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Abstract
Taking cues from Michel Foucault’s late work on ancient cultures of self-care, this article argues that the success of neoliberalism is bound up with an epistemological critique of modernity forged by the movement’s founding theorists. This critique takes aim at three distinct intellectual currents – the socialist, the rationalist, and the pastoral – and thus marks a tripartite break from modern techniques of power and subjectivation. I contend that a Hellenistic model of self-cultivation – exemplified especially in Epicurean, Cynic, and Stoic discourses and scrutinized meticulously by Foucault in his late lectures – becomes reactivated in late twentieth-century American economic and social thought. The second half of the article considers modes of digital writing as “technologies of the self.” Taking the case of “fake news” as my central reference point, I argue that common practices of social media “sharing” constitute an emerging practice of curatorial self-writing that makes one an especially favorable target for neoliberal strategies of social control.
disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 As Elden reveals, Foucault composed this final chapter first, which suggests that he had, at the time, considered the whole History of Sexuality project to be continuous with his research into discipline, knowledge-power, and governmentality (Security, Territory, Population). See Elden 45–46.
2 Foucault, “Genealogy of Ethics” 256.
3 The real value of “sociologists, psychologists, sociobiologists, historians, anthropologists, political scientists, lawyers, and others,” according to Becker, hereby lies in their respective capacity to aid in the “predicting and understanding of behavior” by discovering “how preferences have become what they are and their perhaps slow evolution over time” (Economic Approach 13).
4 A widely disseminated cartoon version of the book, for example, opens with a sunny scene of postwar optimism, with believers in planning, and ends, a mere eighteen panels later, with those believers up against the firing squad. First published in Look magazine, this graphic abridgment of Hayek’s first major political treatise was notably reproduced and distributed in booklet form by General Motors as volume 118 in its “Thought Starter” series (https://mises-media.s3.amazonaws.com/Road%20to%20Serfdom%20in%20Cartoons.pdf?file=1&type=document).
5 Between the two world wars, Hayek transitioned from working on concrete economic problems to problems in the philosophy of science. His preliminary objective was to repudiate the hard rationalism of “social physicists” like Bernal and Haldane, whose methodological conflation of two qualitatively distinct and incommensurate phenomena had, according to Hayek, been directly responsible for what he saw as policy-makers’ hazardous beliefs in the virtue and efficacy of centralized planning, command, and control (see especially Counter-Revolution).
6 See, for example, Hayek’s important essays “Competition as a Discovery Procedure,” “The Theory of Complex Phenomena,” and “Kinds of Rationalism.”
7 Note that we can map biopolitics as Foucault defines it onto the second class of disorganized, complex phenomena, which might help explain why Foucault seems to find it so difficult to talk about neoliberalism and biopolitics in the same breath.
8 See especially “Competition as a Discovery Procedure” and Individualism and Economic Order.
9 See, for example, Crano.
10 Michael C. Behrent highlights a “deep affinity” between Foucault and the neoliberals from the standpoint of anti-humanism (29), but he is ultimately too forceful in making his case for this intellectual alliance, mistaking what I take to be a research interest of Foucault’s for a “strategic endorsement” (53).
11 Neoliberalism in America thus entails what Foucault would only later call a whole “form of life.”
12 Building on Deleuze’s seminal “Postscript” to Foucault, Lazzarato defines debt as the key mechanism for effectuating this sort of laissez-faire social control over the last forty years. “The debtor is ‘free,’” he points out, but only “insofar as [he] assume[s] the way of life […] compatible with reimbursement” (31).
13 Cf. Schultz; Becker, Human Capital.
14 Cf. Becker, “A Theory of the Allocation of Time.”
15 There has been a great deal of interest in Foucault’s post-1976 research in the wake of the serial publication of Foucault’s Collège de France lecture courses over the last ten or so years. Philosophers, historians, and social, cultural, and political theorists have developed in near equal measure Foucault’s theses on liberal governmentality on the one hand, and self-care in Antiquity on the other. Very few, however, attempt to straddle the two seemingly disparate modes of inquiry. Stuart Elden’s recent Foucault’s Last Decade marks the most comprehensive effort to do so to date.
16 Cf. Gros’s “Course Context” in The Hermeneutics of the Subject (514).
17 Cf. Foucault’s lecture on 24 February, wherein he outlines the process by which “spiritual knowledge […] was gradually limited, overlaid, and finally effaced by a different mode of knowledge which could be called the knowledge of intellectual knowledge” (Hermeneutics 308). Ultimately, as Foucault has it, “knowledge of spirituality […] disappeared with the Enlightenment,” metamorphosing into a “faith and belief in a continual progress of humanity” (310–11). From roughly the seventeenth century onwards, rigorous training and preparation – both spiritual and physical – are no longer necessary conditions for recognizing and speaking truth, and so “the notion of knowledge of the object [becomes] substituted for the notion of access to the truth” (191). Foucault defines two “major moments” of modernity. In the first, the Cartesian moment, philosophical and scientific method delink self-knowledge from self-care. In the second major moment of modernity, the Kantian moment, the possibility of self-knowledge becomes entirely closed off, prompting the rise of the human sciences – those disciplines organized around concepts and practices aimed at the objectivation of the living, speaking, working subject. The human sciences, according to Foucault, complete the inversion of the Ancient Greek, Roman, and Christian modes of relating subjectivity and truth (188).
18 Alcibiades’ authorship is now in dispute but, as Elden points out, this matters little to Foucault, whose main concern is the date (155) and the function of the text in its contemporaneity.
19 The Alcibiades dialogue makes clear that, in Foucault’s words, “[t]hose who must take care of themselves are the young aristocrats destined to exercise power” (Hermeneutics 82).
20
The care of [one]self must therefore be such that it also provides [one] with the art (the techne, the know-how) which will enable [one] to govern others well. In short […] one’s self and the care of the self must be given a definition from which we can derive the knowledge required for governing others. (Hermeneutics 51–52)
21 “[T]he major if not exclusive form of the care of the self is self-knowledge: To take care of the self is to know oneself” (Hermeneutics 82).
22 Monastic ascesis, according to Foucault, entails “progressive renunciations leading to the essential renunciation, self-renunciation” (Hermeneutics 319). And again: “[I]n this Christian ascesis there is […] a movement of self-renunciation which proceeds by way of, and whose essential moment is, the objectification of the self in a true discourse” (333).
23 The implementation of neoliberal-style austerity mostly postdates Foucault, but its likeness to the Stoic project of self-control deserves attention, for therein
[one] is shown the world not so that he can, like Plato’s souls, choose his destiny. He is shown the world precisely so that he clearly understands that there is no choice, that nothing can be chosen without choosing the rest, that there is only one possible world, and that we are bound to this world. (Hermeneutics 284)
24 There is a growing body of scholarship pinpointing links between neoliberal ideology and telematic culture. See, for example, Dean; Harcourt; Mirowski.
25 Big hat-tip to Andrew Culp for first suggesting I name curatorial this third mode of telematic self-writing.
26 See, for example, Herbst; Parkinson; Sanders; Stelter.
27 Collected by Silverman in “Viral Fake Election News.”
28 Though it appeared to have ceased generating new content by the final days of the Obama presidency, Ending the Fed was still active during the drafting of this essay, having finally gone offline some time in mid- to late 2017.
29 Clicks, of course, equal profit, most directly in the form of advertising (see, for example, Wu). It is perhaps somewhat ironic that the most dogged debunker of far-right fake news has been Buzzfeed, a born-digital news organization whose business model hitches success almost entirely to click-bait.
30 A companion piece to this article will take up Facebook’s reform efforts rolled out in late 2017 and early 2018, in particular the changes to its Newsfeed algorithm, which, in the name of promoting greater “well-being” of its users, has been recalibrated to give more weight to “personal” posts than to shared news items.
31 See, for example, “Trump Savages News Media at Rally to Mark his 100th Day,” The New York Times 4 Apr. 2017; “Trump Attacks Media in Flurry of Early Morning Tweets,” Associated Press 27 June 2017.
32 Some have argued that selling weapons to Saudi Arabia amounts to something like selling weapons to ISIS by other means, but this would be a debate for another time and place.
33 This holds even in cases where the “fake” in question originates from an ostensibly satirical source.
34 The song is “Izzo (H.O.V.A.)” from the 2001 album The Blueprint.
35 Foucault’s exposition here hinges on Marcus Aurelius’ innovation of the daily review book. In Foucault’s reading of Aurelius,
the review […] is obligatory at the end of the day before going to sleep […] [as it] enables one to draw up a balance sheet of the things one had to do and a comparison of how one did them with how one should have done them. (Hermeneutics 163)
36 Foucault’s depiction of the “teleologically concentrated” subject of self-care strongly resembles the feedback-driven model of the cybernetic governor, named for the steersman or navigator (in Greek, kubernetes) (248–49, 267 n. 7). This is one point where we can establish a certain resonance with Foucault’s earlier studies of governmentality (Security, Territory, Population and The Birth of Biopolitics). He addresses this during his lecture of 17 February, in a rare reference to that term that had dominated his late 1970s lectures (and which continues to dominate an increasingly prominent strand of Foucault scholarship today):
[I]f we understand by governmentality a strategic field of power relations in their mobility, transformability, and reversibility, then I do not think that reflection on this notion of governmentality can avoid passing through […] the element of a subject defined by the relationship of self to self. (Hermeneutics 252)
37 This is remarkably close to the way in which the subject of human capital reacts to changes in the environment, or before that, the way Hayek saw market agents responding to price fluctuations, as described in the first part of this essay.
38 While it would become vital to Stoic ethics, Foucault traces the concept of “prescriptive facts” or “prescriptive truths” as far back as the Macedonian king Demetrius in the third century bce. For Demetrius,
what [one] need[s] to know are relations: the subject’s relations with everything around him. What [one] must know, or rather the way in which [one] must know, is a mode in which what is given as truth is read immediately and directly as precept. (Hermeneutics 236)
39 See, for example, Heffernan.
40 “George Soros Indicted for Voter Machine Fraud and More,” The People’s Resistance 26 Apr. 2017.
41 “Trump HUMILIATES Obama after White House Cleaning Staff Finds Secret Stash of THIS,” America’s Last Line of Defense Feb. 2017.
42 There is certainly room to debate the extent to which the social media subject can be said to partake in such an exercise or ascesis, which for the Romans entails deep commitment on both spiritual and corporeal levels. My position is that, given the increasing virtualization of social engagement and the rapidly multiplying facets of everyday life and culture getting routed through networks, we should at least acknowledge that the habitual gestures (clicks, swipes, taps, and so on) involved in curatorial self-writing online, and the psychical posture one must assume in order to fully partake in such a practice, ultimately amount to something like ascetic training. The essential thing is that it is the practice itself that matters, rather than any concern for the objective veracity of the content of the communication.
43 Cf. Bucher.
44 It might be argued that the alt-right/Macedonian fake news machine is the source of rather than a reaction to the world’s absurdity, but I think we would do better to grasp it as a quasi-public form of inward turning, a rejection of the socio-environmental status quo. Foucault describes the nature of the “break” as a key difference between the Roman and Christian models of conversion:
[I]n Hellenistic and Roman conversion […] there is not that caesura within the self by which the self tears itself away from itself and renounces itself in order to be reborn other than itself after a figurative death. If there is a break – and there is – it takes place with regard to what surrounds the self […] [T]he break takes place for the self. It is a break with everything around the self, for the benefit of the self, but not a break within the self. (Hermeneutics 212–13)
45 See note 19 above.
46 More precisely, Baudrillard argues, “The subject disappears, gives way to a diffuse, floating, insubstantial subjectivity […] an end-of-world subjectivity, a subjectivity for an end of the world from which the subject as such has disappeared” (27).
47 Along these lines, Becker himself admits that HCT, for its part, “is not mainly concerned with individuals”; rather, “it uses theory at the microlevel as a powerful tool to derive implications at the group or macrolevel” (“Nobel Lecture” 650).