I've been summarizing Foucault's lectures, The Birth of Biopolitics. The title is appropriate in that we never quite get a biopolitics fully born; instead we get a kind of coming to be. An appropriate image might be a kind of fractal or a video clip of an animated fractal where we see a pattern emerge: we see little bits and then zone out--or in--and see the pattern again and again. Or maybe we see neoliberalism as a logic of governmentality installing a kind of circuit into society that captures ever more elements, propelling them into a kind of orbit. And we can say that this orbit is established around critical questions of competition, efficiency, and success, a critical gaze or grid that is the interface between government and individual and government and society. Lectures nine and ten (March 14 and March 21) focus on neoliberalism in the US.
1. Neoliberalism in the US emerges in opposition to Keynesianism, social pacts made in WWII (promises to soldiers and citizens regarding what they will get after the war), and programs developed up through the Johnson administration on education, poverty, and segregation (basically, the rise of the social welfare state).
2. Neoliberalism in the US, unlike in France, is more a type of relation between governors and governed than it is the techniques of the governors with regard to the governed. It is also a style and method of thought, analysis, and imagination (which makes me think, gee, Foucault knows he's talking about ideology but can't bring himself to use the term....).
3. Neoliberalism in the US, like German ordoliberalism, has a social or societal policy that focuses on enterprises, an enterprise society. There are multiple, diverse enterprises that are linked to and tangled up in each other. These enterprises provide the field for an individual's choice, action, and decision. In fact, the very life of the individual is like an enterprise: the individual has to think and act in terms of resources and expenditures, supply and demand, costs and benefits. But, there is a way that American neoliberalism is more radical or complete than German ordoliberalism.:
a. German ordoliberalism, even as it was a policy for the economization of the entire social field tried also to compensate for the strictly economic game of competition. Ordoliberalism recognized that competition 'dissolves more than it unifies.' So it acknowledged the need for a moral framework, for some kind of social integration or community (in Habermasian: no system without lifeworld). This was Vitalpolitik.
b. US neoliberalism generalizes competition throughout the social body. Supply and demand, investment and reward, can be applied to anything (dating, time with kids, diet, spirituality).
4. Foucault considers the theory of human capital unique to American neoliberalism. This theory represents two processes, two processes by which economic analysis is extended into new domains:
a. The extension of economic analysis into a previously blocked point in its own domain. Neoliberals say that classical economic theory, going up to Keynes, doesn't analyze labor. Labor needs to be grasped in its specificity.This is not a matter of its price or of the value it adds. Rather, it's a matter of what labor means for the person who works. What choices did that person make? What rationality underlies these choices? The worker must be understood as an active and rational economic subject.
More specifically, why does a worker work? For income. What is income? A return on capital. Capital is a source of future income. From the worker's standpoint, it's the physical and psychological factors--Napoleon Dynamite might call them skills--that enable a worker to earn income. For the neoliberals, this skill inseparable from the worker constitutes the worker as a kind of machine. Important for Foucault is that this idea of capital-ability rather than a conception of labor power. The worker is basically an entrepreneur (this is a change in the idea of homo economicus from a partner in exchange to an entrepreneur of himself).
b. The extension of economic analysis into wholly new domains, basically throughout the entirety of the social body (domains previously the object of disciplinary study--sociology, psychology, demography). This is also made possible by the emphasis on human capital. Human capital consists of innate elements and acquired elements.
i. innate elements are heritable, genetic; genetic research enables the identification of an individual's risk, particularly if that individual reproduces with another individual at risk:
And if you want a child whose human capital, understood simply in terms of innate and hereditary elements is high, you can see that you will have to make an investment, that is to say, you will have to have worked enough, to have sufficient income, and to have a social status such that it will enable you to take for a spouse or co-producer of this future human capital, someone who has significant human capital themselves.
Foucault emphasizes that posing the very problem of improving human capital in general (as a societal problem) inevitably gives rise to problems of control, screening, and the improvement of the human capital of individuals. The political problem of genetics is a product of the complex of interventions around human capital--racist effects, not so much (Foucault does not see that as a major issue).
ii. acquired capital: education, but education toward forming an 'abilities machine' (not a citizen, critical humanist); also, parental time outside of school: what sort of relationship or form of life do the parents (mother, primarily) have with their (her) child? What style of parenting and of eating does she have and how does impart these to the child? Health care and hygiene can also be thought about here.
5. The neoliberal analytic grid enables and justifies a permanent critique of political and governmental action. Such action can be assessed in terms of efficiency, cost. It can measure all public activities in terms of costs and benefits:
Laissez-faire is thus turned round, and the market is no longer a principle of government's self-limitation; it is a principle turned against it.
Is this a return of the repressed? Differently put, if the theme of the lectures was an account of liberalism as 'let sleeping dogs lie' that becomes a liberalism wherein the dogs do not lie at all, wherein governmental action does not follow the injunction not to disturb what is at rest but instead follows one of not letting rest, indeed of disturbing all the way down, down into regions of birth and reproduction, then aren't we actually quite close to Freud after all?
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