Foucault with Marx

Jacques Bidet, Steven Corcoran

• Publisher: Zed Books
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781783605385
• eBook ISBN: 9781783605408
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political History & Theory
• Index: Politics & International Relations

With this timely commitment, Jacques Bidet unites the theories of arguably the world's two greatest emancipatory political thinkers. In this far-reaching and decisive text, Bidet examines Marxian and Foucauldian criticisms of capitalist modernity. For Marx, the intersection between capital and the market is crucial, while for Foucault, the organizational aspects of capital are what really matter. According to Marx, the ruling class is identified with property; with Foucault, it is the managers who hold power and knowledge that rule. Bidet identifies these two sides of capitalist modernity as 'market' and 'organization', showing that each leads to specific forms of social conflict; against exploitation and austerity, over wages and pensions on the one hand, and against forms of 'medical' and work-based discipline, control of bodies and prisons on the other. Bidet's impetus and clarity however serve a greater purpose: uniting two souls of critical social theory, in order to overcome what has become an age-long separation between the 'old left' and the 'new social movements'.

1

THE MARX/FOUCAULT DIFFERENCE: DISCIPLINE AND GOVERNMENTALITY

Prior to undertaking a systematic comparison, I propose to explore some analogies and discrepancies between the respective universes of Marx and Foucault, which appear through a reading of the lectures given at the Collège de France throughout the 1970s: that is, on the one hand, Discipline and Punish,¹ and, on the other, Security, Territory, Population, and The Birth of Biopolitics.² In the lectures from 1972 to 1974, on which Discipline and Punish draws, Foucault rather explicitly sets things in the context of a ‘class’ society, into which, however, he introduces a new paradigm, the ‘disciplinary order’. In the lectures from 1977 to 1979, to which the latter two titles correspond, he situates himself in the field of theories and technologies of power: his approach no longer develops in terms of ‘class relationships’, but instead of ‘relationships of government’.³

1.1 DISCIPLINARY SOCIETY/CLASS SOCIETY: SURVEILLANCE AND PUNISHMENT

1.1.1 Foucault’s discovery of a new social order

Discipline and Punish explores the new penal and disciplinary order that appears in Europe at the end of the eighteenth century. In the case of France, the justice system of the Ancien Régime has been done away with, including its secret procedures and its art of extracting proofs of confession, all crowned with a spectacle of torture in which royal power is restored through terror.

The new system is grounded in public debate under the authority of a judge who is supposedly there to prevent and correct. Execution is handed to a separate administration. Corporeal punishment is equal for all. Inflicted on a juridical subject, it consists in taking away the ultimate freedom of one’s life, simply by using the horological mechanism of the guillotine. To this abstract universe of sanction corresponds a concrete individualisation of the sanctioned person. Now one no longer judges the crime but rather the criminal individual, deemed such at the outcome of a ‘scientific’ procedure into which the psychiatrist, as the judge of the subject’s normality and of possible attenuating circumstances, would soon be introduced.

The ordeal of the prison becomes the standard form of punishment. Foucault recasts it within a broader logic, which is referred to as that of ‘discipline’ and is deemed to be common to barracks, factories, hospitals and schools. Military discipline, which produces a man-machine subject to a strict hierarchy, merely figures as the distillate of a phenomenon affecting all social institutions. We have here the invention of an abstract space stamped by the closure of the whole and its sub-sections, with functional quartering, the marking out of places to fix the respective terrains for each component of the group, and their comings and goings. A collective temporal rhythm is imposed on everyone, with employment and the exhaustive utilisation of time divided into standardised acts and exercises. There is a dividing up of tasks, of stages. This is not the abstraction of the market: it is, such is at least the argument I’m putting forward, ‘another abstraction’, namely organisation.

The ‘panoptic’ apparatus, utopia realised, enables the total control and monitoring of the individuals concerned. It configures the site of the normalised test, of the individual examination, medical or school, producing objective and archivable data to situate each person in his or her case or rank. It calls for an appropriate architecture, one that would come to be common to workshops, hospitals, barracks and prisons. What develops in this closed universe, away from the juridical order, is a second penal context, constituted by norms enacted from the inside, an ‘infra-justice’ outside of common law including corrective penalties, sanctions, punishments and rewards, distributions according to classification systems defined in accordance with the specific institution. This constitutes the instrumentalisation of the organised order by its immediate agents.

Foucault does not fail, all throughout these pages, to refer to Marx’s analyses and concepts. It is clear, in his view, that such institutions are geared to the context of modern class domination – founded on economic relationships – under the aegis of the bourgeoisie. Significantly, he refers to the description of manufacturing and the factory system presented in Book 1 of Capital.⁴ His contemporary interventions and interviews are also strewn with references to Marx. For his part, however, Foucault forged an original body of work. In this text he elaborates the elements of a theorisation that has shown itself powerful enough to become the ‘common sense’ of contemporary critical thought. And this has occurred to such an extent that the Marxist tradition has, for some time already, been striving to appropriate him for itself. It remains to find out, however, under which conditions this ‘assimilation’ could be given any plausibility or coherence. Foucault, of course, presupposes a ‘classist’ connection between economic exploitation and political domination. But he maintains quite some distance from the properly Marxian concepts of class and state. He also marks a distinct indifference toward Marx’s economic analysis and a frank hostility toward political outlooks of a Marxist type.

Marx does not have in mind the class relationship and its reproduction, but instead the exercise of ‘class’ (he adopts this term) power by some individuals over others and notably over those that institutions – private or public – have the task of controlling and setting to work. He maintains that, despite their functions of subjectivation and their repressive dimensions, the nature of these institutions is to be able to institute rational apparatuses that promote a population to higher forms of culture and power. Such is, for an essential part, the original wellspring of the social sciences. In fact in all cases, including that of prison, discipline has as its counterpart the implementation of a form of knowledge in correlation with one of power: a knowledge-power. That is, a new order of reason, which is also a new order of domination. All told, and notably as regards this ambivalence, Foucault’s ambition displays something like a family resemblance to Marx’s, who also sought to render capitalism its due both as force of oppression and as a factor of intellect.

1.1.2 Disciplines and class relations

My aim is to reprise these diverse points by interpreting a beautiful synoptic passage that forms the conclusion to the third part of Discipline and Punish. It is titled ‘Discipline’ (pp. 221–3) and enables us to glimpse in all its complexity the problematic relation that ties Foucault to Marx.

I begin with a line-by-line commentary on these few pages. I then compile this information into a table of observable analogies between the Foucauldian construction of ‘disciplinary society’ and the Marxian schema of ‘capitalist society’. The hurried reader will be tempted to skip these few pages of textual analysis and go straight to the result given at §1.1.3. But it should not be forgotten that the analogies observed here do not have the value of homologies: they are only indications of problems to be identified.

Here then, in a still-disordered sequence relative to the table to be generated, the main statements from this text and my commentaries. I emphasise the most pertinent terms in Foucault’s text for this analysis.

The panoptic modality of power – at the elementary, technical, merely physical level at which it is situated – is not under the immediate dependence or a direct extension of the great juridico-political structures of a society; it is nonetheless not absolutely independent. (pp. 221–2)

The analogy is expressed in the opposition forged between a (higher) order of ‘juridico-political structures’ and a ‘technical-physical’ modality of power, which is distinguished from it. With Marx, there is a power of exploitation; with Foucault, here, a power of control.

Historically, the process by which the bourgeoisie became in the course of the eighteenth century the politically dominant class is masked by the establishment of an explicit, coded and formally egalitarian juridical framework, made possible by the organisation of a parliamentary, representative regime. (p. 222)

At issue, then, is a class society in which a ‘bourgeoisie’ dominates politically, its power ‘masked’ by a ‘formally egalitarian’ and ‘representative’ juridical framework. This is a point of total proximity with Marx’s perspective. It remains for us to find out, however, how the ‘bourgeoisie’ is distinguished from the class that Marx designates as that of ‘capitalists’.

But the development and generalisation of disciplinary mechanisms [dispositifs] constituted the other, dark side of these processes. (p. 222)

With Marx, ‘the other side’ of market equality, being that which makes it possible, is the mechanism of exploitation as defined in chapter 7 of Capital. Here we see that for Foucault it is the disciplinary apparatus that forms the other side of juridical freedom.

The general juridical form that guaranteed a system of rights that were egalitarian in principle was subtended by these tiny, everyday, physical mechanisms, by all those systems of micro-power that are essentially inegalitarian and dissymmetrical that we call the disciplines. (p. 223; tm)

In the Marxian schema, the juridical superstructure of egalitarian law is thus ‘subtended’ by a base of dissymmetrical material mechanisms of exploitation. From this perspective Foucault tackles an order of discipline the effect of which is ‘essentially inegalitarian’, just as the economic base is in Marx’s work.

And although, in a formal way, the representative regime makes it possible, directly or indirectly, with or without relays, for the will of all to form the fundamental authority [instance] of sovereignty, the disciplines provide, at the base, a guarantee of the submission of forces and bodies. (p. 222)

The ‘will of all’ certainly constitutes a ‘foundation’ but only ‘in a formal way’. This is because ‘the base’ is made up of disciplines that subjugate bodies. Similarly, the wage relation (the Marxian ‘base’) guarantees the exploitation of labour power by the capitalist who has them at his ‘command’ – in an order of formal liberty ensured by a parliamentary system.

The real, corporal disciplines constituted the foundation of the formal, juridical liberties. (p. 222)

The operative opposition continues to be between the ‘formal’ and the ‘real’, also referred to as the juridical and the corporal, which relates to the disciplinary ‘foundation’. Foucault seems to exaggerate things as compared with Marx. Of course the reality was that neither thinker would make this play of metaphors, the disjunctions of the formal/real and superstructure/base, as their last word.

The contract may have been regarded as the ideal foundation of law and political power; panopticism constituted the technique, universally spread, of coercion. It continued to work in depth on the juridical structures of society, in order to make the effective mechanisms of power function in opposition to the formal frameworks that it had acquired (s’était donnée). (p. 222)

Similar to Marx, the contract continues to be presupposed. This occurs within the oppositions of ‘ideal foundation’/‘technique’ and ‘freedom’/‘coercion’. The contract pertains to the ‘formal,’ and discipline to the ‘effective’. The contractual framework that class power posits (‘gives itself’) only exists in the conditions of ‘panopticism’, which ‘works’ it. Power’s ‘effectiveness’ resides in this interrelation between the ‘ideal’ and the ‘real’, the nature of which remains conceptually indeterminate. It remains for us to find out if things proceed otherwise with Marx.

The ‘Enlightenment’, which discovered the liberties, also invented the disciplines. (p. 222)

This statement confirms the preceding one: the simultaneous ‘discovery’ of the ‘formal’ and the ‘real’, of the ‘ideal’ and the ‘techniques’, appears not to receive a conceptual formulation in the Foucauldian framework. The relationship between the elements of this dualism is raised only in the vaguely additional terms of ‘also’, which is frequently used by this author. Nonetheless, it is this relationship that ought to concern us, as it forms the core of any future theory.

In appearance, the disciplines constitute nothing more than an infra-law. They seem to extend the general forms defined by law to the infinitesimal level of singular existences; or they appear as methods of training that enable individuals to ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword
• Introduction
• 1 THE MARX/FOUCAULT DIFFERENCE: DISCIPLINE AND GOVERNMENTALITY
• 2 PROPERTY-POWER AND KNOWLEDGE-POWER
• 3 MARXIAN STRUCTURALISM AND FOUCAULDIAN NOMINALISM?
• 4 MARX’S ‘CAPITALISM’ AND FOUCAULT’S ‘LIBERALISM’
• ELEMENTS OF CONCLUSION: A STRATEGY FROM BELOW
• References
• Index