Foucault Beyond Foucault: Power and Its Intensifications since 1984 9780804768443

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foucault beyond foucault

Foucault Beyond Foucault Power and Its Intensifications since 1984

Jeffrey T. Nealon

stanford university press stanford, california 2008

Stanford University Press Stanford, California © 2008 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press. Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Nealon, Jeffrey T. (Jeffrey Thomas)   Foucault beyond Foucault : power and its intensifications since 1984 / Jeffrey T. Nealon.    p.  cm.   Includes bibliographical references and index.   ISBN 978-0-8047-5701-0 (cloth : alk. paper)   ISBN 978-0-8047-5702-7 (pbk. : alk. paper)   1.  Foucault, Michel, 1926–1984.  I. Title. B2430.F724N43 2008 194—dc22 2007007301

Contents

Acknowledgments Introduction: Foucault Today

vii 1

Chapter 1

Foucault Beyond Foucault

Chapter 2

Once More, with Intensity: Foucault’s History of Power Revisited

24

Chapter 3

Genealogies of Capitalism: Foucault, with Deleuze and Jameson

54

Chapter 4

Foucault’s Infamous Ethics; or, Biopower, Globalization, and Ethical Scarcity

74

Chapter 5

Resisting, Foucault

94

7

Notes

113

Works Cited

127

Index of Names

135

Acknowledgments

This project initially grew out of a series of conversations in State College with Charles Scott, Foucaultian extraordinaire, and it picked up conceptual steam at the 2005 and 2006 meetings of the Foucault Circle, where I learned especially valuable things from Tom Flynn, Len Lawlor, Richard Lynch, Todd May, Del McWhorter, and Kevin Thompson. (Of course, no philosophical warranties are implied nor have they been given; many of these folks, I suspect, have substantial disagreements with what I’m doing.) This project benefited immensely from the members of my Foucault graduate seminars at Penn State—each and every one of them made this a better book. I’d also like to thank John Christman, with whom I cotaught a graduate course on the philosophical history of “power”; the seminar helped me rethink this topic from the inside out. To say that I’ve enjoyed crucial input and insight from Rich Doyle is to hilariously understate the value of his friendship. He proves week in and week out that the good things in and around life have no truck with scarcity, resentment, or lack. Among the larger society of influence surrounding this book, I’d especially like to thank Gregg Lambert, John McGowan, Michael Naas, John Protevi, and Alan Schrift. Gentlemen, a friend of the concept is a friend of mine. This project, written from the ground up during my sabbatical in 2005–2006, would have remained a series of scattered notes without crucial material support from the Institute for the Arts and Humanities at Penn State and from the College of the Liberal Arts. Thanks to them for the invaluable gift of time. My last run-through of the book coincided, tragically, with the final months of my father, Thomas J. Nealon (1926–2006). My earlier work on alterity was dedicated to my mother and my sister; on reflection, this

viii   Acknowledgments book on power owes an obvious debt to my father—not as a predictable Oedipal figure for power, but as the person who endlessly taught me to diagnose, confront, mock, and evade power. He’ll be missed. Finally, this book finds its primary origins, joys, provocations, and intensities with Leisha and Bram—who will no doubt immediately recognize this book’s insistence on the common and the everyday as a thinly veiled affirmation of our lives together, the emergence that is today. This, and everything else, is for them.

foucault beyond foucault

Introduction: Foucault Today What difference does today introduce with respect to yesterday? —Foucault, “What Is Enlightenment?”

Although he’s been dead for more than two decades, Michel Foucault’s work has decisively lived on in academia—even after the so-called death of theory. In humanities and social sciences scholarship, Foucault’s work has been and remains by far the most cited among the “big names” associated with theory. In 2005, for example, the Arts and Humanities and Social Sciences Citation Index turns up 1,535 hits for Michel Foucault, 1,016 for Jacques Derrida, 590 for Gilles Deleuze, and 403 for Jacques Lacan. These numbers have grown more or less consistently for the past several years: since the late 1990s, Foucault has generally led the way every year with around 1,000 citations, Derrida steadily in the 500–600 range, and Deleuze and Lacan holding their own at around 300–400. Contra the “theory is dead” hypothesis, these numbers are up considerably from the supposed heyday of theory, the mid-1980s: Foucault, the leader of the citation pack at that time too, scored only 410 hits for 1985. However, the Foucault of the 1980s is substantially different from the Foucault of today. Along with the massive sea changes in the world at large since Foucault’s death in 1984 (the HIV/AIDS pandemic, the end of the cold war, the neoliberal revolution and the waning of the welfare state, the rise of identity politics, the Internet, globalization, the so-called War on Terror), the dominant critical picture of Foucault’s work has also morphed considerably. In the mid-1980s, Foucault’s name was virtually synonymous with power, and more specifically with his analysis of disciplinary power in 1975’s Discipline and Punish. Since his death, however, Foucault’s midcareer work on power has been eclipsed in the academic conceptual imaginary by his “late” work on the ethico-aesthetics of subjectivity. Foucault, in short, is today primarily referenced as a thinker of subjectivity, rather than as a thinker of power. Foucault himself lays down the bass line for this critical refrain in his late essay “The Subject

   Introduction: Foucault Today and Power”: he writes, “It is not power, but the subject, that is the general theme of my research.”1 Since his death, there has emerged a widespread critical consensus concerning the historical development and trajectory of Foucault’s work: there’s the early neostructuralist Foucault; the middle “power” Foucault; and late Foucaultian concern with making one’s life a work of art. For example, with the caveat that “this periodization is only indicative and is discussed and criticized in the book itself,” Beatrice Han begins her excellent Foucault’s Critical Project with this schematic: “archaeological” period   1963 The Birth of the Clinic   1966 The Order of Things   1969 The Archaeology of Knowledge

“genealogical” period   1970 The Order of Discourse   1975 Discipline and Punish   1976 Volume I of The History of Sexuality

the “history of subjectivity”   1984 The Use of Pleasure, Volume II of The History of Sexuality   1984 The Care of the Self, Volume III of The History of Sexuality.2

Simply taking this rough periodization at face value for a moment, charting Foucault’s career in this way (from archaeology to genealogy to subjectivity) helps to highlight just how much the late “history of subjectivity” Foucault has come to dominate our critical picture of his work today. Throughout the 1990s, Foucault’s work on the ethico-aesthetics of subjectivity became the linchpin for a wide range of thinkers who were trying to come to grips with the question of resistance in the postbinary, post–cold war world that was just emerging. Foucault, in short, became a central figure in thinking and rethinking identity and the myriad ways in which individual subjects who were armed with specific regimes of practice could reinscribe or resist hegemonic norms. All this makes sense: of course the dominant critical picture of Foucault would change over the years, in accordance with the tools needed to diagnose and intervene in a changing “today.” Likewise it makes sense that thinkers hoping to extend Foucault’s own project shortly after his

Introduction: Foucault Today    death would attempt to take up where Foucault himself so tragically was forced to leave off, with the late work on the aesthetics of subjectivity. Following suit, I’ll also spend a fair amount of time in this book tracing the shifting terrains of discipline and biopower, trying to reread and clarify their relations in Foucault’s own corpus. However, among my most overarching arguments will be that we have too hastily abandoned or thought ourselves to have profitably moved beyond Foucault’s midcareer work on power. In the culture- and cash-saturated world of the go-go 1990s, it seemed that the nation-state and the welfare state, the two formations that Foucault’s work on disciplinary power took decisively as its targets, were on the wane. A new, smooth world of global and individual flows was taking the place of the rigid segmentations of disciplinary power. Recall that many people, especially those on the American left, argued that in the 2000 U.S. presidential contest between Al Gore and George W. Bush, it really wouldn’t have made any difference who won, largely because the nation-state was yesterday’s news and corporations (with their distinctly nondisciplinary forms of domination) were bound to run the world one way or another. Questions of power and politics were being eclipsed by (or reunderstood in terms of ) work on “resistant” subjectivities, both in the Foucault literature and the (academic) world at large. Since September 2001, however, we’ve seen the nation-state, and its investments in disciplinary power and panoptic surveillance, come roaring back, indeed intensifying beyond our wildest dreams (or nightmares). We live in a world where outright torture of detainees and constant government surveillance of the citizenry are no longer projects that have to be carried out in secret: they’ve become official policy, at least in the United States. This historical (re)birth of discipline and panopticism is, it seems to me, one of the primary reasons for us today to reexamine Foucault’s midcareer work on punitive power and its relations to his late work on the ethics and aesthetics of resistant subjectivity. Even more specifically, my argument will be that the ostensible reasons we’ve “moved beyond” Foucault’s work on power seem all too clear, even if they often go unstated. In short, critics seem to have agreed that Foucault’s midcareer work constituted a dead-end, a totalizing cage, an omnipresent panopticon with no possibility for any subjective or collective resistance. This reading subtends a kind of “Foucault consensus” that shows up everywhere, even (one might say, especially) in works that

   Introduction: Foucault Today aren’t primarily about Foucault: in tag-end footnotes concerning the recent history of theory, throwaway paragraphs on post-1968 thinkers, and translator’s introductions to books by Foucault’s contemporaries. Here, for example, is the Foucault paragraph in the English translator’s introduction to Alain Badiou’s Infinite Thought: In his middle period, Foucault argued that networks of disciplinary power not only reach into the most intimate spaces of the subject, but actually produce what we call subjects. However, Foucault also said that power produces resistance. His problem then became that of accounting for the source of such resistance. If the subject—right down to its most intimate desires, actions, and thoughts—is constituted by power, then how can it be a source of independent resistance? For such a point of agency to exist, Foucault needs some space that has not been completely constituted by power, or a complex doctrine on the relationship between resistance and independence. However, he has neither. In his late work, he deals with this problem by assigning agency to those subjects who resist power by means of an aesthetic project of self-authoring.3

This quotation offers a very concise statement of the prevailing wisdom on Foucault’s work after 1969—his shift from the genealogical work on power to the late work on the ethics of subjective creativity—and is likewise a succinct example of the neo-Hegelian progress narrative that guides much of our present understanding of Foucault’s work and career. The dominant narrative goes something like this: Foucault’s early “structuralist” work fails to provide the critical wedge he’s seeking, so he abandons it—after 1969’s Archaeology of Knowledge—to take up the study of power in the 1970s, in the wake of the upheavals of May 1968. However, the two most famous “power” books, 1975’s Discipline and Punish and 1976’s first volume of The History of Sexuality, likewise comprise a failed project (though for very different reasons than the early neostructuralist project: archaeology fails to account for the bridges among words and things, while the genealogical work on power is—one might say—seen as having been too successful, too totalizing and demoralizing). Insofar as Foucault so convincingly demonstrates that power is indeed everywhere, capillary and molecular, how can we possibly resist it? How can we be anything but dupes for power? Hoping finally to answer this nagging question of resistance, Foucault turns in his late work to the ethical project of making one’s life a work of art.

Introduction: Foucault Today    In terms of our prevailing picture of Foucault, the gaps between major book projects in Foucault’s career often tell the tale, a Bildungsroman with a series of failures leading to higher knowledge. The publishing gap between The Archaeology of Knowledge and Discipline and Punish (1969 to 1975) marks the abandonment of Foucault’s neostructuralist concept of discursive formation and the concomitant turn to the genealogical concerns of power. The second gap—from 1976’s volume 1 to the publication of volumes 2 and 3 of The History of Sexuality in 1984—is in turn indicative of the failure of the (too totalizing) power discourse, signaling Foucault’s turn to questions of ethical resistance, subjectivity, and making one’s self a work of art. In short, the early archaeological work on discourse falters in the late 1960s, which leads Foucault to consider the higher question of power in the 1970s, which in its turn proves too totalizing, thus leading Foucault finally to the mature, late work on subjectivity. It’s hard to dispute the broad outlines of this story, and I’m not necessarily interested in doing so here. I’m more interested in complicating this history by focusing less on the biographical facts of Foucault’s life or the received wisdom concerning the “failures” in his work and by instead looking for mechanisms within his own oeuvre for rethinking the concept and practice of change itself. In short, my argument here will be that Foucault doesn’t at all abandon his midcareer work on power when he shifts focus to questions of ethics and subjectivity; rather than seeing his post-1969 shifts of emphasis as a series of failures and dialectical sublations, I’ll argue that the shifts of Foucaultian emphasis are more productively understood as a series of “intensifications.” In the end, tracing this logic of intensification in Foucault’s work will have much to offer us in terms of both rereading Foucault’s own conceptual itinerary and (more importantly) thinking about ways we might respond to the mutations and intensifications of power that we’ve seen since Foucault’s death in 1984. Much of that “intensification” might in fact be experienced on an everyday level as a collapsing of the political and the economic spheres into subjective identity questions that used to be thought of as “merely” cultural. In short, “who you are” has become increasingly bound up with what you (are able to) consume, what kind of work you (are able to) do,

   Introduction: Foucault Today and what market niche you occupy. The intensifications of postindustrial or postmodern capitalism—the increasing financialization of everyday life throughout the globe—is certainly one of the most remarkable historical developments in the decades since Foucault’s death,4 and these developments comprise a crucial linchpin for this analysis. If indeed Foucault’s last texts ask us to think about the work we do to make our selves subjects, this would seem to commit us to looking closely at recent mutations in the everyday economic work of consumption and investment—libidinal as well as financial. In short, this book also attempts to restage an engagement between Foucault and economics—or more precisely, it stages an overdue encounter between a post-Foucaultian reading of Foucault and a post-Marxist reading of recent economic history. As a caveat or disclaimer, I would like to stress from the outset that I’m not trying to turn the Foucault clock back from the fanciful aesthetic concerns of merely personal subjectivity to the properly political concerns of “real” social and economic power. Rather, and more precisely, I aim to rethink the relations among disciplinary power, biopower, and subjectivity in Foucault’s midcareer and late work. I’d like to reconsider the question of power in the spirit that Foucault suggests when he responds to Deleuze’s remark that “perhaps [power] has to do with investments, as much economic as unconscious.”5 Foucault agrees, but he adds a hesitation: “The play of desire, power, and interest is still relatively unknown. It took a long time to know what exploitation was. And desire, it has been and promises to be a lengthy affair. It’s possible that the struggles now under way, the local, regional, discontinuous theories being elaborated in the course of these struggles, and which are absolutely of a piece with them, are just beginning to uncover the way in which power is exercised.”6 If, as Foucault notes, it took the nineteenth century and a good part of the twentieth for us to get any kind of workable handle on economic and libidinal economies of exploitation, I want to extend that Foucaultian provocation here and suggest that far from being “done” with the question of power, we’ve only just begun to grapple with power and its historical intensifications, both in Foucault’s work and “beyond” Foucault, wherever that might lead us.

chapter 1

Foucault Beyond Foucault The task of philosophy is to describe the nature of today, and of “ourselves today.” With the proviso that we do not allow ourselves the facile, rather theatrical declaration that this moment in which we exist is one of total perdition, in the abyss of darkness, or a triumphant daybreak, and so on. It is a time like any other, or rather, a time that is never quite like any other. —Foucault, “Structuralism and Poststructuralism”

This book has two related aims. The first is constituted by my sense that, while Foucault has been dead for more than two decades and the world has changed quite substantially over those years, his work continues to offer us a set of valuable tools for intervening within today’s discourses of power. In short, Foucault’s work (especially his midcareer work on power and his late work on biopower and governmentality) still has much to teach us about the singular imbrications of practice, subjectivity, resistance, and power that saturate our present—“a time like any other, or rather, a time that is never quite like any other.” If one takes seriously the Foucaultian provocation that theories are toolboxes, conceptual schemas that function primarily within their transversal linkages to other archives, then there would seem no more “Foucaultian” project than one that attempts to take “Foucault beyond Foucault,” into domains that he never could have analyzed. In mobilizing that project, however, it became clear to me that such a trajectory also committed me to a second, related task: to perform a different or counterreading of the relation between the “middle”

   Foucault Beyond Foucault (“genealogical”) Foucault and his “late” work on ethics and subjectivity. This second project—retracing Foucault’s conceptual path from 1969’s Archaeology of Knowledge to his death in 1984—became necessary precisely because of the exigency of the first. In short, it became clear to me that if one wants to read Foucault as something other than an apologist for the present, for the increasing “privatization” of economics, subjectivity, resistance, and power since his death in 1984, then one has to counter (or at least nuance) what has become the dominant sense of “the late Foucault”: the sense that after the mid-1970s, he largely abandoned his work on the social interpellations of power and became instead a thinker of individual, artistic self-creation as a mode of resistance. A concise version of this consensus concerning the late Foucault can be found, for example, in Understanding Foucault, which gives us the following gloss on Foucault’s “later writings, where he shifts his focus from the effects of power to the ways in which human beings become ‘subjects’”: An important concept that comes out of his work is that the self can be “authored” by us, the subjects, and that we can produce these selves and our lives as works of art. Foucault’s early work on subjectivity effectively debunked the idea that identity is inherent or natural, but it failed to explain how and why individuals can in fact act autonomously, or resist the power of disciplinary forces and institutional discourses. In his later work he argues that individuals can in fact “cultivate” themselves through what he calls “arts of existence” that not only allow us to become self-determining agents, but also provide the grounds for us to challenge and resist power structures.1

Although I’ll try to provide a critique of this line of reasoning throughout the text, here at the beginning I’d simply like to mark the hegemony of this reading of the late Foucault. According to the consensus constituted by the secondary literature, Foucault’s early and middle work culminates in a kind of totalizing theoretical cage (of which “discipline” is the highest manifestation) that in turn constituted a kind of crisis or dead-end for Foucault’s thinking by the mid-1970s. As Fredric Jameson puts it, Foucault seems to have constructed a nearly iron “ ‘winner loses’ logic”: “The more powerful the vision of some increasingly total system or logic—the Foucault of the prisons book is the obvious example—the more powerless the reader comes to feel.”2 Hoping to reinvigorate a dis-

Foucault Beyond Foucault    course and practice of resistance, Foucault turns in his late work—after Discipline and Punish (1975) and the first volume of The History of Sexuality (early 1976)—toward a more positive rendering of the formerly “docile” subject, highlighting the individual’s potentials for subversive agency. In short, Foucault’s late work performs a 180-degree turn away from the (too-totalizing and demoralizing) “power” discourse of the early and mid-1970s and culminates in a renewed appreciation of the Enlightenment subject, the ethical arts of the self, and resistance to normalized totalization through individual action. On this line of reasoning, the 1984 essay “What Is Enlightenment?” becomes the central theoretical text where one can see Foucault overtly thematizing this softening of his earlier stances toward truth, subjectivity, reason, and the Enlightenment itself. As Lois McNay puts it, Foucault’s late work turns to an “ ‘ethics of the self ’ ”: Through the formation of a “critical ontology of the self ” it is possible to formulate an alternative ethical standpoint from which individuals can begin to resist the normalizing force of the “government of individualization.” The idea of an ethics of the self redefines Foucault’s relation with a tradition of Enlightenment thought, which he rereads through the figures of Kant and Baudelaire. From this reinterpretation, Foucault is able to deploy the concepts of autonomy, reflexivity, and critique and thereby overcome some of what have been regarded as the nihilistic implications of his earlier work on discipline. The idea of ethics of the self partially overcomes some of the difficulties . . . arising from Foucault’s insistence on individuals as docile bodies rather than as agents with the capacity for autonomous action.3

Foucault’s work does of course consistently shift its targets and interests as it discovers new objects and problems, and as part of his peripatetic research agenda, he clearly does become increasingly interested in the subjective regimes of biopower from the mid-1970s onward. The second and third volumes of The History of Sexuality are certainly quite different from the first; however, the question is whether that difference comes about through an abandonment or dialectical sublation of Foucault’s earlier itinerary, or through a transformative intensification of that very agenda. The dominant reading in the secondary work suggests the former rather than the latter, thereby allowing Foucault to become a pio-

   Foucault Beyond Foucault neering figure in what Amanda Anderson calls “a new subjectivism” in contemporary theory: The most telling example here would be the dramatic late turn in the work of Michel Foucault, which set aside the far-reaching examination of modern power and modern institutions to explore the “care of the self ” within antiquity and, to a lesser degree, within modernity, as well. While Foucault’s previous work had been interested in the forms of subjectivity engendered by modern disciplinary power, the later Foucault was interested in the manner in which individuals understood, conducted, and therefore in some sense owned, their moral, social, and physical lives.4

Here I’ll want to argue vigorously against this “180-degree turn” critical consensus concerning the middle and late Foucault, specifically against the idea that the late Foucault abandons his research on the social canalizations of power and becomes cozy with a kind of liberal individualism. I’ll even try to challenge the sense that his late work “represents a substantial departure from his earlier writings (that the self is a docile body, produced by dominant discourses and institutions).”5 Rather, it seems to me that in Foucault’s work after 1969 there is a continuous experimental research itinerary, as opposed to the picture found in so much of the secondary work: a neo-Hegelian developmental narrative where Foucault’s theoretical “mistakes” (most pointedly, the “nihilistic” or “totalizing” discourse on power developed in Discipline and Punish and in History of Sexuality, volume 1) are negated and sublated in the name of developing a higher truth about the liberal subject and its developing abilities to resist the imperatives of a normative culture. Eric Paras’s Foucault 2.0: Beyond Power and Knowledge is probably the most extended book-length elaboration of this Bildungsroman thesis, although the thrust of the argument is already contained cleverly in his title. “Foucault 1.0” was the old, clunky operating system of power and knowledge which Foucault moved “beyond” in his late work, finally embracing the substantially more user-friendly, “2.0” humanist agenda he had once so savagely critiqued. Richard Wolin sums up Foucault 2.0 in “Foucault the Neohumanist?” by arguing that Paras shows us how Foucault “abandoned his hard structuralist position and later embraced the ideas that he had labored to undermine: liberty, individualism, ‘human

Foucault Beyond Foucault    rights,’ and even the thinking subject. . . . Under the sign of aesthetic self-realization, Foucault rehabilitates and vindicates the rights of subjectivity.”6 For the record, although I do think that such readings are demonstrably “wrong,” for me that’s not the major problem with them (of course, they’re demonstrably “right” as well). I do not undertake this rereading project primarily in the name of a “better understanding” of Foucault; rather, I do so in the name of reactivating his analyses and conceptual vocabulary for use in the contemporary situation. Because if indeed the late Foucault is what most secondary work says he is—a booster of individual ethico-aesthetic self-creation as resistance to the totalizing, normalizing imperatives of disciplinary culture—then that secondary work’s final judgment on Foucault is also, it seems to me, inexorably correct. As McNay writes, summarizing another chestnut of Foucault criticism, such a supposedly “ethical moment amounts in fact to little more than a fetishization of a notion of aesthetic practice.”7 On the dominant reading, the late Foucaultian turn to the self-creating subject and its artistic agency can only remind us of present-day American military recruiting posters (“Become an Army of One”) or the corporate slogan of Microsoft: “Where would you like to go today?” Whatever one may have thought of “artistic self-creation” as an imperative resistant to the dominant culture of the “Moral Majority” 1980s, it is now ubiquitously familiar to us. Not so much from avant-garde art practices or difficult ethical imperatives, but largely from advertising: “Saab: Choose Your Own Road,” “Outback Steakhouse: No Rules, Just Right.” Or the ad agency’s constant helpful reminders concerning the links between authentic cultural rebels and the products by which we know them: Jack Kerouac wore khakis; Ghandi would have used a Macintosh computer; Cadillacs are all about rock ’n’ roll, and so on. In short, if in the end Foucault is a thinker of artistic self-fashioning as ethical resistance, then Foucault would seem to have very little critical to say about the present, especially the economic present, as it seems supersaturated with these practices of endless, fetishized self-creation. Get a tattoo and/or a Humvee, and “normative power” will shudder. As Tom Frank writes about the corporate truisms of today’s so-called new economy:

   Foucault Beyond Foucault Consumerism is no longer about “conformity” but about “difference.”. . . It counsels not rigid adherence to the tastes of the herd but vigilant and constantly updated individualism. We consume not to fit in, but to prove, on the surface at least, that we are rock ’n’ roll rebels, each one of us as rule-breaking and hierarchy-defying as our heroes of the 60s, who now pitch cars, shoes, and beer. This imperative of endless difference is today the genius at the heart of American capitalism, an eternal fleeing from “sameness” that satiates our thirst for the New with such achievements of civilization as the infinite brands of identical cola, the myriad colors and irrepressible variety of the cigarette rack at 7-Eleven. . . . However the basic impulses of the countercultural idea may have disturbed a nation lost in Cold War darkness, they are today in fundamental agreement with the basic tenets of Information Age business theory.8

In short, the cultural and economic imperatives lauded by much secondary work on Foucault—the endless, self-creative project of making yourself and your life a work of art—are imperatives that have, in the short span since Foucault’s death, become wholly “normative.” Post–cold war, American-style neoliberal consumption capitalism has become the driving force behind “globalization” in the past decades, and as Frank wittily argues, that brand of new-age discipline performs its hegemonic or totalizing work not through some notion of cultural standardization or repression, but precisely through the cultural/economic imperative to become a flexibly specialized individual, resistant to the normalizing influence of the government, the “Man,” or the herd. As Foucault himself writes about “American neo-liberalism” of the “Chicago school,” it was “developed in reaction against the ‘excessive government’ exhibited in its eyes . . . by the New Deal, war-planning, and the great economic and social programs generally supported by postwar Democratic administrations.”9 The project of contemporary neoliberal economics, in other words, shares quite a lot with the dominant critical picture of “the late Foucault”: each is supposedly dedicated to the project of throwing off the subjective “docility” inevitably created by powerful social forces and schemes, thereby freeing up individual agency through some notion of authentic self-creation. In his 1982 course on “The Birth of Biopolitics,” a set of lectures delivered in the historical infancy of the neoliberal political and economic regime that we increasingly live under, Foucault comes

Foucault Beyond Foucault    to a rather unsurprising conclusion about such thinking, at least it will seem unsurprising to those of us living on after Foucault, in the economics-saturated world of “freakonomics”: “American neo-liberalism seeks . . . to extend the rationality of the market, the schemes of analysis it proposes and the decision-making criteria it suggests, to areas that are not exclusively or not primarily economic. For example, the family and birth policy, or delinquency and penal policy.”10 Or, one might add, neoliberalism is dedicated to the economization of artistic self-creation as a strategy for resisting normativity: that style of subjectivity has in fact become American-style neoliberalism’s primary engine and product line. In any case, it is from this fate as a thinker of creative, resistant individualism—quite literally as a neoliberal theorist—that I will need to dislodge the late Foucault, if indeed his work is to be useful as any kind of critical wedge to intervene in the world that has configured itself in the years since Foucault’s death.

What Is “What Is Enlightenment?” Much of the critical consensus concerning the late Foucault takes its inspiration directly from his 1984 essay “What Is Enlightenment?” where it seems that Foucault definitively softens his stance toward the Enlightenment imperatives of autonomy, rationality, liberty, and subjective self-determination. Insofar as volumes 2 and 3 of Foucault’s History of Sexuality are primarily practical analyses rather than theoretical treatises (not to mention the fact that those volumes are tightly focused on examining societies between 1,000 and 2,400 years past), the Enlightenment essay becomes a crucial site for the secondary literature’s modernizing of Foucault’s “subject-centered” turn. The Enlightenment essay is important for suggesting, in other words, that the late Foucault’s turn toward studying ancient self-creation techniques may have some ready relevance for us (post)moderns. Perhaps we become “other Greeks and Romans” for the late Foucault, rather than the (more historically plausible, though less immediately appealing) “other Victorians” who we seemed to be in volume 1 of The History of Sexuality. Leaning heavily on Kant’s 1784 response to the question “What

   Foucault Beyond Foucault is Enlightenment?” and Kant’s insistence on the Enlightenment slogan “Dare to know,” Foucault argues that what connects us today to the Enlightenment is not so much a question of doctrinal content (the truth or falsity of this or that Enlightenment argument), but the infinite yet everyday task of such daring “knowing.” In other words, the legacy of the Enlightenment is the call to think critically about the present, to emphasize becoming over being, and to practice what Foucault calls “a permanent critique of our historical era.”11 “Modern man,” Foucault writes citing Baudelaire, “is not the man who goes off to discover himself, his secrets and his hidden truth; he is the man who tries to invent himself. This modernity does not ‘liberate man in his own being’; it compels him to face the task of producing himself.”12 Insofar as Foucault emphasizes Kant’s conception of Enlightenment as Ausgang (an exit, escape, or “a way out” of darkness, ignorance, or servility), Foucault is taken here to be endorsing the practices of Enlightenment subjectivity as a mode of resistance to the present; which is to say, the task of permanent, everyday self-fashioning also harbors “the possibility of no longer being, doing, or thinking what we are, do, or think.”13 Compelled by the early 1980s theory debates to take up a position concerning what he calls “the blackmail of the Enlightenment” (for it, or against it?), Foucault finally comes around to embracing what he had so long resisted: a positive endorsement of the Enlightenment project, “our impatience for liberty.”14 This, at least, is what I take to be the dominant reading of “What Is Enlightenment?” and by metonymy, the whole of “the late Foucault”: he shifts his emphasis from the subject’s sociopolitical docility (thumbs down on the Enlightenment) to its creative, norm-busting individual agency (two thumbs way up). In beginning to trouble that reading somewhat, I’d note that Kant’s “Enlightenment” text makes its debut in Foucault’s thought at least six years before “What Is Enlightenment?” in two texts from 1978 (a period that one might call the “early late Foucault”): the lecture “What Is Critique?” and, most importantly, the introduction that Foucault wrote for the English translation of Georges Canguilhem’s The Normal and the Pathological (see in addition 1979’s “For an Ethics of Discomfort,” which also cites Kant’s essay). Like Foucault’s 1984 essay, this 1978 introduction to the Canguilhem book—reworked by Foucault and published (post-

Foucault Beyond Foucault    humously, it turned out) as “Life: Experience and Science”—also uses Kant’s text as a linchpin organizing principle, but the earlier essay does so in a way that both illuminates and questions the dominant reading of the late Foucault, so much of which is staked on Foucault’s embrace of Kant’s answer to the question, “What is Enlightenment?” In the introduction to the Canguilhem book, Foucault specifically deploys Kant’s Enlightenment concern with “today”—“to analyze the ‘present’ moment and . . . to look for that relation which must be established with this founding act”15—in order to dramatize the differences between what Foucault reads as two opposed lines of inquiry in twentieth-century French thought, “two philosophical directions which have remained profoundly heterogeneous”16: a dominant philosophy of the subject (here he specifically names Merleau-Ponty and Sartre), and a competing philosophy of the concept (Canguilhem, Cavaillès, Bachelard). Foucault insists on a hard demarcating “line that separates a philosophy of experience, of meaning [sens] and of subject, and a philosophy of knowledge, of rationality and of the concept.”17 One doesn’t need to have read much Foucault to know that phenomenological “experience” and “meaning” are almost always fighting words in his post-1960s work, and his (low) opinions concerning the existentialism of Sartre and Merleau-Ponty are well documented (see, for example, “Foucault Responds to Sartre”). Foucault, in other words, clearly aligns himself with what he takes to be Canguilhem’s lineage and project: building a philosophy of the concept, one that has no truck with the prevailing phenomenological “philosophy of meaning, subject, and the experienced thing.”18 More importantly for my purposes here, Foucault also clearly aligns this antisubjective countertradition of French thinking with Kant’s question of the Enlightenment. About “the work of Cavaillès, Koyré, Bachelard, and Canguilhem” (and Foucault himself ), he states quite emphatically, “They set into play this question of the Enlightenment which is essential to contemporary philosophy.”19 Which is to say, for Foucault the “essential” or productive legacy of the Enlightenment is not the inevitability of the liberal subject or some form of self-creative subjectivity (the “meaning” generated by the “experience” of self-fashioning, artistic practice, autonomy, and so on); rather, the crucial question of the Enlightenment the relation of the subject to the concept—to knowledge, ratio-

   Foucault Beyond Foucault nality, practice—and its generative powers in formulating the questions and problems of “today.” Foucault’s Kant, in other words, doesn’t discover the problem of today in terms of the inevitable centrality of the autonomous, liberal subject; rather, the “Enlightenment” question of “today” is primarily an interrogation of the a-subjective concept. Which is to say, the linchpin of the Enlightenment for Foucault is an experimental search for conceptual relations or a matrix of functions rather than the monotonously assured discovery of subjective experience’s “meaningfulness.” The Enlightenment provokes us to ask the conceptual question of today’s relation to yesterday, just as, for example, Foucault’s archaeological “statement” is primarily a function that traces the statement’s a-subjective relation to the archive, or the genealogical deployment of Foucaultian “power” is always a relation among forces (rather than among subjects). And for Foucault the problem with the “subjective” line in contemporary French thought is precisely that it already has a universal answer for Kant’s provocation to think about the present and its relations to prior, foundational moments: subjective phenomenological experience (and its sibling discourse of hidden hermeneutic depth) constitutes both the meaning of the present and any possible set of relations to the past. If nothing else holds it together, Foucault’s work (early, midcareer, and late) sets out to disrupt “the promise that one day the subject—in the form of historical consciousness—will once again be able to appropriate, to bring back under its sway, all those things that are kept at a distance by difference and find in them what might be called his abode.”20 In short, the upshot of the “late” Foucault’s interest in Kant’s “Enlightenment” text, as it’s introduced to his corpus in the 1978 Canguilhem essay and developed in Foucault’s subsequent work, is not somehow to use the Kantian Enlightenment as a launching pad to change paths and embrace the importance of self-creating autonomous subjectivity.21 In fact, Foucault uses Kant in the Canguilhem essay to emphasize a completely “heterogeneous” movement—the irreducible importance not of subjective “experience” or “meaning” but of conceptual relation and its irrevocable ties to practices and processes that lie far “outside” the subject.22 Specifically, Foucault in the 1978 Canguilhem text locates the centrality of what he calls “the ‘norm’ process” as the key research question for an engagement with “today”: “The processes of elimination and se-

Foucault Beyond Foucault    lection of statements, theories, objects are made at each instant in terms of a certain norm; and this norm cannot be identified with a theoretical structure or an actual paradigm because today’s scientific truth is only an episode of it.”23 In short, the Enlightenment question of “today” highlights the centrality of normativity as a practice, the constraining (rather than primarily enabling or ennobling) relationship between tradition and today. “It is to this philosophy of meaning, subject, and the experienced thing that Canguilhem [and with him, Foucault and Kant] has opposed a philosophy of error, concept, and the living being.”24 Which of course suggests that Foucault’s “late” turn to the Enlightenment (and to questions of life and subjectivity) constitutes an extension or intensification of the project outlined in the work of the mid-1970s, not a rejection of it. Or so I’ll be arguing in the remainder of this book.

Foucaultian Economics: What Does It Cost? The other primary focus of this book’s attempt to take “Foucault beyond Foucault” will be to restage an engagement between Foucault’s post-1969 work and questions of economics—questions that have, on virtually any account, come increasingly to saturate our everyday lives in the decades since Foucault’s death. Like this text’s proposed rereading of the history of power and “the late Foucault,” my engagement with economics will likewise require tacking against the prevailing winds of Foucault criticism, which (quite rightly) insists on Foucault’s sledgehammer critique of Marxism and its economic determinism. Despite Foucault’s rejection of orthodox Marxism, I will try to show how Foucault’s post1969 “genealogical” and “ethical” work nevertheless constitutes a thoroughgoing confrontation with questions of economics, in both the broad and more narrowly defined senses of the word. Foucault’s odd “economics” can perhaps best be approached through focusing on a question that Foucault consistently asks about any given practice or theory: What does it cost? This question is most obviously borrowed from Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals, which revolves around the pointed query, “Have you ever asked yourselves sufficiently how much the erection of every ideal on earth has cost?”25 Foucault uses

   Foucault Beyond Foucault this overt terminology of “cost” quite often—asking, for example, what it costs the subject to tell the truth about itself—but just as often Foucault will more subtly invoke the sliding scale of “cost” as a swerve around the binary skeleton of truth and falsity. For example, in “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” Foucault asks after the “costs” of religious belief: “Fathers have only to mistake effects for causes, believe in the reality of an ‘afterlife’ or maintain the value of eternal truths, and the bodies of their children will suffer.”26 Here Foucault, following Nietzsche, subtly shows us that the question “Is it true to believe that there is an afterlife?” is largely irrelevant, or at least foreign to genealogical inquiry. Rather, the crucial and productive question is, “What does it cost to believe in an afterlife?” both ethically (what does it cost your relation to yourself, in terms of what you can do?) and politically (what does it cost others, or others you’re in a position to impact, if you believe in an afterlife?). In the encyclopedia article on himself that Foucault wrote under the pseudonym Maurice Florence in the early 1980s, Foucault thematized his entire critical itinerary under the rubric of this question of cost: In sum, the critical history of thought is neither a history of acquisitions nor a history of concealments of truth; it is the history of “verdictions,” understood as the forms according to which discourses capable of being declared true or false are articulated concerning a domain of things. What the conditions of this emergence were, the price that was paid for it, so to speak, its effects on reality and the way in which, linking a certain type of object to certain modalities of the subject, it constituted the historical a priori of possible experience for a period of time, an area, and for given individuals.27

Reviewing his current research itinerary in a 1983 interview, Foucault further expands on this relation between “speaking the truth” and “cost”: “The question I asked myself was this: How is it that the human subject took itself as the object of possible knowledge? Through what forms of rationality and historical conditions? And, finally, at what price? This is my question: At what price can subjects speak the truth about themselves?”28 This price/cost concept or angle of intervention is in fact the problematization that ties together otherwise quite disparate analyses in Foucault’s experimental itinerary, and this very robust notion of “cost”

Foucault Beyond Foucault    (which really comes to the fore in the late work) allows Foucault retroactively to say that all along he’d been interested in the question of the subject and its relation to the concept, rather than the narrow question of power “itself,” precisely because the question that most obviously connects the subject to power in an everyday and ongoing sense is the social question of the cost of speaking the truth (or not). As Foucault continues to review his career in the 1983 interview, he rereads his entire trajectory precisely on this axis of cost and its relation to truth. Summing up the earliest works on psychiatry and insanity, he sees their central question as having been, “At what price can subjects speak the truth about themselves as mad persons?”29 In turn, “The Order of Things asked the price of problematizing and analyzing the speaking subject, the working subject, the living subject.”30 And he goes on to export this question of cost into his current and future work on the Greek and Roman history of sexuality: “I will be doing the same thing with sexuality, only going back much farther: How does the subject speak truthfully about itself, inasmuch as it is the subject of sexual pleasure? And at what price?”31 The emphasis on truth’s “cost” might also be thematized as a linchpin of Foucault’s wariness concerning the Marxian work of ideology critique. For the critic of ideology, individuals need to be shown the rational kernel of (economic) truth hidden among the mists of ideological illusion; if successful, such a theoretical critique would translate into resistant action of some kind. Embedded in this notion of ideology critique is the sense that there is a grounding or hierarchical relationship, within the individual subject as well as the social body, between theoretical “truth” and everyday “practice”: as that great critic of ideology George Clinton would have it, “Free your mind / and your ass will follow.”32 Foucault responds to this line of reasoning by outlining three problems with ideology critique: “The first is that, like it or not, it always stands in virtual opposition to something else that is supposed to count as truth. . . . The second drawback is that the concept of ideology refers, I think necessarily, to something of the order of a subject. Thirdly, ideology stands in a secondary position relative to something that functions as its infrastructure, as its material, economic determinant.”33 For Foucault, as for Nietzsche, insistence on the “economic” question of cost brings with it not the ideological appeal to neotranscendent or grounding causes

   Foucault Beyond Foucault (the revealed truth, the subject’s bad conscience, the class struggle), but a consistent emphasis on social effects: determining “cost” here is a diagnostic operation rather than a primarily philosophical, moral, or epistemological one. Prices and costs, of course, are hardly “natural”—the physical world recognizes no essential difference between a Prada bag and a grocery sack. However, just because prices are social constructions or effects, it hardly follows that you get to decide what you want to pay for food, shelter, or designer backpacks. Cost enacts or dramatizes the effects of social compulsion and their imbrication with individual desires, without any necessity for natural or transcendental backing: if you want it, you have to consider the price, monetary and otherwise. But, importantly, you don’t get to decide what the price is going to be, or even whether you’ll be happy with the transaction in the long run: that is necessarily decided by a hazardous and discontinuous set of practices, a series of interactions with something or someone else. “Truth” certainly doesn’t disappear as a player within these transactions, but for Foucault “saying the truth” is only possible (or not) as the outcome of a process, rather than as the subtending ground of that process: which is to say, speaking the truth is the stake and outcome of a series of practices and statements, rather than the secret to be revealed (or not) by them. As with the cost of any big-ticket items or “durable goods” (like a car, house, or refrigerator), the initial price paid for “truth” is only part of the total cost-equation: Will it appreciate in value, depreciate, or simply become obsolete? These are things over which “you” have very little control. Another way to approach this Foucaultian methodological fulcrum of price—“What does it cost?”—is to see it as a translation otherwise of the Foucaultian truism about genealogical “danger” and its relation to the moral categories of good and bad: “All power relations are not bad in and of themselves, but it is a fact that they always entail certain risks, . . . this [power] relationship being in itself neither good nor bad but dangerous.”34 Foucault’s problems with orthodox Marxism, one might say, were never so much with its economic determinism—though he’s no fan of that—but with the deeply entrenched moralism of the French Communist Party, its style of denunciation and “doctrine will set you free” ethos. Although Foucault’s critical comments concerning Marxism are legion,

Foucault Beyond Foucault    his engagement with, and appreciation for, Marx’s texts is equally evident throughout his oeuvre. “What I wish for,” he says, “is not so much the defalsification and restitution of a true Marx but the unburdening and liberation of Marx in relation to party dogma.”35 Foucault affirms in Marx not the right-and-wrong dictates of party operatives, but the complex diagnostic sense in which Marx himself studied his object, capitalism: as a mode of production in which there exists “not a power, but multiple powers.”36 For Foucault, Marx shows us that “society is an archipelago of different powers,” rather than a central hierarchical conflict distributed throughout the socius.37 Additionally, Foucault reads Marx as a thinker whose methodology is, as Nietzsche’s, beyond the moral binaries of good and evil. As Foucault approvingly asks: What did Marx do when in his analysis of capital he encountered the problem of working-class misery? He refused the usual explanation that regarded this misery as the effect of a rare natural cause or of a concerted theft. And he said in effect: given what capitalist production is in its fundamental laws, it can’t help but to produce misery. Capitalism’s reason for being is not to starve the workers, but it cannot develop without starving them. Marx substituted the analysis of production for the denunciation of theft.38

On Foucault’s reading, Marx consistently steers us away from moralistic explanations (which really aren’t explanations at all), and toward analyses of production, effects. The Marxist project highlighted by Foucault here is not the denunciation of capitalism as a misery machine, but the project of mapping the myriad ways in which misery is produced by capital, in the hopes that the machine can be modified to support a different series of outputs. As Foucault insists, one cannot simply explain the production of misery “negatively by repression. The whole problem is to understand which are the positive mechanisms that . . . result in misery.”39 Such an “affirmative” analysis of capital is, it seems to me, one of the most crucial legacies of Foucault (and Marx) in our era of globalization.40 I can hear the skeptical question already: “How can we possibly say ‘yes’ to the brutality and inequality of capitalism?” But the insistent Foucaultian question, I would submit, is more troubling: “How can we say ‘no’ to capital? It’s who we are.” Following Foucault, one might say

   Foucault Beyond Foucault that capitalist economics—profit, cost, wealth, exploitation, means of production, efficiency, and so on—are not “bad”; rather, they are “dangerous.” Which is to say that economics is not well treated in a moral register, but deserves a properly political treatment. The “Marxian” side of Foucault rests in this nonmoralistic, properly political diagnosis of any given productive technique’s effects: a scrupulous emphasis on working through the practices and how or what they produce. As Foucault says about his late work, “I am studying the problem of techniques of the self in Greek and Roman antiquity; how man, human life, and the self were all objects of a certain number of tekhnai that, with their exacting rationality, could well be compared to any technique of production.”41 In the end, the Foucaultian “conceptual relation of truth” is less a matter of reference, morality, or signification than it is a matter of cost. The primary Foucaultian question is not the hermeneutic question (“What does it mean?”), or even the epistemological question (“What is it?”), but rather the economic question, “What does it cost?” Of course, this is a very robust notion of economics and cost, one that would look strange indeed within mainstream economics. But as Foucault notes in his discussion of liberal economic principals, it is most productive to approach economics not as a regional science of supply and demand, but rather as a saturated or “intense” mode of everyday production: “Not as a theory or an ideology—and even less, certainly, as a way for ‘society’ to ‘represent itself ’—but rather, as a practice, which is to say, a ‘way of doing things’ oriented toward objectives and regulating itself by means of a sustained reflection. Liberalism is to be analyzed, then, as a principle and a method of rationalizing the exercise of government, a rationality that obeys—and this is its specificity—the internal rule of maximum economy.”42 And as the contemporary intensification of biopolitics focuses our critical attention on the production of subjectivities, Foucault’s analysis shows us that we need to keep that attention focused on the costs of subjectivity as well as its potentials for resistance. Foucaultian economics shows us, contra much of what our critical vocabulary still seems to suggest, that productive practices rather than meaningful things are the primary hinges of critical discourse. Capitalism, like the body, is not a thing to be denounced or celebrated, but diagnosed as a field contending forces, a virtual network of productive

Foucault Beyond Foucault    practices. Of course one might want to intensify the effects of some practices (say, the pleasures of the body or the equal distribution of wealth) while working to downplay others, but it’s not the practices that make up “the body” or “capitalism” that can be said to be “good” or “liberating” or even “interesting.” It is the outcomes of those practices, measured not on a binary scale of morality (good/bad), but on a sliding scale of intensity (a concept I’ll discuss in greater detail in the next chapter). Hopefully this updating and mobilizing of Foucault’s (counter)economics will offer us some alternative points of intervention in a post-Foucaultian world, “our” world, where the axiom “everything has a price” has become much more than a convenient metaphor.

chapter 2

Once More, with Intensity: Foucault’s History of Power Revisited What we need . . . is a political philosophy that isn’t erected around the problem of sovereignty or, therefore, around the problems of law and prohibition. We need to cut off the king’s head. In political theory, that has still to be done. —Foucault, “Truth and Power”

Foucault is undoubtedly among our greatest thinkers of modern “power,” and virtually no contemporary academic discussion of the concept can proceed without positioning itself somehow (pro, con, or a little of both) in the orbits of Foucault’s analyses. One consequence of Foucault’s centrality has been the development of a kind of normative consensus concerning Foucault’s theory of power. The bare bones of the critical consensus might go something like this: Foucaultian power is not something held but something practiced; power is not imposed from “above” a system or socius, but consists of a series of relations within such a system or socius; there is no “outside” of power, no place untouched by power; conversely, there is no place of liberation or absolute freedom from power; in the end, power produces desires, formations, objects of knowledge, and discourses, rather than primarily repressing, controlling, or canalizing the powers already held by preexisting subjects, knowledges, or formations. Resistance, then, doesn’t primarily function “against” power, trying to eradicate it altogether; rather, resistance attempts to har-

Once More, with Intensity    ness power otherwise, in the production of different effects.1 This consensus is well grounded in Foucault’s texts and interviews, and it is well presented in the voluminous secondary literature. However, there’s at least one aspect of Foucault’s work on power that’s not so extensively commented upon: the question of power’s historical mutations or the genealogical account of emergent, “new” modes of power. In short, how do dominant modes of power change over time, mutate from one form to another? Or, more specifically, how does Foucault account for those diachronic changes outside the historicism of “progress,” or without the teleological metaphorics of historical “development”? How does the “disciplinary mode of power,” for example, emerge out of prior modes of “sovereign” and “social” power? In turn, how does contemporary “biopower” emerge out of the disciplinary regimes of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries? And if these developments or mutations are not “progressions,” then what exactly are they? If the mutations of power over time are not the teleological unfolding of power, then how are we to understand these changes? This account of change or mutation is where I’d like to position my entry into the orbit of Foucaultian power analysis, and in some sense it’s a necessary question for me, insofar as I’m orienting much of my engagement with Foucault in terms of his own historical shifts from “archaeological” analyses to “genealogical” ones, to the late “ethical” work. Trying to understand Foucault’s general account of change or mutation will, with any luck at all, allow us to revisit his own specific shift of emphasis, outside the subject-centered explanations that dominate the secondary literature. A quick tour of explanations for Foucault’s shifting vocabulary and conceptual apparatus would include: the eventual softening of Foucault’s early career antihumanism; his embrace of or retreat from the political; Foucault’s changing personal tastes and academic alliances; the conceptual Bildungsroman of (archaeology’s) failure and (genealogical) affirmation; the influence of living in the United States; Foucault’s embrace of sex and drugs (though no one suggests that rock ’n’ roll was involved), or his attention (some say it was too much, some say not enough) to his developing career as an author.2 Whatever their value as provocations, one might note that these are all consciousnessor subject-centered explanations of historical change or mutation, about

   Once More, with Intensity which Foucault’s work—and not just “What Is an Author?”—should make us very suspicious indeed. In the 1970 foreword to the English edition of Les mots et les choses, he makes the point forcefully: “If there is one approach I do reject . . . it is that (one might call it, broadly speaking, the phenomenological approach) which gives absolute priority to the observing subject, which attributes a constituent role to an act, which places its own point of view at the origin of all historicity—which, in short, leads to a transcendental consciousness.”3 So either Foucault was simply inconsistent, remaining somehow unaware of the potential recoil of his theories onto his own practice, or there has to be a way within his work to account for the archaeology-genealogy-ethics shift of emphasis, outside subject- or consciousness-centered models of change. In short, if we are to tackle the question of mutations in modes of power and practice since Foucault’s death, we should probably begin, in classic Foucaultian form, by backtracking and trying to follow out the theory and practice of such changes in Foucault’s work. In performing such a backtracking or rereading movement, one quickly discovers that there’s really only one explanation that’s completely out of bounds for Foucault throughout the body of this work, and not surprisingly it’s the very subject-centered approach that still dominates the secondary work on Foucault.

The Body, Again In addition to functioning as our greatest theorist of modern power, it’s likewise axiomatic that Foucault is a key figure in what might be called “body studies,” the recent resurgence of interest in theories of embodiment. Although this is, after all, the guy who coined the phrase that launched a thousand articles (“docile bodies”), there remains a certain difficulty or ambiguity surrounding “the body” in Foucault’s work. Take, for example, Discipline and Punish (D&P), the book that shows us how modernity discovered the body (rather than the ideological mind) as the primary hinge for the deployment of power. As Foucault famously writes, “The classical age discovered the body as object and target of power,”4 thereby inverting our traditional understanding of the relation

Once More, with Intensity    between body and mind: “The soul is the prison of the body” (30) rather than vice versa. One could however just as easily point out that the whole thrust of D&P, in its arguments and in the performative flow of actually reading it, is that power has not focused directly on the individual body for the past several hundred years. It is, recall, early modern or “sovereign” power that took its object as the physical surface of the offender’s body and its mode of intervention as direct marking of the flesh. Indeed, one of the many affective points driven home by the opening pages of D&P (Foucault’s painstakingly rendered tale of Damiens’s execution) is that power no longer functions primarily by brutalizing and maiming the literal surface of individual bodies; nevertheless, the rest of the book will show us how power in the West still functions quite effectively. In fact, for Foucault power functions much more efficiently today than in the sovereign mode. The central question that organizes D&P, then, is not so much one that directly addresses “the body,” but might be profitably understood as a slightly different query, posed in the book’s opening pages: “If penality in its most severe forms no longer addresses itself to the body, on what does it lay hold?” (16). The answer, in short, is provided further on: “Punishment . . . will be an art of effects” (93), which is to thematize power not solely as sovereign revenge against each subjective act of resistance, but rather to amplify power’s effects within a wider economic field of calculation—the development, canalizing, and harnessing of social and individual capacities on a much more cost-effective mass scale. The whole of D&P traces power’s migration away from the individual body, the sovereign maiming of Damiens’s flesh. Instead, the lion’s share of the book concerns itself with tracing the slow historical transformation from the sovereign power of the seventeenth century to the panopticism of the nineteenth, the mutations necessary in “making it possible to substitute for force or other violent constraints the gentle efficiency of total surveillance” (249). D&P charts power’s increasing movement away from the literal, individual body as the primary site of its intervention—away from power’s exercise on the individual body and toward power’s emergent historical investment in something other than (or in addition to) the surface of the body itself.

   Once More, with Intensity Foucault’s D&P traces a genealogical path of modern power’s mutations that might be represented on a historical timeline roughly like this: Century of Emergence: 17th 17th–18th 18th–19th Mode of Power: Sovereign Social Discipline Primary Actor: King Jurist Expert Primary Target: Flesh Signs Capacities Primary Hinge: Bodies Souls Training (Actions) Primary Practice: Ceremony Representation Exercise Most Intense Form: Torture Reform Panopticism Desired Outcome: Obedience Community Docility D&P Chapter: Scaffold Gentle Way Docile Bodies

The first thing to emphasize here is that this kind of chart or graph is inevitably going to be misleading insofar as it suggests a kind of lockstep historical development, where modes of power die off as others are born. Foucault’s genealogy of power is not a Hegelian refinement of the concept nor a deus ex machina of absolute arrival for the new, but a tracing of the slow mutation of power and its “dominant” modes. To say that a particular mode is dominant at any given historical juncture is not, then, to say that no other modes exist or are in usage. The sovereign mode of power doesn’t simply disappear or become extinct by the nineteenth century; it exists in a lateral or parallel relation with the other modes, no longer in the dominant position from which its preferred practices could organize, canalize, and distribute the effects of the other modes of power. So, for example, Foucault writes that “in the late 18th century, one is confronted by three ways of organizing the power to punish” (D&P 130), or what Foucault also calls more simply, “three technologies of power” (131): “The sovereign and his force, the social body, and the administrative apparatus” (131). Each of these three modes utilizes a preferred practice of implementation (the sovereign’s “ceremony,” social “representation,” and the disciplinary “exercise” [131]), and each mode has a different primary target or effective linchpin: “the tortured body, the soul with its manipulated representations, the body subjected to training” (131). Although these modes exist alongside each other in the late eighteenth

Once More, with Intensity    century and beyond, one might say (importing some diagnostic terminology from Raymond Williams) that at any historical juncture, certain modes and practices of power are emergent, others dominant, still others residual.5 In the late eighteenth century, all three “modern” modes were still in evidence, though the sovereign power of the king functioned largely as a residual form, social power was still dominant, with discipline as the emergent form that would slowly become dominant throughout the nineteenth century. The questions that will interest me in this chapter are ones that take place in the interstices of the consensus concerning Foucault and power, in the space of emergence between sovereign, social, and disciplinary power. How are we to thematize the historical changes in the dominant mode of power? What are the differing effects of the differing modes? How does one form of power intensify, mutate, or bleed into the others? Likewise, outside arguments about historical accuracy (Is this really the way it was?), what is the contemporary efficacy or currency of Foucault’s genealogy of power? If genealogy’s historical mission is not primarily to reconstruct a kind of historical objectivity (the historian’s “getting it right”) nor to offer us a method for producing ever-more commentary (both practices that Foucault abhors), then why is genealogy important, or what use is it to us in the present? In short, what difference does genealogy make? These questions—hopefully very recognizable ones, but posed slightly askew—will animate my (re)consideration of that most well-trod of theoretical topics, “Foucault on power.”

Modern Power, Acts I–III In discussing and clarifying the initial mutation of modern power on our makeshift chart, from the sovereign to social modes, Foucault notes that “the right to punish has been shifted from the vengeance of the sovereign to the defense of society” (D&P 90). In short, Foucault’s map of the early modern terrain shows the way from sovereign to social power running through the nascent development of capitalism, and the territorialization of rights discourse specifically onto property rights (which are nothing other than rights against the sovereign) (see 86–88).

   Once More, with Intensity The emergence of a mode of power wherein “society must be defended” (rather than a mode under which the sovereign’s privilege must always be defended) entails, on Foucault’s account, not so much a repression or negation of the king’s monopoly on criminalizing behavior, but the positive production, proliferation, and distribution of a whole series of brand new illegalities. Under a sovereign regime, the king “owns” everything, so the king is in fact the only person who can legitimately be “harmed” by crime.6 “Democratizing” ownership through the promulgation of social rights, by contrast, exponentially increases the number of potential plaintiffs and defendants, and thereby increases the saturation of “criminality” into the very fabric of society. In other words, as “society” becomes the emergent entity harmed by crime, the early modern criminal’s role and function changes as well: he or she is not merely the barbaric other to be disposed of (or not) by the sovereign’s absolute privilege. Rather, as the specter that consistently haunts rights discourse from within the socius, the criminal must somehow be brought back into the social fold. Here the confrontation is among competing social forces, rather than the sovereign, binary confrontation of absolute power with a tabula rasa body. On Foucault’s account, this first mutation in modern power is a shift from the raw, centralized power of the king to the representation and distribution of power more widely throughout the socius: from the “ceremony” of torture to the “representation” of an individual soul endowed, to widely varying degrees, with rights and responsibilities; from revenge to reform; from the king’s edict to the interpretation of the jurists; from “the spectacle of the scaffold” to “the gentle way in punishment.” The second major shift on our Foucaultian power chart—from the social “gentle way” to the advent of “discipline”—involves a similar set of maneuvers: power becoming less centralized, thereby more effective. However, while the movement from sovereign power to social power is a radical shift or even inversion of power’s techniques and targets (from the raw power of bodily torture to more subtle coercions), the mutation from social power to discipline is less a startling change of direction than it is a kind of intensification of social power’s dictates: one might thematize it as the movement from representation to training, from targeting the soul to targeting the gesture, from social power’s concern with rights

Once More, with Intensity    (who you can be) to the disciplinary targeting of actions (what you can do). As Foucault discusses the movement from social power to discipline, among the first mutations was the object of control: it was not or was no longer the signifying elements of behavior or the language of the body, but the economy, the efficiency of movements, their internal organization; constraint bears upon the forces rather than upon the signs; the only truly important ceremony is that of exercise. Lastly, there is the modality: it implies an uninterrupted, constant coercion, supervising the processes of the activity rather than its result and it is exercised according to a codification that partitions as closely as possible time, space, movement. (D&P 137)

Foucault famously gives the name “discipline” to this extension and refinement of power in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a power that increasingly targets actions rather than bodies and souls (or, more precisely, discipline works on individuals precisely through the more efficient means of targeting their potential actions, their capacities: literally what they can—and can’t—do).7 Foucault’s story of historical mutation shows that power increases its hold on the body and the body politic precisely—if a bit paradoxically—by becoming less obvious, more ubiquitous, and therefore more effective. On D&P’s account of these three modes of modern power (sovereign power, social power, discipline—seventeenth to nineteenth century), power shifts its primary target from the actual surface of an individual body, to utilizing representations that can encompass many bodies (discourses of rights, souls), to promulgating a highly virtual form of training that takes actions as its target. As power mutates, its primary pivot point becomes increasingly “lighter,” more virtual, and its effects become more efficient as power shifts its privileged point of application—from the body, to the soul, to the action. As power increasingly targets not actual bodies themselves but “what they do” (D&P 18), power thereby gains an intensified hold “also on what they are, will be, may be” (18). In short, power’s mutation over time exists alongside the parallel emergence of power’s economic viability: producing the desired effects with fewer costs, less expenditure of time and effort; better results with less economic and political resistance. The gruesomely painful intensity

   Once More, with Intensity of Damiens’s torture and execution gives way to another sense of the word: intensity as the maximizing imperative of efficiency.

Power and/as Intensity: The Economics of Power For Foucault, this charting of emergent modes of power is hardly a story of progress or Enlightenment, but a story of what he calls the increasing “intensity” (intensité) of power: which is to say its increasing “lightness” and concomitant “economic” viability, in the broadest sense of the word “economic.” Power’s intensity most specifically names its increasing efficiency within a system, coupled with increasing saturation. As power becomes more intense, it becomes “more economic and more effective” (“plus economique et plus efficace”; D&P 207). In this sense, the genealogical shift from torturing the body to training it is hardly the eradication of the punitive gesture; rather, it works to extend and refine the efficiency of that gesture by taking the dramas of punitive power and resistance out of the relatively scarce and costly criminal realms and into new situations or “markets”—to everyday life in the factory, the home, the school, the army, the hospital. Punitive power mutates—its targets shift and its functioning becomes more widespread and more effective—in order “to make of the punishment and repression of illegalities a regular function, coextensive with society; not to punish less, but to punish better; to punish with an attenuated severity perhaps, but in order to punish with more universality and necessity; to insert the power to punish more deeply into the social body” (82). From the very direct, yet wildly inefficient and expensive, maiming of the individual body (sovereign power), to inclusion of bodies in a community of rights (social power), to training, developing, and focusing the body’s capacities (discipline), we see played out what Foucault shows us as the formulaic movement of power’s intensification: abstraction, lightening, extension, mobility, and increased efficiency. In Foucault’s words, power mutates or intensifies so that it may “increase its effects while diminishing its economic cost . . . and its political cost” (80–81). And as power intensifies, the potential regions of its application become less rigidly predefined rather than more so: if it is rigorously undecidable who or what is subject

Once More, with Intensity    to power, this offers greatly increased opportunities for the practices of power to saturate larger and larger sectors of the socius. If discipline creates a greater “hold over the body,” that hold is more “intense” precisely insofar as it functions “without recourse, in principle at least, to excess, force, or violence” (D&P 177). On Foucault’s account, power inverts and expands the functioning of “intensity,” turning the concept against its ordinary meaning of maximum bodily feeling and thereby abstracting, expanding, temporizing, and allowing the concept more access to more sites. If intensity generally means “especially great concentration or saturation,” the word itself expands along with Foucault’s analysis: power has become more maximal not merely in the direct, bodily sense (that feelings are said to be intense), but in the more descriptive or physics-related sense: intensity as maximum saturation or penetration within a given field (“the measure of effectiveness of a force field given by the force-per-unit test”). A piece of metal is held intensely by a strong magnet; a sodden sponge is intense with water; or, as Foucault writes, disciplinary exercises are “intensified, multiplied forms of training” (179). Although the concept “intensity” is often associated with the work of Gilles Deleuze, it plays a crucial—and interestingly mutative—role in Foucault.8 In the early pages of D&P, for example, “intensity” carries the usual meaning, an overflowing of bodily feeling or a heightened state of physical awareness, in short, pain. As Foucault writes of the condemned person in the “Spectacle of the Scaffold” chapter, “Every death agony expresses a certain truth: but, when it takes place on the scaffold, it does so with more intensity, in that it is hastened by pain” (45–46). However, when Foucault’s genealogy shifts its focus as power moves “beyond” the physical body, so too does his usage of the word or concept of “intensity.” For example, among the innovations of “societal” power is what Foucault calls “The Rule of Lateral Effects,” which holds the following: “The penalty must have its most intense effects [ses effets les plus intenses] on those who have not committed the crime; to carry this argument to its limit, if one could be sure that the criminal could not repeat the crime, it would be enough to make others believe he had been punished. There is a centrifugal intensification of effects [intensification centrifuge des effets], which leads to the paradox that in the calculation of penalties

   Once More, with Intensity the least important element is still the criminal” (95; my emphasis). In Foucault’s economics of power, this “centrifugal intensification of effects” is the name for the literal movement “away” from power’s enactment on the actual surface of the criminal’s body, toward the more efficient and socially useful targeting of what the body can, will, or is likely to do— from sovereign power’s obsessive emphasis on an individual offender to be punished, to the somewhat cooler political concern with the efficiency of crime and punishment’s effects on others. As D&P’s analysis progresses, the process of “intensification” comes to refer less to a centripetal force acting on an individual body (“intense pain”), and more to name a “lateral” or “centrifugal” smearing or saturation of effects over a wide field (intensity as a state that strives to be complete and exhaustive, as seamless as possible—as in “intensive care”). As Foucault writes about panopticism’s modality of discipline, “The panoptic schema makes any apparatus of power more intense: it assures economy (in material, in personnel, in time); it assures its efficacy by its preventative character, its continuous functioning and its automatic mechanisms. . . . Without any physical instrument other than architecture and geometry, it acts directly on individuals” (206; my emphasis). By the end of D&P, power’s intensity (from the Latin intensus, stretched tight) is the name not so much for a bodily experience, but for a saturated field: just as everything in the desert is bathed in sunlight’s intensity, so everything in the factory is the product of an intensified form of discipline. Another way to thematize “intensity” within differing regimes of Foucaultian power might be to ask after the proper places or sites of power within the various historical modalities. In a sovereign model, for example, king and the court are the privileged—very nearly exclusive—sites of power’s intense concentration, so the direct confrontation of everyday life with power is relatively scarce (and likely deadly, should it happen that you become of interest to the king). Sovereign power’s most intense point of application is a rare one. In a disciplinary regime, however, the confrontation between everyday life and the dominant mode of power is increasingly less scarce, to the point where discipline, as a mode of power, is nearly ubiquitous: you wake up to the disciplinary family, consume a breakfast purchased from the efficiency-saturated shelves of the grocery store, and ride the state apparatus—the highway, bus, or train—to school

Once More, with Intensity    or your job, which in turn is also sodden with the imperatives of discipline: appointments, meetings, tasks, breaks, lunch. Then, on nights and weekends, you’re turned over to the culture industry—where, as Theodor Adorno might point out, the workday imperatives of total quality management are not lightened but rather intensified, as consumers turn these workday strategies on themselves in their so-called leisure time (with copious help from the movies, TV, and advertising): “The defiant reserve or elegant appearance of the individual on show is mass-produced like Yale locks,” Adorno reminds us.9 In short, the mode of disciplinary power is much more “intense” precisely because of its ubiquity—which isn’t necessarily to say that discipline hurts more or that each individual feels its oppressive presence more sharply. Quite the opposite: power’s increasing intensity suggests a kind of abstraction from the wounded body, from the stultifying and oppressive presence of physical compulsion. One might say that as power becomes more virtual, it also becomes more intense. If there were a general Foucaultian “formula” for power’s intensification, it might look something like this recipe, from D&P: “Shift the object and change the scale. Define new tactics in order to reach a target that is now more subtle but also more widely spread in the social body. Find new techniques for adjusting punishment to the target and for adapting its effects. Lay down new principles for regularizing, refining, universalizing the art of punishing. Homogenize its application. Reduce its economic and political cost by increasing its effectiveness and by multiplying its circuits” (89; translation slightly modified). On Foucault’s account, then, punitive power never could have mutated into other sectors of the socius had it become stalled in the sovereign mode, which obtains its discontinuous effects only at an exorbitant “cost,” both economically and politically. Direct, violent manipulation of each individual resistant body is both expensive and not terribly efficient—a point that Foucault makes quite memorably through D&P’s opening narration of the regicide Damiens’s horrible torture and execution, and its immediate juxtaposition with the calmer and more effective intensities of the neomonastic rulebook. Each mode, perhaps, seeks a similar result, though the result is obtained at very different costs by widely different modalities of power’s intensity. The “gentle way in punishment” first discovers the efficiency of

   Once More, with Intensity this virtual character of punishment, and power’s relation to intensity as a saturated field (rather than a concentrated centripetal effect on the surface of an individual body): power is not merely concerned with violently controlling individual bodies, one by one, but with multiplying the confrontations of virtual, centrifugal forces with other forces. As Foucault writes, one of “social” power’s primary mechanisms for mutation is to “reverse the relation of intensities”: “against a bad passion, a good habit; against a force, another force. . . . set the force that drove the criminal to the crime against itself ” (D&P 106). In short, in its emergence out of the sovereign mode, power discovers its object not as the individual body, but as the virtual field of that body’s capacities or forces. Power in fact begins to reconfigure what a body is—not an inert tabula rasa to be written on, but a series of “forces” or capacities, some of which power helps to develop in specific areas of practice and application, some of which it functions to stifle. And the most effective means of such punitive intervention is not sovereign force against flesh, but some more “intense” modality of force against force: “set the force that drove the criminal to the crime against itself.” Allow some forces easier canals to develop and quash others by separating them from what they can do. As a mode emergent from societal power, then, discipline names the continued intensification of power’s capacities: discipline intensifies the social mode of power by inverting, extending, folding back, saturating, and changing targets. Consider, for example, the disciplinary investment in the question of time: discipline’s primary target within temporal management is not simply negative, targeting the idleness of bodies as a principle to be harshly represented or defeated. As far as discipline is concerned, efficiency is not, in other words, simply a question of working on the body or the will of the individual (physical prodding or psychological means of making people feel guilty for slacking off ), but of positively developing and harvesting capacities, ever-more-minute amounts or levels of time. Rather than working solely in a negative register through representational signs (“Don’t do this!”), discipline additionally “arranges a positive economy; it poses the principle of a theoretically ever-growing use of time: exhaustion rather than use; it is a question of extracting, from time, ever more available moments and, from each moment, ever more useful forces. This means that one must seek to intensify the use

Once More, with Intensity    of the slightest moment . . . maximum speed and maximum efficiency” (D&P 154; my emphasis). This positive harvesting of time’s virtual intensity precisely gives power a longer and more effective reach: “There is not a single moment of life from which one cannot extract forces, providing one knows how to differentiate it and combine it with others” (165). Discipline, one might say, gives birth to the very drama of “everyday life,” where every moment is important, or at least potentially so. In the end, Foucault’s two uses of the word “intensity”—to signal individual bodily pain and systematic saturation—correspond roughly to what Foucault calls the “two images of discipline” (D&P 209): first, there are the “negative functions: arresting evil, breaking communications, suspending time. At the other extreme, with panopticism, is the discipline-mechanism: a functional mechanism that must improve the exercise of power by making it lighter, more rapid, more effective” (209). For Foucault, the intensities of raw force, the “negative functions” of power, never simply disappear from later power regimes—the twentyfirst-century upswing in the techniques of torture should be evidence enough of that. These functions of power should be aggressively resisted whenever and wherever they are found; hence, for example, Foucault’s continued engagement with and support of the prisoners’ movement in France. However, at the end of the theoretical day, it is not those “negative” functions of power that Foucault is particularly interested in studying. This is the case not, I would argue, because he thinks that brute force or sovereign power has been eradicated, or that directly contesting raw deployments of power is ineffectual, but because the negative functions of sovereign power are relatively easy to spot, and well-developed and effective techniques have been invented to fight against that more brutal form of power (mass demonstration, rioting, direct intervention, civil disobedience, legal action, media campaigns). In sum, and I think this is one of the hardest things to get a hold of in Foucault’s analysis, the power relation in Foucault does not name a “negative” relation of domination between concrete objects, institutions, or persons, but a “positive” relation among virtual forces. Even if the effects of a given power relation are unequivocally negative (yielding death, misery, destruction, or domination), the relation itself takes place between and among positive forces or capacities. To iterate a piece of the nor-

   Once More, with Intensity mative consensus surrounding Foucaultian power, it is not hoarded or held by a few institutions, groups, or individual people. This is the case precisely because power parses out those “antagonists,” rather than vice versa: power’s primary confrontation is “force against force” (D&P 26). In other words, power regulates relations, not objects, precisely because if power can successfully regulate the relations, it gets the objects for free— there are no “natural” or essential objects or persons that somehow exist “before” power relations. This, perhaps, is the most succinct example of the “profound Nietzscheanism” that Deleuze reads in Foucault’s work: “The doer is merely a fiction added to the deed, the deed is all.”10 In every modern mode after the sovereign one, power names a capacity that works on other capacities, an act that acts on actions or potential actions rather than primarily on bodies or other nouns.

Intensity, History, Practice So, what is the upshot of this understanding of power’s increasing “intensity” for our initial question concerning the historical mutations in Foucault’s account of modern modes of power? In short, I’d argue that the logic of intensification is Foucault’s primary mechanism for explaining historical change: the emergence of new modes of power happens through the lightening, saturation, becoming-more-efficient, and transversal linkage of existing practices. As Foucault writes about the emergence of the disciplinary mode, for example: “The ‘invention’ of this new political anatomy must not be seen as a sudden discovery. It is rather a multiplicity of often minor processes, of different origin and scattered location, which overlap, repeat, or imitate one another, support one another, distinguish themselves from one another according to their domain of application, converge and gradually produce the blueprint of a general method” (D&P 138). On Foucault’s account, the saturation of a set of practices within a field—the slow expansion of a given practice into a “dominant” mode—is the primary mechanism through which historical change happens. Change, then, is a matter of slow mutations, accretions, and accumulations of social practice, rather than either the dramatic unfolding of a teleological story or a deus-ex-machina-style ab-

Once More, with Intensity    solute arrival of the new. One might say that intensity is the general formula for tracing and accounting for modern power’s development; or, in somewhat more Deleuzean parlance, one might say that “Intensify!” is power’s primary mutative axiom. As Foucault sums up the imperatives of nonsovereign power modalities: First, to obtain the exercise of power at the lowest possible cost (economically, by the low expenditure it involves; politically, by its discretion, its low exteriorization, its relative invisibility, the little resistance it arouses); secondly, to bring the effects of this power into their maximum intensity and to extend them as far as possible, without either failure or interval; thirdly, to link this “economic” growth of power with the output of the apparatuses (educational, military, industrial, or medical) within which it is exercised; in short, to increase the docility and the utility of all the elements of the system. (D&P 218)

As Foucaultian power intensifies, it gains what we might call greater “market share” in a given socius, successfully linking itself to, and thereby transforming, myriad other practices and finally functioning to remake the very objects to which it had initially attached itself. Foucault’s “intense” account of historical change, then, has less in common with social-constructionist modes of historicism or with literary-philosophical narratives of development—change growing from an origin or working toward an end—than it does with the tracking of forces that one observes in phenomena like thresholds, phase transitions, or socalled tipping points: tracing saturation levels to find the point where the object or subject mutates into another form. At 200 degrees Fahrenheit, it’s simply hot water; intensified to 212 degrees, it’s boiling water.11 Stocktrading programs work on similar truisms about the intensity of change in markets—if selling reaches a certain tipping point, programs move to halt trading at that threshold to avoid a market panic or crash. Or consider the economist’s “80/20” rule, which suggests that 80 percent of the activity in most markets is driven by 20 percent of the players therein. So, for example, 80 percent of all beer is consumed by 20 percent of beer drinkers; or think of the academic job market, where it’s pretty clear that 80 percent (or more) of those hired into all tenure-track jobs come from around 20 percent of the PhD-granting departments. Of course supply and demand still factors in those markets, but if one doesn’t account for

   Once More, with Intensity “80/20” questions of the intensity of supply and demand, he or she is in big marketing trouble.12 These disparate social and economic phenomena are hardly “essentialist”: the Fahrenheit scale of measurement is in no way “natural,” and nowhere in the nature of things will you learn the best time to dump your shares of amazon.com, but neither are these exactly “socially constructed” practices. Saying that history is a social construction, on Foucault’s account, runs the risk of making a given practice or phenomena seem too easy to change: social construction seems to suggest that people decided something and it became so, thereby returning the rights of history to the individual subject and his or her autonomous action. As Foucault suggests, the scholarly consensus surrounding social constructionism too often leads to “that tender, consoling certainty of being able to change, if not the world, if not life, at least their ‘meaning,’ simply with a fresh word that can come only from themselves.”13 If there is a kind of structuralist legacy in Foucault, one might locate it—despite Foucault’s objections—in this fundamental insight of Ferdinand de Saussure’s: surely language is a socially constructed phenomenon, but precisely because of that fact—because of the famously “arbitrary nature of the sign”—languages and other forms of cultural practice are highly resistant to change. There are no obvious knock-down arguments against a given phenomenon in an “arbitrary” (socially constructed) system, so such systems remain essentially conservative in and of their practices: a “fresh word” can’t change the world. Change has to happen incrementally, from within those essentially conservationist practices. And Foucault’s truisms concerning power bear this out. Outside the historically anachronistic sovereign mode, power can’t simply enforce a consensus from above: a given practice or idea has to have a hook, a lure, an enticement to work its way into the everyday practices of the subject or subjects involved. To use only the most banal example, annoying as they may be, cell phones weren’t simply forced on us by corporations or a government conspiracy. Through a slow mutation in modes of dominant practice, cell phones and text messaging have become a saturated presence within a number of everyday networks of practice throughout the globe: businesses of all kinds, from manufacturing through healthcare to finance capital; the nuclear family; even (especially) informal networks of

Once More, with Intensity    friendship. If you have a cell phone, then gone are the days when you’re out of town or out of reach. Historical change thematized under the rubric of intensity is spurred, developed, or explained not from outside—above or below—a given field of practice; rather, such changes emerge from the mutation of forces and practices within that very field. For example, a simple economic practice like selling is basic and necessary within any well-ordered securities market. At a certain level or past a certain point of selling intensity, however, a well-ordered market will mutate into free-fall, and then crash. A market in free-fall is, by definition, not a well-ordered market—one can tell the difference between them quite easily. At the same time, the two markets are not different in kind, or their difference isn’t given by some exterior relation or extrinsic point of reference: the difference between the two can only be measured or named by tracking the intensity levels of the market’s most basic practices, buying and selling. There are of course myriad other examples that illustrate this logic of change understood as the product of intensity levels within a given field of practice: the tipping point at which a chronic health problem becomes a syndrome or diagnosable disease; the threshold relation between individual and crowd behavior in humans and animals; the points at which various chemical compounds change states; when order emerges out of chaos, a group of words becomes a poem, or when a verbal dispute becomes a physical confrontation. One could refigure this logic of intensity in terms of the more familiar Foucaultian vocabulary of the “emergence” of “singularity” or “the event,” insofar as the building of a practice’s specific intensity is the prerequisite for the historical emergence of the event in his work. Foucault makes a helpful distinction between examining emergences as the “product” of social forces and examining those emergences as “effects” of such forces; in fact, this distinction is sutured into the very heart of his definition of the genealogical project. In 1978’s “What Is Critique?” he writes of “genealogy, that is, something that attempts to restore the conditions for the appearance of a singularity born out of multiple determining elements of which it is not the product, but rather the effect.”14 The singularity of any “new” emergence, in other words, is necessarily born of the combination of existing social forces, but to say that any given emer-

   Once More, with Intensity gence is the “product” of those forces risks a kind of plug-in-grind-out social determinism, where the outcomes of discontinuous social practices would be anything but “singular.” As Foucault insists, “We have to establish a network which accounts for this singularity as an effect”—which is to say, we need to account for historical emergence or mutation as a hazardous, oftentimes unanticipated outcome (an “effect”), rather than a seamlessly manufactured and predictable process (a “product”).15 In short, with a large enough saturation, intensification, or “change of scale” within a given field of practice, one also sees the emergence of “a new type of control” (D&P 142). For example, Foucault takes up the minuteness of eighteenth-century attention to detail: “The classical age did not initiate it; rather, it accelerated it, changed its scale, gave it precise instruments” (139). The classical age of disciplinary humanism’s birth didn’t invent the scrupulous policing of detail; rather, it intensified that existing practice to an unprecedented degree: which is to say the new regime focused that old regime of practice, widened the scope of its application, and gave that emergent, intensified form of attention a series of updated methods and new objects (precisely by extending the procedures of earlier modes of practice, taking them to the limit of what they can do). So something like attention to the minuteness of detail doesn’t simply arrive one day and give birth to the disciplinary regime. Rather, something like a properly “disciplinary” apparatus is only recognizable in and through such an intensified attention to detail—at the point where such modes of attention saturate the traditional processes of transversal fields like economic production and scholarly work, as well as allowing those practices access to previously unpoliced markets like healthcare, family relations, sexuality, personal hygiene, and matters of household commerce. As Foucault writes about such intensifying practices, “What was an islet, a privileged place, a circumstantial measure, or a singular model, became a general formula” (209). At such thresholds, limits, tipping points, events of emergence, or phase transitions, a given practice or phenomenon is no longer exactly the thing it was before. Homosexuality was invented in 1870, Foucault provocatively insists in History of Sexuality, volume 1. This of course doesn’t mean that same-gender sexual unions were unknown before that time. Rather, Foucault’s provocation suggests something about singular-

Once More, with Intensity    ity, intensity, and emergence: through a convergence of scientific, medical, and social practices around 1870, the subject position we understand as the modern “homosexual” (a type of interior subjectivity with a particular etiology and disposition) emerged. With a mutation of dominant practices comes a different understanding of the ostensible object itself— which is to say that change “happens” through the slow intensification of existing practices, an intensification that redefines and reconfigures both the field of practice and the objects within that field. An event or emergence (the “homosexual”) is the effect of those slow transformations. Another concrete example? On the Foucaultian itinerary traversed above, the modern body has been remade through the slow intensification of power’s practices, from an abject tabula rasa (essentially a thing to be written over by sovereign power) into a very lively virtual field of capacities. The body has become no more or less “subject to” the imperatives of power in that long, transformative process; it’s just that the primary imperatives or axioms of power have changed exponentially over time. To revisit a theme we touched on above, Foucault’s account shows that dominant modes of power long ago abandoned the direct marking and manipulation of the physical body as their primary modes of implementation. Practice “itself ” is, on Foucault’s account, the virtual motor and mode of historical change. A body is nothing other than what it can do. This is the case not because of an inherent drive for liberty or agency in subjects, but because modern power has remade the body itself into a machine of increasing capacity, coupled with increasing docility (“discipline” in fact is nothing other than the emergence or discovery of a link between increasing capacity and increasing docility or constraint).16 If discipline “discovers” the body as power’s primary pivot or relay, disciplinary power also “made” that body: “The body becomes a useful force only if it is both a productive body and a subjected body” (26). In the parlance of D&P, “panopticism” names the most intense form of disciplinary power—its lightest, most saturated, effective, and mobile mode. The panopticon is the “dream building” of disciplinary power, not because it somehow becomes a metaphor, representation, or referent for where we all live, but because it is the place of discipline’s greatest intensity or saturation: panopticism names “an unceasing discipline” (236), the mode of power through or in relation to which all other

   Once More, with Intensity techniques of power must orient themselves. The disciplinary mode can be said to be “dominant” at this historical juncture “not because the disciplinary modality of power has replaced all the others; but because it has infiltrated all the others” (216)—undermining some practices of sovereign and social power, strengthening and mutating others by forging links that weren’t previously available. Just as, historically speaking, discipline is a modality of power born from the intensification of social and sovereign practices, panopticism is the most intense form of disciplinary practice. As the most saturated relay point for disciplinary power, the mode of panopticism “carries to their greatest intensity all the procedures to be found in the other disciplinary mechanisms” (236; my emphasis). Of course, the highly mobile and effective relays of practice that comprise the panopticon do not simply arrive out of the historical blue; rather, the panoptic mode was brought about through the slow intensification of hundreds of years of disparate practices whose emergences are painstakingly charted out in D&P. As Foucault reminds us in the closing pages of D&P, “The prison does not at all represent the unleashing of a different kind of power, but simply an additional degree in the intensity of a mechanism that has continued to operate since the earliest forms of legal punishment” (302; my emphasis). In D&P, then, Foucault names nineteenth-century panopticism as the most intense form of discipline, its most highly effective, saturated, and differentiated form—disciplinary power taken to the limit of what it can do. At the panoptic limit of disciplinary power, however, Foucault’s continued mapping of power’s intensification—in the closing pages of D&P, into The History of Sexuality and beyond—suggests that the dominant mode of power in the mid- to late nineteenth century likewise underwent a subtle transformation: discipline’s mutation into what Foucault calls “biopower.” Which brings us back to our chart, now in need of some updating:

Once More, with Intensity    Century of Emergence: 17th 17th–18th 18th–19th 19th–Present Mode of Power: Sovereign Social Discipline Biopower Primary Actor: King Jurist Expert Individual Primary Target: Flesh Signs Capacities Lives Primary Hinge: Bodies Souls Training Governmentality Primary Practice: Ceremony Representation Exercise Norm Most Intense Form: Torture Reform Panopticism Sexuality Desired Outcome: Obedience Community Docility Autocontrol

From Discipline to Biopower In his 1975–76 lectures at the Collège de France (delivered during the brief interval between the publication of D&P and The History of Sexuality, volume 1), Foucault explains that “biopower” constitutes a new technology of power, but this time it is not disciplinary. This technology of power does not exclude the former, does not exclude disciplinary technology, but it does dovetail into it, integrate it, modify it to some extent, and above all, use it by sort of infiltrating it, embedding itself in existing disciplinary techniques. This new technique does not simply do away with the disciplinary technique, because it exists on another level, on a different scale, and because it has a different bearing area, and makes use of very different instruments. Unlike discipline, which is addressed to bodies, the new nondisciplinary power is applied not to man-as-body but to the living man, to man-as-living-being.17

Unlike Foucaultian “discipline,” whose work on bodies is primarily realized through institutional training and the exercise, “biopower” is an even more intense and saturated form of power that works throughout entire populations and takes on its target, “life,” quite directly (as opposed to discipline’s necessarily mediated, institutional character). To use a Foucaultian economic figure, the sovereign power of the king was a very inefficient “wholesale” mode of power’s distribution to the socius (early modern spectacles of execution and torture were expensive and not particularly effective in keeping royal order). Discipline,

   Once More, with Intensity by contrast, discovered and deployed a much more economical and effective “retail” power over individual bodies at particular, transversally linked sites of training (the family, the school, the clinic, the factory, the army). Biopower, then, goes one step beyond discipline in the intensification of power, working on individuals “really and directly” (“réellement et directement”; not words that Foucault throws around lightly).18 For Foucault, biopower is the ascendant type of power at work in modern societies—a very efficient mode of power that infuses each individual at a nearly ubiquitous number of actual and virtual sites, rather than working primarily on specific bodies at particular sites of training (hospital, school, army, factory, store). It’s a form of power “centered not upon the body,” Foucault writes, “but upon life.”19 Another way of putting this might be that biopower forges an enabling link between the seemingly “universal” categories of population or demography and the “individual” idiosyncrasies of everyday life. And the proper name for that link is the “norm.” In the intensification that morphs discipline into biopower, then, not only the form of power but the target of power becomes more murky and more ubiquitous—biopower “is directed not at man-as-body but at man-as-species.”20 Take as a concrete example sexuality, Foucault’s primary example of biopower: not everyone has a shared institutional or disciplinary identity (soldier, mother, or student), but everyone does have something like a “sexuality.” In Foucault’s words, such a pervasive biopower has “acted by multiplication of singular sexualities. It did not set boundaries for sexuality; it extended the various forms of sexuality, pursuing them according to lines of indefinite penetration. It did not exclude sexuality, but included it in the body as a mode of specification of individuals” (HS 1:47). This “specification of individuals”—from out of a “massifying” biopolitical investment in demographics—becomes the innovation biopower provides over panoptic discipline. Biopower sutures the seeming gap between the “wholesale” and “retail” functioning of disciplinary power through its intensification and redeployment of the disciplinary “norm.” In other words, while biopower emerges on the other side of a certain phase transition or tipping point of discipline, biopower is nevertheless born from the intensification of a particular strand of panoptic disciplinary power, the normative medical

Once More, with Intensity    or rehabilitative gaze that seeks to “understand” the causes of crime and criminality. Under a regime of biopower, the political task becomes less training people to be docile, and more a matter of producing and classifying ever-more kinds of subjectivities. So far as biopower is concerned, the functioning of power becomes less invested in regulating behavior through panoptic, institutionally based training exercises, and more invested in directly targeting life and lifestyles—inside and outside the factory, the army, or the school, those recognizable sites of disciplinary power. For the mutation from discipline to biopower, the linchpin figure remains an “abnormal” subject, but the basis on which that abnormality is diagnosed or discovered changes radically. In short, punitive discourse comes to pivot on the (biopolitical) delinquent subject rather than the (disciplinary) criminal act: “The delinquent is to be distinguished from the offender by the fact that it is not so much his act as his life that is relevant in characterizing him. . . . The legal punishment bears upon an act; the punitive technique on a life” (D&P 251–52). Again we see the mutation of dominant forms of power following out the general formula for power’s intensification: abstract, shift targets to ever-more virtual or mobile ones, expand the domain of power’s reach, invent “lighter” and more intense concepts and procedures. The criminal act remains within a fairly well-defined disciplinary realm, with a more-or-less binary system of “guilt”: in the end, you are or you aren’t guilty of a crime. Biopower, then, further multiplies the concepts and practices of potential guilt by its invention of a species or life form lurking behind the acts of criminality: the delinquent, the monster, the homosexual, the pervert. These are subjects who may or may not have done anything illegal or transgressive, but their lives are nonetheless outside the slippery slope of biopolitical normativity. As Foucault insists, biopolitical “delinquency must be specified in terms not so much of the law as of the norm” (253). In short, the disciplinary criminal is known through her transgressive deeds, while biopower’s delinquent is known through his abnormal personality. On Foucault’s account, this nineteenth-century emergence of subject-centered biopower becomes the gateway to the present, to the fetishization of subjectivities that characterizes today’s even more highly intensified biopolitical society: “At this point one enters the ‘criminologi-

   Once More, with Intensity cal’ labyrinth from which we have certainly not yet emerged” (D&P 252). As a concrete example of such biopolitical production of subjectivities, and its mutation from the strictly speaking disciplinary investment in subject production, one could note here that the “homosexual” is the paradigmatic “delinquent” in Foucault, the subject whose conduct is most obviously saturated and explained by his or her “life”: “The nineteenth-century homosexual became a personage, a past, a case history, and a childhood, in addition to being a type of life, a life form, and a morphology” (HS 1:43). In the intense morphing from discipline to biopower (from power targeting the act to targeting the life), the emergence of modern homosexuality is paradigmatic insofar as homosexuality in the nineteenth century becomes understood “less as a habitual sin than as a singular nature” (1:43). In short, homosexuality “was transposed from the practice of sodomy onto a kind of interior androgyny, a hermaphrodism of the soul” (1:43; my emphasis), from an occasional and discontinuous set of actions into the continuous manifestation of a personality defect. And so the dominant modes of power shift, extend, and abstract their targets and tactics: from force coming to bear on the subject primarily through a series of discontinuous (but linked) institutional training exercises (birth, school, work, death), to force coming to bear primarily on that subject more ubiquitously through her very life and lifestyle; from policing the act to policing the norm; from discipline to biopower.

Norms The discourse surrounding norms and normativity in Foucault got off to a very inauspicious start in the 1980s with the “Foucault-Habermas” debate. Unfortunately, much of that “debate” came to be understood around a wooden conception of norms and normativity: in short, the debate seems to have come down to whether one thinks norms and normativity are “good,” inclusionary imperatives that are necessary for any kind of human liberation (this came to be the parody of Habermas’s position); or whether one thinks norms are “bad,” exclusionary dictates that are largely responsible for the evils of the modern world (supposedly, Foucault). And one still sees the legacy of this debate played out today

Once More, with Intensity    in the (dominant) picture of Foucault as a “transgress-the-norms-andset-yourself-free” thinker. As Janet Afary and Kevin Anderson write in their book on Foucault and Islam, for example, “Throughout his life, Foucault’s concept of authenticity meant looking at situations where people lived dangerously and flirted with death, the site where creativity originated. In the tradition of Friedrich Nietzsche and Georges Bataille, Foucault had embraced the artist who pushed the limits of rationality, and he wrote with great passion in defense of irrationalities that broke new boundaries.”21 While I remain puzzled as to where this “concept of authenticity” is positively discussed in Foucault’s texts, and I remain incredulous that a careful reading of Foucault can sustain such an interpretation (this commitment to authenticity and/as transgression is the very content and outcome of “The Repressive Hypothesis,” no?), I take sentiments like this to grow directly out of the “Foucault shows us that norms are bad, or at least dangerous” school of thinking. If Foucault shows us that the norm (indeed, reason itself ) keeps us down, then transgression (and with it, irrationality) lifts us back up where we belong. Although this characterization is perhaps snarkier than it needs to be, I think it is uncontroversially true to say that many commentators and critics take Foucault to be a thinker who is “against” norms and normativity, precisely because of what his work reveals to us: the norm’s binary exclusivity (the construction of the normal excludes and abjects the abnormal), and normativity’s stifling inability to foster the emergence of the new (hence, the “creativity = transgression” equation). Although this may or may not be an accurate picture of normativity on the whole, it bears little resemblance to Foucault’s treatment of and investment in the issue of norms. For Foucault, normativity is a practice, an exercise (primarily filtered through “the exam”; see D&P 185) that is created by discipline and refined into a classifying lifestyle template by the rise of biopower. Which is to say that norms, to repeat the Foucaultian mantra, do not primarily “repress” anything, but rather introduce a heightened productivity into the disciplinary apparatus. For example, Foucault takes up a miniature version of his argument concerning “the author function” within the pages of D&P, pointing out that the rise of discipline, with its emphasis on the authority of the examination, was the end of a certain kind of tex-

   Once More, with Intensity tually based notion of right. With the advent of the examination’s practice of norming, “discipline could now abandon its textual character and take its references not so much from the tradition of author-authorities as from a domain of objects perpetually offered for examination” (186). Norms introduce a vast and intense new productivity into the regimes of truth, or what Foucault calls the ways of truth-telling: “The normal took over from the ancestral,” he writes: “from the epic to the novel, from the noble deed to the secret singularity, from long exiles to the search for childhood, from combats to phantasies” (193). Within such a continuous system of normative testing and classification, individuality or identity is measured “by ‘gaps’ rather than deeds. In a system of discipline, the child is more individualized than the adult, the patient more than the healthy man, the madman and the delinquent more than the normal the non-delinquent” (D&P 193). Although such highly policed disciplinary identities are of course consistently defined by their distance from the “norm,” such normative discourse doesn’t function primarily to “exclude” persons, topics, or acts; rather, norms do their work precisely by trying to include—which is to say, examine, test, and classify—as much raw data as possible. As Foucault writes, “Rather than the massive, binary division between one set of people and another [the power of excluding the leper or quarantining the plague victim], discipline called for multiple separations, individualizing distributions, an organization in depth of surveillance and control, an intensification and ramification of power” (198). At the end of the Foucaultian day, the danger and productivity of norms lies not in their proclivity to exclude people or practices, but rather in their intense and insatiable desire to include, to account for, virtually everything. This, for example, is the upshot of Foucault’s analysis of Victorian sexuality in The History of Sexuality, volume 1: “Victorian” sexuality is hardly prudish in its attempts to account for and categorize (rather than merely reject or refuse) a wide variety of sexual experiences. As Foucault writes of normative productivity, “The norm introduces, as a useful imperative and as a result of measurement, all the shading of individual difference” (D&P 184). In short, for Foucault normalization is not a binary operation of the kind familiar from deconstruction (normal/abnormal, included/excluded); rather, normativity names the functioning

Once More, with Intensity    of a supple, sliding scale of examination or classification whose effect is to produce and consistently maintain the necessity of reevaluating (always testing) the practices of “the norm” and thereby consistently maintaining and refashioning the links between, for example, “life” and sexuality. So, as Foucault argues, the nineteenth-century “growth of perversions is not a moralizing theme that obsessed the scrupulous minds of the Victorians. It is the real product of the encroachment of a type of power [biopower] on bodies and their pleasures” (HS 1:48). The thing to emphasize here, from Foucault’s perspective, is that this type of biopolitical of normalization (here, of “Victorian” sexuality) is not a kind of “gold-standard” operation, where there’s only one official way to be, and all others are (ideally, at least) to be outlawed by the introduction and enforcement of normative procedures. Rather, biopower intensifies forms of sexuality and forms of perversion, “a proliferation of sexualities through the extension of power”: “The implantation of perversions is an instrument-effect: it is through the isolation, intensification, and consolidation of peripheral sexualities that the relations of power to sex and pleasure branched out and multiplied, measured the body, and penetrated modes of conduct” (HS 1:48). It’s axiomatic, or so I’ve been arguing, that Foucaultian power never gains a greater hold on a body or on a socius than when it intensifies, multiplies, and extends its realms of application (rather than rarifying or calcifying them within a clumsy, centralized binary schema). Again, Foucaultian biopolitical norms do not primarily work to exclude the abnormal; rather, they work ceaselessly to account for it as such—to render it as normal or abnormal—and in addition to link that evaluation with the murky, amorphous category of life or lifestyle: “each individual receives as his status his own individuality” (D&P 192). From the banishment of the leper (sovereign power), to the quarantine of the diseased (social power), to panoptic surveillance (discipline), to the designation of the normal (biopower), Foucault’s genealogy of power’s increasing intensity charts a movement to ever-moresupple forms of control. Biopower’s norms are efficient and continuous calculations of alterity, not the binary banishment or exclusion of it. As Foucault writes, “For two centuries now, the discourse on sex has been multiplied rather than rarefied” (HS 1:53).

   Once More, with Intensity

The Ends of Power So, after all this, why or how is this rereading of Foucault’s history of power important—outside simply being “right” (or not) about power’s intense, mutative itinerary from sovereign power to biopower? What force does this genealogy deploy for us, in the present? One admittedly and deliberately indirect way at this question would be to consider Franz Kafka’s famous parable “Before the Law” in terms of the Foucaultian genealogy of power outlined in this chapter. Read through the lens of power and its genealogical intensification, Kafka’s text functions as a kind of instruction manual for demonstrating the costs of misdiagnosing various forms of power: the man from the country performs his relation to power on a sovereign model of law, which is to say he sees power as centralized, housed in a specific place or person. Hence, he wants an audience with power, finally to confront the hidden law, which, “he thinks, should surely be accessible at all times to everyone; but as he now takes a closer look at the doorkeeper in his fur coat, with his big sharp nose and long, thin, tartar beard, he decides that it is better to wait until he gets permission to enter.”22 The parable, however, shows us that biopower is already at work everywhere (inside and outside the law, as well as Kafka’s text). Unlike sovereign power, biopower is wholly immanent to the socius rather than organizing it from above, or from some central location that’s hidden behind everyday social structures (behind Kafka’s series of doors). As the doorkeeper reminds the man from the country in the text’s final lines, “No one else could ever be admitted here, since the gate was made only for you.”23 Mistaking biopower for sovereign power is a matter of misdiagnosing a back-and-forth relation of force as the one-way street of sovereignty. As Foucault reminds us, “It is in this sphere of force relations that we must try to analyze the mechanisms of power. In this way we will escape from the system of Law-and-Sovereign that has captivated political thought for such a long time. And if it is true that Machiavelli was among the few . . . who conceived the power of the Prince in terms of force relationships, perhaps we need to go one step further, do without the persona of the Prince, and decipher power mechanisms on the basis of a strategy that is immanent in force relationships” (HS 1:97). In ana-

Once More, with Intensity    lyzing the force relationships of power, Foucault will in the late 1970s and early 1980s increasingly deploy the concept of “governmentality,” which names this virtual mutation of power from law/sovereignty’s investment in directly controlling individual bodies, toward power’s increasing investment in regulating the relations among them: “Law and sovereignty were absolutely inseparable,” Foucault writes. “On the contrary, with government it is a question of not imposing law on men but of disposing things: that is, employing tactics rather than laws, and even of using laws themselves as tactics.”24 And with a mutation in power’s tactics or targets, the desired result or end of power relations then mutates as well: “We are at an important turning point here: whereas the end of sovereignty is internal to itself and possesses its own intrinsic instruments in the shape of its laws, the finality of government resides in the things it manages and in the pursuit of the perfection and intensification of the processes it directs.”25 With the rise of governmentality, in the historical linkage between discipline and biopower, Foucaultian “intensification” becomes both the useful tool and the desired end of power relations. As power’s targets and modes become more virtual, more disengaged from the actual surface of individual bodies, the strategies of regulating practice become more effective at governing those very bodies—precisely because of the Nietzschean truism that bodies or identities are nothing other than the after-effects of actions. Power increasingly comes to target the economic relations among bodies, rather than the bodies “themselves.” In the end, we might learn from a Foucaultian analysis of Kafka’s parable that we needn’t wait for admittance to the law through a central portal. Rather, the “entrances” to the “law” of biopower are actually and virtually everywhere, as ubiquitous as the form of power itself. Following that trail of power and its intensifications within the realms of everyday life, I turn in the following chapters to examining the complex sets of relations among biopower and postindustrial (postmodern or “late”) capitalism, the genealogy and consequences of biopower’s “commonness,” and the reformulated questions of “resistance” that are presented by these contemporary intensities of power.

chapter 3

Genealogies of Capitalism: Foucault, with Deleuze and Jameson The class struggle still exists; it exists more intensely. —Foucault, Foucault Live

These days, there’s nothing more common than money. It’s unevenly distributed to be sure, but nevertheless it’s everywhere in what my students call “today’s globalized world.” Yet sometimes it seems that the very ubiquity of money robs economics of any intrinsic interest as a topic for cultural discussion: there’s more and there’s less, what else is there to say? One can always track finance’s more outrageous economic or cultural effects—from Bill Gates’s excessive fortune to scenes of Elvis shooting out TVs in a drug-induced stupor. Or conversely we can follow the stunning oppression that the reign of money can produce: reminding ourselves of the crippling poverty that most people on the planet endure, or the more mundane reminder that many successful people in wealthy counties are still only a couple of paychecks or a serious illness away from the street. Likewise, nonhuman ecosystems increasingly find themselves sutured into the flows of international capital, for better or (usually) worse. As Deleuze remarks, it’s axiomatic that capitalism “is an extraordinary generator of both wealth and misery.”1 I think the main reason that most people—most humanities academics especially—don’t want to talk about economics is not because it’s a political hot potato, because it’s so controversial, but precisely because of this commonality or

Genealogies of Capitalism    banality. The very all-encompassing presence of money seems to solicit just as predictable modes of response: celebration, denunciation, or some hand-wringing combination of the two. The academic charge of “vulgar Marxism” was, of course, never animated by the sense that it was impolite or shocking to talk about the cultural force deployed by money (akin to the vulgarity of swearing in church); rather, talking insistently about capitalism when you talk about culture is vulgar in the sense that it’s uninteresting, common, something everyone already knows. One might say that capitalism’s relation to culture is, for many critics, not “vulgar” (in the sense of shocking or startling) enough. In North American humanities anyway, it’s precisely capitalism’s intense saturation that makes it hard to talk about in a critical or diagnostic idiom. Although there remains a great appeal in macro discussions of economics and culture (within globalization or world-systems studies, for example), there hasn’t been so much recent discussion of the economics of the everyday, the common—that is, aside from the “transgressive consumerism” work done in English-language cultural studies in the 1990s. Though we should remember that much of this work positioned itself in direct contrast to work on “economics” proper (to so-called vulgar or determinist Marxism), focusing instead on the ways that individual consumers somehow evaded the totalizing or normalizing imperatives of capitalism by shopping at outlet malls, reading comic books, or attending porn conventions. In other words, much of that work wasn’t as interested in everyday exchanges or the common per se,2 as it was in arguing that the seemingly common was itself “uncommon,” that everyday consumption practices were not ordinary at all, but secretly transgressive or excessive in some way.3 While the so-called New Times work in cultural studies added much to our understandings of the economic and its changing relations to culture, it also had the paradoxical effect of reinventing a certain “Old Times”: specifically, a neoexistentialist philosophy of subjective authenticity in the face of what looks like a totalizing, leveling, or normalizing consumerism.4 Authentic Dasein does some resolutely savvy bidding on Ebay, stealing the good bargains out from under the nose of das Man. In any case, I want to attempt in the remainder of this book to

   Genealogies of Capitalism build a vocabulary for thinking about contemporary economics, money, and the common through a consideration of the Foucaultian concept of “intensity” and its relation both to high finance and to everyday subjectivity in contemporary culture. By way of general background and transition from the question of “intensity” in Foucault to the economics of today, I’ll begin with a quick macrolevel detour on the contemporary reign of money in what Marxist histories tend to call “late capitalism,” important work on where today’s superfast capitalism came from and how its deployments of “intensity” might be different from other modes within the historical development of capitalism. I start here because, vulgar or not, I follow Foucault when toward the end of his life he challenges us to think about the changes that are reconstituting the economic present. As he writes, the “system elaborated during the interwar years . . . today reaches its limits as it stumbles against the political, economic, and social rationality of modern societies.”5 Indeed, the economic limits that the post–WWII Keynesian compromise had reached by the 1980s constituted a crisis in the welfare state that has only intensified in scope and spread geographically in the years since Foucault’s death in 1984. On virtually any account of recent economic history, contemporary privatized neoliberal economics has almost completely eclipsed the Keynesianism of the post–WWII period.6 The experiment that I’m interested in performing in this chapter hopes to link Foucault’s genealogies of modern power with neo-Marxist work on recent mutations in capitalism—especially the work of Fredric Jameson and that of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. My project here will proceed, in the wake of those others like it, not simply in order to lay one critical paradigm over the other, or to use one to “correct” the others, but to see what productive relations can be articulated by thinking them together. Again, I’d like to think I’m following Foucault specifically here because, despite his disagreements with the orthodox Marxism of the French Communist Party and his suspicions of a teleology built into Marxist historiography, Foucault nevertheless held that in the contemporary situation, the class struggle hasn’t disappeared, but rather intensified.7 Which is to say, the practices of class struggle have morphed into a new series of forms alongside transversal developments in capitalism: though class is indeed no longer the overarching binary clash that

Genealogies of Capitalism    organizes the entirety of the socius, it hardly follows that “class” and “struggle” have simply disappeared. Rather, they’ve infiltrated ever-moremicrological sites within the socius. As Foucault notes in another passage that might be a kind of gloss on the class struggle’s intensification: “What I find striking in the majority—if not of Marx’s texts then those of the Marxists (except perhaps Trotsky)—is the way they pass over in silence what is understood by struggle when one talks of class struggle. . . . There aren’t immediately given subjects of the struggle, one the proletariat, the other the bourgeoisie. Who fights against whom? We all fight each other. And there is always within each of us something that fights something else.”8 At some level, this chapter is simply an attempt to make genealogical and historical sense of the historical “intensifications” of capitalism and everyday struggle, class or otherwise.

The Genealogy of “Postmodern” Capital: Jameson In his work on the cultural logic of late capitalism (which is to say, “postmodernism”), Fredric Jameson follows Ernest Mandel’s provocative periodization of modern capitalism and tries to map Mandel’s history of capitalism and its machines onto changing regimes of cultural production. As Jameson explains, a notion of periodization underscores the general thesis of Mandel’s book Late Capitalism, namely that there have been three fundamental moments in Capitalism, each one marking a dialectical expansion over the previous stage: these are market capitalism, the monopoly stage or the stage of imperialism, and our own wrongly called postindustrial, but what might better be termed multinational, capital. I have already pointed out that Mandel’s intervention in the postindustrial involves the proposition that late or multinational or consumer capitalism, far from being inconsistent with Marx’s great 18th-century analysis, constitutes on the contrary the purest form of capital yet to have emerged, a prodigious expansion of capital into hitherto uncommodified areas. This purer capitalism of our own time thus eliminates the enclaves of precapitalist organization it had hitherto tolerated and exploited in a tributary way: one is tempted to speak in this connection of a new and historically original penetration and colonization of Nature and the Unconscious: that is, the destruction of precapitalist third world agriculture by the Green Revolution, and the rise of the media and the ad-

   Genealogies of Capitalism vertising industry. At any rate, it will also have been clear that my own cultural periodization of the stages of realism, modernism, and postmodernism is both inspired and confirmed by Mandel’s tripartite scheme. We may speak therefore of our own age as the Third (or even Fourth) Machine Age.9

Although Jameson’s periodization of recent movements in capitalism has much in common with (and important differences from) Foucault’s account of those last 150 years or so, I’d like at least initially to think of them together around the question of techniques of power and their historical intensification: for both Jameson and Foucault, the primary theoretical question or problem of the present is the increasing saturation of cultural power and its modes in the last century. Jameson’s discussion of a “purer” postmodern capitalism comprises, no less than Foucault’s discourse on biopower, an experimental vocabulary grappling to name this “new and historically original penetration and colonization of Nature and the Unconscious” by modes and practices that were previously thought to be “merely” economic, largely extrinsic to the dramas of (authentic) subjectivity or (high) culture. Foucault, for his part, puts it like this: “If we concentrate on the techniques of power and show the economic profit or political utility that can be derived from them, in a certain context and for certain reasons, then we can understand how these mechanisms actually and eventually became part of the whole.”10 Both Jameson and Foucault might profitably be seen to be asking a similar question: How does one respond to the techniques or practices of the factory or the financial sphere when they mutate from their own specific domain and intensify greatly, coming increasingly to saturate, organize, and canalize much larger sectors of cultural life? At the risk of overly schematizing Jameson (a risk I’ve already run in Chapter 2 by charting Foucault’s modes of power), one might represent (and expand) his cultural schematization of Mandel’s economic history roughly in the following way:

Genealogies of Capitalism    Era of Modern Capital

Machine

Critical/Artistic Response

STEAM ENGINE “INDUSTRIAL” economy

realism: Flaubert, Zola, Dreiser, Norris (naturalism)

COMBUSTION ENGINE “FACTORY” economy

high modernism: Van Gogh, primitivism of Gaugin, Picasso; Pound/Eliot: “make it new!”; surrealism, Abstract Expressionism

NUCLEAR ELECTRONIC “SERVICE” economy

postmodernism: is there a “critical” response? Is there a “subject” or “aesthetic distance”? Cognitive mapping Warhol, Pynchon, etc.

“ea rly ” 1. INDUSTRIALIZATION 1848–1890s “high” 2. FORDISM—FACTORY late 1890s–late 1940s

“l ate” 3. POST-FORDISM 1950s–1990s

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ “just-in-time” 4. FINANCE

COMPUTER CHIP “MARKET” economy

post-postmodernism: the privatization of cultural value

To unpack this a bit: On Jameson’s schematic periodization of economic production and its relations to artistic production, the dominant cultural or artistic response to the first wave of “industrial” capitalism is

   Genealogies of Capitalism nicely encapsulated in the gritty, critical “realism” of a Zola or a Dreiser. In historical turn, the utopian refusals of high modernism are called up in response to second-wave, factory or “Fordist” capitalism: which is to say, the dominant “cultural” response to the economic imperatives of Fordism is a modernism where the aesthetic object itself becomes an escape route from the increasing routinization and alienation of modern life. For example, think of T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land”: like so much modernist art, it doesn’t so much call for a cultural rebirth in the face of mass-produced alienation; rather, the text itself is such an aesthetic remaking or new mode of cultural production. Ezra Pound’s credo, “Make it new,” is probably the most condensed version of this modernist cultural response to the mode of economic production that was Fordism or Taylorism—modes of production which, by definition, seek to “make it the same.” The third wave of modern capitalism, so-called late capitalism, becomes emergent in the middle of the twentieth century, with the economic transition from the Fordist imperatives of factory production to the birth of the post-Fordist or “service” sector, an economy territorialized and driven not so much by innovation in production processes, but by intensified modes of consumption. As an example here, just try to find an “industrial” company listed among the thirty stocks that comprise the NYSE’s Dow Jones Industrial Average. There aren’t many, most of them having been quietly replaced over the last twenty years by computer, software, entertainment, insurance, and finance companies. Ironically, even an “industrial” giant like General Motors is not so much in the Fordist business of producing cars anymore; rather, GM is in the post-Fordist business of servicing cars (which is to say, financing and insuring them): this “service” side of GM’s operation has, in recent years, been much more profitable than the mundane factory production of cars. For the last several years—and for the foreseeable future, in fact—GMAC has accounted for around 80 percent of GM’s total profits.11 Whereas first- and second-wave capitalism (industrialism and Fordism) are regimes committed to innovations in the production of goods, the post-Fordist (or postmodern or postindustrial) regime is committed to the production of services as goods and is characterized by the now-famous triumph of what Slavoj Žižek calls “the unbridled commodification

Genealogies of Capitalism    of everyday life.”12 Of course this situation gives birth to the nearly as famous litany of leftist critiques leveled at this triumph of consumerism in “late capitalism,” from Adorno to Jameson and Žižek, and beyond. In Jameson’s concise words, “What has happened is that aesthetic production today has become integrated into commodity production generally: the frantic economic urgency of producing fresh waves of ever more novel-seeming goods . . . at ever greater rates of turnover, now assigns an increasingly structural function and position to aesthetic innovation and experimentation.”13 So is configured the consumer society of late capitalism, which, on someone like Adorno’s reading, remains a kind of Fordist factory, but one which produces only one product: consumers. “Something is provided for all,” Adorno intones, “so that none may escape.”14 Each product has its niche market, and each social niche or group is increasingly known and studied through its consumption patterns. It’s axiomatic these days that everything is produced to be consumed within a target market, from cars and insurance policies to museum art and academic monographs. In the end, Foucaultian questions concerning the intensification of capitalism are necessarily different from the (properly Marxist) ones raised by Adorno or Jameson, but these questions are different not, I would argue, because from a Foucaultian point of view these folks were wrong in their historical or genealogical work, but precisely because they’re right. Unlike much neo-Marxist work on cultural production, in other words, a Foucaultian analysis is not really invested in the process of demonstrating how X, Y, or Z cultural artifact either is or isn’t in some harmony or dissonance with the dominant mode of production, and talk of whether a given artifact “resists the dominant hegemony” has, it seems to me, been rendered largely incoherent by Foucault’s work on power. The whole dialectical ballet of resistance and co-optation is completely foreign to Foucault’s discourse (precisely because of what we learned from postmodernist discourses on capitalism: critical distance or some wholesale notion of opposition has disappeared—cultural production and economic production share the same “logic”). Likewise, the touchstones of neo-Marxist work on cultural production and late capitalism—the disappearance of critical space, the foundering of the categories of ideology, the complete “economization” of everyday life—are not,

   Genealogies of Capitalism strictly speaking, “problems” in what one might call “post-postmodern” work on economics and culture. As Deleuze and Guattari write, for example, “Capitalism . . . proceeds by means of an axiomatic and not by means of a code.”15 So-called third-wave capital works according to the axiom “consume!” and you really can’t choose to ignore or refuse that axiomatic pronouncement—it’s not up to “you,” whoever you might be. As Jameson explains Deleuze and Guattari’s notion, capital’s “axioms . . . are operational: they do not offer anything for commentary or exegesis, but are rather merely a set of rules to be put into effect.”16 In other words, on Deleuze and Guattari’s reading, one doesn’t get to “decide” to denounce capitalism or appreciate it—or even really to comment on it or understand it. But you do have to respond to it, insofar as capitalism is all about axiomatic deployments of force—from its significations through its outlet malls right up to its border patrols and credit requirements. Markets are ordering mechanisms. There are socioeconomic axioms, and there are fields of response, some of which have the potential to graft onto the present force fields and give birth to new axioms. But, strictly speaking, the question of whether one is “outside” or “resistant to” the capitalist axiomatic is largely incoherent in the wake of Foucault’s work and Jameson’s own analysis in “Postmodernism.”17

Counting to Four: Deleuze I rehearse this history of capitalism’s recent past because there’s an emergent specter haunting third-wave, consumerist, postmodern, or “late” capitalism: something we might call post-postmodern or “finance capital,” that regime in which speculative capital is wagered on a future of supposed or projected worth, rather than being invested in the production and mass marketing of new commodities or services. In other words, the future of capital seems like it rests not so much on the innovation of products or manufacturing processes (a Fordist model), nor on the colonization of new services or clients (the post-Fordist model), but rather on a futures market based on capital itself, on a kind of gambling on the future worth of stocks and other speculation devices. The future of capitalism, in other words, rests not on the extraction of profit from

Genealogies of Capitalism    commodities or services, but on the virtual production of money directly from money—making profit by wagering on an anticipated future outcome. In Marx’s Capital, M-C-M’ names the dialectical formula whereby accumulated wealth (M) is invested in the production of commodities, thereby becoming capital (C); the commodities produced by that investment capital are then sold to produce profit (M’). Thus begun, the dialectical adventure of money continues—with ever-more accumulation, ever-more investment in the production of commodities, and ever-more profits reaped by the capitalist: M-C-M’.18 In this economic vocabulary, one might say—as Marx does—that finance and credit capital skips a step, and its formula might be written as M-M’.19 In other words, an increase in finance capital requires no direct or overt mediation by a commodity or service: no actual goods or services are required to represent or serve as a placeholder for the abstract value of invested money, and no labor theory of value is required to account for the transformation or generation of surplus value as profit. One might say in a kind of shorthand that M-M’ comprises the formula for all forms of gambling, where money is directly intensified—made greater or smaller—rather than being transformed into a different state through the mediating work of commodity production. So, what we might call “fourth-wave” finance capital is the latest instantiation of capitalism’s de-territorializing intensity (and the point at which capitalism, at its cutting edge, “is” nothing other than intensification itself ). Such is the global logic of intensity, then, on both the economic and the cultural levels: in a world that contains no “new” territory— no new experiences, no new markets—any system that seeks to expand must by definition intensify its existing resources, modulate them in some way(s). This, in a nutshell, is what we might venture as the homology between the cultural logic of globalization and the economic logic of finance capital, neither of which is dedicated to discovering wholly new sources of human or economic capital: neither is set on cold war goals such as seeking out raw materials or new territory. Rather, the challenge for the globalized logic of finance capital is to find new mechanisms to work on value itself—new modes of risk intensification and modulation like derivatives, swaps, futures, hedge funds, currency trading, arbitrage.

   Genealogies of Capitalism This intensification and extension of the axiomatic of finance—of the reach of money—is one of the linchpins of Deleuze’s notion of the “control society,” that post-Fordist concept that Deleuze sees emerging in the wake of Foucault’s disciplinary, factory society: “Money,” Deleuze writes, “perhaps best expresses the difference between the two kinds of society, since discipline was always related to molded currencies containing gold as a numerical standard, whereas control is based on floating exchange rates, modulations depending on a code setting sample percentages for various currencies.”20 Money, unmoored from any reference or gold standard, has arrived as the transversal conceptual machinery for constantly modulating “value” throughout the global socius. From the stock market to the corner market, it’s all about floating rates of exchange: How much force does your currency deploy, and what kind? As anyone who lost a great deal of their retirement savings in the market crash of 2001 knows—or, for that matter, as anyone who has lost a great deal in the last ten seconds of an Ebay auction knows—economic value at the edge of capitalism is in the process of being remade as an ongoing question of producing, measuring, and evaluating intensity.

Intensities in Ten Cities When I tell my friends I’m working on the concept of “intensity,” they routinely balk. I suppose it’s easy enough to understand why the word has a bad name: from Dean Koontz’s pulpy novel Intensity, through the lingo of advertising (“b-intense.com” hawks hair gel, for example), to extreme sports (“Dude, that was intense”), the concept of intensity seems to function culturally as the marker for a gonzo-style, hypermasculine retreat from the complexities of theory and history—a simplistic return to the absolute centrality of the subject and the transgressive euphoria of his (and it almost always is his) supercharged personal experience. Listening to Ted Nugent’s live album Intensities in 10 Cities, feeling the hearty excess of The Nuge’s “My Love Is Like a Tire Iron,” you have to think that maybe Yeats was right: “The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.” So let me emphasize that I’m not primarily interested in intensity

Genealogies of Capitalism    as a marker for the experience of snowboarding or the improved taste of Starburst Fruit Chews—though I admit with alacrity that such things are part and parcel of the discourse of “intensity.” Following Deleuze’s exfoliation of Nietzschean “interpretation” as diagnosis or evaluation—“to interpret is to determine the force which gives sense to a thing”—here I’m interested in intensity as an attribute of mobile forces, one that has little or nothing to do with a precious or transgressive “experience.”21 In fact, as I understand it vis-à-vis economic production, intensity only secondarily has anything at all to do with “subjects,” who are beholden to those fields of force just like anything else is: as Deleuze writes in The Logic of Sense, the singularity of force “is essentially pre-individual, nonpersonal, and a-conceptual.”22 Intensity is axiomatic, as is capitalism, the only socius that bases itself on de-territorialized flows. So intensity, like the modulation of “value” in a capitalist finance market, is not rare: it is in fact going on everywhere, all the time. Floating market valuation—weighing sense and value—is simply the way finance capital works, the way it is, what we might venture to call the contemporary “common.” So, and I guess that this is my polemical point, affective subjective “experience” is among the least productive ways of approaching the question of intensity, or at least the most prone to confusion of issues: the territorialization of “intensity” onto the production of conscious or unconscious effects. This puts me at some odds with Deleuze commentators like Brian Massumi, who argues, “Intensity and experience accompany one another like two mutually presupposing dimensions or like two sides of a coin.”23 For Massumi, intensity is associated primarily with a kind of phenomenological excess, and the singular understood as that which is irreducible to the territorializing of norms: Massumi writes that “the strength or duration of the image’s effect could be called its intensity,” which is perhaps most concisely hinted at as a “non-conscious, never to be conscious autonomic remainder,” a nonstate that exists “in excess of any narrative or functional line.”24 If Heidegger’s being were a machine, it might look something like this kind of “intensity”: that thing that consistently guarantees a certain openness, an excess over determination, what Massumi calls “a state of suspense, potentially of disruption.”25 In the end, for Massumi “Intensity is the unassimilable.”26 However, intensity on this subjective register can look

   Genealogies of Capitalism an awful lot like what the existentialists used to call “authentic” experience—a unique, moving, hypercharged bodily interruption of the stale banalities forced on us by the everyday, the common. My beef here, such as I have one, is not that one should avoid talking about “intensity” in terms of subjectivity—as I’m deploying it, intensity is a concept or yardstick that should allow us to say things about subjective experience, money, rivers, nanotechnology, anything. But it’s precisely the “anything” that sometimes gets lost when intensity is territorialized or understood primarily through something called “experience.” In short, because intensity on the excessive or neophenomenological reading is predominantly understood as rare or scarce (something other than the reterritorializing norm), it seems to me that experience and its discontents are not always the most productive ways to think about intensity. Rather, intensity and its modulations are everywhere, even and especially in something like mundane financial transactions: because we really don’t know what money or value is, such categories are under constant construction, and such modulation moves through intensification—speeding up or slowing down of flows. But money, unlike extreme states of experience, is hard to understand as the inassimilable other; it is, in fact, often the proper name for assimilation itself. Put slightly differently, finance capital marks a crucial intensification of “third-wave,” late, or consumer capitalism—figuring not so much the continued ubiquity of commodity consumption, but rather something of a return to an imminent regime of (biopolitical) production. As Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri write in Empire, “The great industrial and financial powers thus produce not only commodities but also subjectivities. . . . They produce needs, social relations, bodies, and minds— which is to say, they produce producers.”27 Finance capital creates not so much consumers as it does producers—all of us, whoever we might be, have to produce and consistently modulate value. Everything is a market. Although this clearly entails an intensified model of consumption, the very hyperintensity of that commodity consumption (the fact that anything “outside” it or any distance from it is gone forever) inexorably mutates the act of consumption into an immanent mode of production, and one that is anything but scarce. We’re all modulating value all the time. In other words, the “problem” or difficulty of finance capital is not

Genealogies of Capitalism    that we’re all made into consumers (we have to be satisfied with what’s on the menu, as Adorno put it), but that we’re all made into producers (we have to produce the menu, then order from it—or be utterly unable to do so, should we be off the map of global capital flows). Given this state of cultural and economic affairs, it’s precisely the vulgarity of economics—its saturated ubiquity—that to my mind makes it interesting (again), and why what one might call the monetary form of intensity (as multiplication and spread) is just as interesting to study as the high-end subjective intensities of transgressive subjective “experience.” However, if intensity is going to function as a Foucaultian figure that connects, smears, or cuts across the general and the specific—the global monetary system and the individual’s experience—I’m going to need to do some “positive” work on the subjective pole: if the “intensity” of subjective experience isn’t merely or primarily to be distilled from high-end “excessive” bodily experience, then what is it? How can I thematize it? It’s here that I turn back specifically to Foucault, insofar as his work on biopower has proven immensely productive in this register.

Through (Foucaultian) Biopower to (Deleuzean) Control As Foucault puts forth in his work on disciplinary regimes, ironfisted mechanisms of regulation are both expensive and inefficient—a lesson that international business learned long before the cold war nation-state did. Foucault argues that the disciplinary apparatus was born gradually alongside imperialist expansion in the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries, and reached its apex in the twentieth, with the factory societies of Fordism. By all accounts, however, this kind of Fordist New Deal welfare state has been systematically dismantled by worldwide conservative political hegemony and the rise of the so-called new economy—in short, by the intensification of biopower. In a world of cyber-work, e-commerce, distance education, virtual markets, home health care, and the perpetual retraining of flexibly specialized labor, the disciplinary world of partitioning and surveillance (the office, the school, the bank, the trading floor, the mall, the hospital, the factory) seems like it’s undergoing a wholesale transformation. As Deleuze argues, “We’re

   Genealogies of Capitalism definitely moving toward ‘control’ societies that are no longer exactly disciplinary. . . . We’re moving toward control societies that no longer operate [primarily] by confining people but through continuous control and instant communication. . . . In a control-based system, nothing’s left alone for long.”28 Deleuze further elaborates on the Foucaultian distinction between discipline and control: “In disciplinary societies, you were always starting all over again (as you went from school to barracks, from barracks to factory), while in control societies you never finish anything—business, training, and military service being coexisting metastable states of a single modulation, a sort of universal transmutation” of power.29 So, following the Foucaultian logic of power we’ve been developing here, as societies of control extend and intensify the tactics of discipline and biopower (by linking training and surveillance to evermore-minute realms of everyday life), they also give birth to a whole new form. And this emergence comes about through what Foucault calls a “swarming [l’essaimage] of disciplinary mechanisms,” through the intensification of discipline rather than its exhaustion or dissipation: “The massive, compact disciplines are broken down into flexible methods of control” (D&P 211). Panoptic disciplinary surveillance in the contemporary world of “control” has been taken to a new, even more disembodied and therefore efficient state; your Web browser, your DNA, your bank ATM card, your subway pass, or your credit report all suggest that you are tracked in ways that make the disciplinary or panoptic warehousing of bodily traces (like photographs, surveillance tapes, fingerprints, or blood types) seem positively quaint by comparison. Discipline has been taken to the limit of what it can do, and in this intensive movement, discipline’s limit has become a threshold, inexorably transforming this form of power into a different mode, a lighter and even more effective style of surveillance that can only accelerate the already lightning-fast spread of that form of power/knowledge known as globalization. For example, Hardt and Negri build their concept of “Empire” precisely around this notion of the waning of disciplinary power and the waxing of the society of control: “The society of control might thus be characterized by an intensification and generalization of the normalizing apparatuses of disciplinarity that internally animate our common and daily practices, but in contrast to discipline, this control extends

Genealogies of Capitalism    well outside the structured sites of social institutions through flexible and fluctuating networks.”30 Hardt and Negri suggest, in classical Foucaultian form, that we are witnessing not so much the end of imperialist or disciplinary power, but its intensification and transmutation into another kind of power: control. At its point of phase transition, one might say that the disciplinary power of imperialism doesn’t merely halt; it is forced to work differently, to develop another modus operandi. As Hardt and Negri argue, the present-day Empire of transnational capital comprises “something altogether different from [what’s traditionally known as] ‘imperialism.’ ” Imperialism was really an extension of the sovereignty of the European nationstates beyond their own boundaries. Eventually, nearly all the world’s territories would be parceled out and the entire world map could be coded in European colors: red for British territory, blue for French, green for Portuguese, and so forth. Wherever modern sovereignty took root, it constructed a Leviathan that overarched its social domain and imposed hierarchical territorial boundaries, both to police the purity of its own identity and to exclude all that was other.31

The logic of contemporary capitalism no longer works primarily according to the rigid disciplinary logics of exclusion, othering, and noncontamination. As disparate financial phenomena like GATT, NAFTA, the Euro, and the WTO attest, the nation-state no longer primarily functions as a machine “to police the purity of its own identity and to exclude all that was other”; rather, the nation-state now seeks primarily to hold the door for transnational capital—though, of course, this task regularly requires crackdowns of a terrifyingly “old-fashioned” disciplinary nature. Such brutal tactics are in fact on daily display in the so-called War on Terror. Suffice it to iterate here a Foucaultian refrain: simply because dominant power’s primary modus operandi has changed, we shouldn’t therefore assume that it’s been wholly evacuated of its sovereign impulses or its disciplinary investments in confinement. In terms of the global production of slums and the concomitant geographical and physical confinement they enforce, for example, market economies have proven to be much more efficient and ruthless than discipline’s company-towns ever could have dreamed. As Mike Davis notes, “The global slum population is now almost equal to the population of the world in 1844 when the

   Genealogies of Capitalism young Friedrich Engels first ventured into the mean streets of Manchester. . . . This is not a war of civilizations but an oblique clash between the American imperium and the labor-power it has expelled from the formal world economy.”32 The emergent economy of globalized control, then, doesn’t simply supersede or wholly displace the society of the nation-state’s severe discipline. However, in the world of contemporary capital, nationalism’s political boosters dream not so much of cultural purity, but rather of the endless, smooth flow of capital and goods across boundaries of all kinds—flows of capital to the global winners and an informal economy of hyperflexible service labor for the rest (you’re a chauffer today, a landscaper tomorrow, a terrorist next week). These days, everyone from politicians to CEOs to Arby’s fast-food chain joins in the global refrain, “Different is good”; needless to say, one can’t imagine any cold war leader worth his SALT talks saying such a thing. The world of imperialism is, by definition, a world where “Different is bad”—otherness is an obstacle, there only to be excluded, demonized, or assimilated. But difference in the postmodern world isn’t there to be overcome; it’s there to be intensified, put to use, capitalized. The logic of intensification is the (non)site where the logic of the individual subject sutures itself to the logic of globalization. Just as the subjective pole of existentialism—with its thematics of alienation, mutually assured destruction, binarized subject/object splits, its heroic confrontations with the other and with death—is inexorably tied to the era of extensive imperialism, so the subjective pole of contemporary “experience” intensification is equally tied to the economic and political logic of globalization. The flexible and fluctuating networks of postmodern globalization function according to an intensification of Foucault’s notion of productive power, which teaches us that power doesn’t hold good until and unless the subject can take some pleasure or knowledge from its bargain with a dominant mode of power. This is the breakthrough modus operandi of Empire, its direct linkage to subjective intensities, the complete “culturization” of political and economic life. As Hardt and Negri argue, “The society of control is able to adopt the biopolitical context as its exclusive terrain of reference.”33 With the triumph of Foucaultian biopower also comes an em-

Genealogies of Capitalism    phasis on the massifying government of populations, where values are determined predominantly by economic calculations—floating rates of various kinds (interest as well as birth, death, crime, and incarceration rates); with questions of biopolitical risk (disease, death, or physical harm) largely amortized along class lines, nationally as well as globally. So, for example, when former World Bank chief and short-lived Harvard president Lawrence Summers infamously argued that it’s “cheaper” to pollute the “less developed countries” than it is to house the globe’s dirty industries and waste in the so-called first world, he was speaking both more and less than metaphorically. Like everything else in our biopolitical world, “life” in fact does have a price, one that fluctuates from neighborhood to neighborhood, town to town, country to country. And where life is “cheaper” or less valuable, there the world’s most polluting industries, toxic chemicals, disposable diapers, and deadly discarded computers can find an economical final resting place.34 On Foucault’s account, with the complete triumph of biopower comes the ascendancy of the economy as the dominant measure for all other social sectors of cultural and political life: “The art of government is just the art of exercising power in the form, and according to the model, of the economy.”35 Under a regime of intensified biopower, then, the regulatory disciplinary apparatus of “the family” gives way to the more flexible and global threshold notion of “the economy”: “The domain of population involves a range of intrinsic, aggregate effects, phenomena that are irreducible to those of the family, such as epidemics, endemic levels of morality, ascending spirals of labor and wealth; finally, it shows that, through its shifts, customs, activities, and so on, population has specific economic effects. Statistics, by making it possible to quantify these specific phenomena of population, also shows that this specificity is irreducible to the dimension of the family.”36 In the rise of governmentality, we see again the paradigmatic Foucaultian “intensification” of power: power becomes lighter, more ubiquitous, less attached to “negative” objects or practices (the disciplinary family, “the father’s no”), and more saturated within formerly ignored realms of social practice. In short, power becomes more effective while offering less obvious potential for resistance. My employer’s new motto, undoubtedly focus-grouped to death in order to weed out any potentially offensive or resistant traits,

   Genealogies of Capitalism tells the story: “Penn State. Making Life Better.” Now who could be “against” that? Importantly, though, on Foucault’s account, the rise of governmental biopower—its intense saturation throughout the socius—doesn’t simply eradicate the techniques or institutions of discipline (the family, the factory, the army, the school). Rather, as the Penn State motto shows, biopower reorganizes those institutions around a different set of issues and practices, refocusing them on different targets and concepts. Like the panopticon, biopower is not a master-paradigm or one-size-fits-all template that is laid over existing power relations and institutions; on the contrary, biopower (like the panopticism that it harnesses) is a form of power that infiltrates and intensifies all the others. The techniques of discipline don’t disappear under the regimes of biopower; they are redeployed in the service of a more general governmental project. In Foucault’s concise words concerning the legacy of the disciplinary family within the governmental regimes of biopower, the family functions “no longer [as] a model, but a segment.”37 He continues: As for discipline, this is not eliminated either; clearly, its modes of organization, all the institutions within which it had developed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—schools, factories, armies, and so on—all this can be understood on the basis of the development of the great administrative monarchies. Nevertheless, though, discipline was never more important or more valorized than at the moment when it became important to manage a population . . . in its depths and details. . . . Accordingly, we need to see things not in terms of the replacement of a society of sovereignty by a disciplinary society and the subsequent replacement of disciplinary society by a society of government; in reality, one has a triangle, sovereignty-discipline-government, which has as its primary target the population and its essential mechanism the apparatuses of security. . . . Three movements—government, population, political economy— constitute from the eighteenth century onward a solid series, one that even today has assuredly not been dissolved.38

Through the invocation of a “triangle” of “sovereignty-discipline-government,” Foucault again attempts to thwart a kind of Hegelian historicism within his thought and turns our attention back toward power as a series of discontinuously linked practices, rather than as an originary secret to be progressively uncovered or a teleological narrative of development.39

Genealogies of Capitalism    If “the economy” has become the dominant form of power/knowledge by which we recognize and deploy the others, this would seem to be an important moment in Foucaultian genealogy not primarily because it helps us to “understand” our world “better,” but because this genealogy should commit us to inventing or harnessing new, more supple, and nondiscipline-based forms of resistance. We know how to resist sovereignty and developed pretty good tools for resisting within disciplinary regimes (which are aimed at our practices). But how to resist the increasingly ubiquitous power directed at “making life better”? In the hopes of dealing with this genealogical question, it is to an intensified examination of Foucaultian biopower and its relations to “everyday life” that I now turn.

chapter 4

Foucault’s Infamous Ethics; or, Biopower, Globalization, and Ethical Scarcity I am no doubt not the only one who writes in order to have no face. —Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge

I begin this chapter deliberately with these, among the most often quoted words in Foucault’s entire corpus. Within a notoriously difficult body of work, these words have come to constitute a kind of commonplace of reference, very nearly a cliché. One imagines that if there were a glossy Foucault calendar, these might be the words chosen for January. Recall that these words are positioned at the end of the introduction to 1969’s Archaeology of Knowledge, a book that was imagined or conceived to provide a kind of retrospective method for understanding Foucault’s early work, when in fact the actual writing of the book functioned far more as a transformation, a springboard allowing Foucault to go beyond or supplement his earlier “archaeological” investigations, in the direction of “genealogy.” These famous, commonplace words specifically constitute part of Foucault’s response to a critical voice imagined in the text, a voice that asks: “ ‘Aren’t you going to change yet again, shift your position. . . . Are you going to declare yet again that you have never been what you have been reproached with being? Are you already preparing the way out [l’issue, the exit] that will enable you in your next

Foucault’s Infamous Ethics    book to spring up somewhere else and declare as you’re now doing: no, no, I’m not where you are lying in wait for me, but over here, laughing at you.’ ”1 Critical commentary on Foucault’s response to this imagined question suggests that Foucault dreamed of a certain anonymity, a constant mobility of becoming, a high-modernist impersonality. Although he was a famous man, he continued to harbor the dream of a kind of literal and figurative “infamy” (like the lives of the infamous men he so cherished and delighted in): an ethics of anonymous contacts, everyday events, faceless encounters, and improvised responses—as opposed to a norm-driven ethics of faces, identities, and obligations. Ethics is rethought by Foucault as a discourse and practice of resistance: “Maybe the target nowadays is not to discover what we are,” he writes, “but to refuse what we are.”2 Foucaultian ethics is not a matter of seeking out and conforming to universal or practical norms, but about resisting the largely punitive, policing discourses of morality. As his friend Pierre Bourdieu writes in tribute, “Foucault’s work is a long exploration of transgression, of going beyond social limits”;3 and Gary Gutting notes that such “transgression”—understood as “an opening up of possibilities that lie beyond the limits of prevailing norms”—is then a key to the ethical moment in Foucault: “a transgression that by its very nature places us beyond the deadening or consoling certainties of conventional life.”4 Or it might suffice simply to recall Foucault’s follow-up to these infamous words in the Archaeology: “Do not ask me who I am and do not ask me to remain the same. Leave it to our bureaucrats and our police to see that our papers are in order. At least spare us their morality when we write” (AK 17). However, this thin threshold between fame and infamy, anonymity and singularity, is where these most commonplace words begin to become a little odd, especially around the distinctly ethical force of Foucault’s interruption of a policed “sameness.” As a mode of ethical resistance, it’s tempting to read, “I am no doubt not the only one who writes in order to have no face,” not so much as Foucault’s denial or refusal of the celebrity identity that has been imposed on him, but as a kind of paradoxical intensification of the very privileges of fame: one could take Foucault to be saying here that critics (and with them, the carping, petty, uncreative “little people” everywhere) are destined both to stay the same,

   Foucault’s Infamous Ethics and in fact to enforce normative categories of sameness; while writers and other creative avant-gardists are charged with the higher calling of transforming culture and politics through their ethics of resistance. One might think here of the words of Fanshawe, the brilliant writer of Paul Auster’s novella The Locked Room, who writes to a less-gifted friend: “You will always be who you are. With me, it’s another story.”5 On such a vanguardist reading, Foucault’s ethics would be in the uncomfortable position of invoking the very structural privileges of authorship that he smokes out in “What Is an Author?” In short, the author-function is a creator of scarcity, an interior space introduced into an exterior field of discourse to create privileged nodes of value. Within the vast, open field of nineteenth-century discursive production, for example, there’s the famous author Charles Baudelaire, and the infamous man Pierre Rivére. They exist on the same flat plane of discursive power, but one has a principle of value-rarification attached to the function of his proper name (Baudelaire), one does not (Rivére). For authorship to remain both theoretically and economically valuable, for it to enact or enable a mode of resistance against the totalizing banality of the common, it must remain scarce, mobile, undefinable, faced as faceless. Paradoxically, then, the cultural privileges of an author’s ostensible “infamy”—the capacity or proclivity constantly to transgress social limits, to change and innovate, to insist on not remaining the same—would mark not “infamy” at all, but would function as the very indicators and guarantors of fame. Indeed, how else could someone like William Burroughs—an avant-garde writer and homosexual drug addict who killed his wife—end up in a commercial for Nike sneakers? “Just do it” indeed. Foucault takes up this very question in “Lives of Infamous Men,” where he writes: There exists a false infamy, the kind with which those men of terror or scandal (Gilles de Rais, Guillery or Cartouche, Sade and Lacenaire) are blessed. Apparently infamous, because of the abominable memories they have left, the misdeeds attributed to them, the respectful horror they have inspired, they are actually men of glorious legend. . . . But the apostate friar, the feeble minds lost on unknown paths, those are infamous in the strict sense: they no longer exist except through the terrible words that were destined to render them forever unworthy of the memory of men. And chance determined that these words, these

Foucault’s Infamous Ethics    words alone, would subsist. The return of these lives to reality occurs in the very form in which they were driven out of the world. . . . Useless to look for another face for them, or to suspect a different greatness in them; they are no longer anything but that which was meant to crush them—neither more nor less. Such is infamy in the strict sense, the infamy that, being unmixed with ambiguous scandal or unspoken admiration, has nothing to do with any sort of glory.6

Such a sense of inexorably common, faceless “infamy” (divorced from the excessive capacities or desires of those who enjoy the protean face of “glorious legend”) might invoke a very different understanding of Foucault’s ethics, and a very different reading of the transgressive privilege seemingly invoked by the quotation that opened this chapter, “I am no doubt not the only one who writes in order to have no face.” It’s precisely this oft-repeat Foucaultian catch-phrase that dramatizes the question I’d like to explore within Foucault’s ethics: Is Foucault’s commitment to an ethics of self-overcoming or transformation (“Do not ask me who I am and do not ask me to remain the same”) based on a principle of scarcity, a privilege of unique individuals who have done the difficult work of transforming themselves? On Foucault’s own terms, is ethics or ethical resistance in fact a scarce commodity that accrues to certain kinds or acts of subjectivity—a resolute, brave, and rare refusal in the face of the normalizing imperatives of the police and the bureaucrats? If so, and I’ll admit there’s plenty of support for this reading,7 I think Foucault’s contributions to ethics become a kind of footnote to the aesthetics of high modernism or to a phenomenological ethics of authenticity. Ethical resistance becomes the cultivation of a particular mood or attitude of disengagement, disparagement, or overcoming of the fallen or mundane everyday world. On this reading, ethical or resistant subjectivity is an inexorably scarce resource—the purview of particularly resolute subjects, while everyone else simply lives according to the program. Thus understood, ethics could never be common, or the realm of the common. Rather, it would be scarcity—the difficulties of ethical life—that would give ethics its value. To Foucault along these lines—reading him as a thinker of ethical scarcity—is not so much incorrect as it is extremely “expensive,” in the sense that I’ve outlined above—the sense that Foucault constantly gestures toward when he asks the Nietzschean question, “What does it

   Foucault’s Infamous Ethics cost?” for a theory or discourse to exhort X or Y principle. In short, I’ll argue that it costs you the store to thematize Foucaultian ethics as a kind of scarce or rare commodity. In fact, I would argue that Foucault’s infamous midcareer shift from archaeology to genealogy can be seen as a discovery by Foucault of the very troublesome nature of the principle of “rarity” or “scarcity” and its relation to questions of ethical value in his own work. Consider for example Foucault’s abandonment, after the Archaeology, of “the statement [l’énoncé]” as a linchpin category for his analyses; this flight, it seems to me, is part and parcel of a Foucaultian move away from a principle of rarity as value. Among the things that never made any sense in the Archaeology’s analysis of the statement was its supposed scarcity: “Statements are rare,” Foucault insists (AK 120; see also 118–25). Without going any further into the voluminous critical discourse surrounding the archaeology/genealogy split in Foucault’s work or the reasons for what commentators call “the methodological failure of archaeology,”8 one might simply point out the following: there are lots of things you can say about “power relations” in Foucault’s middle work, or about “sexuality” in his late work, but they’re certainly not “rare” or scarce sets of relations. Everyone has a prolix investment in “sexuality,” and Foucaultian power is, if nothing else, inexorably “common”; in fact, this very ubiquity or monochrome commonality is what most people want to criticize about the concepts of sexuality and power in Foucault’s “genealogical” work. Recall Thomas McCarthy’s (fairly representative) Habermasian critique: “Power becomes all too like the night in which all cows are black.”9 Although it’s primarily through an examination of Foucault’s late work on “biopower” that I’d like to advance a different—more radically common—thematization of Foucaultian ethics, I would argue that this insistence on the transformative power of the common, the everyday, and the mundane runs throughout Foucault’s work after 1969’s Archaeology of Knowledge. How else can we explain his interest in writing about and publishing the texts of “infamous” figures like Pierre Rivére (1973) or Herculine Barbin (1978)? Or the work that went into The Disorder of Families (1982), a collection of forgotten, everyday poison-pen letters that Foucault unearthed during his daily sojourns to the library? Or Foucault’s unfinished “Parallel Lives” series, for which the essay “Lives of Infamous

Foucault’s Infamous Ethics    Men” (1977) served as a kind of introduction?10 Discussing his principle of organization for that project, Foucault writes, “I excluded everything in the way of imagination or literature: none of the dark heroes that the latter have invented appeared as intense to me as these cobblers, these army deserters, these garment-sellers, these scriveners, these vagabond monks—all of them rabid, scandalous, or pitiful. And this was owing, no doubt, to the mere fact that they are known to have lived.”11 What fuels Foucault’s “little obsession” with these infamous men and women is the brief intensity of their wholly chance encounters with power, and the genealogical facticity of the remainders of those encounters (court documents, brief notes in broadsheets, recorded confessions, bold and blasphemous denunciations).12 Like countless others, all we have left of these lives is what transpired “at the point of their instantaneous contact with power. . . . Lives of a few lines or a few pages, nameless misfortunes and adventures gathered into a handful of words. Brief lives, encountered by chance in books and documents. Exampla, but unlike those collected by sages in the course of their reading, they are examples that convey not so much lessons to ponder as brief effects whose force fades almost at once.”13 In short, “The existence of these men and women comes down to exactly what was said about them: nothing subsists of what they were or what they did, other than what is found in a few sentences. Here it is rarity and not prolixity that makes reality equivalent to fiction.”14 Here we begin to see emerge a different conception of “rarity” for the infamous person than for the famous one: the infamous person is known solely through those points where power meets directly with life—where power takes hold directly on an individual “life” and that life somehow resists. Not by disappearing, necessarily, but by the intensity of a singular response, a flight, a twist, an outburst, a refusal, and it is precisely this building or deploying of an exit, what Deleuze calls a “line of flight,” that I will argue constitutes the common of Foucault’s ethics— the place where we all live. As Foucault insists, “There is no relationship of power without the means of escape or possible flight. Every power relationship implies, at least in potentia, a strategy of struggle, in which the two forces are not superimposed, do not lose their specific nature, or do not finally become confused. Each [force] constitutes for the other a

   Foucault’s Infamous Ethics kind of permanent limit, a point of possible reversal. . . . It would not be possible for power relations to exist without points of insubordination that, by definition, are means of escape.”15 Every power relation, then, has escape as one of its essential conditions; hence, the practices of refusal, resistance, and flight are not by any means scarce (neither are they, importantly, the attributes of particular subjects). To the bright lights and glorious legends of the famous, the colorful transgressions of an existential commitment to authentic actions, Foucault contrasts the dull, everyday monochrome of ethical infamy. “Genealogy,” he reminds us, “is gray.”16 This, I think, is the legacy of a Foucaultian ethics, or at least a legacy I’d like to argue for here: what we might call an “infamous rarity” that’s not a scarcity, the precious or excessive privilege of a select few, but the ubiquity of a direct and intense confrontation with power—most specifically the confrontation with Foucaultian “biopower,” that mode of power that’s been on the ascendancy in the West since the nineteenth century. With the rise of biopower, Foucault writes, “A whole political network became interwoven with the fabric of everyday life,”17 a whole vast network of confrontations and resistances is configured and deployed. And that network confronts us every day, all the time, with increasing intensity. Welcome to amazon.com, Jeffrey, we have some suggestions for you. It is precisely at the intersection of biopower and everyday life that Foucault urges or teaches us to go looking for something we might call the ethical. Because the highly intensified biopower of the present day has become almost completely synonymous with so-called late capitalism (or is it later capitalism? Just-in-time capitalism?), I want to continue my reexamination of Foucault’s network of relations to Marxism—less to the orthodox Marxism of the French Communist Party, than to the strains of post- and neo-Marxism that have sprung up in the two decades since Foucault’s death. Although it’s hard to construct a web of relation between a man who’s been dead for more than twenty years and the discourses of power and resistance that saturate our present, I’d like to think that I’m following Foucault’s own lead here, precisely in texts like “Lives of Infamous Men”: taking the remains of a life, simply the texts and the confrontation with power that they enact, and trying to harness those ethical intensities in a different historical context, in the hopes of deploy-

Foucault’s Infamous Ethics    ing another set of experimental ethical relations. A project that might go by the properly Foucaultian name, a “genealogy of the present.”

II. Biopower was, without question, an indispensible element in the development of capitalism; the latter would not have been possible without the controlled insertion of bodies into the machinery of production and the adjustment of the phenomena of population into economic processes. —Foucault, History of Sexuality, volume 1

At his untimely death in 1984, Foucault left a very different “today” from the “today” we inhabit only a couple of decades hence. The conservative, antigovernment, probusiness agenda of the Reagan-KohlThatcher years was still in its formative stages in the early to mid-1980s. In the post–cold war era of corporate globalization, we’d have to admit the almost complete triumph of that conservative fiscal and political agenda, not only in Western Europe and North America, but increasingly throughout the globe. The mantras of contemporary globalization are the intensified legacy of the conservative, welfare-busting Reagan era: downsize, privatize, outsource, keep the stock price high. These refrains are widely recognizable as the slogans of so-called globalized finance capital, wherein economic profit-motive (code word: efficiency) smears its imperatives across the socius and becomes the dominant logic not only of international finance but increasingly of everyday life. Foucault, of course, never could have envisioned, much less analyzed, what we call globalization as a mode of power. In fact, one could argue that Foucault expended most of his political and theoretical energy smoking out the hidden indignities of a form of governmental power that has decisively lost hegemony in the decades since his death: namely, the welfare state. One of the primary upshots of Foucault’s mammoth studies of the madhouse, the prison, and sexuality is to show how the socalled helping hand of the modern welfare government is in fact a continuation and intensification of another mode of power, the chopping off of hands and the other modes of torture that so vividly open Discipline and Punish. But here I want to advance a simple genealogical premise that I gestured toward in the Introduction to this book: whereas Foucault never had a chance to analyze the mode of power known as contempo-

   Foucault’s Infamous Ethics rary globalization, the work he left behind offers us a number of crucial tools for thinking through “today”—for diagnosing and responding to this new mode of power. Many of those tools have been deployed within the context of contemporary Marxism (or post-Marxism), so I’ll take a genealogical swerve through the legacy of Foucault within that discourse and return at the end of this chapter to the question of today. Foucault’s relations to Marxism remain a vexed set of territories. Although it’s quite clear that Foucault has very little kind to say about orthodox Marxism, it is just as clear that Marx himself plays a pivotal role in many of Foucault’s analyses (one thinks in particular of the linchpin status of Marx in D&P’s analysis of discipline and the factory workday; see, for example, 162–69). In a 1981 interview, Foucault recalls the roots of his thought as a reaction against the dominant French intellectual climate of the 1950s, ruled largely by the phenomenology on the one hand and Marxism on the other. Foucault recalls 1950s’ phenomenology as “academic and university-oriented. You had privileged objects of phenomenological description, lived experiences or the perception of a tree through an office window.”18 Here (and throughout Foucault’s career), phenomenology is consistently thematized—even mocked—as a kind of bankrupt, bourgeois subjectivism, the last gasp of “depth” hermeneutics on the nineteenth-century transcendentalist model. Although Foucault’s critique of phenomenology is thoroughgoing, his suspicions concerning Marxism are a bit more guarded. He writes, again about the 1950s: “Secondly, another important form of dominant thought was clearly Marxism. Marxism referred to a whole domain of historical analysis that, in a way, it left untouched. Reading Marx’s texts and the analysis of Marx’s concepts was an important task, but the content of historical knowledge to which these concepts had to refer, for which they were operational, these historical dimensions were a bit neglected. In any case, Marxism or concrete Marxist history, at least in France, was not highly developed.”19 In the end, one might say that Foucault primarily faults French Marxism for never having been “Marxist” enough—for not having undertaken the analysis of events and their conditions of emergence (“concrete history”), but settling instead for the monotonous uncovering of shopworn transhistorical abstractions lurking somewhere “underneath” the surface events of history (the class struggle,

Foucault’s Infamous Ethics    exploitation, commodity fetishism, some version of top-down “power” as repression, and so on). As Pierre Macherey recounts, Foucault “shunned like the plague everything which arose out of dialectical materialism.”20 Foucault’s critique of Marxism, then, is oddly akin to the critique of phenomenology—depth and revelation are the bad guys in both cases. Phenomenology (that of Merleau-Ponty and Sartre) and Marxism (that of the orthodox French Communist Party) both elide an ethics of the event, as both inexorably understand the emergence of the everyday solely in terms of a preexisting, essentially transcendentalist, structure: the subject or the class struggle. Rather than again going over the “Foucault versus Marxism” ground, I’d like to shift terrain somewhat and examine a strain of recent Marxist theory that overtly takes its inspiration from Foucault (rather than trying to outflank or critique him). In short, I’m thinking of Italian post-Marxism of the autonomist or “workerist” variety, most closely associated with the work of Antonio Negri, Mario Tronti, and Paulo Virno. Although Italian autonomist Marxism is a wide-ranging theoretical and political project, if one is looking for a node of theoretical commonality, one could point out that workerism consistently territorializes its reading of Marx not on the “scientific” Marx of Capital, but on the Grundrisse (1857–58, though not published until 1953), and even more specifically on the so-called “Fragment on Machines” in Notebooks 6 and 7. Here Marx argues that with the advent of the machine arrives a new kind of labor, no longer housed in the negating power of the individual worker (the labor theory of value), but distributed, machinelike, throughout the socius. This new “virtual” or distributed labor “does not exist in the worker’s consciousness, but rather acts upon him through the machine. . . . Labor appears . . . scattered among the individual living workers at numerous points in a mechanical system; subsumed under the total process of the machinery itself, as itself only a link in the system, whose unity exists not in the living worker, but rather in the living (active) machinery which confronts his individual.”21 For autonomists, this “virtual” emphasis on distributed production denotes a shift in Marx from a dialectical thinking of totality (so-called formal subsumption, where capitalism seeks consistently to suture the individual alienation created by the gap between subjective use-value and economic exchange value) to a

   Foucault’s Infamous Ethics more properly immanent or materialist thinking of the socius (so-called real subsumption, where the capitalist means of production directly implicates itself in any and all other modes of production—even the production of subjectivity itself ). Here, capitalism becomes nothing other than productive (or nothing other than production): the production of commodities, lives, joys, suffering, profit, you name it.22 In this thinking of “real” subsumption, capitalism no longer requires an abstract or formal link between the worker and the imperatives of capital (which is to say, it no longer requires the mediating Hegelian machinery of dialectical materialism). The capitalist mode of production is everywhere, directly confronting everyone, all the time. Marx writes: In machinery, objectified labor itself appears not only in the form of the product or the product employed as a means of labor, but in the form of the force of production itself. The development of the means of labor into machinery is not an accidental moment of capital, but is rather the historical reshaping of the traditional, inherited means of labor into a form adequate to capital. The accumulation of knowledge and of skill, of the general productive forces of the social brain, is thus absorbed into capital.23

The emergence of real subsumption is, in short, the event wherein the capitalist mode of production can be recast as the constantly recirculating negotiation of value at all points of the socius—individual and social, public and private. No longer tied to the rare sites like the factory or scarce moments like points of commodity buying and selling, the entire socius becomes part and parcel of “the force of production itself.” The social mediation or distribution of production doesn’t so much disappear as it intensifies—which, as I’ve argued in prior chapters, is to say it saturates the socius, becoming lighter, more ubiquitous, more efficient. Marxian “real subsumption” is, in short, transversally linked to the birth of Foucault’s biopower.24 So, with the “Fragment on Machines” as the nineteenth-century background, the deployment of Foucault within contemporary autonomist Marxism goes something like this: the post-Fordist economic logic of financial privatization (“finance capital” or “globalization”—what Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri call “Empire”) has its cultural upshot in the complete triumph of Foucaultian biopower. Autonomists, then, insist on an important distinction between discipline and biopower (a distinction that I’ve discussed in Chapter 2, and one Foucault himself makes

Foucault’s Infamous Ethics    very clearly in the final lecture of the Society Must Be Defended series). Following the intense saturation of biopower’s concepts and practices within everyday life, contemporary capitalism has not gone about setting boundaries on work, but rather has sought to increase work’s saturation into the very fiber of everyday life. Think of yourself at home, answering e-mail at midnight. A highly intensified mode of biopower, then, is what one might call the “operating system” of contemporary economic and cultural life, at least in the so-called first world.

III. I think that the great changes that occurred between Greek society, Greek ethics, Greek morality, and how the Christians viewed themselves are not in the code but in what I call the “ethics,” which is the relation to oneself. —Foucault, “On the Genealogy of Ethics”

Oddly enough, such a genealogy of contemporary biopower would suggest that what we (whoever “we” might turn out to be) have in common is not so much our public lives (our fragmented disciplinary roles as citizen, teacher, activist, worker), but our private lives (our immanent and continuous construction of a lifestyle, a sexuality, an identity). If there is something that we might call the realm of the contemporary “common,” that vector of power that directly connects the cultural to the economic, for better or worse Foucaultian biopower will show us that this common takes up residence in the private realm, not the public sphere.25 A bit more abstractly, I’d suggest that globalized finance capital marks a transmutation in the very notion and function of “value” itself. The increasing privatization of economic value has been easy enough to point out: during the past twenty years, public assets have been handed over to private corporations in the name of “market efficiency,” and the disparities of wealth distribution in the United States have grown to nearly unbelievable proportion. These are well known—but still shocking—versions of the more and the less: more than 75 percent of the wealth in the United States is held by fewer than 10 percent of the population; the richest 1 percent of individuals owns about 40 percent of the country’s wealth. In 2005, the wealthiest 1/10th of 1 percent of individuals in the United States enjoyed about the same amount of income as the

   Foucault’s Infamous Ethics bottom 50 percent—which is to say, in a country of almost 300 million people, the 300,000 at the top collectively earned as much as the 150 million people at the bottom.26 But what, I wonder, do we make of the equally intense, though much less commented-upon, cultural privatization of value that’s happening across artistic and educational realms as well? Consider, for example, the following trends in recent American cultural production: —The memoir, with its emphasis on private experience, is clearly the literary form of our time—intensifying the almost complete triumph of the personal voice in contemporary American poetry. And, if personal voice and experience have triumphed at the high cultural end of the literary spectrum, they're even more ubiquitously on display in the more popular segments of the book market. Indeed, if you’ve trolled the bookstore or the best-seller lists lately, you’ll see that an emphasis on revealing personal narrative has become integral to everything from managing corporations to coaching basketball. These days, even something as legendarily mundane as military service is packaged as a self-actualization technique (“Be All You Can Be”). Likewise, American politics is saturated with this confessional tone, on both sides of the aisle: Bill Clinton’s constant confessions set a tone for a political style that was only intensified by George W. Bush (the confessed alcoholic) and his intensely “personal” political style. Indeed, a “deeply personal vision” of some kind seems to be a prerequisite for any kind of public success these days. —The “body” (that site of negotiation between public and private, inside and outside) has become the academic topic of our generation. In a related vein, the hottest topic on the literary and cultural theory futures market these days seems to be “affect” (or, even more straightforward, a renewed emphasis on “emotion” or “feeling”). —The home is the new work and play space of our time—leading to an unprecedented privatization of the culture and entertainment industries: high-speed Internet, digital-cable and satellite

Foucault’s Infamous Ethics    TV, home-theater systems, and pay-per-view movies. And when one leaves home, one steps into a home on wheels, an SUV or a minivan that’s built specifically to mirror the womblike, privatized comfort of home. Or even if you’re walking, you can cocoon yourself within the personal soundtrack of the iPod—that is, if you’re not talking on your cell phone. What Deleuze and Guattari call the “territorial refrains” of home have been intensified and made more transportable in the last five or ten years.27 —In popular music, think of the rise of grunge and rap in the 1990s. Both of those (very different) forms are or were absolutely dedicated to some notion of subjective authenticity and the revelation of personal experience. In contrast to the collective, angry punk music of the 1970s, think of the fragile, wounded subjectivity that haunts 1990s Nirvana or Pearl Jam songs—not to mention the hyperinteriorized affect of contemporary American indie-rock “emo” figures like Elliot Smith, Will Oldham, or Chan Marshall. And one might note that virtually every successful rapper or neorapper raps largely about him- or herself: Snoop Dogg raps about Snoop Dogg, Eminem about Eminem. —The discourse surrounding the planning and building of the World Trade Center memorial reminds us of the more-or-less permanent innovation in public monuments and public memory put forth in Maya Lin’s 1982 design for the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington DC: our public memorials are no longer the heavy, hulking statues and phallic structures of the past, but serial invocations of individual heroism. In terms of public memorialization of the past, these days it’s all about the names, the people. The stunning popular success of Ken Burns–style historiography in the United States is yet another instance of this tendency: Burns’s visual and narrative histories of the Civil War, not to mention professional baseball and jazz, all point out one simple cultural truth: history isn’t real to “the public” in the contemporary United States until and unless it’s run through the ringer of individual subjects and their interior, private experiences. (One suspects this phenomenon also has some bearing on the huge success of Mel Gibson’s

   Foucault’s Infamous Ethics Passion of the Christ. Presumably, everybody knows the plot, so it’s not suspense that brought them to the cineplex in droves; both proponents and detractors of the film point to its highly charged affective focus on Christ’s personal, private suffering.) —In the university during the past twenty years, we’ve seen the triumph of student-centered process pedagogies of various kinds— peer learning, portfolio grading, reader-response criticisms, making education personally “relevant” to the students. Specifically within English departments, where I live, one need only look at the nationwide boom in creative-writing majors and classes for confirmation of personal experience’s return to centrality. —Major sporting events, such as the Olympics or even the Kentucky Derby, have become orgies of personal revelation, at least so far as the American TV coverage of them is concerned. Whether we know anything at all about the ins and outs of speed skating, pole vaulting, or horse racing, we’re all familiar with the endless stories of athletes whose heroic recovery from Some Terrible Disease fuels their drive for Olympic Gold, or the horse trainer who saved a bunch of kids from a plane crash, and now he brings that same fierce dedication to his work at the track. —Indeed, the great “public” debates of the American present are largely debates about the private: from abortion to virtual surveillance (credit reports, Internet trackers, cameras in our public spaces), from gay marriage to the security concerns raised by the Patriot Act and the so-called War on Terror, it seems that shape and scope of the formerly private sphere is one of the primary fronts where the public debates of the near future will be fought. All these things are, it seems to me, part of this “smear” of biopower across the social and economic spectrum. Oddly enough, though, the artistic or cultural forms of “the privatization of value” are seldom discussed as further lamentable symptoms of neoliberal economics, but rather as bulwarks against that very logic: which is to say, an emphasis on the small, private, intimate, noncommodified, seemingly self-empowering moments of everyday life is often thought to offer us a kind of swerve

Foucault’s Infamous Ethics    around the logics of the market and its inhuman profit motive. Think globally, resist locally, as they say. Which if nothing else presents us with an interesting problem: just as the subject seems definitively to have disappeared into a virtual ether (we are all posthuman, we are all cyborgs), something like an individual “voice” is back on the cultural landscape, and in a big way. This odd relation between economic privatization and cultural privatization leaves us with a series of pressing questions: Is there a way to understand this cultural turn to privatization, other than ideologically (that is, as a kind of compensation or wish fulfillment: at a historical moment when the interior feelings of any particular private individual count for close to nothing on the global economic and political stage, these feelings come back with an ideological vengeance, displaced and contained in the cultural arena)? Are celebrations of individuals and their intimate experiences merely cultural compensation for an economic system that renders the individual’s private feelings and desires almost completely moot? In short, one might wonder whether the turn to privatized interiority as the privileged locus of cultural value is merely a regressive symptom of privatization’s triumph in the economic realm? This, I think, is a most tempting conclusion—and I’m not sure that I disagree with it. But, as much as I’m attracted to the tidiness of this conclusion, here I want to question it, precisely using the fulcrum of Foucaultian biopower. So, let me attempt to turn the screw yet another notch. Maybe what we’re seeing in the turn to the private in recent American cultural production isn’t so much a retreat from the world of politics and engagement, but precisely the rendering of Foucaultian ethics (the relation to the self ) as the new frame of reference for, and line of flight from, our public discourse. In short, the biopolitical “ethical realm” is the thing that we all have in common. If since the 1980s we’ve seen an unprecedentedly intense invasion of the personal and the private by the dictates of the market (the unmediated impingement of the economic on our formerly private lives), perhaps this turn to reconsidering the ethical or the personal is not so much a quietistic desire to get back behind the complexities of contemporary life and find the “real me” through the courting of “intense” personal or transgressive experience, as much as it is

   Foucault’s Infamous Ethics a direct and widespread cultural response to the current economic situation—where capitalism has already worked its way into every fiber of our “private” lives. To take that biopolitical colonization of the private seriously, one would almost have to turn to an examination of our relations to ourselves—precisely to see where this mode of ethics might be able to take us, or where it might trap us.

IV. I cannot write the history of the future, and I am also rather clumsy at foreseeing the past. However, I would like to try to grasp what is happening right now, because these days nothing is finished, and the dice are still being rolled. —Foucault, “Mythical Leader”

So, what’s the upshot of all this specifically for Foucaultian studies in the age of globalization? First, against the nearly ubiquitous critical consensus concerning the late Foucault (the sense that he changed terrain radically and “returned to the subject” to recover a fairly traditional ethics of subjective authenticity and artistic self-creation toward the end of his career), this genealogy of biopower and swerve through a slightly different tradition further bulwarks my argument that the late Foucault doesn’t soften his stance toward the subject or simply decide to become a neobourgeois thinker of artistic individuality. Rather, his research itinerary is a continuous one, and it leads him directly to biopower, to the subject and the “private” relation to the self. Foucault “discovers” the emergence of biopower through his research, and the workings of biopower in turn commit him to examining different, ever-more-micrological sites of power’s deployment and functionality. One might say that discipline as a form of power commits you to doing research on institutions, insofar as it’s a highly mediated and site-specific form of training. Biopower, by contrast, pretty much commits you to a research itinerary concerning subjects and their relations to themselves—the production of their supposedly “personal” states and everyday lives. In short, the subject or the relation to the self is not something that Foucault decides to affirm toward the end of his life (after having excoriated it in his early work); he doesn’t, in short, change his mind or abandon his earlier itinerary—from the structuralist dream of

Foucault’s Infamous Ethics    anonymity to a neohumanism of the self. On the contrary: the carrying out of his research itinerary precisely leads to the historical discovery of biopower, and hence he “discovers” as well that the subject (especially its so-called private life or relation to itself ) has become the crucial pivot of power since the nineteenth century. From start to finish, you have to go where power leads you, and Foucault’s own research on the genealogy of power led Foucault directly to the “private” subject. Maybe we are all now akin to Foucault’s “infamous” men and women—known, even in our most intimate moments or to ourselves, only through our confrontations with power: our embrace of and flight from power, our turning toward and away from power. Perhaps this helps us in addition to make more sense of the late Foucault’s claim that ethics concerns one’s relation to the self, while politics is the realm of the other: the self and the other are both inexorably exterior sets of relations. Foucaultian ethics concerns governing the forces that come to bear on the self, while politics concerns governing the forces that come to bear on the other, but both of those modalities of force originate from “outside” the individual subject. A swerve through the discourses of autonomist Marxism provides a productive way “at” this problem of the subject and biopower in Foucault because it brings Foucault’s historical research program forward into the present moment—it circles us back to the question of today. But just as importantly, I think getting to the ubiquitous “private” realm of Foucaultian ethics through the pivot of finance and economics recasts some of the allergies that many of us (including me) have toward such discussions of the so-called personal realm. In short, research into the sociopolitical realm of economics proper leads you to the private sphere, to biopower in its most intense manifestations.28 Economics leaves a powerful stamp (though not necessarily the most powerful stamp) on everyday life. And, for me at least, it’s a privileged site for this ethical inquiry precisely because it tends to take some of the rarified wind out of “aesthetics of the self ” discussions in and around Foucault criticism. Sure, the practices of making your life a work of art are deeply ethical sites, cogs in the wheel of deploying and resisting biopower. But so is constantly looking for work, checking your e-mail twenty-five times a day, going to tedious excellence seminars, or commuting to your job. Rare or scarce cultural events are not the only places where “who we are” is under constant construction. If Foucault is right, biopower remains as mundane

   Foucault’s Infamous Ethics as it is ubiquitous, and an emphasis on economic biopower, rather than a primary emphasis on the aesthetics of self-overcoming through high-end “transgressive” experience, helps keep this everyday fact front and center. Refusal, resistance, becoming-other, turning your face away from power in flight: these are the common facts, not the scarce commodities, of contemporary biopolitical life. If we’re choosing Foucault greatest hits, I’ll take “Lives of Infamous Men” every time over “Preface to Transgression.” By way of a conclusion for this chapter, let me return to the “Foucault greatest hit” that opened it: “I am no doubt not the only one who writes in order to have no face.” I guess you could say that what I’ve been trying to do in this chapter, indeed in the whole of this book, is read or translate that sentence otherwise, to drain it of some of the exceptionalist or avant-gardist implications seemingly buried therein. Foucault’s original French is particularly helpful to me in this regard: “Plus d’un, comme moi sans doute, écrivent pour n’avoir plus de visage.” Quite literally and flatfootedly, word by word, one could translate it as “more than one, like me without doubt, write in order not to have a face”: horribly infelicitous as it is, I actually like that rendering. A bit more idiomatically, it might be rendered “Many, like me undoubtedly, write in order not to have a face.” A few things about this translation issue: note that the subjective exceptionalism of the printed translation (“I am no doubt not the only one who writes in order to have no face”) is tempered considerably by the French: Foucault begins here not with himself, but with others; in fact, many others, literally “more than one.” And Foucault—if that proper name indeed names the “moi” of the sentence—arrives not at the beginning of the sentence, in the grammatical place of the subject, but in an appositive clause of afterthought: the sentence begins not with the confident subjective imperialism of “I am no doubt,” but the hesitation and multiple imbrication of “Many, like me undoubtedly. . . . ” In short, the many—the “more than one”—comes before the I, both in this famous sentence and in Foucault’s infamous ethics on the whole. Many, like Foucault undoubtedly, are engaged in the experimental process of fleeing from the punitive categories of contemporary moralistic subjectivity. Such profoundly ethical work is, then, anything but scarce—it is the work of all of us, every day. To paraphrase Marx, it’s the historical

Foucault’s Infamous Ethics    work that goes on behind the back of thinking. Ethics, then, finds its origin or its end not in response to the unique and overwhelming face-toface—not even in the subjective heroics of “facing up” to power. Rather, ethics finds its warrant and its weapons everywhere in flight, escape, in an incessant, radically common movement: elsewhere.

chapter 5

Resisting, Foucault And if I don’t ever say what must be done, it isn’t because I believe that there’s nothing to be done; on the contrary, it is because I think that there are a thousand things to do, to invent, to forge, on the part of those who, recognizing the relations of power in which they’re implicated, have decided to resist or escape them. From this point of view all of my investigations rest on a postulate of absolute optimism. —Foucault, Remarks on Marx

By far and away, “resistance” remains the humanist or neohumanist concept most consistently affirmed in so-called post- or antihumanist thought: after all, what is “humanism” (what is “freedom”) if it’s not about resistance to domination? Of course, in the wake of Foucault, poststructuralist theory will trouble this legacy by insisting that there is not a (human) power of resistance that is somehow wholly other to the (inhuman) powers of domination. The power relation is not well characterized by reference to what Foucault calls the “binary skeleton” of sovereignty: power versus resistance. However, the oppositional pathos surrounding “resistance” has been taken up into contemporary theory almost wholesale—that is, with surprisingly little commentary or hesitation concerning its potential costs. Political and cultural theorists of all stripes have, for the past decades, been involved in a thoroughgoing interrogation and deconstruction of humanist notions like the gender and class markers hidden by “universal” notions of the autonomous individual and the privileges of consciousness. But there’s been hardly a peep

Resisting, Foucault    concerning the status of resistance as a holdover category of humanism. It would seem, then, that in recent theoretical discourse, resistance costs us less than these other neohumanist concepts—or, conversely, perhaps this suggests that it would simply cost political thinking too much to question the thematics of resistance. But I want to open this chapter, and begin winding down this book, by polemically opening the question: Is the thematic of “resistance” an essentially benign or necessary legacy of humanism, one that would be too expensive for any politically engaged theorizing to jettison? Resistance to what, one might ask? If we learn nothing else from Foucault, it’s the axiom that force or power produces “truth,” and truth can serve the ends of domination just as surely as it produces resistance. That being the case, we can certainly launch a sustained critique concerning some of knowledge’s or power’s effects (local or even global instances of domination or totalization, such as the staggering inequity of global wealth), but we can hardly position ourselves “against” power, wealth, or truth itself in any kind of wholesale way, insofar as any kind of effective or productive critique will have to work toward redeploying those very resources of power, truth, and/or wealth. As Foucault writes, “We have to produce the truth in the same way, really, that we have to produce wealth, and we have to produce the truth in order to be able to produce wealth.”1 Using the ontological vocabulary of the Derridean il y a or the Heideggerian es gibt, one might say that “there is power’s productivity” in Foucault, so one must always work with or alongside that productivity in some ways: not merely denying or resisting truth, power, or wealth, but attempting to articulate and deploy them otherwise. Hence, as I’ve argued throughout prior chapters, the primary Foucaultian theoretical apparatus and toolkit is one of “intensification”: which is to say that critique becomes a matter of attempting to extend, broaden, or saturate certain effects within a given field, while trying to constrict, limit, or downplay other effects. It is, in any case, within an affirmative negotiation of a field’s intense play of forces (rather than through a negation coming from outside that field) that one might begin to locate Foucaultian “resistance.” I’ve already devoted substantial space in this book to reexamining some of the central (and seemingly settled) questions in the secondary literature surrounding Foucault: power, the body, the status of the “late”

   Resisting, Foucault work on ethics and subjectivity, and the relations among various periods in Foucault’s career. But I’ve saved this most contentious topic—the question and status of Foucaultian resistance—for last. Of course, there’s a sense in which this question has been front and center all along. For example, the critical consensus concerning the late Foucaultian work on subjectivity is already wholly bound up with questions of resistance, power, and the body: Foucault abandoned his genealogical work on power, or so the story goes, precisely because it seemed to preempt the possibility of resistance. If, as Seyla Benhabib puts it, “for Foucault every act of resistance is but another manifestation of an omni-present discourse-power complex,” then how can power possibly be resisted?2 In other words, the thematic of resistance is already at work animating the critical consensus concerning that crucial “turning point in his thought. In the late 1970s, he was moving from a preoccupation with technologies of domination to a new interest in what he termed the technologies of the self, as the foundation for a new form of spirituality and resistance to power.”3 Foucault’s entire corpus has (already) been read through this lens of enabling or enacting resistance, and even wildly divergent commentary on Foucault’s texts (pro and con, antihumanist and liberal-humanist) would seem to be motivated by a similar presupposition: that Foucault was engaged in a lifelong search for the practices, thoughts, or concepts that might constitute resistance to power. And the failure to realize or adequately deploy these practices, thoughts, or concepts would then finally be what explains his constant shifting of research topics and vocabularies after 1969. Whether it’s archaeology, genealogy, or ethics; prisons, sexuality, or care of the self; protest groups, S&M, or acid trips in the desert, Foucault is constantly changing his critical and theoretical approaches precisely because he’s always on the hunt for new and elusive practices of resistance. To say that resistance functions as a mantra for Foucault criticism is perhaps even to understate the case—it’s really that ubiquitous a topic. However, in the (admittedly perverse, though hopefully Foucaultian) spirit of this book’s earlier chapters and their attempts to, let’s face it, resist the prevailing critical consensus concerning the Foucaultian project (to take Foucault beyond the dominant critical picture of Foucault), here I’d like to suggest that accounting for or locating such “resistance” is not

Resisting, Foucault    really a huge problem in Foucault’s work. Or at least not in the counterreading of the middle and late Foucault that this book tries to perform.4 How can I say something that obviously counterfactual and perverse: Locating resistance is not a particularly difficult or vexing topic in Foucault’s texts? Well, a couple of preliminary considerations. First, one might note that Foucault doesn’t discuss the question of resistance per se very often within his published texts. Nor, one might quickly point out, does he do so concerning something as obviously central to his thought as “power”: there are no more than about a dozen pages in Foucault’s books (D&P 23–31; HS 1:92–98) where he overtly and schematically discusses the theoretical status of power. There are of course dozens of interviews where he takes up and clarifies both specific and general questions surrounding power, and there’s the late explanatory essay “The Subject and Power” (written specifically as an addendum to Dreyfus and Rabinow, the first full-length study of Foucault in English). But I bring up this odd paucity of published pages on the question of power to highlight something that’s been informing my analysis of Foucault all along: almost all the (theoretical and practical) heavy lifting in Foucault’s books is done in the enactment of their analyses, rather than through the argumentative induction or deduction of principles concerning the general status of this or that phenomenon—power, the body, or resistance. My agenda here is not to suggest that, given the relative scarcity of overt reflection on the topic in Foucault’s books, the secondary literature has somehow brazenly and mistakenly fabricated the centrality of resistance in Foucault, any more than this critical literature has foisted upon Foucault the questions of “power” or “the body.” These topics are of course all over Foucault’s texts, especially the middle and late work that I’m focusing on. But these phenomena are not “all over” Foucault as conceptual or theoretical topics to be clarified in a series of refining analyses—in the way that “Being,” for example, is “all over Heidegger.” If you want to figure out what power is in Foucault, you have to read the books that take up this question and follow the “how” of their analyses, rather than concentrating primarily on the dozen or so pages of “what” he has to say about power in general (though of course this holds to a large degree for thinkers like Heidegger as well). Power is nothing other than what it does—power is an act or a situation, a relation among

   Resisting, Foucault forces—and this provocation extends as well to diagnosing or charting the “power” of Foucault’s analyses. I would in fact argue that even his most obviously “philosophical” work, The Archaeology of Knowledge, constitutes for Foucault the performance of a lively conceptual mutation rather than the dry theoretical thematization of transformative modes. After 1969, Foucault will never again publish a book in AK’s high-philosophical idiom, and most commentators take the performative aspect of AK, such as it has one, to consist largely of failure or frustration: while desperately trying to thematize and systematize his early career work in a foreign, neo-Kantian philosophical idiom, AK performs or represents the final exhaustion of the archaeological project, and that conceptual failure opens the way for the birth of genealogy (which in its turn fails because it proves to be too totalizing, opening the way for the late ethical work).5 Aside from the suspiciously teleological quality of this narrative (failure is the true royal road to higher knowledge: affirmation, negation, synthesis), these narratives of Foucault’s conceptual development ignore the account of change (as intensification) that is proffered through or in the very performance of Foucault’s analyses. Historical change for Foucault is never primarily driven by a series of consciousness-raising conceptual realizations leading to “better” theoretical and political schemas—a top-down notion of knowledge’s progressive refinement and a reinforcement of the priority of knowledge over action. AK, on a strictly speaking “Foucaultian” account, is not well treated as an after-the-fact report on an early career mistake, or a change of heart that the Author had concerning the structuralist legacy of his 1960s archaeological work. AK is not, in other words, a methodological document whose ultimate failure opens the door to a higher knowledge—an attempted totalization gone awry. I would argue rather that the book itself is or enacts the transformation from archaeology to genealogy; it does not “represent” that transformation.6 Similarly, the play of power and resistance that we’re trying to describe here is enacted, not merely represented, summarized, or signified by Discipline and Punish and History of Sexuality, volume 1; likewise, the ethical concern with the relation to the self is performed, rather than primarily argued for, in the last works. Many things change in Foucault’s wandering research itinerary, but his commitment to performative

Resisting, Foucault    transformation, as intensification, remains constant. Foucault’s strategic changes of topic and method comprise, then, not a Hegelian teleology of epistemological failure leading to higher knowledge; rather, Foucault’s mutations perform his harnessing, jujitsu response to the “nonteleological” quality of power itself. For Foucault, power is neither a grand cage nor a drama of successive failures leading to greater wisdom, but a series of local, sometimes crazy (but still rational, all-too-rational) schemas, deployed almost blindly, certainly experimentally, with no centralized organizing principle. On Foucault’s account, power doesn’t work through (or, in its nonsovereign modes, even really desire) large-scale finality or a closed teleology. So why, Foucault might ask, should his critical analyses of power expend a lot of energy either fighting or trying to emulate, in however ironic a mode, the sovereign specter of totalization? Foucault writes, “The prison, the hospital, or the asylum are not general principles. . . . They are explicit programs; we are dealing with sets of calculated, reasoned prescriptions in terms of which institutions are meant to be recognized, spaces arranged, behaviors regulated. If they have an ideality, it is that of a programming left in abeyance, not that of a general but hidden meaning.”7 Foucaultian truth—the truth of resistance as well as the truth of power—is not organized around the grand clash of binary oppositions, the unfolding of a secret or hidden principle, or the continued (material) frustration of a (transcendent) ideal. As Foucault insists, “Thus it is not a change of content (a refutation of old errors, recovery of old truths), nor is it a change of theoretical form (renewal of a paradigm, modification of systematic ensembles). It is a question of what governs statements.”8 In short, truth is a political question, which is importantly not to say that truth is socially constructed by those who “have” power, or that what counts as the truth is somehow centrally orchestrated by a central class or dominant ideology. Such Foucaultian political histories of “truth as error” remain profoundly heterogeneous to universal stories of exposed error leading to a higher version of truth: These programs don’t take effect in the institutions in an integral way; they are simplified, or some are chosen and not others; and things never work out as planned. But what I wanted to show is that this difference is not one between

   Resisting, Foucault the purity of the ideal and the disorderly impurity of the real, but that in fact there are different strategies that are mutually opposed, composed, and superposed so as to produce permanent and solid effects that can be perfectly well understood in terms of their rationality, even though they don’t conform to the initial programming; this is what gives the resulting apparatus its solidity and suppleness.9

Totalization or ham-fisted determination, as an effect, certainly happens or can happen in Foucault’s account of power. But totalization comes about as an effect, if it does at all, not simply or even primarily because of some centralized intention or design to totalize or dominate, but rather through the intense saturation of certain modes or practices. In other words, power is more or less efficient, totalizing, or dominating not in its intentions, but in its outcomes. This commitment to examining the supple qualities of power might explain why, contra thinkers like Giorgio Agamben, the Nazi concentration camp doesn’t comprise a privileged figure or site of reflection in Foucault. This is the case not, I would argue, because the death camp is an uninteresting or too-pathos-ridden site of analysis, but because it’s an “expensive” site of analysis insofar as it gives the impression that power is an inherently totalizing cage that follows an iron, centralized logic dedicated to wholly eradicating otherness. Using the concentration camp as a figure or metonym for power itself is costly insofar as it tends to figure all power as abomination pure and simple, organized from a central site with a central intention to destroy difference—which power surely is in some contexts (as in the cases of the concentration camp, war, or ethnic cleansing), but just as surely isn’t in terms of the school, the workplace, sexual relations, knowledge, or even (importantly) the prison.10 There certainly are contexts and sites in the contemporary world where power remains “sovereign” and life is “bare” before it. But, from a Foucaultian point of view, Agamben’s thematics of bare life is theoretically expensive because it suggests that this drama of “bare life versus sovereign power” is (and always has been) the dominant form and secret of power everywhere in the West. Agamben writes, “In contrasting the ‘beautiful day’ of simple life with the ‘great difficulty’ of political bios . . . Aristotle may well have given the most beautiful formulation to the aporia that lies at the foundation of Western politics. The 24 centuries

Resisting, Foucault    that have since gone by have brought only provisional and ineffective solutions.”11 Although it’s impossible to envision Foucault’s probable response to Agamben’s usage and critique of Foucaultian “biopower,” one assumes that a genealogist like Foucault would be deeply suspicious of Agamben’s claim that the question of “life” today remains pretty much the same as it was twenty-four hundred years ago. Agamben’s notion is also expensive, in the Foucaultian sense, because of what it suggests concerning resistance: in Agamben, bare life “itself ” works as the limit, other, or privileged point of resistance to power (the exception that exposes the sovereign rule), rather than “life” being itself machined within that very power (which in Foucault is precisely an “optimistic” premise, as it spreads resistance across the field of everyday life and its contacts with power, rather than scarifying or sanctifying it in life-and-death clashes). As Foucault asks, in a kind of proleptic querying of Agamben’s deployment of biopolitics, “Are we unable to think of the intensity of the present except as the end of the world in a concentration camp? You see how poor our treasure of images really is!”12

Agency and Resistance I’ll have to admit to finding myself completely flummoxed when colleagues, people at conferences, or students ask about the “problem of agency” in Foucault, by which I initially assumed they meant that agency is somehow a scarce commodity or a rare thing in Foucault’s thinking, at least in the work on power. Saying that there is no or very little room for agency in Foucault’s genealogical work is, to my mind, a bit like saying there’s very little room for dialectic in Hegel, or there’s not enough Aristotle in Aquinas. Agency in Foucault, like dialectic in Hegel or Aristotle in Aquinas, is hardly scarce; in fact, it’s virtually all there is. Foucault studies practices, agents doing things, plain and simple (and recall it’s actually agency2 that he studies, insofar as it’s the actions that make the agents, rather than vice versa). A factory, a panopticon, or a sexual identity is nothing other than a series of interlocking practices: insofar as these things don’t exist as rigid abstract templates or as top-down exoskeletal impositions of a dominant capital-P Power, in Foucault’s work there’s

   Resisting, Foucault quite literally nothing but agency. There are in fact many more forms of “agency” than there are “agents.” Sexuality, surveillance, resistance: these things are verbs or deployments of force, or at least that’s what they are before they become attached to nouns, subjects, or states of being. Of course when I say this in reply to people’s “agency problem” with Foucault, it becomes just as clear (through their exasperated looks) that everyone already knows this. “Everything is a practice” is yet another cornerstone of the Foucault Consensus. My initial response to this “problem” in Foucault—there isn’t one, it’s all agency all the time—is never satisfying to anyone who is “troubled” by the “lack of agency” in Foucault’s work on power. Just as assuredly, though, everyone seems to agree that there’s no lack of Foucaultian agency in the mundane sense of practices constantly clashing with other practices, so I for a long time found the insistent recurrence of this question to be quite puzzling. It took me quite a while to figure this out, but it finally became clear to me that the “problem of agency” in Foucault is perhaps better stated as the problem of how to measure, predict, incite, or guarantee subjective resistance in the face of interpellating social norms. Agency, in short, is not simply action or the emergence of something that wasn’t there before, a happening; rather, agency is a code word for a subject performing an action that matters, something that changes one’s own life or the lives of others. Agency is doing something freely, subversively, not as a mere effect programmed or sanctioned by constraining social norms. This, I came to understand, is finally why I never got the “agency question”: it’s really a question about “authenticity.” The question is, where’s the “real” agency in Foucault—subjective agency that is “free,” not “merely” an effect of power? On this line of reasoning, the specific agent must in fact escape the all-encompassing, anonymous banality of doing if he or she is to be an effective force in the world. So, in an embarrassing 180-degree turn, I’m then forced to take back my initial attempt to answer the “agency question” in Foucault. It’s still not a problem, I insist, but that’s the case no longer because agency is everywhere, but far rather because it’s nowhere: there is literally no such thing as unconstrained subjective action in Foucault. This state of affairs comes about not simply because all subjects are always already beholden to power, but because power relations themselves comprise a field that is subject to the

Resisting, Foucault    heterogeneous microworkings of what Foucault calls “force.” Recall that, strictly speaking, the power relation in Foucault is not primarily poweron-body, body-on-body, or even power-on-power, but first and foremost it takes place at the microlevel of “force upon force”: power is “a set of actions on possible actions.”13 And there is no originary, unconstrained, or purely “active” force—as Foucault puts it, “there is no action that is unprovoked.”14 Force, as the capacity to do work, exists only in fields of relation, in terms of other forces: “What defines a relationship of power is that it is a mode of action that does not act directly and immediately on others. Instead, it acts up on their actions.”15 Here, of course, I could continue going round and round with my interlocutors, replaying a series of very interesting debates and entertaining challenges to Foucault’s discourse on power: Isn’t it still totalizing, despite these caveats? Isn’t there still at least a strategic necessity to articulating a space “outside” power in order to resist it? How does one account for individual or collective action in the absence of notions like “progress” or “freedom”? Rather than traveling that high road, going back and forth in a debate whose contours are well known, I’d like to return to, and try to develop, my first naïve response to the “agency problem” in Foucault: his post-1969 work is concerned with nothing other than action, practice, force. On this line of reasoning, the agency problem in Foucault, such as there is one, is not that agency is scarce or nonexistent, but that it’s everywhere, radically and inexorably common. How or why, we might ask ourselves, is that commonality (or one might even call it “banality”) a political problem or liability, something unthinkable if there is to be “authentic,” resistant political action? In short, rather than policing the critical neighborhood surrounding the “agency question,” I’d like to focus instead on a different, seemingly simpleminded conundrum: Why is the easy answer (“Action and resistance are literally everywhere, so don’t worry about them”) not enough to solve the “agency problem” in Foucault? Perhaps the first thing to note about the seeming inadequacy of that response is that commentators seldom, if ever, critique Foucaultian resistance for being “too totalizing” (after all, that’s power’s job). But if we follow out the picture of power we get from commentary on midcareer Foucault (in short, power is everywhere), we’d have to admit that

   Resisting, Foucault resistance is then by definition everywhere as well, insofar as it’s utterly axiomatic in Foucault that the “power of resistance” is not different in kind from the “power of domination.” Where there is force deployed, there is also resistance. This is crystal clear in Foucault: resistance or the possibility of resistance constitutes the cornerstone of the very definition of the “power relation,” which is importantly not simply a relation of domination (though domination may turn out to be an effect of the open and hazardous power relation). Foucault writes, specifically marking his difference from those Frankfurt School analyses dedicated to examining “how we have been trapped in our own history”: I would like to suggest another way to go further toward a new economy of power relations, a way that is more empirical, more directly related to our present situation, and one that implies more relations between theory and practice. It consists in taking the forms of resistance against different forms of power as a starting point. To use another metaphor, it consists in using this resistance as a chemical catalyst so as to bring to light power relations, locate their position, find out their point of application and the methods used. Rather than analyzing power from the point of view of its internal rationality, it consists of analyzing power relations through the antagonism of strategies.16

In a force-on-force logic of power, one can plausibly—though a bit misleadingly—deploy the slogan, “Resistance comes first,” precisely because in Foucault, the power relation literally emerges through antagonism or struggle.17 Power implies and produces resistance, so the easiest way to get a handle on power is to examine those sites at which resistance is or should be most intense: if you want to know what reason is, take a look at madness—and not so much in order to denounce madness’s exclusion from the realm of the reasonable, but precisely to examine the ways that madness has been included (as “other”) in the normative procedures of reason. In the norm-process, resistance comes first quite literally; resistance is what power works on and through. To say that resistance comes first is, then, only to insist again that power works “on” potentials, on other acts, remaking rather than simply deforming or dominating the nouns, the stuff that’s “already” there. The force relations (what can it do?) parse the things (what can it be?), rather than vice versa. So the first thing that you’d have to say about resistance is that it’s not a quality of subjects (“authenticity”), nor a property of

Resisting, Foucault    certain privileged practices (yoga, S&M, making your life a work of art). Rather, resistance exists as what Foucault calls a kind of “chemical catalyst” for diagnosing acts or forces (which can of course be deployed by subjects and obviously do exist in greater intensities in some practices than in others). As Foucault insists, “Liberty is a practice. So there may, in fact, always be a certain number of projects whose aim is to modify some constraints, to loosen, or even break them, but none of those projects can, simply by its nature, assure that people will have liberty automatically, that it will be established by the project itself. . . . Liberty is what must be exercised.”18 In any case, here’s my thought experiment concerning the problem of resistance in Foucault: if one says “the problem with Foucault is that resistance is everywhere,” it seems to me that one says exactly the same thing as the dominant critique of Foucault (“power is too totalizing”), but the former phrasing is perhaps even more damaging than the latter for liberal notions of political theory. In practice, I think it’s a much larger theoretical scandal and provocation to insist that “resistance is everywhere” in Foucault than it is to say that “domination is everywhere.” If domination is everywhere, the traditional jobs of neohumanist political theory are secured: pointing out oppression, giving voice to the oppressed, showing the way (however obliquely) toward freedom. If people are more controlled than they think they are, then there’s certainly a place for critics of ideology. But what if people are freer than they think they are? Whither political theory if people don’t need to be shown the way, if their agency is not scarce, rare, or in need of enlightenment?19 The difficulty surrounding the question of resistance for Foucaultian social theory is not how to refine techniques for mining this scarce thing called resistance from underneath the encrusted surface of totalized power (as if resistance were like gold, a rare and valuable oddity), but rather the question concerns ways to mobilize, focus, or intensify practices of resistance, insofar as they’re already all over the place. I use the gold image quite deliberately, as it seems to me that ours remains an old-fashioned, gold-standard thinking of resistance: if it’s not scarce, and it doesn’t refer to some grounding version of a “real thing,” then it’s not valuable. It’s not actual resistance, it’s just a programmed product of power. Foucault counters that type of thinking with his insistent focus

   Resisting, Foucault on what he calls “subjugated knowledges . . . knowledges from below”; or he counters a gold-standard thinking of political value more simply through his insistence on beginning with resistance, basing a critical analysis on “what people know (and this is by no means the same thing as common knowledge or common sense but, on the contrary, a particular knowledge, a knowledge that is local, regional, or differential, incapable of unanimity, and which derives its power solely from the fact that it is different from all the knowledges that surround it); it is the reappearance of what people know at a local level, of these disqualified knowledges, that made the critique possible.”20 Foucaultian resistance doesn’t begin with the addition or injection of some principle or practice that people don’t know (through a concept like ideology, which secretly explains and reveals what they’ve been doing all along); rather, Foucaultian critique focuses on the intensification and transversal connection of things that people do know. Resistance, on such a model, is hardly a scarce or rare commodity, and critique becomes something other than what I think remains our dominant picture of it: a high-end or very expensive commodity, revealed magician-like by unique men and women, and available only at scarce or obscure locations, such as academic monographs. The Foucaultian question or problem is not so much uncovering resistance, as it is a question of “tuning” it—finding channels, concepts, or practices that can link up and thereby intensify transversal struggles into larger, collective but discontinuous movements.21 This sense of “tuning” resistances may also shed some light on Foucault’s work concerning the Iranian Revolution, so harshly criticized as naïve and orientalist by Afary and Anderson. They turn their critical attention toward Foucault’s dispatches from “Iran in 1978 when Ayatollah Khomeini, leader of the Iranian Revolution, helped convince millions to risk their lives in the struggle against the shah. For Foucault, he seemed to become the personification of Nietzsche’s ‘will to power.’ ”22 And they make much of Foucault’s supposed misdiagnosis of Khomeini, who was (they helpfully remind us) not a Nietzschean superman offering a novel and hopeful “spiritual” form of resistance to Western capitalism, but a brutal, antimodern, antifeminist religious fanatic. Afary and Anderson, however, don’t pay enough attention to the sense in which Foucault deploys the word “spiritual,” which is not (as

Resisting, Foucault    they read it) the offering of some kind of backward-looking moral renewal based on the example of one “great” man, but a collective investment in inventing a new way of speaking the true, as a line of flight from an intolerable situation, such as that under the shah: “Isn’t the most general of political problems the problem of truth? How can one analyze the connection between ways of distinguishing true and false and ways of governing oneself and others? The search for a new foundation for each of these practices, in itself and relative to the other, the will to discover a new way of governing oneself through a different way of dividing up true and false—this is what I would call ‘political spirituality.’ ”23 Given this sense of “political spirituality,” I think it’s a grave mistake to see Foucault as a cheerleader for Khomeini or Islamic fundamentalism (any more than we’re to assume that he’s a big fan of other methods for “dividing up true and false”—madhouses, prisons, economics, or sexuality for that matter). It’s this new mode of intensification (new “ways of governing oneself ”) that Foucault sees on the rise in Iran in 1979, with Islamic clerics using cassette tapes and religious networks as ways of “tuning” resistance against the West. And as we’ve painfully learned in the years since Foucault’s death, this description of a new “political spirituality” is spot on, as are his early warnings about taking Islamic fundamentalism and global poverty seriously.24 Whether one likes it or not, fundamentalism circulates in the streets of the Islamic world largely as a form of intense resistance to the hegemony of Western-style values, or even more specifically against Western neoliberal capitalism. So either the West has to find a way to “tune” that resistance otherwise, or it seems likely that Islamic fundamentalism will continue to hold a monopoly on doing so.

Conclusion: Everyday Resistance In the end, Foucault’s genealogy of power is simultaneously and importantly also a genealogy of resistance. In a sovereign mode, power is concentrated on the king, and thereby so is resistance. As power becomes increasingly more capillary, more invested in everyday matters and everyday lives, so too an immense new field of possibility for resistance

   Resisting, Foucault is opened. “The everyday” in Foucault functions not as someplace untouched by power, but rather as a figure for the proliferation, saturation, and intensification of power (which is also to say, resistance) relations. As Foucault writes in “Lives of Infamous Men,” “There was never a thought that there might be, in the everyday run of things, something like a secret to raise, that the inessential might be, in a certain way, important, until the blank gaze of power came to rest on these minuscule commotions. The birth, consequently, of an immense possibility for discourse.”25 It’s axiomatic that where power goes in Foucault, there is resistance as well. With power’s discovery of “everyday life,” these dramas became infinitely more intense, more generalized, more ubiquitous: alongside power, resistance increasingly saturates the public sphere (“social” power), the family and the job (“disciplinary” power), and finally the subject’s very relation to itself (“biopower”). And this increasing intensity is cause neither for celebration nor despair.26 In Foucault’s work, it’s first and foremost a descriptive claim: as power becomes increasingly more invested in the minute details of our lives, so too have our modes of resistance become increasingly subtle and intense. In the end, continuing to insist on resistance’s scarcity is both expensive and disenabling, a version of the condescending conventional wisdom that most people don’t know what they’re doing. Well, Foucault might answer, sure they do,27 maybe not around strictly speaking theoretical questions (most people have very little compelling to say concerning the functioning of the categorical imperative in Kant), but people do tend to know their way around the questions of power and resistance in their own contexts. And even if they don’t, the resistance tools that most people desire are diagnostic ones, precisely because the potted solutions and concepts of midcentury social theory have, as I argue in the Preface, become the primary drivers of Information Age capitalism: “Stick it to the man!” your cell phone company urges you. This is of course not to say that sticking it to the man is good or bad advice, but to suggest that diagnostically, whatever sticking it to the man might comprise, it’s not to be depended on as an unproblematically “oppositional” or resistant strategy. “There are no machines of freedom, by definition,” Foucault reminds us.28 Just as our dominant understandings of power are becoming anachronistic, Foucault shows us that many of our categories of re-

Resisting, Foucault    sistance remain as holdovers from sovereign understandings of power. Which, again, isn’t to say those strategies of direct confrontation against centralized power are not effective in certain circumstances (as the sovereign mode of power has hardly disappeared altogether). But, genealogically speaking, sovereignty is no longer the dominant mode of power, no longer the only (or even really the primary) game in town. It may, in fact, be that resistance is the dominant mode of cultural power today, that virtual and actual practice through which all the others have to make their way. Indeed, it seems that we live at a historical point where most people will, given a traditional opportunity to choose among alternatives (like voting, for example), almost always choose something that looks to them like resistance, even if it works in obvious ways against what economists would call their best interests. This is true just as surely for poor folks in Kansas who vote Republican as it is for Palestinians who vote for Hamas, or South Americans who elect antiglobalization leaders. I take one of my primary cues in this line of reasoning concerning resistance from Deleuze’s “Desire and Pleasure” essay on Foucault, where he offers a friendly amendment to Foucault’s work on power and its relations to the question of resistance: “For myself, status of phenomena of resistance is not a problem; since lines of flight are primary determinations, since desire assembles the social field, it is rather the dispositifs of power that are both produced by these agencements and crushed or sealed off by them.”29 Such a questioning of the received discourse surrounding resistance is, of course, not merely to say that one always and necessarily assents or agrees to the status quo, but it does name a certain kind of question about how one best transforms this status quo. If, as Deleuze and Foucault both hold, power, pleasure, or desire don’t work through the repression or liberation of a preexisting humanist subject, but rather through incessant production of serial subjectivities, then what could it mean to “resist” power or desire? And doesn’t the vocabulary of resistance, however much we nuance it, entice us unconsciously to think that resistance is a relatively stable signifying quality of authentic subjects, rather than a hazardous and uncertain attribute of an a-signifying, social relation of force? As Nikolas Rose puts it in his book on Foucault, “The notion of resistance, at least as it has conventionally functioned within the analyses of self-proclaimed radicals, is too simple and flatten-

   Resisting, Foucault ing. . . . It is merely the obverse of a one-dimensional notion of power as domination. And it seems to imply a subject who resists out of bravery or heroism. But however noble the sentiment, in the politics of innovation and creation, courage is redundant.”30 Finally, given the radically nonhumanist form of power that we live within, we might have to wonder, along with Rose, Deleuze, and Foucault, whether it costs left theorizing too much to territorialize itself on the category of resistance, precisely because resistance implies or necessitates a kind of totalized, normative, repressive enemy and/or a kind of authenticity of subversive response?31 Concretely, I think we can see this “cost” of resistance being played out in contemporary cultural studies, much of which remains mired in a kind of dead-end bickering over what would constitute “authentic” resistance to an unhelpfully totalized notion of capitalism, the repressive enemy. Capitalism is changing rapidly all around us, but I often wonder whether our modes of resistance and response remain ineffective because they’re stuck in the era of the cold war, structured around a series of top-down binary oppositions that all come down to the master division between dominant/resistant terms: same/other, male/female, first world/ third world, culture/nature, norm/transgression. As Rose suggests, “Each binary suggests a principle of division between those political, technical, and ethical strategies that have made up our present and those that have opposed them. This way of dividing the matter is illusory. There is not a single discourse or strategy of power confronted by forces of resistance, but a series of conflicting points and issues of opposition, alliance and division of labour. And our present has arisen as much from the logics of contestation as from any imperatives of control.”32 In the end, perhaps this Foucaultian emphasis on irreducible experimental struggle, rather than a binary skeleton of power versus resistance, is merely to suggest that the diagnostic project of responding to “power” is ongoing, collective, and emerging at myriad discontinuous sites, as are the collective processes of constructing ways to hack the “dangerous” (rather than “bad”) contemporary world of accelerated capitalism. However, in the service of that project, the theme of “resistance” can often name a stopping point rather than a rallying cry—a moral condemnation or judgment rather than an ethical provocation or map. As Foucault insists, the critical project is not one where individual intellectuals judge

Resisting, Foucault    problems, but a more collective procedure organized around naming and responding to the problems themselves: I concern myself with determining problems, unleashing them, revealing them within the framework of such complexity as to shut the mouths of prophets and legislators: all those who speak for others and above others. It is at that moment that the complexity of the problem will be able to appear in its connection with people’s lives; and consequently, the legitimacy of a common enterprise will be able to appear through concrete questions, difficult cases, revolutionary movements, reflections, and evidence. . . . It is all a social enterprise.33

In other words, it seems that if one is to take Foucault’s emphasis on social force seriously, then one has to start where one is, with the provocation to respond to “today,” a particular problem or set of problems, and one is forced to end with something other than a condemnation or judgment—the tautological conclusion that X or Y is “dominating,” “bad,” or “false.” Let’s give credit where credit is due: it’s really not a matter of whether anyone believes the bullshit served up by her boss or his elected officials, or whether this bullshit is really true or not. Those binary questions of hermeneutic depth aside, we are nevertheless left with the forceful fact this bullshit certainly does produce effects: we certainly do have to respond—outside the economies of representation, assured failure, moralizing judgment, and meaning.34 In short (and in conclusion), it seems that while Foucault has been gone for more than two decades now, his thought continues to present us with an unmet provocation or algorithm for a political theory of the present: work on contemporary culture must consistently be reinscribed outside the binary realm of resistance versus power. Resistance is not a rare attribute of certain heroic subjects, but an essential fact of everyone’s everyday struggles with power. And new strategies and weapons are born every day out of the toolboxes of theory and practice, which is something we can only imagine would have pleased Foucault immensely. As he wrote while he was working on D&P in 1974, “I would like my books to be a kind of tool-box which others can rummage through to find a tool which they can use however they wish in their own area. . . . I would like the little volume that I want to write on disciplinary systems to be

   Resisting, Foucault useful to an educator, a warden, a magistrate, a conscientious objector. I don’t write for an audience. I write for users, not readers.”35 I hope, in my little volume on Foucault, to have contributed to making his work on power (and the rest of his mid- and late career itinerary) useful again in the present, by restocking the box with Foucaultian tools and weapons that we can deploy in our everyday work of responding to the intense singularity that is the present. To take “Foucault beyond Foucault,” in this sense, is finally only to turn Foucault’s work back toward his questions, the questions of “today.”

Notes

introduction 1.  Foucault, “Subject and Power,” 127. 2.  Han, Foucault’s Critical Project, xiii. 3.  Badiou, Infinite Thought, 6. 4. As Foucault lay dying in a Paris hospital room in June 1984, across the Atlantic in New York (then as now, the center of the global financial world) the Dow Jones Industrial Average was struggling to maintain the 1,200 mark, a milestone it had reached more than a year earlier. It wouldn’t break 1,300 until the spring of 1985, though in those days a 100-point gain in the space of a few years was impressive, considering it had taken more than seventy-five years for the Dow to break the 1,000 mark (1896–1972), and a full decade to get from 1,000 to 1,100 (1972–83). As I write this in the fall of 2006, the Dow has surpassed the 12,000 mark. In short, it took eighty-seven years for the Dow to break 1,200, where it stood when Foucault died in 1984. In the ensuing few decades, it has gone up well over 10,000 points—approximately 1,000 percent. Whether it lasts and whatever it may “mean” locally or globally, this recent and unprecedented intensification within the financial sphere is something worth thinking about. 5. Deleuze and Foucault, “Intellectuals and Power,” 212. 6.  Ibid. chapter 1 1. Danaher et al., Understanding Foucault, 150. 2.  Jameson, Postmodernism, 5. 3.  McNay, Foucault, 133. 4. Anderson, Way We Argue Now, 5 5. Danaher et al., Understanding Foucault, 150–51. 6.  Wolin, “Foucault the Neohumanist?” n.p. 7.  McNay, Foucault, 134. 8.  Frank, “Why Johnny Can’t Dissent,” n.p.

   Notes 9.  Foucault, “Birth of Biopolitics,” 206–7. 10.  Ibid., 207. 11.  Foucault, “What Is Enlightenment?” 51. 12.  Ibid., 50. 13.  Ibid., 54. 14.  Ibid., 57. 15.  Foucault, “Introduction to Canguilhem,” 10. 16.  Ibid., 9. 17.  Ibid., 8. 18.  Ibid., 24. 19.  Ibid., 9. 20.  Foucault, Archaeology of Knowledge, 12. 21. Lotringer sums up the critical consensus surrounding “What Is Enlightenment?” (and, inadvertently, also nicely restates Foucault’s “blackmail of the Enlightenment”) in this editorial note to The Politics of Truth: “Foucault’s examination of Kant’s ‘Was ist Aufklärung,’ in a sense, is the most ‘American’ moment of Foucault’s thinking, since it is in America that the necessity of tying down his own reflection to that of the Frankfurt School (Habermas, Benjamin) becomes visible” (237). 22.  It would be interesting, in this regard, to compare Foucault’s insistence on the a-subjective concept with Adorno’s 1963 lecture course on Kant, published as Problems of Moral Philosophy, especially around the question of “givenness” in Kantian morality: “The fact is that you will only do justice to Kant if you stop believing that everything in him can be deduced from everything else. . . . This [irrational] essence is the fact that in Kant the subject has not yet become the principle that presumes to be able to deduce from within itself the totality of everything that exists” (36). 23.  Foucault, “Introduction to Canguilhem,” 16. 24.  Ibid., 24. 25. Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, 95. 26.  Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” 356. 27.  Foucault, “Foucault,” 2; my emphasis. 28.  Foucault, “Structuralism and Poststructuralism,” 89. 29.  Ibid. 30.  Ibid. 31.  Ibid. 32.  See Funkadelic’s 1971 album of the same name. 33.  Foucault, “Truth and Power,” 307. For an incisive discussion of Foucault and the methodologies of Marxism, see Han, Foucault’s Critical Project, 113–15. For a more sustained treatment, see Poster’s Foucault, Marxism, and History.

Notes    34.  Foucault, “Risks of Security,” 72. 35.  Foucault, “Structuralism and Poststructuralism,” 100. 36.  Foucault, “Les mailles,” 186. 37.  Ibid., 187. 38.  Foucault, Foucault Live, 140. 39.  Ibid., 141. 40. Of course, many others have blazed the trail in performing this kind of “affirmative” analysis of capital and culture. See especially works by Deleuze, Jameson, Read, Surin, and Watkins. 41.  Foucault, “Structuralism and Poststructuralism,” 88; my emphasis. 42.  Foucault, “Birth of Biopolitics,” 202. chapter 2 1. Compare Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 23–31; History of Sexuality, 1:92– 98. 2. All of these explanations can be found within the three Foucault biographies—Eribon, Macey, and Miller—but it’s worth remarking on the fact that Foucault is unique among contemporary theorists in the ways that his biography is conflated with—or thought to be relevant to—academic criticism of his work. In short, these explanations quickly migrate from biographical information to explanatory arguments in books and articles. See Halperin for some interesting thoughts on how Foucault’s homosexuality affects the biographical impulse within Foucault criticism. 3.  In the 1970 foreword to the English edition of The Order of Things, xiv. 4.  Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 136 (hereafter cited in-text as D&P). 5.  See Williams, Marxism and Literature. Although this may or may not be legitimate, I’m trying to use Williams’s terminology here in a diagnostic sense, outside any judgments concerning the “oppositional” or “authentic” quality of the residual or emergent in relation to the dominant. For Williams, “emergent” is not merely a descriptive term, but always carries the sense of “oppositional” (as opposed to “alternative,” which merely serves as an extension of dominant practice). Williams’s project is, of course, closely tethered to a teleological understanding of Marxist class politics: in short, the working class becomes the template for any “emergent” phenomenon. This kind of project would surely seem suspicious to Foucault, but here I’m simply trying to use Williams’s terminology in a descriptive sense. 6.  See Hobbes’s Leviathan, where he outlines “the Essence of Soveraignty” as residing in the following “incommunicable and inseparable” powers: “The Power to coyn Mony; to dispose of the estate and persons of Infant heires; to have praemption in Markets; and all other Statute Praerogatives” (236). Al-

   Notes though this last power seems to trump all the others—provoking a laughter akin to that of the Borges list that opens Foucault’s Order of Things—Hobbes’s concern is showing that while “the Soveraign” possesses all rights (economic, criminal, national defense) over the commonwealth and its citizens, some of the commonwealth’s internal “Statute Praerogatives” can legitimately be “transferred by the Soveraign” (236). In short, Hobbes’s “Soveraign” can delegate his absolute economic and criminal authority (to markets and courts), while holding back his ultimate right of “praemption.” But the sovereign cannot, under any circumstances, delegate his ultimate power of national defense—else he would not be a sovereign, on Hobbes’s terms. 7.  Rights discourse constitutes what one might call a “figurative” version of subjective possibility. In Foucaultian terms, discipline is more effective than the figurative discourses of rights partially because it’s more abstract and at the same time more concrete—its target is virtual and futural, what you do rather than who you are; which is to say, paradoxically, discipline’s targets are more murky and thereby its effects are more literal. In terms of rights discourse, you either are or aren’t free to learn a skill (in the abstract), but if you study that skill (if you submit yourself to the discipline of exercise), you really can do the task, whatever it might be. “Social” power’s rights are contentless, that’s why they’re rights; while they use well-nigh universal techniques, disciplines are tied flexibly but necessarily to specific practices, and that’s what makes them more effective. 8. On Deleuze, see, for example, Massumi, Parables for the Virtual. Lest the reader think I’m leaning too heavily on one word in D&P (intensité and its variations) to make claims about all of Foucault’s “middle” work, a quick tour through Foucault’s Dits et écrits shows that Foucault doesn’t use the word at all in his essays and interviews before 1969, where it first appears (predictably) in a review of Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition. The word appears again in Foucault’s 1970’s “Theatrum Philosophicum,” also on Deleuze, and in 1971’s “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History”; then once in 1973, twice in 1974, and three times in 1975. Foucault begins using the word more frequently in the published texts of 1976, and it shows up more than a dozen times in his occasional writings between 1976–79. I should also note that I’m not trying to suggest that Deleuze and Foucault use the concept of “intensity” in the same way because I don’t think that they do, even if Foucault borrows the word from Deleuze. For Deleuze, intensity is “paradoxical” in the sense he outlines in The Logic of Sense: both difference and repetition, singularity and generalization. For Foucault, by contrast, intensification primarily names the modern historical movement of power’s increasing efficiency, spread, saturation, and abstraction. That difference having been emphasized, I would nevertheless argue that Foucault’s work on power and subjectivity is characterized by a kind of diffuse, pervasive Deleuz-

Notes    eanism—which is to say, Foucault’s post-1969 work is characterized by a commitment to the immanence of the event and the irreducibility of force. In short, Deleuze and Foucault share an “intense” commitment to the incorporeality of transformation. See Foucault’s repeated emphasis on this point in “Theatrum Philosophicum.” 9. Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 154. 10. Deleuze, Foucault, 71. See also Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, Essay I, section 13. 11. Thresholds and tipping points have, along with a number of other unlikely phenomena like the leadership secrets of Attila the Hun and Star Trek, recently become fodder for a series of business self-help books. Among the undisputed kings of the genre, see Gladwell, Tipping Point; Kelly, New Rules for a New Economy. These books generally put a very positive, empowering, individualist spin on threshold phenomena—Gladwell’s best-selling Tipping Point breathlessly narrates, for example, how Hush Puppies shoes became popular again because Greenwich Village hipsters began wearing them a few years ago (1–5). In short, the lesson of threshold phenomena on this reading is the following: it really does matter what people do—you (and your gnarly fashion sense) can change the world! As such, though, the lineage of these books seems to rest less in the social science they purport to translate for a popular audience, than in Dr. Seuss’s Horton Hears a Who. You remember: all the Whos frantically yelling, trying to convince the big folks that there was life on their speck of dust. But not until one last Who, the smallest of all, joined in the chorus (and the tipping point was reached) could their collective voice be heard. In passing, it should be noted that scholarly work on thresholds, tipping points, and aggregate phenomena, much of it done in mainstream economics, actually suggests exactly the opposite of this rosy, empowering conclusion. In the world of economics, aggregate phenomena tend in fact to render individual preferences all but irrelevant. Mainstream economists, for example, have a very low opinion of practices like voting insofar as, given the miniscule aggregate chance of your particular vote making any difference at all in the outcome, it’s a complete waste of time rather than a subjectively empowering opportunity (unless, perhaps, you’re wearing Hush Puppies). As Granovetter warns in “Threshold Models of Collective Behavior,” one of the classic essays in the field: “It is hazardous to infer individual dispositions from aggregate outcomes” (1425). 12. To return to our beer example, from the beginning the problem concerning “light” beer was selling it to the 20 percent of drinkers who drive the market. When it was first introduced in the 1970s, big beer drinkers wouldn’t touch the stuff. But with copious help from hypermasculine branding, the Bud Light empties started mounting outside frat houses, and the problem was solved. Past

   Notes a certain tipping point, drinking light beer no longer carried a stigma, and in fact the 80/20 rule in the beer market is on its way to inverting in less than a generation. Today, more than half of all beer purchased is “light,” and if the bottles that end up in my college-town lawn on Sunday morning are any indication, this trend looks like it will only intensify. See Koch, 80/20 Principle. 13.  Foucault, Archaeology of Knowledge, 211. 14.  Foucault, “What Is Critique?” 277; emphasis added. 15.  Ibid., 276. 16.  See D&P 138. 17.  Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 242. 18.  Foucault, History of Sexuality, 1:47 (hereafter cited in text as HS). 19.  Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 249. 20.  Ibid., 243. 21. Afary and Anderson, Foucault and the Iranian Revolution, 2. 22.  Kafka, “Before the Law,” 3. 23.  Ibid., 4. 24.  Foucault, “Governmentality,” 237. For more on governmentality, see the work by Rose et al., Foucault and Political Reason. 25.  Foucault, “Governmentality,” 237. chapter 3 1. Deleuze, Negotiations, 172. 2. Among the many happy exceptions here are Watkins’s excellent book, Everyday Exchanges; Juffer’s At Home with Pornography; and Morris’s classic, “Banality in Cultural Studies.” 3.  See Jenkins, Textual Poachers, for the paradigmatic example of this tendency in American cultural studies. See also Penley’s work on the transgressive qualities of Star Trek fan fiction, Nasa/Trek; and/or Kipnis’s work on pornography, Bound and Gagged. 4.  See Hall and Jacques’s collection, New Times. 5.  Foucault, “Risks of Security,” 66. 6. This is of course not to say that all economic systems are neoliberal to the same degree of intensity. There are important resistances to American-style neoliberalism put up everywhere, from Scandinavian socialism to the growing number of openly antiglobalization governments in South America. At the same time, to say that neoliberalism is “dominant” becomes important, I think, because economic neoliberalism is the sea in which these resistant movements inexorably have to swim. I think that Foucault, no less than someone like Jameson, shows us that providing a sense of the dominant historical mode is an important strategic marker for any kind of diagnostic, “resistant” discourse—for

Notes    grappling with the question, what is to be done, what is likely to be effective in a given situation? So, for example, while socialism was to some degree a short intensificatory hop from Keynesian emphasis on governmentally stimulated and controlled economies, it is an outright blasphemy in terms of neoliberal privatization. 7.  Foucault, Foucault Live, 72. I paraphrase, though the quotation serves as the epigraph for this chapter. I should note that here Foucault uses the French phrase “plus aiguë ” to describe the manner in which class struggle exists today: “Le conflit des classes existe toujours, il existe de manière plus aiguë ” (Dits II:189). As a musical term, aiguë names a heightened pitch or shrillness; as a medical term, it suggests the increasing “acuteness” of a condition. Either way, I think the translator is well within rights to render it as “intensely.” 8.  Foucault, Power/Knowledge, 208. 9.  Jameson, “Postmodernism,” 35–36. 10.  Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 33. 11.  Blackburn, “Finance and the Fourth Dimension,” 44. 12.  Žižek, Tarrying with the Negative, 216. 13.  Jameson, Postmodernism, 4–5. 14. Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 123. 15. Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 251. 16.  Jameson, “Marxism,” 398. 17.  I’ll have a lot more to say about “resistance” in the conclusion, but here, suffice it to say, Foucault’s “intense” thought of emergence or event remains in profound disagreement with any thought of autonomy, the supposed necessity for an exterior provocation or standpoint that has to be brought into the everyday in order to change, correct, or normatively regulate it. For Foucault, change happens genealogically, inexorably from within the immanence of everyday practice, not due to some outside shock to the system. This thought of emergence and the socius puts him at odds with thinkers as disparate as Habermas (see his lectures on Foucault in Philosophical Discourse of Modernity) and Badiou, for whom truth “must be attached to what is not the ordinary regime of the situation’s pure and simple living multiplicity” (Badiou, “Being,” n.p.) if it is to have any “critical” value (which also subtends Badiou’s charge that Foucault is merely a cataloger or a thinker of “encyclopedias”)—as if describing how a system works is always inexorably to be cheerleading for that system, and/or the subject’s intention to be “militant” or “faithful” were somehow the trump card of critical analysis. 18.  Marx, Capital, 163–73. 19.  Ibid., 173. 20. Deleuze, Negotiations, 180.

   Notes 21. Deleuze, Logic of Sense, 54. 22.  Ibid., 52. 23.  Massumi, Parables for the Virtual, 33. 24.  Ibid., 24–25, and 26. 25.  Ibid., 26. 26.  Ibid., 27. 27.  Hardt and Negri, Empire, 32. 28. Deleuze, Negotiations, 174–75. 29.  Ibid., 179. 30.  Hardt and Negri, Empire, 32. 31.  Ibid., xii. 32. Davis, “Urbanization,” 13–14. 33.  Hardt and Negri, Empire, 24. 34.  Summers’s internal World Bank memo is worth quoting in its entirety, as it offers an unparalleled primer on biopower’s investments in population, statistics, and the triumph of economic reasoning precisely through and within a consideration of “life.” Summers later said the memo was a critical parody of World Bank policies rather than a statement of World Bank positions, but either way, it stages biopower’s style of governmentality in a most economical fashion: “DATE: December 12, 1991 TO: Distribution FR: Lawrence H. Summers Subject: GEP ‘Dirty’ Industries: Just between you and me, shouldn’t the World Bank be encouraging MORE migration of the dirty industries to the LDCs [Less Developed Countries]? I can think of three reasons: 1) The measurements of the costs of health impairing pollution depends on the foregone earnings from increased morbidity and mortality. From this point of view a given amount of health impairing pollution should be done in the country with the lowest cost, which will be the country with the lowest wages. I think the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that. 2) The costs of pollution are likely to be non-linear as the initial increments of pollution probably have very low cost. I’ve always thought that under-populated countries in Africa are vastly UNDER-polluted, their air quality is probably vastly inefficiently low compared to Los Angeles or Mexico City. Only the lamentable facts that so much pollution is generated by non-tradable industries (transport, electrical generation) and that the unit transport costs of solid waste are so high prevent world welfare-enhancing trade in air pollution and waste. 3) The demand for a clean environment for aesthetic and health reasons is

Notes    likely to have very high income elasticity. The concern over an agent that causes a one in a million change in the odds of prostate cancer is obviously going to be much higher in a country where people survive to get prostate cancer than in a country where under 5 mortality is 200 per thousand. Also, much of the concern over industrial atmosphere discharge is about visibility impairing particulates. These discharges may have very little direct health impact. Clearly trade in goods that embody aesthetic pollution concerns could be welfare enhancing. While production is mobile the consumption of pretty air is a non-tradable.” (Cited in Vallette, “Larry Summers’ War Against the Earth,” n.p.) 35  Foucault, “Governmentality,” 234. 36.  Ibid., 241. 37.  Ibid. 38.  Ibid., 243. 39.  For an excellent development and exegesis of the nonteleological “triangle” approach to charting Foucaultian power, see Flynn, Sartre, Foucault. chapter 4 1.  Foucault, Archaeology of Knowledge, 17 (hereafter cited in text as AK). 2.  Foucault, “Subject and Power,” 134. 3.  Bourdieu, “Sur Michel Foucault,” 179. 4.  Gutting, “Introduction,” 22. 5. Auster, Locked Room, 281. 6.  Foucault, “Lives of Infamous Men,” 284–85. 7. There are a number of commentators who make convincing cases for the primacy of a kind of vanguardist “ethical aesthetics” of critical self-transformation in Foucault, relying very much on later texts like “What Is Enlightenment?” and Foucault’s many comments about making one’s life a work of art. In addition to Bourdieu and Gutting, see O’Leary, Foucault and the Art of Ethics; Ransom, Foucault’s Discipline; Scott, Question of Ethics. 8. These words comprise the title of chapter 4 from Dreyfus and Rabinow, Michel Foucault, 79–103, as well as the subtitle of Han, Foucault’s Critical Project, chapter 2 (38–72), though a twenty-year span separates publication of the two books. 9.  McCarthy, Ideals and Illusions, 54. 10. On the “Parallel Lives” series, see Foucault, Dits et écrits III:237; Eribon, Michel Foucault, 276–77. 11.  Foucault, “Lives of Infamous Men,” 281. 12.  Ibid. 13.  Ibid., 282, 279.

   Notes 14.  Ibid., 283. 15.  Foucault, “Subject and Power,” 142–43. 16.  Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” 351; compare the preface to Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals, section 7. 17.  Foucault, “Lives of Infamous Men,” 288. 18.  Foucault, “What Our Present Is,” 149. 19.  Ibid., 150. 20.  Macherey, quoted in Balibar, “Foucault and Marx,” 39. 21.  Marx, Grundrisse, 693; my emphasis. 22.  See Hardt and Negri’s Labor of Dionysus, 256–60; Read, Micro-Politics of Capital, 103–14, for a summary and discussion of Marxian “real subsumption.” 23.  Marx, Grundrisse, 694. 24. On real subsumption and/as biopower, see Virno, Grammar of the Multitude, 82–83; Hardt and Negri’s Empire, 22–27. For the beginnings of Hardt and Negri’s critique of Foucault in Empire, see 28ff.; see also the critical comments on Foucault in Negri’s exchange with Casarino, in their “It’s a Powerful Life.” 25. This Foucaultian insight concerning the triumph of biopower is also, then, the entry into discussions of “the multitude” for autonomist Marxism (especially Virno and Negri). As Virno writes in Grammar of the Multitude, contemporary conceptual personae like the multitude have to be understood in terms of the private—which is to say, that version of a commonweal that is opposed to and unlike the modernist notion of the citizen, the public or the people of the nation-state. For Virno and autonomist Marxism on the whole, there is an odd linkage between the logic of privatization (the complete triumph of biopower, economically and culturally) and the power of the multitude. It is, in fact, only under the condition of one that the other can take its proper place on the historical stage. In Virno, the link between the multitude and the everyday common is made not so much in the Spinozistic sense (as it is for Negri), but in Aristotle’s sense of “common places” in the Rhetoric: “Such places are ‘common’ because no one can do without them (from the refined orator to the drunkard who mumbles words hard to understand, from the business person to the politician). Aristotle points out three of those places: the connection between more and less, the opposition of opposites, and the category of reciprocity” (Virno, Grammar of the Multitude, 36, citing Aristotle’s Rhetoric I, 2, 1358a). The Aristotelian common places that Virno cites here are nothing other than modes of intense exchange—cramped, local negotiation within a closed system, rather than a universalizing public appeal to some kind of unifying outside. These are, then, questions about the distribution and redistribution of what we might call “life.” As Virno writes, “The multitude is a mode of being, the prevalent mode of being today” (26), and it

Notes    may be that for the near future, the ubiquitous private sphere, rather than the increasingly rare public sphere, will harbor the intense action in economic and cultural production. 26.  See Henwood, “Wealth News”; Johnston, “Income Gap is Widening.” 27. On the refrain in Deleuze and Guattari, see Thousand Plateaus, 310–50. For a gloss on the functions of refrains, see Nealon, Alterity Politics, 132–35. 28. Negri’s conceptions of biopower, like Foucault’s, are contra those of Agamben, for whom “life” functions essentially as the (nearly transhistorical) limit of power. For Negri’s critique of Agamben, see “It’s a Powerful Life,” 171– 81. chapter 5 1.  Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 25. 2.  Benhabib, Situating the Self, 222. 3. Afary and Anderson, Foucault and the Iranian Revolution, 4. 4. A reflexive note here on my own practice: whatever “resistance” these analyses may perform, I would hope that they don’t simply argue (or derive whatever power they may or may not have by virtue of the fact) that the conventional wisdom concerning Foucault is “wrong” (and that I am “right”). Following Foucault’s practice, I’m trying to invent a new way of speaking the Foucaultian “true,” rather than trying to argue that Foucault criticism has missed the hidden, authentic subtexts of Foucault’s work. 5.  See Han, Foucault’s Critical Project, 38–72. 6.  In AK’s own terminology, the project constitutes a mute, a-signifying “monument” rather than a “document,” rife with secrets and hidden meanings, 6–7. We should take note also of the literal performative aspects that frame AK—the imagined dialogues that begin and end the text. 7.  Foucault, “Questions of Method,” 252. 8.  Foucault, “Truth and Power,” 302–3. 9.  Foucault, “Questions of Method,” 253. 10. As Foucault insists, “I do not think that it is possible to say that one thing is of the order of ‘liberation’ and another is of the order of ‘oppression.’ There are a certain number of things that one can say with some certainty about a concentration camp to the effect that it is not an instrument of liberation, but one should still take into account—and this is not generally acknowledged—that, aside from torture and execution, which preclude any resistance, no matter how terrifying a given system may be, there always remain possibilities of resistance, disobedience, and oppositional groupings” (“Space, Power, and Knowledge,” 135). 11. Agamben, Homo Sacer, 11.

   Notes 12.  Foucault, “Sade, Sergeant of Sex,” 226. 13.  Foucault, “Subject and Power,” 138. 14.  Foucault, “Challenge,” 214. 15.  Foucault, “Subject and Power,” 137. Take, for example, the most basic force in the universe, gravity: although it has no obvious material form, it doesn’t merely exist “in theory”; it is nothing other than a series of force relations among bodies, human and otherwise. You can’t fight gravity wholesale—you can’t simply defeat it, because it defines the field of relations that comprises where we live. Though you can’t defeat the power of gravity, you certainly can resist it; everything does so, by necessity, all the time. That’s what getting up in the morning is, a drama of power and resistance: force on force. Gravity, like other forces, is a power that you’re constantly subjected to, that structures a field of possible relations, but this hardly implies that it controls everything you do. Gravity depends on and produces resistance, and how any given body resists gravity is then largely an experimental process, locally defined. You can’t escape from gravity any more than you can from power—though you can reach a certain escape velocity from the orbit of one kind of gravity, or the gravity exerted by a certain body. In space, outside the earth’s orbit, gravity is different, but it’s hardly absent. In a more philosophical idiom, perhaps the main point here is that a force-on-force logic of discontinuous emergence is a far cry from a cause-and-effect logic of rigid determination. In this idiom, one might say that Foucault consistently shows us that a positive logic of emergence can account for a logic of determination or determinate negation, but not vice versa. 16.  Foucault, “Subject and Power,” 128–29. 17. The slogan is Deleuze’s: “The final word on power is that resistance comes first” (Deleuze, Foucault, 89). 18.  Foucault, “Space, Power, and Knowledge,” 135. 19. As a ready-to-hand example, the fact that critics so uniformly want to resist Foucault’s “totalizing” analyses of power should, in fact, function as one of the great proofs of Foucault’s ideas concerning power and resistance: where there is a very strong deployment of power (however seemingly totalizing), there too one finds resistance (in fact, the more totalization, the more power has to be willing to pay the price of resistance). Recall that the critique of Foucault’s midcareer work on power is not that it’s shoddy or poorly thought through, but precisely that it’s too “good,” too seamless, too totalizing: that’s why you have to resist it. 20.  Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 7–8; my emphasis. This Foucaultian sentiment—what Deleuze calls “the indignity of speaking for others” (“Intellectuals and Power,” 208)—is of course a topic with a critical history of its own, most infamously by way of its critique in the work of Spivak (“Can the Subaltern

Notes    Speak?” and that essay’s reworking in Critique of Postcolonial Reason). Although I don’t want to enter that argument here, I will simply suggest that the projects of Spivak and Foucault may be closer than they appear. As Peter Hitchcock sums up Spivak’s project, “The point is to produce a radical knowledge of the worker without simply having her spoken for” (“Workers,” 72). For his part, Foucault doesn’t simply abandon the “privilege” of the speaker or theorist (such moments of generously “giving up” power are among the first gestures that Foucault tags as suspicious), but tries to reverse the relation, with the theorist no longer being the one who channels or offers a “voice” to the other, but the one who struggles with and responds to that voice, that local knowledge and practice, trying to connect it transversally with other such local (resistant) practices. This might comprise a kind of Spivakean “radical knowledge” of the subaltern, what Foucault calls “a historical knowledge of struggles” (Society Must Be Defended, 8). Genealogies, in short, are not simply the unmediated empiricist sum of people’s thoughts or sentiments (Spivak’s worry about Foucault’s naïve and ideologically suspect project of letting the other speak for him- or herself ); rather Foucault insists, “Genealogies are a combination of erudite knowledge and what people know” (8). 21. As Todd May reminds us, in this sense contemporary anarchism may offer some of the most honed and effective tools for rethinking the political. See his Political Philosophy of Poststructuralist Anarchism. 22. Afary and Anderson, Foucault and the Iranian Revolution, 14. 23.  Foucault, “Questions of Method,” 254. 24. As a kind of proleptic response to Afary and Anderson, one might want in this context to recall Foucault’s warnings about revolution: “There are many different kinds of revolution, roughly speaking, as many kinds as there are possible subversive recodifications of power relations—and further, that one can perfectly well conceive of revolutions that leave essentially untouched the power relations that form the basis for the continuing functioning of the state” (“Truth and Power,” 310). In short, revolution—Iranian or otherwise—is not an unproblematic “good” in Foucault’s thought. 25.  Foucault, “Lives of Infamous Men,” 289. 26.  While this may not seem a terribly controversial claim, much Foucault criticism can’t help but attach moral significance to Foucault’s projects. See, for example, Afary and Anderson’s thumbnail summary of Foucault’s accomplishments: “In sum, Foucault’s new perspective was aimed at countering the prevailing theories of the time (including some forms of feminism), which equated the post-Enlightenment period with the emergence of greater democracy and greater freedoms, at least for the middle classes” (Foucault and the Iranian Revolution, 25–26). Okay, one might agree or disagree with that descriptive claim. But

   Notes there’s more: “Thus, in each of his major writings Foucault privileged premodern social relations over modern ones” (26). Translation: Foucault wrote about the past and was critical of the present; “thus” he had a romantic attachment to medievalism. Thus thus, the book continues, Foucault disliked or ignored women: “Foucault’s one-sided critique of modernity and his minimizing of the harsh and confining disciplinary practices of the premodern world—including those that shackled women’s sexuality—may explain his problematic relationship to the issue of women’s rights” (26). (This “minimizing” of the “harsh and confining disciplinary practices of the premodern world” is shown, I guess, in the opening pages of D&P.) The thesis of Afary and Anderson’s book is, as far as I can tell, a completely moralistic one: Foucault was a bad guy, a death-obsessed orientalist who romanticized a brutal male-dominated past, disliked women, and thought that Khomeini was a laudable Nietzschean superman (see Foucault and the Iranian Revolution, 34–36, a compact few pages of character assassination that contains all the above smears). Thus, the book implies, we can safely ignore his work and conclude that all those who remain invested in Foucault are furthering the work of badness. 27.  Foucault insists on this point: “For me, the problem of the prisons isn’t one for the ‘social workers,’ but one for the prisoners” (“Questions of Method,” 256). 28.  Foucault, “Space, Power, and Knowledge,” 136. 29. Deleuze, “Desire and Pleasure,” 188–89; my emphasis. 30.  Rose, Powers of Freedom, 279. 31.  Which is why the dominant reading of the late Foucault is, to repeat an argument I make throughout, more “dangerous” or “expensive” than it is “wrong”: this sense that only authenticity can save us from the current mode of power is hardly to be depended on to produce an unproblematic resistance, when in fact we are harnessed into the contemporary mode of consumer capitalism precisely by our investments in personal authenticity and the ways that “just being ourselves” supposedly resists standardizing or normalizing power. 32.  Rose, Powers of Freedom, 277. 33.  Foucault, Remarks on Marx, 159. 34.  See, in this context, Frankfurt’s On Bullshit, the only best-selling (hardcover, university press) philosophy book in recent American memory. The success of this book suggests much about the diagnostic tools that it seems to me people are looking for in what my students call “today’s modern world.” 35.  Foucault, “Prisons,” 523–24.

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Index of Names

Adorno, Theodor, 61, 114n22, 125n24, 125–26n26 Afary, Janet, and Kevin Anderson, 49, 106–7 Agamben, Giorgio, 100–101, 123n28 Anderson, Amanda, 10 Aquinas, St. Thomas, 101 Auster, Paul, 76 Bachelard, Gaston, 15 Badiou, Alain, 4, 119n17 Bataille, Georges, 49 Baudelaire, Charles, 9, 14, 76 Benhabib, Seyla, 96 Bourdieu, Pierre, 75, 121n7 Burns, Ken, 87 Burroughs, William, 76 Bush, George W., 3, 86 Canguilhem, Georges, 14–17 Cavaillès, Jean, 15 Clinton, Bill, 86 Clinton, George, 19 Davis, Mike, 69–70 Deleuze, Gilles, 1, 6, 33, 38, 54, 56, 62–65, 67–68, 79, 87, 109, 115n40, 116–17n8, 123n27, 124n17

Derrida, Jacques, 1, 95 Dreyfus, Hubert, 121n8 Eliot, T.S., 60 Eribon, Didier, 121n10 Foucault, Michel, on agency, 101–7; on biopower, 45–53, 85–93; on the body, 26–29; on capitalism, 56–57; career trajectory, 1–6; 8–13, 25–26; on economics, 17–23, 32–38; on the Enlightenment, 13–17; on ethics, 74–93; on the everyday, 74–81, 107–112; on governmentality, 71–73; on the history of power, 24–32; on ideology critique, 19–20; on intensity, 32–45; on Marxism, 17, 20–21, 55, 80–85; on neo-liberalism, 12–13; on norms, 47–51; on resistance, 94–112 Flynn, Thomas, 121n39 Frank, Thomas, 11–12 Frankfurt, Harry, 126n34 Gibson, Mel, 87–88 Gladwell, Malcom, 117n11 Gore, Al, 3 Granovetter, Mark, 117n11 Guattari, Félix, 56, 62, 87, 123n27 Gutting, Gary, 75, 121n7

   Index of Names Habermas, Jurgen, 48, 114n21, 119n17 Hall, Stuart, 118n4 Han, Beatrice, 2, 114n33, 121n8, 123n5 Hardt, Michael, 66–70, 84, 122n22 Hegel, G.W.F, 101 Heidegger, Martin, 65, 95, 97 Henwood, Doug, 123n26 Hitchcock, Peter, 125n20 Hobbes, Thomas, 115–16n6 Jameson, Fredric, 8, 56, 57–63, 115n40 Jenkins, Henry, 118n3 Juffer, Jane, 118n2 Kafka, Franz, 52–53 Kant, Immanuel, 9, 13–17; 114n21 Kelly, Kevin, 117n11 Koch, Richard, 118n12 Koontz, Dean, 64 Koyré, Alexandre, 15 Lacan, Jacques, 1 Lin, Maya, 87 Lotringer, Sylvère, 114n21

Negri, Antonio, 66–70, 83–84, 122n22, 122n25, 123n28 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 17–19, 49 Nugent, Ted, 64 O’Leary, Timothy, 121n7 Paras, Eric, 10 Penley, Constance, 118n3 Poster, Mark, 114n33 Pound, Ezra, 60 Rabinow, Paul, 121n8 Ransom, John, 121n7 Read, Jason, 122n22 Rose, Nikolas, 109–10 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 15, 83 Scott, Charles, 121n7 Seuss, Dr., 117n11 Spivak, Gayatri, 124–25n20 Summers, Lawrence, 71, 120–21n34 Surin, Kenneth, 115n40 Tronti, Mario, 83

Macey, David, 115n2 Macherey, Pierre, 83 Machiavelli, Niccolò, 52 Marx, Karl, 21–23, 57, 63, 82–85 Massumi, Brian, 65–66, 116n8 May, Todd, 125n21 McCarthy, Thomas, 78 McNay, Lois, 9, 11 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 15, 83 Miller, Jim, 115n2 Morris, Meaghan, 118n2

Virno, Paulo, 83, 122n25 Watkins, Evan, 115n40, 118n2 Williams, Raymond, 29 Wolin, Richard, 10 Yeats, W.B., 64 Žižek, Slavoj, 60–61