"When philosophy paints its grey in grey then has a shape of life grown old. By philosophy's grey in grey it cannot be rejuvenated but only understood. The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of dusk." -- G.W.F. Hegel, 'Preface', Philosophy of Right.
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'Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainity and agitation distinquish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones ... All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.' Marx
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Foucault on Governmentality and Liberalism
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October 12, 2010
Mike Gane's Foucault on Governmentality and Liberalism in Theory Culture and Society December 2008 is a review of Foucault's lectures of 1977-78 and 1978-9 at the Collège de France. Gane says that:
The underlying challenge of the 1978–79 lectures is the question: is it not the case that neo-liberalism reverses classical liberalism? Something has changed, for it seems that now ‘one governs for the market, not because of the market’ (2008: 121). Modern liberalism no longer privileges ‘exchange’, today it privileges ‘competition’ (2008: 118). It asks: how can government be modelled on the market? So there is a paradox: if neo-liberalism continues the emphasis of classical liberalism in insisting on the non-intervention of the state, and that the state must not correct the destructive effects of the market, how is it that ‘neo-liberal neo-governmental intervention is no less dense’ (2008: 145)? The great mutation is that modern liberalism shifts the object of strategy from the individual (homo economicus) as producer or consumer, to the individual as the site of ‘enterprise’ (2008: 145). It is important to grasp, Foucault insists, that neo-liberalism is not laissez-faire liberalism, it also has a remarkable social programme that is based on taking the market as the formative ‘truth’ and ‘power of society’.
Gane continues his summary:
This programme, if examined carefully, is also seen to require a mutation in the function of law and juridical institutions (new functions, new terrains). So the paradox is explained: far from bringing less government, neo-liberalism will bring a different type of government and inserted at a different site: a new site of truth, a new application of power, and a new set of demands on conduct.
The focus of the lectures is on liberalism as a particular type of ‘governmental reason’ but there are national versions of neo-liberalism: German, French, American.
Gane says that what Focuault picks out from the latter is:
the new conception of human capital, and a critique of earlier liberalism in terms of time. Work is economic conduct; the individual becomes the ‘entrepreneur of himself’. This introduces the conception of the individual’s culture as a form of capital, and the individual’s body as involving genetic capital, the object of a new biopolitics. So the American version of neo-liberalism entails the extension and unlimited generalization of ‘enterprise’ through the culture, providing the basic intelligibility of a new form of governmentalization.
Gane does not say what the a new (neo-liberal) form of governmentalization is; one that has consolidated over the last 30 years. It is one based on faith in the market; the market does not fail; an alignment of state apparatuses with the market as a self-regulating mechanism; the market mechanism, in ensuring prosperity for the greatest number; does away with the need for state intervention to ensure of more equitable distribution of resources and opportunities; and new biopoliitcal techniques of control
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| | Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 3:37 PM | Permalink |
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