History and Theory 54 (October 2015), 367-371 © Wesleyan University 2015 ISSN: 0018-2656DOI: 10.1111/hith.10765

Forum: Foucault and Neoliberalism 1.

INTRODUCTION

MATTHEW SPECTER

Liberalism, on the other hand, is imbued with the principle: “One always governs too much.”

—Michel Foucault, 19791

In the summer of 2015, at a debate in Paris between the philosophers Elizabeth Roudinesco and Marcel Gauchet, Gauchet mentioned the “trouble” around Fou-cault’s 1979 lecture course at the Collège de France, The Birth of Biopolitics2: “Even the most zealous disciples of Foucault have been forced to recognize, not without embarrassment, that he felt an affinity [il se sent en affinité] with the neoliberal turn then underway.”3 Yet as Mitchell Dean, one of the con-tributors to this forum, notes, “The vast bulk of Foucauldian commentary and analysis would reject the idea of an affirmative relationship between Foucault and neoliberalism.”4 Under the title, “The Birth of Biopolitics,” the lectures barely touched on the promised theme, instead delving into the intellectual history and significance of the neoliberal economic and social theories of Germany’s post-World War II “social market economy” (Ordoliberalism) and the representatives of the Chicago School (Milton Friedman, Theodore W. Schultz, Gary Becker):5 “This year’s course ended up being devoted entirely to what should have been only its introduction.”6

Last year, a French sociologist, Daniel Zamora, published an edited volume on Foucault and the “neoliberal temptation,”7 which has attracted new attention to a debate that has been brewing in the last five or six years on the questions raised by the 1979 lectures.8 One of the contributors to this forum, American historian Michael Behrent, was the first to raise the hypothesis of an affirmative relation-

1. Michel Foucault, “Course Summary,” in The Birth of Biopolitics, ed. Michel Sennelart, transl. Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).

2. Michel Foucault, Naissance de la biopolitique: Cours au Collège de France, 1978–79 (Paris: Seuil-Gallimard, 2004).

3. See http://tinyurl.com/ohtlywl (accessed August 26, 2015).4. Mitchell Dean, “Foucault Must Not Be Defended,” History and Theory 54, no. 3 (2015), 390

(this issue).5. Schultz and Becker were recipients of the Nobel Prize in economics in 1979 and 1984 respec-

tively.6. Foucault, Biopolitics, 317.7. Daniel Zamora, Critiquer Foucault: Les années 1980 et la tentation neoliberale (Brussels: Edi-

tions Aden, 2014).8. For an archive of this growing body of debate and commentary, see http://foucaultnews.com/

category/neoliberalism/ (accessed August 26, 2015).

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ship to neoliberal economic thinking in a series of essays he published in 2009 and 2010. (Behrent and Dean are contributors to the English translation of Zamo-ra’s book.9) The debate has been advanced still further by the 2015 publication of a major new study of Foucault by one of the leading historians of neoliberalism, Serge Audier.10 Our contributors are therefore partisans in an unfolding debate, but they eschew the extremes of presentist and historicist reduction to which it has been prone. Neither Behrent, Dean, nor Audier goes as far as José Luis Moreno Pestaña, who argues in Foucault, la gauche, et la politique (2010) that Foucault was “totally convinced by the neoliberal discourse,”11 or philosopher and sociologist Geoffroy de Lagasnerie, who, in La dernière leçon de Michel Foucault (2012) argues that Foucault offered little criticism of neoliberalism, but that, on the contrary, he seemed “caught up” in it and was prepared to give it his “tacit assent.”12 Although the contributors do share the contextualist ambitions of the Zamora contributors to locate Foucault in the French intellectual-political field of the late 1970s (for example, his proximity to a non-Marxist but still left critique of the welfare state), they are more interested in these essays in the phi-losophical dimensions of Foucault’s lectures, and are more careful to distinguish neoliberalism as a political program from neoliberalism as an epistemology or style of thought.

The contributors also avoid the presentist temptation among some scholars to develop a Foucauldian critique of contemporary neoliberalism out of Foucault’s 1979 lectures, conflating or ignoring the differences between the contexts of 1979 and 2015. In their 2009 La nouvelle raison du monde: Essai sur la société néolibérale,13 for example, philosopher Pierre Dardot and sociologist Christian Laval assume that Foucault is an unproblematic theoretical ally and resource for contemporary critique. In her recent book, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution, Wendy Brown takes a more nuanced position but succumbs to some of the same errors. She alternately emphasizes the “extraordinary pre-science” that makes his conceptualization “a useful springboard” for theorizing neoliberalism’s dedemocratizing effects,14 but recognizes that Foucault’s assess-ment of neoliberalism in 1979 is of very limited utility for critical democratic theory today: “Foucault’s relative indifference to democracy and to capital con-stitutes the major limitations in his framework for my specific purposes.”15 The contributors do not suggest that a Foucauldian critique of neoliberalism is not

9. Foucault and Neoliberalism, ed. Daniel Zamora and Michael Behrent (Cambridge, MA, and Oxford, UK: Polity, 2016).

10. Serge Audier, Penser le “néolibéralisme”: Le moment néolibéral, Foucault, et la crise du socialisme (Lormont: Le Bord de l’Eau, 2015).

11. José Luis Moreno Pestaña, Foucault, la gauche, et la politique (Paris: Editions Textuel, 2010), 120.

12. Geoffroy de Lagasnerie, La dernière leçon de Michel Foucault. Sur le néolibéralisme, la théo-rie et la politique (Paris: Fayard, 2012), 18

13. P. Dardot and C. Laval, La nouvelle raison du monde: Essai sur la société néolibérale (Paris: La Découverte, 2009).

14. Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (New York: Zone Books, 2014), 50.

15. Ibid., 77.

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possible,16 but they insist that the 1979 lectures not only lack an incipient critique, but may in fact have been describing very different terrain from a very different set of perspectives.

The question of Foucault’s normative perspective in these lectures is at the root of the very public controversy that has emerged. Methodologically, too, they are a puzzle: neither archaeology, nor genealogy, neither techniques of the self nor problematizations, but an elusive hybrid of these “modes” of Foucault’s “histories.”17 This uncategorizability may be an attribute of his public lectures, which Foucault utilized as an “experimental, exploratory, and provisional” form, and which therefore requires of us an extra degree of interpretive caution, as one of Foucault’s editors, Bernard Harcourt, has urged.18 However, one can begin to locate the 1979 course methodologically by noting that a shift in Foucault’s account of the relationship of subjects to power occurs between the publication of the first and second volumes of the History of Sexuality, that is, in 1976 and 1984 respectively.19 The 1979 lectures do not mark a “liberal turn” per se; rather they appear to form one node in a longer reworking of his ontology of power. As Foucault wrote in 1984: “Power is not an evil/ Power is strategic games. . . . The more open the game, the more attractive and fascinating it is.”20 One wonders whether part of what drew Foucault to his comparative study of German ordo-liberalism, American neoliberalism, and French neoliberalism was that all three conceptualized the economy as a kind of “game,”21 and that this game was intel-lectually or epistemologically suggestive. As he puts it in one of the lectures, neo-liberal analyses are epistemologically significant because “they claim to change what constituted in fact the object, or domain of objects, the general field of reference of economic analysis.”22 And this purchase of neoliberal epistemology on the constitution of “domains” appears to have spoken to his methodological concerns as a historian. “What I wanted to do—and this is what was at stake in the analysis—was to see the extent to which we could accept that the analysis of micro-powers, or procedures of governmentality, is not confined by definition to a precise domain determined by the sector of the scale, but should be considered simply as a point of view, a method of decipherment which may be valid for the whole scale, whatever its size.”23

16. See for example, Behrent, in Zamora and Behrent eds., Foucault and Neoliberalism, 180. 17. Gary Gutting, “Foucault’s Mapping of History,” in The Cambridge Companion to Foucault,

ed. Gary Gutting (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994).18. Bernard Harcourt, cited in Colin Gordon, “A Note on ‘Becker on Ewald on Foucault on Beck-

er’: American Neoliberalism and Michel Foucault’s 1979 Birth of Biopolitics Lectures. A conversa-tion with Gary Becker, François Ewald, and Bernard Harcourt,” Foucault News (February 2013), 10.

19. See Thomas McCarthy, “The Critique of Impure Reason: Foucault and The Frankfurt School,” in Ideals and Illusions: On Reconstruction and Deconstruction in Contemporary Critical Theory (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), 65; Gary Gutting, “Foucault’s Mapping of History,” in Gutting, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Foucault, 37.

20. The quote is from Foucault, “The Ethics of Care for the Self as a Practice of Freedom” (January 1984). Cited in McCarthy, “The Critique of Impure Reason,” 67.

21. Foucault, Birth of Biopolitics, 201.22. Ibid., 222, italics mine.23. Ibid., 186, italics mine.

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In “Can the Critique of Capitalism be Antihumanist?,” Michael Behrent leaves synchronic political and intellectual contextualization to the side, to focus exclu-sively on Foucault’s philosophical project: “If Foucault displayed an affinity for neoliberalism, it was, in part, because he believed that neoliberals were, like him, attempting to think beyond the category of ‘man’.”24 Through a startling intertextual analysis of the 1978 and 1979 lectures on the one hand, and The Order of Things (1966) on the other, Behrent offers a compelling hypothesis: the reinterpretation of the homo economicus of classical economics by neoliberal economists of the Chicago School as a subject with “interests” rather than an anthropological essence, represented an intriguing escape route from the anthro-pologism of the modern episteme he analyzed in the sixties: “the very idea of a subject of interest functions as a butée—a doorstop, as it were—that blocks transcendentalizing claims.”25

While Behrent privileges The Order of Things in his interpretation of the neo-liberalism lectures here,26 Audier recovers three neglected contemporary texts for his intertextual analysis. Like Behrent, Audier makes Foucault’s relationship to Kant central to his analysis. The question of whether Foucault’s attention to Kant’s essay “What is Enlightenment?” in several key texts of the 1980s, including his first lecture at the Collège in 1983, represented a fundamental shift in his thought has received close scrutiny elsewhere.27 Audier draws our atten-tion to several overlooked texts: an essay on “What is Critique? Critique and Aufklärung” (May 1978); a lecture, “The Analytical Philosophy of Power” (June 1978); and an interview with a magazine, Gai Pied (July 1978), which together illuminate why Foucault found the neoliberalisms of the postwar era a fruitful vocabulary for analyzing opportunities afforded by the crisis of “disciplinary society.” Audier helps us to grasp why, as he writes, “for Foucault, one cannot say that neoliberalism is either ‘good’ or ‘bad’. . . ” but rather in Foucault’s recur-rent phrasing, that it is “interesting” or “worthwhile.”28

In “Foucault Must Not Be Defended,” Mitchell Dean offers his appraisal of the Zamora-Behrent volume’s efforts to contextualize Foucault and a critique of the field of “governmentality studies” that is also a legacy of Foucault’s 1978 and 1979 lectures. Dean underscores that Foucault’s neoliberal moment is not the same context as our own. This move permits him to privilege reading Fou-cault’s work of the late 1970s in its French intellectual and political contexts, to conclude like Behrent that there was “a certain ‘elective affinity’ that obtained between Foucault’s own political-intellectual trajectory and neoliberalism,”29 and at the same time to resist the accounts of “those who would give us a Foucault

24. Michael Behrent, “Can the Critique of Capitalism be Antihumanist?,” History and Theory 54, no. 3 (2015), 374 (this issue).

25. Ibid., 384.26. However, see Behrent’s caveats, at 385, n. 54.27. See, for example, Christopher Norris, “What is Enlightenment? Kant and Foucault,” in Gut-

ting, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Foucault, 159-196.28. Serge Audier, “Neoliberalism through Foucault’s Eyes,” History and Theory 54, no. 3 (2015),

412, 415 (this issue).29. Dean, “Foucault Must Not Be Defended,” 397.

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consistent with [contemporary] economic liberalism”30 (as evidenced by the appreciative readings of Foucault by contemporary economists associated with the Chicago and Freiburg schools).31 Finally, like Audier, Dean argues that there is a “tendency [in the 1979 course] for liberalism and neoliberalism to lose their substantive character and become identified with the ethos of criticism,”32 and it is this ambiguity that has permitted governmentality studies to be appropriated by neoliberals themselves.33

With the publication of all thirteen volumes of Foucault’s Collège de France lectures (1970–1984) completed in May 2015, the time is right for a reassessment of the broader question of Foucault as historian of the present. Behrent, Audier, and Dean all emphasize the late 1970s as a liminal period in Foucault’s political thought. But their careful readings also help us approach the 1979 lectures as a species of contemporary history-writing, one that asks of us now what Foucault asked of historians then: what would it mean to “write history if you do not accept a priori the existence of things like the state, society, the sovereign, and subjects?”34

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30. Ibid., 403.31. Ibid., 390, fn. 4.32. Ibid., 401.33. Ibid., 402.34. Foucault, Biopolitics, 3.