By Gordon Hull
As is well-known, Foucault pretty-much detested orthodox Marxism and the PCF. At the same time, his relation to Marx’s own thought, and that of Marx’s better commentators, is more complex. One way to approach this topic is via primitive accumulation (recall here). Another is by way of intermediaries. Here I’d like to consider what is, as far as I know, an undiscussed connection in a late essay of Althusser’s (as always, I welcome references). In a paper in the recent Marx & Foucault anthology, Julien Pallotta outlines what he takes to be evidence that Foucault is responding to Althusser’s “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses” (1970) in his Punitive Society lectures (1973). In particular, Foucault wants to argue that: Althusser doesn’t realize power is constitutive rather than reproductive/productive; that you need to look at more than wage relations to understand the reproduction of capital, and what you’ll discover is a whole process of moralization and control of the worker so that he’s reproduced and ready to work (capital thus needs workers to save against unemployment or disease etc., even as it works to “free” the worker); and there’s thus a process of subjectification which Foucault pursues in a lot more detail than Althusser.
It seems to me that we have something like an Althusserian response in his later “Marx in his Limits” ([ML] 1978; published in Philosophy of the Encounter, references to this edition). No, I’m not claiming that Althusser had access to Foucault’s lectures. In any event, Althusser’s essay is a long and rambling piece, addressing the general idea of a crisis in Marxism. It also does not reference Foucault directly. What I am claiming, and what legitimates reading this essay as partly a response to Foucault, is that it seems to move in a Foucauldian direction on the points Pallotta emphasizes.
The essay might not initially seem promising for thinking about Foucault and Althusser and Marxism as productively engaged. One of Althusser’s main points in the essay is to argue that Marxists have inadequately theorized the state, that the state is a necessary component in the reproduction of relations of class domination, a point that he argues that neither Marx nor Lenin explicitly theorized, although he had begun to do so in the ISA essay (ML 99). One dominant strategy of the state doing this is that it translates excess force into right, laws and norms (ML 109).
For his part, Foucault famously declared early in Society must be Defended that “we have to study power outside the model of Leviathan, outside the field delineated by juridical sovereignty and the institution of the State. We have to analyze it by beginning with the techniques and tactics of domination” (SMD 34). In Birth of Biopolitics, Foucault notes that “it is often said, well, at least by those who know his work, that there is no theory of power in Marx, that the theory of the state is inadequate, and that is really is time to produce it” (BB 91). He then argues that one does not actually need a theory of the state:
“Is it really so important to provide oneself with a theory of the state? After all, the English have not done so badly and, at least until these last few years, have been tolerably well-governed without a theory of the state. At any rate, the last of the theories of the state is found in Hobbes, that is to say, in someone who was both the contemporary and ‘supporter’ of a type of monarchy that the English precisely got rid of at that time. After Hobbes, there is Locke. Locke does not produce a theory of the state; he produces a theory of government” (BB 91).
The point, then, is that “what socialism lacks is not so much a theory of the state as a governmental reason, a definition of what governmental rationality would be in socialism” (BB 92). Moreover, “there is no governmental rationality of socialism … socialism can only be implemented connected up to diverse types of governmentality” (BB 92). So providing a theory of the state seems useless on Foucauldian grounds.
Nonetheless, it seems to me that Althusser is responding to a similar problem. “Marx in his Limits” explicitly returns to the problematic of the “Ideological State Apparatus” essay, which Althusser calls “a text that is already old and, in many respects, inept” (ML 138). On Pallotta’s reading, “Foucault effects a deplacement in relation to Althusser: it not so much the relation of reproduction as the very constitution of the relations of reproduction that need to be thought” (132). Similarly, in a message that extends “beyond Althusser to some traditional positions in Marxism,” a fixation on wages as the material condition of reproduction of the working class is myopic (133).
Althusser complains that the base-superstructure model of canonical Marxist theory has limited thinking about the state. However, he tries to solve it by suggesting that the tendency to treat the state as a separate entity is mistaken. Rather, the state functions as a mechanism for reproducing the conditions of domination by the dominant class. However, if Althusser still sticks with the language of reproduction, he’s expanded its terms. Thus, he notes that “this reproduction does not consist solely in the reproduction of the conditions of ‘social relations’ and, ultimately, the ‘productive relation’; it also includes the reproduction of the material conditions of the relations of production and exploitation” (ML 120). A good example of this is found in infrastructure projects, and he suggests that “major roads have always been constructed” in line with military and economic objectives, and that they are “closely bound up with contemporaneous forms of domination, and therefore also exploitation” (ML 121).
Althusser’s language is, at this point, moving close to Foucauldian considerations of discipline and biopolitics: the state needs to reproduce the “’modern’ material conditions of private life, that is:”
“private life considered from the standpoint of its mass distribution, as so many conditions for the reproduction of labour-power (children, the school system- also a ‘public service,’ is it not?; the national health service – also a ‘public service,’ is it not? the Church and sports – also ‘public services,’ are they not?; and the telephone, but watch out for taps, and the telly – also ‘public services,’ are they not?, even if they are at the beck and call of adroit or inept ministers), is not only not surprising, but necessary and inevitable” (ML 122-3).
What had been wages has become the entire socius. To be sure, as Althusser immediately underscores, this is a public service the state has been “compelled to provide and multiply … in order to cope with the modern forms of class struggle” (ML 123). But in that narrative, even if framed in terms of class struggle, the issue is one in which “security mechanisms have to be installed around the random element inherent in a population of living beings so as to optimize a state of life” (BB 246), as Foucault put it. The state concern is not just living, but living well. So too, the problematic is one of “the art of exercising power in the form of economy – is to have as its main objective that which we are today accustomed to call ‘the economy’” (STP 92). Foucault and Althusser will differ on why and how this happens, but they are converging on the same object domain.
Althusser complains in ML that his readers “eliminated all mention of the state from my formula (ISA), retaining only the term ‘ideological apparatus’” (ML 138). This is to say that there is not enough attention to repression. In his essay for Marx & Foucault, Balibar argues that Foucault is an attentive reader of both Marx and Althusser, and shows a clear engagement with them throughout the early 1970s. On the ISA, Balibar has this to offer:
“Above all, the expression RSA is an invention of Althusser, which doesn’t exist in earlier Marxsim, [and is] correlative to the ISA. In sum, Foucault says to Althusser (and their common public): contrary to what you believe and teach, the principal problem doesn’t reside in the ideological apparatus, it resides in the repressive apparatus” (92).
ML precisely starts to unpack the ways the repressive apparatus constitutes the means of reproduction of class domination.
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