Neoliberal Political Economy and the Subjectivity of Crisis: Why Governmentality is Not Hollow

Abstract

This paper revisits Foucault's understanding of the importance of subjectivity for politics, focusing in particular on his claims concerning the sorts of demands placed on the subject by contemporary capitalism. Moves to extend the application of Foucault's analysis of liberal modernity to the realm of world politics have met with heavy criticism lately. According to David Chandler, for example, the idea of a “global governmentality” rests on the fundamentally unreliable premise that contemporary globalisation is driven by a kind of hyperbolic or imperial cosmopolitanism. Such arguments, he suggests, fail to recognise the progressive hollowing out or “attenuation” of the political that in fact makes liberalism impossible in the late modern era. In response to this argument, and recent similar arguments made by Marxists, this paper attends to what Foucault referred to as the “consciousness of crisis” that grounds the project of neoliberal governmentality. It is Foucault's contention that neoliberal capitalism has a consciousness of itself as a theory which seeks to incite entrepreneurialism to the point of crisis. In this sense, to speak of a crisis of political legitimacy is not to speak of a kind of mass passivity or “checking out”, as Chandler might put it, but rather as an emergent form of behaviour that has been elicited or produced in a population. In order to escape Chandler's resentment of the failure of populations to live up to their responsibilities as political individuals, then, this paper draws on the theory of neoliberal governmentality. Understood principally as a summoning of entrepreneurial behaviours, the paper suggests that neoliberal governmentality affords us an opportunity for shifting the question of responsibility away from the sort of sovereign individualist platform elaborated by Chandler and towards a platform grounded more in the context of a dynamic and flexible global capitalism. To explore these issues, the paper contends, we should supplement Foucault's few rudimentary remarks on the subjectivity of neoliberal capitalism with the more fine-grained methods of “postliberal” economic analysis, such as that found in the works of Hardt and Negri.

Notes

1. See, for example, Jan Selby, “Engaging Foucault: Discourse, Liberal Governance and the Limits of Foucauldian IR”, International Relations, Vol. 21, No. 3 (2007); Jonathan Joseph, “The Limits of Governmentality”, European Journal of International Relations, Vol. 16, No. 2 (2010).

2. David Chandler, “Critiquing Liberal Cosmopolitanism? The Limits of the Biopolitical Approach”, International Political Sociology, Vol. 3, No. 1 (2009).

3. Nicholas J. Kiersey, “Scale, Security, and Political Economy: Debating the Biopolitics of the Global War on Terror”, New Political Science, Vol. 31, No. 1 (2009).

4. Chandler, op. cit., p. 67.

5. For example, considerations of economic ideology make little, if any, appearance in such commonly cited works as Julian Reid, The Biopolitics of the War on Terror: Life Struggles, Liberal Modernity, and the Defence of Logistical Societies (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006), Jenny Edkins and Véronique Pin-Fat, “Introduction: Life, Power, Resistance”, in Jenny Edkins, Véronique Pin-Fat and Michael J. Shapiro (eds.), Sovereign Lives: Power in Global Politics (New York: Routledge, 2004); Wendy Larner and William Walters (eds.), Global Governmentality: Governing International Spaces (London: Routledge, 2004); Michael Dillon and Julian Reid, “Global Liberal Governance: Biopolitics, Security and War”, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, Vol. 30, No. 1 (2001).

 6. See, for example, Iver B. Neumann and Ole Jacob Sending, “‘The International’ as Governmentality”, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, Vol. 35, No. 3 (2007); Timothy W. Luke, “Governmentality and Contragovernmentality: Rethinking Sovereignty and Territoriality after the Cold War”, Political Geography, Vol. 15, No. 6/7 (1996); Larner and Walters (eds.), op. cit.

 7. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, Volume 1 (London: Vintage Books, 1990); idem, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977–1978 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).

 8. Michel Foucault, “The Subject and Power”, in James D. Faubion (ed.), Power (New York: The New Press, 2000), p. 343. For discussion of the distinction between subjectification (also known, more simply, as subjection) and the more active, self-governing subjectivation see Mark Kelly, The Political Philosophy of Michel Foucault (New York: Routledge, 2009), pp. 87–89.

 9. Michel Foucault, “Governmentality”, in Faubion (ed.), op. cit., p. 208.

10. Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, op. cit., p. 109.

11. Foucault, History of Sexuality, Volume 1, op. cit., p. 137.

12. Reid, op. cit.

13. Julian Reid, “Foucault on Clausewitz: Conceptualizing the Relationship between War and Power”, Alternatives, Vol. 28 (2003), p. 4.

14. Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception (trans. Kevin Attell) (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2005).

15. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude (New York: Penguin, 2004), p. 60.

16. Mitchell Dean, “Nomos and the Politics of World Order”, in Larner and Walters (eds.), op. cit., p. 52.

17. Selby, op. cit., p. 331.

18. Ibid., p. 336.

19. Stephen Gill, “Globalization, Market Civilisation and Disciplinary Neoliberalism”, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, Vol. 24, No. 3 (1995).

20. Selby, op. cit., pp. 337–338.

21. Joseph, op. cit., p. 5.

22. Ibid., p. 8.

23. Foucault, cited in ibid., p. 9. See also Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, op. cit., p. 287.

24. Indeed, it is worth recalling that Foucault had little or no time for the state as an analytic category, going so far as to claim “I must do without a theory of the state, as one can and must forgo an indigestible meal”. See Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–79 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), pp. 76–77. For further discussion, see Nicholas J. Kiersey, “World State or Global Governmentality? Constitutive Power and Resistance in a Post-imperial World”, Global Change, Peace & Security, Vol. 20, No. 3 (2008), pp. 369–370.

25. Joseph, op. cit., p. 12.

26. Ibid., pp. 14–15. See also Barry Hindess, “The Liberal Government of Unfreedom”, Alternatives, Vol. 26 (2001); Wendy Larner and William Walters, “Introduction”, in Larner and Walters (eds.), op. cit.

27. Joseph, op. cit., p. 21.

28. See footnote 23, above.

29. Ian Bruff, “The Totalisation of Human Social Practice: Open Marxists and Capitalist Social Relations, Foucauldians and Power Relations”, British Journal of Politics and International Relations, Vol. 11, No. 2 (2009).

30. Ibid., p. 341.

31. Ibid., p. 346.

32. Ibid., pp. 343–347.

33. David Chandler, “Deriving Norms from ‘Global Space’: The Limits of Communicative Approaches to Global Civil Society Theorizing”, Globalizations, Vol. 4, No. 2 (2007).

34. Ó Tuathail, cited in ibid., p. 285.

35. Keane, cited in ibid., p. 287.

36. Habermas, cited in ibid., p. 290.

37. Ibid., p. 293.

38. Ibid.

39. Ibid., pp. 293–294.

40. Chandler, “Critiquing Liberal Cosmopolitanism?”, op. cit.

41. Ibid., p. 56.

42. Ibid., p. 57.

43. See Vivienne Jabri, War and the Transformation of Global Politics (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2007); Costas Douzinas, Human Rights and Empire: The Political Philosophy of Cosmopolitanism (London: Routledge Cavendish, 2007); Mark Duffield, Development, Security and Unending War: Governing the World of Peoples (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007).

44. Chandler, “Critiquing Liberal Cosmopolitanism?”, op. cit., p. 58.

45. Ibid., p. 56.

46. Ibid., p. 67.

47. Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000).

49. Ibid., p. 66.

48. Chandler, “Critiquing Liberal Cosmopolitanism?”, op. cit., p. 53.

50. Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy and History”, in Paul Rabinow (ed.), The Foucault Reader (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984), p. 87.

51. Chad Lavin, The Politics of Responsibility (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008), p. 22.

52. Foucault, cited in Kelly, op. cit., p. 4; see also idem, “Truth and Power”, in Faubion (ed.), op. cit., p. 117.

53. Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, op. cit., pp. 3–4; see also idem, “The Confession of the Flesh”, in Colin Gordon (ed.), Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972/1977 (New York: Pantheon, 1980), p. 199.

54. See Arnold Davidson's introduction to Michel Foucault, Society Must be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–76 (New York: Picador, 2003), p. xviii.

55. Foucault, “Truth and Power”, op. cit., p. 118; see also idem, Society Must be Defended, op. cit., p. 13.

56. Foucault, History of Sexuality, Volume 1, op. cit., pp. 92–93.

57. Idem, “The Subject and Power”, op. cit., p. 342.

58. Ibid., p. 327.

59. Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy and History”, op. cit., pp. 82–83.

60. Kelly, op. cit., p. 101.

61. Michel Foucault, “Sex, Power, and the Politics of Identity”, in Paul Rabinow and Robert Hurley (eds.), Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth (London: Allen Lane, 1997), p. 167.

62. Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy and History”, op. cit., p. 85.

63. Idem, Society Must be Defended, op. cit., pp. 15–16.

64. Idem, “Nietzsche, Genealogy and History”, op. cit., p. 86.

65. Carl Von Clausewitz, On War (New York: Dorsett Press, 1991), p. 84.

66. Kelly, op. cit., p. 60.

67. Colin Gordon, “Governmental Rationality: An Introduction”, in Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon and Peter Miller (eds.), The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1991), p. 2.

68. Foucault, Birth of Biopolitics, op. cit., p. 186.

69. Ibid.

70. Foucault, “The Confession of the Flesh”, op. cit., pp. 200–201.

71. Idem, Birth of Biopolitics, op. cit., p. 186.

73. Stephen Legg, “Of Scales, Networks and Assemblages: The League of Nations Apparatus and the Scalar Sovereignty of the Government of India”, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, Vol. 34, No. 2 (2008), p. 239.

72. Saskia Sassen, Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006).

74. Sassen offers the perplexing disclaimer that she wants to use the term “assemblage” only in the “dictionary” sense of the term. See Sassen, op. cit., p. 5.

75. Legg, op. cit., p. 239.

76. Neumann and Sending, op. cit., p. 694.

77. Bob Jessop, “From Micro-powers to Governmentality: Foucault's Work on Statehood, State Formation, Statecraft and State Power”, Political Geography, Vol. 26 (2007).

78. Foucault, Birth of Biopolitics, op. cit., pp. 56–58; idem, “Omnes et Singulatim”, in Faubion (ed.), op. cit., p. 316.

79. Foucault, Birth of Biopolitics, op. cit., pp. 31–32.

80. Ibid., p. 320.

81. Ibid., p. 318.

82. Röpke, cited in ibid., p. 148.

83. Ibid., p. 224.

84. Ibid., p. 260.

85. Ibid., p. 259.

88. Foucault, History of Sexuality, Volume 1, p. 141.

86. Ibid., p. 269.

87. Ibid., p. 296.

90. Gary Becker and Richard Posner, “The Erosion of Individual Responsibility”, The Becker-Posner Blog, June 29 (2008), available: <http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/archives/2008/03/the_erosion_of.html>.

89. Jason Read, “A Genealogy of Homo-Economicus: Neoliberalism and the Production of Subjectivity”, Foucault Studies, Vol. 1, No. 6 (2009), p. 30.

91. Ibid.

92. Lavin, op. cit., p. 61.

93. Ibid., p. 73.

94. Read, op. cit., pp. 25–26.

96. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), p. 365.

97. Ibid., pp. 365–366.

95. Antonio Negri and Félix Guattari, Communists Like Us: New Spaces of Liberty, New Lines of Alliance (New York: Semiotext(e), 1990), p. 119.

98. Foucault, Birth of Biopolitics, op. cit., p. 22.

99. Idem, “Truth and Power”, op. cit., p. 120.

100. Idem, Birth of Biopolitics, op. cit., p. 68.

101. Ibid., p. 66.

102. Ibid., p. 65.

103. Thomas Lemke, “Foucault, Governmentality, and Critique”, Rethinking Marxism, Vol. 14, No. 3 (2002), p. 60.

106. Ibid., p. 699.

104. Neumann and Sending, op. cit., p. 698.

105. Ibid., p. 693.

107. Ibid., p. 678.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Nicholas J. Kiersey

A draft of this paper was first presented at a panel entitled “The Uses of Global Governmentality”, at the 33rd Annual Conference of the British International Studies Association, University of Exeter, 13–17 December 2008. The author wishes to thank David Chandler for organising that panel and inviting the interesting debate that took place that day. Thanks are also due to Doug Stokes, who first proposed this special issue of Global Society. Finally, the author would also like to acknowledge the valuable input of Jason Weidner, Ian Bruff, Stephen Legg, Mark Kelly, and two anonymous reviewers.