Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste

by Philip Mirowski

  It is predominantly the story of an entrepreneurial self equipped with promiscuous notions of identity and selfhood, surrounded by simulacra of other such selves. It tags every possible disaster as the consequences of risk-bearing, the personal fallout from making “bad choices” in investments. It is a world where competition is the primary virtue, and solidarity a sign of weakness. Consequently, it revels in the public shaming of the failed and the hapless. It replaces the time-honored ambition to “know yourself” with the exhortation to “express yourself,” with everything the bunco shift in verbs implies. It counsels you to outsource the parts of your life you find irksome. The effect of this congeries of technologies, entertainments, mobilizations, and distractions has been first and foremost to reinforce the exoteric version of the neoliberal self, but more important, has served to so addle and discombobulate the populace that they end up believing that adoption of neoliberal notions constitutes wicked rebellion against the powers that be, corporations, and a corrupt political class. The nimble trick of portraying a neoliberal world as an insurgency always on the edge of defeat, a roiling rage against the system, the rebel bloom of dissent from a stodgy cronyism of corporate and government governance, not to mention the epitome of all futuristic hope, is the secret weapon of the Russian doll structure, deflecting the gale-force winds of prolonged economic contraction. It offers more, better neoliberalism as the counter to a sputtering neoliberalism, all the while disguising any acknowledgment of that fact. It is the promotion of ignorance as the neoliberal first line of defense.

  Discipline and Furnish: Foucault on Neoliberalism

  One of the better ways to become aware of everyday neoliberalism is to approach it from a slightly oblique angle. Many works of art have set out to do just that; one of my favorites is Gary Shteyngart’s popular novel Super Sad True Love Story. The overarching narrative line of this vaguely futuristic novel involves the political collapse of the “American Restoration Authority” and a coup by a for-profit security firm, backed by Chinese investors in American government debt. But the author is less fixated upon such macro-level political science fiction than his plausible exaggerations of trends in the organization of everyday life. For instance, urban streets are equipped with “Poles” that give instant LED readouts of your credit ranking as you pass by, accompanied by personalized investment advice; the protagonist works for the Post Human Services Corporation, which provides unspecified rejuvenation services to those of advanced age (that is, over thirty) by means of prostheses. Everyone wears a device called an “apparat,” which continually streams data between people in near proximity, and allow the user to FAC (Form a Community) on the fly by scanning a standardized set of statistics concerning compatibility, income, and history:

  Streams of data were now fighting for time and space around us. The pretty girl I had just FACed was projecting my MALE HOTNESS at 120 out of 800, PERSONALITY 450, and something called SUSTAINABILITY at 630. The other girls were sending me similar figures . . . The bar was now utterly aflash with smoky data spilling out of a total of fifty-nine apparati, 68 percent of them belonging to the male of the species. The masculine data scrolled on my screen. Our average income hovered at a respectable but not especially uplifting 190,000 yuan-pegged dollars. We were looking for girls who appreciated us for what we were.5

  This might sound like a slightly less gloomy version of the Panopticon of Foucauldian fame; but in the novel, everyone just treats it as uninflected second nature, a logical pedestrian response to a set of desires that would naturally arise in any social setting. People are “free” to use the apparat or not; people are free to alter their personal peccadilloes that factor into the statistical summaries; people are even free to dissimulate and misrepresent their “true” selves, whatever those might be. Politics has become so outré that the possible impending collapse of the government is itself reduced to a set of abstract statistics, which the individual feeds into his strategic risk calculations on the apparat. Revolution is just another occasion for disaster porn and reshuffling the portfolio, rather than a transformation of history. Shteyngart does mention a few characters who recoil from using the apparat, but they are portrayed as backward Russians whose quaint obsessions date from a bygone era of buggy whips and communism.

  I can imagine my reader poised to retort, “That was precisely Foucault’s point!” Power is not simply exercised between the ruler and the ruled; it has been integrated directly into the makeup of modern agency, it fills up the pores of our most unremarkable day; it is the default option of our reflex assumptions about what others think and do. It gets under our skin; which is one way to try to understand what Foucault meant by his seductive term “biopolitics.”6 Yet, as I have already hinted, leaning on Foucault as a guide to everyday neoliberalism can be a treacherous proposition, at best.

  First, let us accord him his due. Foucault read some of the most important members of the NTC, from the ordoliberals to Gary Becker, when it was highly unfashionable to do so. He did not simply recapitulate their writings, but rather drew out a range of stunning implications that ventured far beyond the exoteric knowledge then being broadcast by the collective. Accomplishing this back in 1979, he was the first to appreciate the vaunting ambition of neoliberals to recast not just markets and government, but the totality of human existence into a novel modality, to be disciplined and punished by structures of power/knowledge. He also insisted, contrary to their deceptive assertions, that it was no “return” to classical liberal principles: “Neoliberalism is not Adam Smith; neoliberalism is not market society.”7 He transcended the moralism of those who denounced the commodification of 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 cha
racter 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, but Adam Smith and Röpke and Hayek, that Foucault identified as the key tradition in governmentality.18

  One way to interpret this is to say that the cast of historical figures in capitalist societies operated within a regime of truth that elevated the construct identified as “the economy” to pride of place in their exercise of power; and further, the appeal to self-limitation was a means to their expansion of power; but that does not correspond to what appears in the lectures. Rather, Foucault seeks to interrogate government as the assemblage of techniques, beliefs, practices, and excuses that try to maintain order; but he leaves “the economy” as the independent Representative of the Real, a placeholder without interrogation or even any description. The market as portrayed by Foucault in his late lectures on neoliberalism is the sole legitimate site for the production of indubitable knowledge of the whole; in other words, an absent deity rendered in a manner no different from Hayek or Stigler or Friedman or Buchanan. The “market” (always referenced as a monolithic entity) provides the boundary condition for governmentality, because it alone knows things we can never know. It offers nonstop cogent critique of the pretensions of the state. Far from a ramshackle Rube Goldberg device, it is instead constituted as the Delphic Oracle, capable of interpreting our every dream. Apparently, by 1979 Foucault had abstained from casting his characteristic gimlet eye on the historical constructs that give our life meaning, at least when it came to the economy.

  If I had to summarize where the otherwise prescient Foucault took a wrong turn, it was in too readily swallowing the basic neoliberal precept that the market was an information processor more powerful and encompassing than any human being or organization of humans. What Foucault missed were the critical notions of double truths outlined at the end of the last chapter. The neoliberals preach that the market is the unforgiving arbiter of all political action; but they absolve themselves from its rule. They propound libertarian freedoms but practice the most regimented hierarchy in their political organization; they sermonize about spontaneous order, while plotting to take over the state; they catechize prostration of the self before the awesome power of the knowledge conveyed by the market, but issue themselves sweeping dispensations. Most significantly, they reserve to themselves the right of deployment of the Schmittian exception. Their version of governmentality elevates the market as a site of truth for everyone but themselves. If Foucault had taken this to heart, he would have had to revise his portrait of how regimes of truth validate power.

  I leave it to others to sort through the biographic
al record to try to figure out the motives and considerations that may have steered Foucault in the direction of the neoliberals.19 In this book, Foucault’s acquiescence in the neoliberal doctrine of the market as über–information processor renders him pretty useless for our discussions of the crisis. The point of relevance for our present concerns is that Foucault’s lectures reproduced an asymmetry between the “state” and the “market” that smacks far more of the exoteric caricature promoted by Mont Pèlerin, rather than its internal esoteric understanding. We who acknowledge his acuity and foresight should nevertheless doubt his understanding of everyday neoliberalism, precisely because of this drawback. As Tellmann puts it, in a further play on Foucault’s own evocation of the “invisible hand”:

  Only that which does not exhibit its particularity can be assumed to be universal; only an invisible market can promise viable sight. The . . . invisibility of the market is directed against the very analytical perspective Foucault typically assumes, one aimed at detecting the instruments, positions and architectures that produce epistemological claims and privileges. A more typical Foucauldian approach would commence to undo the invisibility of the economy and the market as an invisible “telescope” and “information machine.” This would mean rendering visible the market’s own “machine of seeing,” rather than seeing like the unseen market itself. 20