Is there a second way? Responses to the neoliberal

The blog, Artisans for a New Humanity, argues that the usual framing of neoliberalism as a coherent project is wrong:

Rather, I am tempted to follow Foucault’s characterisation of ‘neoliberal’ in his 1979 Collège lectures as denoting a modern art of government that allows for the strategic coordination of multiple points of power in apparently liberal capitalist societies:

Il s’agit au contraire d’obtenir une société indexée non pas sur la marchandise et sur l’uniformité de la marchandise, mais sur la multiplicité et la différenciation des entreprises. … Société d’entreprise et société judiciaire, société encadrée par une multiplicité d’institutions judiciaires, ce sont les deux faces d’un même phénomène.

[It involves, on the contrary, obtaining a society that is not orientated towards the commodity and the uniformity of the commodity, but towards the multiplicity and differentiation of enterprises...An enterprise society and a judicial society, a society orientated towards the enterprise and a society framed by a multiplicity of judicial institutions, are two faces of a single phenomenon. Birth of Biopolitics, pp. 149-150. Trans: Graham Burchell]

What this means therefore is that:

by targeting neoliberalism as the Big Enemy, we attack a phantastic entity. What exists is often a pragmatic and impure concatenation of “neoliberal” rhetoric (from Hayek, Friedman, etc) with a mish-mash of instutitional and cultural path dependencies that produce “actually existing neoliberalism”. This why I prefer the term ‘neoliberal’ over ‘neoliberalism‘: it is one paradigm of state policymaking for dealing with global capitalism… We all believe that liberal capitalism is the shiz, the only problem is how to manage it – neoliberal or third-way social democracy.

Is there a second way?

David Harvey argues in his book that historically we experienced merely ‘embedded capitalism’ in the post-war period, even at the height of Keynesianism. That is, capitalism with rules or (some) constraints. Even that is given grudgingly in the USA (regulation is deemed anti-profit and thus anti-American).

So I would be doubtful there is a second way, beside lib-dem or the neoliberal. The decision if you grant that is whether to work within social-dem or for something better but unlikely. And this cannot be a general decision, surely, but rather a tactical one.

I spoke a bit about the relationship of geographers to power in a special panel on foreign policy at the AAG recently. Where the premise of the panel (convened by the Office of the Geographer at the State Department) was how to get geographers more involved in the state’s foreign policy-making, my question was rather whether to be, or if so, in what way. I suggested two things: the academic as critique (in Alec Murphy’s phrase to “problematize the spaces we study” eg., Israel-occupied, etc.). Second, the academic constructing new alliances that perform oversight on government (given that the press and Congress don’t seem able to do this any more). I cited the good work of Wikileaks here, and also public geographies.

Foucault’s own somewhat flexible relationship to state government (refusing a position in Mitterand’s government, but getting his fingers burnt by reporting on Iran) is a case in point of this “tactical” positioning.

New Protevi essay

John Protevi announces a new essay on Foucault:

And I posted the draft of an essay on Foucault and neoliberalism for volume 21 of Pli: The Warwick Journal of Philosophy. I haven’t published that much on Foucault despite teaching him quite often, so this was a very interesting project. It turned out to be more on Foucault’s historical methodology than on the content of what he says about neoliberalism. But maybe I’ll be able to come back to that topic.

Biopolitics talk by Jodi Dean

Jodi Dean, who blogs at I Cite, has given an interesting-sounding talk on “Biopolitics is Post Politics” (hmm). One of her auditors posted the following summary:

Although the title was a reference to what Zizek said ‘somewhere’, the talk mostly focused on Foucault and his rethinking of biopolitics from his own earlier work from 1975-6 on state phobia in which he promotes a ‘sloppy move from social security to Nazi death camps’. Jodi’s point, as I saw it, was that Foucault turned away from such an analysis in the later work, The Birth of Biopolitics 1978-9, to account for the neo-liberal rejection of the state or raison d’Etat (as Foucault calls it) that leads to a concern with producing freedom in peculiar ways. This requires limiting the reaches of the state. In short, the question for Foucault in the biopolitics lectures seems to be: what are the stakes of liberalism taking the ‘risk’ of producing freedom?

More here.

Michael Behrent on liberalism

Behrent’s paper analyzing Foucault’s account of liberalism, which was given at the UMASS conference earlier this year, receives some comments at this blog:

I have just finished reading a very interesting, and unpublished, article by Michael Behrent on Foucault and economic liberalism entitled, “Liberalism without Humanism: Michel Foucault and the Free-Market Creed, 1976-1979”. The article and its references will be very useful for me in thinking about Sorel’s context of reception in post-1968 France; in particular, the question of the meaning(s) of liberalism. Behrent does a wonderful job of situating Foucault and, it seems to me, of explaining what economic liberalism ‘did’ and meant for him. The highest praise: it made me want to run out and buy (perhaps I will tomorrow), the 1978 and 1979 Collège de France lectures on which the argument is based.

As much as I liked the piece, though, I find myself disagreeing with it on a fundamental level. I get the impression that Behrent more or less agrees with what he convincingly argues Foucault thought about economic liberalism. One reason I want to read these lectures is to see if Foucault does indeed seem to be endorsing the idea that the absence of explicit disciplinary practices in an ideal neoliberal regime necessarily means the absence of implicit, or hidden, disciplinary practices.

By the way, where is Behrent now? I cannot find his faculty affiliation at Denison University–has he moved on?

Reviews of the Birth of Biopolitics

Here is a nice review of the Birth of Biopolitics by Francesco Guala in 2006 in Economics and Philosophy (h/t Test Society).

doi:10.1017/S0266267106001052 or here if your library doesn’t take that journal.

Guala:

His goal is to lay bare the “savoir” of liberalism. The concept of savoir is perhaps Foucault’s most enduring legacy to epistemology and the philosophy of science. The customary way to present it to an Anglo-American audience is by way of a contrast with Thomas Kuhn’s notion of scientific paradigm (e.g. Hacking 1979). Like a Kuhnian paradigm, a savoir is a changing historical entity that is mostly invisible to those who live and work within its boundaries. As with Kuhn’s revolutions, there’s a high degree of incommensurability across the “ruptures” (the term is Bachelard’s) that separate different savoirs. Unlike a paradigm, however, a savoir isn’t organized around exemplary achievements. Its role is less in determining what ought to be done within a certain discipline, than what can be done. A savoir defines primarily the conditions of possibility of science, by making certain kinds of entities amenable to a certain type of discourse. More precisely, with the birth of a savoir, an entity or domain becomes a legitimate object for a discourse that can be evaluated in terms of truth and falsity.

What other reviews are available?

Tenured radicals?

Inside Higher Ed.:

The results of the study find a professoriate that may be less liberal than is widely assumed, even if conservatives are correctly assumed to be in a distinct minority. The authors present evidence that there are more faculty members who identify as moderates than as liberals. The authors of the study also found evidence of a significant decline by age group in faculty radicalism, with younger faculty members less likely than their older counterparts to identify as radical or activist. And while the study found that faculty members generally hold what are thought to be liberal positions on social issues, professors are divided on affirmative action in college admissions.

Political Orientation of Faculty Members — 3 Categories

Liberal	44.1%
Moderate	46.1%
Conservative	9.2%

Global war on liberty

Readers of this blog may be interested in this review in Telos of the Global War on Liberty, by the Belgian sociologist Jean-Claude Paye.

Excerpt:

Belgian sociologist Jean-Claude Paye has collected several of his recent essays about the suspension of the rule of law, the emergence of a permanent state of exception, abuses of authority, and the generalized condition of restriction of freedom in Western societies since 9/11 in a single volume, La fin de l’état de droit, now translated, updated, and published by Telos Press under the title Global War on Liberty. [2] Paye’s essays over the past five to six years have positioned him as one of the leading critical voices of the post-9/11 era.

Brad DeLong, “Sensible Liberal” on Foucault

Brad DeLong, who occupies what Atrios calls the “Sensible Liberal” position, on Foucault:

• Michel Foucault: The bill of indictment against Foucault is:
  1. He was a naive enthusiast for a bunch of nasty Iranian terrorists and thugs.
  2. He was French.
  3. He trusted sources he shouldn’t have trusted.
  4. There’s nothing useful you can get out of Foucault that you can’t get out of John Grenville Agard Pocock, Quentin Skinner, and a creative misreading of Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions.

I agree with criticisms 1, 2, and 3. 4 may be true as well, but I came to these ideas not through Pocock and Skinner but through Foucault and Keith Tribe (1). Therefore I openly avow myself the pupil of that mighty thinker Michel Foucault, and even here and there coquette with the modes of expression peculiar to him. But at least for my purposes his useful ideas suffer a certain mystification in his hands: he presents them upside-down, as it were. They must be turned right side up again, if you would discover the rational kernel within the mystical shell.

(Both Atrios and DeLong are economists.)

Here’s DeLong on himself:

I am, as I said above, a reality-based center-left technocrat. I am pragmatically interested in government policies that work: that are good for America and for the world. My natural home is in the bipartisan center, arguing with center-right reality-based technocrats about whether it is center-left or center-right policies that have the best odds of moving us toward goals that we all share–world peace, world prosperity, equality of opportunity, safety nets, long and happy lifespans, rapid scientific and technological progress, and personal safety. The aim of governance, I think, is to achieve a rough consensus among the reality-based technocrats and then to frame the issues in a way that attracts the ideologues on one (or, ideally, both) wings in order to create an effective governing coalition.

There are some interesting comments to the initial post quoted above on Foucault, but perhaps the most striking thing is that DeLong comes across as a proponent of exactly the kind of technocratic liberalism that Foucault unravels in STP and the Birth of biopolitics.

“Reality-based” by the way, is a phrase often used on the left to make fun of the right-wing, and probably vice versa.

Great summary of governmentality, liberalism and the new STP book

Travel day today, but just wanted to note a great post on governmentality, liberalism and Security, Territory, Population [the editors remark that the title has no "and" in it].

And someone in South Africa uses the post to explore the different perceptions and meanings of the word “liberal” or “neoliberal” which are different sometimes form the political science meaning.