Rendered Rational [Foucault]
I’d like to take a moment to speculate on neoliberalism vis-a-vis Foucault. Biopower can be understood as the force of government to affect the population as a whole. Biopolitics is administration at the level of population. The governing of individuals as the level of population emerged from a liberal rationale in the eighteenth century.
Liberalism is an ideology, but moreover, Foucault claims, it is a practice, “a way of doing things”. The particular practice was a max-a-min rationale of government that functions with the finality of the population. It was a way to protect markets, transactions, and the private property upon which all else depends, while ideally remaining non-intrusive to other spheres. But in reality, the modern state governance is characterized by an antinomy of forces – that of minimal government, and the governmental intervention necessary to sustain and produce according to economic liberalism. The “biopower” exercised by the police, itself a technology of the state, functions in the ambit of the latter.
But where does the rationale for “acceptable” or “necessary” government intervention develop? What crisis of governmentality could cause a revision of liberalism?
I posit that economic globalization has introduced new forces causing states to react. Whereas states once only had to manage a political economy, they are now tasked with an international political economy. While there are a few prominent theoretic strategies for engagement with the globalized market, the trend in the west seems to be a liberalism rendered as neoliberalism. This in turn renders the functions of governance, the state, the population, and the individual, under new norms.
An international neoliberal agenda seems to posit economics as the basis for politics. Further, it “seeks to extend the rationality of the market, the schemes of analysis it proposes, and the decision-making criteria it suggests to areas that are not exclusively or not primarily economic.” (Birth of Biopolitics 207) This seems to present an elimination of the antinomy: the field of government would be reduced, and limits introduced by techniques of the state would be recalled. This would give new space to private enterprise, and as private enterprise grows, it might practice a governance of its own, over its own products. Individuals potentially could come under the subjectivation of these new governing entities, perhaps sublating their alliance to the state, or whatever other identifications they may carry. We could speculate that the state will lose strength vis-à-vis other private international governing powers, and that these entities will begin to employ their own private police apparatuses to act within their own fields, perhaps even transgressing state boundaries, according to an international stage radically reinterpreted as singularly economic. Actually, this doesn’t seem so far off…
