Foucault 1979 CdF, Chapter 8, 7 Mar 1979

Discussion began per usual with those present posing questions:

1) Foucault begins with a discussion of methodology, explaining that one of his goals here is to generalize his analytic, rather than to say generalize a concept of the state (cf. 187). This raises a question of how we today, after Foucault, make use of his work. This is a crucial theme for our collaboratory. Given its importance for us, we should ask if this is an appropriate reading of these introductory pages. Further, is there an implicit critique here of uses of Foucault that seek to generalize concepts (e.g., biopolitics) without paying any attention to the analytical methodology? In the background of this question is a worry about the way in which Giorgio Agamben exploits Foucault’s concept of biopolitics without paying attention at all to Foucaultian method, in terms of his analytical strategies (against historical invariant) or his methodological styles (archaeology, genealogy, problematization).

2) Foucault’s discussion of state-phobia critique could be developed. Is it internal, a criticism of state from within? Or is it external, whereby people are critical of state policy, because it does not sufficiently guard against external threats?

3) Governmentality as working on children, poor, mental patients, etc.. It sounds like governmentality ranges on or works over those who are excluded. But later Foucault talks about the ‘game’ of the economy whereby everyone is included. Is there a tension here? How can we reconcile these ideas?

4) Following up on that, a question on the rationality of neoliberalism. How does it work for neoliberal governmentality to keep everyone involved and a part of the system, or rather, the economy?

In response to the last two questions ((3) and (4)), it was suggested that we can read Foucault’s analysis as showing how neoliberalism makes possible the inclusion of populations in ways that are nefarious, or startling, or at least disturbing. These populations are included as excluded. They are floating populations. It was pointed out that the logic of sovereignty (Agamben’s was mentioned) is blind to this kind of problem. There are problems that the logic of sovereignty is well-equipped to address. But there are other problems for which it is totally incompetent.

This has ramifications for question (2) insofar as the ‘included excluded’ or ‘floating populations’ are consequences of state-phobia. But they also act as a check on or guard against too much state-phobia. It does this by setting up a positive need for some kind of governmentality. So neoliberalism includes populations that are beckoned by existing fears of the middle classes (etc.), and in doing this it creates a need for the state. But we may be going beyond Foucault at this point.

In response to the methodological question (1). Foucault shows at the outset of the chapter that he is trying to vary his concepts (biopolitics, see first line of the chapter, neoliberalism, discipline, etc.) in order to test out a more general methodology for the analysis of relations of power (186). He talks about his “methodological reasons (la raison de method)” (186).

Foucault wants to “see the extent to which we could accept that the analysis of micro-powers, or procedures of governmentality, is not confined by definition to a precise domain determined by a sector of the scale, but should be considered simply as a point of view, a method of decipherement which may be valid for the whole scale, whatever its size” (186; cf. Foucault’s “Course Summary”, 317-8). Foucault wants to generalize (or maybe to universalize) the methodological project but he does not want to universalize (or even to generalize) concepts—in fact, his claim is that the universalization or at least the deployment of methodology depends on guarding against the universalization of concept.

Why guard against the universalization of the concept? Because such universalization is theory and as such cannot be either wrong or right. Foucault prefers to specify concepts in a way that is empirical-historical and as such is testable in a way not available to the universalizer. By empiricity and testability one need not invoke an idea of ‘scientific method’ (etc.)—we can get by here just with an idea of localized constraints on empirical inquiry rather than an infallible knock-down empirical method.

Why guard against the theoretical universalization of the concept? Because if one doesn’t, then one will employ vacuous explanations in terms that are all-too-general. Foucault writes, “it then becomes possible not only to use different analyses to support each other, but also to refer them back to each other and so deprive them of their specificity” (187; emphasis added). Depriving concepts and analyses of their specificity involves the loss of empirical grip, which involves the loss of grip on our historical present, which effectively acts as a block on being able to understand ourselves, to work on our selves, and to transform ourselves in the face of our problems. Foucault calls this “inflation in the sense of an increasing interchangeability of analyses and a loss of specificity” (188).

The specificities Foucault wants us to attend to include the distinction between liberal-welfare states and totalitarian-fascist states. He advances the “thesis that the welfare state has neither the same form, of course, nor, it seems to me, the same root or origin as the totalitarian state, as the Nazi, fascist, or Stalinist state” (190). These are not branches of the same tree. They employ different technologies in response to different problematizations.

How does all this connect to biopolitics? If biopolitics is social policy generally conceived, then neoliberalism shows how “social policy, is necessarily an economic policy at the same time” (198). Economic analysis thus becomes a powerful instrument or tool in a biopolitical regime. Neoliberalism works by coordinating the social and the economic in such a way that the two remain distinct or “decoupled” (201), such that their only point of contact is at the place where the economic rules are set up such that at the social level nobody is excluded (202). Whether or not neoliberalism was successful in this partition (probably not, or maybe obviously not) we recognize this as a quintessential liberal thematic.

Lastly, it was observed that in terms of the discussion of Chapter 7 last week, that Foucault’s claim here in Chapter 8 that neoliberalism involves working out “a sort of inverted social contract” (202) supports the analysis of Chapter 7 with the grid in which neoliberalism was described as a kind of ‘contractualist market-based’ political theory.