December 25, 2010
December 10, 2010
we as subjects of “human capital"
Foucault Studies Number 6, (February 2009) is entitled Neoliberal Governmentality. It is a response to the recent publication in English of Foucault’s lectures of 1978‐79, The Birth of Biopolitics in which Foucault explores the most current formations of power and to its modes of subjectivity.
In one of the papers--- A Genealogy of Homo-Economicus: Neoliberalism and the Production of Subjectivity--- Jason Read discusses Foucault’s lectures of 1978‐79, drawing key insights into the analysis of neoliberalism as a mode of governmentality, as a means by which subjectivity is inscribed and produced as a mode of conduct. He examines the way in which neoliberalism can be viewed as a particular production of subjectivity, as a way in which individuals are constituted as subjects of “human capital. Read says that in order to frame Foucault’s analysis it is useful to begin with how he sees the distinction between liberalism and neoliberalism. For Foucault, this difference has to do with the different ways in which they each focus on economic activity.
Classical liberalism focused on exchange, on what Adam Smith called mankind’s tendency to “barter, truck, and exchange.”
It naturalized the market as a system with its own ra- tionality, its own interest, and its own specific efficiency, arguing ultimately for its superior efficiency as a distributor of goods and services. The market became a space of autonomy that had to be carved out of the state through the unconditional right of private property. What Foucault stresses in his understanding, is the way in which the market becomes more than just a specific institution or practice to the point where it has become the basis for a reinterpretation and thus a critique of state pow- er. Classical liberalism makes exchange the general matrix of society. It establishes a homology: just as relations in the marketplace can be understood as an exchange of certain freedoms for a set of rights and liberties.
Neoliberalism, according to Foucault, extends the process of making economic activity a general matrix of social and political relations, but it takes as its focus not exchange but competition. What the two forms of liberalism, the “classical” and “neo” share, according to Foucault, is a general idea of “homo economicus,” that is, the way in which they place a particular “anthropology” of man as an economic subject at the basis of politics.
Foucault takes the neo-liberal ideal to be a new regime of truth, and a new way in which people are made subjects: homo economicus is fundamentally different subject, structured by different motivations and governed by different principles. Neoliberalism constitutes a new mode of “governmentality,” a manner, or a mentali- ty, in which people are governed and govern themselves
What changes is the emphasis from an anthropology of exchange to one of competition. The shift from exchange to competition has profound effects: while exchange was considered to be natural, competition is understood by the neo-liberals of the twentieth century to be an artificial relation that must be protected against the tendency for markets to form monopolies and interventions by the state. Competition necessitates a constant intervention on the part of the state, not on the market, but on the conditions of the market.This shift in “anthropology” from “homo economicus” as an exchanging creature to a competitive creature, or rather as a creature whose tendency to compete must be fostered, entails a general shift in the way in which human beings make themselves and are made subjects.
First, neoliberalism entails a massive expansion of the field and scope of economics.... Everything for which human beings attempt to realize their ends, from marriage, to crime, to expenditures on children, can be understood “economically” according to a particular calculation of cost for benefit. Secondly, this entails a mas- sive redefinition of “labor” and the “worker.” The worker has become “human capital”. Salary or wages become the revenue that is earned on an initial investment, an investment in one’s skills or abilities. Any activity that increases the capacity to earn income, to achieve satisfaction, even migration, the crossing of borders from one country to another, is an investment in human capital.
December 6, 2010
The Anglosphere
John Howard, in delivering the seventh Margaret Thatcher Freedom Lecture address to The Heritage Foundation, earlier this year used Anglosphere in the Churchillian sense of the “English-speaking peoples”.
Howard's address was entitled The Anglosphere and the Advance of Freedom and Howard replays the basic argument in this conservative tradition, that there are certain values and institutions associated with old or core Anglosphere societies – that are, or should be, a model for all others to follow. These are the common values that both unite us and imply good governance and good citizenship and they represent a "civilizational" alliance of English-speaking nations.
One undercurrent is an argument against the "melting pot", cultural-pluralism, or multicultural model of national identity and an argument for the preeminence of the original Anglo-Protestant cultural identity. The cultural absorpton argument is that Each wave of immigrants to the U.S. or Australia entered a society where Anglo-Protestant values prevailed; each generation quickly conformed to these values, thus swelling the numbers of those to be encountered by succeeding generations. It is the r core values and characteristics that have made the Anglosphere societies dynamic, and it is to those values that we must return.
December 5, 2010
biopolitics + sovereign power
Most of the articles in Krisis: Journal for Contemporary Philosophy are not in English. In the latest issue---No 2 2010 there is an article in English by Jodi Dean entitled Drive as the Structure of Biopolitics that explores the relationship between biopolitics and sovereign power.
She says that the most significant work on the link between biopolitics and the relation between sovereign power and capitalist economics comes from Foucault’s 1978-1979 lectures published as The Birth of Biopolitics in which he argues that liberalism is a ‘form of critical reflection on governmental practice’. Dean says:
It is a reflection, Foucault points out, motivated by a suspicion: is government necessary at all? Do free people and free markets need supervision and regulation or are they better off when left to themselves? Over the course of the lectures, Foucault demonstrates how liberalism’s claims to laissez faire, to let the market be, incite a wide range of interventions throughout the newly emergent domain of civil society. Liberalism ends up doing the opposite of what it intends, in effect proving that its suspicions were justified all along: government does bring with it the risks of its own over-reaching.
Dean in this article develops a psychoanalytically attuned reading of Foucault’s lectures on biopolitics. The concept of drive can go some way toward clarifying how it is that biopolitics is a politics of reversal, repetition, and return wherein activity and passivity converge