Never Let A Serious Crisis Go to Waste. Philip Mirowski
(Foucault compares governmentality to the piloting of a ship in The Birth of Biopolitics.)
I am not the first to demur that Foucault’s treatment of neoliberalism leaves something to be desired. It seems that a few scholars are coming around to the position that Foucault managed to be so very prescient with regard to everyday neoliberalism precisely because he took on board such a large amount of the neoliberal doctrine as a font of deep insight into the nature of governmentality. Although he would never have openly adopted the normative stance, he was converging on the assessment that it was “right,” at least as description of the contemporary dispositif.16 Again, to be clear, I am not accusing Foucault of being a member of the Neoliberal Thought Collective—an absurd counterfactual—but rather, suggesting that he shared quite a bit of common ground with their doctrines, and was coming to appreciate that incongruous fact toward the end of his life.
The main common denominator of the later Foucault and the neoliberals was located in the attitude toward economics. Earlier, in Les Mots et les Choses, Foucault had treated political economy as just another epiphenomenon of the episteme, on a par with philology and natural history.17 By the time we get to The Birth of Biopolitics, somehow the economy had become elevated as the privileged locus of the “site of truth”: the Archimedean point that allows a critique of autocratic state power. “The possibility of limitation and the question of truth are both introduced into governmental reason through political economy . . . it was political economy that made it possible to ensure the self-limitation of governmental reason.” And not just any old political economy. Supposedly lacking a market, Foucault denied that socialism had ever possessed its own governmentality or governmental rationality. It was not Marx, but Adam Smith and Röpke and Hayek, that Foucault identified as the key tradition in governmentality.18
One way to interpret this is to say that the cast of historical figures in capitalist societies operated within a regime of truth that elevated the construct identified as “the economy” to pride of place in their exercise of power; and further, the appeal to self-limitation was a means to their expansion of power; but that does not correspond to what appears in the lectures. Rather, Foucault seeks to interrogate government as the assemblage of techniques, beliefs, practices, and excuses that try to maintain order; but he leaves “the economy” as the independent Representative of the Real, a placeholder without interrogation or even any description. The market as portrayed by Foucault in his late lectures on neoliberalism is the sole legitimate site for the production of indubitable knowledge of the whole; in other words, an absent deity rendered in a manner no different from Hayek or Stigler or Friedman or Buchanan. The “market” (always referenced as a monolithic entity) provides the boundary condition for governmentality, because it alone knows things we can never know. It offers nonstop cogent critique of the pretensions of the state. Far from a ramshackle Rube Goldberg device, it is instead constituted as the Delphic Oracle, capable of interpreting our every dream. Apparently, by 1979 Foucault had abstained from casting his characteristic gimlet eye on the historical constructs that give our life meaning, at least when it came to the economy.
If I had to summarize where the otherwise prescient Foucault took a wrong turn, it was in too readily swallowing the basic neoliberal precept that the market was an information processor more powerful and encompassing than any human being or organization of humans. What Foucault missed were the critical notions of double truths outlined at the end of the last chapter. The neoliberals preach that the market is the unforgiving arbiter of all political action; but they absolve themselves from its rule. They propound libertarian freedoms but practice the most regimented hierarchy in their political organization; they sermonize about spontaneous order, while plotting to take over the state; they catechize prostration of the self before the awesome power of the knowledge conveyed by the market, but issue themselves sweeping dispensations. Most significantly, they reserve to themselves the right of deployment of the Schmittian exception. Their version of governmentality elevates the market as a site of truth for everyone but themselves. If Foucault had taken this to heart, he would have had to revise his portrait of how regimes of truth validate power.
I leave it to others to sort through the biographical record to try to figure out the motives and considerations that may have steered Foucault in the direction of the neoliberals.19 In this book, Foucault’s acquiescence in the neoliberal doctrine of the market as über–information processor renders him pretty useless for our discussions of the crisis. The point of relevance for our present concerns is that Foucault’s lectures reproduced an asymmetry between the “state” and the “market” that smacks far more of the exoteric caricature promoted by Mont Pèlerin, rather than its internal esoteric understanding. We who acknowledge his acuity and foresight should nevertheless doubt his understanding of everyday neoliberalism, precisely because of this drawback. As Tellmann puts it, in a further play on Foucault’s own evocation of the “invisible hand”:
Only that which does not exhibit its particularity can be assumed to be universal; only an invisible market can promise viable sight. The . . . invisibility of the market is directed against the very analytical perspective Foucault typically assumes, one aimed at detecting the instruments, positions and architectures that produce epistemological claims and privileges. A more typical Foucauldian approach would commence to undo the invisibility of the economy and the market as an invisible “telescope” and “information machine.” This would mean rendering visible the market’s own “machine of seeing,” rather than seeing like the unseen market itself. 20
This is how I would suggest we should read the disdain of authors like Clive Barnett concerning the way Foucault has been frequently married to critiques of neoliberalism in countless screeds.21 As we have observed, many authors of a Marxist bent want to portray neoliberalism as the simple deployment of class power over the unsuspecting masses, but encounter difficulty in specifying the chains of causality stretching from the elusive executive committee of the capitalist class down to the shopper at Wal-Mart. To paper over the gap, many reach for Foucault and “governmentality” to evoke how shifts from state to market are modulated in the microcontexts of everyday life. But of course, the later Foucault abjured their Marxism; and furthermore, his own appeals to the hard discipline of the market merely recapitulated the invisible hand jive of the neoliberals themselves. The incompatibility with Marxism should have been blindingly obvious, since dissolving all labor into entrepreneurialism of the self thoroughly undermines any Marxist concepts of exploitation and surplus value, and therefore, much else besides. In any event, Foucault disavowed any such use of his work for most of his career: “We must cease once and for all to describe the effects of power in negative terms: it ‘excludes,’ it ‘represseses,’ it ‘masks,’ it ‘conceals.’ In fact, power produces reality; it produces domains of objects and rituals of truth.”22 By the time of The Birth of Biopolitics, Foucault denied any efficacy to the modern conscious intent on the part of anyone to exert political power, because the market effectively thwarts it.23 This comes dangerously close to subsequent platitudes that the crisis was no one’s fault, because it was everyone’s fault. That train of thought just paralyzes analysis.
There is even a deeper reason to hesitate when it comes to biopolitics. Foucault also declines to allow that agents are somehow bamboozled by power/knowledge, since the market is posited to exist in a privileged epistemological space with special position in the regime of truth. The fact that neoliberal concepts such as human capital seep into the daily lives of those perched outside the NTC is just evidence that the entire system of power/knowledge works: autogovernance of the entrepreneurial self is not a puppet show, but rather the wherewithal of how modern agents bring the truth of the world into their own lives. Paraphrasing Walter Benjamin, modern neoliberal citizens must learn to forget about their “rights” and be given free rein to “express themselves,” especially through the greatest information-conveyance device known to mankind, the market. This is very nearly what Foucault himself believed:
People rebel, that is a fact. In this way subjectivity (and not just that of great men but of any given person) enters into history and breathes life into it. A prisoner sets her life against excessive punishment. A mentally ill person does not want to be incarcerated and robbed of rights. A people sets itself against a regime that oppresses it. In this way, the prisoner