{"id":825,"date":"2016-01-28T16:49:23","date_gmt":"2016-01-28T21:49:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/foucault1313\/?p=825"},"modified":"2016-02-07T19:02:08","modified_gmt":"2016-02-08T00:02:08","slug":"foucault-813-kendall-thomas-on-taking-discontinuity-seriously-foucaults-neoliberalism-and-ours","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/foucault1313\/2016\/01\/28\/foucault-813-kendall-thomas-on-taking-discontinuity-seriously-foucaults-neoliberalism-and-ours\/","title":{"rendered":"Kendall Thomas on “Taking Discontinuity Seriously: Foucault\u2019s Neoliberalism . . . and Ours”"},"content":{"rendered":"

By Kendall Thomas<\/strong><\/p>\n

As it happens, I\u2019ve been reading Michel Foucault\u2019s 1978-1979 Coll\u00e8ge de France lectures while preparing and teaching the first classes of a semester long course at Columbia Law School on \u201cLaw and Neoliberalism.\u201d The course is a first year elective designed largely to provide a structured space for critical reflection on our school\u2019s \u201cFoundational Curriculum.\u201d This is a series of courses which, in the last four decades or so (a period which happens to coincide with the triumph of political neoliberalism) has increasingly been given over to teaching our students (some would say indoctrinating them in) \u201ceconomic analysis of law,\u201d a body of scholarship whose central concepts and method received its early and most influential in the work of members of the law school and economics departments at the University of Chicago Law School.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The \u201cLaw and Neoliberalism\u201d course starts with a screening and discussion of Charles F. Ferguson\u2019s 2010 Oscar winning documentary film on the 2008 financial crisis, Inside Job. In addition to the film, I give the students a set of readings that is anchored by \u201cAttack on American Free Enterprise System,\u201d a \u201cconfidential memorandum\u201d prepared for the Education Committee of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce by the corporate lawyer and former American Bar Association president Lewis F. Powell, Jr. The \u201cPowell Memorandum\u201d (as it has come to be known) was submitted to the Chamber of Commerce in the summer of 1971, a few months before Richard Nixon appointed Powell to the U.S. Supreme Court. The Powell Memorandum is a foundational text in the intellectual history of neoliberal corporate activism and \u201cmarks the beginning of the [U.S.] business community\u2019s multi-decade takeover of the most important institutions of public opinion and democratic decision-making\u201d (Cray:2011). In what follows, I propose to put elements of the Powell Memorandum and Inside Job in conversation with the line of argument advanced in The Birth of Biopolitics.<\/p>\n

Toward the end of the 24 January 1979 lecture, Foucault shifts suddenly and somewhat surprisingly from a granular investigation mid-eighteenth century Europe and a narrative analysis of emergent ideas of liberal \u201cfreedom,\u201d liberal \u201cgovernmentality\u201d and \u201c[the] problems of what I shall call the economy of power peculiar to liberalism\u201d to twentieth century Germany, England and the United States, and a set of reflections on the historical moment at which \u201cthis liberal art of government introduces by itself or is the victim from within [of] what could be called crises of governmentality\u201d (BB:68). Foucault insists on the relative autonomy of the \u201ccrises of liberalism\u201d and the \u201ccrises of capitalism\u201d: while \u201cnot, of course, independent\u201d of crises in capitalist economy, the way in which the crises of liberalism \u201cmanifest themselves, are handled, call forth reactions, and prompt re-organizations is not directly deducible from the crises of capitalism\u201d (BB:70).<\/p>\n

Foucault seems to be arguing here that the relationships between \u201cthe crisis of the general apparatus (dispositif) of governmentality\u201d and the \u201ccrises of the capitalist economy\u201d are indirect and contingent. Interestingly, and by contrast, Foucault appears to posit an essential, fundamental connection or continuity between the twentieth century \u201ccrisis of the apparatus of governmentality\u201d (whose elements \u201chave been set out and formulated over the last thirty years\u201d) and the \u201cgeneral apparatus of governmentality which was installed in the eighteenth century\u201d (BB:70) and further elaborated in the nineteenth (BB:70). The \u201cway in which the crisis of the apparatus of government is currently experienced, lived, practiced, and formulated\u201d (BB: 70) can be clarified only by understanding them as the contemporary expression of a century of recurrent and recursive problems in the \u201coverall, general, and continuous history of liberalism from the eighteenth to the twentieth century\u201d (BB:78).<\/p>\n

Wendy Brown, Jim McGuigan and other readers of The Birth of Biopolitics have remarked the \u201cprescience\u201d of Foucault\u2019s recognition of \u201cthe historical profoundity\u201d (McGuigan: 2014) of the renascence of neoliberal thought in the 1960s and 1970s. There is no doubt that Foucault\u2019s percipient analyses of neoliberalism as a system of thought, as a practice of politics and as a mode of subjectivity are an indispensable resource for understanding the ways in which the crises of government\u2014and indeed, of capitalism– here in the United States and elsewhere is \u201cexperienced, lived, practiced and formulated\u201d today, nearly four decades after the 1978-1979 lectures. We would do well to remember, however, the \u201cprecise context\u201d (BB:83) in which Foucault was writing and speaking. The last lecture in The Birth of Politics series was delivered on 4 April 1979. Exactly one month to the day after Foucault\u2019s final lecture, Margaret Thatcher took up residence at 10 Downing Street. Less than two years later, following a landslide electoral victory, Ronald Reagan moved into the White House. Foucault could not have anticipated was the ways in which the \u201capplied neoliberalism\u201d (Stedman Jones:2012) of Prime Minister Thatcher and President Reagan would outrun the neoliberal episteme whose elaboration and analysis were his subject in The Birth of Biopolitics. Nor could Foucault have foreseen the building out and scaling up of neoliberalism that occurred with the proliferation of information technologies. David Harvey has famously identified the cultural, political and economic consequences of digital technology\u2019s \u201cspace-time compression\u201d as a distinctive and defining feature of the neoliberalization of our lifeworld.<\/p>\n

Given the distance and the difference between Foucault\u2019s neoliberal moment and our own, I want to suggest, in the way of a thesis, that the \u201cpresent value,\u201d or if I may, the \u201cutility\u201d of Foucault\u2019s 1979 lectures for us can become accessible only if we are abandon the dream of an \u201coverall, general and continuous history of liberalism from the eighteenth to the twentieth century\u201d discontinuity seriously.\u201d To be sure, Foucault declares himself \u201cunable to undertake\u201d the writing of that \u201cbroad and lengthy history of two centuries of liberalism\u201d (BB: 78); he nonetheless appears to view such an undertaking as both possible and desirable. In short, I propose a reading of The Birth of Politics that \u201ctakes discontinuity seriously.\u201d I am thinking initially and most importantly of the elision (in part conceptual, in part terminological) through which Foucault formulates the question that is at the heart of his project. In the 31 January lecture, Foucault announces that he is concerned, inter alia, with how \u201cliberal governmentality\u201d appears and reflects on itself, how at the same time it is brought into play and analyzes itself, how, in short, it currently programs itself.\u201d He then identifies the three themes (\u201c[l]aw and order, the state and civil society, and politics of life\u201d) to which he intends to devote his remaining lectures. In keeping with the \u201cretrospective\u201d approach to this history which starts from \u201cthings as they stand now\u201d and works backward, Foucault then asks the following question: \u201cWhat is the nature of today\u2019s liberal, or as one says, neoliberal program?\u201d (BB:78) (emphasis added). This is, I believe, the first time the idea-image of \u201cneoliberalism\u201d is appears in the text. In noting Foucault\u2019s textual elision of \u201cliberalism\u201d and \u201cneoliberalism,\u201d I do not mean to suggest that he ignores the differences between the two concepts-terms. Such a claim could not be sustained in the face of the dense and detailed arguments he makes about the specificity of neoliberalism, its definitions and uses of law and legality, its distinctive neoclassical refiguration of homo economicus and the like. However, Foucault\u2019s recognition of the ways in which the \u201cneoliberal turn\u201d can be seen as a series of \u201cshifts\u201d on classical liberalism stops short of seeing neoliberalism (particularly in its U.S. incarnation) as a break, as radically discontinuous in ways that render it not simply a revival or renewal of classical liberalism, but an altogether new thing. Foucault holds onto a vision of the relationship between \u201cliberalism\u201d and \u201cneoliberalism\u201d as a relationship of continuity in which neoliberalism emerges from and extends the \u201crationality\u201d of the liberalism that constitutes it. Consider, in this connection, his argument (in the R\u00e9sum\u00e9 du Cours) that \u201cAmerican neo-liberalism seeks . . . to extend the rationality of the market, the schemas of analysis it offers and the decision-criteria it suggests, to domains which are not exclusively or not primarily economic: the family and the birth rate, for example, or delinquency and penal policy\u201d (BB:323).<\/p>\n

In what follows, and drawing on Inside Job and the Powell Memorandum, I want to identify a couple of what I take to be among the richest and most productive lines of argument Foucault pursues in The Birth of Biopolitics on the problem of \u201ctoday\u2019s . . . neoliberal program.\u201d Although considerations of time and space preclude any detailed analysis, I suggest in each instance if we suspend the Foucauldian assumption of continuities and connections between liberalism and neoliberalism\u2014or within the different configurations of neoliberalism itself\u2014we can begin to see and make sense of aspects of political economy, governmentality, and subjectivity that are unique to \u201cour neoliberalism.\u201d<\/p>\n

1. From Liberal \u201cVeridiction\u201d to Neoliberal \u201cFantastication\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

Foucault contends that liberalism represents a moment in the art of government when a market which had until the middle of the eighteenth century had been \u201cessentially a site of justice\u201d (BB:30) or a juridical \u201cregime of jurisdiction\u201d becomes a \u201csite of truth\u201d (BB:31) or a \u201cregime of veridiction\u201d (BB:35). This \u201cmarket-truth\u201d produces a \u201cnew governmental reason\u201d: henceforth government finds \u201cthe principle of truth of its own governmental practice\u201d (BB:32) in a market which, in Foucault\u2019s formulation \u201cmust tell the truth (dire le vrai) because it obeys and has to obey the \u201cnatural\u201d or \u201cspontaneous\u201d mechanisms of its own self-functioning. Today\u2019s neoliberal market is a market in which \u201ctruth\u201d (and its opposite) is neither \u201cnatural\u201d nor \u201cspontaneous.\u201d Contemporary neoliberalism\u2019s \u201cmarket-truth,\u201d like the market itself, is made.<\/p>\n

Inside Job includes archival footage from a U.S. Senate Committee hearing on the 2008 Financial Crisis and the investment bank Goldman Sachs in which the CEO of Goldman Sachs, Lloyd Blankfein, is questioned by Senator Carl Levin about the multiple millions of dollars the bank made by securitizing and selling subprime assets made up tranches of various mortgages and related instruments known as Collateralized Debt Obligations or CDOs. Goldman Sachs didn\u2019t just sell these toxic assets but bet against them by purchasing billions of dollars in insurance protection in the form Credit Default Swaps from the American International Group (AIG) on CDOs that it didn\u2019t issue or own, but which were of course part of the market the investment bank had created. Fearing that AIG might go bankrupt because of its exposure, Goldman subsequently bought tens of millions of dollars of insurance against AIG\u2019s collapse. The investment bank then started to sell CDOs specifically designed so that the more money their customers lost the more money Goldman Sachs made. When the bubble burst, the U.S. government, under the direction of then Secretary Treasury Henry Paulson, himself a former CEO of Goldman Sachs, managed matters so that after AIG had been bailed out by the federal government Goldman Sachs got all of the $14 billion dollars AIG owed it (at 100 cents on the dollar). Moreover, as a term of the bailout, Secretary Paulson forced AIG to surrender any legal right to sue Goldman Sachs for fraud.<\/p>\n

At the Senate hearing Levin asks Blankfein, \u201cWhat do you think about selling securities which your own people think are crap? Does that bother you? . . . Is there not a conflict when you sell something to somebody and then are determined to bet against that same security and you don\u2019t disclose that to the person you\u2019re selling it [to]?\u201d Blankfein replies, \u201cI heard nothing today [about Goldman\u2019s conduct] that makes me think anything went wrong . . . . In the context of market making that is not a conflict.\u201d Like the market itself, the \u201ctruth\u201d of the contemporary neoliberal economy is not \u201cnatural\u201d but \u201cmade.\u201d The neoliberal marketplace is not a regime of veridiction but a \u201cregime of fantastication.\u201d The neoliberal regime of fantastication is not \u201cthe set of rules enabling one to establish which statements in a given discourse can be described as true or false\u201d (BB:35) but a set of rules under which the \u201ctrue\u201d and the \u201cfalse\u201d have no fixed propositional content or practical \u201cpolitical significance\u201d whatsoever (BB:36-37). Put another way, \u201cone might say\u201d that neoliberalism\u2019s constitution of the market as a \u201cregime of fantastication\u201d suspends rather than extends liberalism\u2019s \u201cregime of veridiction.\u201d<\/p>\n

2. From Liberal \u201cHomo Economicus\u201d to Neoliberal \u201cHomo Freakonomicus\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

In the lecture of 14 March, Foucault contrasts classical liberalism\u2019s conception homo economicus with the figure of homo economicus which emerged with neoliberalism. In the classical conception \u201ceconomic man\u201d is \u201cthe man of exchange, the partner, one of the two partners in the process of exchange\u201d (BB:225). Liberal homo economicus a rational actor (my colleague Patricia Williams describes him as the \u201carms length transactor\u201d) willing and working within a utilitarian \u201cproblematic of needs\u201d (BB:225) within which he \u201cdescribes\u201d and \u201cdefines\u201d \u201ca utility which leads to the process of exchange\u201d (BB:225).<\/p>\n

By contrast, neoliberal homo economicus is not the \u201cbargained-for-exchanger\u201d but an \u201centrepreneur,\u201d the \u201centrepreneur of himself, being for himself his own capital, being for himself his own producer, being for himself the source of [his] earnings (BB:226). Following Gary Becker, Foucault notes that neoliberalism\u2019s homo economicus is not merely a producer, but a consumer \u201cwho produces his own satisfaction\u201d as \u201can enterprise activity by which the individual, precisely on the basis of the capital he has at his disposal, will produce something
\nthat will be his own satisfaction.\u201d What bears remarking here, however, is that like his liberal ancestor, neoliberal homo economicus is governed by a logic of rational choice and utility maximization. This view of the economic subject as an essentially rational and reasonable character holds true as well in the context of the neoliberalizing \u201cgeneralization of the grid of the domain of homo economicus to domains that are not immediately and directly economic\u201d (BB:268).<\/p>\n

In Inside Job, Charles Ferguson interviews Andrew Lo, Professor and Director of the MIT Laboratory for Financial Engineering. Lo describes neuroscience research involving experiments in which researchers have \u201ctaken individuals and put them into an MRI machine and they have them play a game where the prize is money and they notice that when these subjects earn money the part of the brain that is stimulated is the same part that cocaine stimulates.\u201d
\nThe image of neoliberal homo economicus portrayed in Inside Job is an image of competitive consumption, and, at its limit, of competitive \u201cself consumption,\u201d i.e., of addiction and waste. Another interviewee was a psychotherapist whose clientele consisted principally of finance industry professionals:<\/p>\n

\u201cThese people are risk takers, they\u2019re impulsive. It\u2019s part of their behavior, it\u2019s part of their personality and that manifests outside of work as well . . . . It was quite typical for the guys to go out, go to strip bars. I see a lot of cocaine use, use of prostitution . . . . A lot of people feel that they need to really participate in that behavior to make it, to get promoted, to get recognized.\u201d It never was enough. There\u2019s just a blatant disregard for the impact that their actions might have on society, on family. They have no problem using a prostitute and going home to their wife.\u201d<\/p>\n

Contemporary neoliberalism\u2019s attraction to and enchantment with risk (whose internal economy to be distinguished from the external danger Foucault associates with liberalism) is a defining feature of the present moment. In Inside Job, the story of the neoliberal subject is a story whose central protagonist is neither the homo economicus of classical liberalism, nor the Chicago School\u2019s neoliberal rational economic actor whom Foucault describes, but a more more decadent figure who might be aptly named homo freakonomicus.<\/p>\n

In the 24 January lecture, Foucault calls attention to the \u201cconsciousness of crisis\u201d that was an emergent feature of the neoliberalism of his time. One feature of the \u201ccrisis of liberal governmentality\u201d is that the \u201cliberogenic\u201d devices or \u201cmechanisms for producing freedom, precisely those that are called upon to manufacture this freedom, actually produce destructive effects which prevail over the very freedom they are supposed to produce\u201d (BB:69). \u201cThis,\u201d Foucault writes, \u201cis precisely the present crisis of liberalism.\u201d My aim here has been to sketch some of the elements of a neoliberalism whose \u201cdestructive effects\u201d differ both in kind and degree, and find expression not only in the \u201cgeneral apparatus of governmentality\u201d but in the conduct of the neoliberal subjects whose freedom that apparatus claims to promote and protect.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Kendall Thomas As it happens, I\u2019ve been reading Michel Foucault\u2019s 1978-1979 Coll\u00e8ge de France lectures while preparing and teaching the first classes of a semester long course at Columbia Law School on \u201cLaw and Neoliberalism.\u201d The course is a… Continue Reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1271,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[38973],"tags":[38943,38942],"class_list":["post-825","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-posts-8-13","tag-38943","tag-foucault-813"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/foucault1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/825","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/foucault1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/foucault1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/foucault1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1271"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/foucault1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=825"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/foucault1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/825\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/foucault1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=825"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/foucault1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=825"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.law.columbia.edu\/foucault1313\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=825"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}