Digressions&Impressions

21 March 1979: Foucault Diagnoses American Analytic Philosophy (XXXI)

The second interesting use of these neo-liberal analyses is that the economic grid will or should make it possible to test governmental action, gauge its validity, and to object to activities of the public authorities on the grounds of their abuses, excesses, futility, and wasteful expenditure. In short, the economic grid is not applied in this case in order to understand social processes and make them intelligible; it involves anchoring and justifying a permanent political criticism of political and governmental action. It involves scrutinizing every action of the public authorities in terms of the game of supply and demand, in terms of efficiency with regard to the particular elements of this game, and in terms of the cost of intervention by the public authorities in the field of the market. In short, it involves criticism of the governmentality actually exercised which is not just a political or juridical criticism; it is a market criticism, the cynicism of a market criticism opposed to the action of public authorities. This is not just an empty project or a theorist’s idea. In the United States a permanent exercise of this type of criticism has developed especially in an institution which was not in fact created for this, since it was created before the development of the neo-liberal school, before the development of the Chicago School. This institution is the American Enterprise Institute whose essential function, now, is to measure all public activities in cost-benefit terms, whether these activities be the famous big social programs concerning, for example, education, health, and racial segregation developed by the Kennedy and Johnson administrations in the decade 1960–1970. This type of criticism also involves measuring the activity of the numerous federal agencies established since the New Deal and especially since the end of the Second World War, such as the Food and Health Administration, the Federal Trade Commission, and so on. So, it is criticism in the form of what could be called an “economic positivism”; a permanent criticism of governmental policy.
Seeing the deployment of this type of criticism one cannot help thinking of an analogy, which I will leave as such: the positivist critique of ordinary language. When you consider the way in which the Americans have employed logic, the logical positivism of the Vienna School, in order to apply it to scientific, philosophical, or everyday discourse, you see there too a kind of filtering of every statement whatsoever in terms of contradiction, lack of consistency, nonsense. To some extent we can say that the economic critique the neo-liberals try to apply to governmental policy is also a filtering of every action by the public authorities in terms of contradiction, lack of consistency, and nonsense. The general form of the market becomes an instrument, a tool of discrimination in the debate with the administration. In other words, in classical liberalism the government was called upon to respect the form of the market and laisser-faire. Here, laissez-faire is turned into a do-not-laisser-faire government, in the name of a law of the market which will enable each of its activities to be measured and assessed. Laissez-faire is thus turned round, and the market is no longer a principle of government’s self-limitation; it is a principle turned against it. It is a sort of permanent economic tribunal confronting government.--Michel Foucault, 21 March, 1979,  translated by Graham Burchell, Lecture 10, The Birth of Biopolitics, 246-247 [emphases added]

It's difficult to leave the riches of lecture 9 behind without exhausting all possible angles of comment, but it it is clear that in lecture 10 Foucault starts harvesting the fruits of the first nine lectures. This lecture contains two great set-pieces: (i) the comparison between the neo-liberalism of ORDOs and Chicago-school in part to explore the contrasting analysis of the relationship between market/state and market/society; (ii) the evolution of what we may call law and criminality since the Enlightenment in light of Becker's approach. So, it may strike you as a bit perverse that today's post zones in on an apparent aside. 

So, the emphasized passage is odd because it is by no means obvious that Foucault's audience ("one") will have thought of this particular analogy. As I have noted throughout my comments, Foucault is constantly assuming a kind of Bien pensant marxism in his audience. I don't want to make too much of the grammatical structure of his thought -- and I am not conformatible in the French [On ne peut pas ne pas penser, en voyant s'exercer ce type-là de critique à une analogie que je laisse encore une fois sous la forme d'analogie], but it is notable that the (analogical) thought is inevitable (and that Foucault represents his own thought in such disassociated way, and being so analogical) while Foucault takes responsibility for conveying it in the (analogical) manner he has the thought. 

Before, I get to the substance of Foucault's claim, a bit of context is useful. First, I would not be surprised if the possibility of visiting Berkeley (which starts the following year) was not already on Foucault's horizon. As we know he was visiting California from the mid 70s onward. Second, Foucault would have tracked Derrida's confrontation with analytic philosophy, first in the brilliant, and oddly neglected, (1973) The Archeology of the Frivolous. This book is ostensibly about Condillac, but it is simultaneously (recall this post) a critique of Foucualt's earlier practice of archeology and a clever exploration of the nature of analysis. I would be amazed if Foucault were unfamiliar with it because I think it can help explain some important shifts in Foucault's method(s)/stance(s). And then in the infamous exchange with Searle (Foucault's future colleague) that unfolded through the 1970s.* I assume that Foucault would have been familiar with this 'event'. So, perhaps, for Foucault, a possible personal confrontation with American analytic philosophy would have made the thought inevitable.

Let's return to the emphasized bit in the quoted passage from lecture 10 above. And to avoid misunderstanding, Foucault here is not discussing ordinary language philosophy. Earlier, in Lecture 4 (see p. 76) Foucault had noticed the significance of the movement from Vienna (and Freiburg) of certain intellectual practices to the States.** And this point gets amplified by Foucault's surprising organicist commitment in lecture 8, that when ideas travel from their origin, they are radicalized/amplified in new environments. (We may call such intensification in a new ecological niche a law of memetics!) So, on Foucault's view, we may say that what starts out as possible source of emancipation in Left Vienna, is turned into a form of speech policing Stateside.+ 

And Foucault is explicit that the policing speech is not just directed at ordinary speech, but also at scientific and philosophical speech. The significance of this is that Foucault interprets the (ahh) tools and practices of this branch of analytic philosophy in terms of technologies of control.

As an aside, it is worth noting, and a kind of historical irony, that Foucault here is kind of tracking the general atmosphere of victory of Quine-ean regimentation and, especially, a wider naturalizing program(s) over the Carnapian explanation, which had explicitly limited itself (recall here; and here) to artificial speech. I use 'general atmosphere' because what Foucault is describing (as theoretical virtues and non-virtues "contradiction, lack of consistency, nonsense",) while undoubted familiar in some sense, is surely not Quine-ean regimentation (with its own specialist clarified language)--this is a diffuser form of score-keeping familiar from polemics and classroom instruction.

So, I use 'general atmosphere' for another reason. Because the analogy itself is I think itself intended to point to what happens when certain practices leave the rarified technical discussion in elite journals and seminar rooms, and become a more general mode of thought. For, as a disciplinary practice of deploying (philosophical) technologies of speech control that American analytic philosophy is used as an elucidatory analogy for the fact of what happens when think tanks deploy techniques developed by the Chicago school to try to score and police government policy.

This is not to say one can avoid mentioning Quine. For Quine's (rather juridical) tribunal of experience is now transformed (by way of the magic of analogy) "into permanent economic tribunal confronting government."  That is to say, as the ideas of the Chicago school leave Hyde Park and are institutionalizes by well financed interests, a democratic-republican government is now made to account itself not to the voters, and their representatives, or the press, or supreme court judges, but to an intellectual edifice that deploys (protected) theoretical speech. And this edifice represents itself a strand of the liberal tradition that, as Foucault argued in lecture 9, is itself one of the animating principles of the constitutional order. 

I return to the previous paragraph in subsequent digressions on Birth of Biopolitics. Foucault leaves hanging what to make of his view of American analytic philosophy. It's important to realize that the analogy is not a moralizing criticism. If I understand Foucault's larger meta-philosophical (political) position, he thinks that the development and application of technologies of control have a kind of inevitability to them. And it is not impossible -- but here i speculate -- that he believes that (the philosophical politics of) philosophical speech itself is (given the significance of the law of non-contradiction to its way of being) also, always, constituted by technologies of control. And what may be novel here, is unusual clarity and zest of the Americans in deploying such technologies of speech control.

 

 

 

 

The Case Against Hume (II)

Hume’s notorious footnote may not have been widely known about until now. For my part, I have a fairly distinct memory of encountering it in the library of the University of Bristol when I was an undergraduate. I also remember being struck by the passage from Kant’s The Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime (see Tommy Curry’s post) at around the same time. My memories of the precise effect that these readings had on me are less firm. I will try to reconstruct something. The inculcation of a passion to study philosophy seems to go along with an aspiration to join in with the conversation of these “mighty dead”, to be a symposiast at Plato’s table, and so forth. Hence I had a sense of disappointment, even betrayal, that these two philosophers, Hume and Kant, who I had been encouraged to admire in the course of my philosophical education, would have marked me out as ineligible to participate in their virtual salons. This moment of realisation was more troubling for being a private one. The discovery of these philosophers’ denigration of people like me was one I made independently, since none of my teachers had ever mentioned these texts, nor given me reason to think that my personal sense of disappointment could have much legitimacy or relevance to my education. At minimum, we do our current students a service by giving them an unfiltered picture of these figures.

What happened next is that I decided in my own mind that the racist statements of Hume and Kant were tangential to my initial reasons for reading their works, and I got on with my life (but not without a residual feeling of alienation, on which I will say more at the end of this post). Now, over twenty years later, I am far less convinced about the detachability of the racism from the “good ideas”. This is not the place to try to make the case in full. I offer a brief indication. Hume’s influence is not more greatly felt than by the fact that naturalism is the most widespread and orthodox approach in contemporary anglophone philosophy. About eighteen months ago I wished to get clearer in my own mind about what I am committing myself to when I subscribe to the naturalistic methodology. The long and short of it is that naturalism is difficult to pin down, except that it abjures reference to the “supernatural”. What then is the supernatural? It is at this point that the collective unconscious of philosophers dredges up examples of “superstitious” beliefs and some, like Wilfrid Sellars, even tell stories about the emergence of a modern, secular, scientific worldview out of a primal state in which “primitive man” believed in a world populated by spirits and demons. Hume is important because he tells this story to great effect (see “On Miracles”). In that text he writes that, “it forms a strong presumption against all supernatural and miraculous relations that they are observed chiefly to abound among ignorant and barbarous nations.” One need not be the most paranoid kind of hermeneuticist of suspicion to think that something is up here. Africans, we must remember, are one of the “barbarous” kinds of people in Hume’s world, and they are inferior by constitution, moreover. They, believe in silly things, we do not — Hume invites us to think. The question we contemporary philosophers need to ask ourselves is whether there is a legitimate notion of the “naturalistic worldview” that does not require, for its own self-definition, a contrast with the “superstitious worldview” of the “primitive” other. We need also to ask seriously whether the unreflected notion of what is a naturalistic, and hence intellectually respectable explanation, is still being used to de-legitimise explanations offered by various indigenous peoples concerning events in the natural world, events which include the symptoms of an ever more crushing ecological crisis. Such accounts are still regularly categorised as “spiritualistic”, and with that certain voices are still summarily dismissed, as expressed by the Māori individuals interviewed in this news report of a mass whale beaching.

...

I conclude with a remark on my lingering feeling of alienation. Francis Williams was the black man Hume referred to as being “admired for very slender accomplishments, like a parrot who speaks a few words plainly.”** Hume, mocker of the credulous, directs his scepticism against those who might have thought Francis Williams capable of having an original thought. I think that it is under-appreciated how often black students who are educated in majority white societies find themselves in the position of Francis Williams vis a vis David Hume. Which is to say, confronted with the implacable scepticism characteristic of racial prejudice, the voice inside the head of the educator that whispers, doubtfully, ‘accomplished, really?’, ‘has potential, really?’. Philosophy, as a profession, is absurdly reliant on performative smartness but takes no account of how the negating experiences of black students during their educational careers might affect their willingness to engage in such performances, at least for white audiences. One of my biggest disappointments, since becoming a professional philosopher, has been finding that decisions affecting career prospects still in some quarters turn on whether a committee deems a student or candidate “smart”, aside from their tangible achievements. To the detriment of some, and benefit of others.--Mazviita Chirimuuta,  1^st October 2020, @EDINBURGH PHILOSOPHY – VOICES ON HUME

I noticed a steady trickle visitors visiting my digression, "The Case Against Hume," originating at the Edinburg.edu blog. That very Humean emotion, vanity, got the better of me and I decided to investigate. I rediscovered five sophisticated, moving essays by admired colleagues at University of Edinburgh engaging with the circumstances of the renaming of David Hume Tower.

I often (recall here; here) find it useful to have my thoughts be guided by Chirimuuta. Her idea of 'performative smartness' resonated (recall 'boy wonders') because I have long recognized that one non-trivial reason I wanted to become a professional philosopher was to be part of the club of such smart folk, who somehow could put even the knottiest issues in precise words with crystal clarity. A lot has been written on the (sometimes gendered) nature of this desire to participate in and allow for performative smartness, and its costs (see also these two recent pieces by Agnes Callard here; here). 

I have at times alluded to (recall here; here) the emotional deformations that are an effect of participating in such performative smartness. But while it is pretty clear that clarity is often thought to be a democratic element in the society of philosophers, I rarely see any description of the emotional need that may make clarity and precision in our expressions so attractive.* Clarity is often conjoined with surgical images (we make precise and careful distinctions; offer razor-sharp arguments, etc.) Surgeons, as we know, work in sterile environments. And I suspect part of the implied contrast is that our clarity keeps the turmoil and  turbidness of our emotional life at bay. At least, for me our joint commitment to clarity also represents a possible escape route from my most painful imperfections. 

A further reason why her post resonated was because she put her finger on what one might call a conspiracy of silence in our teachers, or a looking away from material and patterns of exclusion that were hidden in plain sight accompanied by many self-serving myths ("since none of my teachers had ever mentioned these texts, nor given me reason to think that my personal sense of disappointment could have much legitimacy or relevance to my education.") It is strange to realize one wants to be part of, even be recognized as a contributing member, of a club and then recognize that this desire reflects, in part, one's own imperfections of looking away and lack of courage.

But as I was circling around these familiar, narcissistic thoughts, I re-read her essay, and I want to close by registering an important historical-conceptual point she makes. Naturalism as a metaphysical doctrine is not ethically or politically neutral in virtue of the fact that the supernatural is indeed coupled with myth, superstition, and, thus, civilizational backwardness. And, so in Hume, we find a rearticulation of philosophy's endemic (recall here; here) suspicion of rusticity (now called 'savage'/'barbaric'). And part of Hume's Enlightenment project is indeed to offer a model of civilization worth having that isn't just committed to the possibly violent expansion of civilization abroad, but also to combat barbarism (of feudalism, of superstition, etc.) at home. And again this shows up in quite a few places. For example, in Hume's History (recall) in discussing Agricola's conquest of Britain, he relies on a distinction between enjoyable chains (civilization) and fierce (animal-like) un-tamedness (barbarism), and he comes close to asserting that the 'uncivilized' or barbarous are interpreted as willingly choosing death and thereby marking themselves as worth killing. This chillingly echoes tropes of how terrorists are often described today.

It is in virtue of the fact that Hume's embrace of naturalism and civilization also underwrite some of the best parts of his philosophy that the serious challenge, thus, Chirimuuta rightly poses for would be naturalists (and skeptics like me), is how to construe and construct naturalism (and skepticism) that does not simultaneously reactivate narratives and thought experiments that reinforce and promote forms of social and political/cultural hierarchy. That's of course no easy matter in the context of oligarchic society and academic practices that may leave our students little space to spend time, and free thoughts, in libraries at all.

Clarity, Analytic Marxism, and the Purported Sinking of dialectics (by Sidney Hook)

The only alternative to this procedure is to present one's own theory of dialectic....I shall argue that it would be best in the interests of clarity to let the term sink into the desuetude of archaisms; in fact, I shall try to show that this is the legitimate moral that can be drawn from any critical investigation of the assumptions and types of procedure most frequently designated as dialectical in the history of thought...

There are two generic conceptions of dialectic under which the various meanings of dialectic may be subsumed. The first is the conception of dialectic as a pattern of existential change either in nature or society or man where the "or" is not exclusive. The second is the view that dialectic is a special method of analyzing such change. Usually, but not always, it is held that the method of dialectical analysis in some sense "reflects" or "corresponds to" the dialectical pattern of change. In any case, there is always a distinction drawn, though with no great regard for consistency, between the dialectical type of change and other kinds. When the dialectic is identified with change as such, it is explicitly contrasted with some other natural or supernatural element which is regarded as undialectical, e.g., unchanging form or pattern. Similarly, with the conception of dialectic as method. Whether taken as a method of analysis or discovery or both it is always distinguished from other methods called undialectical, i.e., metaphysical, scientific, commonsensical, etc. This last distinction is of the first importance. For the alleged justification of the dialectic method consists in its power to lead us to the discovery of new truths or to a deeper and more adequate understanding of old truths, not accessible to us by any other method-- Sidney Hook (1939) "Dialectic in Social and Historical Inquiry" The Journal of Philosophy 36(14), 365-366.

A while ago (recall), I remarked with sardonic bemusement -- I am a liberal bourgeois intellectual, after all -- that analytic marxism is founded in an original sin, that is, an unearned dismissal of the dialectical method. That behind the brilliant rhetoric (recall) of G.A Cohen, Elster and the whole gang lies an appeal to clarity often linked to the stipulated superiority of the existing methods of social science. And while their embrace of clarity and rigor helped their careers in professional philosophy, and -- (let's stipulate) advanced academic discussion in a number of important scholarly fields -- it is by no means obvious they advanced marxism as a revolutionary doctrine to be feared by folks like me. For, while clarity is undoubtedly an important value that can be embraced by Marxists (see my treatment of Korsch's articulation of dialectics) it does not have, let's say, lexical priority over overthrowing capitalism.

In fact, I took considerable pleasure in pointing out that analytic marxists' dismissal of dialectics was unoriginal. For the rhetoric and whole style of pseudo-argument dismissing dialectics were anticipated by (recall here; and, for broader context, here and more recently here) the very bourgeois liberal philosopher, Ernest Nagel (who plays a non-trivial role in shaping analytic philosophy as such). But I noted that Nagel was, in turn, relying on Hook's efforts; and so it is worth looking at Hook.  

I often joke (with a note of ruefulness) that oblivion is the fate of all philosophers since the hegemony of analytic philosophy. But I was pleased to learn that our institutional collective memory, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, has an informative entry on Hook, which treats him as a "leading interpreter and proponent of Deweyan pragmatic naturalism" and "polemicist." Hook was once one of the leading New York intellectuals. And, pertinent for us, Hook became after trying initially to synthesize pragmatism and marxism a leading anti-communists as time passes. (His anti-communism increasingly has a McCarthyite tendency.) A key step in Hook's attempted synthesis and eventual turn against marxism is his rejection of the dialectical method.

Now, if we look at Hook's "Dialectic in Social and Historical Inquiry" all dialectic is dismissed. But strikingly we find only a single explicit mention of Marx's dialectic in a footnote: "I have omitted specific discussion of Marx in this paper because, whether or not we regard his findings as valid, I think it can be shown that he made no distinction between the dialectic method, as he understood it, and scientific method as applied to the historical and cultural sciences." (370) The footnote is more informative than it may seem. 

For, Hook's main strategy is to compare dialectics to ordinary "scientific method" which has a "basic unity" (378), and to find dialectics wanting in comparison to scientific method (371-379). But oddly, when he does so, he takes for granted that the metric/measure of comparison are the cannons of success internal to that scientific method. And to give a flavor of these cannons, among the criteria he identifies are "piece-meal verification" (371) and "predicting as closely as we can the specific form of the institutions of to-morrow" (375). 

Now, I don't mean to remind you constantly I am no Marxist, but even I can see that Hook is rigging the comparison against the dialectician. For Hook presupposes, oddly, that the "alleged justification of the dialectic method consists in its power to lead us to the discovery of new truths or to a deeper and more adequate understanding of old truths." But while undoubtedly dialecticians make such claims, and from my bourgois perspective often exaggeratedly so, this is not what the dialectician, is fundamentally interested in. For she is, I quote, Korsch (recall) committed to articulating "a theory of social revolution." It is plausible that if that is one's aim, one may well find that at times one has deeper understanding of social reality than those with more, say, armchair sensibilities.

Even a bourgeois intellectual like me can discern that in/with the ordinary scientific method as embraced by Hook, revolution is at best an afterthought. The scientific method (which is good at describing and predicting states of affairs) then functions as a kind of input into a different process  (i.e., changing the world). But while nobody denies that in this way science can contribute to enormous social transformations, including many unanticipated ones, this way of conceiving it allows capital to have a more than fair shot at shaping these outcomes.+ People like me would consider that a virtue of Hook's approach! 

By contrast, a key methodological move the dialectician asserts to make revolution really possible,  is "the coincidence of reality and consciousness." This coincidence makes marxist dialectic often seem weird. But as Bertell Ollman shows in Dance of the Dialectic,* the weirdness merely echoes the kind of things one finds in the whole tradition of what he calls the 'philosophy of internal relations' -- with Spinoza as one of the paradigmatic exemplars --  which simply rejects what since Tarski has come to be known as the classical account of truth. And so it is, also, no surprise, again quoting Korsch, this is "bound to appear to [critics of dialectics] as theoretically false and unscientific."

I do not mean to suggest there are no other arguments in Hook. But while all of them land serious blows, none of them take 'conduciveness to the revolution' as a fundamental aim. So, I regret to say we have returned to where started. I ruefully conclude that those purportedly most in the know about marxist dialectics (Hook, the analytic marxists, etc.) have produced refutations that ought not convince the would be revolutionary.** And while I have no standing as a score-keeper on such matters, I report as a psychological fact that it strikes me as a true scandal that these purported refutations are so obviously (to use a technical term) Quatsch. 

 

 

 

14 March 1979: Foucault's Science Fiction of Neo-Liberal Eugenics (XXX)

[I]n Gary Becker there is a very interesting theory of consumption, in which he says: We should not think at all that consumption simply consists in being someone in a process of exchange who buys and makes a monetary exchange in order to obtain some products. The man of consumption is not one of the terms of exchange. The man of consumption, insofar as he consumes, is a producer. What does he produce? Well, quite simply, he produces his own satisfaction. And we should think of consumption as an enterprise activity by which the individual, precisely on the basis of the capital he has at his disposal, will produce something that will be his own satisfaction. Consequently, the theory, the classical analysis trotted out a hundred times of the person who is a consumer on the one hand, but who is also a producer, and who, because of this, is, as it were, divided in relation to himself, as well as all the sociological analyses—for they have never been economic analyses—of mass consumption, of consumer society, and so forth, do not hold up and have no value in relation to an analysis of consumption in the neo-liberal terms of the activity of production. So, even if there really is a return to the idea of homo oeconomicus as the analytical grid of economic activity, there is a complete change in the conception of this homo oeconomicus.
So, we arrive at this idea that the wage is nothing other than the remuneration, the income allocated to a certain capital, a capital that we will call human capital inasmuch as the ability-machine of which it is the income cannot be separated from the human individual who is its bearer. 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. In other words, the neo-liberals say that labor was in principle part of economic analysis, but the way in which classical economic analysis was conducted was incapable of dealing with this element. Good, we do deal with it. And when they make this analysis, and do so in the terms I have just described, they are led to study the way in which human capital is formed and accumulated, and this enables them to apply economic analyses to completely new fields and domains.
How is human capital made up? Well, they say, it is made up of innate elements and other, acquired elements. Let’s talk about the innate elements. There are those we can call hereditary, and others which are just innate; differences which are, of course, self-evident for anyone with the vaguest acquaintance with biology. I do not think that there are as yet any studies on the problem of the hereditary elements of human capital, but it is quite clear what form they could take and, above all, we can see through anxieties, concerns, problems, and so on, the birth of something which, according to your point of view, could be interesting or disturbing. In actual fact, in the—I was going to say, classical—analyses of these neo-liberals, in the analyses of Schultz or Becker, for example, it is indeed said that the formation of human capital only has interest and only becomes relevant for the economists inasmuch as this capital is formed thanks to the use of scarce means, to the alternative use of scarce means for a given end. Now obviously we do not have to pay to have the body we have, or we do not have to pay for our genetic make-up. It costs nothing. Yes, it costs nothing—and yet, we need to see ... , and we can easily imagine something like this occurring (I am just engaging in a bit of science fiction here, it is a kind of problematic which is currently becoming pervasive).
In fact, modern genetics clearly shows that many more elements than was previously thought are conditioned by the genetic make-up we receive from our ancestors. In particular, genetics makes it possible to establish for any given individual the probabilities of their contracting this or that type of disease at a given age, during a given period of life, or in any way at any moment of life. In other words, one of the current interests in the application of genetics to human populations is to make it possible to recognize individuals at risk and the type of risk individuals incur throughout their life. You will say: Here again, there’s nothing we can do; our parents made us like this. Yes, of course, but when we can identify what individuals are at risk, and what the risks are of a union of individuals at risk producing an individual with a particular characteristic that makes him or her the carrier of a risk, then we can perfectly well imagine the following: good genetic make-ups—that is to say, [those] able to produce individuals with low risk or with a level of risk which will not be harmful for themselves, those around them, or society—will certainly become scarce, and insofar as they are scarce they may perfectly well [enter], and this is entirely normal, into economic circuits or calculations, that is to say, alternative choices. Putting it in clear terms, this will mean that given my own genetic make-up, if I wish to have a child whose genetic make-up will be at least as good as mine, or as far as possible better than mine, then I will have to find someone who also has a good genetic make-up. And if you want a child whose human capital, understood simply in terms of innate and hereditary elements, is high, you can see that you will have to make an investment, that is to say, you will have to have worked enough, to have sufficient income, and to have a social status such that it will enable you to take for a spouse or co-producer of this future human capital, someone who has significant human capital themselves. I am not saying this as a joke; it is simply a form of thought or a form of problematic that is currently being elaborated.
What I mean is that if the problem of genetics currently provokes such anxiety, I do not think it is either useful or interesting to translate this anxiety into the traditional terms of racism. If we want to try to grasp the political pertinence of the present development of genetics, we must do so by trying to grasp its implications at the level of actuality itself, with the real problems that it raises. And as soon as a society poses itself the problem of the improvement of its human capital in general, it is inevitable that the problem of the control, screening, and improvement of the human capital of individuals, as a function of unions and consequent reproduction, will become actual, or at any rate, called for. So, the political problem of the use of genetics arises in terms of the formation, growth, accumulation, and improvement of human capital. What we might call the racist effects of genetics is certainly something to be feared, and they are far from being eradicated, but this does not seem to me to be the major political issue at the moment.--Michel Foucault, 14 March, 1979,  translated by Graham Burchell, Lecture 9, The Birth of Biopolitics, 226-229 [emphasis added on 'inevitable'].

It is difficult to write this blog post because I am so in awe of Foucault's analysis. For, in these pages, and the ones that follow and precede it, Foucault basically articulates the whole paradigm in which economic analysis becomes incapable of self-limiting and, thus, totalitarian. The question becomes not just how the genetic endowment, but the "child’s family life will produce human capital?" (229) And as Foucault notes this means that everything that can be measured in this environment must be measured to uncover its effect on human capital formation. Deep learning was made, we might say, for human capital theory.

And this human capital will not just be the principle that generates (possible) income into the future, but also the skill to consume it. Foucault's analysis of Becker's treatment that consumption isn't merely a passive doing, a mere hedonic receptacle, but an effect of human capital is masterly. We must not merely acquire taste but must gain the skill to enjoy our acquired commodities. We might say, as a serious joke, that Becker and Mincer (and Schultz, etc.) re-discover Rousseau and Kames in the vernacular. Foucault alerts us to his own interest in this merging of the philosophy of culture and education with the logical of capital/computing by calling it 'very interesting' (226) which is a stark contrast to the 'banalities' when he discusses political history (216/218). 

As an aside, I noted last week the brilliant almost counterfactual history of economics inscribed in this ninth lecture. But it is also worth noting a bizarre lacuna. For in Foucault's hands it is immediately obvious that this strain of Chicago economics -- the human capital, economic imperialism one -- rediscovers and revives the eugenic features of late nineteenth century and early twentieth century economics most associated with names like Galton and Pearson, but visible and significant in wide variety of American and British progressives, such that it infected the foundation of the welfare state nearly everywhere.* 

That is to say, what Foucault misses, and with him many other well-meaning intellectual commentators, is that part of the neo-liberal reaction against "Keynesian policy, social pacts of war, and the growth of the federal administration through economic and social programs" which "formed the adversary and target of neoliberal thought, that which it was constructed against or which it opposed in order to form itself and develop" (217) had a further moral underpinning (other than the anti-war, anti-collectivism already explicit in Foucault's analysis) one that had high salience after the Nazi-era is that of human moral equality. And this fits even Becker and his Chicago allies/teachers because in their version of human capital theory, after the Robbins redefinition of the nature of economics, the individual agency of each (recall last week) of us matters.  

My language of 'misses' in the previous paragraph is misleading. Given Foucault's knowledge of the study of deviance, it is unlikely he is not aware of this. And, in fact, he clearly signals he is aware of it: "call the racist effects of genetics is certainly something to be feared, and they are far from being eradicated," but he tells us why he does not alert us to this in his treatment: it "does not seem to me to be the major political issue at the moment." This comment raises tough questions about the hermeneutics of Foucault. 

The whole lecture series is (recall) oriented around the liberal art of government. And foucault makes clear that in one sense his is descriptive treatment of praxis and theory, and in other sense he is constructing what we may call the optimal art of liberal government. Now, it comes as no surprise that Foucault is aware of his situatedness in a particular political context; I have tried to be alert in where he hints at this. But here he alerts us to the fact that his decisions about what to highlight are themselves a function of his judgment of what he takes to be a major political issue at that moment. But he does not tell us what -- to be reflexive for a moment -- what enters into the formation of, and what secures the ''output'' of this judgment, and what counts as political for him.

Okay, let's close with a final observation. Above I noted that Foucault rightly discerns a kind of totalitarian element in the neo-liberal turn of Becker, Mincer, Schultz because as a domain of enquiry it is incapable of self-limitation. What he discerns is that (nearly) everything that can become data or a data-set connected to human activity is, in principle, possible evidence (about genes, environment, learning, production, risk, etc.) in this theory. (The remainder of the lecture Foucault spells this out nicely and ambitiously--very much worth re-reading for its significance to theories of capitalism, imperialism, and development.) In so far as there are constraints these are determined more by search costs than by the nature of the paradigm. This is really a contrast to how many other forms of enquiry function, where the paradigm limits severely what may count as possible evidence. 

But, of course, one may object that the totalitarian tendency in enquiry is not sufficient to count something as totalitarian in political praxis. The objection misses the point here. For Foucault is clearly committed to the idea once certain questions become intellectually pertinent -- not to an individual but (notice the bourgeois or at least Weberian terminology of Gesellschaft) "society"* -- then they become also necessarily ("inevitable") pertinent to, and actionable for, political practice ("control, screening, and improvement of the human capital of individuals.") He does not explain why he believes in this kind of weirdly friction-free market in ideas such that the social problem must generate its own social praxis. It is notable that he does not offer a mechanism for why this is inevitably so, and a critique of the present must originate here. But that's for another time.  

To put the more arresting point of the previous paragraph as a serious joke, if one raises the question of what Plato [Republic 546d] calls the marriage number (viz. "the human capital of individuals, as a function of unions and consequent reproduction"), then even in a liberal society (focused on "individuals") there is, contra the hopes of Bacon no self-restraint on its pursuit.* That is to say, Foucault accepts the kind of Heideggerian/Thomistic critique of modernity without their moralism or, despite his latent political "fears," existential angst.