Bad Foucault

I just came across an interview with Daniel Zamora, via a flurry of Twitter excitement, trailing his new book, apparently due to be translated into English next year, which ‘dares’ to develop a critique of Foucault. It’s available at Jacobin, and also at nonsite. The focus is on how Foucault displayed an unseemly interest and sympathy for ‘neoliberal’ ideas in the 1970s. I’m not sure this is a terribly new observation. I say so since I have managed to write a couple of blogs on this, a few years or so ago now, reflecting on how the concept of governmentality is always thought of as a name for the suspect exercise of sinister power, and also on how some thinkers, at least, have been developing rather more precise usages of the term neoliberal in light of Foucault’s thoughts on this theme. I say this not in a “I’m great” sort of way, but rather in a “If I knew all about this, it can’t be that shocking a discovery” sort of way. There is already plenty of discussion of this theme in Foucault’s work, by Colin Gordon, by Michael Behrent, amongst others.

Zamora’s line seems to be that Foucault’s ‘indulgence’ of ideas such as Friedman’s negative income tax’  reflects badly on him, politically. The rhetorical force of this argument rests on a fairly standard trick of drawing homologies between various leftish arguments against statism, or for a bit more freedom, and ‘neoliberal’ free-marketery. I’ve always found that sort of argument lazy, even when advanced by thinkers I otherwise like a lot, such as Nancy Fraser. Above all, it tends to leave in place fairly standard ideas of what ‘neoliberalism’ is and what ‘neoliberalization’ has been. It seems to me that the affinity that Foucault appears to have displayed might be just as well taken as an occasion to rethink both of those ideas. That’s the spirit, for example, of James Ferguson’s discussions of left governmentality. Zamora’s arguments also depend on identifying some new homologies I have not come across before – such as the idea that a defining feature of neoliberal policies is a concern to alleviate poverty (since that leaves deeper issues of inequality in place, you see). I have no great concern to defend Foucault’s honour, but it seems to me a bit limited to suggest that a commitment to providing a minimum level of income is somehow a mark of right-wing neoliberalism. That would be a bit of a surprise, I suspect, to lots of people all the way from Thomas Paine through to Erik Olin Wright and many others.

I suspect that there is plenty of scope for reconfiguring the ‘political’ interpretation of Foucault’s work buried in all those recently published lectures, but it doesn’t seem very creative to do so by simply re-inscribing it into a static terrain in which the constant negative pole is an object of repulsion always called ‘neoliberalism’.