The Birth of Biopolitics (4.1): State-phobia redux

Foucault's March 7, 1979 lecture begins with a set of methodological reflections. It then turns to neoliberalism in France. I focus here on the methodology, skipping the discussion of the French case.

1.   Foucault has been trying to see if the governmentality (now defined as the way in which conducts the conduct of men) would be a useful concept for analyzing the management of the entire social body. Does a perspective useful in analyzing the conducting of the conduct of smaller groups--delinquents, children, the mad--also work at the larger level? (The implication is, yes, of course it does.)

2.   Foucault says that it's also important to consider neoliberalism for 'a reason of critical morality.' This lets him return to the idea of state-phobia. Nearly everyone is critical of the state, its growth, the violence of welfare paternalism, its seeds of fascism. These criticisms tend to highlight two themes:

a.   That the state has an intrinsic tendency to expand, an endogenous imperialism. And what is its target? Civil society. (Btw, this fits with Habermas's account of the juridification of the lifeworld.)

b.   Forms of the state give rise to each other; they are all kin and move into and out of each other as part of the state's intrinsic dynamism (I think of this as a critique of the idea of the becoming-fascist of the state).

3.   These two themes 'put in circulation' an 'inflationary critical currency.'

a.   The themes encourage the growth and acceleration of the interchangeability of analyses. The combination of expansion and kinship into suppositions about the evolution of the state leads the analyses to blur into each other.

For example, an analysis of social security and the administrative apparatus on which it rests ends up, via some slippages and thanks to some plays on words, referring us to the analysis of concentration camps.

(To my mind, this is a key point to be used against Agamben. Foucault is absolutely right on this and Agamben is absolutely guilty.)

b.   The themes lead to a 'general disqualification by the worst.' Since all the different accounts of the state blend together, one harsh sentence becomes 'the sign that the state is becoming fascist,' as if there were no harsh sentences part of non-fascist states (I wonder if this is directly a criticism of Deleuze).

c.   The third inflationary mechanism is 'the elision of actuality.' What is striking in Foucault's discussion here is both his psychoanalytic language and the hints that he might have in mind a direct critique of Deleuze (and Guattari, I think from 1000 Plateaus? It was originally published the following year, 1980, so presumably the arguments were in the air).

The third factor, the third inflationary mechanism, which seems to me to be characteristic of this type of analysis, is that it enables one to avoid paying the price of reality and actuality inasmuch as, in the name of this dynamism of the state, something like a kinship or danger, something like the great fantasy of the paranoiac and devouring state can always be found. To this extent, ultimately it hardly matters what one's grasp of reality is or what profile of actuality reality presents. It is enough, through suspicion and, as Francois Ewald would say, 'denunciation,' to find something like the fantastical profile of the state and there is no longer and need to analyze actuality.

[a few pages later]

what I think we should not do is imagine we are describing a real, actual process concerning ourselves when we denounce the growth of state control, or the state becoming fascist, or the establishment of state violence, and so on. All those who share in the great state phobia should know that they are following the direction of the wind and that in fact, for years and years, an effective reduction of the state has been on the way . . .I am saying that we should not delude ourselves by attributing to the state itself a process of becoming fascist which is actually exogenous and due much more to the state's reduction and dislocation.

Differently put, Foucault is accusing the state-phobics of indulging in paranoid delusions. A fantasy of the state as a devouring (mother) Thing stands in for an actual analysis of the mechanisms, flows, movements, and effects that are the state. The state is not expanding--other governmentalities are expanding, spreading, intensifying.

d.   State-phobics avoid considering the 'real source of this kind of anti-state suspicion.' It's not new in the 60s and  70s. It was already in play in . The 'real source' is neoliberalism-ordoliberalism and its internal debates and efforts to establish itself:

You find this critique of the polymorphous, omnipresent, and all-powerful state in these years when, liberalism or neoliberalism, or even more precisely, ordoliberalism was engaged in distinguishing itself from the Keynesian critique and at the same time undertaking the critique of the New Deal and Popular Front policies of state control and intervention...or, in a word, of socialism generally.

4.   In contrast to the inflationary critique of the state, Foucault presents the following theses:

a.   The welfare state has neither the same form or root or origin of the Nazi, fascist, or Stalinist state.

b.   The characteristic feature of the 'totalitarian' state is a limitation or subordination of the autonomy of the state in relation to the party. This means, then, that the characteristic feature of the totalitarian state is a non-state governmentality, again, the governmentality of the party.

c.   The state is not expanding; it is being reducing. The other form of reduction (in addition to the party) is in the attempt to find a liberal governmentality (such as the attempt of the ordoliberals).

Comments

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This is the material from which the British Foucauldian's, especially Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller in *The Foucault Effect* and Nik Rose, draw to suggest that Foucault was not against the state tout court. Gordon especially argues that Foucault is for a rigorous political intelligence that could never be so facile as to simply dismiss the state altogether. They may be right that Foucault moved that direction especially after 1976. If so, I say so much the worse for Foucault. Foucault's point about the provenance of the welfare state (4a) above is simply wrong (especially with respect to the U.S.) and cannot bear the scrutiny of his previous work. 4b gives us a distinction without a difference. Yes, ordoliberalism has attempted to radically alter from the previous course, but Society Must Be Defended still (Angela M's work on border issues between the European Union and Algeria a while back was priceless in this regard).