This is an amazingly good article and it is ALL related with our little cult! It’s shocking! When one learns about this “truths” of neoliberalism it is very easy to understand how we got where we got to in the Fellowship Cult.
What it doesn’t say is that the tendency in such a society when the mechanism draw along for long enough is to legitimize crime as a normal WAY of existence. What this article shows is that what is happening in society is no different to what happened in the microcosmos of the Fellowship cult. The fact that homeless are “persecuted” is no different to the attitude members held towards Dorothy, an old woman with alzheimer or any of the members with disabilities, particularly if they didn’t produce any income for the cult.
At the end of the article it even mentions that the Public Square has disappeared! No wonder there are only two of us regularly visiting this site which is why it makes it even more relevant to keep it alive! As long as there is one of us, there is hope!!
What is very interesting is that when one looks at the phenomenon itself in the physical realm even with all the inner impulses that define it, the horror of the situation is clear but when one looks at it in another realm, it carries the horror and the seed for something less horrible or even “desireable”. As if the horror were itself a path to something better and yet if we think about the second world war in this sense, this statement might be better understood: yes, we became more conscious of our inhumanity after the second world war but isn’t this neoliberalism proving that we are far from freeing our selves from our inhumanity?
This article even touches upon the question of WE that I insisted so much on in the FOF blog. The neoliberal doesn’t want to think in terms of WE. It’s hard enough to support one’s self to have to think about US! Which reminds me of the fact that in the USA women and men are each supposed to make their own money within a marriage and the concept of being supported by the man has disappeared, concept which is becoming rare in underdeveloped countries but is still regularly practiced. This “separation” seems very healthy for the neoliberal economy but I wonder if this disengagement from each other is at the root of the indifference with which the social, public realm is perceived.
So many questions to consider…. the research must go on!
Trent H. Hamann 2009
ISSN: 1832-5203
Foucault Studies, No 6, pp. 37-59, February 2009
ARTICLE
Neoliberalism, Governmentality, and Ethics
Trent H. Hamann, St. John’s University
ABSTRACT: This paper illustrates the relevance of Foucault’s analysis of neoliberal
governance for a critical understanding of recent transformations in individual and
social life in the United States, particularly in terms of how the realms of the public
and the private and the personal and the political are understood and practiced. The
central aim of neoliberal governmentality (“the conduct of conduct”) is the strategic
creation of social conditions that encourage and necessitate the production of Homo
economicus, a historically specific form of subjectivity constituted as a free and au-
tonomous “atom” of self-interest. The neoliberal subject is an individual who is mo-
rally responsible for navigating the social realm using rational choice and cost-
benefit calculations grounded on market-based principles to the exclusion of all oth-
er ethical values and social interests. While the more traditional forms of domination
and exploitation characteristic of sovereign and disciplinary forms of power remain
evident in our ”globalized” world, the effects of subjectification produced at the lev-
el of everyday life through the neoliberal “conduct of conduct” recommend that we
recognize and invent new forms of critique and ethical subjectivation that constitute
resistance to its specific dangers.
Key words: Foucault, neoliberalism, governmentality, biopolitics, homo economicus,
genealogy, ethics, critique.
Introduction
In his 1978-1979 course lectures at the Collège de France, The Birth of Biopolitics,1
1
Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978-1979, trans-
lated by Graham Burchell, edited by Arnold I. Davidson (New York: Palgrave Macmil-
lan, 2008). Henceforth, BB, with page numbers given in the text.
Mi-
chel Foucault offered what is today recognizable as a remarkably prescient analysis
of neoliberalism. In the thirty years since he gave these lectures their pertinence and
Hamann: Neoliberalism, Governmentality, and Ethics
38
value for a critical understanding of contemporary forms of political governance in
the United States have grown. As I illustrate below, everyday experiences reflect a
neoliberal ethos2 operative within almost every aspect of our individual and social
lives with consequences that are dire for many and dangerous for most if not all of
us. Indeed the central aim of neoliberal governmentality3 is the strategic production
of social conditions conducive to the constitution of Homo economicus, a specific form
of subjectivity with historical roots in traditional liberalism. However, whereas libe-
ralism posits ”economic man” as a ”man of exchange”, neoliberalism strives to en-
sure that individuals are compelled to assume market-based values in all of their
judgments and practices in order to amass sufficient quantities of ”human capital”
and thereby become ”entrepreneurs of themselves”. Neoliberal Homo economicus is a
free and autonomous ”atom” of self-interest who is fully responsible for navigating
the social realm using rational choice and cost-benefit calculation to the express exclu-
sion of all other values and interests. Those who fail to thrive under such social con-
ditions have no one and nothing to blame but themselves. It is here that we can rec-
ognize the vital importance of the links between Foucault’s analyses of governmen-
tality begun in the late 1970’s and his interest in technologies of the self and ethical
self-fashioning, which he pursued until the time of his death in 1984. His analyses of
”government” or ”the conduct of conduct” bring together the government of others
(subjectification) and the government of one’s self (subjectivation); on the one hand,
the biopolitical governance of populations and, on the other, the work that individu-
als perform upon themselves in order to become certain kinds of subjects. While the
more traditional forms of domination and exploitation characteristic of sovereign
and disciplinary forms of power remain evident in our ”globalized” world, the ef-
fects of subjectification produced at the level of everyday life through the specifically
neoliberal ”conduct of conduct” recommend that we recognize and invent commen-
surate forms of critique, ”counter-conduct” and ethical subjectivation that constitute
resistance to its dangers.4
2
Andrew Barry, Thomas Osborne, and Nikolas Rose have observed that for Foucault libe-
ralism (and, by extension, neoliberalism) indicate something like an ethos of government
rather than a specific historical moment or single doctrine. See their introduction to Fou-
cault and Political Reason: Liberalism, Neo-liberalism and Rationalities of Government, edited
by Andrew Barry, Thomas Osborne, and Nikolas Rose (Chicago, IL: The University of
Chicago Press, 1996), 8.
3
Foucault defines “governmentality” as an apparatus of administrative power “that has
the population as its target, political economy as its major form of knowledge, and appa-
ratuses of security as its essential technical instrument.” See Michel Foucault, Security,
Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977-1978, translated by Graham
Burchell, edited by Arnold I. Davidson (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 108-9.
Henceforth, STP, with page numbers given in the text.
4
Throughout this paper I will follow the distinction made by Alan Milchman and Alan
Foucault Studies, No 6, pp. 37-59.
39
I. Neoliberalism as Everyday Experience
One of the significant developments in contemporary life that might fall under the
heading of ”neoliberalism” can be recognized through the various ways that the tra-
ditional distinctions between the public and the private on the one hand, and the po-
litical and the personal on the other have been gradually blurred, reversed, or re-
moved altogether. The exposure of formerly private and personal realms of life has
occurred not only through the more striking examples of growing government and
corporate surveillance (think of the telecoms and the warrantless monitoring of elec-
tronic communications paid for with taxpayer dollars or the growing use of human
implantable radio-frequency identification [RFID] microchips), but, more subtly and
significantly, the extent to which activities of production and consumption typically
practiced in public spaces are increasingly taking place in the home, a space once
exclusively reserved for leisure time and housework. It has become more and more
common to find such activities as telecommuting, telemarketing, and shopping via
the Internet or cable television taking place within the home. Nearly ubiquitous
technologies such as the telephone, home computers with worldwide web access,
pagers, mobile phones, GPS and other wireless devices have rendered private space
and personal time accessible to the demands of business and, increasingly, the inter-
ests of government. To put it simply, it is no longer true, as Marx once claimed, that
the worker “is at home when he is not working, and when he is working he is not at
home.”5
Within this formerly public realm we now find that private interests or pub-
lic/private amalgams have gained greater control and influence. In major urban
areas Business Improvement Districts (BIDs) have appropriated many traditional
Reality television, social networking sites, personal webcams and confes-
sional blogging have all contributed toward exposing the private realm in ways un-
foreseen by the well-known feminist adage from the 1960’s: ”the personal is politi-
cal”.
Rosenberg between 1) “subjectification” (assujettissement) or the ways that others are go-
verned and objectified into subjects through processes of power/knowledge (including
but not limited to subjugation and subjection since a subject can have autonomy and
power relations can be resisted and reversed), and 2) ”subjectivation” (subjectivation) or
the ways that individuals govern and fashion themselves into subjects on the basis of what
they take to be the truth. Subjectivation can take either the form of self-objectification in
accord with processes of subjectification or it can take the form of a subjectivation of a
true discourse produced through practices of freedom in resistance to prevailing appara-
tuses of power/knowledge. See Alan Milchman and Alan Rosenberg, “The Final Foucault:
Government of Others and Government of Oneself” (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Pub-
lishing, forthcoming 2008). Henceforth, FF.
5
Karl Marx, “Estranged Labor,” in The Economic & Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, edited
by Dirk J. Struik (New York: International Publishers, 1964), 110.
Hamann: Neoliberalism, Governmentality, and Ethics
40
governing functions from financially strapped municipalities including taxation, sa-
nitation, and policing. For years the U.S. federal government has given away tradi-
tional public goods such as parklands, water, and the airways to profit-making
businesses, often in exchange for shallow and unfulfilled promises to serve the pub-
lic interest. Many formerly public or government institutions such as hospitals,
schools, and prisons are now managed privately as for-profit corporations as in-
creasing numbers of people go without healthcare, education levels drop, and prison
populations increase. An ongoing effort has been made to further privatize if not
eliminate traditional social goods such as healthcare, welfare, and social security. In
addition, problems once recognized as social ills have been shifted to the personal
realm: poverty, environmental degradation, unemployment, homelessness, racism,
sexism, and heterosexism: all have been reinterpreted as primarily private matters to
be dealt with through voluntary charity, the invisible hand of the market, by culti-
vating personal ”sensitivity” towards others or improving one’s own self-esteem.
Corporations, churches, universities and other institutions have made it part of their
mission to organize the mandatory training of employees in these and other areas of
personal development and self-management. Just as illness and disease are more of-
ten addressed in the mainstream media as a problem of revenue loss for business
than as an effect of poor environmental or worker safety regulations, corporations
have stepped up the practice of promoting full worker responsibility for their own
health and welfare, offering incentives to employees for their participation in fitness
training, lifestyle management and diet programs. We can also find a sustained ex-
pansion of ”self-help” and ”personal power” technologies that range from the old
“think and grow rich” school to new techniques promising greater control in the
self-management of everything from time to anger.6
On a broader scale, there is clear evidence that government policymaking has
increasingly fallen under the influence of private corporate and industry interests,
for whom the next quarter’s bottom line routinely trumps any concern for the long
term common or public good. Transnational organizations such as the World Bank,
International Monetary Fund, and the World Trade Organization commonly use
their global reach in order to dictate what are often austere social policies through
”Structural Adjustment Programs” (SAPs), practices that have been linked to the on-
going expansion of slum populations worldwide.
These and many other examples
demonstrate the extent to which so much that was once understood as social and
political has been re-positioned within the domain of self-governance, often through
techniques imposed by private institutions such as schools and businesses.
7
6
See Binkley, this volume.
7
See Mike Davis, Planet of Slums (New York: Verso, 2006).
While the various discourses of
”ownership” and the like have promoted the populist ideals of choice, freedom, au-
tonomy and individualism, the reality is that individuals worldwide are more and
more subject to the frequently harsh, unpredictable, and unforgiving demands of
Foucault Studies, No 6, pp. 37-59.
41
market forces and the kinds of impersonal judgments that evaluate them in terms of
a cost-benefit calculus of economic risk, financial burden, productivity, efficiency,
and expedience. The recent collapse of the U.S. housing market, the rising costs of
fuel and food, and record-breaking increases in unemployment rates perhaps illu-
strate, not the failure of what sometimes has been called the ”ownership society”,
but rather its success in instituting a moralizing principle of punishing those who
haven’t amassed sufficient ”human capital”. Examples such as these do suggest that,
to at least some extent, the neoliberal strategy of infusing market values into every
aspect of social life and shifting responsibility onto individuals has succeeded.
II. Neoliberalism As Governmentality
In his 1978-79 course lectures, Foucault analyzed liberalism as a historical form of
biopolitical governmentality, that is, as a form of political rationality concerned with
the government of populations and the conduct of individual conduct in accord with
“the internal rule of maximum economy” (BB, 318). His genealogical analysis of libe-
ralism led him to examine the West German Ordo-liberalism of the period from 1942
to 1962 and the American neoliberalism of the Chicago School, which developed lat-
er on. Foucault noted that both forms of neoliberalism were conceived from the very
beginning as interventionist and critical responses to specific forms of governmen-
tality. For the West Germans, who were faced with the daunting task of building a
new state from scratch it constituted a critique of the excessive state power of Naz-
ism and for the Americans it was a reaction to the overextended New Deal welfare
state and its interference in market mechanisms. In this regard both schools were
linked from the start to classical liberalism insofar as they were forms of “critical go-
vernmental reason,” or political rationality that theorized government as immanent-
ly self-limiting by virtue of its primary responsibility for supporting the economy.
Whereas the pre-modern state had utilized the economy to serve its own ends, the
emergence of political economy within the liberal reason of state reversed the tradi-
tional relationship between government and economy (BB, 12-3). What fascinated
Foucault about the American neoliberals in particular, and distinguished them from
the West German Ordo-liberals, was their unprecedented expansion of the economic
enterprise form to the entire social realm. The Americans sought “to extend the ra-
tionality of the market, the schemes of analysis it offers and the decision-making cri-
teria it suggests, to domains which are not exclusively or not primarily economic: the
family and the birth rate, for example, or delinquency and penal policy” (BB, 323).
Government is also reconceived as an enterprise to be organized, operated, and sys-
tematically critiqued according to an “economic positivism” (BB, 247). Within the
reason of state of American neoliberalism, the role of government is defined by its
obligations to foster competition through the installation of market-based mechan-
isms for constraining and conditioning the actions of individuals, institutions, and
Hamann: Neoliberalism, Governmentality, and Ethics
42
the population as a whole. In fact, the government’s ability to operate under the
cost-benefit rule of maximum economy while simultaneously “hard selling” this
“way of doing things” becomes its one and only criterion of legitimacy (BB, 318).
Another significant feature of neoliberalism is its explicit acknowledgment of
the fact that neither the market nor economic competition between individuals is a
natural reality with self-evident or intrinsic laws. Rather, the rationality of neolibe-
ralism consists of values and principles that must be actively instituted, maintained,
reassessed and, if need be, reinserted at all levels of society (BB, 120). While neoli-
beral governmentality seeks to minimize state power as much as possible, it also re-
cognizes that the market can only be kept viable through active governmental and
legal support. Likewise, it explicitly acknowledges that competition between indi-
viduals can only be fostered through social mechanisms that are exclusively en-
coded, ordered and reassessed by market values. The point here is that within the
rationality of neoliberal governmentality8
Governing people is not a way to force people to do what the governor wants; it
is always a versatile equilibrium, with complementarity and conflicts between
techniques which assure coercion and processes through which the self is con-
structed or modified by himself.
it is clear that Homo economicus or “eco-
nomic man” is not a natural being with predictable forms of conduct and ways of
behaving, but is instead a form of subjectivity that must be brought into being and
maintained through social mechanisms of subjectification. As I will illustrate below,
”economic man” is a subject that must be produced by way of forms of knowledge
and relations of power aimed at encouraging and reinforcing individual practices of
subjectivation.
III. Homo Economicus as Everyday Experience
9
Foucault’s analysis in The Birth of Biopolitics notes that one of the concerns of the neo-
liberals was with identifying the reasoning involved in leading an individual to de-
dicate his or her life’s finite capacities and limited resources toward pursuing one
goal or agenda rather than another. Referring to the work of the economist Gary
Becker, Foucault discussed the neoliberal theories of human capital and criminality,
both of which focus on economic principles of rationality for determining decision-
making processes and action. For example, instead of interpreting the wage earner
as an individual who is obliged to sell his or her labor power as an abstract commod-
ity, neoliberalism describes wages as income earned from the expenditure of ”hu-
8
Here and for the remainder of this article my discussion of “neoliberalism” will refer
primarily to the historical and contemporary American variant.
9
Michel Foucault, “About the Beginning of the Hermeneutics of the Self: Two Lectures at
Dartmouth,” Political Theory, 21, 2 (May 1993), 203-4.
Foucault Studies, No 6, pp. 37-59.
43
man capital”, which consists of both an individual’s innate genetic qualities as well
as his or her acquired skills, abilities, tastes, and knowledge. This accumulated ”hu-
man capital” is interpreted as the result of prior and ongoing investments in goods
like education, nutrition, and training, as well as love and affection. In this recon-
struction of the wage earner, workers are no longer recognized as dependent on an
employer but instead are fashioned as free and autonomous entrepreneurs fully re-
sponsible for their presumably rational self-investment decisions. Foucault notes
that this definition of economics gives itself the task of analyzing a form of human
behavior in terms of its internal rationality. Economics is no longer viewed as the
analysis of processes but rather, as the analysis of “the strategic programming of in-
dividuals’ activity” (BB, 223). For Pierre Bourdieu, the institution of these new forms
of entrepreneurial activity has meant that levels of competition traditionally charac-
teristic of relations between businesses and corporations are now deeply entrenched
at the level of the workforce itself:
Competition is extended to individuals themselves, through the individualiza-
tion of the wage relationship: establishment of individual performance objec-
tives, individual performance evaluations, permanent evaluation, individual sal-
ary increases or granting of bonuses as a function of competence and of individ-
ual merit; individualized career paths; strategies of ‘delegating responsibility’
tending to ensure the self-exploitation of staff who, simple wage laborers in rela-
tions of strong hierarchical dependence, are at the same time held responsible for
their sales, their products, their branch, their store, etc. as though they were in-
dependent contractors. This pressure toward ‘self-control’ extends workers’ ‘in-
volvement’ according to the techniques of ‘participative management’ consider-
ably beyond management level. All of these are techniques of rational domina-
tion that impose over-involvement in work (and not only among management)
and work under emergency or high-stress conditions. And they converge to
weaken or abolish collective standards or solidarities.10
Within the apparatus (dispositif)
11
10
Pierre Bourdieu, “The Essence of Neoliberalism,” translated by Jeremy J. Shapiro, Le
Monde diplomatique (December 1998),
http://mondediplo.com/1998/12/08bourdieu (accessed April 30, 2008).
11
Henceforth I will refer to this or that “apparatus,” insofar as I read Foucault’s term dispo-
sitif to indicate the set-ups or apparatuses of knowledge-power-subjectivity that condi-
tion, shape, and constrain our everyday actuality.
of neoliberalism every individual is considered to
be “equally unequal”, as Foucault put it. Exploitation, domination, and every other
form of social inequality is rendered invisible as social phenomena to the extent that
each individual’s social condition is judged as nothing other than the effect of his or
her own choices and investments. As Wendy Brown has pointed out, Homo economi-
cus is constructed, not as a citizen who obeys rules, pursues common goods, and ad-
dresses problems it shares with others, but as a rational and calculating entrepreneur
Hamann: Neoliberalism, Governmentality, and Ethics
44
who is not only capable of, but also responsible for caring for him or herself.12
Within this practically Hobbesian (anti-)social landscape the ”responsibility” of in-
dividuals constitutes a form of market morality
Brown
points out that this has the effect of “depoliticizing social and economic powers” as
well as reducing “political citizenship to an unprecedented degree of passivity and
political complacency.” She writes:
The model neoliberal citizen is one who strategizes for her- or himself among
various social, political, and economic options, not one who strives with others to
alter or organize these options. A fully realized neoliberal citizenry would be the
opposite of public-minded; indeed, it would barely exist as a public. The body
politic ceases to be a body but is rather a group of individual entrepreneurs and
consumers . . . (E, 43).
13
understood as the maximization of
economy through the autonomous rational deliberation of costs and benefits fol-
lowed by freely chosen practices. Neoliberal subjects are constituted as thoroughly
responsible for themselves and themselves alone because they are subjectified as
thoroughly autonomous and free. An individual’s failure to engage in the requisite
processes of subjectivation, or what neoliberalism refers to as a “mismanaged life”
(E, 42), is consequently due to the moral failure of that individual. Neoliberal ratio-
nality allows for the avoidance of any kind of collective, structural, or governmental
responsibility for such a life even as examples of it have been on the rise for a num-
ber of decades. Instead, impoverished populations, when recognized at all, are often
treated as ”opportunities” for investment.14
On June 15, 2006 the UN released a report, “State of the World’s Cities
2006/7,” on the alarming worldwide growth of urban slum dwellers.
15
12
See Wendy Brown, Edgework: Critical Essays On Knowledge and Politics (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 2005). Henceforth, E, with page numbers given in the text.
13
I use the term “morality” here in the formal sense used by Foucault. Generally speaking
it is the code (or codes) that determines which acts are permitted or forbidden and the
values attributed to those acts. These codes inform the ethical relationship one has to
one’s self. See Michel Foucault, “On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of Work in
Progress,” in Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism
and Hermeneutics (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 237-8. Henceforth,
OGE, with page numbers given in the text.
14
We see this, for example, in the high interest rates increasingly attached to micro-credit
issued to poor “entrepreneurs” in the developing world. Viewing poverty as an invest
ment opportunity also frequently leads to other problems such as forced evictions when
lands are appropriated for commercial development. Examples of this can be found eve-
rywhere from New Orleans to Nairobi.
15
The full report “State of the World’s Cities 2006/7” press release, and other related docu-
The report
Foucault Studies, No 6, pp. 37-59.
45
estimated that by the year 2007 the majority of human beings would, for the first
time ever, be living in cities. One third of those city dwellers, that is one billion of
them, will live in slums. The report also projected that the growth in slum popula-
tions will amount to twenty-seven million people per year—an increase that will
continue for at least the next two decades. In 1996 one hundred and seventy-six
leaders from around the world met at the World Food Summit and pledged to cut
the number of undernourished and starving people in half within twenty years.16
Over a decade later, the number of people going hungry around the world has in-
creased by eighteen million, bringing the worldwide total to eight hundred and fifty-
two million, with an average of six million children dying of hunger each year. In
the United States, there has been a dramatic increase in the number of homeless in-
dividuals in the last twenty-five years, attributable mainly to an increase in poverty
and a growing shortage of affordable rental housing.17
The neoliberal approach to dealing with growing poverty, unemployment,
and homelessness is not simply to ignore it, but to impose punitive judgments
through the moralizing effects of its political rationality. For example, the former
Commissioner of the NYC Department of Homeless Services, Linda Gibbs famously
vowed to “change the meaning of homelessness” by emphasizing “better manage-
ment” and “client responsibility.”
Although the nature of home-
lessness makes it difficult to obtain accurate and timely statistics, it is estimated that
an average 3.5 million people experience homelessness annually with the fastest
growing segment of this population being families with children. As of 2003 the
number of homeless who are children under the age of 18 is nearly 40%. In New
York City children constitute nearly half of the homeless population while children
and their families make up 75% of the total. And although we sometimes hear of
employment figures going up across the United States, so too has the number of
working poor and those forced to work multiple jobs without adequate healthcare
and other benefits.
18
ments can be accessed in PDF format at the UN-HABITAT webpage: http://hq. unhabi-
tat.org/content.asp?cid=3397&catid=7&typeid=46&sub MenuId=0 (accessed April 30,
2008). I have not found an updated version of this report at the time of this writing.
16
See Phillip Thornton’s article, “More are Hungry Despite World Leaders’ Pledge,” The
Independent/UK, October 16, 2006.
17
All statistics, facts, and figures on homelessness are taken from the National Coalition for
the Homeless publications website:
http:://www.nationalhomeless.org/publications/facts.htm (accessed April 30, 2008).
18
Linda Gibbs, as quoted by Robert Kolker in his January 6, 2003 New York magazine ar-
ticle: “Home for the Holidays.”
“My expectation” she stated “is that you can ac-
tually manage this in a way that people change their behavior.” Of course, what
never factors into this construction of “client responsibility” are any of the structural
constraints imposed by the city’s endemic social problems, such as unfair housing
practices or the lack of adequate education and employment opportunities. Instead,
Hamann: Neoliberalism, Governmentality, and Ethics
46
one of the Commissioner’s greatest concerns, as she put it, was that “the city has to
be careful that people don’t abuse the system.” Another example of punitive subjec-
tification is the criminalization of homelessness. A joint report issued at the begin-
ning of the year in 2006 by the National Coalition for the Homeless and The National
Law Center on Homelessness & Poverty described the growing practice of crimina-
lizing the homeless in urban America even while homelessness increases and cities
are consistently unable to meet the heightened demand for more shelters. As the re-
port indicates:
An unfortunate trend in cities around the country over the past 25 years has been
to turn to the criminal justice system to respond to people living in public spaces.
This trend includes measures that target homeless people by making it illegal to
perform life-sustaining activities in public. These measures prohibit activities
such as sleeping/camping, eating, sitting, and begging in public spaces, usually
including criminal penalties for violating these laws.
In a nation with the highest worldwide rate of incarceration of its citizens, this
means increased profits for the corporate owned prison industry.19 Treated as crimi-
nals by the police for their desperate efforts to keep themselves alive, the homeless,
who are arguably the most vulnerable segment of the population, have more and
more frequently found themselves the target of violent attacks that have resulted in
injuries and in many cases death.20
19
See the February 29, 2008 Washington Post article “New High in U.S. Prison Numbers,”
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wpdyn/content/story/2008/02/28/ST2008022803016.htm
l (accessed April 30, 2008).
20
See the press release entitled: “Hate Crimes and Violence Against Homeless People In-
creasing,”
http://www.nationalhomeless.org/hatecrimes/pressrelease.html (accessed April 30, 2008).
A report by the NCH in 2005 found that in a re-
cent period of four years, homeless deaths had increased by 67% while non-lethal
attacks increased by 281%. Living and dying in accord with the neoliberal rule of
maximum economy, the homeless find themselves subject to the harshest and cruel-
est effects of its domestic governance. They are the disowned of the ownership socie-
ty. Neoliberalism’s rationality treats criminality in a manner that departs from pre-
vious “disciplinary” (human or social science-based) analyses of crime. Here again,
the criminal is subjectified as a free, autonomous, and rationally calculating subject
who weighs the uncertain risk of having to pay a cost in the form of punishment
against the generally more certain benefits of crime. As the story goes, Gary Becker
hit upon this notion one day when he was confronted with the choice of either park-
ing his car illegally, and thereby risking getting a ticket, or parking legally in an in-
convenient spot. After carefully calculating his options he opted for the former
‘criminal’ choice. As Becker himself has pointed out, this rational choice approach to
criminality fails to acknowledge any significant difference between a murder and a
Foucault Studies, No 6, pp. 37-59.
47
parking offence. Or, at best, and since crime is identified as “any action that makes
the individual run the risk of being condemned by a penalty” (BB, 251), the differ-
ence between committing a murder and parking illegally is nothing other than the
kind of penalty one risks incurring. In its attempt to displace legal judgments in fa-
vor of economic ones, this approach to human behavior rules out any possibility for
an ethical evaluation of actions that would extend beyond simply judging them as
unfortunate miscalculations in light of what is expedient.
IV. Foucault and Neoliberalism Today–Three Concerns
While quite a number of scholars and critics have used Foucault’s ”toolbox” to great
advantage in describing and analyzing many of the same trends I have discussed
above,21
The first concern is that the use of the concept of neoliberalism as a descrip-
tive term in a critical analysis of contemporary society might be ”insufficiently ge-
nealogical”.
a number of questions have been raised about the viability or effectiveness
of doing so. I will briefly describe three of what I take to be the most significant con-
cerns here as a means toward developing my own attempts to address them, albeit
somewhat indirectly, in the remainder of this paper.
22
That is, it seems to claim a bird’s-eye view of things, it tends to gene-
ralize too much, and it consequently moves too quickly in reaching conclusions. In
other words, it risks bypassing the kind of patient and detailed genealogical analyses
that would give us insightful descriptions of the specific local forms of power and
knowledge that are to be found at work in our everyday lives. I have already gone
some way towards offering empirical descriptions of contemporary experiences that
reflect neoliberal governmentality at work. In the next section I will offer a brief ge-
nealogy of neoliberalism that begins by noting the specificity of Foucault’s own
analysis within an examination of liberalism as the framework of intelligibility of
biopolitics.
21
In addition to Wendy Brown, cited above, see for example Jeffrey T. Nealon’s Foucault
Beyond Foucault: Power and its Intensifications Since 1984 (Stanford, CA: Stanford Universi-
ty Press, 2008), and the work of Nikolas Rose, in particular his Powers of Freedom: Refram-
ing Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
22
While he does not raise the problem specifically in relation to neoliberalism, Todd May
expresses a similar concern about the use of the concept of ”globalization” to describe
our present. See his article “Foucault Now?” in Foucault Studies, 3 (November 2005). Also
see the last chapter, “Are we still who Foucault says we are?” in his book The Philosophy
of Foucault (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2006), 132-59.
Hamann: Neoliberalism, Governmentality, and Ethics
48
A second and closely related concern is that by focusing on neoliberalism’s
economization of society and responsibilization of individuals some critics have mis-
takenly offered it up as a new paradigm of power that would supersede older forms
just as disciplinary power is sometimes mistakenly thought to have entirely replaced
sovereign power in one great historical shift.23 Careful readers know that Foucault
warned against making this kind of mistake by indicating the complex ways in
which different forms of power have co-existed and complimented one another.24
A third and final concern is that Foucault’s emphasis on the care of the self
and aesthetics of existence in his later works lends itself quite nicely to neoliberal-
ism’s aim of producing free and autonomous individuals concerned with cultivating
themselves in accord with various practices of the self (education, healthy lifestyle,
the desire to compete, etc.).
One can point, for example, to the alarming explosion of U.S. prison populations and
the worldwide escalation of the use of surveillance technologies as contemporary
manifestations of disciplinary and panoptic forms of power. Likewise the open ac-
knowledgment of the use of torture by the U.S. government can be recognized as
one of the signal characteristics of sovereign power. In the next section I will offer
examples of the presence of sovereign, disciplinary, and panoptic forms of power in
neoliberal governmentality while also noting what I find to be significant differences
or modifications.
25
23
Alan Milchman and Alan Rosenberg locate this problem in much of Anglo-Saxon go-
vernmentality theory [FF]. Nancy Fraser has described disciplinary power as a ”Fordist
mode of social regulation” that is no longer very useful for describing contemporary so-
ciety. See her article “From Discipline to Flexibilization? Rereading Foucault in the Sha-
dow of Globalization,” in Constellations, 10, 2 (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2003), 160-
71.
24
During a discussion of Rousseau in his lecture of February 1, 1978 Foucault suggests:
“…we should not see things as the replacement of a society of sovereignty by a society of
discipline, and then of a society of discipline by a society, say, of government. In fact we
have a triangle: sovereignty, discipline, and governmental management…” (STP, 107).
25
Jeffrey T. Nealon’s Foucault Beyond Foucault offers a characterization of this prevalent but
mistaken reading in which “the late Foucaultian turn to the self-creating subject and its
artistic agency can only remind us of present-day American military recruiting posters
(‘Become an Army of One’) or the corporate slogan of Microsoft: ‘Where would you like
to go today?’” (p. 11).
That is, Homo economicus is a good example of Foucaul-
dian self-fashioning. Consequently, one might conclude that, rather than contribut-
ing toward a critical analysis of neoliberalism, Foucault’s work on self-care and
technologies of the self at best provides us with no useful tools for doing so, or
worse, actually provides a kind of technical support manual for the neoliberal agen-
da of recoding society and its subjects. Indeed we might be mistaken to read Fou-
cault as critical of neoliberalism at all. It could be that his sole interest in it was as a
historically situated critical alternative to the biopolitical model of the welfare state.
In this regard he might even have been a somewhat naive advocate of neoliberalism,
for all we know. In the genealogy that follows I will give particular attention to the
history of Homo economicus because of its central place in neoliberal governmentality.
I have already described how neoliberalism encourages individuals to engage in
Foucault Studies, No 6, pp. 37-59.
49
self-forming practices of subjectivation through processes of social subjectification.
In the last section of my paper I will discuss the possibility of recognizing and in-
venting other forms of subjectivation that critique and resist neoliberal subjectifica-
tion.
V. A Brief Genealogy of Neo-Liberalism
I begin this section by establishing a few points for consideration. The first is that the
question as to whether Foucault thought neoliberalism was a good thing or a bad
thing seems to me to be misguided for two reasons. His analyses of governmentality
sought, to a large extent, to analyze historical relations between power, knowledge,
and subjectivity in order to better understand the present, to identify its dangers,
and to perhaps locate possible opportunities for critical resistance. The judgment
”good” or ”bad” is something I am sure he would have refused in this context as he
consistently did in many others. In addition, if it can be argued that the way many of
us think, act, and speak has, over the past couple of decades, become increasingly
shaped in a manner consistent with the articulations of neoliberal governmentality,
this is nothing Foucault could have anticipated nearly twenty-five years ago. We
cannot know what he would have thought of the actuality of our present. What we
do know is that Foucault found neoliberalism important enough to examine and dis-
cuss it in his 1978-79 lectures at far greater length than he had originally planned
(BB, 185). Although neoliberalism has frequently been used as one of the ”tools”
Foucault offers, perhaps it is not always the case that enough attention is given to his
own treatment of it. We should bear in mind that his discussion of it occurs within
the context of an analysis of liberalism as “the general framework” or “condition of
intelligibility” of biopolitics (BB, 327-8). In fact, at the end of his first lecture on Janu-
ary 10th, he suggested that: “only when we know what this governmental regime
called liberalism was, will we be able to grasp what biopolitics is” (BB, 18). Consider-
ing this analytical framework we might pause for a moment over the ”neo” of neoli-
beralism. A genealogical approach should perhaps first seek to establish its possible
links with some of the older disciplinary and panoptic forms of power described by
Foucault as constituting the history of our present.
Many of the contemporary practices that can be defined in terms of neolibe-
ralism have historical precedents that we can locate in Foucault’s archaeologi-
cal/genealogical analyses. It is hard to argue with those who would point to today’s
exploding prison populations, the use of prison labor and the training of both stu-
dents and prisoners in ”entrepreneurialism”,26
26
See, for example, the transcript of the PBS News Hour report aired January 15, 2007 on
the NIFTY programs at a Providence, Rhode Island high school and the Rikers Island jail
facility.
the replacement of welfare with
Hamann: Neoliberalism, Governmentality, and Ethics
50
workfare, the pervasive use of surveillance, training, and testing, etc. as instances of
the contemporary manifestation of something that appears to be disciplinary power.
For example, as was true in ”the great confinement” described by Foucault in Mad-
ness and Civilization,27 the present incarceration of unprecedented numbers of the
population in the U.S. is not simply a negative act of exclusion aimed at protecting
and preserving a pre-given social order. Rather, it is a positive means of producing
certain kinds of subjects in accord with a certain biopolitical apparatus implemented
by the police (understood here in the broad governmental sense of the term used
during the eighteenth century as outlined by Foucault)28
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/education/jan-june07/entrepreneurs_01-15.html (ac-
cessed April 30, 2008).
27
Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, trans-
lated by Richard Howard (New York: Random House, 1965), 38-64.
28
Michel Foucault, “The Political Technology of Individuals,” in Luther H. Martin, Huck
Gutman, and Patrick H. Hutton (eds.), Technologies of the Self (Amherst, MA: The Univer-
sity of Massachusetts Press, 1988), 145-62. Henceforth, PTI, with page numbers given in
the text. Foucault explains here that: “The police govern not by the law but by a specific,
a permanent, and a positive intervention in the behavior of individuals” (p. 159).
with the aim of producing a
certain kind of social order. What may be unique about neoliberal forms of punish-
ment is that they recognize a certain continuum between those subjects who are in-
carcerated and those who are not. Whereas the Hôpital Général described by Fou-
cault served to constitute a division between normal and pathological subjects, neo-
liberal governmentality aims toward producing something like a graduated social
plane by constituting all subjects as ”equally unequal”. Incarcerated or not, all neoli-
beral subjects are presumed ”equal” and ”free”. Social divisions no doubt exist, in-
deed many of them (such as economic disparity) have been increasing steadily, but
as we have seen, neoliberalism attributes those divisions to failures of individual
choice and responsibility. When Foucault discusses the neoliberal conception of cri-
minality, he concludes, “there is an anthropological erasure of the criminal” and
“what appears on the horizon of this kind of analysis is not at the ideal or project of
an exhaustively disciplinary society in which the legal network hemming in indi-
viduals is taken over and extended internally by, let’s say, normative mechanisms”
(BB, 258-9). In contrast to traditional forms of disciplinary power, these contempo-
rary instances posit a continuum that begins with a conception of individuals as al-
ready rationally calculating, individualized atoms of self-interest. Once those prin-
ciples are incorporated within governing institutions, social relations, academic dis-
ciplines, the workplace, and professional organizational policies, individuals are en-
couraged and compelled to fashion themselves (their practices, understanding, and
manner of speaking) according to its rules, often out of practical necessity. On the
other hand it seems that a number of Foucault’s descriptions of nineteenth-century
society and government find echoes in contemporary society, such as docile bodies
being subject to continuous training and judgment, or the poor being criminalized
Foucault Studies, No 6, pp. 37-59.
51
and cast out of the cities. It does not require much imagination to hear in Bourdieu’s
description of today’s entrepreneurial work culture, quoted above, a repetition of
Foucault’s description of one of the effects of panopticism:
The efficiency of power, its constraining force have, in a sense, passed over to the
other side—to the side of its surface of application. He who is subjected to a field
of visibility, and who knows it, assumes responsibility for the constraints of
power; he makes them play spontaneously upon himself; he inscribes in himself
the power relation in which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the
principle of his own subjection.29
Turning again to Homo economicus, who might best be described as the subject
who would be ”the principle of his own subjection” because of the conditions of his
environment, we recognize that this prescribed form of subjectivity also has its his-
torical precedents within the biopolitics of liberalism. In his article “The Ethology of
Homo Economicus” Joseph Persky traces the original use of the term Homo economicus
We find significant precedents such as this one in the past, but, as Bourdieu makes
clear, the new values promulgated in this contemporary form of panopticism are ex-
clusively entrepreneurial ones. We find here no references to traditional Christian
morality or descriptions of ”idleness” as a sin. If the panopticon as described by
Foucault was a vast experiment using various techniques in order to find what
worked best, today’s corporate work environments may very well be one of a num-
ber of practical applications of its results. If one of the effects of panopticism is to
produce free subjects, then the critical issue is not so much a matter of liberating in-
dividuals from this or that constraint, but rather examining the apparatuses within
which subjects are conditioned and constrained as free subjects. The workers de-
scribed by Bourdieu, the homeless who are treated as both ”clients” and criminals,
those who are poor due to their own ”mismanagement” and those citizens described
by Brown who can strategize for themselves among available options but play no
role in determining those options—they are all free. But their freedom is shaped,
conditioned, and constrained within a form of subjectification characterized by in-
creasing competition and social insecurity. It is an apparatus that produces only cer-
tain kinds of freedom understood in terms of a specific notion of self-interest, while
effectively preempting other possible kinds of freedom and forms of self-interest (in-
cluding various collective, communal, and public forms of self-interest) that neces-
sarily appear as impolitic, unprofitable, inexpedient and the like. Rather than
representing a new paradigm of power, neoliberalism perhaps constitutes a sove-
reign-disciplinary-governmental triangle of power.
29
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, translated by Alan Sheridan
(New York: Random House, 1979), 202-3.
Hamann: Neoliberalism, Governmentality, and Ethics
52
to the late nineteenth century.30 There he locates the term in a series of critical res-
ponses to John Stuart Mill’s work on political economy, in particular his 1836 essay
“On the Definition of Political Economy; and on the Method of Investigation Proper
to It.”31
While this brief example is no substitute for a thorough genealogy of Homo economi-
cus, Mill’s interest in this ”art” of ”character building” is a provocative indication
that while the political rationality of classical liberalism may have appealed to ”na-
ture” and the “human propensity to ‘truck and barter’” (E, 41), it was also concerned
with the governmental problem of the conduct of conduct.
There and in later writings Mill made use of an abstract hypothetical human
subject useful for the purpose of economic analysis. Mill himself never used the
term, and so “economic man” first came into being as a satirical rebuke to what was
caricatured as Mill’s “money-making animal,” an imaginary being who was only
interested in the selfish accumulation of wealth. In fairness to Mill, his actual de-
scription of this self-interested man also included the desire for luxury, leisure, and
procreation. Interestingly, the problem of labor didn’t enter into this picture except
insofar as he was concerned that the presumably natural desire to avoid work and
give one’s self over to costly indulgences threatened to hinder the accumulation of
wealth. Rational calculation, a central feature of today’s Homo economicus was, of
course, also absent. Persky notes that Mill’s approach was basically laissez-faire but
that he also introduced ownership and profit sharing as motivating factors. While
he sometimes treated Homo economicus as something of a natural being, he was also
aware that the constitution of individual preferences, passions, and the overall de-
velopment of character needed to be studied through a “political ethology.” As
Persky explains:
Strictly speaking, Mill viewed efforts to analyze the development of character as
the proper task of ethology, a science he placed logically subsequent to elementa-
ry psychology. Ethology, according to Mill, was that science ‘which determines
the kind of character produced in conformity to those general laws [of psycholo-
gy], by any set of circumstances, physical and moral’. In terms of Mill’s grander
scheme of sciences and arts, ethology (like political economy) produced axiomata
media, or middle-level theory—logically precise deductions from admittedly
shaky first principles that then could be applied in useful arts. Thus, the art cor-
responding to ethology was ‘education’, or what today might be called ‘character
building’ (EHE, 226).
32
30
Joseph Persky, “The Ethology of Homo Economicus,” Journal of Economic Perspectives. 9, 2
(Spring 1995), 221-31. Henceforth, EHE, with page numbers given in the text.
31
John Stuart Mill, “On the Definition of Political Economy; and on the Method of Investi-
gation Proper to It,” in Collected Works. vol. 4 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1967),
120-64.
32
Here I am in at least partial disagreement with Wendy Brown when she suggests that, in
What Persky is describ-
Foucault Studies, No 6, pp. 37-59.
53
ing in this article is Mill’s interest in a technology of subjectification. Specifically, he
finds in Mill an inquiry into the techniques made available through various forms of
scientific knowledge for producing a certain form of subjectivity with a certain ethos
to serve the interests of political economy. Homo economicus, in other words, is histor-
ically introduced as a modern subject of governmentality, a biopolitical subject of
power/knowledge.
Foucault describes the classical version of Homo economicus as ”the man of ex-
change”. He appears as a figure that must be analyzed in terms of a utilitarian
theory of needs. His manner of behavior and mode of being must be broken down
and analyzed in terms of his needs, which lead him to engage in a utilitarian process
of exchange (BB, 224). By contrast, in neoliberalism, Homo economicus is no longer a
partner in exchange but instead is fashioned as “an entrepreneur and an entrepre-
neur of himself.” As such he is his own capital, his own producer, and the source of
his own earnings. Even in terms of consumption (and here again Foucault refers di-
rectly to Becker) the neoliberal Homo economicus is recognized as a producer of his
own satisfaction. In place of all the old sociological analyses of mass consumerism
and consumer society, consumption itself becomes an entrepreneurial activity ana-
lyzable solely in terms of the individual subject who is now recognized as one
among many productive enterprise-units (BB, 225). Insofar as the enterprising indi-
vidual is not directly subject to disciplinary and normalizing forms of power, neoli-
beralism is more ”tolerant” of difference. Instead, society is to be arranged such that
it can be divided or broken down not in terms of the ”grain” of individuals, but ac-
cording to the ”grain” of enterprises.
Foucault demonstrated that, from its origins, biopolitics has constituted mod-
ern subjects in empirically verifiable scientific and economic terms. Discipline and
Punish provides detailed accounts of the training of individuals with imperatives of
expedience, efficiency, and economy. It also illustrates the importance of constant
surveillance and examination as the subject moves from one institutional space to
another. As I have illustrated above, Foucault’s analysis of panopticism describes
how the disciplined biopolitical subject is made to internalize particular forms of re-
sponsibility for him- or herself through practices of subjectivation. One of the tasks
required for producing genealogies of neoliberalism and Homo economicus is to iden-
tify the specific forms of knowledge that both inform and are produced by neoliberal
practices, both individual and institutional. If the historical forms of disciplinary
contrast to classical economic liberalism, “neoliberalism does not conceive of either the
market itself or rational economic behavior as purely natural” (E, 41). She is right about
neoliberalism but I am not sure this feature distinguishes it from classical liberalism.
First and most importantly, liberalism is explicitly an art of governing concerned with the
conduct of conduct despite its appeals to “nature”. Second, neoliberalism also has the ef-
fect of making competition among individuals appear “natural” or a matter of ”common
sense” as a result of its active interventions in the social realm.
Hamann: Neoliberalism, Governmentality, and Ethics
54
power and subjectivation made use of the human and social sciences and related
disciplines (psychology, anthropology, political science, pedagogy, etc.), a study
must be made into the forms of knowledge that presumably have either taken their
place or infiltrated them. The most obvious development in this regard would be the
extent to which rational choice theory, the lynchpin of contemporary Homo economi-
cus, has made its way into the various disciplines from micro-economics to sociolo-
gy, political science, and philosophy. As Foucault put it in his last lecture from 1979:
Hence there is a new problem, the transition to a new form of rationality to
which the regulation of government is pegged. It is now a matter not of model-
ing government on the rationality of the individual sovereign who can say ‘me,
the state’, [but] on the rationality of those who are governed as economic subjects
and, more generally, as subjects of interest in the most general sense of the term
[BB, 312].
VI. Ethics and Critical Resistance
[T]here is no first or final point of resistance to political power other than in the
relationship of self to self.33
Whether neoliberalism will ultimately be viewed as having presented a radically
new form of governmentality or just a set of variations on classical liberalism, we
can certainly recognize that there are a number of characteristics in contemporary
practices that are new in the history of governmentality, a number of which I’ve al-
ready discussed. Another one of these outstanding features is the extent to which the
imposition of market values has pushed towards the evisceration of any autonomy
that may previously have existed among economic, political, legal, and moral dis-
courses, institutions, and practices. Foucault notes, for example, that in the sixteenth
century jurists were able to posit the law in a critical relation to the reason of state in
order to put a check on the sovereign power of the king. By contrast, neoliberalism,
at least in its most utopian formulations, is the dream of a perfectly limitless (as op-
posed perhaps to totalizing) and all-encompassing (as opposed to exclusionary and
normalizing) form of governance that would effectively rule out all challenge or op-
position. This seems to be the kind of thing that Margaret Thatcher was dreaming
about when she claimed that there is “no alternative”.
34
33
Michel Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject: Lectures at the Collège de France 1981-82,
translated by Graham Burchell, edited by Frédéric Gros (New York: Palgrave MacMillan,
2005), 252. Henceforth, THS, with page numbers given in the text.
34
This comment was made at a press conference for American correspondents in No. 10
Downing Street in London on June 25, 1980.
Such formulations of what
might be called “hyper-capitalism” seem to lend themselves to certain traditional
forms of criticism. However, critical analyses that produce a totalizing conception of
Foucault Studies, No 6, pp. 37-59.
55
power and domination risk the same danger, noted above, of overlooking the some-
times subtle and complex formations of power and knowledge that can be revealed
through genealogical analyses of local practices. Important for any genealogical
analysis is the recognition that, while there is no ”outside” in relation to power, re-
sistance and power are coterminous, fluid, and, except in instances of domination,
reversible. There is an echo of this formulation in Foucault’s understanding of go-
vernmentality as ”the conduct of conduct”. Governmentality is not a matter of a
dominant force having direct control over the conduct of individuals; rather, it is a
matter of trying to determine the conditions within or out of which individuals are
able to freely conduct themselves. And we can see how this is especially true in the
case of neoliberalism insofar as it is society itself and not the individual that is the
direct object of power. Foucault provides examples of this in “The Subject and Pow-
er”, in which he discussed a number of struggles of resistance that have developed
over the past few years such as “opposition to the power of men over women, of
parents over children, of psychiatry over the mentally ill, of medicine over the popu-
lation, of administration over the ways people live”.35 Despite their diversity, these
struggles were significant for Foucault because they share a set of common points
that allow us to recognize them as forms of resistance to governmentality, that is,
”critique”. Through the examples he uses Foucault notes the local and immediate
nature of resistance. These oppositional struggles focus on the effects of power expe-
rienced by those individuals who are immediately subject to them. Despite the fact
that these are local, anarchistic forms of resistance, Foucault points out that they are
not necessarily limited to one place but intersect with struggles going on elsewhere.
Of greatest importance is the fact that these struggles are critical responses to con-
temporary forms of governmentality, specifically the administrative techniques of
subjectification used to shape individuals in terms of their free conduct.36
Tying all of these modes of resistance together is the question “Who are we?”
While some might be concerned about exactly who this we is suggested by Foucault,
both here and in his discussions of Kant and enlightenment, I think the question is in
some ways its own answer. In other words, it is meant to remain an ongoing critical
question that can never be definitively answered, or, as John Rajchman has sug-
gested, it is a question that can only be answered by those who ask it and through
35
Michel Foucault, “The Subject and Power,” in Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Mi-
chel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago
Press, 1983), 211. Henceforth, TSP, with page numbers given in the text.
36
As Foucault put it: “Power is exercised only over free subjects, and only insofar as they
are free” (TSP, 221).
Hamann: Neoliberalism, Governmentality, and Ethics
56
the process of asking it. In his introduction to The Politics of Truth he writes:
The ‘we’ always comes after, emerging only through the on-going light its activi-
ties shed on the habits and practices through which people come to govern
themselves—and so see themselves and one another. Indeed in this lies precisely
the originality of the critical attitude, its singular sort of universality, its distinc-
tive relation to ‘today’—to ‘now’, ‘the present’, l’actuel.37
Power functions by investing, defining, and caring for the body understood as a
bioeconomic entity. The operation of biopower is to define the freedom and truth
of the individual in economic and biological terms. Reason is given the task of
comprehending the body in these terms and setting the conditions within which
it can be free. ...The formation of the disciplines marks the moment where askesis
itself was absorbed within biopolitics.
This ”critical attitude” that Foucault repeatedly refers to in all of his discussions of
Kant from the 1970’s and 1980’s is inseparable from both his analysis of governmen-
tality and his discussions of ethics and the history of the experience of the relation-
ship between the subject and truth. What fascinated Foucault about the ”care of the
self” he discovered in Greek and Roman ethics was the ”spiritual” relationship that
existed between the subject and truth. In order to gain access to the truth, that is, in
order to acquire the ”right” to the truth, individuals had to take care of themselves
by engaging in certain self-transformative practices or ascetic exercises. Here we find
critical and resistant forms of subjectivation where, rather than objectifying them-
selves within a given discourse of power/knowledge, individuals engaged in prac-
tices of freedom that allowed them to engage in ethical parrhesia or speak truth to
power. In modernity, however, following what Foucault identified as ”the Cartesian
moment” the principle ”take care of yourself” has been replaced by the imperative
to “know yourself” [THS, 1 - 24]. In contemporary life that which gives an individual
access to the truth is knowledge and knowledge alone, including knowledge of one’s
self. In this context knowledge of the self is not something produced through the
work individuals perform on themselves, rather it is something given through dis-
ciplines such as biology, medicine, and the social sciences. These modern forms of
knowledge, of course, become crucial to the emerging biopolitical forms of govern-
mentality. Whereas individuals were once urged to take care of themselves by using
self-reflexive ethical techniques to give form to their freedom, modern biopolitics
ensures that individuals are already taken care of in terms of biological and econom-
ic forms of knowledge and practices. As Edward F. McGushin puts it in his book
Foucault’s Askesis: An Introduction to the Philosophical Life,
38
37
John Rajchman, “Introduction: Enlightenment Today,” in Sylvère Lotringer (ed.) The Poli-
tics of Truth (Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e), 2007), 14-5.
38
Edward F. McGushin, Foucault’s Askesis: An Introduction to the Philosophical Life (Evanston,
Foucault Studies, No 6, pp. 37-59.
57
Foucault explicitly identified critique, not as a transcendental form of judgment that
would subsume particulars under a general rule, but as a specifically modern ”atti-
tude” that can be traced historically as the constant companion of pastoral power
and governmentality. As Judith Butler points out in her article “What is Critique?
An Essay on Foucault’s Virtue”,39 critique is an attitude, distinct from judgment, pre-
cisely because it expresses a skeptical or questioning approach to the rules and ra-
tionalities that serve as the basis for judgment within a particular form of gover-
nance. From its earliest formations, Foucault tells us, the art of government has al-
ways relied upon certain relations to truth: truth as dogma, truth as an individualiz-
ing knowledge of individuals, and truth as a reflective technique comprising general
rules, particular knowledge, precepts, methods of examination, confessions, inter-
views, etc. And while critique has at times played a role within the art of government
itself, as we’ve seen in the case of both liberalism and neoliberalism, it has also made
possible what Foucault calls “the art of not being governed, or better, the art of not
being governed like that and at that cost” (WC, 45). Critique is neither a form of ab-
stract theoretical judgment nor a matter of outright rejection or condemnation of
specific forms of governance. Rather it is a practical and agonistic engagement, re-
engagement, or disengagement with the rationalities and practices that have led one
to become a certain kind of subject. In his essay “What is Enlightenment?” Foucault
suggests that this modern attitude is a voluntary choice made by certain people, a
way of acting and behaving that at one and the same time marks a relation of be-
longing and presents itself as a task.40
IL: Northwestern University Press, 2007), 239.
39
The Political: Readings in Continental Philosophy edited by David Ingram (London: Basil
Blackwell, 2002).
40
Michel Foucault, “What is Enlightenment?” in The Politics of Truth, edited by Sylvère Lo-
tringer (Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e), 1997), 113. Henceforth, WE, with page numbers
given in the text.
Its task amounts to a “historical investigation
into the events that have led us to constitute ourselves and to recognize ourselves as
subjects of what we are doing, thinking, [and] saying” (WE, 125). But how can we
distinguish the kinds of resistance Foucault was interested in from the endless calls
to ”do your own thing” or ”be all you can be” that stream forth in every direction
from political campaigns to commercial advertising? How is it, to return to the last
of the three concerns raised above, that Foucault does not simply lend technical sup-
port to neoliberal forms of subjectivation? On the one hand, we can distinguish criti-
cal acts of resistance and ethical self-fashioning from what Foucault called ”the Cali-
fornian cult of the self” (OGE, 245), that is, the fascination with techniques designed
to assist in discovering one’s ”true” or ”authentic” self, or the merely ”cosmetic”
forms of rebellion served up for daily consumption and enjoyment. On the other
hand we might also be careful not to dismiss forms of self-fashioning as ”merely”
Hamann: Neoliberalism, Governmentality, and Ethics
58
aesthetic. As Timothy O’Leary points out in his book Foucault and the Art of Ethics,
Foucault’s notion of an aesthetics of existence countered the modern conception of
art as a singular realm that is necessarily autonomous from the social, political, and
ethical realms, at least as it pertained to his question of why it is that a lamp or a
house can be a work of art, but not a life. O’Leary writes:
Foucault is less interested in the critical power of art, than in the ‘artistic’ or ‘plas-
tic’ power of critique. For Foucault, not only do no special advantages accrue
from the autonomy of the aesthetic, but this autonomy unnecessarily restricts our
possibilities for self-constitution. Hence, not only is Foucault aware of the specif-
ic nature of aesthetics after Kant, he is obviously hostile to it.41
What O’Leary rightly identifies here is Foucault’s interest in an aesthetics of exis-
tence that specifically stands in a critical but immanent relation to the ways in which
our individuality is given to us in advance through ordered practices and forms of
knowledge that determine the truth about us. The issue is not a matter of how we
might distinguish “authentic” forms of resistance (whatever that might mean) from
“merely” aesthetic ones. Rather it is a matter of investigating whether or not the
practices we engage in either reinforce or resist the manner in which our freedom—
how we think, act, and speak—has been governed in ways that are limiting and into-
lerable. In short, critical resistance offers possibilities for an experience of de-
subjectification. Specifically in relation to neoliberal forms of governmentality, this
would involve resisting, avoiding, countering or opposing not only the ways in
which we’ve been encouraged to be little more than self-interested subjects of ra-
tional choice (to the exclusion of other ways of being and often at the expense of
those “irresponsible” others who have “chosen” not to amass adequate amounts of
human capital), but also the ways in which our social environments, institutions,
communities, work places, and forms of political engagement have been reshaped in
order to foster the production of Homo economicus. Endless examples of this kind of
work can be found in many locations, from the international anti-globalization
movement to local community organizing.
41
Timothy O’Leary, Foucault and the Art of Ethics (London: Continuum, 2002), 129.
Foucault Studies, No 6, pp. 37-59.
59
These
struggles question the status of the individual in relation to community life, in terms
of the forms of knowledge and instruments of judgment used to determine the
”truth” of individuals, and in relation to the obfuscation of the real differences that
make individuals irreducibly individual beings.
It may be too early to determine the viability of neoliberalism as a form of
governmentality and “grid of intelligibility” for thinking about our present, particu-
larly as it continues to coexist with other more disciplinary and normalizing forms of
power/knowledge/subjectivity. Certainly it seems to have expanded and become
more prevalent than when Foucault analyzed it in the late 1970’s. In any case, the
proof will be in our practices, that is, a better understanding will emerge by attend-
ing to our everyday activities, what we say and how we think, our commitments
and obligations as well as the kinds of truths about ourselves we rely upon and rein-
force in the process of doing so. Critical attention should continue to be paid to how
neoliberal forms of governmentality continue to reinforce and expand Homo economi-
cus as a form of subjectivation that can be directly linked to greater wealth disparity
and increasing poverty, environmental degradation, the evaluation and legitimation
of governance through market values alone, growing rates of incarceration, the in-
creasing intervention of private corporate values and interests into our everyday
lives, the disappearance of the public square and an increase in the political disen-
franchisement of citizens. All of this might best be attended to while bearing in mind
Foucault’s cautionary suggestion that “People know what they do; they frequently
know why they do what they do; but what they don’t know is what what they do
does.”42
42
Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, ”Power and Truth” in Michel Foucault: Beyond
Structuralism and Hermeneutics (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1983), 187.
