everyday life. The fact that he pursued these insights in lectures that were not further developed into full-blown texts before his death in 1984 accounts for the long delay in cognizance of that fact. (The current Foucault renaissance dates from posthumous publication of the Collège de France lecture transcripts over the past decade.) His perspicuity takes on greater significance in retrospect, since it is conventionally said that the political ascendancy of the neoliberals dates from the early 1980s. Figure 2.4 in chapter 2 also demonstrates that interest in the neoliberals (outside of the thought collective itself ) was not widely common prior to that date. Thus, Foucault was reconnoitering a development in its infancy, one that most people in his circles had up till then ignored, and which has since proven to be far more consequential than it was in his own lifetime.
Let us venture even further in giving him his due. Foucault appears to have been the trailblazer when it came to insisting that power operates on the microlevel through the production of subjectivity in the multitude. He highlighted a number of phenomena characteristic of the neoliberal project that have since been topics of frequent commentary, when not taken as obvious. A short list (with citations to his lectures) would include:
A) The fragmentation of identity is attendant upon
an entrepreneurial version of the self.
The individual’s life must be lodged, not within a framework of a big enterprise like the firm, or if it comes to it, the state, but within the framework of a multiplicity of diverse enterprises connected up to and entangled with each other . . . [It] must make him into a sort of permanent and multiple enterprise.8
B) An entrepreneurial regimen for the self will eventually extend
the purview of its calculus to every conceivable social activity,
and not just those narrowly oriented to pecuniary profit.
This happens because it renders persons more susceptible to control, and not simply due to the profit motive. As Foucault put it, one extends the “grid, the schema, and the model of Homo economicus to not only every economic actor, but to every social actor in general inasmuch as he or she gets married, for example, or commits a crime, or raises children, gives affection and spends time with the kids . . . Homo economicus is someone who is eminently governable.” Entrepreneurship was insensibly downgraded as a narrow societal function and redefined as a set of character traits.9
C) A stance of cold calculation of interest will eventually be reprocessed as a new, warm, soulful form of moral economy. 10
Quoting Margaret Thatcher: “Choice is the essence of ethics; good and evil only have meaning insofar as man is free to choose.” In the neoliberal imagination, “faith-based charities” “were crowded out by the rise of the welfare state and would grow again . . . if government were to reduce its profile or remove itself entirely.”11
D) “The malleability of the self presumed by the theory of human capital investment will extend down to the most basic corporeal level, which will eventually mean investment in genetic manipulation.” 12
Foucault was the first to insist that Becker’s “human capital” was a first move in the neoliberal disintegration of the self. This race to the empty bottom is the terminal meaning of “biocapital.”
E) “The Entrepreneurial self cannot be passive, but must move strategically in a world rife with risk. Hence, reward and punishment are accepted by the agent as the outcome of calculated risks, not as the dictates of ‘justice.’” 13
Casinos are not cynical scams taking advantage of the naïve and improvident; they are the practice tables for life. Risk is the oxygen for the entrepreneurial self, but also the means through which failure is leached of its political valence. The failed should accept the verdict of the market without complaint or pleas for help. Insecurity is the incubator for risk-loving behavior. The birth of actuarial tables is the death of tragedy.
F) Ignorance is the natural state of mankind, and the guarantor of neoliberal order. The neoliberal self is comfortable with this ignorance.
“Everyone must be uncertain with regard to the collective outcome if this positive collective outcome is really to be expected. Being in the dark and blindness of all the economic agents is absolutely necessary . . . Invisibility is absolutely indispensable. It is an invisibility which means that no economic agent should or can pursue the collective good. But we must no doubt go further than economic agents; not only no economic agent, but also no political agent . . . You cannot because you do not know, and you do not know because you cannot know.”14 Ignorance as the linchpin of the neoliberal project was already stressed in the previous chapter. These quotes reveal that Foucault got there first.
There are undoubtedly further observations on the neoliberal approach to everyday life salted throughout the lectures; but these will suffice to demonstrate that Foucault was poised to elucidate the microstructures of a new sort of power. He was fascinated with the prospect that the classical liberal notion of a governmentalized “population” in a designated “territory,” the very calling card of the prince, was being downsized and recast by neoliberalism through its transformation of the disciplined body into an autogoverned federation of temporary investments. However, in stark contrast to his previous writings, he was not teasing out the operation of power on the ground and under the skin, so to speak; instead, he was extrapolating certain trends from the theoretical writings of some of the most prominent members of the Neoliberal Thought Collective. These lectures did not resemble his prior texts, usually amply stocked with anthropological nuggets from archival sources. The shift in register was a little odd. It was as if he had taken in his waning years to writing the ethnography of the twenty-second century by reading H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine.15 Or, to clumsily switch metaphors in midstream, it was as if Foucault were thumbing through an IKEA catalog, trying to decide what sort of deck chairs to order, without paying any attention to whether the furniture would come assembled, or indeed, whether he was furnishing the deck of the Titanic or the QE2. (Foucault compares governmentality to the piloting of a ship in The Birth of Biopolitics.)
I am not the first to demur that Foucault’s treatment of neoliberalism leaves something to be desired. It seems that a few scholars are coming around to the position that Foucault managed to be so very prescient with regard to everyday neoliberalism precisely because he took on board such a large amount of the neoliberal doctrine as a font of deep insight into the nature of governmentality. Although he would never have openly adopted the normative stance, he was converging on the assessment that it was “right,” at least as description of the contemporary dispositif.16 Again, to be clear, I am not accusing Foucault of being a member of the Neoliberal Thought Collective—an absurd counterfactual—but rather, suggesting that he shared quite a bit of common ground with their doctrines, and was coming to appreciate that incongruous fact toward the end of his life.
The main common denominator of the later Foucault and the neoliberals was located in the attitude toward economics. Earlier, in Les Mots et les Choses, Foucault had treated political economy as just another epiphenomenon of the episteme, on a par with philology and natural history.17 By the time we get to The Birth of Biopolitics, somehow the economy had become elevated as the privileged locus of the “site of truth”: the Archimedean point that allows a critique of autocratic state power. “The possibility of limitation and the question of truth are both introduced into governmental reason through political economy . . . it was political economy that made it possible to ensure the self-limitation of governmental reason.” And not just any old political economy. Supposedly lacking a market, Foucault denied that socialism had ever possessed its own governmentality or governmental rationality. It was not Marx,
