Foucault's Overlooked Organisation: Revisiting his Critical Works

Abstract

In this essay I propose a new reading of Michel Foucault's main thesis about biopower and biopolitics. I argue that organisation represents the neglected key to Foucault's new conceptualisation of power as something that is less political and more organisational. This unique contribution was lost even on his closest interlocutors. Foucault's work on power had a strong influence on organisation and management theory but interestingly not for the reasons I am proposing. In fact, although theorists in management and organisation studies have emphasised power in relation to discipline, control and subjectivity they have overlooked the transformative meaning of Foucault's organisation. His work on biopolitics has attracted opposition, too, as evidenced by the controversy sparked by Giorgio Agamben about Foucault's biopolitics. From Agamben's critique, it appears that Foucault's notions of politics and power do not allow a deconstruction of the violence of the concentration camp. However, a critical reading of Primo Levi's biographical narratives reveals the camp as a place where the prisoners’ ability to organise their daily lives secured survival. To make sense of Levi's revelation, I use John Dewey's notion of habits as forms of organisation and reconnect it to Foucault's organisation. A shared understanding of the objective conditions of human activity and experience highlights the similarities between Dewey's pragmatism and Foucault's pragmatic metaphysics. In the end, however, Foucault's metaphysical background has caught up with him, pushing him away from his own most radical proposal that organisation was the new form of power and the new substance of politics.

Notes

¹But if Foucault was silent on the camp and the totalitarian state, it seems that Arendt did not capture the essence of the totalitarian state as inscribed in biopolitical sovereignty either. According to Agamben, the concentration camp does not represent, as Arendt suggests, ‘human made hell’ (Arendt 1994: 240), but rather the very opposite situation in which life becomes its trademark. ‘Only because politics in our age had been entirely transformed into biopolitics was it possible for politics to be constituted as totalitarian politics to a degree hitherto unknown’ (Agamben 1998: 120).

²Some questioned his critique, arguing that Agamben's reading of Foucault is structural rather than genealogical (Neal 2006).

³Agamben tends to lean toward Aristotle's notion of paradigm where the part of something (singularity) is analysed not in reference to a whole, or the whole in relation to the part – that is particular versus universal or universal versus particular – but rather the part is viewed as being concerned with the part. This means that the particular is understood in relation to the particular only. Such a move could neutralise the dichotomous thinking contained in the opposition particular–universal and the zone of undecidability that it creates. ‘The paradigm is neither universal nor particular, neither general nor individual; it is a singularity which shows itself as such, and produces a new ontological context’ (2002: 3).

⁴The notion of the ban was originally developed by Jean-Luc Nancy in his book The Birth to Presence (1993) that followed his highly controversial book The Inoperative Community (1991).

⁵In Mortal Questions (1979: 178) the moral philosopher Thomas Nagel mentioned the notion of physicalism pointing to the philosopher Donald Davidson's suggestion that a psychophysical theory could help elaborate on the physical causes and effects of mental events through physical descriptions. Such a theory has not been developed yet but neuroscience might be the next step to it.

⁶This social hierarchy, however, did not suspend anti-Semitism in the camp. In more than one occasion, Levi showed that political prisoners were fighting the Nazi regime in political terms and totally disregarded the fate of the Jews. And ordinary criminals had even less scruples in this regard because many were fundamentally in agreement with the Nazis. 

⁷Because of the lack of testimony and biographical accounts from female prisoners, we do not know how women selected for the final solution were referred to. Perhaps there was not such a term for them. This could be why the compound ‘Mexico’ located outside the perimeter of Birkenau's concentration camp, where only female prisoners transitioned, has never been mentioned in the literature (see Giaccaria and Minca 2011: 9).

⁸In my view, Levi's description of the Muselmann as the complete and true witness must be put into perspective. Levi was not theorising about the Muselmann. The description is based on real, physical experiences. Hence, I do not to agree with Davis’ (2004: 88) conclusion that Agamben's philosophical closures have been influenced by Levi. To blame Levi for Agamben's own shortcomings is unfair. Vardoulakis (2010), too, disagreed with Agamben's representation of the Muselmann.

⁹This discussion is reminiscent of Heidegger's notion of ‘readiness-to-hand’ and ‘ready-to-hand’ in Being and Time (1962). Dewey and Heidegger share the notion of experience and activity preceding thinking and reflection. It is impossible for me to reconstruct this discussion in the present essay, but I have elaborated on their similarities and differences in my forthcoming book on Heidegger.

¹⁰Dewey did not differentiate between the two. This is because impulse alone evokes the idea of something that is loose, undirected. But in connection with human instinct it acquires a cultural meaning. He argued that animals live within a ready-made instinct, while human beings can adapt and change their instinct, and so by cutting across various activities their instincts become an activity that can be learned within an organised life. ‘In learning habits it is possible for man to learn the habit of learning’ (Dewey 1922: 105). I shall not enter into this discussion, confining myself to the comment that in the past 50 years a more sophisticated knowledge of how animals organise their safety, group life and reproduction has prompted some serious revision of our notion of animal instincts.

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Notes on contributors

Michela Betta

Dr Michela Betta is a teacher, researcher, theorist and writer. She studied philosophy and social sciences in Milan and Frankfurt, and completed her doctorate at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University of Frankfurt. She is currently concerned with questions pertaining to phenomenological approaches to organisation, management and leadership, ethical theory. She has published on a variety of topics in scholarly journals and books embedded in her research interests. Michela has also published three collections of short stories with the intention of disseminating theoretical knowledge through literary media. She writes in three languages (Italian, English and German), and has published on phenomenology, Foucault, discourse and power, ethics and science. Michela Betta works at Swinburne University of Technology, Melbourne, Australia.