The Birth of Biopolitics, 14 March lecture

 Questions:

1. If this is a genealogy, what kind of genealogy is it? Should we consider it as such?
2. Question of neoliberalism about scarce resources and allocation of them. What is the relationship between this allocation and strategic programming? (P. 223, 227)
3. Criticism against theory of imperialism; how much is MF concerned with Schumpeter’s criticism of Marxist/Luxemburgian theory of imperialism? (P.231-232)
4. When MF discusses theory of human capital—move from labor to time, what is the role of temporality in MF conception of human capital?
5. MF offers a historiography of neoliberalism; how do we reconcile this with genealogy? (P.216–219)
6. Why does he choose these three events specifically; one could argue there’s a lot more events he could have chosen, what was the significance of these?
7. “Let’s methodologically suppose universals don’t exist…” (P.3) The contrast between “dialectical logic” and “strategic logic”…”I suggest replacing dialectic logic with strategic logic…” Is this cool? (p.42) 

Discussion:

Q 1: By ‘it’ being a genealogy..what do we mean?

It has a genealogical impetus but it is trying to track the present so it doesn’t have the same ability (Like D&P, for example) to examine an established archive. We don’t have the privilege of looking back on what is now obvious to us. MF sees this as a policy project but it is early to assess the nuance of techniques. Interesting that there is a lot of debates re why it is the “Birth of Biopolitics”? There is a foresight—maybe an anticipatory genealogy? 

Is this where he is articulating his notion of biopolitics? What do we mean by it? The neoliberalist subject? 

Post-war, Chicago school neoliberalism are main objects of critique. Is there a clear method or are these just observations? 

 Would Birth of Neoliberalism be a more accurate title? History of Sexuality where he works through concept of biopolitics/biopower. 

He’s tracking a mode of thought, a mode of analysis…looking at how a specific form of subjectivity is made. 

Maybe this is more of an archaeological analysis than genealogical?

Elements of policy, there’s a practice related to this discourse…a way of being. 

Now we can track this because we are in the future of this present (could have not happened).

Not just empirical examples; MF as trying to create a system for these examples? P. 228 on taking a spouse with equal levels of human capital…P. 225 “principle of decipherment…” “problematic of needs…” There’s a sense in which he has these methodological terms that does sound more like an archaeology. The problematization more like genealogy; trying to constitute the thought undergirding the examples he uses.

Not starting with a universal but how a universal is being built. (Q 7)

We could look at a universal in neoliberalism and perform a genealogy on how it was built. 

(P.223) “Adopts the task of analyzing a form of human behavior…”

Maybe this speak to Tiisala’s argument re an underlying savior? It’s not only about rationality in a science but rationality in a human behavior.

MF as citing theorists; this is pre-Reagan, pre-Thatcher…Sounds like a description of a “political rationality.” This is quintessential archaeology; the rationality isn’t an exercise of power. It’s another thing to have this in play, in policies. It’s not that there is no genealogy here but it’s not above and beyond History of Madness a Birth of the Clinic.

(P.232) “…programming of the processes I am talking about…” he sees the emergence of a kind of power here but you cannot get the full story. It’s archaeological but it’s more about where he’s standing in regards to this method. 

Maybe MF is just developing a neoliberal theory of governmentality? Do all MF’s works have to be conscious of methodology?

Does seem there is something he is trying to track. 

What is the difference between an archaeology and a traditional theory here?

These lectures approach interesting theoretical approaches to neoliberalism.

Even at the level of research, you don’t start with a method but observations…

MF also begins stating interest in government and art of government; liberalism as a government; the conduct of conduct. There is a continuity thematically with other things he’s doing as well. 

The methodology question is important with MF because his work is so empirical. It seems like there is an onus on the research or the work to not be done in a pell-mell manner whereas speculative philosophy can get away with this more. We can then track that methodology in some extent. If we assume he is more or less applying a methodology, what in the method more or less causes him to deduce this theory of neoliberalism as opposed to others?

One question: how much is the method dependent on the historical dependence? If the neoliberal policy prescriptions haven’t been implemented, how can you give an adequate genealogical account of their power? 

Distinction between recent past and near future: MF always discussing about recent past, describing something up until a few decades ago. 

Rabinow and distinction between historiography for the past and anthropology for the contemporary investigation.

(P.33) “I don’t think we can find the cause….we should establish the intelligibility of this process…” Maybe one difference—one event as the cause for something, there’s still a focus on the event but there’s multiple and its not over-rationalizing the significance of the event?

Marxist critiques flatten the plurality of neoliberalism (it exists different in different political economies).

Regardless of it is a genealogy, how does genealogy figure into these broader historical events he is discussing? 

Genealogy operates through multiple historical concatenations. 

Role of the individual; we think of things like policy changes in terms of individuals; dangers of thinking of this in terms of ‘one event.’ Economic historian might point to one cause of an event, how does genealogy respond? History places a lot of emphasis on subjects as the movers of events rather than events themselves.

Interesting look at the family and the ways the private is folded into economics in ways others don’t notice, new to this period, not addressed by traditional Marxist analysis. 

Discussion of migration as an investment in life; similarities to the way people discuss migrants today. 

What did he have in mind in this section? (P.230)

“Migration has a cost…” Cost for the migrant, nation? Cost for who?

“What is the function of this cost…” 

(Q 4) He contrasts economic subject qua labor power; (p 220) comment about Marx and the worker as just a worker; in neoliberal, worker is not a worker in social time it is an entrepreneur who invests in the future. 

This is not about exploiting the worker til its death; you have to invest and replenish; it’s not capital against life but capital and life; a traditional Marxist view not sufficient for analysis. 

Different kind of work; it’s not just abstract labor for a job but involves a level of self-investment as a worker. We can see this in people’s responses the things like why we go to college; not many would answer they go for the intrinsic value of wanting to know. 

Time and temporality…(p 221) “neoliberals and marxists…[on] variables of time” How actually is time the key variable for neoliberals? How does this connect to Punitive Society lectures? 

In the old capitalist model: time as purely abstract; in neoliberalism time: time reconstituted and matters, it’s about the individual’s future; time as something you plan.

(P 223) “Analysis of internal rationality…” there’s something intentional happening when you look at economics through the lens of behavior. 

Key concept of neoliberalism MF draws on: choice. Choice is a phenomenon that governs economic behavior. Everyone is an entrepreneur capable of making good market choices on their own. Good economics cultivates good choices. It’s an economic theory that does away with broad economic theories. (P 222)

(P 226) “…Man of consumption, insofar as he consumes, is a producer…” This has a hold on how we both experience and use our time. 

Fundamental shift from classical factory model (worker sells labor and that’s it) to labor as a function of classical accumulation which is itself a temporal motion? 

Discipline and Punish, "Illegalities and delinquency" (pt. 4, ch 2)

 Questions

1. Is there anyone to whom surveillance does not apply (200; 204)?

2. How is "work" operating in this chapter (and in The Punitive Society)? What is the relation between disciplinary power and work?

3. Production of delinquency appears as a demobilizing tactic, but how does his class analysis figure into Foucault's methodology with respect to discipline? 

4. The delinquent is produced "as a pathologized subject" (277). How does said production connect with the "usefulness" of delinquency in the relation to work-labor?

5. How does genealogy determine what is "a target" (276)? In this case it appears to be illegalities or illegalisms. 

6. How do we understand illegalities through the failure of penality (272)? Does this help us define illegalities/illegalisms?

7. Foucault anti-dialectical form of argument: prison and reform (264-265). Who are his interlocutors here? Or is this an argument geared at dialectics more broadly?

8. If the function of the prison is not to render docile those who transgress the law, how do we square this with the "opening illegalities" which function towards rendering docile (272; 277)?

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Discussion

Description of delinquency in relation to labor, labor organizing, and labor rights (and its relation to the formation of social class) was very interesting as forms of resistance or counter-conduct (274ff). This had not been developed before as clearly. 

Illegalities are targeted by disciplinary power and the constitutive failures produce delinquency in a way that favors or is useful to the bourgeoisie. In that sense, it is not only the production of workers but also the disruption of dissidence or sedition that is crucial for class (or capitalist) power. (see, e.g., 280). In that sense, the emergence of the delinquent is parallel to that of the worker.

Another important relation of delinquency with labor can be found in Foucault's analysis of the paralegal development of police to manage "the mass of reserve labor" (280). But the delinquent is also useful as a political weapon.

What is difference of this genealogy from a Marxist account of class formation? It could be seen as a response of why certain revolutionary attempts failed (the internalization of discipline). Different emphasis of the emergence of the working class and the reserve army but in terms of the productivity of power.

Diffusion of illegalities (273-275): the association of crime/criminality and class is something novel (the "classization" of crime) that Foucault is attempting to track. There is a production of class disymmetry as a vector through which penal discourse and practices travel. 

There is an introduction of the present in the text that brings into view the contemporaneity of the archive and Foucault's genealogy (268): the uprisings in French prisons are articulated as a "reform" and therefore as an "improvement" or "amelioration" of the prison that is thus unable to recognize its functional and historical specificity.

Notion of tactics as "reach[ing] their target" (285). This sounds intentional. How do we square this with Foucault's emphasis on power a non-intentional? Why is there such a "need"? Is it a need to solve a problem that arise in conflict/class/revolutionary struggles?

Tactics are bound up with articulations of a problem – The coming into power of a class is contingent upon it being able to articulate a "class dissymmetry" (276) successfully and functionally. 

Part of the argument could be that the moralization of the lumpenproletariat is a fuller story of this form of subjectivity. (the lumpenproletariat). Delinquency is nonetheless the vector for class differentiation. If you tell the story that way, you can tell a different story about the emergence and hegemony of the capitalist class that does not assume that they had power in advance.

Interesting that he refers to indiscipline in terms of a "native, immediate liberty" (292) when addressing the Fourierists.

The Punitive Society, March 28 Lecture

 1. Foucault's use of habit to describe disciplinary power? How do we understand its critical use?

2. What is the relationship between genealogy and habit? Particularly, the "change" of habit. 

3. Fleshing out distinctions between ideology and "strategies of power"? 

4. Can we track the four theoretical schemas of power? (pp. 228 - 229, 231, 233).

5. What is an "institution" for Foucault? How does this differ from something like "apparatus"? (p. 235).

Institution as social form? "... institutional condition of possibility..." (227). Institutions as "effects" of techniques, practices, knowledges -- Foucault's "nominalism." Institutions as something like "anticipatory dispositifs"?

Example:

power-knowledge ---> surveillance, examination, normalization ---> techniques(?) ---> institutions (e.g., prison, clinic, army, etc.).

Four schemas of power:

(1) power as exercised as opposed to appropriative (i.e., not a matter of possession) 

(2) power as diffused as opposed to localized (centralized?)

(3) power as constitutive of production, not subordinate to it 

(4) power as knowledge formation, not ideological (i.e., power-knowledge)

Who is Foucault mogging? Arguably, political philosophy hitherto.

(1) Hobbes and the social contract tradition.

(2) Althusser 

(3) "post-Hegelians," i.e. (early) Marx

(4) Critical theory, i.e., Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse (and Althusser, again). 

In terms of ideology, what is meant by "transparency" and "opacity." Against the idea that ideology distorts actual knowledge, whereas Foucault wants to suggest that we need not posit hidden motives and interests to understand the operations of power. Ideology critique as revealing how operations of power distort consciousness of subjects (false consciousness).

Foucault distinction between eighteenth-century and nineteenth-cenutury discourses. What's the exact nature of the shift? Foucault doesn't seem to be offering a comprehensive theory of habit -- wish he was saying more here.

Foucault: March 21, 1973 Lecture (Punitive Society)

The group began with questions: 

(1) p. 206: Is Foucault making a distinction between relays/multiples of power as opposed to productive power/powers that serve a specific function?

(2) p. 212: What is the second "function" of sequestration that Foucault mentions?

(3) p. 214: Double system of prevention of heterosexuality and prohibition of homosexuality?  

(4) p. 206-207: What is meant by hyper-power?

Discussion...

On Hyper-power: 

—Intensification of power on bodies

—Does hyper-power mean more power?

—Social bodies: power is predicated on membership; mechanical bodies: on productive function; dynastic: ?

—Is the prison the site of hyper-power? Site of multiplication (places where mechanisms of power, normalization, the examination, occur and then become diffuse through the social body). 

—State structure is a relay-multiplier of power "within a society in which the State structure remains the conditions for the functioning of these institutions" (209)?

On "Mono-functional institutions" (p. 212):

—Institutions appear to be mono-functional, but that is not the case. 

—Second function is to fabricate the social—"fabricate something that is both prohibition and norm, and that has to become reality: they are institutions of normalization" (214-215). 

—At first sight not implied in the institutional function itself 

—Establishes whole set of norms that exceed institution's stated/explicit functions. 

—Function in Foucault vs. Althusser/Marx

Prevention of heterosexuality vs. prohibition of homosexuality (p. 213-214): 

—Structure of a sex-segregated school system means that heterosexuality as a practice is prevented (cannot be exercised); it just is prevented but not on some moral ground; just a structural feature. 

—Homosexuality needs to be prohibited 

—Heterosexuality is the external norm that is diffused; homosexuality is internal 

—p. 214: is apparatus in footnote apparatus or dispositif  in French translation. 

New type of discursivity (p. 215) 

Michel Foucault - The Punitive Society, Lecture 10 (7 March 1973)

Questions:

1. (p. 178) Criminology and medico-juducial codification - what is the relation? What is transcription? 

2. (p. 175) Fascism as connecting military force and corporatism to protect apparatus of production. How does this relate to capitalist penality?

3. (p. 173) How is 'illegalism' different from 'infra-legal illegalism'? What marks the distinction between them? 

4. (p. 171) How does the earlier fear of the vagabond connect to urbanization? Is this the 'whole floating population turned out by poverty'? 

5. (p. 175) How is the 'record book (livret)' connected to militarism and corporatism?

6. (p. 174) How is the civil code connected to habit? Is there a temporal dimension here? 

Discussion

* Reference to the "text" and "discourse." We are not getting "behind" or "underneath" what is said. (p. 165)

• It seems like the concern is not the vagabond but the proximity of workers and how their habits are connected to profitability (Q4)
• Vagabond is the paradigmatic figure of delinquency - but now all of these other modes of punitive practices that are extended to workers
• Now, there is increase in state apparatus and production 
• The workers are quasi-delinquent; Foucault wants to show the connection between work and punishment
• Narrative is about the mechanism of control towards non-working populations moving to the worker as the central site of concern
• Immorality, concerning "the body, need, desire, habit, and will" (p. 176); "whole system of moral conditioning needs to be incorporated into penality" (p. 176)
• Vagabond in 1714 (p. 45) versus workers in 1830 (p. 172) (Q4)
• Technique - penitentiary applied to vagabond; then penality extends to worker
• Social enemy as a figure is transcribed into "immature, maladjusted, and primitive" (Q1)
• "moralizing modulation" (p. 177)
• Shift to morality of worker over the contract (p. 174) 
• Quakers not medico-judicial in their penitentiary 
• No psychologists in prison
• Beccaria isn't connecting the medical to punishment 
• Medicalization and moralization that are different
• Moralization now outside of prison 
• (p. 91) medical health and religious transformation
• Discipline or the crafting of habits (moralization) 
• Discipline and Punish - sovereign form of punishment versus reformers (Beccaria) versus disciplinary 
• So, Beccaria is not disciplinary
• These are all in the discourse; practices are also part of what is said (Foucault is not giving conspiratorial social theory) 
• (p. 179) "penal text" procedures of moralization
• Different functions of juridico-medical versus criminology (Q1)
• Criminology gives punishment to crime
• Medico-judicial gives the prediction of criminal 
• "homicidal monomania" creates a medical cause (p. 179) 
• Criminology transports medico-judicial model elsewhere
• Penal Code 
• We could think of a practicing judge who says "I'm not a psychologist" and "social dangerousness is not an infraction in the code" 
• Psychologist gives the law a way to identify social dangerousness - language of "dispositions"
• Branching out of a disciplinary society - not just people who commit crimes, but those who could potentially commit crimes (also extends beyond the domain of the courts)
• infra-legal illegalism - think of "infra" as "not quite" or "underneath" (Q3)
• But weren't the illegalisms already infra? 
• Examples of "infra-legal": lazy, getting drunk, being late
• "infra-legal" illegalism is not opposed to illegalism (?) 
• Disagreement on this point - weren't the earlier cases of illegalism cases which were illegal but not punished?
• Illegalisms that officially break the law versus those that don't 

Note: Recommendation to read 14 March, 194-196, for the next week + 21 March

Michel Foucault – The Punitive Society – Lecture 8 (21 of February 1973)

 Questions

1. What does Foucault mean by a transition from fraud to theft (148-149)? Can we track all the illegalisms that are at play in this lecture?
   
   
2. Are oppositions key entry-points into understanding or uncovering the underlying conditions of possibility for the punitive society (145)? Is this part of genealogical method?
   
   
3. "A law functions, it is applied only within a field of illegalism that is actually practiced and, in a way, supports it" (145). What is does the "field of illegal practices" that allows the law to be applied refer to? 
   
   
4. What is the role of the State apparatus in the transition from the penal system to the penitentiary system (139-140)?
   
   
5. What is the origin of the term "illegalism" (140) and what is the relation to the "anarchist ideology" at the end (151)?
   
   
6. Foucault tracks the transition from the compatibility to incompatibility of popular illegalisms to bourgeois economy. What is the relationship of in/compatibility with the concept of "tactic of the bourgeoisie" (149)?
   
   
7. How does the moralization of the worker connect with the development of the penitentiary (149)? How is this related to the prison-form vs the wage-form?
   
   
8. Why is "depredation" inevitable once the worker is exposed to material wealth (147)? Can "depredation" be a site of counter-conduct?
   

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Anarchism refers to illegalisms in order to articulate a justification for looting and other activities but it seems that Foucault has a much broader conception than this. 

There has been a contemporary resurgence in relation to assassination (e.g. Luigi Mangione) and other forms of direct action and/as violence.

Foucault, however, seems is trying to emphasize the "productivity" of illegalisms and avoid a more traditional focus on repression and the quelling of sedition (this is his debate with Althusser but, in this case particularly, with E. P. Thompson).

Different kinds of illegalisms in terms of classes: (1) lower-class/popular illegalisms; (2) "privileged" illegalisms (aristocracy); and (3) merchant, business or bourgeois illegalism. However, Foucault also mentions illegalisms in terms of spheres/styles(?): economic (machine breaking), social (formation of associations), civil (rejection of marriage), political (riots) – p. 151.

Illegalism in contrast to sedition  – other possible names: crimes (but it could be anachronistic). This would make this a functional distinction vis-à-vis the responses of power: illegalisms calls for a disciplinary response versus sedition calls for repression (sovereign response).

Foucault uses a practice-based description of illegalism: "lower strata practicing illegalisms" (150), especially in order to avoid "the criminal" as a figure or status.

Important to note his notions of "ambiguous" and "oscillating" between illegalisms as practices and the law. Illegalism is a "game" within which legality is a "strategy" (144). There appears to be some mutual benefit or some kind of reciprocity.

In some sense there is an account of class struggle, but the emphasis here is in the "struggle" in terms of strategies and tactics in order to give a more nuance account of the workings of power beyond repression and (mere) prohibition.

Prison separates the delinquency from the general lower-class of illegalisms and it is there that criminalization (or the appearance of crime) becomes salient (see p. 150). Delinquents in that sense are autonomous but at the same time are "soaked up" as "recruits for the police" (151). It is possible to see these discussions in relation to moralizing account of the lumpenproletariat.

Delinquency is useful, therefore, as a theory and a practice because it helps to manage and solve the problem of the worker in relation to fortune/wealth. Delinquency is a tactic of population management.

2 open questions: (1) what happens to these non-delinquent illegalisms (and what is an example); and (2) is this strategy or a tactic? Is it intentional (seems too clean for Foucault) or is it an effect? If it is not planned in advance, then how and why did it persist? What stabilized it? What is the social environment that makes that possible?

Maybe the bourgeoisie does not have an interest in repressing illegalisms and therefore there is a question: what do we do about it? The prison: we need to discipline them and inculcate the work ethic.

There is a methodological tension because there is a lot of function language (very useful in social theory) and even teleology (p. 150), and also a resistance to it. Is there value in choosing which one to lift or use, or maybe maintaining the ambiguity between them...?

This is also complex when we consider conceptions of "appearance" and of things "appearing" that also points to the emergence of phenomena or events. 

Concern with "revolt" (150) in relation to the stability of...the nation? Again: how are we to understand the role of the State apparatus here. 

Michel Foucault, The Punitive Society Lecture Five (31st January, 1973)

Questions:

1. What is the level of autonomy of the subject of power relations?

2. (P. 92): “new form of judicial established through it…” What does it mean to say that it is not the “old monastic form” but a new “juridical-religious connection that emerges through it?

3. (88-89): What is a good example of the impermeability of Christianity and the penal system?

4. How does the Quaker conception of political power contrast with a non-religious or non-Quaker conception of political power? (perhaps catholic?)

5. (91 first paragraph): connaissance (program of knowledge) and savoir (criminal as object of knowledge) / what are the elements F. lists (dossier, biography, etc.) tracking? Is it pouvoir or something else? 

6. (85): “temporal justice”: what does he mean by this term? 

7. (84) F. points to a formal analogy and a functional dis-analogy, how do we understand the distinction between an analysis of forms v. an analysis of functions. What does he mean by “function” here? What would some synonyms be?

8. (90): “The Christian conscience penetrates…” What does it mean that it penetrates not from the ideological level of principles, but from the base/ bottom?

9. (89) What is the penitentiary? How do we specify its function or its form? Or is it an institution/ technique?

Beginning with Q9: a footnote on 65 is illuminating.

• Perhaps the penitentiary is more abstract, somewhat synonymous with the prison

• Penitentiary is a place to make people penitent, to correct or repent for wrongdoing

• Historical claim is being made: wherein the penitent movement takes place in the Americas (in Pennsylvania), and then is brought back to France. 

• Also speaks to processes of globalization during the modern era.

Question 4:

• In catholicism, the institutions, modalities of power and practices are a top-down form of power. The political form takes on a verticality, while the Quaker model seems more horizontal.

• Power, on the Quaker model, must be moral, where any politics beyond morality is excluded.

• Raises questions about slave labor and colonization

• Perhaps a good segway to question about impermeability 

Question 3:

• The idea of the sovereign here seems based on the Roman conception (infraction against the sovereign).

• But, don’t Christians (87) also hold this view?

• The claim for Foucault seems to be that when it comes to lay justice, the Church (before the Quakers), was satisfied that the state, with its own mechanisms, would control the institution of punishment. When the Quakers come along, they believe that it is the Church’s role to intervene in these practices of punishments.

• And, this first intermeshing does not take place at the level of principles, but “through the penitentiary’s invasion of the whole of the penal and the juridical”

• Is one point that the Quakers have a different conception of evil (as something to be eradicated) versus something inevitable in human nature? (Catholics)

• Raises questions about the genealogical analysis of morality, similar to Nietzsche. 

• What has to happen for Christian morality to be autonomous such that it becomes formal for a punitive society?

• How do we move from the case of the vagabond, who isn’t an object of Christian intervention, to the evildoer, who becomes an object of jurico-religious power?

• And, what kind of example would Foucault need to claim that the penal system and christianity are impermeable before this moment he is articulating through the phenomenon of the Quakers?

• There is a difference between claiming an affinity between relations and forms and claiming a causal connection. Is Foucault tracing affinities? What gets emphasized in either project? 

• Maybe one form that “affinity” takes is “alliance,” rather than “descendent” or “descent” –thinking methodologically about the history F.’s genealogy is giving.

• Interestingly, Foucault describes his genealogical analysis here (84) as “dynastic” (not plural)

Question 5:

• Pages 90-91, the second consequence of the heterogeneity of the judicial and moral: knowledge of the prisoner (as such) becomes a central problem.

• Unfolding of punishment with surveillance or supervision, “the object must be monitored” (91)

• This accumulation of connaissance (knowledge) qua object of savoir, is possible through various techniques: dossier, etc., –are these surface knowledges or depth knowledges?

• How do we read the “need for”? Is the “need for” available to the episteme or actors?

• What comes first? The “need” or the techniques?

• Quakers were aware of a need to cure/punish the object: criminal, where the savoir that conditions the need for techniques and practices (dossiers, etc) is something like objectification of the criminal–of knowability and ultimately individualization/normalization (pouvoir) 

• Where will we end up? That the criminal will become objectified as an object of knowledge and power, and this is his social status.