Roberto Ciccarelli: Il governo delle "risorse umane" @ Il manifesto 10Feb2015 (recensione del libro di Massimiliano Nicoli "Le risorse umane")

Il governo  delle  «risorse umane» 

di Roberto Ciccarelli

Il Manifesto, 10 febbraio 2015

Read more @ Il Manifesto

Neoliberismo. Massimiliano Nicoli, Le risorse umane (Ediesse). Come, e perché, l'impresa è diventata la nostra forma di vita e il management l'unico discorso sull'«umano». Un libro prezioso sia dal punto di vista della documentazione, sia dal punto di vista critico

L’egemonia della cul­tura dell’impresa neo­li­be­rale emerge nei luo­ghi più ina­spet­tati. Quando la Cgil invita ai con­ve­gni Luigi Ber­lin­guer, già mini­stro dei Ds che rifor­ma­rono l’università intro­du­cendo le pra­ti­che con­ta­bili, ban­ca­rie e azien­da­li­sti­che per quan­ti­fi­care i «cre­diti» di un corso di stu­dio per uno stu­dente o la nozione di «capi­tale umano» per incre­men­tare il suo port­fo­lio di com­pe­tenze e com­pe­tere sul mer­cato del lavoro gra­zie alla «for­ma­zione continua».

Oppure quando un par­tito della sini­stra ita­liana orga­nizza il suo labo­ra­to­rio pro­gram­ma­tico chia­man­dolo «Human Fac­tor», senza accor­gersi (o forse era voluto?) che il con­cetto di «fat­tore umano» è il pila­stro della scuola delle rela­zioni umane che ha rivo­lu­zio­nato le teo­rie del mana­ge­ment negli anni Venti del XX secolo e oggi costi­tui­sce il rife­ri­mento delle teo­rie neo­li­be­rali sul mar­ke­ting. Segnali di que­sto tipo atte­stano che il discorso dell’impresa è diven­tato la forma di vita in cui si danno oggi tutte le rela­zioni in una società.

Un utile stru­mento di orien­ta­mento e deco­di­fi­ca­zione dell’orizzonte appa­ren­te­mente insu­pe­ra­bile dell’impresa, e del suo lin­guag­gio ormai natu­ra­liz­zato, è il libro del filo­sofo Mas­si­mi­liano Nicoli Le risorse umane (Ediesse, pp. 239, 12 euro). Un libro pre­zioso sia dal punto di vista della docu­men­ta­zione (è una ras­se­gna delle teo­rie sulla gestione d’impresa sin dalla fon­da­zione con Ford e Tay­lor), sia dal punto di vista cri­tico (l’autore è un inter­prete di Michel Fou­cault e della sua let­tura del neo­li­be­ri­smo e della biopolitica).

La con­giun­zione tra il discorso pub­blico e l’immaginario del sog­getto impren­di­tore si è sal­data fin dagli anni Set­tanta, si è con­so­li­data nella rivo­lu­zione con­ser­va­trice di That­cher e Rea­gan, è diven­tata uni­ver­sale dopo la caduta del Muro di Ber­lino. L’idea della spe­cia­liz­za­zione fles­si­bile della pro­du­zione post­for­di­sta (lean pro­duc­tion e pro­du­zione just-in-time o on demand) ha incon­trato la stra­te­gia dell’innovazione per­ma­nente e della for­ma­zione con­ti­nua. La tra­sfor­ma­zione del modo di pro­du­zione ha defi­nito l’esistenza di un nuovo cit­ta­dino al quale è oggi richie­sta la par­te­ci­pa­zione al capi­tale, la col­la­bo­ra­zione desi­de­rante alla pro­pria alie­na­zione, l’interiorizzazione delle colpe dei domi­nanti sotto forma delle poli­ti­che dell’austerità e del debito.

Nicoli mostra come la forma-impresa sia diven­tata una forma di vita, men­tre la sog­get­ti­vità è con­ce­pi­bile solo come un dive­nire impresa del sé e del rap­porto con gli altri. «La con­nes­sione tra post­for­di­smo e neo­li­be­ra­li­smo non solo asse­gna ai mer­cato un ruolo “ale­tur­gico”, cioè di mani­fe­sta­zione del vero e di test della vali­dità delle pra­ti­che poli­ti­che – scrive — ma indi­vi­dua nella sog­get­ti­vità indi­vi­duale un altro luogo di “veri­di­zione” in cui si mani­fe­sta la nozione neo­li­be­rale di “capi­tale umano”. Ciò che resta della sto­ria è noto: la poli­tica, come la cono­scenza, o qual­siasi forma di vita attiva, oggi sono l’espressione del mana­ge­ment delle risorse umane eser­ci­tato attra­verso le tec­ni­che della valu­ta­zione, espo­si­zione o con­fes­sione che tra­sfor­mano gli indi­vi­dui in unità-imprese».

Il libro di Nicoli non si occupa diret­ta­mente delle alter­na­tive a que­sto dispo­si­tivo di governo delle menti e dei corpi. Quanto scrive è tut­ta­via il risvolto di una ricerca che oggi impe­gna il dibat­tito poli­tico più avan­zato. Il suo metodo ricorre agli stru­menti della genea­lo­gia di Fou­cault e si eser­cita sui saperi «grigi» dell’organizzazione d’impresa, facendo emer­gere le sfu­ma­ture del neo­li­be­ri­smo dalle bio­gra­fie dei mana­ger o dalla ster­mi­nata let­te­ra­tura sulle rela­zioni d’impresa pro­dotta in un secolo. Le mappe remote del pre­sente così trac­ciate dimo­strano che la tra­sfor­ma­zione delle strut­ture del governo oggi non pas­sano dai saperi «inco­ro­nati» dalle cat­te­dre, dalle isti­tu­zioni o dai loro corpi inter­medi, ma dalla cri­tica ser­rata degli oggetti «bassi» come il mana­ge­ment di impresa che hanno colo­niz­zato la vita.

Massimiliano Nicoli: Le risorse umane - Ediesse, Ita, Gennaio 2015

Massimiliano Nicoli: Le risorse umane 
Ediesse, Ita, Gennaio 2015

Read more @ Ediesse

La nozione di risorsa umana è diventata centrale per definire la «forma-impresa» che caratterizza il capitalismo di stampo neoliberale. Di che cosa è sintomo l’inflazione di questa nozione all’interno dei luoghi di lavoro e non solo? In che modo l’«umano» è diventato oggi la «risorsa» principale dell’economia capitalistica? In questo libro - attraverso una digressione che parte dalla disciplina di fabbrica novecentesca, si sofferma sull’invenzione del management moderno e arriva fino a oggi – si sostiene che la «risorsa umana», lungi dal segnalare l’avvento del lavoro infine umanizzato, è piuttosto il correlato di una tecnologia di potere che si situa all’incrocio fra il governo politico degli individui e l’organizzazione del lavoro. Ciò che sembra una nozione tecnica o neutrale proviene in realtà da un campo di conflitti e di lotte, e rappresenta l’esito attuale di una lunga storia di tentativi di addomesticare quella che Marx chiamava la «mano ribelle del lavoro».

Daniel Zamora and Foucault and Neoliberalism AUFS Event: Daniel Zamora – A Reply: Was Foucault Speaking in His Own Voice? @ AUFS blog, 06Jan2014

Foucault and Neoliberalism AUFS Event: 

Daniel Zamora – A Reply: Was Foucault Speaking in His Own Voice?

Read more @ AUFS blog

Daniel Zamora is a doctoral candidate in Sociology at the Université Libre de Bruxelles. Later in 2015, a translation of Critiquer Foucault: Les années 1980 et la tentation néolibérale will appear in English. Two recent discussions by Zamora on Foucault and Neoliberalism can be found at Jacobin.

First I would like to thank the four contributors and AUFS for devoting this series to the theme of Foucault and neoliberalism. All the interventions are highly stimulating and take us to the heart of a debate of great current moment. Obviously I am not able to undertake a general discussion of all the interventions and all the central questions they pose. But I am sure that the debate will not end here, that it will continue when the book is published in English. However, I would like to revisit the reasoning behind my argument, and why I do not think that it is a problem of interpreting Foucault’s words.

It is indeed true, as Stuart Elden notes in his response, that “Foucault’s mode of reading texts often makes it look like he is agreeing with arguments, when he is really trying to reconstruct them, to understand their logic, and so on.” Verena Erlenbusch, for her part, adds that I “[fail] to recognize that Foucault is not speaking in his own voice but paraphrasing important representatives of neoliberal thought.” The argument made by Stuart Elden clearly applies to Foucault’s lectures at the Collège de France. But while I am largely in agreement with his critique, I do not think it affects my argument. This is the case for two reasons.

First, because my argument is only secondarily based on Foucault’s lectures. Indeed, of the 45 footnotes citing Foucault in my text [in Critiquer Foucault], only 9 come from the lectures he delivered at the Collège de France. The other 36 are from texts, interviews, and interventions that he delivered over a period stretching from 1972 to 1983. Thus, when Foucault takes aim at the notion of a “right to health,” in terms that are ambiguous to say the least, or when he invokes the “perverse” effects of social security, he is responding to a national secretary of the CFDT [the French union federation] in one of the rare interviews that he devoted to this subject. To this, Verena Erlenbusch replies that “with regard to the interviews Foucault gave, it seems to me by no means necessary that Foucault always speaks in his own voice.” But on what basis can she claim this? Why, in this interview given in 1983, in which absolutely nothing indicates he was not speaking in his own name, should I think this is the case? And if it is the case, should we then conclude that there is no interview where Foucault ever gave his own opinion? If this were the case, it would be necessary to revise the great majority of the existing studies of Foucault.

The truth is much simpler: the person interviewing Foucault is very clearly addressing him and soliciting his opinion, using terms such as “do you think”, “in your opinion,” “is it your view that,” “do you support the goal I’ve just outlined?” Foucault is speaking in his own name; it is necessary to accept this and to try to understand why he thinks such things. The same goes for all the other interviews where he takes up neoliberal arguments in his own words and speaks in his own name. Understanding Foucault means above all to read him honestly, not to attribute to him the opinions that suit us and to ignore those we don’t like. As Michael Behrent notes, “the real danger consists in turning Foucault into our fantasy philosopher, the thinker we want him to be—an unrelenting critic of Marxism who somehow remained a kind of socialist; a Nietzschean who embraced solid progressive principles. This is just wishful thinking. Historicizing, in this instance, is the best form of critique.”

Second, I do not think we can exempt from discussion the texts of the Collège de France lectures. The least that can be said is that they are ambiguous, and that what he is saying in them is a matter of debate. In addition, the argument I make about Soléru’s negative income tax is based on a more general theoretical discussion about the shift from exploitation to exclusion, and towards those on the “margins” of the workforce. These two shifts – the end of the political centrality of the working class and the notion of exploitation – constitute, in my view, two of the principal theoretical evolutions that accompanied the advent of neoliberalism. And it cannot be denied that, on these two planes, in his books as well as his texts and interviews, Foucault participates in this evolution. Certainly all of this is complicated and demands much more thorough discussion. But I think that today these questions are quite pertinent and absolutely necessary.

Thus, to the criticism that this isn’t the “right question,” I would respond, on the contrary, that it is precisely the right question. The neoliberal offensive profoundly reconfigured the intellectual field of the 1970s, and to better oppose it we must understand its origins. In this sense, my response would take the form of that which Foucault gave to Chomsky concerning anarcho-syndicalism. In our haste to oppose neoliberalism, without first understanding the profound revolution of which it is the product, we risk perpetuating it in our discourse, however progressive that discourse may be.

In French:

Tout d’abord j’aimerais remercier les quatre contributeurs et le blog AUFS pour avoir consacré cette série au thème de Foucault et le néolibéralisme. Les interventions étaient toutes très stimulantes et nous plongent au coeur d’un débat qui est d’une grande actualité. Je ne pourrais évidemment pas entamer une discussion générale sur toutes les interventions et sur les questions centrales qu’elles posent. Je suis cependant certain que ce débat ne s’arrêtera pas ici et qu’il pourra continuer lors de la parution du livre en anglais. J’aimerais cependant revenir sur les raisons de mon argument et sur pourquoi je ne pense pas qu’il s’agisse d’un problème d’interprétation des propos du philosophe.

En effet, comme le note Stuart Elden dans sa réponse : « Foucault’s mode of reading texts often makes it look like he is agreeing with arguments, when he is really trying to reconstruct them, to understand their logic, and so on. » Verena Erlenbusch ajoute, pour sa part que je « fails to recognize that Foucault is not speaking in his own voice but paraphrasing important representatives of neoliberal thought. » L’argument que fait légitimement Stuart Elden porte bien évidemment sur les cours au Collège de France qu’a donné Foucault. Si je suis en grande partie d’accord avec cette critique, je pense cependant que cela ne porte pas atteinte à mon argument. Et cela pour deux raisons.

La première est que mon argument ne se base que secondairement sur les cours. En effet, sur les 45 notes renvoyant à Foucault dans mon texte, seuls 9 proviennent des leçons qu’a donné Foucault au Collège de France. Les 36 autres sont issues de textes, d’interviews et d’interventions que le philosophe a donné sur une période qui s’étend de 1972 à 1983. Ainsi, lorsque Foucault s’en prend à la notion du « droit à la santé », dans des termes pour le moins ambigus ou qu’il évoque les effets « pervers » de la sécurité sociale, il répond à un secrétaire national de la CFDT dans une des rares interviews qu’il consacre alors à ce sujet. A cela Verena Erlenbusch répond que « with regard to the interviews Foucault gave, it seems to me by no means necessary that Foucault always speaks in his own voice. ». Mais en vertu de quoi peut elle affirmer cela ? Pourquoi, lors de cet entretien donné en 1983 ou strictement rien n’indique qu’il ne parle pas en son nom, devrai-je penser que c’est le cas ? Et si c’est le cas, faut il alors considérer qu’il n’y a aucune interview ou Foucault donne son avis ? Si tel était le cas, il faudrait dès lors revoir une grande majorité des études faites sur Foucault. La réalité est beaucoup plus simple, la personne qui interroge Foucault s’adresse très clairement à lui et à son opinion dans des termes tels que « estimez vous ? », « a votre avis », « est-ce votre avis ? », « souscrivez vous à l’objectif que je viens d’énoncer ? »,… Foucault parle en son nom et il faut accepter ce fait et tenter de comprendre pourquoi il pense de telles choses. Il en va de même pour toutes les autres interviews où il reprend les arguments néolibéraux à son compte et s’exprime en son nom. Comprendre Foucault c’est avant tout le lire honnêtement et pas lui prêter les opinions qui nous conviennent et écarter celles qui nous plaisent moins. Comme le note Michael Behrent, « the real danger consists in turning Foucault into our fantasy philosopher, the thinker we want him to be—an unrelenting critic of Marxism who somehow remained a kind of socialist; a Nietzschean who embraced solid progressive principles. This is just wishful thinking. Historicizing, in this instance, is the best form of critique.”

Ensuite, je pense que nous ne pouvons pas écarter de toute discussion sur les textes des cours donnés au collège de France. Le moins qu’on puisse dire c’est qu’ils sont ambigus et que ce qui y dit est – au moins – matière à débat. Par ailleurs l’argument que je mène sur l’impôt négatif de Soléru se base sur une discussion théorique plus générale à propos du recentrage de l’exploitation vers l’exclusion et les figures aux « marges » du salariat. Ces deux déplacements – la fin de la centralité politique de la classe ouvrière et de la notion d’exploitation – constituent à mon sens deux des principales évolutions théoriques qui ont accompagné l’avènement du néolibéralisme. Et force est de constater, que sur ces deux plans, autant dans ses livres, ses textes et interviews, Foucault participe à cette évolution. Bien sur tout cela est beaucoup plus compliqué et demanderai une discussion beaucoup plus aboutie. Cependant je pense que ces questions sont tout à fait pertinentes aujourd’hui et absolument nécessaires.

Ainsi à la critique que ce n’est pas « la bonne question » à poser, je répondrais qu’au contraire, c’est précisément la bonne question. L’offensive néolibérale a profondément reconfiguré le champ intellectuel des années 70 et nous devons, pour mieux s’y opposer, en comprendre la genèse. En ce sens ma réponse sera à l’image de celle qu’offre Foucault à Chomsky concernant l’anarcho-syndicalisme. A vouloir trop vite s’opposer au néolibéralisme, sans, au préalable, en avoir compris la profonde révolution dont il est le produit, on risque de le voir se perpétuer dans nos discours, aussi progressistes soient-ils.

Thomas Nail: Michel Foucault, Accelerationist @ AUFS blog, 05Jan2014

Thomas Nail: 

Michel Foucault, Accelerationist 

@ AUFS blog, 05Jan2014

Read more @ An und für sich

Thomas Nail is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Denver. He is the author of Returning to Revolution: Deleuze, Guattari and Zapatismo (Edinburgh University Press, 2012) and The Figure of the Migrant (Stanford University Press, forthcoming). His publications can be downloaded at http://du.academia.edu/thomasnail

The Debate: So far the debate over Foucault’s relationship to neoliberalism is split between two positions. On one side there are those (Daniel Zamora, François Ewald, Michael Behrent, and others) who argue that Foucault’s “sympathy” for neoliberalism marks his later work as at least partially “compatible” with neoliberalism. On the other side many more (Stuart Elden, Peter Gratton, Steven Maynard, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, and others) argue that although “Foucault’s mode of reading texts often makes it look like he is agreeing with [neoliberal] arguments, he is really trying to reconstruct them, to understand their logic, and so on.” Furthermore, given Foucault’s commitment to Leftist groups like Le Groupe d’information sur les prisons, GIP and others, the argument goes, Foucault could not have been a neoliberal.

But perhaps this debate has been made unnecessarily polemic. The question of the debate is not, “was Foucault a neoliberal or not?”. As far as I can tell, no one is explicitly arguing that he was, only that he shared “some sympathies” with neoliberal theory: some anti-statism, some anti-authoritarian values, and so on. Is it not possible to share some points of interest or critique with a position that one does not fully accept? Thus, the more interesting question I think we should be asking is, “what commonalities or shared interests might exist between Foucault’s political thought and certain neoliberal ideas, and to what degree?”

Accelerationism: Posing the question in this way points us to a third position in the debate: that Michel Foucault was an accelerationist, or least expressed someaccelerationist tendencies. Accelerationism is the political belief that the best way to combat capitalism is actually by accelerating capitalism’s own inherent tendenciestoward anti-statism, decentralization, constant novelty, and experimentation. To be clear, this position should not be confused with either resignation (the hope for capitalist apocalypse) or dialectics (the hope that capitalism will transform itself into communism through contradiction). Accelerationism does not simply affirm capitalism or neoliberalism: it only affirms some tendencies in it. Much has been written recently on the history and theory of this position as well as criticisms of it. Michel Foucault, to my knowledge, has not been included in these discussions. But perhaps he should be.

I do not have the space in this short piece to mount a full defense of this position, but it is not very hard for me to imagine that Foucault might have been influenced by French accelerationism in his 1978-1979 lectures on neoliberalism, The Birth of Biopolitics. For instance, several of his colleagues at the University of Paris VIII, Vincennes had been espousing accelerationism for years. Deleuze and Guattari published Anti-Oedipus in 1972 where they write that our “flows are not yet deterritorialized enough, not decoded enough, from the viewpoint of a theory and a practice of a highly schizophrenic character. [The task then is] Not to withdraw from the process, but to go further, to ‘accelerate the process’” (AO, 239–240). Foucault wrote the preface to this accelerationist work. Two years later Jean-François Lyotard published Libidinal Economy, where he writes that “We abhor therapeutics and its vaseline, we prefer to burst under the quantitative excesses that you judge the most stupid. And don’t wait for our spontaneity to rise up in revolt either” (LE, 116).

Even if Foucault did not fully adopt these positions at the time, it seems like more than a coincidence that after their publication he is suddenly inspired to begin a new research program analyzing the features of twentieth century capitalism—something he had never attempted before, and something Deleuze himself had only just begun in 1972 with Guattari.

Accelerationism in The Birth of Biopolitics: In his new research program, Foucault located several points at which neoliberalism and Left wing struggles share some similar biopolitical features. First, they share a “state-phobia.” “All those who share in the great state phobia,” Foucault says, “should know that they are following the direction of the wind and that in fact, for years and years, an effective reduction of the state has been on the way, a reduction of both the growth of state control and of a ‘statifying’ and ‘statified’ (étatisante ou étatisée) governmentality born in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries” (BB, 191-192). Anti-state anarchists and neoliberals, despite their differences, have been working to reduce the power of the state for over a hundred years—and this tendency is winning.

Second, they share a valorization of previously non-economic phenomena like affect, leisure, intellect, desire, and other forms of so-called “immaterial labor.” As Foucault says in his lectures, “How is this capital made up? It is at this point that the reintroduction of labor or work into the field of economic analysis will make it possible, through a sort of acceleration or extension, to move on to the economic analysis of elements which had previously totally escaped it” [my italics] (BB, 226). Foucault is correct to describe this process of real subsumption as an “acceleration,” since it is precisely this tendency within capitalist production that keeps deterritorializing farther and experimenting with new markets (social capital, intellectual capital, cultural capital, etc). But it is also this same tendency that describes the revolutionary task of “moving beyond” the current order. The difference between the two is that capitalism is slowed down by the requirements of commodification, while the revolutionary has already moved on.

In the context of accelerationism, what we are witnessing in this renewed debate about Foucault’s relationship to neoliberalism is all too familiar. Deleuze, Guattari, and Lyotard have all been praised both as revolutionaries and so-called “post-modern capitalists.” Slavoj Žižek, for example, even argues both in the same chapter. “Deleuze,” he says, “more and more serves as the theoretical foundation of today’s anti-global Left” (OwB, xi). Eleven pages later he then argues that this foundation is only “masquerading as radical chic, effectively transform[ing] Deleuze into an ideologist of today’s ‘digital capitalism’” (OwB, xxii). But there is no contradiction. This is the point Žižek and others miss. Accelerationism is an affirmation of capitalist deterritorialization, but without the need for commodification and its axioms of exchange. Foucault was well aware of this theoretical position and even makes several points that are entirely “compatible” with accelerationism in his 1978-1979 lectures.

Foucault was not a neoliberal, but he may have experimented with accelerationism.

Foucault/Neoliberalism Mini-series @ AUFS blog:

Johanna Oksala: Never mind Foucault. What are the right questions for us?
Verena Erlenbusch: Neoliberalism and the genealogy of biopolitics
Gordon Hull: Why Foucault is still helpful on neoliberalism

Johanna Oksala: Never Mind Foucault: What Are the Right Questions for Us? @ AUFS blog, 04Jan2014

Johanna Oksala: 

Never Mind Foucault: What Are the Right Questions for Us? 

@ AUFS blog, 04Jan2014

Read more @ AUFS blog

Johanna Oksala is currently Academy of Finland Research Fellow (2012-2017) in the Department of Philosophy, History, Culture and Art Studies at the University of Helsinki, and a Visiting Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the New School for Social Research, USA (2013-2015). Oksala is the author of Foucault on Freedom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), How to Read Foucault (London: Granta Books, 2007), Foucault, Politics, and Violence (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2012), and Political Philosophy: All That Matters (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 2013). 

Daniel Zamora’s recent interview in Jacobin titled “Can We Criticize Foucault?” has sparked another discussion on Foucault’s alleged endorsement of neoliberalism. For those of us who did not know Foucault personally, the evidence for such a claim can only be found in his writings. I, for myself, have not found any such evidence yet. Zamora’s revelations that Foucault met with Lionel Stoléru several times seem inconclusive at best.

More importantly, this debate itself seems misguided to me. Whether Foucault had some secret sympathies for neoliberalism might obviously be of some biographical or historical interest, but theoretically the answer to this question would only be relevant if it disqualified his thought as a useful toolbox for the academic left today. Zamora’s aim seems to be to show that this is in fact the case. In a follow-up article to the initial interview he claims that Foucault was not asking the “right questions” due to his neoliberal leanings, and that his thought has therefore contributed to the disorientation of the left and to the dismantling of the welfare state.

In this short response I want to suggest that it is Zamora, and to some extent us too, as participants to this debate, who are not asking the right questions. We should not be asking whether we can criticize Foucault, nor should we be asking whether he endorsed neoliberalism. The answer to the first of these questions is an obvious yes: we have criticized him repeatedly and we should continue to do so. And when the answer to the second question is supposed to determine the theoretical and political relevance of his thought today, we are ultimately engaging in biographical speculation and ad hominem reasoning, the problems of which I do not need to point out here.

The only relevant question the academic left should be asking regarding Foucault’s analyses of neoliberalism is whether they provide us with any useful tools that can be successfully deployed against the current neoliberal hegemony. And I believe that the answer to this question is, significantly, also a yes. Foucault’s thought continues to provide an important theoretical perspective for the academic left today, and I also believe that his lectures on neoliberalism delivered at the Collège de France in 1979 offer a novel conceptual and theoretical framework for the critical analysis of neoliberalism today. It is my contention that his investigation of neoliberal governmentality represents in many respects a theoretical advance over the traditional leftist defenses of the welfare state that Zamora is hankering after. Foucault’s thought provides a more nuanced diagnostic approach to neoliberalism than traditional welfare socialism, because it enables us to account for neoliberalism’s constitutive effects. These effects include both new forms of the subject as well as new limitations on what are understood as viable and rational political options in today’s society.

I can only provide a brief outline here of what I take to be Foucault’s key contributions to a critical study of neoliberalism. I have to refer you to my publications for a more detailed argument.[i] I want to highlight three distinctive ideas in particular.

1. What makes Foucault’s philosophical interpretation of neoliberalism particularly helpful, in my view, is his critical analysis of it, not as an ideology, economic doctrine or political regime, but as a specific, rationally reflected and coordinated way of governing: a form of liberal governmental rationality or governmentality. Neoliberalism is thus not reducible to a set of economic policies such as limiting the regulation of capital, maximizing corporate profits, and dismantling the welfare state. As a form of governmentality neoliberalism extends beyond economic policy, or even the economic domain as traditionally conceived. A fundamental feature of neoliberal governmentality is not just the eradication of market regulation, for example, but the eradication of the border between the social and the economic: market rationality—cost-benefit calculation—must be extended and disseminated to all institutions and social practices. In other words, while in many socialist analyses neoliberalism is seen just as an intensification of capitalism, from a Foucaudian perspective it is in fact a distinctive organizing principle for the economic, but also for the social and political spheres.

Foucault’s approach also implies that neoliberalism and the state cannot be understood as simply antithetical to each other when they are understood to combine in the form of a rationally coordinated set of governmental practices. Hence, the political stakes do not come down to being for or against the state. Foucault was not suffering from “state-phobia” and explicitly warned the left against it. Our current problem, on the other hand, is not “the erosion of the state,” but its neoliberal reorganization.

2. Instead of treating neoliberalism as an ideological mask for a hidden truth, Foucault advocates a response to it on the level of the production of truth. The spread of neoliberalism has been difficult to stop in our current governmentality according to which economic progress, defined as GDP growth, is the unquestioned political end of good government and politically neutral economic truths are understood as the essential means for achieving it. The neoliberal economic argument has kept winning in this governmental game of truth: according to neoliberals, economic growth can be best achieved via free international trade, sound budgets—meaning normally fiscal austerity, which translates into cuts in welfare spending—low inflation, privatization, and the deregulation of markets. In such economic reasoning commodification and privatization, for example, are particularly effective means of speeding up growth given that GDP is measured in terms of market transactions.

The socialist critics of neoliberalism are undoubtedly right in demonstrating that its rise has been contemporaneous with the dramatic increase of the wealth of the elites. Since the global neoliberal turn in the 1970s, there has been an enormous spiralling of the levels of wealth in the top income categories. This new distribution of wealth is often presented as the primary aim of the neoliberal turn by its socialist critics: the neoliberal project has been a deliberate attempt to restore the power and the wealth of the capitalist classes.[ii] However, the models of resistance to neoliberalism become more complicated if we accept that the aim of neoliberal governmentality is to maximize economic growth – in other words, everybody’s material welfare, not just the welfare of the elite. The growing disparities of wealth are then perceived as the unfortunate, but inevitable consequence of neoliberal government and not as its conspiratorial aim. Since the end of the 1970s the left has repeatedly lost in the economic debates centred on the key question of economic growth. It has been forced to either accept “hard economic facts” or to back up its political demands with moral arguments—arguments that have appeared as misplaced compassion for those failing to give their lives proper entrepreneurial shape.[iii]

In other words, the left has not been disarmed or disorientated by post-structuralism nor has it been duped by dubious ideological propaganda; rather, it has been defeated by economic truths. Truth poses a far more difficult political conundrum than ideology or the restoration of class privilege because opposing it politically appears irrational. The incongruous question that the left has had to face is: how can we resist politically economic truths, which are supposed to be politically neutral?

3. The third key issue that points beyond traditional socialist welfare politics concerns the political subject. Foucault’s perhaps most important contribution to political theory has been his philosophical insight that any analysis of power relations must recognize how these relations are constitutive of the subjects involved in them. This insight must continue to remain central when we try to understand and evaluate the political impact of neoliberalism. The Foucauldian critique against traditional forms of Marxist theory has targeted the latter’s inability to account for the different ways in which subjects are constituted in intersecting, capillary networks of power.

Foucault theorizes neoliberal governmentality as a particular mode of producing subjectivity: it produces subjects who act as individual entrepreneurs across all dimensions of their lives. He shows how governable subjects are understood as self-interested and rational beings navigating the social realm by constantly making rational choices based on economic knowledge and the strict calculation of the necessary costs and desired benefits. They are atomic individuals whose natural self-interest and tendency to compete must be fostered and enhanced. Instead of capitalists and workers, in contemporary society everybody has become an entrepreneur of the self attempting to maximize his or her human capital. A Foucauldian approach thus shows that the political impact of neoliberalism is not limited to the dismantling of the welfare state, but extends even to the most private and personal aspects of our being. As a form of governmentality neoliberalism is constitutive of our conceptions of politics and political action, but also of ourselves as political subjects.

As Zamora notes, relations of power within the academic field have changed considerably since the end of the 1970s. Tables have turned: Marxism has declined and Foucault’s thought has occupied a central place. Hence, it is Foucault’s turn now to be attacked by the radical Marxist margins. A critical analysis of contemporary capitalism is a pressing task for political theory today and I am sympathetic to the attempts to combine Marxist and poststructuralist frameworks. However, it is my contention that the poststructuralist turn in political thought in the 1980s and 1990s was an important advance. Now its theoretical and political force has to be redirected to the overlapping social, political, economic, and ecological crises facing us. Anything else would be dangerous nostalgia.

[i] See e.g. Johanna Oksala, Foucault, Politics, and Violence (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2013); Johanna Oksala, ‘Foucault, Feminism and Neoliberal Governmentality’, Foucault Studies, No. 16, pp. 32-52, 2013; Johanna Oksala, ‘Neoliberalism and the Feminine Subject’, Public Seminar, http://www.publicseminar.org/2014/12/neoliberalism-and-the-feminine-subject/.

[ii] See e.g. David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).

[iii] See Wendy Brown, Edgework: Critical Essays on Knowledge and Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 56.

Foucault/Neoliberalism Mini-series @ AUFS blog:

Thomas Nail: Michel Foucalt, Accelerationist
Verena Erlenbusch: Neoliberalism and the genealogy of biopolitics
Gordon Hull: Why Foucault is still helpful on neoliberalism

Gordon Hull: Why Foucault is Still Helpful on Neoliberalism @ AUFS blog, 03Jan2015

Gordon Hull Why Foucault is Still Helpful on Neoliberalism @ An und für sich blog, 03Jan2015

Read more @ ANFS blog

Gordon Hull is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Director of Center for Professional and Applied Ethics at The University of North Carolina Charlotte. His Hobbes and the Making of Modern Political Thought was published by Continuum in 2009.

The conceptual core of Daniel Zamora’s “Can We Criticize Foucault,” in which he argues that Foucault’s late writings end up advocating the same things neoliberalism does, seems to me to be the proposal that Foucault “seemed to imagine a neoliberalism that wouldn’t project its anthropological models on the individual, that would offer individuals greater autonomy vis-à-vis the state.” In a follow-up piece, Zamora concludes that Foucault “doesn’t advocate neoliberalism, but he adopts all of its critiques of the welfare state.” That’s clearly a problem, though I am aware that I’ve got the benefit of a generation of hindsight about neoliberalism. I also don’t know many of the writings in question, and so I’m reluctant to say anything about the (for lack of better terms) sociological and biographical questions at play.

However, I have no trouble saying that if Foucault thought neoliberalism wouldn’t project its models of subjectivity onto individuals, he was mistaken. I’m also not sure he (consistently) thought that: the Birth of Biopolitics lectures emphasized that one of the main innovations of neoliberalism over classical liberalism was precisely the awareness that markets weren’t natural, and had to be nurtured by the state (Bernard Harcourt underscores the point here), and he emphasizes entrepreneurship of the self as a neoliberal vision of subjectivity. Whatever he thought about social welfare programs, phrasing things this way allows us to focus on the important question: Foucault says that “writing only interests me to the extent that it is incorporated into the reality of a battle.” Does Foucault’s writing offer any weapons against neoliberalism, even if he didn’t realize it?

If we focus on the late 1970s texts (avoiding the vexed questions about Foucault’s move to “ethics” in the 1980s, though I’m going to put things in a way that gestures to them), I find the work on biopower – which Zamora barely mentions – consistently very productive, with one significant caveat. When Foucault discusses biopower in History of Sexuality I, it’s to propose that techniques of population management and of disciplinary power are two halves of the same biopolitical coin, and that this kind of governance is emerging at the expense of older juridical models of power. In later interviews (e.g., “Subject and Power”), Foucault makes the claim that he’s always been concerned with how subjects come to be formed. That claim has been treated as an about-face away from power, but it’s not hard to see that the production of certain kinds of subjects – “insane” or “abnormal” or “docile” – was a central focus of nearly all of Foucault’s theoretical work on power.

This gives us a path forward: in the Birth of Biopolitics course, it seems to me that what Foucault achieves is an understanding of neoliberal theory as evidencing a shift in biopower away from older, public health models (social security, sanitation projects, etc.), to more nuanced efforts to mold individuals directly. Nikolas Rose has the authoritative book on this shift in medicine generally, and you can see it in individual cases like smoking cessation programs. It also emerges quite clearly in Foucault’s discussion of Becker and crime: following neoclassical microeconomics, Becker rethinks crime as a matter of balancing incentives. From this angle, neoliberalism needs to be thought as a dispositive of biopower, one that presents a new “truth” for the biopolitical subject, who is supposed to instantiate homo economicus, and when he or she does not, is to be nudged in that direction by adjustments in penality or other social policies (I am not the first to make this sort of point; see, e.g., here and here).

That insight – which treats homo economicus as the central project of neoliberal ethical subjectification – seems to me to have a lot of traction, as it draws attention to, and makes visible some connections between, a diverse set of techniques of governance that would otherwise appear disconnected. For example, the U.S. shift in worker retirement packages from “defined benefit” pensions to “defined contribution” 401(k) plans over the course of the 1980s is an excellent example of the drive to treat workers as entrepreneurs of themselves (as are efforts to transfer risk to individual workers, etc.). But it also coordinates with late 1990’s revisions in copyright law, the effect of which is to enable digital rights management routines that force users to watch advertising and copyright notices prior to seeing a movie, thereby educating those users that they are consumers. It helps us to explain the treatment of higher education in terms of “return on investment” (it should be remembered that Becker’s Human Capital was about education). It also gives us something to say about the appalling disrespect for privacy ensconced in the “click here to accept” models of privacy “self-management,” which are universally presented as how privacy should be understood, and nearly universally acknowledged as failing. It even explains the rise of behavioral economics, as the discipline dedicated to the study of how individuals fail to behave as homo economicus, and how to remedy the situation.

The caveat is that Foucault’s work here doesn’t say enough about law: he tends to downplay the continuing importance of law in general, and the juridical system – the courts – in particular. However, the current regulatory and political environment clearly displays complex interactions between both juridical and biopower, including inside the courts. This matters partly because neoliberal biopower often relies heavily upon statutory or juridical regimes (Exhibit A: “Obamacare”). Indeed, as Duncan Kennedy noted, law sets the “framework of ground rules” where social interactions and bargaining can take place, “including such basic rules as that corporations can ‘own’ factories, that no one ‘owns’ the ocean, that you have no legal obligation to help a starving stranger, that workers can sell their labor and must refrain from taking its product home with them” and so forth (86).

For this sort of reason, Foucault’s tendency not to think of the role of law in subjectification is a significant gap, even if it’s something that neoliberalism tries to hide behind an exoteric libertarianism. We need a lot more analysis of the regulatory state and administrative law, how they have (or have not) become more biopolitical over the last fifty years, and what that means for all of us as subjects. The need for this analysis in the U.S. context is particularly acute, as the Constitution establishes a series of juridical rights. Because these are expressed as juridical rights, and because the Supreme Court legitimates current decisions in part with reference to previous ones, the dynamics of power in the Court don’t cleanly map a juridical/biopolitical dimension. My own, initial forays into this topic, which look at things like the relation of law, juridical and sovereign power in state surveillance; the willingness of courts to use juridical law to achieve biopolitical results in the case of wife-beating laws; and a recent death penalty case; indicate a very complex relation that really has not been studied in the depth it deserves. But the model of subjectivity presupposed by juridical power is not at all like the one presupposed by neoliberal biopower, and it often comes to the courts to negotiate between them.

Foucault/Neoliberalism Mini-series @ AUFS blog:

Johanna Oksala: Never mind Foucault. What are the right questions for us?
Verena Erlenbusch: Neoliberalism and the genealogy of biopolitics
Thomas Nail: Michel Foucault, Accelerationist

Verena Erlenbusch: Neoliberalism and the Genealogy of Biopolitics @ AUFS Event, 02Jan2015

Verena Erlenbusch: Neoliberalism and the Genealogy of Biopolitics 

@ AUFS Event, 02Jan2015

Read more @ An und für sich blog



Verena Erlenbusch is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Memphis. In much of her research, Erlenbusch brings to bear Foucault's genealogical method on the phenomenon of terrorism. She has two noteworthy pieces forthcoming: “Foucault und die Realitätsbedingungen leiblicher Erfahrung” (Foucault and the Conditions of Existence of Embodied Experience) in Leiblichkeit und Politik, edited by Thomas Bedorf and Tobias Klass. Velbrück Wissenschaft, 2015 (forthcoming) and "Terrorism: Knowledge, Power, Subjectivity," in Terrorism as Practice: Using Critical Methodologies for the Study of Terrorism, edited by Jacob Stump and Priya Dixit. Routledge, 2014 (forthcoming).

Daniel Zamora’s edited volume Critiquer Foucault: Les années 1980 et la tentation néolibérale (Criticizing Foucault: The 1980s and the neoliberal temptation), published in November 2014 with Éditions Aden, has been hotly debated over the past few weeks on the philosophical blogosphere. My contribution to the conversation here has two main purposes. First, since the volume will remain unavailable for English readers until later in 2015, I want to give a brief overview of the chapters assembled by Zamora. Second, I’d like to offer some thoughts on an aspect that appears to me to be largely absent from discussions of Foucault’s relationship with neoliberalism, namely the hermeneutical salience of Foucault’s methodology. This is to say that Zamora et al.’s failure to engage Foucault’s methodology leads to a very specific reading, a misreading to my mind, of Foucault’s project. As opposed to their interpretation of Foucault as interested in the political claims made by neoliberals, I suggest that Foucault is concerned with the production of neoliberalism as a regime of truth (thanks to Andrew Dilts for his helpful comments here).

That Zamora’s collection has caused quite a stir has, I believe, more to do with Zamora’s interview with Jacobin Magazine, provocatively titled “Can We Criticize Foucault?,” than with the book itself. For many of the arguments presented in the volume are neither as revolutionary nor as provocative as the interview would make it seem. This is, in part, because Foucault’s relationship with neoliberalism has been subject to critical scrutiny by Clive Barnett (also here and here), John Clarke, Mitchell Dean, Andrew Dilts (also here), Colin Gordon (and here), Trent Hamann, Bernard Harcourt (also here), Nicholas Kiersey (as well as here and here), Thomas Lemke, Johanna Oksala, Jason Read, Keith Tribe, and Shannon Winnubst, but also because in addition to three new pieces by Daniel Zamora, Jan Rehmann, and Jean-Loup Amselle, the volume includes previously published work by Michael Scott Christofferson, Michael C. Behrent, and Loïc Wacquant. Moreover, the chapters in Critiquer Foucault are rather impressive in their careful evaluation as well as application of Foucault’s work. Based on his 2004 French Intellectuals against the Left, Christofferson’s piece, for instance, raises some critical points concerning Foucault’s account of power, but otherwise offers a nuanced explanation of Foucault’s arguably surprising endorsement of André Glucksmann as the result of a strategic alliance between the philosophers. Wacquant’s contribution, a condensed version of his conclusion, or “Theoretical Coda,” of his 2009 Punishing the Poor, draws on his work on the American carceral system to highlight the limitations of Foucault’s examination of penal practices in Discipline and Punish, but it is hardly surprising that Foucault’s account of the emergence of disciplinary mechanisms in eighteenth-century Europe must be modified when applied to penal practices under conditions of twentieth-century American neoliberalism. More provocatively, perhaps, Behrent, whose essay is a French translation of his 2009 article “Liberalism without Humanism,” argues that Foucault actually endorsed neoliberalism. Yet, he carefully situates Foucault’s alleged fascination with neoliberalism in the context of the political situation of post-war France and examines the significance of economic liberalism’s anti-humanism in rousing Foucault’s interest.

More provocative, perhaps, are the three new pieces by Zamora, Rehman, and Amselle, who diagnose a certain conservatism in Foucault’s late work. For Amselle, this conservatism is manifest in Foucault’s local strategies of critique and resistance, which he regards as representative of a paradigm shift from revolt to indignation. Foucault’s concern with the individual, illustrated by Foucault’s interest in the care of the self, as well as his focus on zones of autonomy, which has replaced an attempt to devise strategies for usurping power to change the world, is, Amselle says, eminently conservative and perfectly compatible with neoliberalism. Without being able to respond to this argument in detail, it is worth pointing out that, for Foucault, for resistance to be effective, it must operate on the same level as technologies of power. As a consequence, as Dilts rightly emphasizes, Foucault’s engagement with neoliberalism allows him to think about modes of being that are, precisely, alternatives to neoliberal forms of subjectivity.

Based on a very helpful discussion of the notion of governmentality, Rehmann criticizes Foucault for not examining liberalism as a practice. Rather, Foucault is said to “identify himself with his object of study without critical distance and remain at the level of empathetic and intuitive repetition” (146). He suggests that Foucault’s failure to adhere to his own analytic distinction, the multiple meanings he gives to the concept governmentality, and his inability to tie governmentality to structures of social domination result in a failure to grasp the relationship between domination and subjectivation under conditions of neoliberalism on Foucault’s part as well as on the part of those scholars engaged in Foucaultian governmentality studies. What is needed to bridge the gap between technologies of domination and technologies of the self, Rehman argues, is a reinterpretation of Foucaultian governmentality studies from the perspective of a critical theory of ideology. While I agree with Rehman’s criticism of an unreflexive and unmodified application of Foucault’s notion of governmentality to different contexts, his turn to ideology critique takes Foucault’s project in a decisively non-Foucaultian direction that, while certainly a worthwhile intellectual endeavor, risks distorting Foucault’s claims about (neo-)liberalism and governmentality. For Foucault is not interested in a history of ideologies, which evaluates discourses by reference to the accuracy of their representation of reality, but a history of the rules that make statements true or false, the norms and mechanisms that make use of these statements to manage and control the behavior of individuals, and the kinds of subject one can be in a context shaped by particular forms of knowledge and certain relations of power. Foucault’s lectures, then, should be read as an attempt to analyze neoliberalism as a phenomenon that not only plays out alongside the axes of knowledge, power, and subjectivation, but also elucidates how knowledge, power, and subjectivation take effect in a biopolitical regime.

A similar rejoinder can be made to Zamora’s chapter, in which he suggests that the late Foucault is sympathetic to and has, in fact, been seduced by and converted to neoliberalism. Zamora develops this argument on the basis of a reading of Foucault’s lectures Security, Territory, Population and The Birth of Biopolitics, among other texts, where he takes Foucault to rather faithfully accept neoliberal doctrine. As evidence for this claim he cites, among other things, Foucault’s statements about the negative economic effects of systems of social security, his taking up of the classical neoliberal argument that social security benefits the rich at the expense of the poor, and the fact that Foucault dedicates a long section of his lectures to the idea of a negative tax proposed by Lionel Stoléru. While Foucault indeed says and does these things, Zamora fails to recognize that Foucault is not speaking in his own voice but paraphrasing important representatives of neoliberal thought.

As Stuart Elden has pointed out in his reflections on Zamora’s Jacobin interview, “Foucault’s mode of reading texts often makes it look like he is agreeing with arguments, when he is really trying to reconstruct them, to understand their logic, and so on.” This way of reading is part of Foucault’s analytic strategy, which can be described in rather general terms as a kind of historical-philosophical inquiry that engages empirical historical content in order to uncover the conditions of possibility of discursive and non-discursive practices. Instead of trying to refer practices back to a single origin, fundamental principle, or first cause that made them necessary, he asks about the historically specific conditions that make them possible. To reveal the contingency of what appears to be necessary, Foucault proposes to uncover the history of the objectification of phenomena that are usually assumed to be objectively given. Employing a nominalist principle of reversal, he inverts traditional explanations of social, historical, or cultural phenomena and shows that they are not causing certain events, practices, institutions, laws, and so on, but are themselves effects of the things they are assumed to cause.

Foucault mobilizes two analytic strategies to pursue this critical historical-philosophical inquiry. The first one, archaeology, aims to reveal the historically variable conditions of possibility of systems of knowledge as they are expressed in scientific theories or invested in practices. As a “method specific to the analysis of local discursivities” (“Society Must Be Defended,” 10-11), archaeology is not interested in their truth or falsehood, legitimacy or illegitimacy, reality or illusion, ideology or scientificity, but in the epistemic ground on which these distinctions become possible. In other words, Foucault’s archaeologies seek to undermine claims to universal truth by showing that what counts as true and false at any given moment is historically contingent and variable. Yet, while a description of what has been said and done allows Foucault to show that the conditions of possibility of knowledge are contingent, this strategy is not enough to also say something about how the emergence of new ways of thinking, knowing, and acting becomes possible. To address this second question, Foucault deploys genealogy, the “indispensable historical other side to the genealogy of knowledge” (Psychiatric Power, 239), which operates as a “tactic which, once it has described these local discursivities, brings into play the desubjugated knowledges that have been released from them” (“Society Must Be Defended,” 10-11). That is to say, genealogy traces the random events and contingent historical practices that constitute the conditions of emergence of systems of thought, whose internal structures are the object of archaeology.

Consider, as an example, Foucault’s genealogy of penal practices in Discipline and Punish, which opens by contrasting the public torture of Damiens the regicide in 1757 with Faucher’s rules for prisoners. Separated by a mere 80 years, each of these events, Foucault says, represents a distinct penal style. Foucault’s aim is not merely to describe and contrast these styles (the archaeological project), but to show how the transformation of punishment became possible (the genealogical project). To this end, he maps those disparate and unrelated practices, techniques, institutions, and mechanisms, whose colonization and co-optation gave rise to a system of disciplinary power. He thus shows that disciplinary power was not the inevitable result of a predestined historical process or the intentional doings of rational agents, but the accidental outcome of contingent events. To elucidate this new form of power, Foucault considers the writings of Jeremy Bentham, whose Panopticon he regards not as a normative model of penal practice but as the architectural figure of disciplinary power.

In the same way Discipline and Punish examines practices of punishment to develop a genealogy of disciplinary power, it might be argued that the lectures The Birth of Biopolitics constitute (part of) Foucault’s genealogy of biopolitics on the basis of a consideration of neoliberalism. In keeping with his effort to reveal the historical a priori, or the conditions of possibility, of discursive and non-discursive practices, Foucault wants to show how it was possible for neoliberals like Gary Becker or Lionel Stoléru to articulate their economic programs. He finds these conditions of possibility of neoliberalism in a biopolitical concern with the regulation and management of populations and in regulatory practices of environmental modification, whose genealogy Foucault traces from the Christian pastorate through a new art of government that emerged in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In this genealogy of biopolitics, neoliberals like Becker function, in analogy to the architectural figure of Bentham’s Panopticon in Discipline and Punish, as intellectual figures, if you will, of neoliberalism. In light of my argument for a genealogical reading of Foucault’s lectures, then, Zamora’s claim that Foucault has “made his choice” between capitalism and socialism (111), right and left, seems to be missing the point of Foucault’s inquiries – for these categories, at least as we commonly understand them today, only make sense once the distinction between them has been accepted. Part of Foucault’s concern in his genealogy of biopolitics, however, is to map the logical space in which these distinctions become possible in the first place. Perhaps it is this interest in the historical a priori of the divide between “the Left” and “the Right,” rather than a clear taking of sides, that explains at least in part Zamora et al.’s unease with Foucault’s work on neoliberalism (I owe this point to Colin Koopman).

To say that Foucault’s writings on neoliberalism have to be read against the background of his genealogy of biopolitics is, of course, not to deny Foucault’s keen interest in neoliberalism, and specifically in the neoliberal understanding of the subject. Neither do I mean to suggest that Foucault’s lectures are the last word on neoliberalism and biopolitics. As he himself was well aware, genealogy is infinite and incomplete because not only are concepts, statements, and practices subject to continuous change, but empirical content can always be reexamined on different levels and according to a different periodization. Foucault, in other words, has given us a model of inquiry, which calls for a continuation and modification of his work in the form of our own genealogies of neoliberalism that are attentive to our own historical context. Such a project appears to me more interesting, more important, and also more in tune with Foucault’s ambition to write not for readers but for users who could borrow from his tool-box to pursue their own investigations, than the question if we can criticize Foucault.

Foucault/Neoliberalism Mini-series @ AUFS blog:

Johanna Oksala: Never mind Foucault. What are the right questions for us?
Gordon Hull: Why Foucault is still helpful on neoliberalism
Thomas Nail: Michel Foucault, Accelerationist