Notes on Discussion of Andrew Dilts’ forthcoming article from Foucault Studies from CGC
Our meeting began by developing a set of questions around the text as follows:
* Greg:
Is Dilts endorsing certain parts of neoliberal subjectivity as a way to get to care of the self in antiquity?
To what extent are MF’s discussions of neoliberal subjectivity about a discourse/theory of subjectivity in neoliberalism or about an actual existence/practice of subjectivity in the world? To what extent is this the case in reality? Is this about discourse or actual practices?
* Thomas:
What’s the diff b/w neoliberal subjectivity and subjectivity in care of the self?
Three differences laid out on page 12.
What are the terms of this shift?
* Vernon:
Can we extend the bridge b/w Foucault’s work on neoliberal subjectivity and his late work on Ancient ethics? Can we go for a biographical interpretation?
* George:
Why privilege neoliberalism as the thing to which Foucault’s ethics are responding? Why not some other point in history or set of practices? Why not see the ethics as a general response to European modernity?
* Nicolae:
What is the diff between neoliberal ‘investment’ conception of the self and being self-consciously aware of the rules of the game?
Assuming that the very possibility of ethics is based on the possibility of having practices of the self, how can you have an ethics when most of the practices seem to be investments?
Is it difficult to distinguish a game when you are in the game?
We then developed these questions in a little more detail:
1. Why privilege neoliberalism as the thing to which Foucault’s ethics are responding? What is Foucault looking for in his ethics such that it would be a response to neoliberalism? Can you further explain what things Foucault is reacting against (i.e., certain nefarious features of discipline)? There are also things that positively prompted Foucault. Dilts’s claim is that neoliberalism positively provokes Foucault.
2. What’s the diff b/w neoliberal subjectivity and subjectivity in care of the self? Foucault embraces neolib focus on subject as subject not as object. Three differences laid out on page 12. 1) Neolib ignores history. 2) Neolibs think domination is over. 3) They deny the link between liberty and ethics, i.e. the view that liberty is the ontological grounds of ethics, namely that liberty is the ontological ground of ethics. What are the terms of this shift? We would like to hear more about this.
3. Do you see Foucault as analyzing discourses or as analyzing practices? Is Foucault just reading theory? Why isn’t he also looking at policy, architecture, etc.? Or is he? Some say that the 1979 CdF lectures are archaeologies rather than genealogies. Methodologically, what is the object of analysis? And what is the mode?
4. What specifically or precisely opens up in 1979 CdF lectures that wasn’t available in D&P and HofM? Is it the subject as subject vs. subject as object? This relates to question (1).
5. Methodology? What is a genealogy?
6. Self? What is the self?
We then Skyped with Andrew and here is a set of notes on the discussion:
1a. Why privilege neolibsm?
AD: You can find ethics throughout Foucault’s career, e.g. going back to Intro to Kant’s Anthropology. Why privilege it here? My own personal interests. A specific interest in criminological issues. What to do with Foucault past D&P? Here is something I can use to help me think through how certain criminological figures show up. Becker seems helpful in ways if you throw out part of the neoliberal baggage. Do I want to privilege it overall? No. I want to use it as an interpretive lens. Two genealogies that we need to do. 1) A genealogy of neoliberalism, by way of a history of criminological figures, and punitive practices. This would be an alternative to dominant discourse in contemporary criminological discourse. 2) A genealogy of Foucault. How do we read volumes 2 and 3 of HS? He talks about how he has always been interested in conduct, in government, etc.. But he doesn’t mention in his late writings (e.g., the MF piece) the 1979 CdF stuff. Why? Is he obviously critical of neoliberalism? Or does he obviously embrace neoliberalism? Well, it’s more complicated than that. There is a shift in language and terminology here. But the danger here is in privileging, as I do in this piece, the 1979 CdF lectures, in fact only 3 of those lectures. I should probably get rid of the ‘pivot’ language or metaphor. It’s more complex than saying “we are all neoliberals today”. If you ask Becker, he says that we have not implemented neoliberal policies, e.g., opening borders, and legalizing drugs. Some people, though, say we need not care what Becker says.
2a. What is the methodological object of analysis? Discourses? Practices?
AD: It’s an open question where the boundaries of ‘discourse’ stops and ‘practices’ begin. This is especially true when one is looking at subjugated knowledges and subjugated practices. Perhaps it’s best to think of discourses as parts of practices. What kind of distinction is helpful here? What kind of distinction is problematic, methodologically, and philosophically? If one were thinking about this as a first chapter of a book, this piece would look like something more on the ‘discourse’ side of things, with a focus on Schulz and Becker. One could use these readings of Becker and Schulz as discursive objects to then go on to focus on Foucault as doing a kind of discursive analysis of these figures. But one needs to get around to thinking through or engaging everyday quotidian practices on the streets. Foucault repeatedly insists that it’s about practices, that practices are the appropriate objects of analysis, such that reading just thinkers and just thoughts can be problematic. Foucault perhaps doesn’t always follow his own advice on this count? We need to know the conditions of possibilities of the practices we are observing. –The “as if” assumption that Becker inherits from Friedman suggests that neoliberalism is not just empirical social science. There is something discursive going on here. The neolibs however rarely acknowledge that there is a history to their discourse. –My focus on discourse here is, frankly, partly a function of my being in Chicago and having access to ‘the discursive archive’, i.e. to Schulz’s papers.
3a. Diffs between neoliberal subjectivity and subjectivity in care of the self in antiquity? Particularly with respect to the third diff that neoliberalism is responsive but noncritical and ancients as responsive and ethical?
AD: You are right that the third one is potentially the most problematic. But let me take all three in order.
3a.1. Let me start with the first. The claim here is that neoliberals ignore the historicity of their own discourse. With respect to the first I have a hunch that Schulz may have been more attentive to history than the others. (CK: It would be ironic in some ways that American neoliberals would ignore history, a) because Hayek was so attentive to history, and b) because Hayek’s politico-economic theory is one that emphasizes historicity of politics and political practices and political discourses, insofar as social order is ‘the result of (historical) human action but not of (rational and nonhistorical) human design’.) I am relatively confident with this claim though. Neoliberals don’t accept the view that there is a history to their economic theory.
3a.2. In this case, I think I am right, but there is a potential kickback here from Becker. Consider his focus on employment discrimination. Becker suggests that people have racial and gender preferences which can/should be modeled in the utility function. There is an insistence that all you have to do is to model it, and then you can subsume it. I take this to be a dismissal of the very question itself. Because it models ‘domination’ as a ‘preference’ or a ‘taste’. This is just to ignore domination. So here again the neoliberals differ from the kind of ethics that Foucault elaborated in his late work on antique ethics.
3a.3. I agree that this is the difficult one. Neolibs suggest that ‘wherever you have Pareto optimal conditions operating in your market, then this is the best kind of market conditions, i.e. one that should be preferred.’ This is a normative statement. But the neoliberals do not take it or treat it as an ethical claim. The neoliberals get the relation between liberty and ethics backward. They think that a ‘free market’ is what can make us free. At best, they collapse the two things together, whereby choice in a market is a sufficiently complete account of liberty. But maybe this is a little bit part of the existentialist roots in Foucault. For Foucault, the problem of ethics shows up as a result or function of the problem of freedom, not the other way around. If we want to read HS v2 and v3 as a critique of certain rationalities, then we need to see a space opening up to create room for that. My hunch is that for Foucault this space is opened up by a kind of Kantian critique.
3b. Following up. Thinking about Kevin Thompson’s discussion of resistance in his article, what is at stake and what is constitutive in the difference between Foucault’s ethical resistance and the neoliberal accounts of freedom?
AD: Two models of resistance. Resistance in D&P. Resistance in HS v2 and v3. KT not interested in the multiple Foucaults understanding. There are changes in Foucault, yes, but these are changes in tactic, but not changes in ‘fundamental organizing principle’. So you can see two forms of resistance. This doesn’t mean that there is not some kind of continuity here. Is the late Foucault’s interest in projects of the self and caring of the self? I remember thinking when I first read this stuff: “What happened to the prisoners? What happened to the insane? Is this a little bit self-involved?” Government is the place where these two things come together. So there is a worry that the final Foucault is more interested in the self then he is in practices of effective political resistance.
4a. A methodology question but one that follows up again on the discussion, what do you think the self is in Foucault? How would you summarize the self as an analytical category and/or as an object of analysis?
AD: Shift from language of soul to language of self. In DP he is talking about souls and subjects in terms of souls. By the end of his career he is focusing more on self. The self sounds more like an overaching analytical catgegory that doesn’t have much content. It’s going to be given content in specific genealogical analyses. One thing that does a lot of work for me, analytically, is ‘figure’. So you see Foucault giving us a set of ‘figures’. ‘The monster’ and ‘the abnormal’ in, e.g., The Abnormal lectures. Or ‘the delinquent’ in Discipline and Punish? What happens when you have discursive overlaps is the fabrication of figures. Figures are the things that get made where these discourses come together. In my own work, I’m obsessed with the figure of ‘the felon’ and the figure of ‘the free black laborer’ in the United States, or in U.S. political discourse. So thinking about the self in terms of ‘figures’. You can see this in Del McWhorter’s work, where she traces figures in the nineteenth century to get a hold of the discourses. She does this to get a hold of discourses and the way they inform subjects and processes of subject-formation. Now, to go back to the first question, this necessarily entails a history of practices. For me the mediating term is ‘figure’. Not ‘example’ because that doesn’t do the work. They aren’t just ‘cases’. We can give ‘case studies’ or ‘instances’ or ‘examples’. But this doesn’t work. What does work for me are figures.
4b. Are there intermediary notions between analytical categories and figures?
AD: What makes a genealogy a genealogy is its specificity. Any genealogy has to be a genealogy of something specific, not necessarily a place. (CK: I am going to ask you about this again on Thursday.) There is a historical and spatial boundary that gets set. It comes back to a time and a place. This comes back to a frustration I have about some of the writings on neoliberalism, e.g., David Harvey’s. We need a more genealogical investigation than what Harvey gives. What makes it possible for certain things to occur? What makes a genealogy a genealogy is that you actually have to do the work.
CK: What is the thing that holds a genealogy together? What is the anchor? More precisely, what is the analytical category that serves as the anchor? Is it a figure? For me, it is probably the problematization. But the anchoring, of course, is a process, and not something you can guarantee in advance by adopting a certain methodological position.
AD: Figures are that which bound time and space together, and arguably not even human figure. The thing I use to anchor are identifiable figures in the discourse of whatever archive I am looking at. But the methodological humility has to be something like this: given that these figures might not signify for me what they do in the archive, we have to be careful. The other anchor, though, is the idea that the genealogy is in service of something in the present condition. Even when I want to learn about what shaped or formed ideas of abnormality or monstrosity, ultimately I have to remind myself that my interest is always shaped by the present, and so I am doing a history of the present. One wants to be able to say something about what is going on right now. We need to give an account of how the current moment is a contingency. Other moments could have happened. Genealogy is disruptive because it shows the way in which the current moment is contingent on a series of conditions of possibility. This is where the history/genealogy distinction might matter. See the Jacquelyn Stevens article on Foucault and Nietzsche. I am not entirely sure what to do with that. My approach is critical theoretical which involves showing how we got here. The bounding, or the anchor, is thus provisional. The genealogy is a genealogy of figurationl The only thing I know to do with it is to be as humble as possible while still making some pretty grandiose claims. The anchor, ultimately, is going to depend on the project.
CK: This relates to the ‘contingency that’ versus ‘contingency how’ distinction that I make in my ms..
AD: Yes. I like this. Ian Hacking’s work is helpful on this.
CK: Yes, Hacking is very helpful.
AD: I really like Spivak on this point. Spivak wants to enable us to subject more things to critique than we otherwise would. We have to critique the things that “we cannot not want” like liberalism, like the self, like authenticity, not even just heteronormativity anymore but sex itself. This can maybe push us more towards histories as lending themselves to pragmatic reworking. To get at the process or mechanism question, we need more specificity, a smaller genealogy, a narrower account. The other side. The other thing that is in my head a good deal at the moment is Butler. So we need to attend to ways in which lots of little practices are doing the work of the reproduction and passing along the contingencies in which we find ourselves. So I read her as showing how it happened.
CK: It’s interesting that you mention Butler here. I read her the same way. Interestingly, however, she does not read Foucault the way that I do, because she sees Foucault as endorsing the contingency thesis.
AD: Yes, Butler’s Psychic Life of Power for me is illuminated by what Foucault is doing in the 1979 lectures. Butler is there onto many of the things that Foucault is on about in his lectures. There is an important resonance here. And in Frames of War she does a lot of good work in showing how it happened, i.e. how this frame or view or composition was contingently made.
CK: Another good work here is Saba Mahmood’s Politics of Piety. I highly recommend this.
