Foucault 1979 CdF, Chapter 10, 21 Mar 1979

I. Discussion began with methodological questions.

1. We began by comparing Foucault and Austin, taking off from 264n29. What distinguishes the Austinian analysis of speech acts (in context) from the Foucaultian analysis of discursive context? Austin seems to privilege language, utterance, speech, etc.. It might seem that Foucault does not privilege this, at least in his genealogical writings.

But one striking similarity is that both are building their analytics around the project of fleshing out a context, background, or problematization that makes possible a certain foreground conception—whereas Austin’s foreground tends more towards speech acts, Foucault’s foreground (at least in the genealogy) tends more towards practices. Both, however, are looking to get the respective foreground to recede into the background. Both are situating their objects of analysis in a broader context, and then it is this context that becomes the central object of analysis.

Here is a question worth considering. For Foucault, the foreground (of practice) emerges out of the background (of problematization) in such a way that both are made of the same stuff—‘it is all ice’ according to Paul Veyne’s wonderful iceberg metaphor. Is this also characteristic of Austin’s analyosis? This is possibly the case. Speech acts are constrained by context, but at the same time they reproduce those contexts. A speech act is always conditioned by other speech acts.

2. We then briefly turned to a methodological issue concerning Foucault’s analysis of neoliberalism, returning to last week’s question concerning whether or not Foucault is endorsing neoliberalism or merely describing it. Foucault is describing neoliberalism as our problematization. As part of our problematization it is something we are fluent in, and so something that appears attractive to us. Think about how attractive discipline is to us all—even if, after reading Foucault, we realize its darker side.

II. Discussion then turned from methodological questions to substantive issues regarding neoliberalism.

Foucault’s discussion at the end of the lecture to techniques of ‘environmental control’ seem to be throwing open the long-closed window onto biopolitics that he had promised throughout the lectures. So the neoliberal analytic, insofar as it analyzes us in these more environmental terms, is itself a part of, and reproductive of, biopower. “On the horizon of this analysis we see instead the image, idea, or theme-program of a society in which there is an optimization of systems of difference, in which the field is left open to fluctuating processes, in which minority individuals and practices are tolerated, in which action is brought to bear on the rules of the game rather than on the players, and finally in which there is an environmental type of intervention instead of the internal subjugation of individuals.” The logic of regulation that Foucault seems to be describing here seems analogous to the idea of axiomatization in Deleuze. Regulation, and neoliberalism, works by axiomatizing (even if only temporarily) a decision, without basing this decision in anything in particular we have knowledge of.