of producing free and autonomous individuals concerned with cultivating themselves in accord with various practices of the self (education, healthy lifestyle, the desire to compete, etc.). 25 That is, Homo economicus is a good example of Foucauldian self-fashioning. Consequently, one might conclude that, rather than contributing toward a critical analysis of neoliberalism, Foucaults work on self-care and technologies of the self at best provides us with no useful tools for doing so, or worse, actually provides a kind of technical support manual for the neoliberal agenda of recoding society and its subjects. Indeed we might be mistaken to read Foucault as critical of neoliberalism at all. It could be that his sole interest in it was as a historically situated critical alternative to the biopolitical model of the welfare state. In this regard he might even have been a somewhat naive advocate of neoliberalism, for all we know. In the genealogy that follows I will give particular attention to the history of Homo economicus because of its central place in neoliberal governmentality. I have already described how neoliberalism encourages individuals to engage in
23
24
25
Alan Milchman and Alan Rosenberg locate this problem in much of Anglo-Saxon governmentality theory [FF]. Nancy Fraser has described disciplinary power as a Fordist mode of social regulation that is no longer very useful for describing contemporary society. See her article From Discipline to Flexibilization? Rereading Foucault in the Shadow of Globalization, in Constellations, 10, 2 (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2003), 16071. During a discussion of Rousseau in his lecture of February 1, 1978 Foucault suggests: we should not see things as the replacement of a society of sovereignty by a society of discipline, and then of a society of discipline by a society, say, of government. In fact we have a triangle: sovereignty, discipline, and governmental management (STP, 107). Jeffrey T. Nealons Foucault Beyond Foucault offers a characterization of this prevalent but mistaken reading in which the late Foucaultian turn to the self-creating subject and its artistic agency can only remind us of present-day American military recruiting posters (Become an Army of One) or the corporate slogan of Microsoft: Where would you like to go today? (p. 11).
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self-forming practices of subjectivation through processes of social subjectification. In the last section of my paper I will discuss the possibility of recognizing and inventing other forms of subjectivation that critique and resist neoliberal subjectification.
V.
A Brief Genealogy of Neo-Liberalism
I begin this section by establishing a few points for consideration. The first is that the question as to whether Foucault thought neoliberalism was a good thing or a bad thing seems to me to be misguided for two reasons. His analyses of governmentality sought, to a large extent, to analyze historical relations between power, knowledge, and subjectivity in order to better understand the present, to identify its dangers, and to perhaps locate possible opportunities for critical resistance. The judgment good or bad is something I am sure he would have refused in this context as he consistently did in many others. In addition, if it can be argued that the way many of us think, act, and speak has, over the past couple of decades, become increasingly shaped in a manner consistent with the articulations of neoliberal governmentality, this is nothing Foucault could have anticipated nearly twenty-five years ago. We cannot know what he would have thought of the actuality of our present. What we do know is that Foucault found neoliberalism important enough to examine and discuss it in his 1978-79 lectures at far greater length than he had originally planned (BB, 185). Although neoliberalism has frequently been used as one of the tools Foucault offers, perhaps it is not always the case that enough attention is given to his own treatment of it. We should bear in mind that his discussion of it occurs within the context of an analysis of liberalism as the general framework or condition of intelligibility of biopolitics (BB, 327-8). In fact, at the end of his first lecture on January 10th, he suggested that: only when we know what this governmental regime called liberalism was, will we be able to grasp what biopolitics is (BB, 18). Considering this analytical framework we might pause for a moment over the neo of neoliberalism. A genealogical approach should perhaps first seek to establish its possible links with some of the older disciplinary and panoptic forms of power described by Foucault as constituting the history of our present. Many of the contemporary practices that can be defined in terms of neoliberalism have historical precedents that we can locate in Foucaults archaeological/genealogical analyses. It is hard to argue with those who would point to todays exploding prison populations, the use of prison labor and the training of both students and prisoners in entrepreneurialism, 26 the replacement of welfare with
26
See, for example, the transcript of the PBS News Hour report aired January 15, 2007 on the NIFTY programs at a Providence, Rhode Island high school and the Rikers Island jail facility.
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workfare, the pervasive use of surveillance, training, and testing, etc. as instances of the contemporary manifestation of something that appears to be disciplinary power. For example, as was true in the great confinement described by Foucault in Madness and Civilization, 27 the present incarceration of unprecedented numbers of the population in the U.S. is not simply a negative act of exclusion aimed at protecting and preserving a pre-given social order. Rather, it is a positive means of producing certain kinds of subjects in accord with a certain biopolitical apparatus implemented by the police (understood here in the broad governmental sense of the term used during the eighteenth century as outlined by Foucault) 28 with the aim of producing a certain kind of social order. What may be unique about neoliberal forms of punishment is that they recognize a certain continuum between those subjects who are incarcerated and those who are not. Whereas the Hpital Gnral described by Foucault served to constitute a division between normal and pathological subjects, neoliberal governmentality aims toward producing something like a graduated social plane by constituting all subjects as equally unequal. Incarcerated or not, all neoliberal subjects are presumed equal and free. Social divisions no doubt exist, indeed many of them (such as economic disparity) have been increasing steadily, but as we have seen, neoliberalism attributes those divisions to failures of individual choice and responsibility. When Foucault discusses the neoliberal conception of criminality, he concludes, there is an anthropological erasure of the criminal and what appears on the horizon of this kind of analysis is not at the ideal or project of an exhaustively disciplinary society in which the legal network hemming in individuals is taken over and extended internally by, lets say, normative mechanisms (BB, 258-9). In contrast to traditional forms of disciplinary power, these contemporary instances posit a continuum that begins with a conception of individuals as already rationally calculating, individualized atoms of self-interest. Once those principles are incorporated within governing institutions, social relations, academic disciplines, the workplace, and professional organizational policies, individuals are encouraged and compelled to fashion themselves (their practices, understanding, and manner of speaking) according to its rules, often out of practical necessity. On the other hand it seems that a number of Foucaults descriptions of nineteenth-century society and government find echoes in contemporary society, such as docile bodies being subject to continuous training and judgment, or the poor being criminalized
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/education/jan-june07/entrepreneurs_01-15.html (accessed April 30, 2008). Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, translated by Richard Howard (New York: Random House, 1965), 38-64. Michel Foucault, The Political Technology of Individuals, in Luther H. Martin, Huck Gutman, and Patrick H. Hutton (eds.), Technologies of the Self (Amherst, MA: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1988), 145-62. Henceforth, PTI, with page numbers given in the text. Foucault explains here that: The police govern not by the law but by a specific, a permanent, and a positive intervention in the behavior of individuals (p. 159).
27
28
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and cast out of the cities. It does not require much imagination to hear in Bourdieus description of todays entrepreneurial work culture, quoted above, a repetition of Foucaults description of one of the effects of panopticism:
The efficiency of power, its constraining force have, in a sense, passed over to the other sideto the side of its surface of application. He who is subjected to a field of visibility, and who knows it, assumes responsibility for the constraints of power; he makes them play spontaneously upon himself; he inscribes in himself the power relation in which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle of his own subjection. 29
We find significant precedents such as this one in the past, but, as Bourdieu makes clear, the new values promulgated in this contemporary form of panopticism are exclusively entrepreneurial ones. We find here no references to traditional Christian morality or descriptions of idleness as a sin. If the panopticon as described by Foucault was a vast experiment using various techniques in order to find what worked best, todays corporate work environments may very well be one of a number of practical applications of its results. If one of the effects of panopticism is to produce free subjects, then the critical issue is not so much a matter of liberating individuals from this or that constraint, but rather examining the apparatuses within which subjects are conditioned and constrained as free subjects. The workers described by Bourdieu, the homeless who are treated as both clients and criminals, those who are poor due to their own mismanagement and those citizens described by Brown who can strategize for themselves among available options but play no role in determining those optionsthey are all free. But their freedom is shaped, conditioned, and constrained within a form of subjectification characterized by increasing competition and social insecurity. It is an apparatus that produces only certain kinds of freedom understood in terms of a specific notion of self-interest, while effectively preempting other possible kinds of freedom and forms of self-interest (including various collective, communal, and public forms of self-interest) that necessarily appear as impolitic, unprofitable, inexpedient and the like. Rather than representing a new paradigm of power, neoliberalism perhaps constitutes a sovereign-disciplinary-governmental triangle of power. Turning again to Homo economicus, who might best be described as the subject who would be the principle of his own subjection because of the conditions of his environment, we recognize that this prescribed form of subjectivity also has its historical precedents within the biopolitics of liberalism. In his article The Ethology of Homo Economicus Joseph Persky traces the original use of the term Homo economicus
29
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, translated by Alan Sheridan (New York: Random House, 1979), 202-3.
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to the late nineteenth century. 30 There he locates the term in a series of critical responses to John Stuart Mills work on political economy, in particular his 1836 essay On the Definition of Political Economy; and on the Method of Investigation Proper to It. 31 There and in later writings Mill made use of an abstract hypothetical human subject useful for the purpose of economic analysis. Mill himself never used the term, and so economic man first came into being as a satirical rebuke to what was caricatured as Mills money-making animal, an imaginary being who was only interested in the selfish accumulation of wealth. In fairness to Mill, his actual description of this self-interested man also included the desire for luxury, leisure, and procreation. Interestingly, the problem of labor didnt enter into this picture except insofar as he was concerned that the presumably natural desire to avoid work and give ones self over to costly indulgences threatened to hinder the accumulation of wealth. Rational calculation, a central feature of todays Homo economicus was, of course, also absent. Persky notes that Mills approach was basically laissez-faire but that he also introduced ownership and profit sharing as motivating factors. While he sometimes treated Homo economicus as something of a natural being, he was also aware that the constitution of individual preferences, passions, and the overall development of character needed to be studied through a political ethology. As Persky explains:
Strictly speaking, Mill viewed efforts to analyze the development of character as the proper task of ethology, a science he placed logically subsequent to elementary psychology. Ethology, according to Mill, was that science which determines the kind of character produced in conformity to those general laws [of psychology], by any set of circumstances, physical and moral. In terms of Mills grander scheme of sciences and arts, ethology (like political economy) produced axiomata media, or middle-level theorylogically precise deductions from admittedly shaky first principles that then could be applied in useful arts. Thus, the art corresponding to ethology was education, or what today might be called character building (EHE, 226).
While this brief example is no substitute for a thorough genealogy of Homo economicus, Mills interest in this art of character building is a provocative indication that while the political rationality of classical liberalism may have appealed to nature and the human propensity to truck and barter (E, 41), it was also concerned with the governmental problem of the conduct of conduct. 32 What Persky is describJoseph Persky, The Ethology of Homo Economicus, Journal of Economic Perspectives. 9, 2 (Spring 1995), 221-31. Henceforth, EHE, with page numbers given in the text. John Stuart Mill, On the Definition of Political Economy; and on the Method of Investigation Proper to It, in Collected Works. vol. 4 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1967), 120-64. Here I am in at least partial disagreement with Wendy Brown when she suggests that, in
30
31
32
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ing in this article is Mills interest in a technology of subjectification. Specifically, he finds in Mill an inquiry into the techniques made available through various forms of scientific knowledge for producing a certain form of subjectivity with a certain ethos to serve the interests of political economy. Homo economicus, in other words, is historically introduced as a modern subject of governmentality, a biopolitical subject of power/knowledge. Foucault describes the classical version of Homo economicus as the man of exchange. He appears as a figure that must be analyzed in terms of a utilitarian theory of needs. His manner of behavior and mode of being must be broken down and analyzed in terms of his needs, which lead him to engage in a utilitarian process of exchange (BB, 224). By contrast, in neoliberalism, Homo economicus is no longer a partner in exchange but instead is fashioned as an entrepreneur and an entrepreneur of himself. As such he is his own capital, his own producer, and the source of his own earnings. Even in terms of consumption (and here again Foucault refers directly to Becker) the neoliberal Homo economicus is recognized as a producer of his own satisfaction. In place of all the old sociological analyses of mass consumerism and consumer society, consumption itself becomes an entrepreneurial activity analyzable solely in terms of the individual subject who is now recognized as one among many productive enterprise-units (BB, 225). Insofar as the enterprising individual is not directly subject to disciplinary and normalizing forms of power, neoliberalism is more tolerant of difference. Instead, society is to be arranged such that it can be divided or broken down not in terms of the grain of individuals, but according to the grain of enterprises. Foucault demonstrated that, from its origins, biopolitics has constituted modern subjects in empirically verifiable scientific and economic terms. Discipline and Punish provides detailed accounts of the training of individuals with imperatives of expedience, efficiency, and economy. It also illustrates the importance of constant surveillance and examination as the subject moves from one institutional space to another. As I have illustrated above, Foucaults analysis of panopticism describes how the disciplined biopolitical subject is made to internalize particular forms of responsibility for him- or herself through practices of subjectivation. One of the tasks required for producing genealogies of neoliberalism and Homo economicus is to identify the specific forms of knowledge that both inform and are produced by neoliberal practices, both individual and institutional. If the historical forms of disciplinary
contrast to classical economic liberalism, neoliberalism does not conceive of either the market itself or rational economic behavior as purely natural (E, 41). She is right about neoliberalism but I am not sure this feature distinguishes it from classical liberalism. First and most importantly, liberalism is explicitly an art of governing concerned with the conduct of conduct despite its appeals to nature. Second, neoliberalism also has the effect of making competition among individuals appear natural or a matter of common sense as a result of its active interventions in the social realm.
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power and subjectivation made use of the human and social sciences and related disciplines (psychology, anthropology, political science, pedagogy, etc.), a study must be made into the forms of knowledge that presumably have either taken their place or infiltrated them. The most obvious development in this regard would be the extent to which rational choice theory, the lynchpin of contemporary Homo economicus, has made its way into the various disciplines from micro-economics to sociology, political science, and philosophy. As Foucault put it in his last lecture from 1979:
Hence there is a new problem, the transition to a new form of rationality to which the regulation of government is pegged. It is now a matter not of modeling government on the rationality of the individual sovereign who can say me, the state, [but] on the rationality of those who are governed as economic subjects and, more generally, as subjects of interest in the most general sense of the term [BB, 312].
VI.
Ethics and Critical Resistance

[T]here is no first or final point of resistance to political power other than in the relationship of self to self. 33
Whether neoliberalism will ultimately be viewed as having presented a radically new form of governmentality or just a set of variations on classical liberalism, we can certainly recognize that there are a number of characteristics in contemporary practices that are new in the history of governmentality, a number of which Ive already discussed. Another one of these outstanding features is the extent to which the imposition of market values has pushed towards the evisceration of any autonomy that may previously have existed among economic, political, legal, and moral discourses, institutions, and practices. Foucault notes, for example, that in the sixteenth century jurists were able to posit the law in a critical relation to the reason of state in order to put a check on the sovereign power of the king. By contrast, neoliberalism, at least in its most utopian formulations, is the dream of a perfectly limitless (as opposed perhaps to totalizing) and all-encompassing (as opposed to exclusionary and normalizing) form of governance that would effectively rule out all challenge or opposition. This seems to be the kind of thing that Margaret Thatcher was dreaming about when she claimed that there is no alternative. 34 Such formulations of what might be called hyper-capitalism seem to lend themselves to certain traditional forms of criticism. However, critical analyses that produce a totalizing conception of
33
34
Michel Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the Collge de France 1981-82, translated by Graham Burchell, edited by Frdric Gros (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2005), 252. Henceforth, THS, with page numbers given in the text. This comment was made at a press conference for American correspondents in No. 10 Downing Street in London on June 25, 1980.
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power and domination risk the same danger, noted above, of overlooking the sometimes subtle and complex formations of power and knowledge that can be revealed through genealogical analyses of local practices. Important for any genealogical analysis is the recognition that, while there is no outside in relation to power, resistance and power are coterminous, fluid, and, except in instances of domination, reversible. There is an echo of this formulation in Foucaults understanding of governmentality as the conduct of conduct. Governmentality is not a matter of a dominant force having direct control over the conduct of individuals; rather, it is a matter of trying to determine the conditions within or out of which individuals are able to freely conduct themselves. And we can see how this is especially true in the case of neoliberalism insofar as it is society itself and not the individual that is the direct object of power. Foucault provides examples of this in The Subject and Power, in which he discussed a number of struggles of resistance that have developed over the past few years such as opposition to the power of men over women, of parents over children, of psychiatry over the mentally ill, of medicine over the population, of administration over the ways people live. 35 Despite their diversity, these struggles were significant for Foucault because they share a set of common points that allow us to recognize them as forms of resistance to governmentality, that is, critique. Through the examples he uses Foucault notes the local and immediate nature of resistance. These oppositional struggles focus on the effects of power experienced by those individuals who are immediately subject to them. Despite the fact that these are local, anarchistic forms of resistance, Foucault points out that they are not necessarily limited to one place but intersect with struggles going on elsewhere. Of greatest importance is the fact that these struggles are critical responses to contemporary forms of governmentality, specifically the administrative techniques of subjectification used to shape individuals in terms of their free conduct. 36 These struggles question the status of the individual in relation to community life, in terms of the forms of knowledge and instruments of judgment used to determine the truth of individuals, and in relation to the obfuscation of the real differences that make individuals irreducibly individual beings. Tying all of these modes of resistance together is the question Who are we? While some might be concerned about exactly who this we is suggested by Foucault, both here and in his discussions of Kant and enlightenment, I think the question is in some ways its own answer. In other words, it is meant to remain an ongoing critical question that can never be definitively answered, or, as John Rajchman has suggested, it is a question that can only be answered by those who ask it and through
35
36
Michel Foucault, The Subject and Power, in Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 211. Henceforth, TSP, with page numbers given in the text. As Foucault put it: Power is exercised only over free subjects, and only insofar as they are free (TSP, 221).
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the process of asking it. In his introduction to The Politics of Truth he writes:
The we always comes after, emerging only through the on-going light its activities shed on the habits and practices through which people come to govern themselvesand so see themselves and one another. Indeed in this lies precisely the originality of the critical attitude, its singular sort of universality, its distinctive relation to todayto now, the present, lactuel. 37
This critical attitude that Foucault repeatedly refers to in all of his discussions of Kant from the 1970s and 1980s is inseparable from both his analysis of governmentality and his discussions of ethics and the history of the experience of the relationship between the subject and truth. What fascinated Foucault about the care of the self he discovered in Greek and Roman ethics was the spiritual relationship that existed between the subject and truth. In order to gain access to the truth, that is, in order to acquire the right to the truth, individuals had to take care of themselves by engaging in certain self-transformative practices or ascetic exercises. Here we find critical and resistant forms of subjectivation where, rather than objectifying themselves within a given discourse of power/knowledge, individuals engaged in practices of freedom that allowed them to engage in ethical parrhesia or speak truth to power. In modernity, however, following what Foucault identified as the Cartesian moment the principle take care of yourself has been replaced by the imperative to know yourself [THS, 1 - 24]. In contemporary life that which gives an individual access to the truth is knowledge and knowledge alone, including knowledge of ones self. In this context knowledge of the self is not something produced through the work individuals perform on themselves, rather it is something given through disciplines such as biology, medicine, and the social sciences. These modern forms of knowledge, of course, become crucial to the emerging biopolitical forms of governmentality. Whereas individuals were once urged to take care of themselves by using self-reflexive ethical techniques to give form to their freedom, modern biopolitics ensures that individuals are already taken care of in terms of biological and economic forms of knowledge and practices. As Edward F. McGushin puts it in his book Foucaults Askesis: An Introduction to the Philosophical Life,
Power functions by investing, defining, and caring for the body understood as a bioeconomic entity. The operation of biopower is to define the freedom and truth of the individual in economic and biological terms. Reason is given the task of comprehending the body in these terms and setting the conditions within which it can be free. ...The formation of the disciplines marks the moment where askesis itself was absorbed within biopolitics. 38
37
38
John Rajchman, Introduction: Enlightenment Today, in Sylvre Lotringer (ed.) The Politics of Truth (Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e), 2007), 14-5. Edward F. McGushin, Foucaults Askesis: An Introduction to the Philosophical Life (Evanston,
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Foucault explicitly identified critique, not as a transcendental form of judgment that would subsume particulars under a general rule, but as a specifically modern attitude that can be traced historically as the constant companion of pastoral power and governmentality. As Judith Butler points out in her article What is Critique? An Essay on Foucaults Virtue, 39 critique is an attitude, distinct from judgment, precisely because it expresses a skeptical or questioning approach to the rules and rationalities that serve as the basis for judgment within a particular form of governance. From its earliest formations, Foucault tells us, the art of government has always relied upon certain relations to truth: truth as dogma, truth as an individualizing knowledge of individuals, and truth as a reflective technique comprising general rules, particular knowledge, precepts, methods of examination, confessions, interviews, etc. And while critique has at times played a role within the art of government itself, as weve seen in the case of both liberalism and neoliberalism, it has also made possible what Foucault calls the art of not being governed, or better, the art of not being governed like that and at that cost (WC, 45). Critique is neither a form of abstract theoretical judgment nor a matter of outright rejection or condemnation of specific forms of governance. Rather it is a practical and agonistic engagement, reengagement, or disengagement with the rationalities and practices that have led one to become a certain kind of subject. In his essay What is Enlightenment? Foucault suggests that this modern attitude is a voluntary choice made by certain people, a way of acting and behaving that at one and the same time marks a relation of belonging and presents itself as a task. 40 Its task amounts to a historical investigation into the events that have led us to constitute ourselves and to recognize ourselves as subjects of what we are doing, thinking, [and] saying (WE, 125). But how can we distinguish the kinds of resistance Foucault was interested in from the endless calls to do your own thing or be all you can be that stream forth in every direction from political campaigns to commercial advertising? How is it, to return to the last of the three concerns raised above, that Foucault does not simply lend technical support to neoliberal forms of subjectivation? On the one hand, we can distinguish critical acts of resistance and ethical self-fashioning from what Foucault called the Californian cult of the self (OGE, 245), that is, the fascination with techniques designed to assist in discovering ones true or authentic self, or the merely cosmetic forms of rebellion served up for daily consumption and enjoyment. On the other hand we might also be careful not to dismiss forms of self-fashioning as merely
IL: Northwestern University Press, 2007), 239. The Political: Readings in Continental Philosophy edited by David Ingram (London: Basil Blackwell, 2002). Michel Foucault, What is Enlightenment? in The Politics of Truth, edited by Sylvre Lotringer (Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e), 1997), 113. Henceforth, WE, with page numbers given in the text.
39
40
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aesthetic. As Timothy OLeary points out in his book Foucault and the Art of Ethics, Foucaults notion of an aesthetics of existence countered the modern conception of art as a singular realm that is necessarily autonomous from the social, political, and ethical realms, at least as it pertained to his question of why it is that a lamp or a house can be a work of art, but not a life. OLeary writes:
Foucault is less interested in the critical power of art, than in the artistic or plastic power of critique. For Foucault, not only do no special advantages accrue from the autonomy of the aesthetic, but this autonomy unnecessarily restricts our possibilities for self-constitution. Hence, not only is Foucault aware of the specific nature of aesthetics after Kant, he is obviously hostile to it. 41
What OLeary rightly identifies here is Foucaults interest in an aesthetics of existence that specifically stands in a critical but immanent relation to the ways in which our individuality is given to us in advance through ordered practices and forms of knowledge that determine the truth about us. The issue is not a matter of how we might distinguish authentic forms of resistance (whatever that might mean) from merely aesthetic ones. Rather it is a matter of investigating whether or not the practices we engage in either reinforce or resist the manner in which our freedom how we think, act, and speakhas been governed in ways that are limiting and intolerable. In short, critical resistance offers possibilities for an experience of desubjectification. Specifically in relation to neoliberal forms of governmentality, this would involve resisting, avoiding, countering or opposing not only the ways in which weve been encouraged to be little more than self-interested subjects of rational choice (to the exclusion of other ways of being and often at the expense of those irresponsible others who have chosen not to amass adequate amounts of human capital), but also the ways in which our social environments, institutions, communities, work places, and forms of political engagement have been reshaped in order to foster the production of Homo economicus. Endless examples of this kind of work can be found in many locations, from the international anti-globalization movement to local community organizing. It may be too early to determine the viability of neoliberalism as a form of governmentality and grid of intelligibility for thinking about our present, particularly as it continues to coexist with other more disciplinary and normalizing forms of power/knowledge/subjectivity. Certainly it seems to have expanded and become more prevalent than when Foucault analyzed it in the late 1970s. In any case, the proof will be in our practices, that is, a better understanding will emerge by attending to our everyday activities, what we say and how we think, our commitments and obligations as well as the kinds of truths about ourselves we rely upon and reinforce in the process of doing so. Critical attention should continue to be paid to how
41
Timothy OLeary, Foucault and the Art of Ethics (London: Continuum, 2002), 129.
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neoliberal forms of governmentality continue to reinforce and expand Homo economicus as a form of subjectivation that can be directly linked to greater wealth disparity and increasing poverty, environmental degradation, the evaluation and legitimation of governance through market values alone, growing rates of incarceration, the increasing intervention of private corporate values and interests into our everyday lives, the disappearance of the public square and an increase in the political disenfranchisement of citizens. All of this might best be attended to while bearing in mind Foucaults cautionary suggestion that People know what they do; they frequently know why they do what they do; but what they dont know is what what they do does. 42
42
Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Power and Truth in Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1983), 187.
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Sam Binkley 2009 ISSN: 1832-5203 Foucault Studies, No 6, pp. 60-78, February 2009
ARTICLE
The Work of Neoliberal Governmentality: Temporality and Ethical Substance in the Tale of Two Dads Sam Binkley, Emerson College
ABSTRACT: This paper considers debates around the neoliberal governmentality, and argues for the need to better theorize the specific ethical practices through which such programs of governmentality are carried out. Arguing that much theoretical and empirical work in this area is prone to a top down approach, in which governmentality is reduced to an imposing apparatus through which subjectivities are produced, it argues instead for the need to understand the self-production of subjectivities by considering the ethical practices that make up neoliberal governmentality. Moreover, taking Robert T. Kiyosakis Rich Dad/Poor Dad as an illustrative case, the point is made that the work of neoliberal governmentality specifically targets the temporalities of conduct, in an attempt to shape temporal orientations in a more entrepreneurial form. Drawing on Foucaults lecture courses on liberalism and neoliberalism, and Jacques Donzelots work on the social, the case is made that neoliberal governmentality exhorts individuals to act upon the residual social temporalities that persist as a trace in the dispositions of neoliberal subjects. Moreover, the paper concludes with a discussion of the potentials for resistance in this relation, understood as temporal counter-conducts within neoliberalism. Key words: neoliberalism, governmentality, temporality, the social, Foucault, Donzelot, counter-conduct.
Every day with every dollar, you choose to be rich, poor or middle class.
Rich Dad Poor Dad is a best selling book on financial advice written by Robert T. Kiyosaki. Originally self-published in 1997 as supporting material for Kiyosakis fi1
Robert T. Kiyosaki, Rich Dad/Poor Dad, (New York: Business Plus, 2000), 197.
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Binkley: The Work of Neoliberal Governmentality
nancial advice lectures, and later picked up by Warner Business Books in 2000, the text relates a rich allegorical narrative about the mental hard wiring required for financial success, and the concealed ways of thinking practiced by the wealthy. Kiyosakis method is comparative: he tells of his childhood relationships with two fathers; one a biological parent, the other a friends father who undertook the task of young Roberts financial education. Each father presented radically distinct outlooks on financial life. His own father, the poor dad, was a government man, head of the Department of Education for the state of Hawaii who, in spite of his impressive qualifications and career accomplishments, remained poor his whole life, snarled in a plodding, credentialist faith in institutional advancement as a slow climb up the ladder of bureaucratic hierarchy. The rich dad, on the other hand, was a self-made millionaire with an eighth grade education who held a deep distain for the nave approach to wealth generation practiced by the majority of Americansone that conceived of earned reward in terms of educational credentials and the patient advance to higher salaried positions within a single firm. Throughout the book, poor dads dour lectures on the virtues of patience, loyalty and circumspection were contrasted with rich dads exhortations to swashbuckling fiscal adventurism, self-interest and self-responsibility. Kiyosaki compares the advice offered by his two dads:
My two dads had opposing attitudes in thought One dad recommended, study hard so you can find a good company to work for. The other recommended, study hard so you can find a good company to buy. One dad said, the reason Im not rich is because I have you kids. The other said, the reason I must be rich is because I have you kids. One said when it comes to money, play it safe, dont take risks. The other said, learn to manage risk. 2
At first blush, the case of Rich Dad Poor Dad might seem innocuous enough: another proselytizing tome in a long tradition of entrepreneurial boosterism extending from Horatio Alger through Norman Vincent Peale to Donald Trumpa discourse on fiscal self-realization extolling the virtues of entrepreneurship and voluntarism as a personal ethic. Yet what distinguishes this example is not just its timeliness given the current zeal for anti-welfarist, anti-statist rhetoric, and its veneration for market cowboyism, (nor its stunning popularity, becoming a New York Times best selling title in 2002), but the specific way in which it dramatizes the dynamism within this space, what we might describe as the inner life of the neoliberal subject. This space is characterized by a specific tension between the inertia of social dependency and the exuberance and vitality of market agencya tension that is, in Kiyosakis prose, barbed with exhortations to mobilize the latter against the former.
Ibid, 15-16.
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Foucault Studies, No. 6, pp. 60-78.
In what follows, the provocations posed by Kiyosakis tale of two dads will provide a backdrop for an inquiry into debates around what has come to be termed neoliberal governmentality. 3 I take this term to indicate the ways in which subjects are governed as market agents, encouraged to cultivate themselves as autonomous, self-interested individuals, and to view their resources and aptitudes as human capital for investment and return. 4 Neoliberal governmentality presumes a more or less continuous series that runs from those macro-technologies by which states govern populations, to the micro-technologies by which individuals govern themselves, allowing power to govern individuals at a distance, as individuals translate and incorporate the rationalities of political rule into their own methods for conducting themselves. 5 However, in much recent work on governmentality, the emphasis has fallen on the institutional logics, the assemblages, technologies and dispositifs, as Foucault called them, through which the rationalities of neoliberal governmentality invest populations, while less emphasis has been placed on the practical, ethical work individuals perform on themselves in their effort to become more agentive, decisionistic, voluntaristic and vital market agents. 6 The tale of Rich Dad Poor Dad reminds us of the dynamic practices by which neoliberal governmentalities are incorporated. Moreover, it suggests that these practices are ethical, in the sense that Foucault used the term in his later work: they involve daily work performed upon specific objects or features of the self held to be problematicethical substances, as Foucault called them, which in this case implicates and acts upon the embodied, moribund collectivist dependencies and dispositions that are the legacy of poor dads mode of existence.
3
Michel Foucault, Governmentality in The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, ed. Colin Gordon and Peter Miller (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1991). Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collge de France. Translated by Graham Burchell. (New York: Palgrave, 2008). Andrew Barry, Thomas Osborne and Nikolas Rose, Introduction in Foucault and Political Reason, ed. Andrew Barry, Thomas Osborne and Nikolas Rose (London: UCL Press, 1996). Mitchell Dean, Governmentality: Power and Rule in Modern Society (London: Sage, 1999). Graham Burchell, Liberal Government and Techniques of the Self in Foucault and Political Reason, ed. Andrew Barry, Thomas Osborne and Nikolas Rose. (London: UCL Press, 1996). Thomas Lemke, The Birth of BioPoliticsMichel Foucaults Lecture at the Collge de France on Neoliberal Governmentality Economy & Society, 30, 2 (2001): 190-207. Nikolas Rose, Governing `Advanced Liberal Democracies in Foucault and Political Reason, ed. Andrew Barry, Thomas Osborne and Nikolas Rose (London: UCL Press, 1996). Sam Binkley, Governmentality and Lifestyle Studies Sociology Compass, 1: 1 (July 2007): 111-126. Nikolas Rose, Pat OMalley and Mariana Valverde, Governmentality Annual Review of Law and Social Science, 2 (2006): 83-104. Sam Binkley, "The Perilous Freedoms of Consumption: Toward a Theory of the Conduct of Consumer Conduct Journal for Cultural Research, 10: 4 (October 2006): 343-362. Barbara Cruikshank, The Will to Empower: Democratic Citizens and Other Subjects. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999).
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In short, governmentality expresses a certain series or relation between power and the subject, yet it is important to remember that this series is not seamless and complete. Instead, governmentality represents what Foucault called an unstable contact point between techniques of domination (or subjection), and the actual practices of subjectification by which neoliberal subjects govern themselves. Or, as Foucault put it in his 1980 lecture at Dartmouth College:
The contact point, where the individuals are driven by others is tied to the way they conduct themselves, is what we can call, I think government. Governing people, in the broad meaning of the word, governing people is not a way to force people to do what the governor wants; it is always a versatile equilibrium, with complementarity and conflicts between techniques which assure coercion and processes through which the self is constructed or modified by himself. 7
In other words, the relation of the subject before power is not reducible to the simple production of neoliberal subjects: what is involved is the production of selfproducing subjectssubjects whose own self-production is prone to reversals and appropriations, to mis-productions through which the subject produces herself differently than is intended by power itself. By considering the specific ethical practices through which individuals isolate and act upon certain elements within themselves, as they work to transform themselves from socially dependent subjects into neoliberal agents (or from poor dads into rich ones), it is possible to draw out the ambivalence that operates in this point of contact. Between dispositifs and ethical practices, or between techniques of coercion and the processes by which subjects construct themselves, there is, implicit within neoliberal governmentality, an indeterminacy that leaves open the possibility of doing things differently. Toward this end, I will attempt a theoretical reconstruction of the ethical dynamism that constitutes the work of subjectification, drawing anecdotally and for illustrative purposes on the allegory of the two dads, and the specific kinds of work on the self related in Kiyosakis gentle exhortation. More precisely, in seeking to emphasize these practical dimensions, I will highlight the precise object of everyday conduct that appears as the ethical substance, or the specific material upon which ethical practices workthat part of the self that is made the object of the transformative work of neoliberal governmentality. This substance is defined by time and the changing practices of temporal calculation and practical orientation by which everyday conduct is undertaken. Considering the temporal sensibility of social dependence as the substance of an ethical problematization within the practice of neoliberal governmentality, it is possible to consider how neoliberal subjects work to optimize, individualize and entrepreneurialize
7
Foucault 1993: 203-4, cited in Thomas Lemke Foucault, Governmentality, and Critique Rethinking Marxism, 1, 3, (2002): 49-64(16).
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themselves and their conducta program of subjectification centered on the vitalization and responsibilization of a dependent subjectivity, but also one shadowed by a certain ambivalence and instability, a technique of subjectification that remains open to the potential for being otherwise practiced.
1.
Governmentality, Subjection and Subjectification
I will begin with the question of this ambivalence within governmental practices. While it is not my intention to expand the already voluminous exegetical literature on Foucaults oeuvre (much less evolve a prescriptive template for how resistance might be strategized), it is nonetheless helpful to locate my project within the familiar reference points of his scholarship. By considering governmentality not as a political rationality in a technical sense, but as an everyday ethical undertaking, I am attempting to incorporate elements from what are considered distinct moments of Foucaults intellectual trajectory, drawing from his later work of the 1980s on the ethics of the self, in order to resolve problems posed elsewhere, in the late 1970s, in his studies of governmentality, biopower and discipline. 8 Indeed, between these two moments are distinct and contrasting understandings of how it is that subjects are produced in relationship to the larger structures they inhabit. In a general sense, Foucaults work of governmentality occupies a position between his genealogical studies of dispositifs, (or the apparatuses of power by which modern societies organize their populations through state apparatuses and institutional structures), and his studies of the ethical practices of the Ancient world, where the emphasis falls on the specific creativity of the individual in fashioning a unique relation to herself. 9 At the risk of over-simplification, it can be argued that, while in the case of the former, the subject is produced by power, in the case of the latter, the subject is produced by power as a self-producing subject. Foucault arrives at a discussion of the latter relation, the production of selfproduction, with the term assujetissementa term that is variously translated in English as subjection, subjectification or subjectivation, each term shaded with subtle differences of meaning. While such a meaning implies the passivity of the subject, Rosenberg and Milchman write, Foucault also sees assujetissement as entailing more
Foucault, Governmentality. Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collge de France, 1975-76. Trans. David Macey, ed. Mauro Bertani and Alessandro Fontana (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2003). Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population. Lectures at the Collge de France, 1977-78. Trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave, 2007) and Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison. Trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1979) and Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality Volume II: The Use of Pleasure. Trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1984).
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than relations of domination, as involving the autonomy, and the possibility of resistance, of the one who is assujetti [subjected] as well. 10 Such shifts of emphasis become important in the pivotal lectures of the late 1970s, where Foucault began to unfold his notion of governmentality, the elaboration of which developed against the backdrop of his wider efforts to reform and expand the analysis of power he had developed earlier, largely under the banner of discipline. Here power is a phenomenon of those complete and austere institutions so richly described in Discipline and Punish, whose power was the power to act on subjects, through the optimization of forces and the perpetual exercise of their capacities. Foucault attempted to attenuate this constraint in the first volume of the History of Sexuality and later in his lecture course of 1976-77, Society Must Be Defended, through an engagement with biopower as a broader exercise of power encompassing a range of extra-institutional societal deployments, centered on the very life of the population. 11 However, in the lecture course of the following year, Security, Territory, Population, the concept of biopower is quickly abandoned for an analysis of governmentality, understood not as a medico-juridical deployment, but as a state apparatus, first of popular security, and later, in his lectures of 1978-79, The Birth of Biopolitics, as a technology of political and economic liberalism.12 While there are strong arguments to be made both for a marked shift of emphasis in Foucaults work during this time (a case recently put forward by Eric Paras in Foucault 2.0) and for the persistence of underlying themes (as Jeffrey Nealon argues in Foucault Beyond Foucault), it is certainly the case that an incremental drift from discipline to biopower and ultimately governmentality is one which increasingly describes the production of subjectivity before power, or assujetissement, as a practice of self-formation, as the production of self-production. 13 Or as Graham Burchell has argued: the introduction of the idea of techniques of the self, of arts or aesthetics of existence, etc. seems to imply a loosening of the connection between subjectification and subjection. 14 Such loosening notwithstanding, within the framework of governmentality, there remains, I would argue, the powerful imprint of Foucaults genealogical study of power, and a depiction of the production of the subject before power as a fundamentally top-down process of subjection/subordinationthe production of subjects but not the production of self-producing subjects. 15 This is not to force a overhasty
10
11 12 13
14 15
Alan Milchman and Alan Rosenberg, The Aesthetic and Ascetic Dimensions of an Ethics of Self-Fashioning: Nietzsche and Foucault Parrhesia, 2 (2007): 55. Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended. Foucault, Security, Territory and Population and Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics. Eric Paras, Foucault 2.0: Beyond Power and Knowledge (New York: Other Press, 2006) and Jeffrey Nealon, Foucault Beyond Foucault: Power and its Intensifications Since 1984 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008). Burchell, 20. Ben Goldner, Foucault and the Genealogy of Pastoral Power Radical Philosophy Review, 10: 2 (2007): 157176.
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reduction on these two moments in Foucaults work, nor to assume that, in his work on dispositifs, Foucault left no room at all for a reflection on the self-forming activities of discipline, for indeed he did. Yet there is undeniably a shift of emphasis in the passage from his middle to later works, one which gradually gives increasing weight not only to the autonomy of these practices, but to the uncertainty of their outcomes. In this regard, this tendency has carried over into the expanding field of governmentality research that has emerged in recent years, wherein, as Katharyne Mitchell has argued: the work often seems top heavy and seamless, with an inexorable and inescapable quality to the situations and transformations depicted by governmentality scholars. 16 An alternative, bottom-up approach to governmentality, it would seem, would describe the negative operation of ethical work by which the rationalities of domination are extended into a program of self government itselfthe actual practices of shaping, changing or negating some feature of the self. Writing several years after his pivotal lectures on governmentality, and to a very different set of concerns, Foucault described these ethical practice as processes in which the individual delimits that part of himself that will form the object of his moral practice, defines this position relative to the precept he will follow, and decides on a certain mode of being that will serve as his moral goal. 17 Moreover, an important element of such an operation could be identified in the ethical substance, the prime material of his moral conduct, or the raw material upon which the ethical practitioner works. 18 For it is in operating on this ethical substance that the subject is both subjected to power, and enacts a practice of subjectificationan active shaping of the self as a subject. To locate the specific ambivalence operative in this point of contact, it is necessary to consider the active dynamics of self-governmental practices, the active negation of a prior ethical substance, or the work one performs on that dimension of the self one seeks to transform through government. In the case of neoliberal governmentality, this element appears, I have suggested, in the sedimented residue of earlier inscriptions of power, in the lazy predispositions to social welfare and institutional dependency that characterize the specific temporality of the poor dad.
2.
The Work of Neoliberal Governmentality
For Kiyosaki, the path to riches is one that leads us through a difficult labor of selftransformation. Ostensibly written for children of poor dads, or readers who were in
16
17 18
Katharyne Mitchell, Neoliberal Governmentality in the European Union: Education, Training, and Technologies of Citizenship Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 24 (2006): 390. Foucault, The History of Sexuality Volume II: The Use of Pleasure, 28. Ibid., 26.
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fact poor dads themselves, the text gently exhorts us to go to work on ourselves, to transform our poor dad habits into rich ones. The outlooks of the dads are described:
One dad believed in a company or in the governments taking care of you and your needs. He was always concerned about pay raises, retirement plans, medical benefits, sick leave, vacation days and other perks. He was impressed with two of his uncles who joined the military and earned a retirement and entitlement package for life after twenty years of service. He loved the idea of medical benefits and PX privileges the military provided its retirees. He also loved the tenure system available through the university. His idea of job protection for life and job benefits seemed more important, at times, than the job. He would often say, Ive worked hard for the government, and Im entitled to these benefits. The other believed in total financial self-reliance. He spoke out against the entitlement mentality and how it was creating weak and financially needy people. He was emphatic about being financially competent. 19
Poor dads sedentary life is embodied in the flabby matter of sedimented habits and unthought routines, shaped around social trust, institutional norms and the organizational protocols of managerial hierarchy. While poor dad plodded through life in a resigned, faithful spirit, seldom questioning the doxa of financial common sense, rich dads self-reflexive, hyper-voluntaristic outlook emphasized choice, agency, the examination of life and exercise of self-control on all levels. The transformative task to which Kiyosaki exhorts us takes the form of an exercise, the effect of which would effectively invigorate the body and the spirit by dissolving dependency and assuming full autonomy, injecting a vital life force into otherwise inactive material.
Although both dads worked hard, I noticed that one dad had a habit of putting his brain to sleep when it came to money matters, and the other had a habit of exercising his brain. The long term result was that one dad grew stronger financially and the other grew weaker. It was not much different from a person who goes on to the gym to exercise on a regular basis versus someone who sits on the couch watching television. Proper physical exercise increases your chances for health, and proper mental exercise increases your chances for wealth. Laziness decreases both health and wealth. 20
Exercise, in this regard, indicates the work that is performed to facilitate the circulation of vital forces within the mind and the bodya vitality that is at once a fundamental biological drive, and also a dispositional pre-requesite for neoliberal conduct. In his lectures of 1978-79, The Birth of Biopolitics, Foucault spelled out the radically different ways in which classical and neoliberal thought confronted basic ques-
19 20
Kiyosaki, 16. Ibid., 15.
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tions of autonomy and constraint. 21 These differences can be briefly summarized: while classical liberalism viewed the agencies and initiatives constitutive of market conduct as generic to social life itself, from the standpoint of neoliberalism, such dispositions had to be actively fostered through state interventions. The problem confronting early liberalism in the eighteenth century was how to establish a market within and against an existing state, and how to limit the interventions of that state in order that the market could assume the dynamism and rationality to which it was naturally inclineda process which would, if allowed to occur, enrich the state economically and militarily through the practice of governing less. 22 What distinguishes neoliberalism from classical liberalism, then, is their differing views on the naturalness of these market rationalities, and consequently their contrasting views on the role of the state in creating the conditions for market activities. In his discussion of the German post-war liberalism of the Ordo School, Foucault described how the problem facing liberalism in the aftermath of the Second World War was not to carve out a space of freedom within an existing state, as it was for classical liberalism.23 Instead, the task was to devise a state capable of creating, through its own programs and initiatives, the voluntaristic, entrepreneurial and selfresponsible dispositions, upon which market forms depend. Neither the market nor the competitive dispositions upon which market rationality draws, were considered sui generis features of social life: they had to be actively fostered through the interventions of a liberal state, whereby individuals were brought to cultivate an entrepreneurial disposition within their own modes of conduct. From this perspective, neo-liberalism is seen to invert problems long attended to by the agencies of Keysianism and the welfare state: against the Schumpeterian orthodoxy which holds monopolistic tendencies of capitalism as an intrinsic consequence of capitalisms economic logic, Ordo liberals consider this a fundamentally social problem, whose remedy is open to forms of social intervention, which target the tendencies toward collectivism by aiming to ignite competitive conducts. 24 Blockages to economic activity originating in the social fabric, the Ordo liberals argued, could be negated through programs of state intervention, aimed at suppressing collectivism, and stimulating entrepreneurial, market behaviors. Practices of neoliberal governmentality express the extension of these interventionist strategies into the social field, but also into the very domain of subjectivity itself, where, as Graham Burchell has put it: Neo-liberalism seeks in its own ways the integration of the self-conduct of the go-
21
22 23 24
Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics and Lemke, The Birth of Bio-PoliticsMichel Foucaults Lecture at the Collge de France on Neoliberal Governmentality. Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 27-51. Ibid., 183-5. Ibid., 185.
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verned into the practices of their government and the promotion of correspondingly appropriate forms of techniques of the self. 25 Yet while Burchell and others quite adequately account for this practice of self government by which market actors produce themselves through the inscription of a certain economic rationality, he does not say what stands in the way of this operation, what inner constraints within the individual have to be broken or what material was in need of work in order that such an ethical program be realized. In other words, the work of neoliberal governmentality entails important negative programs, undertaken through an active practice of self-transformation, requiring the break up and dissolution of those sedentary collectivist dispositions and anti-competitive habits that were the accidental and periodic consequence of capitalist life itselfthose very same forms of cooperative collective social life that Keynsianism and the welfare state actively sought to foster and solidify. There is a clear sense, writes Burchell, in which neoliberalism is anti-society. 26 To understand this negation as the active inner principle of a mode of ethics, we must better understand the ethical substance upon which this work is carried outa substance rooted in the collectivist dispositions fostered by social government. Moreover, it is in this collectivist disposition that we discover the specific temporality, the time consciousness by which specific forms of conduct are oriented, and which appears, in the work of neoliberal governmentality, as the unique ethical substance of a practice of self-government.
3.
Docility and Social Time
Clearly, rich dads and poor dads conduct themselves within radically distinct temporal frames: while poor dads practice a docile compliance to the prescribed rhythms and schedules of the institutions within which their faith is invested and their trajectories marked (poor dads, we recall, count sick days and look forward to earned vacations), rich dads, or neoliberal agents, take this docility as the specific object of an ethical program, assuming full responsibility for the temporality of their own conduct, managing risks and projecting their futures against opportunistic horizons tailored to their own unique projects. To grasp this process, we must understand the emergence of the temporality of the social both as a historical event, and as a residue accumulated in the bodies and dispositions of contemporary individuals. Such collectivist dispositions originate with a figure of power characterized by Jacques Donzelot as the sociala mode of government which arose in the intervening period between classical and neoliberal forms of rule. 27 The social
25 26 27
Burchell, 29-30. Ibid.,27. Jacques Donzelot, The Policing of Families. Trans. R. Hurley (New York: Pantheon, 1979). Jacques Donzelot, LInvention du Social (Paris: Fayard, 1984). Jacques Donzelot, The Promotion of the Social Economy and Society, 17:3 (1988): 394427. Jacques Donzelot,
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represents a problem-space wherein the excesses of liberalism (in the form of an accelerated capitalist economy and the over-extension of market sovereignty) are held to be problematic, identified and acted upon as a force eroding other forms of popular solidarity and creating fertile ground for revolutionary challenges to capitalism itself. From the early nineteenth to the middle of the twentieth century, social government developed through a technology of rule entailing, as Mitchell Dean has described, a set of problematizations of the liberal governmental economy (e.g., the social question, social problems, social issues), a set of institutions and practices (e.g., social welfare, social insurance, social work), a set of laws and legal jurisdictions (e.g., the juvenile court, family law) and a variety of actors, agencies and authorities (e.g., social workers, schoolteachers, police officers, general practitioners).28 The solution proposed to the problem of too much liberalism was, as Donzelot has argued in his genealogical analysis of the welfare state, the production, through state programs, of new social solidarities and new collectivist units. 29 Through the technology of welfare, the state assumed a function described by the French legal theorist Charles Gide as the visible expression of the invisible bondan instrument for the fostering of a normative moral order amid conditions of social disintegration resulting from the atomizing effects of industrialization. 30 Two important features of this new technology of rule must be understood if we are to apprehend it in terms of its specific temporal dimension: first, we must point out the capacity of social government to shift responsibility for risks from individual to collectivist forms, and second, we must understand the resulting durational temporal sense that emerges from this allocation. These points will be discussed in turn. In his Linvention du Social, (1984) Donzelot traces social government to a specific set of policy debates and legislative initiatives that developed in France during the nineteenth century. With an increasingly militant labor movement and the incipient threat of socialism, liberal legislators sought policies that would mitigate antagonism between labor and capital without mandating too radical an agenda of social reform. The resulting social rights legislation was a specific instrument of social government meant to foster solidarity, both among workers and between labor and capital more generally, as a means of ensuring social integration while blunting the specific indictment of the social order emerging from the socialist camp. Appropriating key Durkheimian themes, Donzelot describes the welfare state as one in which
The Mobilization of Society. in The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, ed. Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon and Peter Miller (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 169-179. Jacques Donzelot, Pleasure in Work in The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, ed. Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon and Peter Miller (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 251280. Dean, 53. Donzelot, The Promotion of the Social. Ibid., 403.
28 29 30
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this concept of solidarity serves to define not only the framework but also the specific mode of state intervention, one which affects the forms of the social bond rather than the structure of society itself. 31 Social rights legislation, Donzelot argues, extended a set of protectionist measures to workers, meant first to mitigate the specific risks and uncertainties arising from the industrial labor process (principally workplace accidents), but later applied more generally to a range of social and personal risks associated with health, fiscal security and social well being. 32 In its incipient form, this displacement addressed the question of culpability for workplace accidents, whose occurrence typically became flashpoints between labor and capital. In the industrial firm of the nineteenth century, industrial accidents immediately raised difficult and often irresolvable questions of responsibility, with both bosses and workers seeking to blame each other in squabbles over compensation payments, the award of which could alternately drive owners into bankruptcy, or abandon injured workers to pauperism. The solution arrived at by social legislators was that of the insurance techniquea system successfully applied in Germany under Bismarck, wherein regular individual payments into a common fund served to finance compensation paid to the injured in the event of accidents. 33 Such a seemingly simple policy measure, reproduced and disseminated across a range of institutional settings, carried with it a more subtle realignment in the practice of government: the insurance technique succeeded in shifting culpability from individuals (workers or managers) to the institutional conditions of work itself. Donzelot writes:
With so many cases remaining unresolved due to the characteristic difficulty of ascribing fault to anyone, wouldnt it be better to regard accidents as effects of an unwilled collective reality, not of an individual will but effects arising from the general division of labour which, by making all actors interdependent, results in none of them having complete control over their work, or consequently being in a position to assume full responsibility. 34
The institutionalization of such an unwilled collective reality entailed the socialization of risk, relieving individuals and management of responsibility for unforeseen outcomes of their own conduct. 35 A swarming of welfarist agencies and services throughout the industrializing world variously seized upon this model, fashioning solutions to the problem of social disintegration and strife resulting from too much liberalism, and particularly the profusion of risks, in the form of a renewed solidarity capable of absorbing those risks into itself. Moreover, this entailed state interven31 32 33 34 35
Donzelot, The Mobilization of Society, 173. Donzelot, The Promotion of the Social, 400 and Donzelot, Pleasure in Work, 256. Donzelot, The Promotion of the Social, 399. Ibid., 400. Ibid., 398.
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tion aimed at the normalization and regulation of workplace conditions (and later of social conditions more generally), as it became these conditions themselves, and not the owners of capital, that were ultimately liable for risks incurred. 36 The application of Taylorism to the French industrial economy in the years preceding World War I is a process aimed at enhancing worker productivity, not only through the technical division of labor for which it is best known, but through the adjustment of the worker to the mosaic of normalized interpersonal relationships into which work and its risks are socialized. 37 Better adjustment of the worker to the normalized conditions of production reduced the risk of accidentsa key governmental objective of welfarism, yet one that substituted a collectivist, institutional responsibility for the individual culpability for output and risks. As such, life under social government was characterized by a certain docility of conduct under the normalized conditions of an engineered solidaritya unwilled collective reality in which individual agency was itself no longer willed, but instead suspended within a socialized horizon of expectation, futurity and temporality. Of course, the docile conduct into which the solidarities of social government induced its members did not originate with social rights themselves, nor did they appear with the normalized social units into which such individuals were adjusted. Such modes of conduct, and the specific temporalities through which they were enacted, were for two centuries already being quietly insinuated into the conducts of modern people through those disciplinary institutions Foucault so well documented in Discipline and Punishthe schools, prisons, hospitals and military barracks. Indeed, there is a specific link between the forms of social government by which risk was transposed from individual conduct to the collective responsibility of the social totality and the docile temporality of the disciplinary institution. Foucault has described the specific manner in which the production of docility is accomplished through technologies of temporalization, and specifically with the deployment of duration as a temporal frame. 38 As a durational act, the temporality of an action is not bound to its immediate outcomethe risks it entailswhich have become remote from the actor, incorporated into the institutional totality within which it is executed. The time of the docile body (and by extension, the time of socialized risk) is measured simply as durationas abstract, homogenous time, whose ultimate motivation and endpoint is unwilled, remote from the responsibilities of the actor, fixed in the remote planning schemes of the institution. The emergence of durational time is often tied to the dissemination of clocktime in the labor process. 39 Linked with a wider rigidification of the intrinsic volun-
36 37 38 39
Ibid., 412. Donzelot, Pleasure in Work, 255. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison, 151. E. P. Thompson, Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism. Past and Present, 38
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tarism and spontaneity that characterizes personal and social life, the notion of duration is, in historical literature on temporality, associated with the reification of the natural rhythm and meter of everyday practice, specifically for the purposes of a more thorough exploitation of the productive capacity invested in the temporality of the act. 40 E. P. Thompsons well-known study of this process uncovers the manner in which a task-oriented temporality takes over and displaces traditional temporal sensibilities tuned to the rhythms of natural processes, such as the seasonal regularities of agriculture. 41 However, durational temporality is not simply a medium for the exploitation of labor: it is a means through which labor power is produced and sustained as a force, both within the individual and within the social unit as a whole. 42 Thompson shows how the disciplining of work-time functioned as much to fashion the basis for collectivist opposition to capitalist exploitation as to ensure the conditions for the extraction of profits from the bodies or workers. Similarly, durational time is, as Donzelot has shown, a mechanism of social integration and for the formation of unwilled collective realities and de-responsibilized conducts, wherein risk is socialized and the agency of individuals is transposed from to the horizons of individual actions to those of institutional norms. Foucault provides such an account in his detailed discussion of the production of docility in the incipient institutional temporalities of early modern societies. He describes the inscription of durational temporality as a positive operation, one that entails the decomposition of modes of conduct into administratively discreet moments, and their simultaneous recomposition in the sequence of a disciplinary practice. Foucaults account of the temporal elaboration of the act describes the precise manner in which an increasingly refined demarcation and segmentation of temporal units takes place in the marching instructions given to French foot soldiers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, wherein the simple step of the soldier is subjected to an increasingly precise division that expands from one to four basic movements in the course of a century. 43 The act is broken down into its elements; the position of the body, limbs, articulations is defined; to each movement are assigned a direction, an aptitude, a duration; their order of succession is prescribed. Time penetrates the body and with it all the meticulous controls of power. 44 This segmentation is not without aim, but neither is it specifically teleological. It is not completed with the exploitation of labor for profit, but is instead ongoing and productive, seeking as much to produce labor power as a permanent potential
(1967): 56-97 and Evitar Zerubavel, Hidden Rhythms: Schedules and Calendars in Social Life (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press), 1985. Zerubavel, 2-5. Thompson, 61. Foucault, Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison, 159. Ibid., 151. Ibid., 152.
40 41 42 43 44
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of the individual and to articulate this potential together with the ongoing functioning of the factory, as to secure its exploitation. 45 Foucault describes the production of durational temporality: for the French foot soldier of the eighteenth century, bodily practice was reintegrated into a new docile temporalitythe military marchwhich is directed to a new endpoint or goal, characterized by the general enhancement of productive forces, both for the individual himself, and for the institution of which he is a member. In other words, durational time acquires meaning as a permanent and ongoing exercise. Exercise, having become an element in the political technology of the body and of duration, does not culminate in a beyond, but tends toward a subjection that has never reached its limit. 46 As such, duration, measured by the rhythms of military training, the educational calendars of the public schools or the pay schedules imposed by the wage system, has no specific beginning and no end, and thus inscribes no agency or telosno will. For the worker, the prisoner, the student or the soldier, the performance of a task is ongoing and often without purpose. Temporality itself has been socialized. It was precisely this durational temporal orientation, the unwilled faithfulness to the rat race of a salaried job, that rich dad took as the object of the ethical work to which he exhorted his young student. He chastised this durational disposition for the flaccid spirit it exuded, but also for the lack of reflective awareness, the truncation of the horizons of economic action it imposed. The way out was first through the renunciation of the mind- numbing comforts supplied by such conduct, from which would follow an revitalization of ones willingness to confront risk, and a vast expansion of the horizon of economic opportunity. One of rich dads lessons involved inducing the two ten-year olds to work without pay for several weekends, under the argument that the experience would teach them that salaried labor reflected a lazy and dull-minded faith in a structured reward system, and that the true reward of work lay beyond the narrow rewards of the wage system. Rich dad explained his rationale:
Keep working, boys, but the sooner you forget about needing a paycheck, the easier your adult life will be. Keep using your brain, work for free, and soon your mind will show you ways of making money far beyond what I could ever pay you. You will see things that other people never see. Opportunities right in front of their noses. Most people never see these opportunities because theyre looking for money and security, so thats all they get. The moment you see one opportunity, you will see them for the rest of your life. 47
The awakening intended by this exercise was one that was meant to turn the two boys to work on themselveson the traces and residues, the inscribed habits and
45 46 47
Ibid., 161. Ibid., 162. Kiyosaki, 50.
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dispositions remaining from an earlier deployment of a collective social reality, and the displacement of responsibility and risk it entailed. The social, durational temporalities that are the residue of docility and durational time can be identified, not just in the generational rift between poor dads and their sons, but in the historical sedimentations accumulated in the bodies of those sons themselves, and in the readers to whom Kiyosaki appealsa body that, as Foucault wrote in his essay Nietzsche, Genealogy, History, can be understood as the repository of historical inscriptions, or as he put it, the inscribed surface of events. Indeed, it is in this work that the ambivalence between the institutional forms of self-government, and the individual practices of self-rule, or subjection and subjectification, becomes operative.
4.
Conclusion: Temporality and Counter-Conduct
The emphasis placed here on the work of neoliberal subjectification has indicated the need to consider the ambivalence between subjection and subjectification, or the loose fit between power and the subject. So far, however, little has been said of the specific content of this ambivalence, or of the general forms it might take. Of what, then, might this ambivalence consist? How is the work one performs on residual durational temporalities, the ethical substances of social conduct, or the residual inscriptions of Donzelots unwilled collective reality to be practiced differently? I will close with a very general and brief suggestion for the direction in which such a study might movea purpose for which it is useful to consult Foucaults discussion of what he termed counter-conduct, or the tactical reversals to which rationalities of governmentality are prone. Arguments for the tactical reversibility of clock-time as a technology of domination in the capitalist labor process are not unfamiliar: Thompson has described the process by which, a generation after the appearance of clocks in the labor process, struggles increasingly took place within the framework of scheduled labor: [workers] had accepted the categories of their employers and learned to fight back within them. They had learned their lesson, that time is money, only too well. 48 Yet the notion of a temporal counter-conduct within neoliberal governmentality requires that we move beyond Thompsons analysis of time as an instrument in the exploitation of labor, to a consideration of temporality as an object in the ongoing and openended practice of government, or as the self-forming work of subjectification itself. Foucaults many statements on practices of resistance need not be rehearsed here, save to point out some elements that are relevant to our effort to understand the neoliberal government of temporality as a practice characterized by ambivalence and tactical reversal. Toward this end, two points will be made, the first concerning the persistence of earlier temporal sensibilities in the conducts of individuals. In his
Thompson, 91.
48
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statements on counter-memory and counter-history, Foucault describes the manner in which subjugated knowledges are carried over from previous, now forgotten struggles, left to lie fallow, or even kept at the margins of the body and in everyday rationalities that shape conduct, yet which contained the memory of combats, the very memory that had until then been confined to the margins. 49 What I have described here as the residual temporalities of social conduct that appear as ethical substances in the work of neoliberal governmentality, share important features with such subjugated knowledges: to do the work of neoliberal governmentality differently is to engage differently the sedimented memory of social time that is the ethical substance of neoliberal governmentality, to engage this trace, not through a practice of disaggregation and responsibilization, but through a reactivation and redeployment of the unwilled collective reality that is the fabric of social time. A second point derives from the idea of counter-conducts, or revolts of conduct, which Foucault elaborated in his lectures of 1977-78, and through which practices of government can be understood in terms of their own potential for reversal. Counter-conducts, Foucault explains, are distinguished from economic revolts against power (such as those described by Thompson), by their emphasis on the government of the self as the stake of revolt, and the specific rejection, through inversion and reversal, of the precise ways in which one is told that one should govern oneself. Counter-conducts emerge from within the specific logics of a given mode of conduct, inverting the series that runs from the macro-level technologies of rule to the specific ethical practices by which individuals rule themselves. Foucault describes the pastoral counter-conducts developed in opposition to ecclesiastical rule during the medieval period, illustrated by the Flagellants, for whom extreme forms of asceticism took up specific features of Christian pastoral governance, while redeploying them in practices that were ultimately antagonistic to the pastoral establishment itself. 50 Similarly, temporal counter-conducts within neoliberal governmentality might choose to practice differently certain tenets of neoliberal rule, specifically the mandate to assume agency, to responsibilize oneself and to orient ones actions within a temporal horizon specifically conceived around ones own enterprising conduct. In doing so, such conducts might operate upon the ethical substance defined by the residual docility of social time in a manner opposed to that which it was intended by power. Rather than inscribing an individualizing responsibility through the temporality of personal conduct, neoliberal counter-conduct might undertake to transpose that responsibility elsewhere, to undertake the work of an unwilled conduct, of not acting, or withholding agency, of refusing to project ones conduct into the opportunistic temporal horizons that characterize the entrepreneurial outlookthe initiative to which rich dad inspired us. The temporal counter-conducts of neoliberalism
49 50
Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 8. Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, 207.
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might, instead of shaping new temporalities around the radical responsibilizing of ones own conduct, remobilize the subjugated memory of poor dads unique penchant for the unwilled life, recovering the capacity for inaction, irresponsibility and the refusal to seek out opportunity. Indeed, it is possible that such moments of counter-conduct punctuate the everyday lives of individuals in contemporary neoliberal societies. An illuminating example comes from the rising psycho-social phenomenon of procrastinationa cresting lifestyle affliction affecting larger numbers every year and garnering around itself an ever more verbose clinical discourse and practice, suggests some ways in which exhortations to self-responsibilization might provoke unique counter-conducts. Procrastination, recent studies have shown, is increasingly evident in public and private life, ever more present in the lives of students, spouses, taxpayers, politicians and professionals. 51 In a 2007 study published in Psychological Bulletin, Piers Steel describes the growing prevalence of procrastination: among the general population, 15%-20% consider themselves procrastinators, while among college students the figure is much higher, reaching 75%, almost 50% of whom procrastinate consistently and problematically. 52 Within the clinical literature on procrastination, the phenomenon is defined in strictly utilitarian terms: procrastination is most often considered to be the irrational delay of behavior, where rationality entails choosing a course of action despite expecting that it will not maximize your utilities, that is, your interests, preferences, or goals of both a material (e.g., money) and a psychological (e.g., happiness) nature. 53 Indeed, procrastination has become a growing topic in the self-help literature category, described in books with suggestive titles such as Do It Now: Breaking the Procrastination Habit, 54 and The Procrastination Workbook: Your Personalized Program for Breaking Free from the Patterns That Hold You Back; 55 The Now Habit: A Strategic Program for Overcoming Procrastination and Enjoying Guilt-Free Play, 56 and The Procrastinator's Handbook: Mastering the Art of Doing It Now. 57 A description of the procrastinators disposition is offered:
The power of procrastination erupts from deep within. It often masquerades as a friend. Let it wait, we hear ourselves say, for when you feel rested, youll fly
51
52 53 54
55 56
57
Piers Steel, "The Nature of Procrastination: A Meta-Analytic and Theoretical Review of Quintessential Self-Regulatory Failure" Psychology Bulletin, 133, 1 (2007): 6594. Ibid., 65. Ibid., 66. William Knaus, Do It Now: Breaking the Procrastination Habit, revised edition (New York: Wiley, 1997). Ibid. Neil Fiore, The Now Habit: A Strategic Program for Overcoming Procrastination and Enjoying Guilt-Free Play, revised edition (New York: Tarcher, 2007). Rita Emmet, The Procrastinator's Handbook: Mastering the Art of Doing It Now (New York: Walker & Company, 2000).
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Foucault Studies, No. 6, pp. 60-78. through these tasks to create a tomorrow that all will envy. This is one of those procrastination paradoxes, where a soothing idea has hidden barbs. You feel relief when you think you can later gain command over what you currently dont want to do. The barb is found in practicing a negative pattern of retreat. When you procrastinate you needlessly postpone, delay, or put off a relevant activity until another day or time. When you procrastinate, you always substitute an alternative activity for the relevant one. The alternative activity may be almost as timely or important as the one you put off. But more likely, it will be irrelevant, such as daydreaming instead of writing a report. 58
In closing, and by way of illustration, I offer procrastination as just one opening into the wider question of the contemporary practice of temporal counterconduct within the context of neoliberal governmentality. It is possible to read the choice to let it wait, so antithetical to the rich dads swaggering self-responsibility, as a specific ambivalence within the production of the neoliberal subject as a self-producing subject. The unwilling of procrastination calls back to the unwilled realities of durational temporality, cultivated in the collectivist time of social governance, and in the docile time of the disciplinary society, here worked differently, mobilized as a daydream, against the writing of reports.
58
Knaus, 8.
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Alan Milchman 2009 ISSN: 1832-5203 Foucault Studies, No 6, pp. 79-82, February 2009
REVIEW
Timothy Rayner, Foucaults Heidegger: Philosophy and Transformative Experience (New York: Continuum, 2007), ISBN 978-0-8264-9486-3.
Timothy Rayner has written an important book on a topic that has not been explored in great depth thus far: the profound impact of Martin Heidegger on Foucaults thinking over the course of more than thirty years, from the early 1950s to his death in 1984. Rayners point of departure is Foucaults own claim, in his final interview, The Return of Morality, that: For me Heidegger has always been the essential philosopher. Rayner takes Foucault at his word here and proceeds to defend a provocative, but compelling hypothesis, that, in the course of his career, Foucault appropriated, modified and began to articulate a quasi-Heideggerian transformative philosophical practice. (p. 35) Before elaborating on this hypothesis, it is important to point out that Rayner has already told his readers that his approach does not centrally involve comparing and contrasting Foucault and Heideggers work, with the risk that such an approach entails of providing a reductively Heideggerian (and thus misrepresentative) reading of Foucault .(p. 5) Instead, intending his title quite literally, Rayner is determined to focus on Foucaults Heidegger, the Heidegger that Foucault probably read; the Heidegger that he claims shaped the Foucauldian project through all its turns. That means that a great deal of Heideggers writings, unpublished during Foucaults lifetime, especially the lecture courses, including all of the courses given by the early Heidegger at Freiburg from 1919-1923, as well as the manuscripts from the mid-1930s to 1945, are excluded, even where their analysis would shed light on Foucaults own project and understanding of philosophy, inasmuch as they were not part of Foucaults Heidegger. However, the result of that focus is a compelling portrait of the philosophical trajectory of Michel Foucault, and the genealogy of his conceptual toolbox. What then is this transformative philosophical practice, which Rayner claims links Foucault to Heidegger? Indeed, in what sense can one even designate Foucault as a philosopher? According to Rayner, at the very outset of his career, Foucault sought to distinguish his own project from the philosophical tradition of phenomenology. Whereas the philosophical tradition of which phenomenology is exemplary focused its gaze on some facet of lived experience in order to grasp its
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meaning, another philosophical tradition, one linked to Nietzsche or Blanchot, for example, focused on how experience could itself be transformative, on how experience could be implicated in a project of desubjectivation. Rayner situates the Heidegger of Being and Time within the phenomenological tradition that Foucault claims he has sought to avoid. Later Heideggerthe philosopher of Ereignis, the critic of modern technology and the advocate of a turn (Kehre) in thinkingis at least intuitively aligned with the style of desubjectifying post-philosophy that Foucault has sought to engage. (pp. 2-3) While I have significant reservations about such a periodization of Heideggers thinking, especially in light of the publication of the writings of the early Heidegger, on the way to Being and Time, in terms of Foucaults Heidegger, such a demarcation is perhaps reasonable. Rayner then sees Heideggers thinking evolving from a phenomenological critique of subjectivity into a radical other thinking, one that is a more or less codified practice specifically intended to transform the experience of being. (p. 12) Heideggers philosophical practice, so understood, is seen by Rayner as the key to understanding Foucaults conception of philosophy as a vehicle of transformation. This is why Foucault cites Heidegger as his essential philosopher in his final interview. (p. 36) And that is the case, whether Foucault at the moment is focusing on knowledge and truth, on power, or on ethics, on the relation of self to self, the rapport soi. Within an overall perspective that sees the historical transformations in games of truth, power relations, and modes of subjectivity, as having their bases in events, thereby transforming their status from universals to particulars within a volatile history of struggles for power (pp. 74), I want to specifically address aspects of Rayners treatment of knowledge/truth, power, and ethics that seem to me to be both illustrative of his method, and to raise interesting issues of interpretation. Foucaults understanding of philosophy as a transformative experience is concretized in the kinds of books that he writes, what he designates as experience books, works of ficto-criticism. According to Rayner, experience books have the function of transforming the subject in relation to truth; the objective of the experience book is to open a radical perspective on the history of truth that transforms the experience of being. (p. 60) In contrast to demonstration books, which seek veridical truth, Foucaults experience books are examples of ficto-criticism, which aim to constructor at least facilitate the construction ofa ficto-critical antiworld (p. 66), one in which established truths, and modalities for arriving at truth, deeply embedded power relations, and long instantiated subjectivities, can all be transgressed. In situating forms of true knowledge within a context of historical events, Rayner discusses the influence of Heidegger on Foucault in terms of the latters distinction between two forms of knowledge: savoir and connaissance, with the latter referring to subject-object relations, and the specific forms of intentional knowledge (p. 70) and the rules that govern it. Yet given Rayners concern with Foucaults Hei-
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degger, something seems to be missing here. Is there not perhaps a link between connaissance and savoir and the distinction that Heidegger makes in Being and Time between understanding beings as present-at-hand [Vorhanden] and ready-tohand [Zuhanden], with the latter, our pre-ontological understanding of the environing world or work world [the Umwelt], corresponding to savoir, as in savoirfaire? While Foucault acknowledged that he had not made a detailed study of Being and Time, it is likely that in the early 50s he would have been struck by Heideggers important distinction between our knowledge of a world of objects and that of our work-world. Though somewhat skepticaland perhaps not without good reasonof the expansiveness of Hubert Dreyfuss claim that power for Foucault plays the same role that being plays for Heidegger, Rayner convincingly shows how both thinkers construe modern techno-power as objectifying, organizing, and managing the real, thereby permitting a heightened measure of mastery and control over objectdomains, and how both situate all forms of [modern] life within a domain of technical manipulation. (p. 100). Rayner situates Foucaults vision of biopower, and the management of a whole population, within a world in which rationalities and technologies render collective bodies knowable and controllable. (p. 96) However, when he discusses contemporary neo-liberalism, which he acknowledges to be a variety of biopolitics, Rayner tells us that liberal technologies of government work to create self-directing, entrepreneurial subjects (p. 108), thereby, in my view, obscuring what Gilles Deleuze saw as another dimension of biopolitics, its instantiation in the form of a control society, in which the space for the elaboration of technologies of the self was restricted by the imposition of new and more effective mechanisms of control. It is with his ethical turn, around 1980, that Foucaults confrontation with Heidegger assumes its most dramatic form, according to Rayner. In a series of provocative and, indeed, scintillating moves, Rayner demonstrates how Foucaults Heidegger came to assume an ever-increasing importance in the French thinkers elaboration of the themes of critique, subjectivity and desubjectivation, spirituality, and problematization. Foucaults concept of critique is linked to his reading of Kant, not the Kant of the analytics of truth, of the formal conditions under which true knowledge is possible (p. 135), but the Kant of What is Enlightenment? who sought an exit from the immaturity of subjection to authority. Critique, for Foucault, then, is tied to desubjugation and desubjectivation, escaping from the prevailing modes of subjectivity, precisely what Heideggers other thinking and his vision of Ereignis entail. Indeed, the final Foucaults preoccupation with the subject is no return to some kind of philosophical anthropology, inasmuch as he is clear that he is not speaking of a substantive subject, an a-historical or constitutive subject. Rayner claimsand his claim is a powerful onethat his interpretation enables us to see how, in Foucaults
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later years, the quasi-Heideggerian practice that had previously remained in the background of his critical activity moves to the foreground to become the philosophical activity of thinking otherwise by getting free of, or disassembling, the self. (p. 142) That mode of philosophical activity, in which access to the truth entails a process of self-transformation is what the final Foucault designates as spirituality, in contrast to the philosophical tradition that has shaped the modern West, that is based on self-knowledge and is a hermeneutics of the subject. As Rayner points out, there is another modern tradition, a counter-tradition, that includes Nietzsche, Heidegger, and, of course, Foucault: Foucault calls this the critical ontology of the present and ourselves. This second tradition, Foucault maintains, resituates ancient spirituality in a modern context by linking the activity of knowing the present to a transformation in the subjects being. (p. 135) That transformation proceeds through what Foucault terms problematizations, by which one can transform everyday difficulties into coherent, problematic experiences (p. 124) in which the historical crises of our experience in a domain of knowledge, power relations, or selfpractices, provoke us to explore new ways of being, an event of thought that Rayner sees as an ontologically tempered version of Heideggers concept of Ereignis, which is also an event of thought. (p. 125) Timothy Rayners Foucaults Heidegger, through its thesis that Foucaults search for a transformative practice, for an experience that transgresses the prevailing games of truth, power relations, and modes of subjectivity, is closely linked to Heideggers own philosophical project and constitutes a link in a chain of thinking that seeks to construct a viable anti-world. Alan Milchman, Queens College of the City University of New York
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Margaret A. McLaren 2009 ISSN: 1832-5203 Foucault Studies, No 6, pp. 83-87, February 2009
REVIEW
Amy Allen, The Politics of Our Selves: Power, Autonomy, and Gender in Contemporary Critical Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008) ISBN: 9780231136228.
Feminist critical theory needs both an account of domination that reflects the reality of womens subordination in societies pervasively structured by gender asymmetry, and a theory that provides the possibility for resistance to this domination and resources for social transformation. In her new book, The Politics of Our Selves, Amy Allen aims to provide just such an account. She attempts this ambitious project by demonstrating that the differences in the critical projects of Foucault and Habermas have been sharply overdrawn, and she carves out a middle ground between them. She argues that Foucaults insights on power as an ineliminable part of human social life are indispensable for feminist theory. But admitting the pervasiveness of power appears to compromise the autonomy necessary to critically reflect upon and resist social norms. Allen does not completely agree with this common criticism of Foucault, and emphasizes his discussions of autonomy in his later work. But she argues that he fails to provide an adequate account of social life, one that includes mutual recognition and reciprocity. For this, she turns to Habermas whose discourse ethics is based upon a non-instrumental mutuality. She looks to Habermas for a more robust conception of autonomy. However, in order to reconcile Habermass ideas with Foucaults insights on power, one has to rethink Habermass distinction between validity and power and recognize the entanglement of power and validity. Ultimately, she concludes that feminists should take the best insights from the work of both Foucault and Habermas to craft a feminist critical theory capable of explaining both the ways in which subjectivity is constituted through relations of power (including gender, race and sexual subordination) and of resisting and transforming those power relations. In chapter one, Allen sets out the parameters of her project. Foucaults politics of the self has two aspects: it is constituted through power relations, and is capable of critical reflection and self-transformation (characteristic features of autonomy). Yet these two aspects of the politics of the self are usually seen as incompatible; the task of Allens book is to demonstrate that they are not. The Foucault-Habermas de-
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bate has cast Foucault as anti-Enlightenment and Habermas as continuing the Enlightenment project of rational critique. This polarization construes Foucault as rejecting reason, subjectivity and norms which critics argue leaves him few, if any, resources for social transformation. Critical social theorists such as Habermas, on the other hand, overemphasize the power and purity of rationality. This debate continues in the positions of Judith Butler and Seyla Benhabib, with Benhabib claiming that emancipation requires a regulative principle, and Butler invoking Foucaults claim that there is no outside to power. 1 Amy Allen takes up the task set out by Nancy Fraser of integrating the Foucaultian account of subjection with the Habermasian account of autonomy. 2 Allen believes, however, that the two accounts cannot simply be integrated, but need to be substantially re-worked. Through her meticulous and insightful readings, she mines the best insights of Foucault, Butler, Habermas and Benhabib, and provides a promising new account of subjectivity, one that accounts for both power and autonomy. After introducing her overall project in chapter one, Allen provides a reading of Foucault in chapters two and three that emphasizes his engagement with Kant and with the critical project of Modernity. Chapter two reassesses Foucaults relationship to Kant. Allen addresses the criticism raised by feminists and critical theorists that in his early work Foucault argues for the death of the subject. A closer look at Foucaults early work reveals that his criticisms of the subject are directed toward the dominant philosophical notions of subjectivity, Kants transcendental subject and the subsequent phenomenological-existential notion of subjectivity. By carefully examining Foucaults engagement with Kant from his early work (his thse complmentaire) on Kants Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View) through his latest work, Allen provides a reading of Foucault as a continuation through transformation of the Kantian critical project. 3 Having established that Foucault does not abandon the subject in his early work, in chapter three Allen turns to Foucaults later work on autonomy and technologies of the self. Foucaults analysis of power and subjection seems to undermine autonomy, but this is only true if one conceives of power and autonomy as diametrically opposed. However, Foucault conceives of autonomyboth in the sense of the capacity for critical reflection and in the sense of the capacity for deliberate self-transformationas always bound up with power. 4 Accepting the interrelatedness of autonomy and power means we must transform Kants notion of autonomy. Foucault inverts the relationship between necessity and freedom. Rather than viewing freedom as resulting from the necessity of giving one self the moral law as Kant does, Foucault urges us to call into question that which is
1
See Seyla Benhabib, Judith Butler, Drucilla Cornell and Nancy Fraser, Feminist Contentions: A Philosophical Exchange (New York: Routledge, 1995). Allen, The Politics of Our Selves, 8. Ibid., 44. Allen, The Politics of Our Selves, 47.
2 3 4
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presented to us as necessary, thus opening up the space for possible transgression of those limits that turn out to be both contingent and linked to objectionable forms of constraint.5 Allen carefully articulates a Foucaultian notion of the subject that retains autonomy even while constituted through power relations, but in the end she concludes that Foucaults work does not provide the resources necessary for an account of autonomy capable of resistance and self-transformation. What is needed for a stronger conception of autonomy, she claims, is a broader conception of the social, specifically a conception of social life that includes non-strategic social relations such as reciprocity and mutual recognition. For this she turns to Habermas in chapters five and six. Before turning to Habermas, Allen examines Butlers work to see how it extends and supplements Foucaults account of subjection. Chapter four takes up a central question for feminists: How do women resist gender norms, given our ambivalent attachment to them? Butler offers an account of subjection that goes some way toward explaining why women become attached to normative gender roles in spite of the fact that they perpetuate womens subordination. Because identity is constituted through recognition and attachment, painful attachment is better than no attachment at all. Allen argues that although Butlers account of subjection rounds out Foucaults theory by integrating psychoanalytic insights, it does not provide the resources to explain how resistance is possible, or how to ensure that a resignification transforms social norms, rather than simply reinscribing them. With her characteristically careful reading of texts, Allen points out that Butler conflates dependency and subordination, noting that we need an account of dependency that is not subordination for resistance to be possible. As Allen says, whereas we might have good reasons for accepting the view that gender identity under current social and cultural conditions requires some individuals to become attached to their own subordination, there do not seem to be good reasons for accepting the view that becoming a subject necessarily involves such an attachment to subordination. Butler moves towards a fuller and more positive account of social relations in her more recent work, Giving An Account of Oneself acknowledging that dependency and vulnerability are part of a fundamental relationality that supports and nurtures us as physical (not to mention physic) beings. 6 While Allen agrees with Butler that recognition by others constitutes identity, she believes that recognition does not always involve subordination. Following Jessica Benjamin she believes in the possibility of mutual recognition (though dynamic and fleeting). Chapters five, six and seven flesh out the Habermas side of the FoucaultHabermas debate. Chapter five takes a closer look at the ideas of power and autonomy in Habermas, and questions the distinction between power and validity. Allen
5 6
Ibid., 65. Ibid., 87.
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McLaren: review of Politics of Our Selves
does a remarkable job of synthesizing and explaining Habermass wide-ranging corpus. She delineates three aspects of power in Habermass work: the colonization of the lifeworld, systematically distorted communication, and individuation through socialization. While Habermas himself acknowledges the first two aspects of power, Allen develops the third as the most promising for explaining the role that power plays in the lifeworld, for instance, in structuring gender subordination. Because power is present in the lifeworld, including in familial relationships where identity and the capacity for autonomy are formed, Allen argues that Habermas cannot maintain the distinction between power and validity in light of his own acknowledgment of the important role that socialization plays in the formation of identity. Allen clearly demonstrates that power is a necessary condition for individuation through socialization. But does this undermine autonomy and the possibility of critique entirely? As she argues in the following chapter, even though admitting power collapses the empirical/transcendental distinction that Habermass wishes to maintain, it does not undermine his project entirely. The possibility of critique, and of appealing to a normative framework still exists. But instead of assuming that validity stands apart from power and socio-historical circumstances, we need a more modest position. Allen suggests that the pragmatic turn advocated by Thomas McCarthy and Maeve Cooke allows for a reconceptualized idea of validity, one that allows for the appeal to norms in light of the impurity of reason. A more contextualist and pragmatic critical theory would advocate a context transcending validity, rather than a context transcendent validity. This approach salvages the concern with norms so important to the Habermasian project, while acknowledging the ever-present role of power in the social world. Blending the best insights of Foucault and Habermas, Allen says we need to develop a principled form of contextualism that emphasizes our need both to posit context-transcending ideals and to continually unmask their status as illusions rooted in interest and power-laden contexts. 7 In chapter seven Allen takes up feminist critical theorist Seyla Benhabibs work. Benhabibs interactive universalism gives more credence to particularity than Habermass communicative ethics, and this goes some way toward establishing a critical social theory that retains a strong notion of autonomy, and the ability to appeal to norms while adding sensitivity to cultural and historical particularity. However, in spite of Benhabibs own concerns about Habermass excessive rationalism, Allen discovers a rationalist residue in Benhabibs account of the self. Namely, despite Benhabibs attention to gender in her work, she holds the implausible view that there is an ungendered core to the self, and that gender is like clothes we can outgrow or shoes we can leave behind. 8 For Benhabib, gender is just one of the
7 8
Ibid., 148. Ibid., 159.
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narratives that we weave into our narrative conception of the self. But Allen cites empirical evidence that gender identity precedes our ability to construct a narrative account of the self. And, of course, the formation of gender identity takes place within power relations. Allens main criticism of Benhabib mirrors her earlier criticism of Habermas that power goes all the way down, structuring not only our options, but also the very selves who choose. In her conclusion she discusses the implications for feminism: How can women resist normative femininity given that our very selves are structured by it? Allen suggests two sources for such self-transformation, the conceptual and normative resources offered by social movements, such as the womens movement or queer movement. And new possibilities found in the social and cultural imaginary via literature, film and art. One might wish that she had developed these suggestions further: How do the alternatives to gender and sexuality norms already produced by these historic social movements play a role in individual selftransformation? Although Foucault shied away from prescriptive accounts of social and political change, in his later essays and interviews he discussed how the alternative social arrangements among gay men could inspire new possibilities for social relationships for everyone. Allens nuanced and careful readings of Foucault, Butler, Habermas and Benhabib demonstrate that both subjection and autonomy are necessary for an adequate theory of the self, and that the tension between Foucaults position and Habermass has been exaggerated. She offers us a Kantian reading of Foucault, and a contextualized, historicized version of Habermas that brings their projects together in interesting and productive ways, illuminating both sides of the politics of ourselves, autonomy and subjection. Margaret A. McLaren, Rollins College
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Bradley Kaye 2009 ISSN: 1832-5203 Foucault Studies, No 6, pp. 88-90, February 2009
REVIEW
Cressida J. Heyes, Self-Transformations: Foucault, Ethics, and Normalized Bodies (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007) ISBN: 0195310543
A stunning array of references burgeon forth from this text. Heyes has clearly done her homework. If the stated purpose of Oxford University Presss Studies in Feminist Philosophy Series was to showcase cutting-edge feminist approaches to philosophy, then it has accomplished this goal with Cressida J. Heyess Self-Transformations: Foucault, Ethics, and Normalized Bodies. For the most part the book utilizes a Foucauldian understanding of ethics that is not less concerned with producing a moral judgment of rights and wrongs, than it is with producing an askesis of freedom. This means creating a notion of self-becoming that is a product of what we desire ourselves to become, implying a power relation that is productive rather than repressive. As Heyes tells us, transforming the self entails a disciplined, meditative perseverance that is less achieved by turning the body into a perfect form than it is by an affirmation of the process itself. Heyes says that she rejects teleological conceptions of the body, and this book approaches ethics in this provocative, cuttingedge manner. Rather than evaluating whether or not weight loss programs are good or bad Heyes challenges readers to view the dieting process as being an expression of great self-control. Fusing her text with Buddhist thinking, Heyes says that if there is such a thing as a human essence it is a vessel of joy-- a joy that comes not from the egos achievements, but from a deep sense of unity and connection with all things. (p.4) Obsessing over ones body often distracts from this basic human desire to experience joy, but the process of self-transformation can often result in an extremely intense focus of the mind and body that can both generate and deepen feelings of joy. She remarks on the great sense of relief in accomplishing a goal after a long, concerted effort. The dark side of this approach is that it can turn into a monomaniacal obsession. Heyes has a deep sense of empathy with the transgendered subject, the weight-watchers subject, and the vulnerable woman who chooses to undergo the radical transformation that accompanies plastic surgery. She does not lump all of these subjectivities under one classification, as she is aware of difference; more importantly, Heyes is unafraid to explore the biopolitical underpinnings of these transformative phenomena. She shows how people are guided by doctors and health offi-
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cials into believing that without these life-altering self-transformations their psychological well-being, even their lives, may be at stake. The message doctors too often give to patients pressuring them to shave off poundage is often, lose weight and your future morbidity may decrease. (p.5) She also shows how with the recent invention of online discussion boards, these varied subjectivities are becoming a species all to themselves. Keeping track of ones weight loss progress and knowing the nuanced art form of calorie counting are ways of gaining acceptance in the world of dieters. Confronted by a deluge of books discussing normalization, Heyes is also extremely careful in the way she uses the term. She sees this term as being a manifestation of disciplinary power, which is not a substance, but rather a series of circulating relations that cannot easily be located in an individual or an institution. Disciplinary power is constitutive rather than external to the subject it creates, rather than being imposed upon a type of individual. Its functioning is based on a productive power relation, creating the self, rather than being a repressive hypothesis, and there is a power relation that consists of liberating a persons inner-self: saying yes to what is within rather than no. This disciplinary type of power holds the possibility of exhilarating people to the point of incredible joy and euphoria while achieving ones goals, or to obsessions that manifest in subjects who can think of nothing but changing their body. She insists that obsessing over transforming ones body is most often the result of a culture industry that insidiously permeates society with images of what the desirable female body type should be. The problem is that she insists on the one hand that women are not mere dupes of a patriarchal culture, yet also insists that media play a crucial role in shaping social norms, media that are still predominantly run by men. From here she goes on to show the fallacies in glamorizing a skinny female body type because it limits a womans ability to defend herself, presumably from the aggression of stronger male bodies, and also limits a womans ability to take on manual labor, traditionally a male line of work. Although a cardiologist would undoubtedly disagree, Heyes shows how desiring a thin female body is not causally related to health problems. Surprisingly, Heyes says that there is no link between obesity and poor health, which runs contrary to dominant medical and governmental discourse on the subject. These institutions presumably form a power/knowledge nexus that propagates a message that there is an obesity epidemic, and that weight reduction leads to better health. For Heyes, obesity is instead linked to social functionalism regarding what is a proper womans role within a patriarchal society, even if we are not to believe that women are dupes of this system. One of the bright spots for scholars of Foucault comes toward the end of the book. Heyes holds steadfast to the legacy of Foucault as a thinker who was deeply concerned about the way technologies of the self constitute a subjectivity within a nexus of power/knowledge, but from the perspective of an ethical agent who must establish a relation to his or her own subjectivity as a supplement of a larger histori-
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cal viewpoint. Heyes is rightly disturbed by various culture warriors working inside and outside of the academy who have made a cottage industry out of slandering Foucault in the hopes of discrediting his entire body of work. She says, some ad hominem and possibly homophobic readings of Foucaults biography generate the impression that he became, eventually, a decadent dilettante (i.e., promiscuous, unremorseful, eclectic, queer), rather than a serious scholar (i.e., dogged, earnest, narrowly focused, straight). As a colleague in philosophy once rhetorically asked me, Foucault? Wasnt he some kind of crackpot? Undoubtedly, most Foucault scholars have more than likely dealt with this uninformed view of the Foucault, which is based more on gossip than serious engagement with his texts. Heyes meets this critique by saying, By remaining feisty, unpredictable, radical and critical, Foucault exemplifies a political personality and an ethical attitude that does not crumble in the absence of self-certainty. In her view, Foucault stands in stark contrast to other canonized philosophers such as Nietzsche, who, Heyes says, epitomizes a certain type of academic aura-building that goes into creating a heroic male intellectual. Foucault is a different kind of philosopher, whose writings, according to Heyes, are absolutely conducive to a feminist interpretation primarily because of his concern regarding transformations of all bodies. That makes Foucaults work anti-programmatic and a joy to interpret and discuss. As a feminist scholar Heyes is disconcerted by the lackadaisical manner in which early feminist interpretations explained such self-transformations as dieting and plastic surgery in simplistic terms. Often these feminists concluded that the female was an oblivious dupe of patriarchy and then proceeded to paint a bleak picture of society with broad brushstrokes that showed it to be male-dominated. Heyes, inspired by Foucault, instead proposes that feminists and intellectuals in the social sciences and humanities take into account the personal narrative behind a selftransformation. Such an approach will help us better understand why an individual desires to alter her/his body, instead of producing universal theories to encompass all vaguely similar alterations. She is also sympathetic to the view that subjectivity is always created out of inter-connected relations of power. The self is always caught up in these interconnected networks of gender normalization, but that is not to say the subjects are simply victims without hope of extrication. There is hope, Heyes maintains; in fact, one of her own ethical tenets is that feminists must not give in to intellectually-inflected despair (p. 112), and to realize that hope cannot be generated by means of a discourse of political or ethical condemnation. Bradley Kaye, SUNY Binghamton
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Adrian Switzer 2009 ISSN: 1832-5203 Foucault Studies, No 6, pp. 91-95, February 2009
REVIEW
The Revolution Cannot Be Televised Tamara Chaplin, Turning on the Mind: French Philosophers on Television (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2007), ISBN: 0-226-50991-5
Near the end of Sans Soleil (1982), Chris Markers experimental, filmic meditation on memory, the political history of imperialism, cultural identity, and the incursion of appearances into reality, and, conversely, fact into storytelling, Alexandra Stewart the narrator reads from one of the letters by Sandor Krasna that run through the film:
I remember that month of January in Tokyo, or rather I remember the images I filmed of the month of January in Tokyo. They have substituted themselves for my memory. They are my memory. I wonder how people remember things who dont film, dont photograph, dont tape. How has mankind managed to remember? 1
Succinctly, the narrator articulates a central question of modernity: as the archive grows, and as the means of record-keeping are perfected, culturally (and collectively) we suffer a lapse in memory: Everything works to perfection, all that we allow to slumber, including memory. Logical consequence: total recall is memory anesthetized. If it is the rapid, technological advance in recording media that precipitates such amnesia, so the rise of new media simultaneously announces the end of history: Im writing you all this from another world, a world of appearances. In a way the two worlds communicate with each other. Memory is to one what history is to the other: an impossibility. In light of this situation, the narrator contrasts the delirium and drift with which memory must make do, given its modern circumstances, against the traditional, memoirists wont to simplify history by treating moments as isolated evidence: A moment stopped would burn like a frame of film blocked before the furnace of the projector. To remember, or to do history, is to engage in a kind of rambling enterprise; any appeal to traditional, historical practices
1
Sans Soleil, Chris Marker, director (Irvington, NY: Criterion Collection, 2007).
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signals the anesthesia of modern memory. The great, delirious aim of Sans Soleil is thus to remember; further, or what is the same, the film also practices history, and revolutionary, political history, in the only way that remains: by fits and starts, discontinuities and excisions. Markers film on memory and history thus shares something with Foucault's own work on history (as a phenomenon and discipline): both are conducted in the wake of history as an institutionalized practice; or, as Friedrich Kittler notes in Gramophone, Film, Typewriter: Foucault [is] the last historian or the first archeologist. The historians craft that Foucault still wields in his archeological period, and that he culminates and overcomes with his turn to the jolts ... surprises ... unsteady victories and unpalatable defeats of genealogy, 2 recognizes the medium of writing while ignoring the techniques of its production. It is for this reason, Kittler continues, that Foucaults archaeological analyses end immediately before that point in time when other media penetrated the librarys stacks. For sound archives or towers or film rolls, discourse analysis becomes inappropriate. 3 Generalizing over the specifics of Foucaults genealogical turn, what Kittler presses us to think is the possibility of remembering and of doing historyand how one might engage in these paired practicesin the era of the audio-visual archive. This is the main political question that threads through Markers film. Consider in this regard the history of Guinea-Bissaus war of independence against Portugal (1956-1974). In Sans Soleil, stock footage is shown of the leader of the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde (PAIGC), Amilcar Cabral, waving from the bow of a small motor boat as it pulls off the shore of Bijags; Marker then cuts fifteen years forward to Cabrals half-brother Luis recreating the scene. Except that the video record misleads: despite appearances, Luis Cabral is not leaving the shores of Bijags but coming to them: In an old film clip Amilcar Cabral waves a gesture of good-bye to the shore; hes right, hell never see it again. Luis Cabral made the same gesture fifteen years later on the canoe that was bringing us back. The film lingers for a while on the Amilcar (half-)brothers and the history of Guinean independence. The narrator reflects on the guerilla tactics employed against the occupying Portuguese army; she notes, with regret, the use of the term guerilla to describe a certain breed of film-making. Such reflections are synched to old, black and white film showing the advanceor is it a retreat?of liberation fighters pouring over a dusty meadow, crushing beneath them as they go the parched undergrowth. Then, once more, a cut forward in time: And now, the scene moves to Cassaque: the seventeenth of February, 1980. Guinea and Cape Verde are in the full
2
Michel Foucault, Nietzsche, Genealogy, History, The Foucault Reader, edited by Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984), 76. Friedrich A. Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, translated by Geoffrey WinthropYoung and Michael Wutz (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 105.
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flush of independence. Luis Cabral is president of the new nation; he is shown at a ceremony decorating a soldier for his contributions to the insurgency. Once more, though, things are not as they seem: But to understand it properly one must move forward in time. In a year Luis Cabral the president will be in prison, and the weeping man he has just decorated, Major Nino, will have taken power. The party will have split, Guineans and Cape Verdeans separated one from the other will be fighting over Amilcars legacy. We begin to feel the vertigo of the moving-image; or, better, since the feeling is more a temporal than a geographical disorientation, what we succumb to is the inertia of what Deleuze terms the time-image [Limage-temps]: 4 the uniquely modern form of audio-visual representationand experiencethat comes with the rise of the modern cinema. Yet, to identify the vertiginous relationship we moderns have to time with the medium of film is to overlook the more immediate influence of television. This insight lies at the heart of Sans Soleil. Krasna writes in one letter, which is read at length, of his experience watching Japanese television: he refers to the set as that memory box; the programming that follows is fittingly historical in character. Cloistered away in a Tokyo hotel, hemmed in on all sides by oppressive black frames, we watch through Markers lens a numbing day of television programming: first, there are the sacred deer of Nara; then a cultural program on NHK about the nineteenth-century French writer and dandy Grard de Nerval; the Nerval program carries us to the grave of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, followed by an evening program on the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia; later still, after the killing fields, there is adult programming: I did it all. All the way to the evening shows for adultsso called. Images from the day spent before Japanese television recur throughout the film; the persistence of the images suggests that the temporal vertigo of filmthe insane memory, as one Krasna letter describes the temporality of modern, cinematic and televisual imageryis borrowed from the small screen. The narrator senses as much. In trying to juxtapose the Nerval/Rousseau show against images of Pol Pot, the voiceover wonders aloud: From Jean-Jacques Rousseau to the Khmer Rouge: Coincidence? Or, the sense of history? This tentative speculation unfolds into the streets of Tokyo: the narrator voices Krasnas sense that the fine line between representation on television and life in the city has blurred. In one hypnotizing scene in particular, Marker shoots what seems an endless stream of commuters handing in their travel tokens to board the train; the transit official collecting the passes is at this moment indistinguishable from a ticket-taker at a movie theater. The further implication, which Marker captures on the faces of the commuters, is that they see themselves in a similar light.
4
Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time Image, translated by Hugh Tomlinson (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1989).
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Watching modern life as if through the small screen of the television setwith a kind of senseless, disjointed exchange of imagesis a matter of watching persons watch themselves in the same manner. To underscore this point, Marker takes footage from one of the adult programs from late night television and inserts it into the furtive glances young men cast on women on the train. Continuous, lived experience is a montage drawn from an ever-expanding store of footage. The metonymic principle of association and dissociation by which experience is thus edited together would seem to favor a Lacanian, psychoanalytic approach to a people and culture that has been televised. Yet, to exploit this point of convergence between contemporary theory and modern media by isolating Lacans actual appearance on televisionand this is the strategy, generally, of Turning on the Mind, Tamara Chaplins history of French philosophers on television 5is to miss the question(s) that Markers film, for example, or Foucaults genealogy puts to us. With the rise of the machinery of recordkeeping is it still possible to remember? Is it still possible to have, and to do, history? And the political question that follows from these first two questions: In what manneror in what "style" in a Nietzschean senseare we to conduct an historical research that must call itself into question? Marker and Foucault may not offer ready answers to these questions, but in their non-narrative film-making and genealogical efforts, respectively, they acknowledge that they are "unable not to ask them today," as Foucault puts it in The Order of Things. 6 Lacanas Sartre and Camus before him and Lyotard and Foucault after him in their own waysis always on television insofar as his theoretical questions of subjectivity and sexual difference are at the same time questions of the possibility of theory and how such theory can and should be conducted. Lacan puts the point plainly at the opening of Television, the transcript of his 1974 appearance on the cultural magazine show Un certain regard: [T]heres no difference between television and the public before whom Ive spoken for a long time now, a public known as my seminar. A single gaze in both cases: a gaze to which, in neither case, do I address myself, but in the name of which I speak. 7 Lacan recognizes that his work, his ideas, and he himself are implicated in the changed circumstances of a modern culture that is used to being recorded/remembered and that is used to watching itself through such technologies. It is for this very reason, in turn, that Lacan is able to insist on the political character of his television appearance. The relations of power and desire that exist between the institutions of psychoanalysis and state-governed television
5
Tamara Chaplin, Turning on the Mind: French Philosophers on Television (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2007). Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), 307. Jacques Lacan, Television: Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy, translated by Denis Hollier, Rosalind Krauss and Annette Michelson (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1990), 3.
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are gestured at or intimated throughout the broadcast. In playfully punning on the language of therapy and television, Lacan effectively draws the viewers attention to the political space of this institutional exchange without thereby bringing it into full, televisual view. Chaplins book is at its finestand indeed is at these points utterly captivatingwhen it allows theory and media to run together, mutually and reciprocally illuminating (and obscuring) one another. Two long passages stand out in this respect, though generally she is at her best in narrating the particulars of the programs. The first is a description of Foucaults December 1976 appearance on Apostrophes; the second is her subsequent treatment of Lyotards March 1978 segment on the short-subject program Tribune libre. It is here that the two intra-statist institutions of academic philosophy and public television are put in dialogue with one another; the great store of power coded in this exchange is exercised through the figures on the screen. Rather than fitting these scenarios to the extrinsic demands of an historical narrative that is variously divided between how television helped the French construct a post-War, national identity and naturalize its growing immigrant population, and how select programs disproved the going assumptionthough whose assumption this is, we are never surethat serious, philosophical discussion can not reach the masses through television, Chaplin simply lets the scenes unfold. For a moment, we are left to glimpse the broad, affecting personality of Foucault and the knowing wit of Lyotard. In short, we are witness to performances on television of television. Yet, such performances are not unique to the modern theorist (or to the theorist of modernity); these just happen to be two occasions that the audio-visual archive has remembered. This brings us back, finally, to Marker's successes in Sans Soleil in filming the political circumstances of modernity: the political can not be explicated, as Marker recognizes, but rather only suggested by editing. It is by cutting back and forth between the insurgent Amilcar Cabral and his presidential half-brother, Luis Cabral, that Marker projects the revolutionary politics of power-relations between a government and its radical elements. Marker's achievement in engaging the political in this way stands in sharp contrast to Chaplin's failure. Committed as she is to a general, historical positivism, Chaplin isolates French philosophers on television and in so doing enervates the political potency of a theory as it connects with other forms of discourse, other practices, and other institutions. To put this last point more concretely: it is not, as Chaplin comments at one point in the book, that the events of May and June of 1968 were not broadcast over the airwaves. Rather, it is that politics in the distinctly modern sense of relations of power, desire or forceand this is the politics of les vnement de Maican not be televised. Adrian Switzer, Western Kentucky University
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Adrian Switzer 2009 ISSN: 1832-5203 Foucault Studies, No 6, pp. 96-104, February 2009
REVIEW
Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, Objectivity (Cambridge, MA: Zone Books, 2007). ISBN: 1890951781
Time is out of joint: permanently so, it seems. What struck Walter Benjamin with such force nearly a century ago in borrowing Klees image of the Angelus Novus the angels eyes are cast back over centuries of historical ruin as he is flung into the future by paradises tempest1is for us familiar, all too familiar. Life without interruption, or a smooth, homogeneous life-experience is differentiated by a multitude of group identities, and a periodized biography. Whether in response to, or as a contributing factor in, the modern fact of a fragmentary, divided time, history is theorized as such. In this regard, consider how Thomas Kuhns once novel thesis of disruptiveor eruptivescientific revolutions has effectively replaced the idea of continuous historical development. 2 Whether adopted in the work of a particular historian or rejected in the name of a different model of historical change, at the very least the Kuhnian model serves as a touchstone for all subsequent histories; it bulks particularly large for those who would undertake to write a history of science after Kuhn. Implicitly, it is Kuhnian history that Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison have in mind in the following passage from their work on the history of scientific objectivity:
[T]his history is one of innovation and proliferation rather than monarchic succession ... Instead of the analogy of a succession of political regimes or scientific theories, each triumphing on the ruins of its predecessor, imagine [the history of objectivity being akin to] new stars winking into existence, not replacing old ones but changing the geography of the heavens. 3
Walter Benjamin, ber den Begriff der Geschichte. Walter Benjamin Gesammelte Schriften, Erste Band, Erste Teil (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1974), 697. Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1996). Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, Objectivity (Cambridge, MA: Zone Books, 2007), 18.
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Imagining the firmament of scientific history dotted with all different theories both past and present is a challenging response to Kuhn, for whom each new theory burns so brightly as to blot out all that precede it. Again, with Kuhn implicitly in mind, Daston and Galison write: In contrast to the static tableaux of paradigms and epistemes, this is a history of dynamic fields, in which newly introduced bodies reconfigure and reshape those already present, and vice versa. 4 Though they would rework the specifics of a Kuhnian, disruptive history to include a multitude of scientific theories within a changing, dynamic landscape, Daston and Galison nevertheless conceive of the advance of historical time as irregular; throughout the book, their preferred metaphorical image of historical change is that of the avalanche.
Just as in the case of the avalanche, preconditions must coincide with contingent circumstances ... Rather than razor-sharp boundaries between periods, we should therefore expect first a sprinkling of interventions, which then briskly intensify into a movement, as fears are articulated and alternatives realizedthe unleashing of an avalanche. 5
Later, in discussing mechanical objectivity as the episteme, ethos, and guiding principle of scientific practice in the mid- to late-nineteenth century, Daston and Galison again imagine the icy convulsions of historical change: Like the spring melt of an ice-bound northern river, the change begins with a crack here and there; later comes the explosive shears that throw off sheets of ice, echoing through the woods like shotgun blasts. 6 Trading in metaphors of revolutionary versus avalanche-like historical change serves a purpose: it hones the language by which the historian reports on his or her findings. In the social sciences, and in theory in general, clarifying terms is in many ways an end in itself. Yet, re-fashioning the terminology of an older theoretical model to fit different data, while useful, also tends to be something of a distraction. Clarifying the model of historical change distracts those who would theorize particular, disjointed histories from the more embracing issue of the ethics of such theorization. Let us be clear on this last point. There will be inter-historical ethical questions that arise within a field of social, scientific study. For example, in writing a history of the American Civil War, ethical questions will almost certainly arise concerning race and the institution of slavery. Yet, these are not the ethical issues that face the modern historian as historian. For their part, Daston and Galison acknowledge the ethical questions that arise within their chosen fields of study, namely, the bio4 5 6
Ibid., 19 Ibid., 50. Ibid., 124.
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logical and physical sciences. They note, for example, the seeming heartless[ness] of technocrats and the indifferen[ce] of scientific objectivity to familiar human values. 7 Daston and Galison raise the specter of ethical failings within the science just long enough to set them aside in the name of conducting a (Foucault-like) historical study of scientific norms and practices. In concluding the text, Daston and Galison reflect, briefly, on the larger ethical import of their own history: To claim that there are multiple virtues, be they epistemic or moral, is very different from the claims that all virtues (or none) are equally well- (or ill-) grounded and that whim may decide among them. By historicizing scientific epistemologies, and thereby multiplying their epistemic virtues, Daston and Galison conceive of their history as preparatory to, but absent from, the ensuing ethical debate of such virtues. As far as the ethical tasks, responsibilitiesor even, questionsthat face the historian given her epistemology (of historical time as disjointed), and given the practices that emanate from and articulate that epistemology (e.g., framing a history of objectivity in terms of the images that illustrate scientific atlases over time), Daston and Galison are unequivocal: All history can do is to demonstrate the possibility of alternatives, which is to say, in matters of epistemic virtues, history ... clarif[ies] what they are, how they work, and how much hangs in the balance if one is obliged to choose among them. 8 It is this last set of claims that causes hesitation: All history can do is to show an episteme as it is; all history can do is to demonstrate which practices follow from the ethos of a particular episteme; all history can do is present, without deciding, the ethical import of an episteme and its attendant virtues. History as a social scientific discipline is thereby exempted from the questions that confront a science when its epistemology is historicized; in short, history is conceived of as disinterested, non-evaluative, and therefore as an objective observation and reportage of facts as they are given in the historical record. In this way, the historian with one hand unsettles the seeming givenness of objectivity as a fixed or grounding scientific principle, and unsettles it by way of its historicization, while with the other hand recuperates into history itself a basic or founding objectivity: in the name of discontinuous historical time, objectivity is dissolved in a field of social, scientific study only to be precipitated out again in the discipline of history itself. Consequently, the value-laden choices and the virtues and practices that grow out of an historical epistemology get covered over. In other words, questions concerning the ethical implications and entanglementsand, more importantly, the ethical responsibilities and possibilities of doing historyare skirted. But there is great ethical potential in an historical epistemology that treats time as disjointed or fragmentary; Benjamins unique sense of the messianic, for one,
7 8
Ibid., 52-53. Ibid., 376.
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attests to the ethical potency of such an epistemology. Here it is instructive to follow a different approach to answering the question of the ethical task and promise of doing modern history. Further, it is instructive to do so by availing ourselves of the same Kantian and Foucauldian resources Daston and Galison employ in their own historical study. After all, it is in part through his engagement with the Kantian notion of critique that Foucault is led, methodologically, toward a historical genealogy. In turn, though it is unacknowledged, it is by a kind of Foucauldian genealogy that Daston and Galison conduct their study of the virtues and practices of the biological and physical sciences. What Foucault gains by this methodological turn to genealogy, and what he lacked in his archaeology, is a means of coordinating his theorization of a particular field of knowledge with the practices that define and articulate that field: the interaction between the practices being theorized and their (practical) theorization is traceable through a genealogical method in a way that is not possible for an archaeology. 9 Given Foucaults insight into how knowledge and power are related, an ethics of theory follows naturally from the preceding, epistemological point: the interaction between theorized practices and their theorization is not ethically neutral; again, a genealogy is methodologically keyed to the ethical consequences of theory in a way that archaeology is not. To begin our brief reconstruction of the ethics of theory in generaland the ethics of history in particularwe must first insist on the modernity of such history since it is based upon the modern epistemological view of historical time as disruptive, disjointed, and out-of-sync with itself. Historical time in disrepair now seems to be a settled matter; what has lapsed since Benjamin discerned this structure a century ago is its vibrancy. No longer do we survey history in the stark hues of Klees reds, blues, and sharp angles. We are instead awash in grey news-copy famines, plagues, wars, and/or natural catastrophes; or, more simply, the high-gloss arrhythmia of digital media. With the entrenchment of an historical epistemology comes a quietism concerning the questions raised by that epistemology and a diminishment of its possible claim on us: change and disruption are learned by rote; they are unthinkingly treated as synonymous with historical time. We need look no further than ourselves to find out how history has settled into such a state. It is through the lens of modern subjectivity that we view history; it is from the same, subjective vantage that history shows up in its modern disfigurement. The modern subject is activeor characterized by spontaneity [Spontaneitt] in the Kantian senseit is self-determining, autonomous, self-reflexive, and yet it remains opaque to itself upon reflection. To date the arrival of this modern self is to look back into the written philosophical record and note the terminological drift to9
Michel Foucault, Nietzsche, Genealogy, History. Translated by D. F. Bouchard & S. Simon. In The Foucault Reader. Edited by Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon, 1984). 76100.
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ward a recognizable objective/subjective distinction: as is the case with all linguistic histories, so too with subject and object the change is gradual. While Descartes, writing in the mid-seventeenth century, continues the traditional, scholastic usage according to which object refers to a mental artifacta concept or representation in the minda hundred years later, in the pages of Kant, subject as referring to cognitive and/or perceptual operations and faculties is clearly distinguished from the object as the shared reference of such operations for all rational beings. In making their case that changes in ideas and practices of subjectivity inform changes in the ideas and practices of scientific objectivity, Daston and Galison note that by the mid-nineteenth century, dictionaries and handbooks in English, French, and German credited Kantian critical philosophy with the resuscitation and redefinition of the scholastic terminology of the objective and subjective. 10 The implication is that changes in the textual or linguistic record correspond with extra-discursive changes in society in general (it is just this transition from discursivity to extradiscursive practices that Foucauldian genealogy tracks). Just as subjectivity and objectivity are written about differently in texts from the end of the nineteenth century compared to how they are addressed in texts from the beginning of the same period, so subjectivity and objectivity are experienced, lived, or practiced differently by the generation that spans the same time period. In invoking Kants idea of an active, willful subject to make the correlative point that scientific objectivity, as it is modernly understood and practiced, is historically situatedand only recently acquiredDaston and Galison avail themselves of part of Kants modernism while neglecting another, related part: an active or spontaneous subject is for Kant also a self that is concealed from itself. For Daston and Galison, Kants notion of a self-determining subject prefigures what they term the scientific self, which appears in the mid-nineteenth century (at just the moment the Kantian terminology of subject and object enters into the official, textual record). Once Kant has drawn the distinction between what is merely subjective in the cognitive and perceptual operations of human beings, and what is objective in those same operations and as such verifiable, epistemologically warranted, and communicable, the scientists task is to diminish by strength of will the former in the name of the latter. The mid-nineteenth century historical record bears out this development in a number of ways. For instance, there is suddenly a new literary genre; or, at least, a marked change in the tone of an older genre. What appears at this time is the intellectual biography of the scientist, der Wissenschaftler, le scientifique 11 as selfdisciplined, steel-willed, and self-abnegating. Consider the following excerpt Daston and Galison provide from an 1878 British guide to research methods in physics and
10 11
Daston and Galison, Objectivity, 206. Ibid., 217.
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chemistry: [The will is] the strong central authority in the mind by which all its powers are regulated and directed as the military forces of a nation are directed by the strategist who arranges the operations of a war. 12 Such an idealized image of the scientist as self-denying and (militarily) self-disciplined is absorbed into the practices of the common, laboratory under-laborer. Meticulous journals are now kept, with detailed record not only of the objects of study but of the state of the observer; Daston and Galison reproduce a page from the Sudelbcheror waste booksof the scientist, poet and philosopher Georg Christoph Lichtenberg: observations of changes in barometric pressure are woven into reflections on Lichtenbergs own mental and physical state. 13 As rooted in Kant as these developments in (scientific) subjectivity are, still there is a crucial piece of the Kantian story that is overlooked: it is just this missing piece that accounts for the way history appears to us moderns; it is this same piece that problematizes the idea and practice of an objective history (and makes apparent the ethical task that confronts the historian). At precisely the juncture in the Critique of Pure Reason from which one can extract the (modern) notion of an active and reflective subject, one also finds Kant insisting on the opacity of such subjectivity to itself. In acknowledging an active self as the condition of the possibility of a unified object of experience, Kant is careful to situate such a subject at the inaccessible level of the transcendental; this is the significance, in Kant, of identifying the self as the transcendental unity of apperception. 14 The representation of an object (of experience) as a synthetic achievement rather than as an empirical given is rooted in a self that is itself a synthetic achievement. Yet, as the transcendental condition of the possibility of an object (of experience), the synthesis of the unity of apperception cannot itself be conditioned. As unconditioned, the synthetic unity of apperception is not determinable, that is, it is not cognizable or knowable to consciousness. All objects of experience are thus tinged with a degree of opacity, which is inherited from the opacity of their transcendental condition; Kant in this way inclines toward empiricism and away from the rationalist, Leibnizian hope that objects might be fully determined (or cognized) by thought alone. To put the same point in more familiar Kantian terms, an object (of experience) is for Kant an appearance; the object as it is in-itself is not knowable (just as/because the self as it is in-itself is unconditioned and thus unknowable). Stepping back from the Kantian trees in which it is all too easy to lose the forest, what follows is that if modern objectivity is rooted in the Kantian critical project, it is so at the considerable price of a ready and complete access to the object. Given
12 13
14
Ibid., 229. Ibid., 236-237; Cf. Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, The Waste Books. Translated by Reginald J. Hollingdale (New York: New York Review of Books, 1990). Immanuel Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft. Akademieausgabe von Immanuel Kants Gesammelten Werke, Band III (Berlin, GER W.: de Gruyter, 1902). B139-140.
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the opacity of the self to itselfand here we should recall that Freud, a century later, will have Kant in mind in developing psychoanalysisif an object is approached through the lens of modern subjectivity it will appear with just the same imperfections that mar the lens. This same disfigurement marks every possible object on which the modern observer would turn a probing eye. Given our present interest in the study of historical time by history as a social, scientific discipline, we can specify the preceding conclusion: historical time appears to history as disjointed, disarticulated, or incomplete just because it is viewed through and from the vantage point of the modern subject. The great tragedyor comedy, depending on ones Nietzschean sensibilitiesof modern life is that the subject becomes acutely selfinterested at the very moment of falling into obscurity to itself. The first generation of nineteenth-century modern theorists was unaware, to various degrees, of the significance of all of this for theory itself. For instance, Kant conceives of the Critique of Pure Reason methodologically as a process of reason sitting in self-judgment. In at least this one important respect, Kant is thus blind at the time of the first Critique to the broader theoretical exigencies of his own account of subjectivity: critique as a methodology of reasoned self-reflection must need be frustrated by the same obscure fate that faces modern subjectivity. Later modern theoristsand Kant himself by the end of his careercome to appreciate the theoretical (or methodological) problems that arise from the idea of a (Kantian) transcendental subjectivity. In response to Kant, Nietzsche and Marx exemplify the modern theorist in working out, in their own distinct ways, theoretical models adjusted to the modern realities of subjectivity, time, and society. And here we should note one further, more recent close-reader of Kant: Michel Foucault. Like Nietzsche, Freud, and Marx before himto all of whom Foucault dedicates an early, eponymous essay15Foucault acknowledges the great theoretical potential of Kantian critique; with these same early modern theorists, Foucault also realizes that critique in its traditional, Kantian form is no longer viable given the different structure of modern, historical time. 16 By privileging practices and techniques over discursive formations, Foucault replaces in theory the Kant-like regulative ideas that modern sciences and institutions erect on grounds that have been razed by a process of analysis and critical investigation. What Foucault instead attends to in his genealogical approach is site- and time-specific phenomena that resist the (temporally) pre-modern approach of most discursive analyses. Leaving aside the formidable theoretical challenges that in turn confront a study of historically situated practices and norms, it here suffices to note that in a genealogy both the ob15
16
Michel Foucault, Nietzsche, Freud, Marx. Translated by Gayle L. Ormiston and Alan D. Schrift. In Transforming the Hermeneutic Context: From Nietzsche to Nancy (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1990), 59-67. Cf. Michael Kelly, Critique and Power: Recasting the Foucault/Habermas Debate (Cambridge, MA; MIT Press, 1994).
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ject of study and the means of its study are specific, deeply contextualized, and localized in time and place. As might be expected, the ethics of theorizing in this fashion is comparably site-specific and particular in its focus. Thus, the ethical burden we shoulder as theorists with a new, modern epistemology of historyone that treats historical time as a fractious, unsteady advance from past into futureis that of the specific, particular, or individual. The focus of Foucaults genealogical studies bear out this point; the late works occupy the space between an uneven, disjointed history, the imperatives that accrue in the interstices of historical time, and the ethical possibilities open to those who have slipped into those dead spaces. Texts like Discipline and Punish and The History of Sexuality also aim to fit the resources available from the western, intellectual tradition into the margin (and in so doing empower those who have been marginalized by the [un]steady advance of history). At the level of theorizing modern, historical time and its attendant systems of knowledge and regimes of power, Foucault moves in his later work from an archaeological retrieval of the discursive traces of change left in the knowledge systems of the sciences to a genealogy of the practices of those same systems. What Foucault gains in this methodological change is a theoretical proximity to his particular field of study and, more importantly, a way of gauging the intrusion of his own theoretical practices into whichever topic is under investigation. Though Foucault would appeal to the language of knowledge and power to describe the theory-level implications of his genealogical approach, the language of an ethics of theory seems equally apt given the point at which Foucault arrives at the end of his career. We might, accordingly, read Foucaults interest in the ancient practices surrounding the hupomnemata as self-referential: if there is an ethics of the self being practiced in this ancient writing perhaps it reflects the ethics of writing about such matters in an historical study of antiquity. 17 An epistemology that treats of historical time as disjointed, demands, as noted above, a matching theory that is sufficiently pliable to adjust to the uneven terrain of such a history. A theory like Foucauldian genealogy reflects such pliability in its value-bias toward what is local, specific, or marginal. To put the same point in the above Kantian language, a genuinely modern theory attends to what is concealed or obscured in its field of study; a modern theory approaches what is liminal within a particular field of knowledge or what tends toward and anticipates a different set of practices and norms. In short, marginality and difference are the epistemic virtues of all modern theory as modern. Given the very insubstantiality of the notion of the marginal by which a modern, theoretical epistemology operates, the ethics that attends modern theory is normatively biased toward adopting alternate theoretical approaches and re-orienting historical studies by various different arrangements
17
Michel Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the Collge de France 1981-1982. Translated by Graham Burchell (New York: Picador, 2005), 367.
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of site- and time-specific practices. Again, we see just this point being practiced in Foucaults late works: the move from studying incarceration in the early modern period to Victorian-era practices of sexuality to the ethics of self-care in late-antiquity attests to an ongoing ethical concern with how one theorizes history. By keeping the theory-level, ethical implications of social, scientific study alive in this way, Foucault avoids darkening still further the obscure corners and blind-spots that form within an historical time in disrepair. Whatever ones sensibilities are about the dangers of letting whole sections of historical time fall into obscurityand with them, the populations that occupy those timesit is nevertheless true that in adopting a modern epistemology of uneven historical time one is ethically committed to just those times and those populations. Here, then, is the real ethical danger of practicing history in an objective guise while appropriating an historical epistemology that is anything but objective: Daston and Galison in their history sever a modern epistemology from its ethical implications (while still attending in their study to site- and time-specific historical practices). Specifically, what Daston and Galison fail to realize in their objective history (of objectivity) is that only a nonobjective history avoids presenting theory as ethically neutral. Our modern situation is such that our subjectivity, our history, our claims of knowledge and our social practices are all obscure; the ethical responsibility of the theorist in the face of this is to pay constant (and vigilant) attention to her own contributions to such obscurity. Adrian Switzer, Western Kentucky University
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Denis Duez 2009 ISSN: 1832-5203 Foucault Studies, No 6, pp. 105-109, February 2009
REVIEW
Leonard M. Hammer, A Foucauldian Approach to International Law: Descriptive Thoughts for Normative Issues (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007). Hardcover. ISBN: 978-0-7546-2356-4.
Since the early 1980s, international studies have sustained a theoretical dynamism. The demise of the empiricist-positivist promise for a cumulative science has forced scholars to re-examine the ontological and epistemological foundations of their discipline. 1 After the first great debate that pitted idealism against realism in the 1940s and the second debate confronting behaviouralism and traditionalism in the 1950s1960s, this so-called third debate has lead to an increasing criticism of the dominant realist paradigm in international relations. Foucaults work unquestionably fuels this third inter-paradigm debate and the rise of the post-positivist approach to international relations. 2 His concern with historically specific conditions in which knowledge is generated allowed poststructuralists to offer an alternative conception of international relations. It brought new blood to international relations by questioning the realist image of the world, especially its state-centrism, its obsession with political-military power and its blindness to various sub-national or trans-national actors. While international relations scholars have been trying for more than twenty years to address contemporary changes in world politics by debating the key concepts structuring political science, public international law is obviously stuck within a largely unquestioned and outmoded statist approach. A Foucauldian Approach to International Law is a noticeable exception to this general assertion. In his book, Hammer points out that international law essentially failed to acknowledge the emergence of new international actors such as non-governmental international organisations and sub-national political entities or individuals. Moreover, international law has been struggling since its very origins with some inherent ambiguities
1 2
Yosef Lapid, The Third Debate: on the Prospects of International Theory in a PostPositivist Era, International Studies Quarterly, 33, 3, 1989, 235-254. Pierre Anouilh, Emmanuel Puig, Les relations internationals lpreuve du poststructuralisme : Foucault et le troisime grand dbat pistmologique, in Sylvain Meyet, Marie-Ccile Naves, Thomas Ribmont (eds.), Travailler avec Foucault. Retours sur le politique (Paris, LHarmattan, 2004), 141-159.
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and inconsistencies regarding the link between law and political processes. According to Hammer, the main problem is that, unlike in national jurisdictions, within the international system there is no actual legal system. Since the states are creating the law for their own regulation, aspects of enforcement are usually lacking. International law has thus been caught between three different discourses: first, the realist assertions that international law does not exist as such, but only as a tool of states and as a reflection of their particular interests; second, institutionalism that accords some role for international law-making organisations; third, cosmopolitan assumptions of moral state behaviour with a view towards the identification of an existing social order.3 Referring to Foucault as a means of understanding and enhancing international law, Hammer tries in the second chapter of the book to move away from the traditional dichotomous battle between normative objectivity and consensual understanding of international law. He suggests a transformative understanding of the international system and a transgressive approach to ones perception of international society. 4 The underlying assertion is that the transgressive Foucauldian conception of power can help international legal theory to address the on-going changes that have developed within the international system: the growth of international and regional organisations, the move towards globalisation and the rise of new actors. Since the state is not maintaining full and complete control but rather part of a matrix of power, Hammer considers that what begs attention is not the state as the central actor in the international system, but an understanding of the variety of actors use of techniques and tactics of domination to understand the framework and forms of relations. 5 The influence of international law is not solely a matter of sovereign command, but is one of resistance among social forces. It is a part of the social power system. The law does not serve a regulatory role between the state and the individual, but rather functions as part of the process in shaping individuals and allowing for their reactions that in turn further serve to shape and influence social process. Starting from these general assumptions, each chapter of the book addresses a fundamental problem within international law, with each chapter following the same pattern. After discussing the underlying problems posed by traditional legal doctrines regarding the topic of the chapter, Hammer offers an alternative approach pursuant to Foucaults understanding of power and governmentality. The third chapter considers the manner by which a state might acquire standing and personality within the international system via international recognition. Recognition is at a crossroads between a state according another entity some form of
3 4 5
Leonard M. Hammer, A Foucauldian Approach to International Law: Descriptive Thoughts for Normative Issues (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 8. Ibid., 9. Ibid., 19.
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legitimacy such as to deem it a state, while also making a statement regarding policy and desire. The legal doctrine recognizes that the explanation for this decision is not to be found in a specific normative framework but essentially in the will of the state. Recognition is always a political decision reflecting interests and treatment accorded by one entity to another with little legal fallout. It is linked to the circumstances. By introducing the Foucauldian notion of regime of truth, Hammer shows that even with the recognition decision being considered within a political context and at the mercy of the states, there are still other forms of influence that hold sway over the state to the extent of influencing its decision as well as altering the position and status of the entity at question.6 Recognition is an ongoing pattern of changing standards for a recognized entity, such that the truth of an entitys status is subject to the regime of understanding as understood by the actors involved in the process. This regime of truth within the context of recognition is thus a contingent notion. It emanates not only from other states, but also from their relationship with such other bodies as international organisations. It reflects an ever-changing conception of the criteria for statehood. Therefore, what is important is to understand why an idea is understood to be the truth and how that came about. 7 The fourth chapter addresses a key source of international law, that being customary law. Adhering to the transgressive approach to custom, Hammer proposes to turn ones attention from the question of identifying the contents of custom towards the surrounding events and developments that have led one to declare a norm as achieving customary status. Once again, the questions are why and how a customary norm has emerged. Reflecting Foucaults approach to governmentality, Hammers goal is to rethink rules and aspects of state behaviour by considering how the state and other actors envision custom. Customary international law then is not considered as a final source of law, but as part of the ongoing discourse that tends to influence and affect pattern of relations and actions. This discourse incorporates a broad gamut of international and domestic actors, including the individual, nongovernmental organisations, the state and international bodies. The fifth chapter is probably the most original of the book, and potentially the most controversial too. It considers international human rights via a reference to the right of freedom of religion and belief. The purpose of the author in this chapter is to examine modes by which human rights can maintain some form of social role within society in a manner that does not necessarily eviscerate the surrounding culture, but becomes part of the ongoing social discourse. 8 According to Hammer, it is important to acknowledge the social function of beliefsespecially minority beliefs and their manifestationsboth in forming avenues of understanding and recognising the necessity for social development. Starting from Foucaults approach to
6 7 8
Ibid., 41. Ibid. Ibid., 71-72.
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power, Hammer interprets human rights as the means by which a state subjugates the individual to pre-conceived notions regarding the desired structure of society. Rights can serve to entrench the state and create a strict framework of operation at the expense of individual development. As a result, autonomy and free-thinking can be stymied rather than enhanced by human rights. Incorporating Foucaults understanding of truth, Hammer argues that the actual content of the belief or the potential contradictions between a belief and other rights are not the key issues. Since truth and belief are contingent, one should understand belief as a matter of ongoing discourse within society and ever-shifting understanding of truth. As a result, he suggests that states and judicial tribunals must look beyond the temptation to engage in some form of social balancing by considering the broader social interplay that is at work. 9 Somewhat less original in content, the sixth chapter engages the relatively recent notion of human security. Unlike the state-centric approach, the human security approach views the individual as a subject of the international legal system and considers the notion of security in a more human-orientated manner. It allows a variety of programs and initiatives that meet the needs of populations in distress. In this chapter, Hammer evaluates the merits of such a reference to human security within the framework of international law. Regarding the work of Michel Foucault, Hammer points out that the focus on the welfare of the populations is, in a broad sense, pursuant to Foucaults notion of bio-politics, which shifts attention away from the state as the central figure. He suggests that a transformative approach enlightened by Foucaults conception of power allows for a conceptualization of human security in a manner that need not rely upon existing normative systems, but rather allows for human security to develop in a descriptive sense, as the needs of the population or group shift and sway, depending on necessities and surrounding changes. The seventh chapter turns towards the Foucauldian framework as a means of addressing the rise of non-governmental organisations within an international legal framework. Recognising the problems associated with non-governmental organisations, especially internal and external accountability issues, Hammer examines the conditions necessary for a new approach to international law that incorporates various non-state entities as viable actors. His goal is to demonstrate how the global civil society process reflects the power/knowledge relationship proposed by Foucault. In this perspective, global civil society is not presented as a movement of resistance emanating from below, but as a reflection of changes in power relations between actors, all of whom maintain some form of influence, as well as being subject to influential drives of the other participating actors. Global civil society is not considered as a democratic ideal, but rather as a reflection of emerging forms of governmentality. Leonard Hammers book is a very good piece of scholarship. It challenges the statecentric paradigm that dominates international legal theory and questions both the
9
Ibid., 94-95.
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realist and cosmopolitan interpretations of international law. Hammer emphasizes the ever-changing character of truth and the importance of analyzing the broader context within which international norms and practices emerge. Pursuant to Foucaults toolbox approach, Hammer does not intend to propose a new global explanation for the international legal system. He invites us to use the intellectual devices offered by Foucault to better explicate international law. Nevertheless, while the book is an excellent contribution to the epistemological debate in the field of international law, the author nonetheless falls short of offering a satisfactory analysis of any of the issues that he has selected for investigation. Therefore, although the book by Hammer is a breakthrough in international legal theory, it does not bring any new perspectives to political science or Foucauldian studies. The book is a new examplea quite good one indeedof how Foucaults political thought can usefully be re-appropriated in support of renewed analysis of the social power system. Denis Duez, Facults Universitaires Saint-Louis, Bruxelles
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Mike Jolley 2009 ISSN: 1832-5203 Foucault Studies, No 6, pp. 110-114, February 2009
REVIEW
Jeffrey. T Nealon, Foucault Beyond Foucault: Power and its Intensifications since 1984, (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008), ISBN 9780804757027.
In Foucault Beyond Foucault Nealon draws out some of the most important and often ignored aspects of Foucaults approach to power. He explicates elements such as the productive aspects of power and the connections between discipline, biopower, and the subject while critiquing interpretations that see Foucault as outlining a repressive, iron cage approach to power or as being a converted humanist in his later work. While many Foucaultian commentators have pointed out the importance of productivity rather than repression, multiplicity rather than centralization, in their discussions of power, Nealon takes the important step of applying these ideas to a range of different topics including popular culture and capitalism. One of the most important concepts for Nealons interpretation of the Foucaultian approach to power is intensity 1. While many readers will recognize this term as Deleuzian, Nealon draws mainly upon Foucaults middle works in his discussion of the ways that intensity and intensification can be useful tools of analysis. In addition to reading key texts such as Discipline & Punish 2 through the lens of the intensification of power relations, Nealon also uses it as a way to describe historical change, specifically the change in dominance of one mode of power over another. 3 While I find the concept of intensity as utilized by Nealon to be a useful conceptual tool, I am not quite prepared to apply it in such a ubiquitous fashion. In his review of this book Todd May also voices some concern over intensification, specifically over its transhistorical appearance and the way it cuts a wide swath across Foucaults work, perhaps too wide a swath. 4 Unlike May I do not so much take is1
3 4
Jeffrey T. Nealon, Foucault Beyond Foucault: Power and its Intensifications since 1984 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008). See chap. 2. Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage/Random House, 1995). Nealon, Foucault Beyond Foucault, 25-31. Todd May, Review of Foucault Beyond Foucault: Power and its Intensifications since 1984, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews (2/14/2008).
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Jolley: review of Foucault Beyond Foucault
sue with intensity as a concept that more or less accurately describes historical change but rather with the way it tends to shift our focus away from power as a multiplicity of force relations 5 and towards less useful questions such as which mode of power we are currently in. Nealon also does not seem to be overly concerned with periodization but does use intensification along with the (also Deleuzian) concept of threshold to account for historical change from one mode of power to another (from discipline to biopower, for example). It is not my contention that this is the wrong reading of Foucault; however, I do believe that this more broadly historical application of intensity may in effect result in an overemphasis on: 1) the distinction between different modes of power rather than their simultaneous and often interweaving character; and 2) the internal unity of different modes of power rather than their heterogeneity. Despite this broader historical application, Nealon continues on to emphasize the different infiltrations or connections between different modes of power even shifting from one meaning of the word intensity to another. He states, The gruesomely painful intensity of Damiens torture and execution gives way to another sense of the word: intensity as the maximizing imperative of efficiency. 6 In this description of the transition from sovereignty to discipline as the dominant mode of power, Nealon reveals that he is actually tracing Foucaults shifting use of this concept, citing somewhat different usages in Discipline & Punish (the body) and in History of Sexuality, Volume 1 (biopower, life). This would seem to indicate a question of emphasis rather than of accuracy. While one may or may not accept Nealons use of intensification as historically causal, it is difficult to deny that he has opened up a much more interesting and potentially productive series of questions regarding Foucaults different uses of this concept. Along with intensity another concept Nealon sees as connecting discipline to biopower is the norm. Much of Nealons discussion of norms echoes his approach to power; they are constituted in practice, are productive rather than repressive, and attempt to account for rather than to exclude the abnormal. 7 While Nealons discussion of the norm as productive and inclusive in its effects is useful and serves to connect discipline and biopower, it also raises some difficult questions. 8 These ques5
6 7 8
Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality, Vol.1: An Introduction (New York: Vintage/Random House, 1990), 92-93. Jeffrey T. Nealon, Foucault Beyond Foucault, 36-37. Ibid., 48-51. Of course, there is also an issue of what Link refers to as semantic turbulence. In the many variations of this term (norm, normativity, normal, normalize, etc.) there is ample space for slippage in meaning, which raises another set of questions about the relations between these different variations. See Jrgen Link translated by Mirko Hall, From the Power of the Norm To Flexible Normalism: Considerations After Foucault, Cultural Critique 57 (Spring 2004).
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tions begin with the fact that Nealon bases his discussion of the norm almost entirely on Discipline & Punish with an occasional reference to The History of Sexuality. While these are obviously not inaccurate or inappropriate sources, I believe that Nealons emphasis on these texts leads to a somewhat individualized account of the norm, one that sidesteps issues of population, risk, and security. This is evident in his references to Discipline & Punish, which are almost entirely focused on the terms individual, individuality, or identity as well as in the absence of any discussion of the importance of population, a central concept in Foucaults later work. 9 This is not to say that the individual is unimportant to biopower; it is rather to point out that the connection between individuals and the population is key. Foucault explored this connection in his lectures on the eighteenth-century concept of Polizeiwissenschaft, which he saw as at once an art of government and a method for the analysis of a population on a territory. 10 In his discussion of Von Justis approach to this concept, Foucault states, He [Von Justi] perfectly defines what I feel to be the aim of the modern art of government, or state rationality, namely, to develop those elements constitutive of individuals lives in such a way that their development also fosters the strength of the state. 11 [emphasis added]. Nealons focus on the individual is also carried over in his discussion of contemporary capitalism. In this text he points out a number of interesting connections between biopower and certain aspects of contemporary capitalism, especially consumption and the Marxian issue of the real subsumption of labor. In his engagement with several neo-Marxist perspectives 12 Nealon again makes use of the concept of intensity to describe how money is intensified in what he refers to as the globalized logic of finance capital. 13 While I find this to be a useful way of thinking about speculation and finance, it also refers to culture and the tendency of contemporary capitalism to proliferate and embrace differences. This tendency, of course, resonates with and is an important connection to biopower. It is here that Nealons overemphasis on the individual is again revealed but with somewhat different effects. In his discussion of the increasing investment in everyday life, 14 mostly
9
For a discussion of the conceptual and historical importance of population see Francois Ewald, translated by Marjorie Beale, Norms, Discipline, and the Law, Representations, 30, Special Issue: Law and the Order of Culture. (Spring 1990).
Michael Foucault, Omnes et Singulatim: Towards a Critique of Political Reason, in Power: Essential Works of Foucault, 1954-1984. Edited by James D. Faubion (New York: The New Press, 1994), 322-323. Ibid. Most notably Fredric Jameson and Michael Hardt & Toni Negri. Nealon, Foucault Beyond Foucault, chap. 3. Nealon, Foucault Beyond Foucault, 62-63. This term itself carries with it quite a bit of ambiguity and invokes a number of different debates on the status of the everyday. Nealons footnote on this (chap. 4, footnote 25)
10
11 12
13 14
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based on autonomist Marxists like Hardt and Negri, Nealon points to the importance of the private:
If there is something that we might call the realm of the contemporary common, that vector of power that directly connects the cultural to the economic, for better or worse Foucaultian biopower will show us that this common takes up residence in the private realm, not the public sphere. 15
While privatization has become one of the most important foci of any discussion of neoliberalism and contemporary capitalism, there is a curious slippage in Nealons choice of examples. These range from individualistic rap lyrics and popular memoirs to market-based solutions and the transfer of public assets to private corporations. 16 This mix of examples, which would seem to invoke different conceptions of the private, raises important questions about the conflation of the individual or self and the private, not to mention its relationship to the public. 17 Thus the importance of Nealons analysis lies not only in its linking of the individual and the private to neoliberal capitalism but also in its registration of a more general set of issues related to the contemporary status of the private and the public. 18 Overall I found Foucault Beyond Foucault to be a very useful text in its application of a Foucaultian approach to contemporary culture and capitalism. Nealon skillfully walks the difficult line between being relevant to a number of different important theoretical discussions as well as to contemporary culture and politics. In addition to applying Foucaults ideas about power in an innovative way, Nealon raises some important questions about specific concepts and the way they structure the
is fascinating, especially his mention of Paulo Virno as Aristotelian contrasted with Toni Negri as Spinozan. Nealon, Foucault Beyond Foucault, 83. Ibid., 86-88.
15 16 17
18
In my view Nealons critique of the Deleuzian literature on value and affect (Brian Massumi, specifically) as being overly focused on the experiential or phenomenological raises similar questions. While much of this scholarship engages with biopower in a broad manner, I see Nealons more rigorously Foucaultian critique as an important contribution to this debate. For a more in-depth discussion see Patricia Cloughs Introduction to Patricia Clough and Jean Halley, The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007). The problem of the private and public in relation to biopower has been raised by Tiziana Terranova in Futurepublic: On Information Warfare, Bio-racism and Hegemony as Noopolitics, in Theory, Culture, & Society, 24(3): 125-145 (Sage, 2007). I find her discussion of the ways in which public opinion is reconfigured in biopower to become a surface of intervention along with Nealons discussion here, a way to open an important theoretical conversation.
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way we read Foucault. His attempt to construct a more useful reading of Foucault opens up a number of important theoretical conversations and encourages us to do the same.
Mike Jolley, Doctoral Candidate in Sociology, CUNY Graduate Center
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David Konstan 2009 ISSN: 1832-5203 Foucault Studies, No 6, pp. 115-119, February 2009
REVIEW
Sandra Lynch, Philosophy and Friendship (Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press, 2005) ISBN 0 7486 1727 2.
Sandra Lynch's book is something of a hybrid. On the one hand, it surveys various philosophical views of friendship, from Aristotle down through postmodern writers such as Derrida and Lacan, stopping along the way to discuss Cicero, Montaigne, Kant and Hegel on the master-slave relation, Buber's I-Thou, Sartre on love (since he "does not specifically discuss friendship," 69), Bataille, Blanchot, Colin Turnbull's The Mountain People (1971), which narrates the dysfunctional society of the Ik tribe of Uganda, and many others. She also devotes several pages to Goethe's Elective Affinities, Sndor Mrai's Embers, and Toni Morrison's Sula, among other texts, thereby taking account of literary treatments of friendship as well as formal philosophical analyses. On the other hand, Lynch has a thesis of her own to defend on the nature of friendship, which her survey is designed to support. The following quotations illustrate the main idea of her argument.
Nietzsche, Blanchot and Derrida are theorists of friendship who appreciate the place of uncertainty in relations between friends. By comparison with these modern theorists, Aristotle avoids the discomfort of uncertainty by aligning the socio-political structures of the polis with his ethical prescriptions: the free male citizens of the polis are good men united by virtue in the communal civil life of the polis. However, the nexus created between the ethical and the social-political spheres of life determines that Aristotelian civic friendship obscures the demand for indirection in friendship as well as the recognition of difference between friends (101).
More specifically, "Aristotelian civic friendship simply conceals the possibility that citizens may have differing conceptions of what constitutes the good for the community of which they are members" (107). The ancient view of friendship, represented by Aristotle, Cicero, Thomas Aquinas, Montaigne, and others, put the emphasis on social unity, and hence treated friendship as primarily a relationship among the better class of people, who held a common view about the society and the nature of the good. Modern, or at all events postmodern views, on the contrary,
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Konstan: review of Philosophy and Friendship
stress difference and the ultimate uncertainty that inhabits friendship. According to the modern view, which Lynch evidently shares, "friends have the potential to respond to one another in unreserved and inventive ways" (145). Allying herself with the approach of object-relations psychologists such as Donald Winnicott and Heinz Kohut, Lynch affirms that "the process of constituting a self is a precarious one which places us in an ambiguous relation to the other" (151). But we need others, nevertheless, to achieve selfhood as it is understood by thinkers such as Jacques Lacan: "the ability to take account of the perceptions and expectations of others is crucial to the development of a coherent or stable conception of self". Lynch uses "psychoanalytic perspectives on the formation of identity and the constitution of the self ... to emphasise the creativity that is implicit in relations between friends. Friendship emerges as a creative and uncertain synthesis of the play of forces that create identity and difference between friends" (165). This, finally, is Lynch's strategy for defeating Derrida's insistence on "the impossibility of any complete or sustained connection between friends" (95), given that "the possibility of friendship rests on our acceptance of a fiction ... of connection" (93). For "the connection between friends can be seen as one that is intersubjectively created and nurtured" (187)it resides in a process of maturation and self-formation, and if the result is a "fragile connection," it is friendship for all that. Such is the gist of Lynch's argument. The ancient or classical view, associated principally with Aristotle, serves as a foil to the modern: whereas Aristotle stresses identity among friends, and obscures "the recognition of difference between friends" in the service of a larger ideal of civic solidarity, the modern view acknowledges and indeed relishes difference, both on the personal and the social level: Lynch adduces Georg Simmel for the view that "modern culture, society and personality are by nature fragmented" (166). But if ancient and modern societies are indeed so different, and so too, correspondingly, the dominant conception of friendship in each, it is legitimate to ask whether Aristotle, Derrida, and Winnicott are talking about the same thing when they speak of "friendship". The very decision to translate a term into another language as "friendship" already presupposes a view about what the idea means for the speakers of that language. The Greek term philia, which is often translated as "friendship," basically means "love"; it only signifies "friendship" in contexts in which love obtains among those designated as friends (in Greek, philoi), as distinct from kin, spouses, or amatory (including pederastic) relations. Latin amicitia, however, specifically means "friendship." Love of all sorts, whether familial or erotic, was amor in Latin; in Greek, however, passionate love was designated by the term ers. Thus, when Lynch equates ers with philia (12-13), I see a red flag: although Aristotle says the erotic passion an adult man feels for a boy may turn into friendship when the boy matures, provided he has a suitably virtuous character, the two categories were distinct in classical Greek. Leaving aside technical points of philology, one may inquire whether earlier
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views of friendship, which are predicated upon such disparate conceptions of the self and society, can have anything to offer us moderns. Lynch affirms, rather surprisingly: "Putting aside the criticisms of Aristotelian and Kantian accounts of friendship, my argument is that both philosophers provide a theoretical structure for the maintenance of relations in the broader social context within which intimacy develops" (108). Very possibly, but this idea is not (so far as I can tell) put to use in Lynch's discussion of modern friendship. Indeed, if ancient and modern societies are as different as Lynch says, it is difficult to see how Aristotle's or Kant's theories concerning social relations can be of much help, or how such disparate views of friendship can illuminate one another; I had the sense, as I followed Lynch's discussion, that they simply pass each other by, as though Aristotle and Derrida were speaking different languages (which of course they are). I believe that Lynch is broadly right to hold that Aristotle's conception of friendship was conditioned, at least in part, by his vision of a society run by virtuous men, and that postmodern notions of friendship are, on the contrary, disposed to celebrate difference, although I do not share Lynch's view that developmental psychology can help resolve the paradoxes of friendship that Derrida identifies. Nevertheless, I am afraid that she sometimes misrepresents the classical view, and more particularly that of Aristotle and Cicero, which allows more scope for difference, intimacy, and self-development than Lynch concedes. In what follows, I shall concentrate on these two thinkers, but before proceeding, I must indicate a certain parti pris. I am the author of a book entitled Friendship in the Classical World (Cambridge, 1997), not mentioned by Lynch, in which I discuss friendship in a wide context, including philosophical treatments. What is more, my views, while respectable enough, are not universally shared. Some of Lynch's comments on ancient friendship reflect interpretations advanced by other scholars with which I disagree. I cannot in the space of this review present all the arguments on either side of these disputes, but the reader should be alert to the fact that such differences exist, and deserve to be recognized. To take an example from a non-philosophical text: I do not agree with Lynch's claim that in Homer we find "a relatively unquestioning depiction of friendship as a formal relationship" (7), and that "relations between warrior-chieftains did not involve ties of an emotional kind" (9). The relationship between Achilles and Patroclus, the principal friends in the Iliad, is intensely emotional, as Lynch herself observes (11). Lynch is here following a conception, which I regard as dated though many scholars still subscribe to it, according to which Greek philia, whether in Homer or later, had an objective, quasi-contractual character. So too, when Lynch avers that "amicitia was once used interchangeably with factio to refer to a band of friends" (55-56), but that it degenerated into the sense of mere political faction, she is appealing to the view promoted more than half a century ago by Lily Ross Taylor, but decisively refuted (as I believe) by Peter Brunt, who demonstrated that party loyalties
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Konstan: review of Philosophy and Friendship
seem to have had virtually no impact at all on the formation or dissolution of friendships in ancient Rome. Proceeding now to philosophical treatments, Lynch observes that Aristotle identifies three types of friendship, predicated on recognition of virtue in the other, or else "motivated by the friend's usefulness or pleasure to me, rather than by concern for the friend's good" (16). I maintain, however, that for Aristotle all three kinds of friendship involve concern for the welfare of the other. Indeed, in the definition of friendship that Aristotle provides in the Rhetoric (2.4), as opposed to his ethical treatises, he affirms: "Let to philein [loving] be wishing for someone the things that he deems good, for the sake of that person and not oneself, and the accomplishment of these things to the best of one's ability"; and he adds: "A philos is one who loves and is loved in return". This is a description of love generally, not just that based on appreciation of virtue. The affection that arises as a result of mutual commerce, for example, is still a kind of love; to be sure, it is less durable than virtue friendship, but while it lasts it entails (in my view) caring for the friend, just like friendships formed in the workplace today. Lynch observes: "Modern individuals might feel a degree of affection for business associates or work colleagues and yet not regard them as friends" (17); true enough, but so too might ancient Greeks. Aristotle nowhere suggests that all persons who are useful to each other are, by that token, friends. Was Aristotle's conception of friendship conditioned by the social world of the classical city-state, which he saw, according to Lynch, as "an arena of likeminded citizens who agree about their interests, adopt the same policy and act on their common resolutions" (24)? There is no doubt that Aristotle valued concord or homonoia among the citizen body, and that he believed that a kind of communal affection or friendly feeling went a good way toward securing civic solidarity. Lynch supposes that such an ideal, involving "a harmony of interests, ideas and activities," is one that "we today would regard as impossible" (ibid.). It is true enough that we do not typically speak of friendship as the bond between fellow citizens, but we do refer to brotherhood in this connection, precisely in order to emphasize equality of rights and a kind of familial warmth of feeling. Lynch also finds problematic Aristotle's emphasis on regard for virtue as a basis of friendship or love: "From the perspective of the modern reader it seems that in Aristotle's highest form of friendship we like our friend for the sake of his goodnessrather than for himself" (27). Lynch notes that any account of why we like someone "suggests liking for the sake of something else"; this is in contrast with what she identifies as the modern view, "that friends are loved for what it is that makes them unique" (28), a fuzzy concept that hardly lends itself to analysis at all. I agree on the latter point, but Aristotle makes it clear that, for friendship to arise, one must have intimate knowledge of the other, deriving from long acquaintance; he also specifies that one can have only a very few friends, whereas, were regard for virtue the only factor, we should be friends with all the virtuous people we know.
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Finally, I differ with Lynch's interpretation of the role of maternal love in Aristotle (32): this love is, according to Aristotle, natural (he uses the term phusei, "by nature"): animals too experience it, whereas they do not form friendships based on regard for virtue or utility. Whether parental love "provides the child with a sense that she is loved for her own sake" (34) is perhaps questionable, but it does offer a model of unconditional affection, in which respect it differs from friendship, which responds to causes. Turning briefly to Cicero, it is true that Cicero recognized that politics could divide friends, at least if it came to the point of seriously endangering the republic, for example participating in or covering up a conspiracy out of loyalty to one's comrades; but this does not mean that Cicero shared the Epicurean credo of abstentionism in regard to politics (54). On the contrary, Cicero was both active in politics and maintained friendships with people of all political stripes, even in the dire conditions of civil war. Nor would I say that Cicero's ideal of concordia was "based on a similarity of rights" (55): it is debated whether there existed a concept of "rights" in classical antiquity, but for Cicero, at all events, concordia was first and foremost a relationship across class lines. The concordia ordinum that he sought to foster was hierarchical rather than egalitarian. Lynch covers, as I have indicated, a great deal of territory in this book, with the result that the argument sometimes races over points that in my view deserve more attention. Treating the various conceptions of friendship from Aristotle on down as the prolegomenon to an argument about the nature of modern friendship further complicates the presentation. Whether modern friendship is predicated on an acknowledgment of difference and the development of a stable self through mutual exchange and recognition is in my view moot, but more could have been done to historicize this notion, which is very much a product of our own culture. While it is not for me to dictate the book that Lynch should have written, I could have wished that she had conceived her task in this more critical vein. David Konstan, Brown University
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Michael Maidan 2009 ISSN: 1832-5203 Foucault Studies, No 6, pp. 120-125, February 2009
REVIEW
Michel Foucault, Introduction lAnthropologie prsent par Daniel Defert, Franois Ewald et Frdric Gros, suivi de Anthropologie du point de vue pragmatique dEmmanuel Kant, traduit et annot par Michel Foucault (Paris : Vrin Bibliothque des Textes Philosophiques , 2008) Michel Foucault, Introduction to Kants Anthropology, Edited and with an afterword and critical notes by Roberto Nigro, translated by Roberto Nigro and Kate Briggs, Semiotext(e), Los Angeles, CA, 2008.
The recent publication of the complete text of Foucaults Complementary Thesis is an important and welcome development for anybody interested in his work because this text was known more by hearsay than by direct acquaintance. The history of the Introduction is well known. The regulations of the French university in the 1960s required the submission of two works for a Doctorat dEtat: a major thesis, which had to be published, and for which Foucault presented Madness and Civilization; the translation and introduction of Kants Anthropology was his secondary submission. This Thse Complmentaire was up to now only accessible at the Sorbonnes library in a microfiche of the original typescript or through unauthorized transcriptions on the Internet. In 1964 Foucault published his translation of Kants Anthropology together with a Notice historique which reproduced a few of the initial pages of his thesis, the full text of the Introduction having been considered too interpretative to be published together with the translation. 1 At the end of the Notice, Foucault announced that The relationships of the critical thinking and the anthropological reflection would be studied in a subsequent work. 2 Instead of reworking the Introduc-
Didier Eribon reproduces in his Michel Foucault (1926-1984), 2nd edition (Paris: Flammarion, 1991), 138-139, the official report of the thesis examination, which includes the objections of the Jury both to the Introduction and to the translation. Michel Foucault, Dits et crits, 1954-1988, Bibliotheque des sciences humaines. (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1994). I, 293.
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Maidan: review of Kants Anthropology
tion, Foucault went on to write a new book altogether, which would become The Order of Things. 3 Beyond the fact of the availability of the text, a positive event in itself, there is an additional reason to rejoice, because we may see in its publication a relaxation of the policies enforced up to now by Foucaults literary executors. According to the prevalent interpretation to Foucaults will, only writings that he himself had revised and approved for publication would be released to the public. This rule has been somewhat tweaked for some materials in the Dits et Ecrits collection, and the Lectures in the Collge de France. Coincidently, this year a new volume of the Lectures was released, and this time the editors reported that the transcript of the audio tape had been supplemented to some extent with Foucaults original notes. 4 Such information was not given in the other volumes, which were supposed to be actual transcripts. Furthermore, in the editors presentation to the Introduction, they refer to a course given at the University of Lille in 1952-1953, with ninety-seven manuscript pages, Foucaults oldest surviving philosophical text (8; 10) 5, a text not listed in the inventory of the IMEC where Foucaults papers have been deposited. A recent article by Foucaults long-time companion and literary executor Daniel Defert seems to indicate that we could see more releases in the future. 6 Although no official text of the Introduction lAnthropologie was available until now, a number of doctoral theses, papers and books had already discussed Foucaults text. 7 This, and the fact that the existing transcriptions were considered unre3
Michel Foucault, Les Mots et les Choses: une archologie des sciences humaines (Paris : ditions Gallimard, 1966). Chapter. ix : (LHomme et ses doubles) is closely related to the Introduction. Michel Foucault, Le Gouvernement de soi et des autres : Cours au Collge de France, 1982-1983 (Paris : Gallimard - Le Seuil, 2008), 7-8. Parenthetical references indicate first the pages of the original French text, followed by the corresponding page number in the English translation. If only one set of pages is mentioned, it corresponds to the French edition, except in the last section, where it would refer to the English translation. Cf. Je crois au temps : Daniel Defert lgataire des manuscrits de Michel Foucault, interview by Guillaume Bellome, Revue Recto/Verso, no. 1, Juin 2007. S. Watson, Kant and Foucault: on the Ends of Man, Tijdschrift voor philosophie, 1985, 47, 1, 71-102; Frederic Gros, Thorie de la connaissance et histoire des savoirs dans les crits de M. Foucault, Universit de Paris XII, 1995 (unpublished PhD thesis); Batrice Han. L'ontologie manque de Michel Foucault: entre l'historique et le transcendantale,. Grenoble, SP: Millon, 1998 (English translation: Batrice Han, Foucaults Critical Project (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002); Ricardo Ribeiro Terra, "Foucault lecteur de Kant: de l'anthropologie l'ontologie du prsent", In Ferrari, J., d., L'anne 1798. Kant et la naissance de l'anthropologie au Sicle des Lumires (Paris, Vrin, 1997), 159-171; Amy Allen, Foucault and Enlightenment: A Critical Reappraisal, Constellations, 10, 2, 2003, pp. 180198; Arianna Bove, A Critical Ontology of the Present : Foucault and the Task of our Times, University of Sussex, 2007 (unpublished PhD thesis). See additional references in Roberto
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liable, seems to have influenced the editors and executors to finally publish this text, together with Foucaults translation of Kants Anthropologie. The volume comprises a short editorial presentation, followed by Foucaults introduction (pp. 11-79), his translation of Kants Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht (pp. 83-262), and concludes with a discussion of textual differences between the manuscript and Kants published text (263-267). This book will mainly interest the student of Foucaults work since it documents Foucaults interest in and attachment to the philosophy of Kant, the extent of Nietzsches and Heideggers influence in shaping his understanding of Kant, and one of the earliest formulations of the ideas further developed in The Order of Things. It will also be of interest to historians of philosophy interested in the reception of Kant, Heidegger and Nietzsche in postwar French philosophy. How did Foucault present the Anthropology to his readers? His textwhich does not have any heading or titles and is only separated into sections marked in the French version with asterisksbegins by discussing the origins of the Anthropology in the lectures given by Kant for more than twenty years. Only upon reaching retirement did Kant decide to publish this text, of which Foucault wishes we could have more information about its geology or archaeology. What is at stake here is, according to Foucault, whether underlying the development of Kants philosophy there is a certain concept of man already shaped in the pre-critical period that remained basically unchanged and unchallenged during the elaboration of the critical philosophy, only to surface again in his last published work (12; 19). Or, maybe Kant modified his Anthropology over the years, while elaborating his overall philosophy. Foucault seems to adopt a mixed and three-pronged position regarding the text. He claims that, from a chronological as well as a structural point of view, the Anthropology is ...contemporary with what come before the Critique, with what the Critique accomplishes, and with what would soon be rid of it (14; 22). To substantiate the first remark, Foucault points out the similarities between the Anthropology and other texts of the pre-critical period. Regarding the second, he stresses that the Anthropology not only belongs to the period in which Kant begins developing his critical position (17; 28), but at least in one major point, it already evidences a post-Copernican turn. The Anthropology studies man not from a cosmological but from a cosmopolitan perspective, i.e., one in which the world is a city to be built rather than a cosmos already given (20; 33). In the Anthropology, man is neither homo natura nor a purely free subject (34; 54-55). Man, in Kants Anthropology, is always entangled with the word. And regarding Foucaults third remark, it finds its briefest and most poignant formulation in Foucaults final sentence: The trajectory of the question: was ist der Mensch? in the field of philosophy reaches its end in the response which both chalNigro, Afterword, 152-153.
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lenges and disarms it: der bermensch (79; 124). This last remark points out the issues central to The Order of Things and supports the thesis of continuity between this essay and the later claims about the death of man and the criticism of the human sciences. It also shows that Foucault already at this stage embraced and was fond of waving a Nietzschean flag. What is the relationship between Anthropology and Critical Philosophy? Foucault points out the apparent lack of contact between the two aspects of Kants work. This Anthropology is not the answer to the question What is man? that Kant presented in his Logic. In these sections, Foucaults interpretation seems to echo Heideggers Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics. Both the notion of finitude as an essential problem (67; 105), and the recurrent use of the word repetition lead in that direction. But even if Foucault was inspired by Heidegger, their philosophical objectives seem to diverge. Heidegger wants to show that Kant was unable or unwilling to take the step of grounding metaphysics, thereby mapping his own philosophical direction simultaneously as a continuation of and also a break with Kants enterprise. Foucaults concern, already at this stage, is more historically oriented. According to Foucault, if Kants Anthropology is related to Critical philosophy, it is also related to a whole series of anthropological researches being undertaken, primarily in Germany, in the second half of the eighteenth century (69; 109). This is a complex relationship, one by which Kant was influenced, but also in which he was himself a very influential figure, well before his lectures were finally printed. In this section (68-79; 108-124) Foucault is developing an archeological reading (in the sense Foucault gives to this term in his later works 8). Methodologically, this is a break with an internalist reading, one in which the text itself, in its internal inconsistencies, in the failure to draw a conclusion, and in other symptoms, provides a key to its own interpretation. Foucault proceeds by locating Kants argument in a complex web of contemporary arguments and discussions. The meaning of the Anthropology is established not (or not solely) on the basis of its place in Kants work, but primarily in relationship to the general discussion about a science of man which is unfolding at that time. Foucault claims that there is a fundamental ambiguity in this attempt to consider man: it is the knowledge of man, in a movement that objectifies man on the level of his natural being and in the content of his animal determinations; at the same time, it is the knowledge of the knowledge of man, and so can interrogate the
While Foucault is here doing archaeology in the sense of his later work, he uses the word archaeology in a different way: Leaving aside the archaeology of a term the form of which, if not the fate, had already been fixed by the sixteenth century. What can these new anthropologies mean in relation to a science of man of the Cartesian type? (71). Cf. also the following utterance: Would the archaeology of the text, if it were possible, allow us to see the birth of homo criticus, whose structure would essentially differ from the man who preceded him? (13). For a contemporaneous use of archaeology, see Foucaults 1961 preface to Histoire de la Folie (Cf. Dits et crits, I, 160).
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subject himself, ask him where his limitations lie, and about what he sanctions of the knowledge we have of him (74; 117). The Anthropology is not applied pure reason and does not have the same status as Kants Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science, an essay that applies the concepts of pure reason to physics. On the contrary, the entanglement between object and subject seems endemic in the science of man; furthermore, the accomplishments of Kants philosophical revolution seem to have tightened this entanglement. To offer the appearance of a solution is the role of the Anthropology, and for Foucault that explains Kants stubborn attachment to this work, his patient repetition of the lectures over the years, and their final publication at the end of his life. * * * While the editors did an important job delivering this text to a wide audience, they fell short in a number of areas that one hopes will be corrected in a second edition. First, if the original text was difficult to read and transcribe as we are told in the presentation (9; 12), the absence of footnotes explaining possible alternative readings or editorial decisions is surprising. We also regret the lack of an index to this volume. A discussion of Foucaults translation of Kant, the extent of changes between the original 1961 typescript and the 1964 edition, an index to the translation and a glossary discussing choices made by Foucault would also have been useful. But these are minor matters when compared to the joy of finally being able to read Foucaults text in its authorized version. *** It is unusual for a translation to be published almost simultaneously with the original. The translation of the Introduction by Roberto Nigro and Kate Briggs not only allows a wider public to gain access to this early work by Foucault, but also improves on the original publication. Nigro based his translation both on the published French version and on the original, annotated, and with a few missing references in the text inserted. The English translation also has a very useful Afterword that places this work in context. In a short Introduction, Nigro shares with the reader some of the underlying assumptions guiding the translation. The Introduction refers to Kant in three different ways, all of which represent a challenge for the potential translator. Foucault quotes Kant in the original German language, paraphrases him, and also quotes him in his own translation, which this work was supposed to introduce. Nigro and Briggs choose to leave the original German, but to use a standard English translation for both the translations and the paraphrasing, trying at the same time not to lose altogether the flavor of Foucaults rendering of the Kantian text.
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The translation itself is very down to earth, making great efforts to deliver Foucaults ideas if not his somewhat convoluted style in a clear and readable prose. Sometimes they underplay Foucaults rich prose a little too much. Where Foucault writes : ...celle dune structure qui soffre, en ce quelle a de plus radical que toute facult possible, a la parole enfin libre dune philosophie trascendentale, the English text renders : that of a structure, more radical than any possible faculty lends itself to transcendental philosophy, liberated at last (54; 86 emphasis added). The notes to the text (142-150) give a glimpse of the difficulties involved in reading and transcribing Foucaults original. The French edition silently corrected or glossed over such problems as missing, illegible words and typos. Nigro also provides information on some of the less known thinkers who corresponded with Kant during the period in which he was writing the Anthropology and to which Foucault refers as background for Kants project. Finally, the Afterword deals with the history of Foucaults Introduction. This short essay (127-139) deals with the history of the text, and provides useful hints for his interpretation. Nigro warns the reader not to see in the Introduction the source of Foucaults later ideas, because these took unforeseen directions and resonated with each other in different ways (130). He notes the often-discussed influence of Heidegger, in particular, of his Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, which Heidegger dedicated to the memory of Max Scheler, one of the leading figures of philosophical anthropology in the early twentieth century. But he also notes that the Introduction can best be understood in the context of contemporaneous philosophical discussions. In particular, he stresses Foucaults closeness to Althusser. Nigro sees a parallelism between Foucaults interest in Kants anthropology and Althussers research on Feuerbach (133). This is an interesting lead, which need to be developed further. Nigro concludes his essay by suggesting that Hyppolites criticism of Foucaults complementary thesis as being too Nietzschean points to Foucaults combat against the immense all-encompassing resources of Hegelian thinking (137), a combat for which he enlisted as allies not only Nietzsche but also Artaud, Bataille, Roussel and many others. Michael Maidan
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Trent H. Hamann 2009 ISSN: 1832-5203 Foucault Studies, No 6, pp. 126-130, February 2009
REVIEW
Edward F. McGushin, Foucaults Askesis: An Introduction to the Philosophical Life. (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2007). ISBN: 9780810122833.
At the heart of Edward F. McGushins book is his original reconstruction of a Foucauldian history of philosophy. Relying to a significant extent on Foucaults lectures at the Collge de France (most of which were either unpublished or not translated at the time he was writing), McGushins history makes good use of Foucaults blend of philosophical reading techniques, derived from both ancient and modern practices. What holds together the diversity of Foucaults readings, which span a period of four decades, is McGushins re-reading of Foucaults earlier archaeological and genealogical writings on modern forms of power/knowledge through the lens of his later work on subjectivity, the ethical care of the self and aesthetics of existence. 1 The result is a compelling Foucauldian genealogy of philosophy presented as a history of our present. It begins where Foucault ended, in the ancient world, and concludes with Descartes and Kant, two figures of great significance both in Foucaults earliest works and in lectures he gave in the last few years of his life. Along the way, McGushins genealogy serves two closely related purposes, one explicit and the other more implicit. First, it allows him to illustrate how Foucault eventually came to recognize his own lifes work as comprising a critical and self-transformative askesis that constituted a distinctly philosophical life. In this regard McGushin succeeds in bringing to life Foucaults claim in the Introduction to The Use of Pleasure that he had made use of experimental forms of writing in order to think differently and thereby become different, an exercise that constituted for him the living substance of philosophy:
While this is an original aspect of McGushins reading, there is some precedence for doing so in Foucaults own later assessments of his earlier work. For example, in a 1983 discussion with Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow Foucault suggested that all three axes, knowledge, power, and ethics, could be found, albeit in a somewhat confused fashion, in Madness and Civilization, which was originally published as Histoire de la Folie in 1961. See Michel Foucault, On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of Work in Progress, in Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1983), 237.
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Hamann, review of Foucaults Askesis
The essaywhich should be understood as the assay or test by which, in the game of truth, one undergoes changes, and not as the simplistic appropriation of others for the purpose of communicationis the living substance of philosophy, at least if we assume that philosophy is still what it was in times past, i.e., an ascesis, askesis, an exercise of oneself in the activity of thought. 2 To those who might be tempted to find here a thinly veiled attempt at appropriating Foucault to the philosophical fold against all competing disciplinary claims, it should be pointed out that McGushin is certainly aware of Foucaults longstanding ambivalence toward philosophy. Of course, as Foucault well knew, we generally do not assume that philosophy is . . . an exercise of oneself in the activity of thought, nor do we tend to read the history of philosophy from the perspective of such a framework. But, as McGushin emphasizes, Foucault identified the eclipse of the ancient imperative to take care of oneself in favor of the imperative to know oneself as an extremely significant event in the history of thought. 3 It is here that I find what I take to be the second and more implicit purpose of McGushins genealogy. By tracing the history and consequences of this event, he raises anew Foucaults question, Who are we in our actuality today? At stake is nothing less than the ways we think, write, act, and speak when we engage in contemporary philosophical practices, especially those of us who have been trained to work within the disciplinary confines of professional academic philosophy. Rather than making a proprietary claim on behalf of the discipline of philosophy, McGushin is raising the critical questions What is philosophy? and Who is a philosopher? in a most powerful way. Joining together the two purposes of McGushins genealogy is Foucaults examination of the practice of parrhesia or ethical truth telling. Using diverse examples from the ancient world and extending them in provocative ways into the modern, Foucault offered a general description of parrhesia as a philosophical form of etho-political resistance to the dangers of self-neglect that emerge as the result of taking for granted the established relations between power, subjectivity and truth. In the first four chapters of the book, which comprise the first of its two parts, Philosophy As Care of the Self, McGushin traces Foucaults interpretation of the history of the concern with the self and parrhesia in the ancient world. Beginning with the work of Euripides, Foucault identified parrhesia as a political right and duty of aristocratic Athenians to speak ones mind. However, as Athens became more and more democratic, a certain anxiety developed around the practice of parrhesia and the problem of Athenian governance. In his reading of Plato, Foucault highlighted
2
Michel Foucault, The Use of Pleasure, translated by Robert Hurley (New York: Random House, 1990), 9. McGushin, 31.
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Socrates concern with the susceptibility of his fellow Athenians to flattery and rhetoric. Socrates identified this vulnerability as a form of self-neglect insofar as they failed to take care of themselves by being concerned with the truth. In this context parrhesia appears as a political problem of truth that is also ethical insofar as it involves a concern with both self-governance, that is, the work one must perform upon oneself in order to not succumb to ignorance, as well as the governance of others. McGushin notes that this convergence of truth, ethics, and politics was important for Foucault in thinking about our present because he found in it a way of isolating the dynamic interplay between relations of power, discursive or epistemic forms, and practices of ethical subjectivization. 4 In the ancient texts interpreted by Foucault he revealed examples of philosophy as a way of life consisting of spiritual exercises focused, not primarily on the acquisition of objective knowledge, as orthodox interpretations have insisted, but on practices of selftransformation aimed at truthful living. In his readings of Hellenistic and Roman philosophy he discovered a rich diversity of practices of care of the self that led to a wide range of forms of subjectivity with various relations to different forms of truth. Of particular significance is Foucaults interest in the Cynics, not only because their practices constituted an especially radical form of resistance to orthodoxy, but also because their particular exercises of self-care were eventually appropriated and redefined by early Christian forms of asceticism. It was these practices that later led to ethical self-renunciation and the forms of pastoral power that Foucault had already begun to describe in his earlier work. As a result of these historical transformations philosophy became divorced from spiritual practices and made to become a purely theoretical activity. Here we find an example that illustrates the crucial genealogical point that no set of practices, discourses, or forms of subjectivity can be accepted as definitively true, universal, or final. They all arise as specific forms of resistance to specific historic problems. However, to the extent that they succeed, there is always the danger that they will solidify into a new form of orthodoxy. The second part of the book, Care of the Self and Parrhesia in the Age of Reason, is a rereading of Foucaults earlier work on modern thought in light of his later work. Specifically, McGushin examines the modern forms of power/knowledge elaborated by Foucault in his works from the 1960s and 1970s in terms of the problematic of care of the self and ethical truth telling. Although it is arguable that Kant remains the most important modern philosopher throughout the entirety of Foucaults career (at least as important as Nietzsche and Heidegger), it is Descartes who stands as a pivotal central figure here. His most famous work consisted of a series of meditations that made use of self-transformative exercises that resulted in the production of an entirely new form of subjectivity positioned in a new
Ibid., 14.
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relationship to truth. In this regard Foucault interprets Descartes as the creator of a modern form of philosophical askesis and parrhesia developed in order to resist the pastoral forms of power/knowledge that dominated the Renaissance era. Here again, however, we find an example of a philosophical care of the self that successfully emerged as a specific form of resistance to a prevailing apparatus of truth and subjectivity only to be rigidified into a new form of orthodoxy. As we saw in the case of the Christian appropriation of Hellenistic practices, once philosophical askeses are abstracted from their original historical context of problematization and resistance, they lose their truth effects as parrhesia. The emergence of this Cartesian moment, as Foucault described it, ultimately proved to be perfectly congruent with disciplinary power and biopolitics, particularly as they took hold through the development of the human sciences. McGushin is right to suggest that it may be because we continue today to live under the shadow of this Cartesian moment, particularly in terms of our philosophical understanding of subjectivity and truth, that we tend to have a blind spot in regard to the initial spiritual aspect of Descartes work. Through his reading of Foucaults repeated encounters with Kant, McGushin suggests that Kants critical philosophy failed to recognize its own complicity with disciplinary power, at least in part because of his ahistorical approach to questions of knowledge and subjectivity. Kant was unaware of the philosophical practice of care of the self that had been abandoned by Descartes only to be picked up by the new pastoral forms of biopolitical governance. Even in his article What Is Enlightenment? in which he focused on the importance of maturity, autonomy, and the courage to know, Kant insisted on a private obligation to obey governmental power even while encouraging free engagement in public critique. Nietzsche, of course, is the modern figure who allowed Foucault to extend his critical project beyond Kants limitations by way of his recognition that subjectivity and truth are historical formations inextricably interwoven with the contingencies of power. It was at this point of convergence between his earlier archaeological and genealogical work and his later work on the ancient care of the self that Foucault was able to propose the possibility for a modern form of parrhesia that would constitute a re-spiritualization of philosophy practiced as a way of life. The parrhesiastic role of philosophy proposed by Foucault is comprised of two moments. Its first task is to produce truth in the form of a critical diagnosis of who we are in our present actuality. The key element here is the use of what McGushin calls a genealogical circle. It begins by using a contemporary apparatus of power, knowledge, and subjectivity as a lens for examining historical texts. The goal of such an interpretation is not to produce a history of ideas and practices, but to problematize the apparatus as a historically contingent formation. By problematizing what is presently taken for granted as given or natural, this critical form of parrhesia reveals the manner in which we engage in self-neglect. In
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modernity this neglect manifests itself in the extent to which we allow ourselves to be taken care of by disciplinary or biopolitical forms of power and discourse. To the extent that these modern forms of power, knowledge, and subjectivity present us with the task of discovering or liberating our true or authentic selves, the second task of parrhesiastic philosophy is to offer us the possibility of a flight from the self by way of truths that are etho-poetic. Philosophical discourses and ways of living constitute a work of freedom that can produce truths experienced through their transformative effects on life. These effects register as new ways of thinking, speaking, and acting in the world. However, as Foucault often pointed out, the work of freedom is something that can never be completed because, as McGushin puts it, there is no natural form of human life; the most natural thing about us is that the problem of being human always requires new responses and new forms of life. 5 In this way, McGushins depiction of Foucaults journey to the philosophical life is also a call and invitation for those of us willing to hear it and respond. Trent H. Hamann, St. Johns University
McGushin, 287-88.
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Ellen K. Feder 2009 ISSN: 1832-5203 Foucault Studies, No 6, pp. 131-135, February 2009
REVIEW
Margaret A. McLaren, Feminism, Foucault, and Embodied Subjectivity (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2007). ISBN: 0791455149
Beginning in the mid-1980s and extending through the 1990s, feminists grappled with the question of whether postmodernism was a positive development for feminist theory. The central concern was whether the challenges presented by thinkers such as Derrida, Lyotard, and Foucaultmost saliently concerning the denial of a metaphysical ground for truthwould undermine the basic aims of feminist politics that depended on this ground for its own claims for justice and equality. The nature of the worry and of the stakes involved was succinctly put by Nancy Hartsock in the important collection, Feminism/Postmodernism (1990). Why is it, she asked, that just at the moment when so many of us who have been silenced begin to demand the right to name ourselves, to act as subjects rather than objects of history, that just then the concept of subjecthood becomes problematic? 1 Feminists have by now engaged postmodern theory in innumerable ways, but Michel Foucault has been perhaps the most important single figure in feminist theorizing about issues of power, identity and embodiment ever since. This should not be surprising, for, as Susan Bordo points out, the focus on the body that came to preoccupy Foucault in his middle or genealogical period in fact coincided with feminist contentions that the definition and shaping of the [gendered] body is the focal point for struggles over the shape of power. 2 But if disagreements over whether Foucault should be regarded as friend or foe to feminism spanned almost two decades, Margaret A. McLarens Feminism, Foucault, and Embodied Subjectivity should be the last word on the usefulness of Foucaults work for feminist theory. McLarens book opens its first chapter, The Feminism and Foucault Debate, with an overview of the range of feminist perspectives (liberal, radical, socialist, etc.), and brief treatments of the position of each with respect to postmodern theory,
1
Nancy Hartsock, Foucault on Power: A Theory for Women? in Feminism/ Postmodernism, edited by Linda Nicolson (New York: Routledge 1990), cited in McLaren, Feminism, Foucault, and Embodied Subjectivity, 55. Susan Bordo, Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1993), 17.
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before turning to the extended engagement with what she takes to be the productive contribution of Foucaults work for feminism that occupies the rest of the book. In chapter two, Foucault, Feminism, and Norms, she provides another kind of introduction to what she makes clear is the complex relationship between Foucault and feminism with a characteristically helpful discussion of Foucaults ambivalent relation to Enlightenment thought. Famous for his damning criticism of the Enlightenment postulation of a universal truth, Foucault nevertheless endorses [the] critical impulse of the Enlightenment in the mode of thinking he calls critique. 3 Prominent contemporary critics of Foucault like Jrgen Habermas or Charles Taylor cannot reconcile what appears to be Foucaults ambivalence toward truth, that is, his suspicion of a timeless truth, the very criticism of which appears itself to rely on some normative framework. But this reconciliation, McLaren explains, is precisely the project of her book, namely, to understand and apply the Foucaultian critique that has as its aim the unmasking and undermining of domination, the task she takes to be the heart of a feminist praxis. What Foucault provides, according to McLaren, is a framework for criticizing domination that does not rely on a metaphysical ground for truth. Instead, Foucault appropriates critique, which he redefines as the movement by which the subject gives himself the right to question truth on its effects of power and question power on its discourses of truth. Critique will be the art of voluntary insubordination, that of reflected tractability. 4 If this condemnation of domination appeals to a Kantian notion of freedom, Foucault claims that what he calls the critical attitude must be understood instead as condemned todependency and pure heteronomy. 5 It is, in other words, a product of history. What then appears to be a normative confusion in Foucaults work, McLaren explains, functions productivelyto criticize traditional Enlightenment norms and social norms while allowing for a reconceptualization of normative notions such as freedom and critique. 6 This reconceptualization will have important implications for understanding subjectivity, which is the focus of the third chapter, Foucault and the Subject of Feminism. Feminist critics cast Foucaults understanding of the subject as a destruction of subjectivity or its complete determination. Either way, these accusations finally amount to the same denial of agency. Complaints such as these provide McLaren an opportunity to advance her argument for the fundamental compatibility of Foucaults theory and feminist aims. What is particularly noteworthy about this discussion is her development of a feminist engagement with Foucaults thought that extends beyond the genealogical works into the final ethical
3 4
McLaren, Feminism, Foucault, and Embodied Subjectivity, 21. Michel Foucault, What is Critique? in The Political, edited by David Ingram (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers), 194. Foucault, What is Critique, 192. McLaren, Feminism, Foucault, and Embodied Subjectivity, 23.
5 6
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work on care of the self. McLaren here, as elsewhere in her wide-ranging book, is entering lightly trodden conceptual ground, 7 anticipating and inspiring the rich development of work in this area of feminist Foucault studies which would follow in subsequent years. 8 This analysis is notable not only for its contribution to feminist applications of Foucault, but to the development of Foucault studies more generally. In the years preceding the publication of McLarens book, most commentators gave the later work short shrift, and McLarens is among the very first worksguided, as she was, by her extensive work in the Foucault archivesto address its significance and its rightful place in Foucaults thought . The new direction of Foucaults analysis marked by the second and third volumes of The History of Sexuality comes to define, McLaren writes, a different conception of subjectivity, one that ruins or rejects not the concept of the subject itself, but rather, as McLaren puts it, a particular formation of it, 9 namely, the subjectification that is conveyed by the term assujettissement, the making of the subject that is also making subject. Rather than relying on Enlightenment notions of the subject, which he takes to remain active, though recast, in existentialism and phenomenology, 10 Foucault turns to ancient Greek conceptions of the self. It is here that McLaren locates what she argues is the guiding thread connecting the genealogical and ethical in Foucaults work. As she writes, Foucaults genealogies
reveal the normalizing character of the disciplines that constitute subjectivity; this should prompt us to investigate nonnormalizing ways of existence. In Foucaults view, refusing what we are would enable us to liberate ourselves from the type of individuality (subjectivity) that has imposed itself on us through the disciplines and practices for the last several centuries. The refusal to be what we are, to be subject and hence subjected, opens up new possibilities for being. 11
McLaren will return to Foucaults final work in the sixth and final chapter, Practices of the Self: From Self-Transformation to Social Transformation, where she provides a compelling case for understanding the feminist movement-defining practice of consciousness raising in Foucaultian terms as a practice of freedom. 12 The personal and political transformation effected by consciousness-raising, she provocatively
7
In addition to McLaren, Ladelle McWhorter was among the very few feminist theorists to substantively engage this work. See Bodies and Pleasures: Foucault and the Politics of Sexual Normalization (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1999). See e.g., Dianna Taylor and Karen Vintges, editors, Feminism and the Final Foucault Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2004); Cressida Heyes, Self-Transformations: Foucault, Ethics, and Normalized Bodies (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007). McLaren, Feminism, Foucault, and Embodied Subjectivity, 61. Ibid., 62. Ibid., 62. Ibid., 160.
9 10 11 12
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suggests, may be located in the contemporary psychotherapeutic movement associated with the Australian therapist Michael White, whose work has been significantly shaped by both Foucaultian and feminist perspectives. Whites narrative therapy locates individuals problems not in them, as traditional psychoanalysis does, but in the subjectifying apparatus of social systems. As a result, narrative therapy understands individual change to be bound up with political change, or at least, the understandingthe deconstructionof the messages that individuals have internalized.13 To apply the approach outlined here also sheds important light on the aims of the preceding chapter which focuses more specifically on Identity Politics: Sex, Gender, and Sexuality. The very category of Woman, as so many feminist theoristsJudith Butler most importantlyhave now argued, must be understood as a normative category, one that promotes exclusion, but has also been an effective rallying point for sociopolitical change. McLaren carefully walks the reader through the discussion of identity politics that has, she writes, been problematically understood as a matter of essentialism (proponents of identity politics) versus social construction (critics of identity politics). For new students of feminism this discussion will be tremendously instructive, but it also lays the ground for McLarens elucidating discussion of the contribution of Foucaults theory in the consolidation of the social constructionist critique. And yet, McLarens discussion clarifies, in Foucaultian terms, precisely how the characterization of the debate itself is misconstrued. Even as categories of identity are exclusionaryfailing, as they must, to represent the diversity of group membersand naturalizingreifying the existence of types of people and concealing their historical production14McLaren makes the case that this recognition can nevertheless be compatible with the strategic deployment of these categories. In Foucaults own work of course, the homosexual is the exemplary model of how a category of identity can be deployed to define and subject individuals, 15 but it was also by means of this category that a resistance movement, gay liberation, was born. 16 Acknowledging Foucaults refusal to address the specific production of gender, McLaren here extends Foucaults own analysis of hermaphroditism, providing a new analysis of Herculine Barbin, and offers a novel treatment of the bisexual identity politics that peaked in the early 1990s. The employment of these last examples locates McLarens own work historically, as the situated analysis it must be. Throughout the book, McLaren offers an extremely helpful overview of the history of feminist engagement with Foucaults work that also moves feminist Foucaultian scholarship forward in ways that mark its
13 14 15 16
Ibid., 162. McLaren, Feminism, Foucault, and Embodied Subjectivity, 118. Ibid., 122. See e.g., Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume I: An Introduction, translated by Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1990), 101.
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own production. The discussion of bisexuality would, if published in the fastmoving landscape of sexual identity politics today, likely be a discussion of transsexuality or trans identities, and the discussion of intersex politicsonly a few years old at the time of publicationwould be far richer as that movement has matured and diversified. This is not a criticism so much as it is a caution to readers for whom the history of feminist theorizing should be marked off from the contributions McLaren here makes, which are already historical moments. Several years after its publication, Feminism, Foucault, and Embodied Subjectivity remains invaluable for its rendering of a thoroughgoing account of feminist theorists interaction with Foucault through the late 1990s. As McLaren rightly points out, no single philosopher since Marx has garnered as much attention from feminists 17 and recent feminist work on Foucault 18 is testament to feminists ongoing engagement. Ellen K. Feder, American University
17 18
McLaren, Feminism, Foucault, and Embodied Subjectivity, 16. See e.g., Amy Allen, The Politics of Ourselves: Power, Autonomy, and Gender in Contemporary Critical Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007); Heyes, Self-Transformations.
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Alex Means 2009 ISSN: 1832-5203 Foucault Studies, No 6, pp. 136-140, February 2009
REVIEW
Mitchell Dean, Governing Societies: Political Perspectives on Domestic and International Rule (New York: Open University Press, 2007). ISBN: 0335208975
In the January 2008 issue of Foucault Studies, Colin Gordon and Jacques Donzelot offer an evaluation of governmentality scholarship since the landmark 1991 publication of The Foucault Effect. In this conversation, Gordon and Donzelot articulate concerns over how Foucaults perspectives on liberalism and government have been taken up over the past two decades. Donzelot claims that while the analysis of neoliberal governmentality has yielded many important insights it has also tended to flatten the innovative and critical potential of Foucaults approach. They both agree that in some cases this has lead to an exaggerated focus on the technical as opposed to the political aspects of neo-liberalism, as well as a kind of ambivalent rationalization of its central rationalities. 1 Mitchell Deans book represents an attempt to address these concerns. For readers not familiar with Dean, he has been one of the leading scholars in governmentality studies since the early 1990s. In Governing Societies he moves away from the more systematized analytics of government approach developed within his previous work and instead embarks on a detailed engagement with the political dimension of liberal powers. His overarching claim within Governing Societies is that mainstream social science narratives as well as perspectives in governmentality have failed to adequately apprehend the rapid changes in domestic and international governance in the post 9/11 era due to their failure to engage it politically -- that is, as something concerned with power, confrontation and appropriation, with struggle resistance and combat, and with the use and threat of force. 2 On the one hand, Dean is interested in producing a sober counter-narrative to social and political theorists who have claimed that neo-liberal globalization has thrown the historical project of governing societies into doubt. On the other hand, he seeks to revive the relevancy of studies in governmentality, which he argues have in many cases become complicit in reproducing instead of challenging the normative
1
Jacques Donzelot and Colin Gordon, Governing Liberal Societies: the Foucault Effect in the English Speaking World, Foucault Studies 5 (2008), 48-62. Dean, 1.
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logics of neo-liberal rule. He argues that this is the result of a general failure of governmentality studies to attend to the continuing salience of sovereignty and its complex relation to matters of life and death. Through an appropriation of insights from Max Weber, Carl Schmitt, and Giorgio Agamben, Dean foregrounds the political in order to critically account for the assemblages of governmental, biopolitical, and sovereign powers, which, he argues, are intrinsic to liberalism itself. Governing Societies is divided into three thematic sections. In the first section entitled Dilemmas, Dean outlines the historical conditions that gave rise to the project of governing societies. He argues that since the origin of the modern state and state system with the Treaty of Westphalia, the liberal project of governing societies has been defined by two distinctions. First, by respecting the quasi-natural processes of a domain separate from the state within civil society, liberal arts of security have employed governmental forms of expertise in order to optimize economic and social efficiency within particular national frameworks. Second, these liberal arts of security have worked to maintain this order by defeating and punishing enemies who violate or threaten it both within and outside the borders of the nation. Dean argues that one of the mistakes realist political theory has made is to treat the liberal state as a concrete arrangement as opposed to a discursively constituted tendency, or aspiration, which must be continually made and remade through legal, economic, and social and cultural processes in accordance with shifting historical conditions. This misrecognition has led to a fundamental misinterpretation of liberal rule within the contemporary era. He claims that while neo-liberal globalization has presented various challenges to the traditional alignments of governing societies it has not effaced them. In the third and final chapter of the Dilemmas section, Dean expands this argument through a critique of mainstream social science narratives of globalization. Drawing on Manuel Castells, Anthony Giddens, and Ulrich Beck, he raises questions concerning the presumed decline of state power and the corollary rise of a more flexible, reflexive, and cosmopolitan subject of government. Dean contends that this assumes a deterritorialized political sphere and a detraditionalized social sphere leading to the displacement of governmental authority onto a host of technologies that work primarily through the freedom and ethical culture of individuals. 3 He argues that these narratives are teleological in that their normative articulations presume the very outcomes that they prescribe. In contrast, he uses the notion of dividing practices in order to describe how governmental rationalities work to differentiate populations based upon exceptions to liberal norms which determine those who are capable of government through freedom, those in need of obligation, and those requiring coercion and violence. He suggests that we need to ask when, in what contexts, how, and for which individuals and groups, governance conducted with the aim of activating individuals comes to place obligations above freedom,
3
Dean, 73.
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and the use of sanctions and coercive measures in the establishment of a particular form of life. 4 Such questions help to foreground the variegated relations of knowledge and power defining the terrain in which political struggles over economic provision and social recognition necessarily take place. They also destabilize discourses that situate neo-liberal government as primarily governing through freedom, as governmental programs such as welfare reform, zero tolerance policies, and immigration enforcement apply heavy-handed modes of obligation and physical force against those positioned outside the norms of autonomy and full citizenship. In section two, entitled Diagnostics, Dean shifts his analysis to perspectives on governmentality. In these two chapters he emphasizes a critical as opposed to a descriptive side of a governmentality perspective. This represents an attempt to extend governmentality beyond concerns with the conduct of conduct, which he locates as only one potential zone of liberal power. Dean argues that a critical governmentality approach to liberalism entails diagnosing the disjuncture between liberalisms normative claims to provide a safeguard against authoritarian forms of rule, and the operation of biopolitical and sovereign powers that often take illiberal and despotic forms. This leads to one of Deans most provocative suggestions, that liberalism has an intrinsic authoritarian dimension inherent in a liberal understanding of government itself. He locates this authoritarian dimension in the traffic between a legal political-order and a liberal order of police that works to define what constitutes accepted frames of life that may be, if necessary, defended against their exceptions through coercion and violence. Here, biopolitics, sovereignty, and government are conceived as overlapping complexes of power that may become operable in variable combinations within the social field, perhaps even falling into what Agamben has called a zone of indistinction. This refers to situations where decisions over life and death blur the boundaries of biopolitics and sovereignty, such as in cases concerning bioethics and human reproduction, or geopolitically, when a nation seeks to defend and promote its way of life through war, such as in the United States invasion of Iraq. In the third section of the book entitled Departures, Dean draws on Carl Schmitt and Giorgio Agamben in order to engage questions concerning sovereignty and the state of exception. Here, Dean expands Schmitts conception of the sovereign as he who decides the exception in two key ways. First, he argues that Schmitts view of sovereignty does not account for the multidimensional processes of domination and contestation whereby legal, cultural, institutional, and technological norms are produced. Thus while it might be said that the sovereign can decide when a normal legal order exists, it does not readily follow that he thereby decides what constitutes a normal social existence. 5 Second, against the notion that the sovereign decision resides only or even primarily within the juridical-legal and constitu4 5
Ibid., 77. Dean, 163.
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tional authority of the state, Dean seeks to widen the field of sovereign decision by analyzing how sovereign powers and the localization and diffusion of the decision, are delegated and arrogated within local-global regimes of institutional and social practices. He claims that if the governmentality perspective misses the sovereign decision imbricated within regimes of practices, Schmitt misses the normalizing practices that surround the exception. 6 Building on his analysis of Schmitt, Dean offers an extended engagement and critique of Giorgio Agamben. He reads Agambens work as a totalizing critique of the present in which the camp becomes the central spatial-(extra)legal construct of the contemporary moment, or, in Agambens language, the new biopolitical nomos of the planet. 7 While finding much theoretical value in Agamben, he contests the overly generalized logic of the camp on the grounds that its focus on the most extreme and sensational examples limits possibilities for conceiving the full range of political, economic, legal, and social conditions in which decisions on the exception are made. In contrast, Dean argues that decisions on the exception are integrated at multiple and overlapping scales and become delegated and arrogated throughout the very fabric of normal life. 8 In other words, decisions on the exception occur at all scales involving individuals, institutions, and political formations. While Governing Societies offers a series of provocative challenges and insights for governmentality studies it is not without its weaknesses. At times it appears that Dean is guilty of overplaying his argument against social science accounts of globalization. Throughout the book he directs his critique against theorists, most notably the aforementioned Manuel Castells, Anthony Giddens, and Ulrich Beck, who, Dean claims, have prematurely asserted the death of governing societies and the rise of a networked cosmopolitan world, without ever delving very deeply into the nuances of their arguments and/or, the significant differences between them. Moreover, his lengthy commentary and critique of Carl Schmitt and Giorgio Agamben at least partially belies the recent widespread scholarly interest in the configuration and (re)assertion of contemporary forms of sovereignty. Additionally, while acknowledging that the dividing practices of liberal rule position subjects and groups on a scale of worthiness for full autonomy, and that the most violent forms of power are most often directed toward minority populations, Dean misses the opportunity to deepen his analysis by delving more specifically into how various registers of social difference operate within liberal rule. In particular, how distinctly political matters involving access and struggles over social provision and symbolic recognition become re-routed through various discursive and material processes to enforce obligations and to coerce through race, class, ethnic, gender, and sexual differences. These criticisms aside, Governing Societies offers a wide range of theoretical
6 7 8
Ibid. Ibid., 177. Ibid., 194.
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insights for those interested in the continuing saliency of Foucaults thought for grappling with modern governance on both a domestic and international scale. In particular, it offers invaluable tools for rethinking governmentality through the lens of the political: as something concerned with the complex realities of antagonism, resistance, and struggle. Furthermore, by analyzing the depth at which biopolitical and sovereign powers operate within contemporary liberal rule, Dean has provided much needed insight for re-engaging governmentality on a more creative and critical level. Alex Means, Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto
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Timothy OLeary 2009 ISSN: 1832-5203 Foucault Studies, No 6, pp. 141-148, February 2009
REVIEW
Paying Attention to Foucaults Roussel Michel Foucault, Death and the Labyrinth: The World of Raymond Roussel. Translated by Charles Ruas. Introduction by James Faubion. Postscript by John Ashbery (London: Continuum, 2006) ISBN: 0826464351.
No one has paid much attention to this book, and Im glad; its my secret affair. You know, he was my love for several summersno one knew it (187).
This new edition by Continuum Press of one of Michel Foucaults earliest books is a perfect illustration of the idea that a book (just like power or the subject) is not a substance. On its first publication in French in 1963 (the same year as Naissance de la Clinique), the book entered a world in which Raymond Roussel (1877-1933), who had been a figure of minor interest (mostly associated with Surrealism), was finally becoming significant for readers of the then-emerging nouveau roman. Foucault himself, who had published work on Ludwig Binswanger, the book on madness, and a series of literary articles in Critique and Tel quel was also a minor figure, one who seemed to have a strong attraction for the exceptional, the marginal, and the transgressive. It is difficult to judge what impact the book had upon publication, but we can take as indicative the fact that it did not appear in an English translation until 1986. At that time, the book was published with an interview that the translator, Charles Ruas, had with Foucault in September 1983. In addition, a Postscript was added, consisting of an essay written by the American poet and critic John Ashbery in 1961 (hence, a pre-script?); an essay that introduced Roussel to an American audience presumed to have no knowledge of his work. And this Postscript to the book had itself another Postscript that was added by Ashbery in 1986. Finally, the English translation changed the title significantly, from the simple French title Raymond Roussel to the more elaborate, interpretive title Death and the Labyrinth: The World of Raymond Roussel. Now, in 2006, Continuum Press have re-published Foucaults book, with all the apparatus from the 1986 edition, but this time adding yet another layer; an Introduction by James Faubion that situates the original book, the Interview and the Postscript in the context both of the study of Roussels work and the
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OLeary: review of Death and the Labyrinth
subsequent development of Foucaults work. At the centre of this multiplicity is Foucaults 1963 book (originally conceived as an article for Critique), which itself begins as a commentary on Roussels posthumous book, How I wrote Certain of my Books, 1 which is itself of course, also a commentary on some of Roussels books. As if this Rousselian madness was contagious, this review will now comment on the recent re-edition as a twentieth-first century event in Foucault studies, an event that gives us a chance to reconsider some of the often forgotten aspects of Foucaults work. Today, forty-five years after the books initial publication, the first question to be asked is, how should we read this book? Well, since we are talking about the version of the book that has recently been re-published, I would say that we should read it backwards and, not only that, but we should begin by reading something else, by which I mean, we should begin by reading some Raymond Roussel (the novels Locus Solus and Impressions of Africa would be good places to start 2). Then we should read this edition, but beginning with John Ashberys 1961 essay, working back through the 1983 interview with Foucault, then reading the book itself, and finally ending with James Faubions Introduction. But why make the effort to read this difficult book at all? If there is any justification for the proliferating apparatus that surrounds Foucaults book, it is precisely because that book is essentially difficult, obscure, and, as Foucault himself admits, convoluted. 3 The first source of difficulty is the fact that it assumes the reader already has a detailed knowledge of Roussels works and is also familiar with the work of Alain Robbe-Grillet, Michel Butor, et al. For example, Foucault has a tendency to weave references and allusions to events in the novels, poems and plays without alerting the reader to their origins or significance. A second difficulty arises from the style of the writing itself. It is a curious and striking fact that much of Foucaults writing on literature from the first half of the 1960s seems to be deliberately opaque. In some cases, such as his essays on Bataille and Blanchot, 4 one has the suspicion that his writing style is a form of homage to the subject of the essay. The essay on Blanchot, in particular, is strongly reminiscent of Blanchots own allusive, and elusive, style. However, it would perhaps be wrong in the case of this book to think that the difficulty stems from Foucaults mimicking of Roussels style. After all Roussel, like Robbe-Grillet, his nouveau-roman admirer, could write prose with ex1
3 4
Raymond Roussel, How I Wrote Certain of My Books, translated and edited by Trevor Winkfield (Cambridge, MA: Exact Change, 1995). Raymond Roussel, Locus Solus, translated by Rupert Copeland Cunningham (London: John Calder, 1983); and Raymond Roussel, Impressions of Africa, translated by Lindy Foord & Rayner Heppenstall (London: John Calder, 2001). See this volume, An Interview with Michel Foucault, 187. Michel Foucault, The preface to Transgression and The Thought of the Outside, both in Essential Works of Michel Foucault 1954-1984, Volume 2, Aesthetics, Method and Epistemology, edited by James D. Faubion (London: Penguin, 2000).
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treme clarity. In this case, it may be closer to the truth to simply accept Foucaults own explanation: that this book was written by him in a matter of two months, it was a pleasure, a secret pleasure, and he didnt subject it to his usual process of rewriting, simplifying, and clarifying. 5 Perhaps the greatest source of difficulty for a Foucauldian reader today, therefore, does not come from a mirroring of style, but from the mirroring of the central concerns of Roussels work. Foucault sees in Roussel a writer who is anxiously obsessed with language and who is constantly exploring the intimate connection between language and death. This concern is mirrored and amplified by a similar concern on the part of Foucault. In fact, in the 1983 interview, he admits that his own obsessional side (174) may partly explain his fascination with these works. In the last line of his book, Foucault generalises this experience by saying that what we share with Roussel is this anguish of the signified (169). A shared anxiety in the face of language is both what allows us to understand Roussels works and what allows us (Foucault) to speak of them. However, it may also be what contributes to giving the book its labyrinthine opacity, its relentless turning around the question of what Foucault sees as the void that opens up at the heart of language and connects it inexorably with death. For potential readers of the book today, therefore, the question remains: given its difficulty, its apparent marginality in Foucaults oeuvre, and the fact that few people today read Roussel, why should we read this book? Assuming that this question is addressed to those whose interest is primarily in Foucault, rather than in Roussel, I think there are two important, connected reasons. First, this book is the only extended example of Foucaults engaging in a form of discourse in which he was highly skilled, but which he had abandoned by the late 1960s, what we could call the formalist analysis of literary or artistic works. Striking examples of this form of discourse include his analysis of Las Meninas in The Order of Things, his short book on Magritte and his extended essay (now a book) on Manet;6 and of course his essays on Bataille, Jules Verne, and the nouveau-romanciers. The second reason has to do with the nature of this engagement itself, or at least with the literary side of this engagement. Foucaults deep involvement with literary analysis in the early to mid1960s was a function of his interest in a range of fundamental questions about the nature of language and its relation to the world. The second reason for reading his book on Roussel, therefore, has to do with the contribution it can make to help us understand the form his questioning of language took at this time. However, it also has to do with helping us to pose, if not answer, a question about Foucaults subsequent turning away from using works of literature as a privileged access to the problem of the relation between words and things.
5 6
An Interview, 187. Michel Foucault, La Peinture de Manet, suivi de Michel Foucault, un regard. Edited by Maryvonne Saison (Paris: Editions de Seuil, 2004).
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Insofar as we read the book, firstly, as an example of Foucaults powers of literary analysis and insight, we have to recognise that for both Foucault and the reader the primary interest will be one of pleasure. Not only the pleasure for us of reading Foucaults convoluted, but at times dazzling, analyses; but also the sense we have of the pleasure Foucault himself is taking both in the writing of the book and in the reading of Roussel. Convolution, repetition, and mirroring were key features of Roussels work and they obviously find a strong resonance in the Foucault of the early 1960s. In one of Roussels last works, Nouvelles Impressions dAfrique, a long poem that re-works some of the themes of the earlier novel Impressions of Africa, there is a complicated layering of parentheses within parentheses within parentheses. Foucault clearly enjoys calculating that, at one point, if we include the parentheses inside the footnotes to the poem, this layering extends to the ninth degree (130). It would clearly be next-to-impossible for a reader to navigate this complexity without confusion, and that is something that we will see could also perhaps be said of Foucaults book itself. This kind of convolution and layering is a constant feature of Roussels work. And, a significant part of the pleasure of those works comes from the fact that, at one level, they can be approached as a kind of mystery that both resists and invites explanation; in fact, as a mystery which is constantly being explained, but in ways which we cannot quite accept as reliable. In Locus Solus (solitary place), for example, we are introduced to the extraordinary garden of Martial Canterel. A group of visitors is led by Canterel through a series of marvels which he has assembled (literally) using his incomparable powers of engineering and chemistry. These include a series of vignettes, inside large glass-fronted refrigerators, in which cadavers that have been temporarily re-animated using two substances invented by Canterel (resurrectine and vitalium) re-enact the most highly charged moments of their lives, before collapsing again into a state of death. Before any explanation is given, the visitors (and the reader) are taken from window to window to observe the curious actions of the inmates of each refrigerated cell. The scenes are described in meticulous, but baffling detail; neither we nor the visitors to the garden have any idea of the significance of the actions we are witnessing. After the eight scenes, Canterel explains both his discovery of the chemical compounds resurrectine and vitalium and, once again in great detail, describes the context of the moments that we had seen being recreated inside the refrigerated cells. This second description is, then, an explanation of the original description, but it is one that is almost as mysterious and inexplicable as the first. One way of understanding these narratives, which bring together extraordinary machines with complicated plots, has been to see them as the product of a richly surreal imagination. Roussel was, in fact, a cause clbre of the Surrealists who, for example, came to some of his plays to noisily support them against the attacks of bored and frustrated audiences. However, another approach would be to assume a
144
hidden meaning behind the inventions of plot and language, and to connect these with the singularities of Roussels own life. According to this approach, Roussels works would be seen as containing a hidden message that would be decipherable if we could find its key. In a 1963 review of Foucaults book, 7 the novelist Philippe Sollers makes the point that whether or not this approach is legitimate, we should not (and Foucault does not) therefore think of Roussel as an initiate of an occult language to which we too would try to gain access. But this does not mean that we do not still try to find a key to the works; or, to adopt a recurrent metaphor, that we do not still try to find a thread that will lead us both into and out of the labyrinth that Roussel constructs. And in fact, Roussel himself gave us just such a key the posthumous text in which he explained how he had written certain of his books. For Foucault, this text demonstrates the sense in which Roussels work should be read, not as a series of flights of the imagination, but as an experiment that is carried out on language, in order to expose both the labyrinth that it constructs for us and the abyss on which it rests. In How I Wrote Certain of My Books, Roussel explains some of the basic techniques upon which he built certain of his books (principally Locus Solus and Impressions of Africa). The first technique consisted of choosing two almost identical words for example billard (billiard table) and pillard (plunderer). To these he would add identical words capable of two meanings in order to produce two almost identical sentences with radically different meanings. Hence: les lettres du blanc sur les bandes du vieux billard [the white letters on the cushions of the old billiard table]; and, les lettres du blanc sur les bandes du vieux pillard [the white mans letters on the hordes of the old plunderer]. His task was then to construct a narrative that would begin with the first sentence and end with the second sentence. It was this story, Roussel tells us, that was the basis for his novel Impressions of Africa. A second technique was to take two words, link them with the preposition [to/with], and attribute two meanings to each word, taking, for example, the word palmier, which is both a kind of tree and a kind of pastry, we can get palmier restauration, which is both a restaurant serving pastries, and a tree that commemorates the restoration of a dynasty. It was from this play of words that Roussel derived the palm tree in Impressions of Africa that commemorates the restoration of the dynasty of Talou (the old plunderer). The third technique that Roussel unveils moves even more in the direction of the use of found language. In this case, he would choose a random sentence from a song or a poem and modify it in order to produce a series of images that then constitute one part of a narrative. Hence, the line from the traditional song Au clair de la
7
Philippe Sollers, Choix Critique: Logicus Solus, Tel quel, 1963, 14, 46-50. Republished (untranslated) in Michel Foucault: Critical Assessments 1: Situating Foucault: Archaeology, Genealogy and Politics, 3 volumes, edited by Barry Smart (London: Routledge, 1994), 349-354.
145
lune mon ami Pierrot becomes Eau glaire (cascade dune couleur de glaire) de l lanmone midi ngro [Glairy water (glairy-coloured waterfall) from whence the anemone with noon Negro]. In another example, Roussel takes a product name from an advertisement Phonotypia and produces fausse note tibia [false note tibia], from which he invents a Breton character that plays a flute that has been made from his own amputated tibia. 8 As we have seen, the point to be made about these inventions is that they are not primarily the product of a rich, surreal imagination. Rather, they are the products of a process which extracts wonders (in a Jules Verne sense) from the limitless fecundity of language itself: the reader thinks he recognises the wayward wanderings of the imagination where in fact there is only random language, methodically treated (40). For Foucault, this is the key to the locked doors of Roussels work: not so much the mechanics of the process itself, and certainly not the psychopathology of the author, but the sense in which the equal poverty and richness of language are capable of generating a world of crystal clarity and impossible mystery. However, this is by no means a nave celebration of literary language. For Foucault, what underlies all of these experiments is an anxiety about words and their relation to things. Roussels work both conveys and instills this anxiety, a formless anxiety relating to the stifling hollowness, the inexorable absence of being[the] expanse that Roussels narratives cross as if on a tightrope above the void (13, 21). For Foucault, the significance of this process is that it gives a mechanism for spanning the gap between the everyday repetitions of language and the poetic annihilation of those patterns. If, as Foucault suggests, poetic language exposes an emptiness at the heart of the labyrinthine constructions of language, then Roussels work is of interest for the way it allows us to see these two aspects at play. On the one hand, the incredibly rich and detailed descriptions of worlds that seem to be so real; on the other hand, the uncanny evocation of an emptiness that not only undercuts the descriptions themselves, but also seems to reach out and undermine our experience of the undoubtedly real worlds in which we live. In Roussel, therefore, as in the work of Robbe-Grillet, the effect of the incredibly precise descriptions of the world of things is, paradoxically, to undermine our faith in a direct and faithful relation between words and things. One of the central features of this relation is that there are, quite simply, fewer words than things and that is why words take on meaning. If there were as many words as things, language would be a useless mirror of the world. Jonathan Swift has reduced to absurdity the dream of a language that would neatly and rigidly fit over the world of things. In his travel to Laputa, Gulliver meets the members of an academy who, instead of using words, carry around with them all the things to which they wish to refer. The only problem is that the more things they wish to speak about, the more things they must carry around, until finally they are weighed
8
Roussel, Impressions, 67-8.
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down with heavy burdens that must be packed and unpacked for every conversation. 9 For us, however, the poverty of language is the source of its richness. Out of its essential poverty springs the possibility for words to repeat in forms that appear to be the same, but are actually different. Hence, the point for Roussel is not to say the same things differently, but to say different things using the (almost) same words. For Roussel, as for Foucault, therefore, the relation between words and things can never be a straightforward one of reflection or adequate expression. The value of descriptive language lies not in its fidelity to the object. Instead of following and translating perceptions, language opens up a path for our subsequent perceptions; it is only then that things begin to shimmer for themselves, forgetting that they had first been spoken. 10 Today, more than forty five years after its first publication, what does this book mean for our understanding of Foucault? Projecting forward from 1963, we can clearly see that Foucault is already immersed in the set of questions that animate Les mots et les choses (1966). Foucault famously attributes the seed of that book to his laughter at Borges account of the Chinese encyclopedia; that makes a nice story, but we should also add that Foucaults entire interest in modern literature (from Mallarm to Robbe-Grillet, via Roussel) also turns around similar concerns. Projecting backwards, we can say that Foucaults earlier History of Madness was also written within a constellation of influences in which Roussel shone. In the 1983 interview, Foucault acknowledges that his intense reading of Roussel occurred while he was writing the book on madness. Both provoked him to search for a way of understanding the connections between language, madness, and history. But how does this book fit into Foucaults trajectory, as it unfolded in the twenty years after its publication? In the 1983 interview, Foucault seems to be happy that his secret affair with Roussel has not attracted much attention, and he even goes so far as to say that the Roussel book does not have a place in the sequence of my books (187). For a thinker who was constantly telling new narratives that would make sense of the sequence of his books, this is a surprising assertion. Is Foucault disowning the book? Is it something that he can no longer integrate into his sense of his own intellectual project? One way to make sense of the claim would be to see it in the light of Foucaults undoubted turn away from literature by the end of the 1960s. While the early to mid-1960s had been a time of continuous engagement with literature, by the time of his inaugural lecture at the Collge de France in 1969 Foucault had finally relegated literature to an area of marginal interest. And it is not just the Roussel book that gets forgotten in this shift; for example, in the pseudonymous entry he wrote on his own work for a dictionary of philosophy, he does not once
9 10
Jonathan Swift, Gullivers Travels, Part III, chap. 5 (London: Penguin Books, 2003). Michel Foucault, Pourquoi rdite-t-on loeuvre de Raymond Roussel? Un prcurseur de notre littrature moderne, in Dits et crits, vol. 1 (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), 422.
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mention his work on literature. Instead, he characterises his work of the 1960s as involving the study of those discourses about the human being that take the form of scientific knowledge. 11 We could speculate that one of the reasons both for this turn and for the subsequent tendency to forget what had gone before is the fact that Foucaults overall approach to literature at this time was based on a philosophy of language which he was later to reject. In one of his Tel quel articles also from 1963, Foucault suggests the possibility of outlining a formal ontology of literature.12 This ontology would be based, primarily, on the observation that literary language involves a mirroring reflection on death and a consequent construction of a virtual space in which language repeats itself to infinity. 13 From Homer and Scheherazade, to Borges and Roussel (although Roussel is not mentioned in this article), literature would then be a unique practice of language in which we create for ourselves a world that in some way goes beyond the world in which we live and will die. But for the Foucault of this era, this fairly simple position is always expressed in an almost tortuous evocation of labyrinths, eternal mirroring, yawning voids, and transgressive repetitions. At the very least, it is clear that the metaphysical, almost mystical, style of Foucaults exploration of language and literature at this time quickly gave way to the more sober, and politically grounded, analyses that followed in the 1970s. And that is not something we should regret. One of the important things about the Roussel book, however, is that it shows that approach to literature in full flight. And reading it is a pleasure, but a pleasure that is not unmixed with pain. Foucaults own enjoyment, not only of the texts of Roussel, but of the process of producing his analyses of those texts, is contagious. And if that makes us go back and read some of Roussels work, then the book has served an important function. But, on the other hand, if we read the book today, having read so much of Foucaults later work, we may find it frustratingly obscure and unnecessarily convoluted. And that may be why Foucault was happy that it had not received much attention. But given Foucaults own fondness for subjugated knowledges and forgotten histories, we would be well justified in uncovering this secret love of an anguished and obsessive young philosopher.
Timothy OLeary, University of Hong Kong
11 12 13
Michel Foucault, Foucault, in Essential Works, Volume 2, 460-61. Michel Foucault, Language to Infinity, in Essential Works, Volume 2, 92-93. Ibid., 90-91.
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SverreRaffnse,AlanRosenberg,AlainBeaulieu,SamBinkley,SvenOpitz, JensErikKristensen;withMorrisRabinowitz&DitteVilstrupHolm2009 ISSN:18325203 FoucaultStudies,No6,pp.

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