Foucault Security, Foucault
Foucault Reader, Foucault
Foucault On Kant, Foucault
Foucault Routledge Key Sociologists, Foucault
Foucault Routledge Critical Thinkers, Foucault
Fabricating Foucault Rationalising the Management of Individuals.EEn, Foucault
Foucault Discourse and Truth- The Problematization of Parrhesia (Berkeley, Foucault
Formalności po ślubie,
First Latin Course, Łacina, Latin - Best, First Latin Course
Full Track List, - ⢠M ⤠Sandra Cretu Collection âŹâŹâŹâŹâŹâĄâ¤âŹâŹâŹâŹâŹ, Sandra - Discography Lighting & Studio Albums (1985-2012)
Foucault and The Birth of Biopolitics, Foucault
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]1
"The Birth of Bio-Politics" – Michel Foucault's Lecture at the
Collège de France on Neo-Liberal Governmentality
From 1970 until his death in 1984, Michel Foucault held the Chair of "History of Systems of
Thought" at the Collège de France.
In his public lectures delivered each Wednesday from
early January through to the end of March/beginning of April, he reported on his research
goals and findings, presenting unpublished material and new conceptual and theoretical
research tools. Many of the ideas developed there were later to be taken up in his various
book projects. However, he was in fact never to elaborate in writing on some of the research
angles he presented there. Foucault's early and unexpected death meant that two of the key
series of lectures have remained largely unpublished ever since, namely the lectures held in
1978 ("Sécurité, territoire et population") and in 1979 ("La naissance de la biopolitique").
These lectures focused on the "genealogy of the modern state" (Lect. April 5, 1978/1982b,
43). Foucault deploys the concept of government or "governmentality" as a "guideline" for the
analysis he offers by way of historical reconstructions embracing a period starting from
Ancient Greek through to modern neo-liberalism (Foucault 1978b, 719). I wish to emphasize
two points here, as they seem important for an adequate assessment of the innovative potential
of the notion of governmentality. First of all, the concept of governmentality demonstrates
Foucault's working hypothesis on the reciprocal constitution of power techniques and forms
of knowledge. The semantic linking of governing ("gouverner") and modes of thought
("mentalité") indicates that it is not possible to study the technologies of power without an
analysis of the political rationality underpinning them. In other words, there are two sides to
governmentality (at certain points Foucault also speaks of "the art of government"). First, the
term pin-points a specific form of
representation
; government defines a discursive field in
which exercising power is "rationalized". This occurs, among other things, by the delineation
of concepts, the specification of objects and borders, the provision of arguments and
justifications etc. In this manner, government enables a problem to be addressed and offers
certain strategies for solving/handling the problem. In this way, it also structures specific
1
The following discussion draws on material of a chapter from my book on Foucault's
concept of governmentality (Lemke 1997, pp. 239-56).
2
The version authorized by Foucault contains only the lecture of February 1, 1978 (Foucault
1978) and the summary he prepared of his research findings (Foucault 1997a and 1997b).
In addition, there are in part written minutes kept of the lecture of January 31, 1979
(Foucault 1984) and a transcript of the lecture of January 25, 1978 (Foucault 1992).
Finally, there is a very incomplete translation into German of the 1978 lecture (Foucault
1982b).
The two introductory lectures have been brought out as audio cassettes by Paris publisher
Seuil as
De la gouvernementalité
. Owing to the problematic state of the material, I rely in
what follows above all on my own transcriptions from the tape recordings kept in the
Fonds Michel Foucault
in Paris (Documents C 64, 2-12 and C 67, 1-12).
1
2
forms of
intervention
. For a political rationality is not pure, neutral knowledge which simply
"re-presents" the governing reality; instead, it itself constitutes the intellectual processing of
the reality which political technologies can then tackle. This is understood to include
agencies, procedures, institutions, legal forms etc. that are intended to enable us to govern the
objects and subjects of a political rationality.
Second, Foucault uses the concept of government in a comprehensive sense geared
strongly to the older meaning of the term and adumbrating the close link between forms of
power and processes of subjectification. While the word government today possesses solely a
political meaning, Foucault is able to show that up until well into the 18
th
century the problem
of government was placed in a more general context. Government was a term discussed not
only in political tracts, but also in philosophical, religious, medical and pedagogic texts. In
addition to control/management by the state or the administration, "government" also
signified problems of self-control, guidance for the family and for children, management of
the household, directing the soul, etc. For this reason, Foucault defines government as
conduct, or, more precisely, as "the conduct of conduct" and thus as a term which ranges from
"governing the self" to "governing others". All in all, in his history of governmentality
Foucault endeavors to show how the modern sovereign state and the modern autonomous
individual co-determine each other's emergence (Lect. Feb. 8, 1978/1982b, 16/17; Foucault,
1982a, 220-1; Senellart, 1995).
While in his 1978 lectures Foucault traces the genealogy of governmentality from Classical
Greek and Roman days via the early Christian pastoral guidance through to the notion of state
reason and the science of the police, the 1979 lectures focused on the study of liberal and neo-
liberal forms of government. At the beginning and end of the lecture series, Foucault gave an
outline of the classic liberal art of government by discussing the works of Adam Smith, David
Hume and Adam Ferguson. In the lectures in-between he analyzed the neo-liberal
governmentality, concentrating in particular on two forms of neo-liberalism: German post-
War liberalism and the liberalism of the Chicago School, which derives from the former,
takes it a step further, and gives it more radical form.
Foucault's concept of government has inspired many studies in the social sciences and
many historical investigations, and it has been especially his analysis of neo-liberal
governmentality that has kindled interest. At the same time, it is precisely this material which
has to date remained more or less inaccessible and large parts of which are therefore not
widely known. Owing to this difficult starting point, I shall in the first two sections of this
article concentrate on this specific section of the lecture series and reproduce in systematic
form Foucault's hypotheses on neo-liberal governmentality, citing source material as carefully
as possible. In the concluding section I shall offer a short discussion of the methodological
and theoretical principles underlying the concept of governmentality and the critical political
angle it provides for an analysis of neo-liberalism, followed by a brief presentation of some
subsequent work inspired by Foucault's account.
3
In part of the lecture of March 7, 1979 Foucault also concerned himself with French neo-
liberalism and the politics of President Giscard d'Estaing.
2
3
1. "Inequality is equal for all": the Ordo-liberals
The theoretical foundations for German post-War liberalism were drawn up by jurists and
economists who in the years 1928-1930 had belonged to the "Freiburg School" or had been
associated with it and later published in the journal
Ordo
. Notable among them were Wilhelm
Röpke, Walter Eucken, Franz Böhm, Alexander Rüstow, Alfred Müller-Armack and others.
These
Ordo-liberals
played a substantial role in devising the "social market economy" and
decisively influenced the principles of economic policy applied in West Germany in its
infancy (see 1997b, 77-79).
Foucault puts his finger on a series of issues and experiences of the "Freiburg School"
which it shared with the "Frankfurt School". The two had in common not only the point in
time when they first appeared on the scholarly scene — namely the mid-1920s — and a
destiny shaped by exile, but both were also part and parcel of a political-academic
problematic which prevailed in Germany as of the early 1920s and was closely associated
with Max Weber. Weber was important for having shifted Marx's problem of the
contradictory logic of capitalism onto a level where he discussed it as the irrational rationality
of capitalist society. This problem was the point of departure for both schools, but resulted in
completely different angles of discussion: The Frankfurt School searched for a new social
rationality that would annul and overcome the irrationality of the capitalist economy. The
Freiburg School opted for the opposite approach and endeavored to re-define the economic
(capitalist) rationality in order to prevent the social irrationality of capitalism from unfolding
(Lect. Feb. 7, 1979).
Foucault believes that another parallel of both schools is the significance accorded to
reflection on the reasons for the emergence of the Nazis. Yet here, too, addressing one and the
same problem leads to two diametrically opposite answers. While Adorno, Horkheimer and
other Critical theorists insist that there is a causal connection between capitalism and fascism,
the neo-liberals consider the Third Reich not to be the product of liberalism but instead the
result of an absence of liberalism. The collapse of democracy in Germany is not caused by a
functioning market economy, but rather the consequence of the fact that such an economy did
not exist. From the viewpoint of the Ordo-liberals, the Third Reich was the inevitable result of
a series of anti-liberal policies. Unlike the Frankfurt School, the Freiburg School therefore
believed that the crucial alternative was not between capitalism and socialism, but between
liberalism and different forms of state interventionism (Soviet socialism, National socialism,
Keynesianism), all of which, if to differing degrees, threaten liberty (Lect. Feb. 7, 1979;
Burchell, 1993, 270).
Now, Foucault maintains that the theoretical basis for the Ordo-liberals' conviction was
their radical anti-naturalistic conception of the market and of the principle of competition. In
the Ordo-liberal scheme, the market does not amount to a natural economic reality, with
intrinsic laws which the art of government must bear in mind and respect; instead, the market
can only be constituted and kept alive by dint of political interventions. In this view, like the
market, competition, too, is not a natural fact always already part and parcel of the economic
domain. Instead, this fundamental economic mechanism can only function if support is
3
4
forthcoming to bolster a series of conditions, and adherence to the latter must consistently be
guaranteed by legal measures. Pure competition is therefore neither something that exists
"naturally", nor is it something ever completely attained, but provides the justifications for a
projected target which necessitated incessant and active politics. In such an approach there is
no room for a conception that distinguishes between a limited domain of liberty and the
legitimate domain of government intervention. Unlike this negative conception of the state
typical of liberal theory in the 18
th
and 19
th
century, in the Ordo-liberal view, the market
mechanism and the impact of competition can only arise if they are produced by the practice
of government. The Ordo-liberals believe that the state and the market economy are not
juxtaposed to each other but that the one mutually presumes the existence of the other (Lect.
Feb. 7, 1979).
Foucault emphasizes three important strategic functions of this anti-naturalism:
1. It initially means in
theoretical terms
that the strict separation between an economic base
and a political-legal superstructure is inappropriate. This dichotomy is therefore not tenable
because the economy is not a domain of natural mechanism, but instead defines a social field
of regulated practices.
2. The
historical
significance of this hypothesis is that it rejects a concept of history that
attempts to derive socio-political changes from the economic transformation processes of
capitalism. For the Ordo-liberals, the history of capitalism is an economic-institutional
history. It is not a unilateral causal connection structuring the course of history but incessant
reciprocity: capitalism is an "historical figure" through which economic processes and
institutional "framework" are articulated, refer to and support each other.
3. The
political
dimension of this hypothesis addresses the survival of capitalism. For the
Ordo-liberals there is no capitalism because there is no logic to capital. What is called
capitalism is not the product of a pure economic process and historical capitalism cannot be
derived from a "logic of capital". We do not have to do here with a firmly circumscribed and
defined structure (
capitalism
which possesses an end we can forecast owing to its
contradictory logic) but instead with something that is historically singular (
one
form of
capitalism among possible other forms). In other words, we have to do with something which
is open for a specific number of economic and institutional variables and operates in a field of
possibilities: a "capitalist system". Thus, the focus of theoretical debate is on the fact that
capitalism is a construct: If capitalism is an economic-institutional unity, then we must be able
to intervene in this ensemble in such a way that in one and the same process we both change
capitalism and "invent" ("intervenir"/"inventir") a new capitalism. From this angle, we
consider less an existing form of capitalism and instead try and create a new one. The Ordo-
liberals replace the conception of the economy as a domain of autonomous rules and laws by
a concept of "economic order" (Foucault uses the original German term
"Wirtschaftsordnung") as an object of social intervention and political regulation (Lect. Feb.
20, 1979).
This form of argumentation also emerges in the way the Ordo-liberals tackled two
positions which believed capitalism was unable to be innovative owing to its intrinsic
regularities. On the one hand, the Ordo-liberals reject
Schumpeter's
pessimistic assertion that
capitalism necessarily exhibits monopolistic tendencies. They admittedly agree with him that
4
5
ongoing concentration is not attributable to the economic process itself, but stems from the
social consequences of competitions: both Schumpeter and the Ordo-liberals construe the
monopolistic organization not as an economic but as a social phenomenon. However, the
Ordo-liberals draw completely different conclusions from this shared appraisal. Precisely
because monopolization is a social phenomenon, they suggest, it is not some irrevocable and
inevitable process, but can be prevented by social intervention and by creating a
commensurate institutional framework. Monopolization is not some economic destiny, but the
result of a failed political strategy and inadequate forms of institutionalization (Lect. Feb. 20,
1979).
On the other hand, the Ordo-liberals attack
Sombart's
proposal that innate to the modern
economy is an irreversible development into a uniform "mass society" which leads to the
immiseration of human relations and the experience of community gives way increasingly to
anonymous social relations. The Ordo-liberals again take the opposite track. They hold that it
is not capitalism which is responsible for the problems outlined by Sombart and others, but
claim that instead it is the product of the planning methods and bureaucratic apparatuses
deployed by enemies of the market mechanism. From this viewpoint, the neo-liberal art of
rulership does not spawn a uniform society but instead represents a new direction intended to
lead directly away from the homogenizing trends of a "mass society" (Lect. Feb. 14, 1979;
Gordon, 1986, 80-1).
If we follow Foucault's interpretation, then the Ordo-liberals' theoretical efforts were
designed to show, in the wake of the experience of the Third Reich, that the irrationalities and
dysfunctionalities of capitalist society could be overcome by politico-institutional
"inventions", as these problems were not compellingly innate to the logic of capitalism but of
a contingent historical nature. For this reason, the Ordo-liberals change the theoretical angle,
construing the economy not in naturalistic but in institutionalist terms. Under such conditions,
it is no longer meaningful to speak of the destructive "logic of capital", as such talk assumes
the existence of an autonomous domain of the economy with its own rules and limits. The
Ordo-liberals instead presume that the survival of the "capitalist system" depends on the
political capacity to construct innovative answers to the more or less contingent structural
compulsions and blockages that are part of this system and which it is necessarily subject to.
To put it over tersely, the Ordo-liberals try to show that there is not just one capitalism with
its logic, its dead-ends, and its contradictions, but an economic-institutional entity which is
historically open and can be changed politically.
Such a conception of the economic domain includes the necessity of devising a social
policy (Foucault uses the original German term "Gesellschaftspolitik") which is not limited to
transferring and redistributing monies but stands out for its active creation of the historical
and social conditions for the market. For the Ordo-liberals, social policy did not exercise a
negative, compensatory function; moreover, its task, they believed, was not to offset the
destructive impact of economic liberty. Instead of lessening the anti-social consequences of
competition, it had to block the anti-competitive mechanisms which society can spawn. There
are two important strands to such a social policy, namely the universalization of the
entrepreneurial form, and the re-definition of law.
5
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
