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In the emerging neoliberalism of the 1970s, Michel Foucault saw the promise of a new social order, more open to individual autonomy and experimental ways of living. That’s not how things turned out.
INTERVIEW BY
Kévin Boucaud-Victoire
In a new book coming out in English next year from Verso, sociologist Daniel Zamora and philosopher Mitchell Dean retrace Michel Foucault’s post-1968 intellectual journey, in which a flirtation with leftist radicalism gave way to a fascination for neoliberalism.
In this interview with the French website Le Comptoir, Zamora reflects on the intellectual turmoil of 1970s France and how Foucault’s response to it prefigured so much of our political world today.
KBV
The self-proclaimed heirs of Foucault are highly diverse; they range from left-libertarians to Chamber of Commerce officials, and include social democrats and the vestiges of the French “second left.” How do we explain this? How do we situate Foucault?
DZ
First of all, I think some intellectuals have a questionable habit of imposing their own agenda on certain philosophers. Placing yourself under the authority of some great figure of intellectual life to legitimize your own ideas is a common practice, but it has been pushed to a particularly bizarre degree in the case of Foucault. Even the most basic contextualization of his work is hard to do in France. You have to ask why, today, some of the most stimulating works on French intellectual history are produced by Anglo-Saxon scholars like Michael Behrent or Michael Scott Christofferson. You also have to wonder why reminders about Foucault’s association with the “new philosophers” or the “second left” are so inaudible.
It’s not a little ironic that a self-proclaimed “historian of the present” is now read and interpreted in complete abstraction from his own present. Those who like to claim him today want to make him into a figure that responds to their own expectations.
More fundamentally, I think that enormous diversity is also partly the result of how Foucault himself presented his work. He never sought to build a system of thought or a grand social theory; he defined himself more generally as an “experimenter.” The texts and the concepts that were important to him only interested him as ways of interrogating his own era. So he could call himself a “structuralist,” he could flirt with the Maoism of the gauche prolétarienne, or, later, marshal the ideas of neoliberalism in his battle against anything that assigns the individual to a certain conception of himself. That’s where his famous metaphor came from, comparing his books to “toolboxes” that we could mobilize as we liked. But that view has its limits.
A concept is never completely independent of the context or the purposes that surrounded its birth. It always remains partially a prisoner of its own architecture. So we can be skeptical of those endless incantations aiming, for example, to reconcile Marx and Foucault in some grand synthesis, when in fact at the end of his life Foucault was seeking precisely to “get rid of Marxism.” The same is true of those who try to make him into a thinker hostile to neoliberalism.
KBV
What is the contribution of Foucault’s analysis of neoliberalism?
DZ
His analysis is remarkable in that it represents one of the first attempts to closely study neoliberalism as a thought collective — the things that united it as well as the great differences that coexisted within it. We often forget that between Friedman and Hayek there was an intellectual chasm. But it wasn’t until the 1990s that more researched studies of the intellectual history and analysis of neoliberalism appeared. So Foucault offered one of the first interesting interpretations of its main concepts and ideas.
In particular, he distinguishes it from classical liberalism, in that it isn’t a form of “laissez-faire” but, on the contrary, an active politics of market construction. There isn’t the domain of the state on the one hand and the free play of market forces on the other hand. Foucault observes quite rightly that for the Austrian neoliberals the failure of nineteenth-century economic liberalism led them to see their own doctrine as one of actively and conscientiously constructing the market, an entity that was in no way natural. “There will not be the market game, which must be left free, and then the domain in which the state begins to intervene,” he explained in his lectures, “since the market, or rather pure competition, which is the essence of the market, can only appear if it is produced, and if it is produced by an active governmentality.”
Another interesting element of his analysis, in this case bearing mainly on American neoliberalism, is that it sees this new neoliberal mentality as “environmental.” It wasn’t aiming to produce subjectivities but to stimulate individuals to behave in certain ways, mainly by acting on their economic environment. Neoliberalism as a “technology of the environment,” he said in his lectures, heralds a “massive withdrawal with regard to the normative-disciplinary system.” Foucault observed that for someone like Gary Becker, crime should be dealt with by acting on economic incentives and not by constructing criminal subjectivities. In the neoliberal view, the criminal is merely someone whose cost-benefit calculus inclines them toward crime.
As a result, the goal of economic action should be to alter these variables so as to “optimally” reduce the “incentive” for crime. Foucault thus understands neoliberalism not as the withdrawal of the state, but as the withdrawal of its techniques of subjection. It wasn’t trying to assign a certain identity to us, but simply trying to act on our environment.
For the premier thinker of modern techniques of normalization, that’s saying something! This analysis explains the deep connection between the deployment of neoliberalism as a form of governmentality in mid-1970s France and Foucault’s championing of the invention of new subjectivities. Far from being opposed, in his eyes the two go together. Neoliberalism, being more open to pluralism, seems to offer a less constrictive framework for the proliferation of minoritarian experiments.
But all of this represents less a critique of neoliberalism than a way of making its rationality intelligible. On this point, it’s significant that Gary Becker, one of the fathers of American neoliberalism, found himself in perfect agreement with Foucault’s analysis of his own texts. Critiquing neoliberalism means not mirroring its own image of itself, but, on the contrary, deconstructing the mythology it’s built for itself.
KBV
Foucault’s analysis of neoliberalism seems to studiously ignore the Pinochet experience, which started in 1973, and the fact that this “governmentality” can accommodate itself to authoritarianism. It seems oddly ahistorical.
DZ
Indeed, it’s a deliberate choice on Foucault’s part. Thatcher and Reagan weren’t yet in power at the time, but you could already see the conservative features that would characterize their political triumph. Thus, Foucault was well acquainted with the politics of Ronald Reagan, who was then governor of California, where Foucault traveled regularly beginning in the mid-1970s. And Milton Friedman’s association with the campaign of ultraconservative Republican Barry Goldwater in the 1964 presidential election probably didn’t escape him either.
I do, however, think his analysis was historically situated, but more in the French context. To understand it, you first have to place it in the context of the intellectuals’ growing opposition to the program of the (1972–1977) Union of the Left and to postwar socialism. And then as joining with the ideas advanced by the “second left” in France, organized around figures like Michel Rocard in the Socialist Party or Pierre Rosanvallon in the CFDT. So in this scenario, where parts of the Left were questioning what its future would be, Foucault didn’t see neoliberalism as a bogeyman, but rather, as Serge Audier put it, he was seeking out an “intelligent use” of it as an alternative to socialism.
He thus examined neoliberalism as a “governmentality,” as a way of thinking politics, rather than as an economic agenda. This way of seeing neoliberalism, incidentally, was motivated in France by the very particular context of the policies of Valéry Giscard-d’Estaing. Foucault saw the development of neoliberalism in France with the Giscard government as a break with the classic “left-right” cleavage. Indeed, he pointed out, as Serge Audier has quite rightly observed, Giscard’s excellent relationship with the socialists of Helmut Schmidt’s German SPD. It must be recalled that before taking a more conservative turn in 1976, his presidency was marked by the decriminalization of abortion, the introduction of prisoners visits, the end of censorship, as well as lowering the legal voting age. Neoliberalism thus wasn’t seen strictly in the framework of left-right opposition, but as a governmentality that was capable of redrawing the way politics itself was thought.
Foucault saw the Gaullists and Communists as belonging to the “social-statist” camp, in the terminology of the second left, whereas the Giscardians and Rocardians seemed to represent a camp that was less focused on the state, contrasting it with the virtues of civil society and entrepreneurship. This aspect, by the way, seems to be totally ignored in the works of Geoffroy de Lagasnerie or Christian Laval. Foucault’s effort to reinvent the Left and scrutinize neoliberalism wasn’t taking place in a void but in his own political context, especially in dialogue with the second left.
KBV
In that sense, wasn’t Foucault’s analysis purely theoretical?
DZ
Indeed. Just as Lagasnerie is right to see in Foucault’s lectures not a denunciation but precisely a form of intellectual experimentation, that experimentation was aimed at questioning his era, not ours. In a context where he believes questions of inequality and exploitation have been basically solved and where the idea of revolution is outdated, what’s at issue is individual autonomy. Power was no longer something to be “taken”; rather, within it spaces must be built within which individuals can reinvent themselves and test out other forms of existence. His critique was focused on all the mechanisms of subjection: social security, schooling, the justice system, etc. It should make it possible for us, as he said in his famous quote referring to the Enlightenment, to “not be governed so much.”
Since power is omnipresent, Foucault’s thought didn’t aspire to “liberate” the individual, but rather to increase his autonomy. So although change had to take place largely via a proliferation of minoritarian experiments, within power, this “environmental” neoliberal governmentality could, in his view, widen spaces of autonomy that would be freed from “social-statist” normativity.
And this was not an idea that was limited to Foucault. We can recall, in the same context, André Gorz’s view on neoliberalism. In the Nouvel Observateur he wrote under the pseudonym Michel Bousquet that “if Giscardism can loosen the power of the center and open up new spaces for collective initiative, why not take advantage of it?” Although Giscard was a neoliberal, he added, “it does not follow that the liberalization of society must necessarily be a project of the Right.” He went on to emphasize that “throughout today’s Europe there are exchanges and partial permeations between neoliberals and neo-socialists.” For Gorz and Foucault, it’s not that neoliberalism represented a solution, but it opened their eyes to the prospect of occupying the spaces liberated from the state and filling them with other types of experiences. Of course, their prescriptions didn’t exactly materialize, and the great swaths of the state that were “liberated” through neoliberal policies did not lead to a politics of emancipation. The evacuation of the state did not lead to a proliferation of autonomous spaces and the discourse of autonomy paradoxically transformed the welfare state into an “activation” (i.e. welfare-to-work) machine that is more disciplinary than emancipatory. But that’s another story . . .
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