Foucault and the invisible economy

Foucault Studies

Volumn , Issue 6, 2009, Pages 5-24

  Tellmann, Ute ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF BASEL   (Switzerland)

Author keywords

Economy; Foucault; Governmentality; Invisible hand; Liberalism

Indexed keywords

EID: 79961239089     PISSN: None     EISSN: 18325203     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.22439/fs.v0i0.2487     Document Type: Article

References (43)

1. For Foucault's uses of this notion see Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality. An Intro- duction. Volume I (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 82.
2. This article takes the two lecture courses, Security, Territory, Population and The Birth of Biopolitics as its main references, for the simple reason that they feature most prominently the question of economy as part of an analysis of relations of power (Michel Foucault: Se-curity, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France 1977-78. (Houndsmill, ENG: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008) and
3. Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics. Lectures at the Collège de France 1978-79 (Houndsmill, ENG: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008)).
4. For the necessity of probing deeper into Foucault's account of economy and liberalism see also William Walters, "Decentering the Economy." Economy and Society, 28, 2 (1999): 312-323. His argument concentrates more on how governmentality fails to properly ac-count for the birth of "the economy" as a distinct field of reality. Ricardo, rather than Adam Smith, should be the proper anchor for such a discursive emergence.
5. The relevant part reads as follows: "Déchiffer une strate de réalité de manière telle qu'en émergent les lignes de forces et de fragilité; les points de résistance et les points d'attaques possible, les voies tracées et les chemins de traverse. C'est une réalité de lutes possible que je cherche à faire apparaitre." (Michel Foucault, Dits et Écrits II, 1976-1988 (Paris: Gallimard, 2001), 633).
6. See also Wendy Brown's account of genealogy for a discus-sion of this understanding of knowledge-production (Wendy Brown, "Genealogical Politics," in The Later Foucault: Politics and Philosophy, ed. Jeremy Moss (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1998), 45).
7. He does so in an interview with Les Nouvelles Littéraires titled "Sur la sellette", in March 1975 (Michel Foucault, Dits et Écrits I, 1954-1975. (Paris: Gallimard, 2001), 1588).
8. De-leuze's account of Foucault centers on this cartographic project. He speaks of 'making see and making hear' what is determining our regimes of visibility and sayability (Gilles De-leuze, Foucault (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1986), 42).
9. That Foucault wanted the know-ledge he produces to have a tactical and strategic use and had thus to present strategic links and accounts of forces is a persistent theme in his interviews, lectures and writings. See, for example, the lecture of January 7 in his lecture course Society must be defended (Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975-76, ed. Mauro Bertani and Alessandro Fontana, (New York: Picador, 2003).
10. The argument against the "hermeneutics of suspicion" as marshaled by Paul Ricoeur is based on showing and exposing the superficiality of things in an "overview, from higher and higher up, which allows the depth to be laid out in front of him in a more and more profound visibility; depth is resituated as an absolutely superficial secret," as Foucault put it in an early work, Nietzsche, Freud, Marx (Foucault 1967, cit. in Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow. Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics. Second Edition. With an afterword by and an interview with Michel Foucault, (Chicago, IL: Univer-sity of Chicago Press, 1983), 107).
11. Foucault defined his form of doing philosophy as analyzing the politics of truth: "How- ever, in one way or another, and for simple factual reasons, what I am doing is some-thing that concerns philosophy, that is to say, the politics of truth, for I do not see many other definitions of the word 'philosophy; apart from this" (Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, 3).
12. Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 283.
13. Michel Foucault, "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History." In Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews by Michel Foucault, ed. Donald Bouchard (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), 146.
14. Foucault, Dits et Écrits II, 629.
15. Michel Foucault, "The Subject and Power", in ed. Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, Second Edition (Chicago, IL: Uni-versity of Chicago Press, 1983), 218.
16. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage Books, 1995).
17. See paradigmatically the last chapter in Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 140f
18. Bruno Latour, "Postmodern? No, Simply Amodern! Steps Towards an Anthropology of Science," Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science, 21, 1 (1990): 145-171.
19. Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 13ff.
20. The cursory explication of the security-dispositif by Foucault has given rise to the com- plaint that Foucault's analytical strategies focus too much on purely theoretical or textual material (Pat O'Malley, Lorna Weir and Clifford Shearing, "Governmentality, Criticism, Politics," Economy and Society, 26, 4 (1997): 501-517). The question posed here has a differ-ent concern: it inquires about the fecundity of inspiration, which Foucault's analysis con-tains for developing a richer, more detailed or more material account.
21. Stuart Elden has discussed how territoriality has elapsed from the analytical perspective, while being so prominently featured within the very title of the lecture-course: Security, Territory, Population. He argues that this omission might be remedied within the very framework proposed by Foucault, but remarks nevertheless this curious obliteration, at the cost of an exclusive account of population analytically separated from territoriality (Stuart Elden, "Government, Calculation, Territory," Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 25 (2007): 562-580).
22. Wendy Brown, "Neo-Liberalism and the End of Liberal Democracy." Theory and Event, 7, 3 (2003). http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/tae/v007/7.1brown. html#copyright (accessed June 16, 2008).
23. James Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998).
24. Kirstie McClure, Judging Rights: Lockean Politics and the Limits of Consent, (Ithaca, NY: Cor- nell University Press, 1996), 63; 69.
25. Adam Smith, who assumed in the former account a middling position between the mod- ern and the classical age, turns later into a paradigmatic figure for the modern liberal po-litical rationality. Also, the modern "finitude of men" Foucault diagnoses in the Order of Things is not properly translated into his account of governmentality. Attending to this shift towards finitude might help to provide answers to the question of the relation be-tween biopolitics and economy - which is not sufficiently addressed by Foucault. See Ul-rich Bröckling, Menschenökonomie, Humankapital. Eine Kritik der biopolitischen Öko-nomie," in Disziplinen des Lebens. Zwischen Anthropologie, Literatur und Politik, ed. Ulrich Bröckling et al. (Tübingen, GER: Gunter Narr Verlag, 2004) for an argument about the missing link between biopolitics and economy.
26. Nikolas Rose and Peter Miller, "Political Power beyond the State: Problematics of Gov- ernment," British Journal of Sociology, 43, 2 (1992): 189.
27. Emma Rothschild, Economic Sentiments. Adam Smith, Condorcet, and the Enlightenment, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), 50.
28. Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, and Michel Foucault, "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History", 154f.
29. Sheldon Wolin, Politics and Vision: Continuity and Innovation in Western Political Thought. Expanded Edition, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 263. Sheldon Wolin is more inclined to take such differences not as internal to liberalism, but as signaling two different traditions easily "lumped together": democratic radicalism and liberalism. Thomas Paine would belong to the former, whereas Adam Smith to the latter. Emma Rothschild tries to draw out the differences between Adam Smith and the liberalism of the nineteenth century, which was ever more inclined to secure the foundations of un-questioned (epistemological) order. These differences are here accounted for as they help to distinguish the differences in respect to the politics of visibility or invisibility. But of course, it is important to keep in mind that Adam Smith and David Hume's skepticism towards the democratization of judgment was profound.
30. Thomas Robert Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population. Sixth edition (London: William Pickering, 1986), 501; 494.
31. Foucault elaborates this in a discussion about philosophy and science and the disciplin- ing of knowledge. See the lecture of February 25 in the lecture course Foucault, Society must be Defended.
32. Antoine-Nicolas de Condorcet, Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind. (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1955), 131.
33. Johan Heilbron, The Rise of Social Theory, (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), 168, and Rothschild, 178f.
34. Albert Hirschman, The Passions and the Interest: Political Arguments for Capitalism Before its Triumph, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 104.
35. For the relations between the founder of conservatism Edmund Burke and the form of neo-liberalism Hayek stands for, see Hayek's own identification as an "old Whig", draw-ing parallels to Edmund Burke in the postscript The Constitution of Liberty titled "Why I Am Not a Conservative." (Friedrich A. Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty, (Chicago: Uni-versity of Chicago Press, 1960), 399f, 409).
36. This title is misleading. Hayek argues against a conservatism that is indistinctively reluctant to any change. Thus, he attempts to distin-guish himself, as well as Edmund Burke from a type of "Tory-conservatism" that tends to allow less experimentation than he would embrace. "I am as little a Tory-conservative as was Edmund Burke " (Friedrich A. Hayek, "The Mysterious World of Trade and Money", in The Fatal Conceit. The Errors of Socialism. The Collected Works of Friedrich August Hayek, Vol 1. (London: Routledge, 1988), 53).
37. For the intimate links between a form of po-litical conservatism and this strand of liberalism, see also William Scheuerman, "The Unholy Alliance of Carl Schmitt and Friedrich A. Hayek," Constellations, 4, 2 (1997)) and also
38. John P. McCormick's discussion of this type of conservatism (John P. McCormick, Carl Schmitt's Critique of Liberalism: Against Politics as Technology (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-versity Press, 1997), 303f).
39. Hayek, "The Mysterious World of Trade and Money", 14.
40. Friedrich A. Hayek, "The Use of Knowledge in Society", in The American Economic Review, Vol. 35(4), 1945: 527.
41. Hayek, "The Use of Knowledge in Society", 526f.
42. For remedying this aspect, Judith Butler has always argued that the orders of discourse need to be prominently related to what is undone in their midst (Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of "Sex." (New York: Routledge, 1993), 8).
43. Very similarly, Jacques Rancière stressed the divisions between what is rendered intelligible and what is delegated to mere noise. The political artifice resides in creating these divisions and or-ders of the sensible, as he phrases it (Jacques Rancière, "Ten Theses on Politics," Theory & Event, 5, 3 (2001). http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory-and-event/v005/5. 3ranciere.html (accessed June 16 2008)).