The Last Man Takes LSD

Foucault and the End of Revolution

Daniel Zamora, Mitchell Dean

• Publisher: Verso
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781839761416
• Topic: Filosofía
• Subtopic: Filósofos

How Michel Foucault, drugs, California and the rise of neoliberal politics in 1970s France are all connected In May 1975, Michel Foucault took LSD in the desert in southern California. He described it as the most important event of his life, one which would lead him to completely rework his History of Sexuality. His focus now would not be on power relations but on the experiments of subjectivity and the care of the self. Through this lens, he would reinterpret the social movements of May '68 and position himself politically in France in relation to the emergent anti- totalitarian and anti-welfare state currents. He would also come to appreciate the possibilities of autonomy offered by a new force on the French political scene that was neither of the Left nor the Right: neoliberalism.For this paperback edition, the authors have written an afterword responding to the debate occasioned by the book's first publication.

1

The Birth of a Controversy

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What I am trying to do is provoke an interference between our reality and the knowledge of our past history. If I succeed, this will have real effects in our present history. My hope is my books become true after they have been written – not before.

Michel Foucault, 1980¹

Understanding Foucault’s relationship to neoliberalism is far from a straightforward matter. His lectures on neoliberalism, The Birth of Biopolitics, delivered in early 1979, would be published in 2004 and appear in English only in the fateful year 2008. As a result, destiny has tied these lectures – which were concluded a month prior to the election of the Thatcher government in the United Kingdom and almost two years before the Reagan administration took office in the United States – to a wholly different context. That context was the worst economic crisis in the North Atlantic world since the Great Depression and the subsequent revaluation of the legacy of neoliberalism and its poster children. It was a financial crisis that continues to define our present, from the recurrent debt and budget crises of the countries of the European Union to the political traumas of the United States, the United Kingdom and France.

A second complication is that these very lectures are made available under the general editorship of his former student and assistant, François Ewald, thus making him perhaps Foucault’s most influential follower and arbiter of what constitutes his oeuvre. The apparent irony here is that Ewald, in his work with the employers’ association, MEDEF, has promoted what Maurizio Lazzarato describes as the ‘policies and mechanisms for … reconstructing society according to neoliberal principles’ that were first revealed to him in Foucault’s lectures of 1979.² By the end of the millennium, Ewald had become the most important intellectual advocate of the boycott by employers of French corporatist arrangements in the name of the vitality of civil society. While the case of Ewald’s neoliberalism has been raised for some time by Mauricio Lazzarato, Antonio Negri and Jacques Donzelot, among others,³ the question of Foucault’s own relationship to neoliberalism has been put on the agenda by none other than Ewald himself. In 2012 at the University of Chicago, in conversation with the economist, Gary Becker, Ewald suggested that Foucault had offered an ‘apology of neoliberalism’.⁴ Indeed, both major branches of neoliberalism have now endorsed Foucault’s presentation of the thought of their schools. Representatives of the Ordoliberals have lauded Foucault’s lectures on their school,⁵ and Gary Becker himself admitted to being hard pressed to find anything critical of his own work or that of his colleagues, emphasizing to a somewhat confused Foucauldian interlocutor after reading the lectures, ‘I don’t disagree with much.’⁶

The questions surrounding Foucault’s relationship to neoliberalism are, if anything, intensifying. Recently, several books have appeared in French suggesting some degree of endorsement of neoliberalism by Foucault, although drawing the opposite political conclusions. Among them, there is Geoffroy de Lagasnerie’s La dernière leçon de Michel Foucault, which depicts Foucault’s lectures as an exercise in ‘mental hygiene’ for the Left, by using neoliberalism to ‘rethink the conditions of elaboration of an emancipatory practice’.⁷ His book is a brief, polemical essay rather than a scholarly monograph, and perhaps should be addressed as such. It adopts a breezy and accessible style and runs through a range of affinities between Foucault and neoliberalism. These include a common rejection of the juridical-political vocabulary and orientation of state and sovereignty; an embrace of plurality (or multiplicity), immanence and heterogeneity; a suspicion of the concept of society, totalizing knowledge and theory more generally, including the social and behavioural sciences; and an anti-totalitarianism asserting a fundamental ungovernability that vitiates state planning and the normative focus on order.

Foucault, Lagasnerie argues, attempted to read neoliberalism affirmatively and used it to develop a critical approach. In doing so, he ‘transgressed a boundary deeply inscribed within our intellectual space’.⁸ The ‘great audacity’ of Foucault is that he was not content simply to follow neoliberalism’s dogmas but adopted the far subtler idea of ‘using neoliberalism as a test, as an instrument of critique of both thought and reality’. By reading neoliberalism in its own terms rather than as a foil for his own position, Foucault moves to engage neoliberalism as a ‘kind of experimental dispositive’,⁹ as a form of critique and as ‘the instrument of the renewal of theory itself’.¹⁰ Lagasnerie claims, then, to read Foucault from the Left as someone seeking to unlock the possibilities of neoliberalism for leftist thought. Foucault’s engagement with neoliberalism, for him, thus points the way to a new critical theory and a ‘project of renewing what Pierre Bourdieu called “the libertarian tradition of the Left”’.¹¹

While Lagasnerie’s book does offer a trenchant argument, it suffers from a number of striking deficiencies. First of all, it ignores all of those works that have raised this relationship in a more contextual perspective and situated Foucault’s interest in neoliberalism in relation to an increasing affinity with the ‘Second Left’ exemplified by figures such as Pierre Rosanvallon.¹² In this sense, Lagasnerie’s work is completely decontextualized and largely ignores Foucault’s relationship with the CFDT,¹³ the ‘New Philosophers’, or the role of neoliberal rationalities and left politics in the years since Foucault wrote. It is as if the Third Way, New Labour and Bill Clinton’s administration had never happened.

Further, the essayistic and polemical character of the text means that it engages insufficiently with Foucault’s work itself. English-language readers familiar with Foucault’s work on governmentality and the large secondary literature on neoliberalism may find themselves dissatisfied at many points. For example, the book fails to distinguish between the various schools of neoliberalism or between neoliberalism and classical economic liberalism (after Adam Smith). In this way, it is consistent with how neoliberals themselves presented their ideas. It takes some contortionist talent not to see the chasms that separate Hayek not only from John Stuart Mill but even from Becker. These distinctions are, however, key to Foucault’s analyses.

Basically, Lagasnerie is only very superficially interested in the intellectual history of neoliberalism. Although he regrets that the political affinities displayed by the neoliberals have generally ‘obscured the perception of their work’,¹⁴ he nonetheless reproduces a very complacent reading of their ideas. He does not, for example, seem to perceive that if neoliberalism is apparently ‘on the side of disorder’, it was, in its Austrian version, extremely attentive to the desire to build a ‘constitutionalized’ economic order sheltered from the vagaries of democracy. One of its great successes was precisely not to oppose the ‘authoritarian impulses’ of the Keynesian order but to ‘insulate’ the economic system from democratic spaces by a legal system that, in Hayek’s words, would ‘dethrone politics’.¹⁵ The ‘sovereignty of the consumer’ aimed from the outset to constitute a space freed from democracy rather than to ‘renew’ it. It reconceptualized the demos as a simple variation of the competition of individual interests in a market, the impersonal system of prices being substituted for any other form of collective political deliberation.

The biggest howler in this sense occurs when Lagasnerie claims, amid his exegesis of Foucault’s lectures, that ‘Homo oeconomicus thus appears, in a proper sense, as an ungovernable being’.¹⁶ Yet, Foucault’s point concerning neoliberalism and its difference from classical liberalism is precisely the opposite: ‘Homo oeconomicus is someone who is eminently governable. From being the intangible partner of laissez-faire, homo oeconomicus now becomes the correlate of a governmentality which will act on the environment and systematically modify its variables.’¹⁷ In other words, Foucault contrasts the quasi-naturalistic and ungovernable status of the economic subject in classical economic liberalism with the constructed and manipulable status of the economic subject in neoliberalism, the case in point being that of Gary Becker. The specificity of neoliberalism will therefore rather reside, as we show in this book, in the environmental relation it has with subjects. At the least, Foucault’s interest in neoliberalism is partially driven by the idea that the economic subject opens the way for new forms of power and regulation, and hence in some respects reverses its place in classical economic liberalism.

There is indeed a strange discord between the temporalities of French and English receptions of Foucault’s neoliberalism lectures. Anglophone readers, schooled in the governmentality literature starting with Colin Gordon’s seminal introduction, and a massive literature on governmentality studies,¹⁸ would thus find Lagasnerie’s arguments deficient from a simple scholarly perspective, whatever the merits of the overall intervention he seeks to make.

But it is only two years later, with the publication of more contextual books, that the debate really started. Foucault and Neoliberalism in particular assembled various perspectives that, beyond their differences, largely registered Foucault’s affinities with neoliberalism as a matter of concern for the intellectual history of the Left and an occasion to reflect on its recent theoretical trajectories.¹⁹ Needless to say, the ensuing debate, stirred by an interview published in Jacobin with one of the current authors (Zamora),²⁰ has added both heat and light. That interview in particular made the point that Foucault barely raised problems of economic and social inequality, recasting the main social question away from ‘exploitation’ to matters of personal conduct.

Finally, it is important to mention Serge Audier’s book, Penser le ‘néolibéralisme’, with its well-documented and detailed account of the context in which Foucault gave his lectures and of the intimate link between his interest in neoliberalism and the French ‘crisis of socialism’. The key Second Left intellectual, Pierre Rosanvallon, recently described this book as the ‘indispensable’ reference on the topic, one that fully captures Foucault’s late trajectory and places it in the context of the struggles within the French Left between its statist and anti-statist components.²¹ It is ‘the absence of historical training and concerns’, argues Audier, that has shaped the complacent and uncritical reception and readings of Foucault’s lectures.²²

From this perspective, there is a healthy debate to be had about Foucault’s relationship to neoliberalism given the central position he still occupies in critical thought. However, before exploring this relationship further, and in particular how it fits into the last decade of the philosopher’s work, we need to reposition Foucault’s intellectual enterprise in a little more detail.

Foucault and the liberal arts of government

Foucault’s analysis alerts us to the plurality of forms of neoliberalism, and to their emergence within, but movement across, national borders and temporal contexts. He demonstrates the worth of an intellectual-historical study of the variants of neoliberalism and even the biographies of its key figures.²³ This brings neoliberalism down to earth as something that is identifiable and study-able, something more plural, contingent and historically rooted than a narrative of ‘neoliberalization’ might indicate.

With the recent publication of excellent intellectual-historical studies of neoliberalism by Mirowski and Plehwe, Jamie Peck, Angus Burgin, Niklas Olsen, Quinn Slobodian and, more recently, Jessica Whyte,²⁴ this point might seem redundant. But, if we allow Foucault the status of a thinker of the Left, then this project was almost unique at the time of his lectures. In the United Kingdom, there was Andrew Gamble’s paper in The Socialist Register in 1979,²⁵ and Stuart Hall’s pieces on Thatcherism in Marxism Today,²⁶ published in 1979 and 1980. But it is interesting that, despite Laclau and Mouffe’s 1985 recognition that neoliberalism was a ‘new hegemonic project’,²⁷ there was little engagement on the Left with the sources of this project. This was despite the fact that, as Foucault’s lectures would report, the neoliberal project had been a practical doctrine of government since the very beginning of the Federal Republic of Germany, almost forty years earlier. For Foucault, this neglect was due to mistaking neoliberalism as a mere revival of classical liberalism or simply another ideology of market capitalism. The Left, still in thrall to a complex version of the base–superstructure model of ideology, was not able to develop a project to try to grasp neoliberalism ‘in its singularity’. As Foucault puts it: ‘Neo-liberalism is not Adam Smith; neo-liberalism is not market society; neo-liberalism is not the Gulag on the insidious scale of capitalism.’²⁸

In paying serious attention to the intellectual-historical sources of neoliberalism, Foucault anticipated those who would regard neoliberalism as a ‘thought collective’,²⁹ that is, as an empirically and historically identifiable group of thinkers pursuing a common intellectual project and political ambition, but within a certain space of conversation and dissension. The neoliberal thought collective proved to be one of the most successful, if not the most successful, political movements of the second half of the twentieth century, in its influence, capture and appropriation of the powers of national states and other governmental organizations above and below the nation-state.

Yet, almost contrary to this careful intellectual-historical approach, with its emphasis on the plurality and historical contingency of the various strands of the neoliberal thought collective, was another of Foucault’s bold masterstrokes: the identification of neoliberalism – and indeed classical lib...