Neoliberalism and the crossed-out link with Lacan

It is clear that the topic laid out by Foucault in these seminars is unavoidably aimed at presenting the problem of the relations between truth and subject in the core of liberalism understood as an art of government. The following seminar should have tackled the problem, but what we read in Hermeneutics of the subject is disappointing: all we find is that liberalism is not the proper attitude for the teckné tou biou of the ancients. Regarding contemporary liberalism, the best is found in The birth of Biopolitics, and it is not very good. There, he clarified that liberalism was an art of governing «according to the rationality of the economic agents and, more generally, [an] art of governing grounded on the rationality of the governed». From the point of view of liberalism, he clearly suggested that the issue of the relations between truth and subject was to be found in the market. Here the revelation of what is right in governmental sense, as "lieu de véridiction" took place. Then, the key to verify or to falsify the governmental practice was in the market. The practice based on this assumption shared a similar nature with scientific praxis.

To accomplish that mission, some type of relation between truth, reason and freedom of the governed had to be established. The expression and revelation of that relation was permeated by the market. Foucault proposed utility as a center for the synthesis of these elements. From the point of view of the population that finds its rhetoric in the idea of utility, Foucault talked about a «république phénoménale des intérêts». This governmental ordering needed liberty, since only through it does the subject find its truth, define its interest and calculate its utility in the market. Therefore, just before consuming in the market, freedom must be consumed, and to do this, it must be produced and organized, the phenomena that tend to destroy it must be regulated, and its circulation within a space must be assured. We have, away from any kind of unilateralism, the market guarding the State and the State guarding the market. The institution of a panoptic is thus unfeasible.

The set of problems raised by the human natural order as a fundamental premise of neoliberalism is enormous. Oddly, the seminar on The Birth of Biopolitics does not tackle them. The course was devoted to demonstrating that the crisis of liberalism, and the collapse of its confidence in the rationality of the governed, led to the forms of nazi and fascist States, and that neoliberalism was an alternative solution. Foucault’s annotations on neoliberalism are quite scattered, but important. The key question dwells in the fact that if the market is the place for truth, then it shouldn’t be understood as a place for trading, but as a place for competition. The action of the government is related to this question, and it should recreate it continuously. This is essentially the transformation of neoliberalism. Therefore, the government does not intervene in the market, but in society itself, and in the social environment. There liberty should be produced and human nature should be brushed. And it must be done by assuring not only the market’s homogeneity and its equivalence, but its heterogeneity, differentiation, and multiplicity. The human being considered by neoliberalism is not the one that demands in the market —as if he had a core of fixed needs —, but the one that produces difference by means of his own business. The economic man is not l’homme de l’échange, but l’homme de l’enterprise. This is the true power of society and that is why it needs to suppose, to consume, and to renew freedom. This economic man is the medium between the government and the free individual. The neoliberal government technique tests the differentiation, the inequality, the competence. Therefore, the sovereign loses his function here: he cannot control the set of phenomena that enterprises promote from liberty.

I am not interested in the need for continuous arbitration on liberty and competition; Foucault himself wrote many pages on this question. Neither can I develop the more important argument on the conversion of work in human capital, of the worker in an enterprise himself. There is no doubt about the prominence of these problems and their formation of the very rhetoric of the present. Otherwise, I can only point out Foucault’s flirtation with the Theory of Systems, viz., with the intervention of the government in the “environment” or “scenario” of the economic system as a social system of freedom. The decisive aspect is that the intervention in this environment should produce a continuous differentiation, a systematic modification, a perpetual displacement of equivalences, because the notion of enterprise in competition only takes place there. Foucault didn’t investigate what upholds this continuous displacement of freedom, nor this productivity of differences that renders the market more plural and incapable of establishing equivalences, more uneven and therefore more competitive. Thus, inequality is the condition for competition. The game is the necessity of providing a heterogeneousness susceptible of being continuously reduced to equivalence —the game of multiculturalism. Foucault has suggested that the final test can be found in economic growth and that this is the only test that can deal with the rhetoric that transforms the worker into a businessman who capitalizes himself. But this final process has to do with the definition of a market completely mobilized by competition, and this definition is related to the ability to continuously regenerate the economic freedom and to introduce new heterogeneity. At this point, Foucault stops. Adelino Zanini, an expert on The Birth of Biopolitics, said that we find an abrupt end in this problematical question. Moreover, he said that this seminar «sembra a tratti sfuggire dalle mani del suo autore». If the premise was that neoliberalism was a naturalism, an assumption about human nature that knows its own truth in the market via its conversion in enterprise, Foucault didn’t want to develop this idea. As we know, he took refuge in the aesthetic elitism of the artist in and of himself, so alien to democratic society.

I suspect that this is only one of two blockades, and that they underline the distance between Foucault and theory. At some point in the seminar Hermeneutics of the subject, one person in the audience raises his hand and asks: «can’t we see in your discourse some genuinely Lacanian concepts?». Foucault demands some additional explanations, clearly puzzled by the question. Then he affirms that his theme is the relation between subject and truth. The questioner, animated, confirms that it is exactly what he is talking about. At this point we can see Foucault doubtful, on the defensive. He concludes by maintaining that on the topic of subject and truth «I only see Heidegger and Lacan. Personally, as you can see, I am trying to think about it from Heidegger’s side and from Heidegger. That’s it. No doubt, anyway, that when one starts to tackle these questions he will find Lacan». It was a bad moment. The daring questioner had suggested the possibility of Foucault’s employing theoretical concepts. Foucault confirmed, smirking, that what he did was Heideggerian philology and if he had something to say about the truth of the subject it would have to be derived from a new beginning. As Heidegger went to the physis of the presocratics, so Foucault went to the Alcibiades, an apocryphal platonic dialogue. Of course, he recognized that all this was involved with problems introduced by Lacan, but he didn’t step in. Finally, he got rid of the situation with a pet phrase we all know. He changed the subject rapidly and said: “Another question?”. Actually, he only repeated what he had said at the beginning of the seminar: that the interest and the power of Lacan’s analysis resides in his renewal of the relation between subject and truth. In that case, it would have been at least necessary to wonder about the market as a place for veridiction. A similar blockade to that in The Birth of Biopolitics reappeared now as a refusal to confront Lacan.

Дата добавления: 2015-07-10