Can We Criticize Foucault

7/26/2019 Can We Criticize Foucault

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Can We Criticize Foucault?

byDaniel Zamora

Late in life, Michel Foucault developed a curious sympathy for

neoliberalism.

Jean-Paul Sartre and Michel Foucault at GIP (Groupe dinformation sur les prisons) press conference,January 17, 1972. Photo by Elie Kagan.
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Since his death in 1984,Michel Foucaults work has become a touchstone for the academic left

worldwide. But in a provocative new book published in Belgium last month, a team of scholars led by

sociologist Daniel Zamoraraises probing questions about Foucaults relationship with the neoliberal

revolution that was just getting started in his last years.

In an interviewthis month with the new French journalBallast, Zamora discusses the books

fascinating findings and what they mean for radical thought today. Below is the text of the interview,

translated from French by Seth Ackerman.

In his bookFoucault, Sa Pense, Sa Personne, Foucaults friend Paul Veyne

writes that he was unclassifiable, politically and philosophically: He believed in

neither Marx nor Freud, nor in the Revolution nor in Mao, in private he

snickered at fine progressive sentiments, and I knew of no principled position of

his on the vast problems of the Third World, consumerism, capitalism, American

imperialism.

You write that he was always a step ahead of his contemporaries. What do you

mean by that?

It should be said that Foucault undeniably put the spotlight on themes that were very clearly ignored,

even marginalized, by the dominant intellectuals of his era. Whether it was on psychiatry, the prison, or

sexuality, his works clearly marked out a vast intellectual terrain. Of course he was part of an era, a

much wider social context, and he wasnt the first to work on these questions. These themes were

popping up everywhere and became the objects of significant social and political movements.

In Italy, for example, the anti-psychiatry movement initiated by Franco Basagliadidnt have to wait forFoucault to challenge the mental asylum to formulate stimulating political proposals of its own for

replacing that institution. So obviously Foucault did not originate all these movements he never

claimed to but he clearly opened the way for a very large number of historians and scholars working

on new themes, new territories that had been little explored.

He taught us to always politically question things which at the time seemed beyond all suspicion. I

still remember his famous discussionwith Chomsky, where he declared that the real political task in

his eyes was to criticize institutions that were apparently neutral and independent and to attack them

in such a way that the obscured political violence within them would be unmasked.

I might have some doubts about the nature of his critiques well come back to that Im sure but it

was nevertheless an extremely novel and stimulating project.

By making Foucault compatible with neoliberalism, your book could ruffle a lot

of feathers.

I hope so. Thats sort of the point of the book. I wanted to clearly break with the far too consensual

image of Foucault as being in total opposition to neoliberalism at the end of his life. From that point of

view, I think the traditional interpretations of his late works are erroneous, or at least evade part of the

issue. Hes become sort of an untouchable figure within part of the radical left. Critiques of him are

timid, to say the least.
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This blindness is surprising because even I was astonished by the indulgence Foucault showed toward

neoliberalism when I delved into the texts. Its not only his Collge de France lectures, but also

numerous articles and interviews, all of which are accessible.

Foucault was highly attracted to economic liberalism: he saw in it the possibility of a form of

governmentality that was much less normative and authoritarian than the socialist and communist left,

which he saw as totally obsolete. He especially saw in neoliberalism a much less bureaucratic and

much less disciplinarian form of politics than that offered by the postwar welfare state. He seemed to

imagine a neoliberalism that wouldnt project its anthropological models on the individual, that would

offer individuals greater autonomy vis--vis the state.

Foucault seems, then, in the late seventies, to be moving towards the second left, that minoritarian

but intellectually influential tendency of French socialism, along with figures like Pierre Rosanvallon,

whose writings Foucault appreciated. He found seductive this anti-statism and this desire to de-statify

French society.

Even Colin Gordon,one of Foucaults principal translators and commentators in the Anglo-Saxon

world, has no trouble saying that he sees in Foucault a sort of precursor to the BlairiteThird Way,

incorporating neoliberal strategy within the social-democratic corpus.

At the same time, your book is not a denunciation or a prosecutorial inquiry. As

you said earlier, you recognize the quality of his work.

Of course! Im fascinated by the personality and his work. To my mind its precious. I also enormously

appreciated the work recently published by Geoffroy de Lagasnerie,La dernire leon de Michel

Foucault. Ultimately his book is sort of the flip side of ours, since he sees in Foucault a desire to use

neoliberalism to reinvent the left. Our perspective is that he uses it as more than just a tool: he adopts

the neoliberal view to critique the Left.

Still, Lagasnerie underlines a point that to my mind is essential and goes to the heart of numerousproblems on the critical left: he argues that Foucault was one of the first to really take the neoliberal

texts seriously and to read them rigorously. Before him, those intellectual products were generally

dismissed, perceived as simple propaganda. For Lagasnerie, Foucault exploded the symbolic barrier

that had been built up by the intellectual left against the neoliberal tradition.

Sequestered in the usual sectarianism of the academic world, no stimulating reading had existed that

took into consideration the arguments ofFriedrich Hayek, Gary Becker,orMilton Friedman.On this

point, one can only agree with Lagasnerie: Foucault allowed us to read and understand these authors, to

discover in them a complex and stimulating body of thought. On that point I totally agree with him. Its

undeniable that Foucault always took pains to inquire into theoretical corpuses of widely differing

horizons and to constantly question his own ideas.

The intellectual left unfortunately has not always managed to do likewise. It has often remained

trapped in a school attitude, refusing a priorito consider or debate ideas and traditions that start from

different premises than its own. Its a very damaging attitude. One finds oneself dealing with people

whove practically never read the intellectual founding fathers of the political ideology theyre

supposedly attacking! Their knowledge is often limited to a few reductive commonplaces.

In your book, you contest his vision of social security1and wealth redistribution.

Could you talk about that?

Its practically an unexplored issue within the immense corpus of the Foucauldians. To tell the truth,

I didnt think Id be working on this when I was thinking up the plan of the book. My interest in socialsecurity wasnt originally connected to Foucault directly, but my research on this issue led me to think

about how over the past forty years weve gone from a politics aimed at combatting inequality,
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grounded in social security, to a politics aiming to combat poverty, increasingly organized around

specific budget allocations and targeted populations.

But going from one objective to the other completely transforms the conception of social justice.

Combatting inequalities (and seeking to reduce absolute disparities) is very different from combatting

poverty (and seeking to offer a minimum to the most disadvantaged). Carrying out this little revolution

required years of work delegitimizing social security and the institutions of the working class.

It was while reading closely through the texts of the late Foucault (from the late seventies and early

eighties) that it became clear to me that he himself fully took part in this operation. So, he not only

challenged social security, he was also seduced by the alternative of the negative income tax proposed

by Milton Friedman in that period. To his mind, the mechanisms of social assistance and social

insurance, which he put on the same plane as the prison, the barracks, or the school, were indispensable

institutions for the exercise of power in modern societies.

Its also interesting to note that in Franois Ewalds central work, he doesnt hesitate to write that the

welfare state fulfills the dream of biopower. No less! [Ewald was Foucaults disciple and assistant,

now a leading intellectual aligned with Frances insurance industry and the Medef, the main French

business federation.]

Given the many defects of the classical social security system, Foucault was interested in replacing it

with a negative income tax. The idea is relatively simple: the state pays a benefit to anyone who finds

themselves below a certain level of income. The goal is to arrange things so that without needing much

administration, no one will find themselves below the minimum level.

In France this debate begins to appear in 1974, through Lionel Stolrus book Vaincre la pauvretdans

les pays riches(Conquering Poverty In the Rich Countries). Its also interesting to note that Foucault

himself met with Stolru several times when Stolru was a technical advisor on the staff of [right-wing

French president] Valry Giscard DEstaing. An important argument runs through his work and

directly attracted Foucaults attention: in the spirit of Friedman, it draws a distinction between a policy

that seeks equality (socialism) and a policy that simply aims to eliminate poverty without challenging

disparities (liberalism).

For Stolru, Im quoting, doctrines can lead us either to a policy aiming to eliminate poverty, or to a

policy seeking to limit the gap between rich and poor. Thats what he calls the frontier between

absolute poverty and relative poverty. The first refers simply to an arbitrarily determined level (which

the negative income tax addresses) and the other to overall disparities between individuals (which

social security and the welfare state address).

In Stolrus eyes, the market economy is capable of assimilating actions to combat absolute poverty

but it is incapable of digesting overly strong remedies against relative poverty. Thats why, he

argues, I believe the distinction between absolute poverty and relative poverty is in fact the distinction

between capitalism and socialism. So, whats at stake in moving from one to the other is a political

issue: acceptance of capitalism as the dominant economic form, or not.

From that point of view, Foucaults barely masked enthusiasm for Stolrus proposal was part of a

larger movement that went along with the decline of the egalitarian philosophy of social security in

favor of a very free-market-oriented fight against poverty. In other words, and as surprising as it may

seem, the fight against poverty, far from limiting the effects of neoliberal policies, has in reality

militated for its political hegemony.

So its not surprising to see the worlds largest fortunes, like those of Bill Gates or George Soros,

engaging in this fight against poverty even while supporting, without any apparent contradiction, the

liberalization of public services, the destruction of all these mechanisms of wealth redistribution, and

the virtues of neoliberalism.
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Combatting poverty thus permits the inclusion of social questions on the political agenda without

having to fight against inequality and the structural mechanisms that produce it. So this evolution has

been part and parcel of neoliberalism, and the objective of my text is to show that Foucault had his

share of responsibility in this development.

The question of the state is omnipresent in your book. Whoever critiques its

raison dtreis allegedly a liberal. But isnt that forgetting the traditions of

anarchism and Marxism, from Bakunin to Lenin? Arent you overlooking that

dimension?

I dont think so. I think the critique from the Marxist or anarchist tradition is very different from the

one Foucault was formulating, and not only him but also a significant swath of the Marxism of the

1970s.

First, for the simple reason that all those old anarchist and Marxist writers knew nothing of social

security or the form the state would take after 1945. The state Lenin was addressing was effectively the

state of the dominant class, in which workers played no real role. The right to vote, for example, wasnt

really generalized for men until the interwar era. So its hard to know what they would have

thought of these institutions and their so-called bourgeois character.

Ive always been very irritated by this idea, which is relatively popular within the radical left, that

social security is ultimately nothing more than a tool of social control by big capital. This idea

demonstrates a complete misunderstanding of the history and origins of our systems of social

protection. These systems were not established by the bourgeoisie to control the masses. On the

contrary, it was totally hostile to them!

These institutions were the result of the strong position held by the workers movement after the

Liberation. They were invented by the workers movement itself. From the nineteenth century onward,

workers and unions had established mutual societies, for example, to pay benefits to those unable to

work. It was the very logic of the market and the enormous risks it imposed on the lives of workers that

pushed them to develop mechanisms for the partial socialization of income.

In the early phase of the industrial revolution, only property owners were full citizens, and as the

sociologist Robert Castelemphasizes, it was only with social security that the social rehabilitation of

non-property-owners really took place. It was social security that established, alongside private

property, a social property, intended to usher the popular classes into citizenship. This is the idea Karl

Polanyiadvances in The Great Transformation, which sees in the principle of social protection the aim

of withdrawing the individual out of the laws of the market and thus reconfiguring relations of power

between capital and labor.

One can, of course, lament the statist form in which social security is managed, or say, for example,

that it ought to be run by collectives though I dont really buy that but criticizing the tool and its

ideological basis as such, thats very different. When Foucault goes so far as to say its clear that there

is hardly any sense in speaking of a right to health, and asks, should a society seek to satisfy

individuals need for health? And can those individuals legitimately demand the satisfaction of those

needs? we are no longer really within the anarchist register.

For me, and contrary to Foucault, what we should do is deepen the social rights that we have already,

we should build on what already exists, asBernard Friotsays. And social security is an excellent tool

that we should both defend and deepen.

Along the same lines, when I read the philosopherBeatriz Preciado, who writes inLibrationthat

were not going to cry over the end of the welfare state, because the welfare state is also the

psychiatric hospital, the disability office, the prison, the patriarchal-colonial-heteronormative school,
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it makes me think that neoliberalism has done much more than transform our economy; it has

profoundly reconfigured the social imagination of a certain libertarian left.

If you look at the few critical intellectuals who contest Foucault (Im thinking of

Mandosio, Debray, Bricmont,Micha, Monville, or Quiniou), you might say, in

broad terms, that they criticize him for positioning himself as more socitalthan social [i.e., more socio-cultural than socio-economic].

But in focusing on the marginal (the excluded, the prisoners, the mad, the

abnormal, the sexual minorities, etc.), didnt Foucault make it possible to

bring into the light all these people who had until then been ignored by orthodox

Marxism which had only been able to see economic relations?

Youre absolutely right. Ill say it again: his contribution on this point is very important. He clearly

removed from the shadows a whole spectrum of oppressions that had been invisible before. But his

approach did not solely aim to put these problems forward: he sought to give them a political centralitythat can be questioned.

To say it plainly: in his eyes, and in the eyes of many writers of that period, the working class today is

embourgeoise, it is perfectly integrated into the system. The privileges that it obtained after the

war make it no longer an agent of social change, but, on the contrary, a brake on the Revolution. This

idea was very widespread at the time, it can be found in authors as varied asHerbert MarcuseorAndr

Gorz. Gorz would go so far as to speak of a privileged minority, with respect to the working class.

The end of this centrality which was also a synonym for the end of the centrality of work would

find its outlet in the struggles against marginalization of ethnic or social minorities. The

lumpenproletariat(or the new plebeians, to use Foucaults term) acquired a new popularity and was

now seen as a genuinely revolutionary subject.

For these authors, the problem is thus no longer so much exploitation, but rather power, and modern

forms of domination. As Foucault wrote, if the nineteenth century was concerned above all with

relations between large economic structures and the state apparatus, now it was the problem ofpetits

pouvoirs[little powers] and diffuse systems of domination which have become fundamental

problems.

The problem of exploitation and wealth had been replaced by that of too much power, the power of

control over personal conduct, and forms of modern pastoral power. At the dawn of the 1980s, it seems

clear that for Foucault it was no longer a question of redistributing wealth. He has no trouble writing:

One could say we need an economics that deals not with production and distribution but an economics

that deals with relations of power. Thus, its less about a struggle against power as economicexploiter, and more about struggles against day-to-day power, embodied especially by feminism,

student movements, prisoners struggles, or those of the undocumented.

Let me be clear, the problem is obviously not to have placed on the agenda a whole spectrum of

dominations that had once been ignored, the problem comes from the fact that these dominations are

more and more theorized and thought outside of questions of exploitation. Far from outlining a

theoretical perspective that thinks through the relations between these problems, they are little by little

pitted against each other, even thought of as contradictory.

Thats essentially what some people criticize him for: praising the figure of the

delinquent, the criminal, and the lumpen while ridiculing the conservative

laborer and worker.
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In your book, Jean-Loup Amselle draws a link between this abandonment of

the people and the colo-bobo position of the governmental left, along the

lines of Terra Nova [a neoliberal French think tank close to the Socialist Party].

What do you think of that?

The problem is that this dismissal of the working class had rather astonishing effects. It put at the

forefront of public debate the social exclusion of the unemployed, immigrants, and the youth of the

banlieuesas theprincipalpolitical problem. This evolution ended up being the point of departure on

both the right and the left for the centrality the excluded were to assume, the idea that now post-

industrial society would divide between those who have access to the labor market and those who, to

one degree or another, are excluded from it thus displacing the focus from the world of work to

exclusion, poverty, or unemployment.

As the sociologists Stphane Beaud and Michel Pialoux have noted, this displacement would indirectly

place workers on the side of the ins, those who have a job on the side of the privileged and

unearned advantages.

This logic, which redefined the social question on both sides on both the right and on the left as a

conflict between two factions of the proletariat, rather than between capital and labor, is something that

needs to be examined. On the right, the aim was to limit the social rights of the surplus population

(surnumraires) by mobilizing the workers (actifs) against them, and on the left it was about

mobilizing the surplus population against the embourgeoisement of the workers. Both sides, then,

accept the centrality of the factions excluded from the stable workforce, at the expense of the

workers.

We can thus ask ourselves whether, when Margaret Thatcher contrasted the protected and coddled

underclass with those who work, was she not expressing in inverse form the thesis of Foucault or

AndrGorz? This new doxa of the conservative neoliberal right seeks essentially, asSerge Halimi

notes, the redefinition of the social question in such a way that the line of cleavage no longer divides

rich from poor, capital from labor, but rather two fractions of the proletariat from each other: that

which is suffering from compassion fatigue from that which represents the welfare nation.

Obviously the political content of these right-wing statements differs radically from those of these late

1970s authors, but they both presuppose that today it is the excluded who pose the problem, or the

solution; it is the surplus population that has become the central political subject and no longer the

working class.

Indeed, how can we not see a strange paradox between Gorzs non-class and the underclass that is

so dear to the ultra-conservative ideologue Charles Murray? Both for Gorz and for the neoliberal

movement, it is no longer the fact of being exploited that poses the problem, so much as ones

relationship to work. Gorz sees the way of life of the surplus population as a deliverance from work,

and Thatcher sees a vice of laziness that must be combated. One elevates a right to be lazy to the

status of virtue, whereas the other makes it out as an injustice that must be destroyed.

But underneath, these two versions function in the same logic. Thus, both the Left and the Right want

the surplus population to be the problem, thereby supplanting those old, out-of-date, dogmatic ideas

that placed exploitation at the heart of the social critique.

Both the left and the right want to pit against each other two factions of the proletariat which, with the

neoliberal economic evolution, have entered into a destructive competition with each other. As the

Marxist philosopher Isabelle Garo described it so well, this shift would help to replace exploitation

and the critique of it with a centering of the victim who is denied justice, the prisoner, dissident,

homosexual, refugee, etc.
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Debray writes inModernes catacombesthat Foucault, the rebel and subversive,

has become an official philosopher. How do you understand this paradox?

And how do you explain how Foucault can seduce so many of those in radical

milieus who nevertheless affirm with force that they wish to put an end to the

neoliberal era?

Its a very interesting question, but one I dont have a satisfying answer to. I would, nevertheless,

suggest that its in large part due to the structure of the academic field itself. Youd have to go back to

Bourdieuand the precious works of Louis Pinto to better understand this evolution.

It should never be forgotten that joining a school, or associating oneself with a certain theoretical

perspective, means associating oneself to an intellectual field, where there is an important struggle for

access to the dominant positions. Ultimately, calling oneself a Marxist in the France of the 1960s

when the academic field was in part dominated by self-identified Marxists did not have the same

meaning as it does to be a Marxist today.

Concepts and canonical authors are obviously intellectual instruments, but they also correspond tovarious strategies for becoming part of the field and the struggles over it. Intellectual developments are

then partly determined by relations of power within the field itself.

Also, it seems to me that relations of power within the academic field have changed considerably since

the end of the 1970s: after the decline of Marxism, Foucault occupied a central place. In reality, he

offers a comfortable position that allows a certain degree of subversion to be introduced without

detracting from the codes of the academy. Mobilizing Foucault is relatively valued, it often allows his

defenders to get published in prestigious journals, to join wide intellectual networks, to publish books,

etc.

Very wide swaths of the intellectual world refer to Foucault in their work and have him saying

everything and its opposite. You can be an adviser to theMEDEFand edit his lectures! [A reference toFranois Ewald, adviser to the main French business federation; see above. ] I would say that he opens

doors. And you cant really say the same of Marx nowadays.

This critique of the margins as the center of political combat could end up

delighting all manner of counter-revolutionaries in France or Belgium. Arent

you afraid of playing into their hands?

I do think there exists a conservative critique of Foucault and more broadly of what May 68

represents in French social history. This critique is no longer marginal at all: you can find it among the

thinkers of the conservative right likeEric Zemmouror within the National Front. It openly critiques

the whole feminist, anti-racist and cultural legacy of May 68 while having much less to say about theeconomic ravages of neoliberalism. Its as if the problem were the political liberalism that came with

the 1980s, and only by going back on these societal evolutions will we be able to faire socit.

One often hears this kind of thinking, according to which it was the destruction of family values or

communitarian forms of the social bond that allowed the expansion of neoliberalism. There may be a

grain of truth in these analyses, but they are totally deluded when they propose a return to more

traditional ways of life. Were heading towards a much more authoritarian kind of liberalism, with a

return to family values, a return to a total fantasy of national culture, and the good old pre-globalized

capitalism. . . .

As for the idea of playing into their hands, I dont think its a problem. If theres a problem with

certain aspects of the legacy of May 68, the role of the Left is not to close its eyes because the far rightis saying it, but on the contrary, to render its own judgment, to formulate its own critique, so as not to
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Bourdieuhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Bourdieuhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mouvement_des_Entreprises_de_Francehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mouvement_des_Entreprises_de_Francehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mouvement_des_Entreprises_de_Francehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/May_1968_events_in_Francehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89ric_Zemmourhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89ric_Zemmourhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Front_(France)http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Bourdieuhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mouvement_des_Entreprises_de_Francehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/May_1968_events_in_Francehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89ric_Zemmourhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Front_(France)


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totally lose the ideological battle. That is the task we need to get started on in order to reconstruct a left

that is both radical and popular.

1.Social security is used here in its French meaning, to refer to all social insurance. For example,Frances national health insurance is part of its social security system.

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/12/foucault-interview/
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Can We Criticize Foucault