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On Foucault on “Chardino-Marxism,” part 5: Lunacharsky

By Gordon Hull

I’ve been developing (first, second, third, fourth) some reflections on what Foucault means by a reference to “Chardino-Marxism,” a disturbing trend that he credits Althusser with “courageously fighting.”  The real opposition point seems to be Roger Garaudy, a PCF intellectual who is a leader in the effort to establish a post-Stalinist humanist Marxism, and who had a real sympathy for religion.  Last time, I traced some of Garaudy’s sources on religion to Engels.  Some of what Garaudy says also sounds like it’s coming straight from the Russian Marxist Anatoly Lunacharsky’s Religion and Socialism (1908).  The claim here is categorically not that Garaudy read Lunacharsky – as will become evident in a minute, I think that’s highly unlikely.  What I do want to underscore is that there is a coherent line of thought behind Garaudy’s religious impulse.  As I’ll note when I get back to Garaudy and Althusser, there is a very specific political context to Althusser’s attacks on Garaudy having to do with the latter’s role in the PCF and his effort to use a humanist Marxism as a (from Althusser’s point of view, failed) alternative to Stalinism. 

I know very little about Lunacharsky (Wikipedia here), but apparently he was tolerated by Lenin (despite being criticised heavily), and fell out of favor under Stalin.  He died before he could be repressed, but in 1936-8, his memoirs were banned and he was erased from the official histories of communism.  He enjoyed somewhat of a revival after Stalin’s death.  Religion and Socialism is very obscure now: Google books reports a Yiddish translation (!) as well as a Spanish one from the 1970s.  It’s not been translated into English or French.  Marxists.org refers only to his later works in English and in French, and he doesn’t even show up on the German part. 

Most of the work available on Lunacharsky now seems to be attributable to patient work by Roland Boer (upon whom I am completely dependent here).  Religion and Socialism fell out of favor due to Lenin’s denunciation after it was published, was left out of Lunacharsky’s collected works, and was reduced to a few copies.  Here is Boer in his paper on the text:

On Foucault on “Chardino-Marxism,” Part 3

By Gordon Hull

The last couple of times (here then here), I’ve started trying to work through a disparaging reference in the mid-1960s Foucault to “Chardino-Marxism.”  Foucault is associating it with Marxist humanism, and comparing it unfavorably to the Althusserian alternative.  As I noted, the name Foucault uses is Teilhard de Chardin, but the consistent target of the Foucault-aligned theorists appears to be Roger Garaudy.

So why, exactly, might Teilhard appeal to Marxism?  More precisely, in what sense would Teilhard appeal to Garaudy?  In a 1969 paper, Ladis KD Kristof offers some context (for Kristof’s remarkable life, see the memorial notice here).  The “Phenomenon Teilhard” was widely discussed within the Soviet bloc countries, and within the USSR as early as 1962; a Russian translation of Teilhard’s Phenomenon of Man appeared in 1965.  Kristof suggests that the initial Marxist attraction to Teilhard lies simply in that he has a world view – something they can respect, as opposed to (for example) American positivism or empiricism.  More specifically, Teilhard: (a) has a scientific worldview, in that he has a Baconian belief that science can solve all problems; (b) has an evolutionary worldview, arguably even more so than Marx. On Kristof’s account, the difference is first in scope: Teilhard’s evolution is cosmic and Marx’s human.

This leads to a second fundamental difference; following Engels in Anti-Dühring, Marxists think that when man [I am following 1960s usage here – this is the generic “man”] starts taking control of nature (= making history), that is the final qualitative change, and that that future changes are quantitative.  Teilhard, on the other hand, thinks that the end of the process of what he calls “hominization” will involve a qualitative leap.  However, both camps are fundamentally anthropocentric in that “man” is the focus throughout.  Finally, (c) Marxism involves a movement of faith: if one is struggling for the revolution, this requires a prior faith that one can effect progress and so forth; in this, there is a convergence with Teilhard’s optimism.  Something of the sense of all this is conveyed in the following (long) passage from Teilhard’s Future of Mankind (I’m getting it from Kristof, who quotes part of it):

What is Chardino-Marxism and Why does Foucault Care? (part 2)

By Gordon Hull

Last time, I noted that mid-late 1960s Foucault aligned himself in favor of Althusser’s work on Marx, and against what he called “Chardino-Marxism,” which turns out to be a shorthand for humanist Marxism, in particular any efforts to synthesize Marx and Teilhard de Chardin, as well as (or rather, as exemplified by) the work of PCF intellectual Roger Garaudy.  Foucault’s opposition to “humanism” is well-known, but his differentiation of Marxism into less-desirable humanist varieties and more-desirable Althusserian less so, and so I want to pursue the Chardino-Marxism critique further, because it helps us understand the context in which the humanist critique appears, as well as Foucault’s subsequent efforts to position himself relative to Marxism in the 1970s (obligatory self-promotion: my foray into that is here)

In the 1966 interview, “L’homme est-il mort? [Is man dead?]”, Foucault gives as clear a position statement as I’ve seen on all of this.  The interview is roughly contemporaneous with Order of Things, and certainly the more detailed exposition of humanism and Marxism’s place in it there needs to be taken into account in any full discussion.  The interviewer had asked if Foucault differentiated among different kinds of humanism, naming Sartre.  Foucault responds that “if you set aside the facile humanism that Teilhard and Camus represent, the problem of Sartre appears completely different.”  Foucault then stops talking about Sartre and offers a general characterization: “humanism, anthropology and dialectical thought are related.  What ignores man, is contemporary analytic reason which we saw born with Russell, [and] which appears in Levi-Strauss and the linguists.”  On the other hand, dialectics, Foucault says, promotes the idea that the human being “will become an authentic and true man.”  That is, it “promotes man to man and, to this extent, it is indissociable from humanist morality.  In this sense, the great officials of contemporary humanism are evidently Hegel and Marx” (D&E I, 569).  So we are back to the Lindung interview, where Foucault accuses Garaudy of having indiscriminately “picked up everything from Hegel to Teilhard de Chardin” (discussed last time), though with perhaps an emerging sense of what that lineage looks like.

What is “Chardino-Marxism” and why is Foucault talking about it? (part 1)

By Gordon hull

In a 1966 interview with Madeline Chapsal, Foucault proposes that “our task currently is to definitively liberate ourselves from humanism” and offers the following example:

“Our task is to free ourselves definitively from humanism, and it is in this sense that our work is political work, insofar as all the regimes of the East or West pass out their bad goods under the flag of humanism. We have to denounce all these mystifications, like today, inside the Communist Party, where Althusser and his courageous companions are struggling against “Chardino-Marxism.”” (33)

Other than the fusion of Teilhard de Chardin and Marx, what is “Chardino-Marxism” and why does Foucault care?

Teilhard was a Jesuit priest and scientist who tried to reconcile his work in paleontology with Christianity.  I’m dependent on Wikipedia for this, so I’ll just let you read the desription there of his main work, the Phenomenon of Man:

“His posthumously published book, The Phenomenon of Man, set forth a sweeping account of the unfolding of the cosmos and the evolution of matter to humanity, to ultimately a reunion with Christ. In the book, Teilhard abandoned literal interpretations of creation in the Book of Genesis in favor of allegorical and theological interpretations. The unfolding of the material cosmos is described from primordial particles to the development of life, human beings and the noosphere, and finally to his vision of the Omega Point in the future, which is "pulling" all creation towards it. He was a leading proponent of orthogenesis, the idea that evolution occurs in a directional, goal-driven way. Teilhard argued in Darwinian terms with respect to biology, and supported the synthetic model of evolution, but argued in Lamarckian terms for the development of culture, primarily through the vehicle of education.”

Teilhard is also known for developing the concept of “noosphere” to refer to the space of human reason and a transcendence of biology; this concept had some uptake among early Internet theorists.  Apparently Teilhard was very trendy in the 1950s and 1960s.  Foucault mentions him occasionally, and always to associate him with humanism.  Later in the interview quoted above, and in response to question about whether the direction he was taking philosophy didn’t appear “cold and rather abstract,” Foucault exclaims: “it is humanism that is abstract!” and adds:

“What makes me angry about humanism is that it is now this screen behind which the most reactionary thought takes refuge, where monstrous and unthinkable alliances are formed: they want to combine Sartre and Teilhard, for example. In the name of what? Of man! Who would dare speak ill of man? And yet, the effort currently being made by people of our generation is not done in order to claim man [a]s against knowledge and against technology, but is precisely to show that our thought, our life, our manner of being, even our most everyday manner of being, are part of the same systematic organisation and therefore depend on the same categories as the scientific and technical world.” (34-5, translation slightly revised. Emphases original).

In a 1968 interview with Yngve Lindung that appeared in Stockholm (D&E #54; I can’t find a translation), Foucault elaborates a more on the topic. Asked if structuralism was opposed to Marxism, he acknowledges that “it is true that there are certain Marxists who are declared anti-structuralists,” but adds that “at the same time, we need to say that there are a large number of Marxists, among the youngest and let’s say the most dynamic, who on the contrary feel very close to structuralist research.”  He explains:

“In general, one can say that we have to deal today with a soft, bland, humanist Marxism which tries to pick up everything that traditional philosophy has been able to say from Hegel up to Teilhard de Chardin [qui essaie de ramasser tout ce que la philosophie traditionnelle a pu dire depuis Hegel jusqu’à Teilhard de Chardin].  This Marxism is anti-structuralist insofar as it is opposed to structuralism’s having put in question the old values of bourgeois liberalism.  Then we have an opposing group of Marxists that we could call anti-revisionists and for whom the future of Marxist thought and of the communist movement indeed requires that one reject all this eclecticism, all this interior revisionism, all this peaceful coexistence concerning the plan of ideas, and these Marxists are instead structuralists” (D&E I, 682-3 (2 vol version)). 

Later in the interview he names the PCF intellectual Roger Garaudy in this regard.  Now, Garaudy claims to be inspired by structuralism.  But he also claims to be a humanist.  Foucault responds that “I don’t believe that one could reasonably pretend that Garaudy is a Marxist.”  He then adds that “it doesn’t in any way surprise me that Garaudy wants to gather [recueillir] what he is able to call a concrete structuralism and humanism.  He has picked up everything from Hegel to Teilhard de Chardin.  He will pick me up too [Il a tout ramassé depuis Hegel jusqu’à Teilhard de Chardin. Il me ramassera aussi]” (684).

The objection is to the eclecticism, and one can imagine Garaudy as having produced what one might call a scavenger Marxism.  There is definitely this sense to Garaudy.  I’ll say more in a later post, but in Marxism in the Twentieth Century (1966), for example, he writes that “structuralism can, like cybernetics [!], be one of the ways of comprehending the world and of conceiving man and his action, which corresponds the best to the spirit of our time, to the development of a new humanism: this will be precisely the humanism of which Marx was the pioneer, integrating all that was one by Graeco-Roman humanism and Judeo-Christian humanism, and going beyond both in a new synthesis of nature and man, of the external world and subjectivity, of necessary law and liberty” (75).

That’s a lot!  Foucault wants nothing of it.  Later in the Lindung interview he says the following, which is worth quoting at length:

“The situation of the French left is still dominated by the presence of the communist party.  The current problematic at its interior is essentially the following: should the party, theoretically and politically, make itself the agent of peaceful coexistence, which politically drives [entraîne] a sort of neutralization of the conflict with the U.S., and which comports, from an ideological point of view, with an attempt at ecumenicism thanks to which all the important ideological currents in Europe and in the world are found [retrouveraient] more or less reconciled?  It is clear that people like Sartre and Garaudy work toward this peaceful coexistence between diverse intellectual currents, and they precisely say: but we don’t have to abandon humanism, but we don’t have to abandon Teilhard de Chardin, but existentialism is also a little bit right , but structuralism too, if only it wasn’t doctrinaire, but concrete and open to the world.  Opposed to this current, which puts coexistence at the first rank, you have a current that the ‘right wing people’ call doctrinaire, neostalinist and Chinese.  This tendency inside the PCF is an attempt to reestablish a Marxist theory of politics, of science and of philosophy which is a consequential theory, ideologically acceptable, in accord with the doctrine of Marx.  It is this attempt which at this moment effected [opérée] by the intellectuals of the left wing of the party, and they are more or less regrouped around Althusser.  This structuralist wing is the left.  You understand now what this maneuver of Sartre and Garaudy consists in, knowing how to pretend that structuralism is a typical ideology of the right.  It lets them designate as accomplices of the right those who are in reality to their left.  It lets them consequently present themselves as the only true representatives of the French left and communists.  But this is only a maneuver” (686)

In this sense, Teilhard seems to be less of interest to Foucault than what Garaudy in particular is doing with Teilhard within the PCF.  Teilhard is a stalking horse for Marxist humanism, which (like other humanisms) is to be combatted. 

Next time, I’ll pick up from here…

Signal or Noise? Foucault and Communication Theory (part 2): Noise as Resistance

By Gordon Hull

Last time, I followed up on a reference in Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan’s Code to Foucault’s short text “Message ou bruit” (1966). Here I want to trace out some of the political implications of that text, or at least to suggest a path from it to some of his later work in the 1970s and current forms of political resistance.

One of Foucault’s emergent interests in philosophy of language is in pragmatics and speech act theory. I don’t know enough about his reading in the relevant time period to know if this exactly tracks his growing interest in politics, but by a 1978 lecture in Japan (which I discussed here) he is able to say that:

“Perhaps one could see that there is still a certain possibility for philosophy to play a role in relation to power, which would be a role neither of foundation nor of renewal of power. Perhaps philosophy can still play a role on the side of counter-power, on the condition that this role does not consist in exercising, in the face of power, the very law of philosophy, on the condition that philosophy stops thinking of itself as prophesy, on the condition that philosophy stops thinking of itself either as pedagogy, or as legislation, and that it gives itself the task to analyse, clarify, and make visible, and thus intensify the struggles that develop around power, the strategies of the antagonists within relations of power, the tactics employed, the foyers of resistance, on the condition in sum that philosophy stops posing the question of power in terms of good and bad, but rather poses it in terms of existence. The question is not: is power good or bad, legitimate or illegitimate, a question of right or morality? Rather, one should simply try to relieve the question of power of all the moral and juridical overloads that one has placed on it, and ask the following naïve question, which has not been posed so often, even if a certain number of people have actually posed it for a long while: what do power relations fundamentally consist in?” (192)

Foucault’s emphases here – from the emphasis on local struggles to the rejection of prophetic thinking – should be familiar. He then immediately suggests that “We have known for a long time that the role of philosophy is not to discover what is concealed, but rather to make visible what precisely is visible, which is to say to make appear what is so close, so immediate, so intimately connected with ourselves that we cannot perceive it.” This is recognizable as a reference to Wittgenstein – specifically, the remark in Philosophical Investigations 128 that “the work of the philosopher consists in assembling reminders for a particular purpose.”

Signal or Noise? Foucault and Communication Theory (Part 1)

By Gordon Hull

Last time, I offered a quick synopsis of Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan’s excellent new book Code.  Here, I’d like to track one specific Foucault reference in it.  Geoghegan takes Lévi-Strauss’s Savage Mind as a central text in the ambivalence French theorists came to feel about American communication theories, and he notes that the book “occasioned a broader reassessment of the human sciences marked by a new ascent of ‘coding’ as a key concept poised to dislocate and perhaps dissolve, existing scientific hierarchies” (152).  He adds:

“Learning to code – that is, to cast cultural objects in terms of codes, relays, patterns, and systems – did more than reframe existing knowledge in cybernetic jargon. It also reflected a growing cynicism toward existing cultural and scientific nodes. From the 1960s onward, the semiotic task of deciphering obscure ‘codes’ in culture, politics, and science overtook the structuralist project. This crypto-structuralism shifted emphasis from the neutral connotations of ‘communication’ to antagonistic notions of code …. If these terms furthered the technocratic project of US foundations, they also set in motion a radical critique of scientific neutrality. Beneath the neutral science, something ‘savage’ lurked.” (152-3).

Geoghegan cites Lacan, Barthes and the Tel Quel group (on which see Danielle Marx-Scouras’s excellent study).  He also quietly footnotes Foucault’s “Message ou bruit [message or noise]” “for a critical discussion of these same terms by Foucault” (215n81).

Reading List: Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan, Code

By Gordon Hull

I made myself wait until I was settled into the summer to read Bernard Dionysius Geoghegan’s Code: From Information Theory to French Theory.  It was absolutely worth the wait. Code offers a look into the role of cybernetic theory in the development of postwar French theory, especially structuralism and what Geoghegan calls “crypto-structuralism.”  The story starts in the progressive era U.S., with the emergence of technocratic forms of government and expertise “against perceived threats of anarchy and communism” and the “progressive hopes to submit divisive political issues for neutral technical analysis” (25).  This governance as depoliticization then generates the postwar emphasis on cybernetics and information theory.  Along the way, it picks up and reorganizes psychology and anthropology in figures like Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson, as the emerging information theory disciplines are given extensive funding by “Robber Baron philanthropies” (and later, covertly of course, by the CIA).  This then sets the stage for postwar cybernetic theory and the careful cultivation (again, substantially by philanthropies and the CIA) of intellectuals like Roman Jakobson and Lévi-Strauss.

This is not a story I’d heard before – and I get the impression that almost no one has, at least not in philosophy, which is why this book is so important – and the details are fascinating.  It makes a compelling case for the need for those of us who work on the post-war French to get a handle on cybernetic theory in particular, especially because of the link to structuralism (more on that in a moment).  It calls to mind some of Katherine Hayles’ work – I’m thinking of How we Became Posthuman and My Mother Was a Computer – that probably needs rereading in this context.

Some Reasons to be Skeptical of AI Authorship, Part 1: What is an (AI) Author?

By Gordon Hull

Large Language Models (LLMs) like Chat-GPT burst into public consciousness sometime in the second half of last year, and Chat-GPT’s impressive results have led to a wave of concern about the future viability of any profession that depends on writing, or on teaching writing in education.  A lot of this is hype, but one issue that is emerging is the role of AI authorship in academic and other publications; there’s already a handful of submissions that list AI co-authors.  An editorial in Nature published on Feb. 3 outlines the scope of the issues at hand:

“This technology has far-reaching consequences for science and society. Researchers and others have already used ChatGPT and other large language models to write essays and talks, summarize literature, draft and improve papers, as well as identify research gaps and write computer code, including statistical analyses. Soon this technology will evolve to the point that it can design experiments, write and complete manuscripts, conduct peer review and support editorial decisions to accept or reject manuscripts”

As a result:

“Conversational AI is likely to revolutionize research practices and publishing, creating both opportunities and concerns. It might accelerate the innovation process, shorten time-to-publication and, by helping people to write fluently, make science more equitable and increase the diversity of scientific perspectives. However, it could also degrade the quality and transparency of research and fundamentally alter our autonomy as human researchers. ChatGPT and other LLMs produce text that is convincing, but often wrong, so their use can distort scientific facts and spread misinformation.”

The editorial then gives examples of LLM-based problems with incomplete results, bad generalizations, inaccurate summaries, and other easily-generated problems.  It emphasizes accountability (for the content of material: the use of AI should be clearly documented) and the need for the development of truly open AI products as part of a push toward transparency.

Foucault and Epistemic Injustice (Part 3)

In the previous two posts (first, second), I took up the invitation provided by a recent paper by Daniele Lorenzini to develop some thoughts on the relationship between Foucault’s thought and theorizing around epistemic injustice.  In particular, Miranda Fricker’s account both draws heavily from Foucault and pushes back against his historicism to advocate for a more a-historical normative ground for the theory: testimonial injustice “distorts” who someone is.  Last time, I looked at some of Foucault’s own work in the lectures leading up to Discipline and Punish to develop a sense of how both “truth” and “power” are relevant – and distinguishable – in that work, even as they both are historical constructs. In particular, following Lorenzini, we can distinguish between “x is your diagnosis” and “therefore, you ought to do y.” Here I begin with the complexity introduced in Foucault’s work by his addition of an embryonic genealogy of truth practices. 

Let’s begin with the Psychiatric Power lectures, where Foucault had been talking about the strange role of science (and its personification in the doctor) in the governance of asylums.  There, when speaking of the historical contingency of the modern scientific enterprise, Foucault writes:

New Paper: How Foucault got rid of (Bossy) Marxism

Now published in Critical Review.  Here's the abstract:

Foucault distanced himself from Marxism even though he worked in an environment—left French theory of the 1960s and 1970s—where Marxism was the dominant frame of reference. By viewing Foucault in the context of French Marxist theoretical debates of his day, we can connect his criticisms of Marxism to his discussions of the status of intellectuals. Foucault viewed standard Marxist approaches to the role of intellectuals as a problem of power and knowledge applicable to the Communist party. Marxist party intellectuals, in his view, had developed rigid and universal theories and had used them to prescribe action, which prevented work on the sorts of problems that he uncovered—even though these problems were central to the development of capitalism.

The paper is an attempt to cut a path through some (mostly 1970s) texts to get a handle on what Foucault is doing with his inconsistent references to Marx and Marxism.  There's a complex tangle of issues here, many related to the vicissitudes of the reception of Marx, and I hope that others will be able to add to our understanding of them and the period.

A huge thanks to Shterna Friedman, whose editorial work resulted in a much better article.  Also, my paper is going to be part of a special issue of Critical Review on Foucault - the other papers should be appearing relatively soon.

Foucault and Epistemic Injustice (Part 2)

By Gordon Hull

Last time, I took the opportunity provided by a recent paper by Daniele Lorenzini to develop some thought on the relationship between Foucault’s thought and theorizing around epistemic injustice.  Lorenzini’s initial point, with which I agree fully, is that Fricker’s development of epistemic injustice is, on her own terms, incompatible with Foucault because she wants to maintain a less historicized normative standpoint than Foucauldian genealogy allows.  Epistemic injustice, on Fricker’s reading, involves a distortion of someone’s true identity.  Lorenzini also suggests that Foucault’s late work, which distinguishes between an epistemic “game of truth” and a normative/political “regime of truth” offers the distinction Fricker’s theory needs, by allowing one to critique the regime of truth dependent on a game of truth.  In terms of Foucault’s earlier writings, he does not fully reduce knowledge to power, in the sense that is can be useful to analytically separate them. Here I want to look at a couple of examples of how that plays out in the context of disciplinary power.

Consider the case of delinquency, and what Foucault calls the double mode of disciplinary power (Discipline and Punish, 199): a binary division into two categories (sane/mad, etc.) and then the coercive assignment of individuals into one group or the other.  The core modern division is between normal and abnormal, and we have a whole “set of techniques and institutions for measuring, supervising and correcting the abnormal” (199).  The delinquent, then, is defined epistemically or juridically (in other words, as a matter of science or law; as I will suggest below, Foucault thinks that one of the ways that psychology instituted itself as a science was by successfully blurring the science/law distinction), and then things are done to her.  This is the sort of gap that epistemic injustice theory, at least in its testimonial version, needs: in Fricker’s trial example, there is the epistemic apparatus of “scientific” racism, and then there is the set of techniques that work during the trial.  Both of these can be targets of critique, but testimonial injustice most obviously works within the second of the two.

Foucault and Epistemic Injustice (part 1)

By Gordon Hull

Those of us who have both made extensive use of Foucault and made a foray into questions of epistemic injustice have tended to sweep the question of the relation between the two theoretical approaches under the rug.  Miranda Fricker’s book, which has basically set the agenda for work on epistemic injustice, acknowledges a substantial debt to Foucault, but in later work she backs away from the ultimate implications of his account of power on the grounds that his historicism undermines the ability to make normative claims.  In this her argument makes a fairly standard criticism of Foucault (whose “refusal to separate power and truth” she aligns with Lyotard’s critique of metanarratives (Routledge Handbook of Epistemic Injustice, 55).  As she describes her own project:

“What I hoped for from the concept of epistemic injustice and its cognates was to mark out a delimited space in which to observe some key intersections of knowledge and power at one remove from the long shadows of both Marx and Foucault, by forging an on-the-ground tool of critical understanding that was called for in everyday lived experience of injustice … and which would rely neither on any metaphysically burdened theoretical narrative of an epistemically well-placed sex-class, nor on any risky flirtation with a reduction of truth or knowledge to de facto social power” (Routledge Handbook, 56).

On this reading, then, Marxism relies too much on ideology-critique, on the one hand, and on privileging the position of women/the proletariat (or other, singular subject position).  Foucault goes too far and reduces the normative dimension altogether. 

In a new paper, Daniele Lorenzini addresses the Foucault/Fricker question head-on, centrally focusing on the critique of Foucault’s supposed excessive historicism.  Lorenzini’s contribution, to which I will return later, is to suggest that Foucault’s later writings (1980 and forward) distinguish between “games” of truth and “regimes” of truth. The distinction is basically illustrated in the following sentence: “I accept that x and y are true, therefore I ought to do z.”  The game of truth is the epistemic first half of the sentence, and the “regime” of truth – the part that governs human behavior – is the second half, the “therefore I ought…”  On this reading, genealogy is about unpacking and bringing to light the tendency of the “therefore” to disappear as we are governed by its regime, and to unpacking the power structures that make it operate.  In other words genealogy doesn’t collapse questions of truth and power; rather, it allows us to separate them by showing that a given game of truth does not entail the regime of truth that goes with it.

Foucault, Marx and Prophecy Part 3: On Bureaucrats

By Gordon Hull

In a previous post, I noted that Foucault strongly implies in a 1978 interview that his communist detractors are bureaucrats, and tied that to an earlier interview with Maoists in which he suggests that structuring populist tribunals on the model of bourgeois courts would fail to break with the power structure of the bourgeois court system: the model of impartiality is intrinsically bourgeois, and so importing that model into communist popular tribunals would iterate the very power structures that were to be replaced.  Here I want to flesh out a little more some of the resonances of an accusation of bureaucracy in the context of 1970s Marx debates in France.   I should say in advance that these are notes more than a complete assessment, designed to pick out highlights.  The back and forth polemics of Marxists are byzantine, and we should all be grateful that Foucault sets it as a rule not to engage in them.  Here I will mainly draw from Trotsky’s critique of Stalin and Lenin, with a closing gesture to a representative text of the French far-left that emerged in the aftermath of the 1968 student uprisings.

Foucault, Marx and Prophecy, Part 2: The Role of the Intellectual

By Gordon Hull

In a previous post, I made the case for reading Foucault’s 1978 comments on Marxism (especially in the Yoshimoto interview) in the context of theory/practice questions raised by the re-evaluation of Marx’s 11^th “Thesis on Feuerbach.”  Here I want to flesh out that position a little more, starting with reference to another 1978 piece.  Shortly after the Japan interviews, Foucault writes a response to the Italian communist Massimo Cacciari’s “Rationality and Irrationality of Politics in Delezue and Foucault” (the piece appeared in Italian; as far as I can tell, there is no translation of it).  Much of Foucault’s response is dedicated to accusing Cacciari of using the tactics of Stalinism: “always having a unique adversary” (created in this case by amalgamating Foucault, Deleuze and the New Philosophers), of engaging in a trial-like procedure, of assimilating ‘the enemy’ and danger, of reducing thought immediately to a system, and so forth.

He then defends the argument of Discipline and Punish, in particular with reference to the understanding of power; Foucault says he “would like precisely to show this heterogeneity of power, that is to say how it is always born of something other than itself” (D&E #238, II, 651 (2 vol. ed, 2001]).  He underscores that there is no metaphysics of power here, no “power with a capital P.”  Rather, “it is necessary to put the relations of power back into the interior of struggles and not suppose that there is, on the one hand, power, and on the other, that on which it is exercised, and that the struggle unfolds between power and non-power” (632).  In other words, Foucault’s entire effort is to resist the sort of abstraction that the Theses on Feuerbach warn against reifying.  The goal is rather to write a text that does something, that constitutes an intervention or a tool.  In language similar to that of the Japan interviews, and against the accusation that he is merely telling a story, Foucault proposes:

“In reality, what I am trying to do, and therein lies the difficulty of the attempt, is to work out an interpretation, a reading of a certain reality, which is such that, on the one hand, this interpretation is able to produce effects of truth and that, on the other hand, these effects of truth can become instruments at the heart of possible struggles.  To speak the truth so that it can be attacked [dire la vérité pour qu’elle soit attaquable].  It is a reality of possible struggles that I seek to make appear.” (633)

A few sentences later, he argues that “the effect of the truth that I seek to produce resides in this manner of showing that the real is polemical” (633).  However, “I do not speak of the current situation.  I effect an interpretation of history, and the problem – but I do not resolve it – is to know what the possible utilization of these analyses in the current situation is” (633-4).

This then leads to a very clear statement of the role of the intellectual.  “It is absolutely true that, when I write a book, I refuse to take a prophetic position which consists in saying to people: here is what you ought to do, or again, this is good, that is not.”  Instead, the goal is to show in a general way “it seems to me that these things have happened, but I describe them in such a manner that views of possible lines of attack are traced.  But in this I do not force or constrain anyone to attack” (634).  What to actually do – and he refers to his own decisions about throwing himself into certain political actions - “is a problem of groups, of physical and personal engagement,” and not of books.  Indeed, bossy Marxists are not radical: “one is not radical because one has pronounced some formulas; no, radicality is physical, radicality concerns existence” (634).

The Necropolitics of Intellectual Property

By Gordon Hull

Update (4/30).  Essential piece by Amy Kapczynski (who is one of my sources below).  Also see this Twitter thread by Dennis Crouch of PatentlyO, characterizing the issue as one of technology transfer more generally than patents specifically.  Trade secrets are an important issue - like patents, they allow companies to control access to innovation.  Companies also will use a strategy of combining patents and trade secrets in order to maximize their revenue (so if they think something can't be patented, they might claim it as a trade secret).  The theory behind trade secrets is based more in contracts than property, which means that they are arguably even worse if you're worried about neoliberalism, since they are an even further privatization of law and policy.

Update (4/29).  Here's more on IP and other barriers to vaccine distribution in India (and elsewhere):

• The Modi government is incompetent at every level, and India's base capacity was lower than it estimated.
• Most of the world wants IP waivers.  The U.S. and Europe and a few other countries do not. 
• This WaPo piece argues that waivers are bad but licensing (preferably voluntary, but with compulsory as a stick) is good.  Note that licensing is not what Bill Gates is talking about, as far as I can tell, which is buying vaccines and donating.

In my Biopolitics of Intellectual Property, I argue that IP policy has shifted from what I call a “public biopolitics” model to a neoliberal version.  In its briefest form: the public version treats IP as a necessary but limited monopoly to promote public goods, and the neoliberal version focuses on private wealth gain through proprietization (I summarize the argument here).

Something that I don’t particularly talk about in the book, but that one knows from Foucault, is that biopolitics comes with its inverse, necropolitics: if biopolitics is about promoting life and health for the “population,” it is also about who is allowed to die.  As Foucault puts it, “the ancient right to take life or let live was replaced by a power to foster life or disallow it to the point of death [au vieux droit de faire mourir ou de laisser vivre s'est substitué un pouvoir de faire vivre ou de rejeter dans la mort]” (History of Sexuality I, 138).  Governmental power goes from the right to kill to the power to cause people to live; death becomes something into which one is literally “thrown back.”  The leading examples of necropolitics are political, as for example Foucault’s discussion of state racism (of which Nazism is the apotheosis) in Society must be Defended.  Achille Mbembe’s “Necropolitics” article spends time on how post-colonial African states have dismantled populations, which are “disaggregated into rebels, child soldiers, victims or refugees, or civilians incapacitated by mutilation or simply massacred on the model of ancient sacrifices” (34).  Building on these, Ege Selin Islekel’s brilliant treatment of the disappeared in Turkey notes that in necropolitical spaces, “the entire content and the fact of living, constituted by the ethical, political, and epistemological conditions of life, are subsumed under death.”

However, as Ute Tellman has recently demonstrated, the political treatment of biopolitics needs to take seriously how it is co-configured with the economy.  On Tellman’s account, the notion of economic scarcity first appears in Malthus (it was missing in Smith!) as a way to police the behavior of the poor (and “savages” in the colonies) by training them to think in terms of futurity.  For Malthus, the poor have to be trained not to eat and procreate their way into oblivion by forcing them to think in terms of economic rationality.  This brings us to the neoliberal justification of IP, which is partly underpinned by the Schumpeterian thesis that innovation is to be pursued at all costs, because the gains of future innovation (“dynamic efficiency”) are more important than whatever short-term distribution problems (“static inefficiencies”) they entail.  Thus, more or less, is Harold Demsetz’s reply to Kenneth Arrow. 

It also subtends the argument being given for why IP rights around Covid vaccines shouldn’t be licensed to the poor in India (side note: Malthus served as professor at the East India Company College).  Developing countries have proposed a waiver of related IP rights to ensure the rapid production of generic Covid vaccines, and Pharma has responded with an army of lobbyists to explain that no, IP can’t possibly be the problem with Covid vaccine distribution, and it would be much better for philanthropies to purchase lots of drugs and then distribute them.  Other unrelated IP industries have followed with their own lobbyists.  Whatever other difficulties exist in getting vaccinations to people in developing countries, it seems hard to deny that insisting on IP rights and thereby limiting production of the drugs isn’t one of them.  Allowing generics – especially in India and Brazil – increases capacity.

Foucault, Marx and Prophecy: the 11th “Thesis on Feuerbach”

By Gordon Hull

Foucault thinks Marxism is bossy.  In Society must be Defended, he lays down the gauntlet clearly enough: totalizing theories get in the way of useful things at the local level.  As he notes, one should beware of:

“the inhibiting effect specific to totalitarian theories, or at least – what I mean is – all-encompassing and global theories.  Not that all-encompassing and global theories haven’t, in fairly constant fashion, provided – and don’t continue to provide – tools that can be used at the local level; Marxism and psychoanalysis are living proof that they can. But they have, I think, provided tools that can be used at the  local level only when, and this  is the real point ,the theoretical unity of their discourse is, so to speak, suspended, or at least cut up, ripped up, torn to shreds, turned inside out, displaced, caricatured, dramatized, theatricalized, and so on. Or at least that the totalizing approach always has the effect of putting the brakes on” (SMD 6).

That is, when you insist on your theoretical unities, you get in the way of actually doing anything.  What we need are to unearth “subjugated knowledges” and specific histories, and such activity requires the “removal of the tyranny of overall discourses” (SMD 8).  In his 1978 interviews with the Italian Communist Duccio Trombadori, Foucault underlines that “I absolutely will not play the part of one who prescribes solutions.  I hold that the notion of the intellectual today is not that of establishing laws or proposing solutions or prophesying, since by doing that one can only contribute to the functioning of a determinate situation of power that to my mind must be criticized” (Remarks on Marx, 157).

He similarly says at the end of an earlier 1978 interview in Japan that “I think that the role of intellectuals, in reality, absolutely does not consist in playing [the role of] prophets or legislators” (D&E #236; Vol II, 264-5 (2 vol, 2001 ed.)).  Marxism is theological, as he says in his 1979-80 Collège de France Lectures:

“With Marxism, it’s the same thing.  You have the model of the fall, alienation and dis-alienation.  You have the model of the two ways: Mao Zedong.  And you have, of course, the problem of the stain of those who are originally soiled and must be purified: Stalinism.  Marx, Mao, Stalin; the three models of the two ways, the fall, and the stain” (Government of the Living,  108)

At one level this is clear enough.   But Foucault also of course is an advocate of social change, and he wants his works to be picked up and used in local struggles, as he also says repeatedly.  Here I want to add a little specificity to the question about Foucault’s relation to Marxism (at least as he understands it around 1978) by picking up on his remarks in the Japan interview. Immediately after saying that intellectuals should not be prophets or legislators, he adds that: “for two thousand years, philosophers have always spoken of what we should have done [de ce qu’on devait faire].  But this always led to a tragic end.  What is important is that philosophers speak of what is currently happening, but not of what could happen” (624).  The first thing to note is the implicit reference to Lenin, at least in the context of a discussion of Marxism: Lenin’s What is to be Done is translated into French as Que Faire (the French rendering is correct: the book is Что Дълать, literally “What to Do”).  More significantly, the connection to prophetic discourse is something Foucault repeats in his slightly earlier interview with Yoshimoto, where he says that:

New Paper: "Infrastructure, Modulation, Portal: Thinking with Foucault about how Internet Architecture Shapes Subjects"

Now up on SSRN.  This paper uses Foucault's works on disciplinary power to develop a typology for understanding different models of Internet governance.  Here is the abstract:

Following Foucault’s remarks on the importance of architecture to disciplinary power, this paper offers a typology of power relations expressed in different models of Internet governance. Infrastructure governance understands the Internet as a common pool or public resource, on the model of traditional infrastructures like roads and bridges. Modulation, which I study by way of Net Neutrality debates in the U.S., understands Internet governance as traffic shaping. Portal governance, which I study by way of data collection policies of dominant platform companies, understands the Internet as creating a user experience that facilitates data mining. The latter two are forms of architectural disciplinary power that undermine the first. I then argue that the rise of portal and modulation governance primarily serves to remake parts of civil society by fostering market norms of consumption and entrepreneurialism. In that sense, efforts to shape Internet architecture need to be understood as techniques of subjectification.

 

Foucault on Public Opinion

If you’re like me, you spend too much time – way too much time – these days looking at polling data.  I ran across some interesting remarks by Foucault on opinion yesterday, which I’ll share here as a technique of distraction.  He makes them in the context of a 1976 conversation with J. P. Barou and Michelle Perrot (whose work on resistance to disciplinary power he favorably cites near the end of the conversation) that was published as the preface to an edition of Bentham’s Panopticon writings.  It appears as “L’oeil du pouvoir” (D&E #195, pp. 190-207 in my 2 volume edition) and is translated in Foucault Live (=FL).   For context, then, the conversation appears in the year after Discipline and Punish.  It covers a range of topics, including Foucault’s own path to discovering the panopticon (initially via hospital architecture, which had the dual need to see patients and keep them physically separated to avoid the spread of disease).

Foucault suggests that Bentham’s original work enjoyed considerable uptake in revolutionary France.  Barou sets Foucault up: “isn’t it surprising to realize that the French Revolution, in the persons of people such as Lafayette, favorably received the project of the panopticon?” (D&E 195).  Foucault answers that Bentham “is the complement of Rousseau” because the “Rousseauian dream” that “animated the revolutionaries” was of a “transparent society, both visible and legible in each of its parts, which had no more obscure zones, no zones established by the privileges of royal power or by the prerogatives of such and such body, or indeed by disorder; that each, from the point that he occupies, is able to see the entirety of society; that their hearts communicate with one another, that the gazes encounter no more obstacles, that opinion rules, that of each on each [celle de chacun sur chacun]” (D&E 195/FL 230).  Opinion thus functions similar to what Foucault will later identify as a function of pastoral power (omnes et singulatim), simultaneously totalizing and individuating.  “Opinion” is an object of “police” power in Discipline and Punish (213), that power that is concerned with understanding and managing the minutiae of daily life.

In the interview, Foucault suggests that Bentham is “both this [Rousseauian dream] and its complete opposite” because he understands the problem of visibility “while thinking of a visibility organized entirely around a dominant and surveillant gaze” (D&E 195/FL 230).  Thus you have joined the “lyricism of Rousseau and the obsession of Bentham.”  Foucault then suggests:

“A fear haunted the second half of the 18^th century: there is a dark space, a screen of obscurity which provides an obstacle to the complete visibility of things, of people, of truths. [One needs] to dissolve the fragments of night which were opposed to the light, to make it so that there is no more dark space in society; to demolish the black rooms where arbitrary political power, the caprices of the monarch, religious superstitions, conspiracies of tyrants and priests, illusions of ignorance and epidemics [all] fomented” (D&E 196/FL 231).

In this context, the then proposes that “the rule of ‘opinion’ that we invoke so often in our age is a mode of functioning where power will be able to be exercised on the sole condition that things are known and that people are seen by a type of immediate gaze [par une sorte de regard immédiat] that is collective and anonymous” (D&E 197/FL 232).

Hold on to the word "immediate" – it will be important in a moment.  But for now, notice the extent to which this is a pretty good description of nights spent gazing at opinion polls, both the obsession with knowing, and the fear that there are (say) hidden Trump voters like there were last time.  More light!  This sort of epistemology is driven by a fundamentally paranoid logic, as Wendy Chun emphasized a while ago: once I use some sort of optical device to see beyond what my naked eye tells me, that opens the fundamental possibility that a better device would see more.  See a molecule with the microscope?  Is that really the smallest particle?  After all, there were molecules lurking below the surface that you hadn’t seen before.  Here the paranoia is inevitable given a sampling process.  The poll represents underlying opinions, and the process of sampling invariably “sees” only part of the data, even when it’s done exactly right.  And that’s before you factor in questions about whether people who don’t have landlines are proportionally represented, or whether young people who say they will vote will actually do so, and so on.  That’s also before you get to issue polling, which I complained about before the last election, arguing that it worked to create populations and truths about them that were fully the product of the polling questions, making it (for example) impossible to express views that didn’t fit the categories the polling firm wanted to hear.

In any case, as anybody who works in data will tell you, our access to data is fundamentally mediated by the process of its collection and description, which means that the immediacy we want – to just see clearly whether Trump has enough hidden voters somewhere in Pennsylvania to pull off the upset.  We have to content ourselves with something like the fivethirtyeight statistical runs: crunch all the polling data (including weighting it by quality of poll), simulate the election 40,000 times (there’s a vision of hell: 40,000 occurrences of this election!) and see what happens (as of this minute, Biden wins 88% of the time).  But the human brain just doesn’t like that: a pair of papers, one in Philosophy and Public Affairs,  and one in the Stanford Law Review, by David Enoch, Levi Spectre and Talia Fisher make the case that we prefer juridical reasoning in the sense that we can explain why somebody is wrong, rather than living with the statistical truth (in this case, that Trump could win and there’s nothing wrong with the model at all.  Enoch Spectre and Fisher use the example of liability for a bus accident).

All of which leads to the following remarkable paragraph.  In response to Perrot’s suggestion that Bentham seems to overstate the power of his panopticon, Foucault says:

“This is the illusion of almost all of the reformers of the 18^th century who lent to opinion a considerable power.  Opinion is only able to be good when it is the immediate consciousness of the complete social body; they believed that people would become virtuous by the fact that they were observed [regardés].  For them, opinion was a spontaneous reactualization of the social contract.  They misunderstood the real conditions of opinion, of the media, a materiality which is caught in the mechanisms of the economy and power” (D&E 204/FL 238).

And:

“They also failed to understand that the media would necessarily be controlled by economic and political interests. They did not perceive the material and economic components of public opinion. They thought that public opinion would be just by its very nature, that it would spread on its own accord, and provide a kind of democratic surveillance. It was essentially journalism—a crucial innovation of the 19th century—that manifested the utopian characteristics of this entire politics of the gaze” (D&E 204/FL 238)

Of course as Foucault notes, journalism comes with its own politics, and different forms of it come with different politics.  I’ll close with two tidbits.  First, one large study found that false news traveled further, faster and deeper on Twitter than true news, almost no matter how one measured diffusion.  It’s the materiality of the news infrastructure and the business models of the platforms through which opinion is constituted.  Second, there appears to be a horrible nexus of Instagram, Facebook, QAnon and multi-level marketing schemes that’s contributing to the diffusion of that conspiracy: it turns out that QAnon and multi-level marketing share a lot in common, and social media tends to facilitate that.  I can’t describe it better, but the article is worth a read.  The paranoid logic is baked in!

A Deleuzian Undercurrent to “What is an Author” (part 6: Instaurateur as Event)

By Gordon Hull

I want here to tie together the preceding several posts (one, two, three, four, five) and finish the case for a Deleuzian undercurrent (perhaps better to say, Deleuzian and Althusserian undercurrents) to Foucault’s 1969 “What is an Author” seminar.  Recall the specific point of interest: in a somewhat odd moment near the end of the lecture, Foucault distinguishes between authors and “instaurateurs.”  The first move is to distinguish Marx and Freud from Ann Radcliff, the founder of Gothic novels.  Radcliff “opened the way for a certain number of resemblances and analogies which have their model or princiuple in her work” (114).  Marx and Freud, on the other hand, “have created a possibility for something other than their discourse, yet something belonging to what they founded” (115).  He then disginguishes Marx/Freud from science as established by Galileo; for Marx/Freud, “the initiation of a discursive practice is heterogenous to its subsequent transformations” (115) rather than a development of it.

The most direct Deleuzian way to express this distinction is to say that instaurateurs are repetitions (as I explored earlier) or “events.”  Before doing that, though, it’s worth noting that Foucault did not have to mention Marx in this context.  Indeed, given his dismissals of Marxism and his hostility to the PCF, it is perhaps striking that he does so.  After all, while it is certainly the case that Foucault sees himself as offering a different critical approach from that in Marxism, he could achieve that simply by distinguishing his approach from Marxism.  Why the reference to Marx?  As I have suggested, the Foucault-Marx relation is one that’s under-explored in the literature; here, it’s only necessary to note that Foucault takes appreciative notice of Althusser’s circle and its efforts at rereading Marx.  In a decisive passage (that I noted last time), Althusser  writes:

A Deleuzian Undercurrent to “What is an Author” (part 5: Althusser’s Marx as instaurateur)

By Gordon Hull

The last couple of times (first, second), I have been setting up Althusser’s Marx as the background to Focuault’s invocation of Marx as an “instaurateur” in his “What is an Author.”  Today, I want to finish that project by noting three additional moments in Althusser’s reading that indicate that he is not treating Marx as an “Author,” at least not straightforwardly.   (a) Marx’s self-consciousness is irrelevant to the reading (“it is essential to avoid any concession tot the impression made on us by the Young Marx’s writings and any acceptance of his own consciousness of himself” (For Marx [=FM] 74).  (b) In accounting for Marx’s emergence in the context of German idealism, Althusser defers to Marx’s own account of why “this prodigious layer of ideology” existed at that time and place.  The reason – Germany was unable “either to realize national unity or bourgeois revolution” (FM 75) was basically exogenous to philosophy, but it made the subject position of German philosophers possible and intelligible.  (c) Althusser rejects any implication of a Romantic author thesis; even an author like Marx who invents new worlds “must have absolute necessity have prepared his intelligence in the old forms themselves” (FM 85).

A Deleuzian Undercurrent to “What is an Author” (part 4: Althusserian ‘reading’ and ‘emergence’)

By Gordon Hull

Last time, I set up the context for reading Foucault’s remarks on Marx in “Author” in the context of Althusser, as well as some of the basic contours of the Althusserian anti-humanist Marx.  Here, I want to pursue that line further.  Althusser writes against the growing popularity of a humanist Marx, which is derived from Marx’s early writings.  Althusser (and his circle) want to read an anti-humanist Marx, which requires that the early writings be successfully contained.  At stake in this project is thus both a question of the content of Marx, but, perhaps even more importantly, a strategy for reading Marx.

According to the Althusserian reading, Marx had a humanist phase that he abandoned as he reached theoretical maturity, a moment that Althusser calls – explicitly following Bachelard (For Marx, 32) – an “epistemological rupture.”  The turning point, on this argument, is found in the “Theses on Feuerbach” or German Ideology.  For a sense of how the argument works, consider Rancière’s contribution to Reading Capital, in which Rancière says he will be tracking “the passage from the ideological discourse of the young Marx to the scientific discourse of Capital.” (1973 Maspero edition, p. 8).

A Deleuzian Undercurrent to Foucault’s “What is an Author?” (part 3: Excursus into Althusser)

By Gordon Hull

Back in Before Times, I wrote a couple of posts beginning to make the case for a Deleuzian influence behind Foucault’s “What is an Author” (part 1, part 2).  This post resumes that series… Recall that Foucault’s narrative in “Author” distinguishes between those who found a science, like Galileo, and those who are an “initiator [instaurateur]” of discourses.  Examples of the latter are Marx and Freud.  So let’s consider how the Foucault of the late 1960s reads Marx, given that he pretty much despises Marxism.  For example, in Order of Things, he worked hard to say that Marxism was not genuinely revolutionary:

“At the deepest level of Western knowledge, Marxism introduced no real discontinuity; it found its place without difficulty, as a full, quiet, comfortable and, goodness knows, satisfying form for a time (its own), within an epistemological arrangement that welcomed it gladly (since it was this arrangement that was in fact making room for it) and that it, in return, had no intention of  disturbing and, above all, no power to modify, even one jot, since it rested entirely upon it. Marxism exists in nineteenth-century thought like a fish in water: that is, it is unable to breathe anywhere else. Though it is in opposition to the ‘bourgeois’ theories of economics, and though this opposition leads it to use the project of a radical reversal of History as a weapon against them, that conflict and that project nevertheless have as their condition of possibility, not the reworking of all History, but an event that any archaeology can situate with precision, and that prescribed simultaneously, and according to the same mode, both nineteenth-century bourgeois economics and nineteenth-century revolutionary economics. Their controversies may have stirred up a few waves and caused a few surface ripples; but they are no more than storms in a children’s paddling pool” (OT 285).

On this reading, the 19^th-century project is to merge humanism and history into one larger, utopian project: “History will cause man’s anthropological truth to spring forth in its stony immobility; calendar time will be able to continue; but it will be, as it were, void, for historicity will have been superimposed exactly upon the human essence” (OT 286).  It wasn’t until Nietzsche that this conceptual apparatus declined, as he “made it glow into brightness again for the last time by setting fire to it” (OT 286).

Why We Are Not Bare Life: What's wrong with Agamben’s Thoughts on Coronavirus

By Gordon Hull

In a follow-up to a controversial piece in which he argued (in late February) that the social distancing and quarantining in Italy presented the temptation to universalize the state of exception, Agamben says this:

“Fear is a bad counsellor, but it makes us see many things we pretended not to see. The first thing the wave of panic that’s paralysed the country has clearly shown is that our society no longer believes in anything but naked life. It is evident that Italians are prepared to sacrifice practically everything – normal living conditions, social relations, work, even friendships and religious or political beliefs – to avoid the danger of falling ill. The naked life, and the fear of losing it, is not something that brings men and women together, but something that blinds and separates them. Other human beings, like those in the plague described by Manzoni, are now seen only as potential contaminators to be avoided at all costs or at least to keep at a distance of at least one metre. The dead – our dead – have no right to a funeral and it’s not clear what happens to the corpses of our loved ones. Our fellow humans have been erased and it’s odd that the Churches remain silent on this point. What will human relations become in a country that will be accustomed to living in this way for who knows how long? And what is a society with no other value other than survival?”

To be sure, there are and will be bad actors.  William Barr’s DOJ has apparently seen the epidemic as a good time for a power grab (notably, one that has been sharply critiqued from both the right and the left).  Ohio seems to be using it as a pretext to stop abortions.  So – and this will be my point – we must always be vigilant about the expansion of emergency powers.

But when you have a leitmotif, you stick with it, and so Agamben reiterates his basic thesis about the combination of state of exception and bare life:

A Deleuzian Undercurrent to Foucault’s “What is an Author?” (part 2)

Last time, I began the to make the case that there is evidence of an engagement with Deleuze in Foucault’s “What is an Author.”  Specifically, I made the case that there is an implict Platonism behind the concept of authorship as Foucault articulates it.  This time, I will look at the way that Barthes overturns authorship, and how Foucault’s language distances himself from that, while of course beginning with the proposition that the author is, in fact, a fiction.  For Deleuze, the question of difference, when posed against Platonism, is substantially a question of attending to the “swarming” differences that lie outside the Platonic metaphycial schema, and which are accordingly illegible wihtin it, insofar as they cannot be referred back to the anchoring eidos.

This language of swarming differences that are inexpressible and illegible from within a representative schema is also found in Barthes, who is often Foucault’s presumed interlocutor in “Author.”  As Barthes  sees clearly, “writing” and “text” radically exceed this space of authorship, bringing into play indefinitely many differences and ways of thinking difference.  Writing is, to revert to Deleuzian terms, “a world of impersonal individuations and pre-individual singularities” (DR 277).   Barthes’ “Death of the Author” is the most obviously relevant contribution here, and he famously opens “Death of the Author” with praise of “writing:”

A Deleuzian Undercurrent to Foucault’s “What is an Author?” (part 1)

By Gordon Hull

Toward the end of “What is an Author,” Foucault distinguishes between the “founder” and “initiator [instaurateur]” of a discourse.  Galileo is the paradigmatic example of the former, and Marx of the latter.  This is a puzzling distinction, to say the least.  Let’s begin with the terminology: Although “founder [fondateur]” is common enough, as far as I know, Foucault doesn’t use “instaurateur” anywhere else.  At least, a computer search of the text of Les Mots et Les Choses, Archéologie du Savoir and the pre-1975 Dits et Écrits didn’t turn up anything.  Other things being equal, those seem like the most likely places to find it (if I’m missing uses of the term, I’d love to learn about them!).  In particular, Order is a likely bet, because in the French seminar version (the one in D&E – see my initial thoughts here and Stuart Elden’s discussion of the textual history here) of “Author,” Foucault frames the text as partly responding to some leftover business from Order, where he admits that he both refuses to organize texts by authors, but also uses authorial names.  The nominal “instauration” occurs a few times in these texts in a way that something more substantial than a blog post would need to investigate, but as far as I can tell, the term of art in “Author” – “instauration discursive,” naming somebody rather than an event – is specific to that lecture.  So something is going on here!

It seems to me that it helps to understand this distinction by putting Foucault in conversation with Deleuze.  Specifically, it seems to me that the instaurateur is an application of what Deleuze calls difference or repetition outside the order of representation.  I’ll make an initial, obviously sketchy, case for that thought over the next few posts, with the caveat that I am not a Deleuze scholar.

The Surveillance Gap and Neoliberal Necropolitics

By Gordon Hull

Consider the following, too brief summary: following Foucault, one can say that biopolitics is about optimizing populations, or something to that effect.  This involves a lot of work on the part of the administrative state, which sets itself up to provide services, everything from sewers and other infrastructure to social safety nets.  Different places do this differently, but the goal is to provide for the general welfare.  At the same time, as Foucault noted from the get-go (see the last lecture in Society must be Defended), the biopolitical “make live or allow to die” generated a correlative “if you want to live, they must die” (SMD 255).  Those Others were excluded from the “population” that the state tried to optimize and so were either allowed to die, or (in cases such as the Nazis) actively killed, or (in the case of American Jim Crow) actively suppressed and marginalized and often killed.  These various forms of necropolitics are intimately related as both a matter of historical fact (the Nazis thought Jim Crow an excellent example of race management) and conceptual structure under the rubric of something like state racism.  So too, the biopolitics of optimization is historically tied to the necropolitics of state racism, as scholars like Dell McWhorter make clear in the American case, or Agamben does in the case of the German Versuchpersonen.

But biopolitics has more than one variant, or at least so I’ve tried to argue.  I think it’s useful to view biopolitics in an earlier phase – what I call “public biopolitics” and a more recent neoliberal version.  The two can be distinguished in part by how they conceptualize the members of the population they are trying to benefit, and how they think they might do so.  For example, intellectual property on the public model is about public welfare and the benefits to everyone of encouraging inventive activity.  On the neoliberal version, the emphasis is much more on individual creators and markets. But the neoliberal version very much embeds a view of public welfare – a society of individual entrepreneurs and consumers, whose well-being is measured by various indicia of consumer welfare.

But what about the necropolitics of neoliberal biopolitics?  One obvious avenue to pursue is that those who are excluded from markets are allowed to die.  The rhetoric of consumer choice is often then utilized to suggest that they deserve their fate because of a failure to opt-in.  Whatever the merits of that avenue, it seems clear enough that more can be said.  One component of the U.S. piece is going to be data and surveillance.  Biopolitics itself arose in the context of data governance mechanisms like the census, and the importance of data to contemporary capitalism is large and growing.  One way the surveillance state implements necropolitics is by what Margaret Hu calls “big data blacklisting:” classifying certain kinds of people as ineligible for many of the things to which other members of the population are entitled (such as employment or the ability to board a commercial aircraft), or rendering them subject to ceremony-free death by drone strike.

In a fascinating recent paper, Michelle Gilman and Rebecca Green offer some important clues to another aspect of the story.  Most of the literature about data privacy focuses on what happens when people don’t have enough privacy.  Gilman and Green focus on the inverse problem: what happens when people have too much privacy, i.e., when they become invisible in a society predicated on visibility?  Working primarily with examples of the undocumented, the homeless, day laborers and those with felony convictions, Gilman and Green tell the story of “populations that remain outside seemingly omnipresent surveillance systems” (257), those who live in the “surveillance gap.”  If too much surveillance is bad, so is too little:

The Biopolitics of Intellectual Property

I'm very pleased to announce that my new book, The Biopolitics of Intellectual Property, is now out in print/electronically on Cambridge UP.    Here's a blurb:

"Intellectual property is power, but what kind of power is it, and what does it do?  Building on the work of Michel Foucault, this study examines different ways of understanding power in copyright, trademark and patent policy: as law, as promotion of public welfare, and as promotion of neoliberal privatization.  It argues that intellectual property policy is moving toward neoliberalism, even as that move is broadly contested in everything from resistance movements to Supreme Court decisions.  The struggle to conceptualize IP matters, because different regimes of power imagine different kinds of subjects, from the rights-bearing citizen to the economic agent of neoliberalism.  As a central part of the regulation of contemporary economies, IP is central to all aspects of our lives.  It matters for the works we create, the brands we identify and the medicines we consume. The kind of subjects it imagines are the kinds of subjects we become"

 

The CUP page for the book has not just the text as a whole but the chapters (the main ones are a theoretical discussion, and one each on copyright, trademark and patent), and each of the chapters has an abstract.  For now, here's a little text from the introductory chapter that should give a better idea of what I'm up to.  As you'll see, I want to say something about IP, of course, but also about how I think biopolitics works (in both what I call its earlier, "public," form, and current neoliberalism) and about the fundamental but neglected importance of including law and legal institutions in our genealogical work:

"The core of my argument is that the kind of power expressed in IP is subtly changing. Initial evidence for this claim is that new doctrinal developments have been difficult to incorporate into traditional models of IP. For example, retroactive  copyright extension is hard to square with a theory that says copyright is about incentives to create new works. Presumably, Walt Disney will be unmotivated by any changes in IP today. Trademark dilution, which allows action against expression that damages a brand’s image in consumers’ minds, is difficult to square with the standard theory that says that trademark is about avoiding consumer confusion. And the patentability of living organisms and (until recently) isolated genetic fragments is difficult to reconcile with the traditional view that products of nature should not receive patent protections. In cases such as these, I will argue, it is necessary to recognize that IP is performing a different and new social function, one that requires a rethinking of the kind of power expressed by IP laws and regulations.

"I take my theoretical starting point from the work of Michel Foucault, for whom modern power has operated in two basic forms. The first, associated with the social contract tradition, conceptualizes a rights-bearing, juridicial subject, for whom law operates as a system of constraint and coercion. That which law does not prohibit is allowed, and the most important questions revolve around the limits to law’s ability to prohibit. The second, associated with the modern, administrative state, Foucault calls “biopower” or “biopolitics,” and it is concerned with productively managing and even optimizing populations through such measures as public health and education programs. Biopower is thus fundamentally generative. Closely aligned with the rise of capitalism, biopower has emerged as central to the operation of the modern state, which tends to emphasize regulatory agencies and administrative law, even if it also retains a framework of judicial rights.

On the Authorship of Law: Copyright, Foucault, and Hobbes

There is an interesting copyright case before the Supreme Court this term, Georgia v. Public Resource.org. It is settled law that official edicts of the government – statutory texts, judicial opinions, agency rules – are not copyrightable. More about that in a moment. In this case, Georgia entered into a contract with Lexis to produce an annotated version of its code. The state gets editorial control, and Lexis gets exclusive publication rights. The product is the “Official Georgia Code Annotated” and is generally cited as the authoritative statement of Georgia law. Public Resource made copies of the OGCA publicly available for free, including the annotations. The state claims copyright over the annotations and sued to enjoin Public Resource.  The question before the court is thus whether the annotations to state law are copyrightable, even given that the statutory text is not.

The case follows an appeal from a substantial Eleventh Circuit opinion, finding that the OGCA was not copyrightable because, even if it wasn’t quite the same thing as the statutory text, it nonetheless is “an exercise of sovereign power” (3) and “sufficiently law-like so as to be properly regarded as a sovereign work” (4). There’s a lot to say, and much depends on the peculiar arrangement Georgia has with Lexis.  For example, the OGCA both costs money and is taken to be authoritative over the unannotated version of the text made available for free; it is both the results of a heavily regulated legislative process and is routinely cited by Courts as authoritative in interpreting the law. What I want to focus on here, however, is the 11^th Circuit’s discussion of authorship.

Hobbes, Biopolitics, Security, part 2: Spinoza

By Gordon Hull

Last time, following a new paper by Andrea Rossi, I suggested that Hobbes’s reformulation of the Stoic “security” in terms that we would recognize as biopolitical – oriented toward human flourishing, and not just survival – enables him to reformulate the Ciceronian salus populi suprema lex (“the welfare of the people is the supreme law”).  As I suggested, this renders Hobbes a different thinker from what Foucault thought he was.  Here, I want to suggest that it also shows that one of the usual divisions between Hobbes and Spinoza (roughly: Hobbes is a juridical absolutist and a theorist of potestas; Spinoza is a democrat and theorist of potentia) just doesn’t hold much water.  In other words, the sharp division drawn by Negri regarding the “permanence and opposition of two lines” in modernity, “the absolutist one, following Hobbes, and the democratic one, espousing Spinoza” (Porcelain Workshop, 52) – gets in the way of a more productive engagement between the two.  It’s not that Hobbes and Spinoza come to the same political conclusions (they clearly do not) – the interest is in how similar they are  prior to those conclusions.

Hobbes, Biopolitics, Security

By Gordon Hull

Foucault aligns Hobbes with juridical power, not biopower.  Juridical power is repressive and takes life away; it is epitomized by monarchy.  Biopower, in contrast, is power that “exerts a positive influence on life, that endeavors to administer, optimize, and multiply it, subjecting it to precise controls and comprehensive regulations” (HS 1, 137).  Foucault then famously says that “the representation of power has remained under the spell of monarchy. In political thought and analysis, we still / have not cut off the head of the king” (HS1, 88-89).  In Society must be Defended, he argues that:

“Rather than asking ourselves what the sovereign looks like from on high, we should be trying to discover how multiple bodies, forces, energies, matters, desires, thoughts, and so on are gradually, progressively, actually and materially constituted as subjects, or as the subject.  To grasp the material agency of subjugation insofar as it constitutes subjects would, if you like, be to do precisely the opposite of what Hobbes was trying to do in Leviathan” (SMD 28).

Well, no. I think this is a misreading of Hobbes, and in my Hobbes book, I argued that it’s productive to see Hobbes as a sort of proto-theorist of biopolitics in the Foucauldian sense. How so?  My argument was basically that Hobbes actually rejects a juridical model of power that’s focused on the king, and instead focuses on how the commonwealth can bolster the population.  More precisely, Hobbes starts by rejecting the Aristotelian zoon politikon.  In De Cive, Hobbes claims that “man is made fit for society not by nature, but by training” (DC I.2, note).  This is a direct repudiation of the Aristotelian dictum that “the political art does not make men but takes them from nature and uses them” (Politics 1258a22).  On my reading, Hobbes shifts focus to how to make people fit for society, a project that involves their subjectification as rational subjects.  This requires, above all, careful regulation of the system of signification at work in the commonwealth, because stability there is key to getting inside people’s heads.  After all, Hobbesian people actually lack an intellectual faculty – intellect specifically reduces to imagination. The pithiest pronouncement of this thesis is in De Homine, where Hobbes announces that “intellect is in fact imagination, but which arises from the settled signification of words [est enim intellectus imaginatio quidem, sed quae oritur ex verborum significatione constituta]” (DH 10.1; OL II, 89).  This means that if you can control external stimuli, you have a pretty good shot at getting bad thoughts out of people’s heads.