CFP Foucault/Habermas/Rawls

MANCEPT are hosting a conference in August and September 2011 in Manchester.

Pessimistic Foucault quote and student protests

‘The juridical systems – and this applies both to their codification and to their theorisation – have enabled sovereignty to be democratised through the constitution of a public right articulated upon collective sovereignty, while at the same time this democratisation of sovereignty was fundamentally determined by and grounded in mechanisms of disciplinary coercion.’ (Power/Knowledge, 105).

My guess is the government will ignore the student protests, instigate their changes to university funding across the board despite the protest, and thus show Foucault to be unfortunately accurate. But that may be because I’m feeling pessimistic today.

 

Governmental benefits

On Thursday, BBC Radio 4 interviewed an academic about the government’s proposed benefit cuts. He suggested that the government’s aim was to track behaviour changes in benefit claimants in real time in order to adjust payments accordingly. He was skeptical about the possibilities of this. It does confirm what I suggested in my previous post, that the government has, on some level, an ambition towards total and real time knowledge of the population.

PS see here for Remy’s follow up to our earlier conversation on gradualism and Anglo-Foucaultians.

Government at school

In 1833 a British MP stated in parliament that he would rather see an increase in the infant mortality rate than interfere in the domestic hearth. I want to suggest that now the government takes the opposite approach, in that its ambitions are towards a complete, exhaustive and real-time knowledge of every child in the country. Each time a child dies there is a Serious Case Review (SCR) in order to learn lessons for future policy and legislation for government (and other agencies). Agencies are now encouraged to communicate with one another so that any significant information or patterns missed by one agency but picked up by another can be shared, so that a more complete picture of the child’s life is available. The ideal is to line up every agency so that a crack in one is caught by another agency, so that no cracks completely line up for a child to fall through. In order to decide what information is significant, norms must be created against which to judge each child. Paediatricians have obesity measures; teachers and social workers decide about smell, health, dress, behaviour, language.

There is a background assumption here that the state must check on every family to ensure it is looking after its child properly, which is to say, in accordance with the norms set by various institutions and apparatuses. This seems to be very close to saying that no family can be trusted to look after its children. This lack of trust is compounded by the increased suspicion with which one must regard all other adults in their relations with children. Ideally, an adult and child would never be alone together, or at least not without having been checked by the criminal records bureau. Even though very few people, if any, think that no family can be trusted to look after its children, and even though very few people ever suspect anyone who works with children as being a danger to children, people are made to act as if this is the case anyway.

This is somewhat unusual for a liberal democracy. Liberalism wants to protect the rights of individuals, including from interference by the government (hence the 1833 politician). Liberalism also, according to some, regards some things as beyond the government’s ability to know or govern, at least entirely – civil society, the economy, individuals – yet try to govern it must. Each failure is a chance to improve governing (hence the SCRs). Yet in ‘safeguarding’ terms, the government seems to have an ambition precisely to know all there is to know about every child (or at least enough to assess any possible danger). This is both an extension of government power to every child and those who work with them (and the relevant institutions and apparatuses), and its intensification in the desire to know more of each child and worker in order to govern them. I think this is benevolently motivated but is definitely a paternalistic side of liberalism.

An interesting conversation

Over at Remy’s blog we’ve been discussing Anglo-Foucaultians at related matters. Remy put up an interesting post and promises more to come. Observe.

Foucault conference

You know you want to go to this.

War, violence, media

BBC Radio 4’s coverage yesterday of the Afghan soldier who shot some English soldiers was completely typical, exactly what one would expect to hear, but it wasn’t really coherent. The military spokesman said the Taliban should not be respected and William Hague (Foreign secretary) said the attack was ‘despicable and cowardly’. Yet, as anyone who has read The Heart of Darkness knows, the attack was clever and successful. The Taliban (assuming it was them) killed three soldiers and got away without dying. That is the point of fighting in wars. What’s more, the Taliban have far fewer resources than the allies so they have to use quite different tactics to make do with what they’ve got. This sort of attack breaks down morale and the trust between trainers and trainees, all of which helps the Taliban.

The deeper point is that all technologies of violence have a rationality by definition. It is interesting to compare the rationality of the Taliban’s violence with that of the allies. According to Foucault (Security, Territory, Population), raison d’État, as it emerged in the sixteenth century, was admitted as being artificial, not contiguous with any natural laws, but concerned with necessity, the necessity of the state itself. It is circular and self-justifying. It certainly uses laws but they are not fundamental. (We could add that this suggests democratic raison d’État has no hard line dividing it from totalitarianism or absolutism).

In this period the term coup d’État meant something different from its present sense. It meant ‘the state acting of itself on itself, swiftly, immediately, without rule, with urgency and necessity, and dramatically…It is the self-manifestation of the state itself. It is the assertion of raison d’État…’ Now, ‘the nature of coup d’État is to be violent.’ Indeed, ‘there is no antinomy between violence and reason, in things concerning the state at least.’ Hence, coup d’État ‘requires us to accept acts of violence as the purest form of reason, and of raison d’État.’ That is why, according to the military spokespeople and the politicians, ‘our’ task in Afghanistan is necessary, good, just, helpful, prevents violence in Afghanistan and abroad. (If the Taliban had a state, would their violence be treated as more respectable, as justified self defence?) Yet where is the news’ alleged attempt to include both sides of the argument? Obviously it’s difficult to talk directly to the Taliban, but why just air the statements of the military and politicians without question? (Except to ask families of dead soldiers if we should be in Afghanistan).

The other important fact about coup d’État is that it is by nature theatrical, an important way that sovereignty can show its power. So when a state suffers a defeat in a war or battle, it is a very public challenge to its power and all the more embarrassing.

Foucault on the church and state

In the lecture from March 15th in Security, Territory, Population, Foucault notes the way that the cosmo-theological continuum broke down in the 16th century so that political rule ceased to refer to ends outside itself (such as God) and developed a new immanent, secular raison d’État. Along with this the knowledge necessary to the ruler shifted from phronesis and knowledge of natural and divine laws to knowledge about the state, statistics. (Now let’s suppose, though Foucualt doesn’t talk about the present day church, that for the church this cosmo-theological continuum still exists and that most church members agree with it and agree to being governed towards transcendent and moral ends). The question is shouldn’t we be glad about this? Isn’t this, in fact, a fairly decent way to run church state-relations? And if so, does this make critique of the state a little more difficult? After all, what’s the point in critiquing the state for not being like the church? The state doesn’t recognise the same morality from within its point of view, from within its game, unless it is to see that it doesn’t undermine itself by losing the support of the populace. If one goes down this line, does it make less sense to focus on the church’s distinctive beliefs and practices and more on what common reforms and goods can be pursued with other groups?

Surveillance

Last night I watched an excellent production of 1984 at the Royal Exchange in Manchester. This morning I read the following in Michel Foucault’s essay ‘Governmentality’

‘the managing of a population not only concerns the collective mass of phenomena, the level of its aggregate effects, it also implies the management of population in its depths and its details.’

Compared to the article I posted yesterday about the secret service’s inability to be secret, it’s all disturbingly relevant.

An excellent article by Jason Read

Which can be seen on the excellent Foucault Studies site. Read argues, following Foucault, that neoliberalism differs from classical liberalism by positing an anthropology based on competition rather than on exchange. This affects our subjectivity, causing us to view all of life through market eyes. His examples are considering marriage or children as an investment, looking to get the maximum gain from the minimum input. (I’m not sure that’s a good example for his case. Are people really daft enough to do that? I guess some are, but the majority? We need someone to do some study on that…).

Neoliberalism posits such an anthropology but also tries to create it. For instance, short term contracts encourage people to see other workers as competition rather than as fellow workers with whom one might be in solidarity. They also encourage seeing one’s whole life as a form of capital, so that everything must become an investment (taking courses to go on your CV etc). And this thinking pervades all of social life. (Again, perhaps a bit over done, but very perceptive I think). He ends with a great paragraph I’ll quote at length.

As Foucault argues, neoliberalism operates less on actions, directly curtailing them, than on the condition and effects of actions, on the sense of possibility. The reigning ideal of interest and the calculations of cost and benefit do not so much limit what one can do, neoliberal thinkers are famously indifferent to prescriptive ideals, examining the illegal drug trade as a more or less rational investment, but limit the sense of what is possible. Specifically the ideal of the fundamentally self-interested individual curtails any collective transformation of the conditions of existence. It is not that such actions are not prohibited, restricted by the dictates of a sovereign or the structures of disciplinary power, they are not seen as possible, closed off by a society made up of self-interested individuals. It is perhaps no accident that one of the most famous political implementers of neoliberal reforms, Margaret Thatcher, used the slogan, “there is no alternative,” legitimating neoliberalism based on the stark absence of possibilities…It is also this sense of possibility that the present seems to be lacking; it is difficult to imagine let alone enact a future other than a future dominated by interest and the destructive vicissitudes of competition. A political response to neoliberalism must meet it on its terrain, that of the production of subjectivity, freedom and possibility. (36)

It’s a bit pessimistic, as you might expect from a post-structuralist, but it also seems sadly accurate.