Foucault and Neoliberal Society: The Worker as 'Entrepreneur of Self'

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MARI GALDAS
FOUCAULT AND
NEOLIBERAL SOCIETY: THE
WORKER AS "ENTREPRENEUR
OF SELF"
MAURICIO PELEGRINI – 14.12.2017

At a small conference held by the French Society of Philosophy in 1978, Michel Foucault presented an analysis of the concept of national interest (raison d'État) which first emerged in the West in the 16th century, building on the studies he had been conducting at the Collège de France that same year (FOUCAULT, 2008a). But in this lecture entitled "What is critique?" along with identifying the various ways by which the role of the government of individuals (known as governmentality) expanded, he also pinpoints a perpetual concern: "how to be not be governed? Here Foucault did not intend to abolish every and any form of government, not least because by the word government he understands not only the realm of politics, but also that of work, family, religion, etc.; to govern is to steer conduct, and governmentality is no more than the set of many policies of the State that seek to steer the conduct of its citizens. As such, "the critical attitude," as understood by Foucault, is a constant questioning of the forms of government imposed, or further, the refusal of any guidance of conduct considered inappropriate or unfair. In this way, the definition of critique is presented as:

Critique [is characterized as] the art of not being governed like that. (...) "how not to be governed like that, by that, in the name of those principles, with such and such an objective in mind and by means of such procedures, not like that, not for that, not by them." (FOUCAULT, 2007, p. 48).

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Yet this isn't a case of desiring no form of government whatsoever, but rather one of questioning a determined form of steering, and all governments are thus subject to critique, which never ceases, producing a permanent movement of restlessness. In his analysis of disciplinary power, Foucault had already affirmed that "where there is power, there is resistance," intending to state that power is only truly exerted if there is an existing freedom to produce resistance. Similarly, in his studies on the emergence of the modern concept of national interest, he found numerous forms of opposition, resistance, and disobedience to the forms of governmentality. This is not a mere reaction to political governance, nor is it a simple negation of the constituted government, but instead a creative affirmation of another form of conducting oneself and being conducted. To designate these practices, Foucault created the term counter-conducts, defining them as:

movements whose objective is a different form of conduct, that is to say: wanting to be conducted differently, by other leaders (conducteurs) and other shepherds, towards other objectives and forms of salvation, and through other procedures and methods. They are movements that also seek (...) to escape direction by others and to define the way for each to conduct himself (FOUCAULT, 2009, p. 259).

Counter-conducts are possible ways to inventively construct new forms of positioning oneself in the world, new opportunities for the constitution of subjectivity, new ideas for relating to oneself and others. In this sense, they are tasks that are at once ethical and political, individual and collective. By way of the neologism "counter-conduct," Foucault developed a new theoretical tool, one that's quite useful in analyzing contemporary movements of resistance to the modes of control over subjects which have become increasingly entrenched with the emergence and expansion of neoliberal societies.

Though still lesser known, since the theme of neoliberal capitalism is generally associated with Marxist literature, Foucault ventured an important and innovative interpretation of neoliberal governmentality (FOUCAULT, 2008). In his analysis of the contemporary neoliberal program, he sought to demonstrate that there's been a great shift from the classical liberalism inaugurated by Adam Smith. According to Foucault, when referring to these contemporary forms of neoliberalism, the following general characteristics can be ascertained: a) from an economic point of view, they rehash old, worn out theories; b) from a sociological point of view, they institute strictly

mercantile relations; c) from a political point of view, they provide cover for a generalized and administrative intervention of the State. Yet, “these three types of response ultimately make neoliberalism out to be nothing at all, or anyway, nothing but always the same thing, and always the same thing but worse,” which would allow it “to be turned into practically nothing at all, repeating the same type of critique for two hundred, one hundred, or ten years” (Ibid., p. 130). But for Foucault, neoliberalism presents some important new features, both in its theoretical presentation and the exercise of its governmental rationality. And detecting these new features implies analyzing transformations in liberal thought that have taken place more or less since the 1920s and ’30s, with an emphasis on the Post World War II era, moving toward so-called neoliberalism, still incipient in the 1970s, but which, since then, has taken on force on a global scale, leaving the realm of theory to that of actual governmental practices.

In the course he administered in 1979, Foucault presents the neoliberal theory in its North American offshoot, which eventual became the standard model for neoliberalism, based on the so-called Chicago School of economic thought. According to his reading, American liberalism has a historically important particularity: it is intrinsic to the very functioning of American society, and has been present in all of the political debates throughout the country’s history. In Foucault’s words:

Liberalism in America is a whole way of being and thinking. It is a type of relation between the governors and the governed much more than a technique of governors with regard to the governed. [...] I think this is why American liberalism currently appears not just or not so much as a political alternative, but let’s say as a sort of many-sided, ambiguous, global claim with a foothold in both the right and the left. It is also a sort of utopian focus which is always being revived. It is also a method of thought, a grid of economic and sociological analysis. (Ibid., p. 217-218).

The main focus of Foucault’s analysis of American neoliberalism is not merely economic, but also political and sociological; in other words, as a way of deciphering a new kind of valid and increasingly more prevalent social rationality. Neoliberalism is the “extension of economic analysis into a previously unexplored domain,” or even the “possibility of a giving a strictly economic interpretation of a whole domain previously thought to be non-economic” (Ibid., p. 219). It’s the economic model that would be expanded to span the entire gamut of

social intelligibility, from market analysis to the interpretation of all social phenomena, including criminality, the constitution of the family, marriage and even the sexual division of work. With it, a new rationale is established, which goes on to constitute new forms of subjectivity. The main theoretical innovation introduced by Foucault in his studies of neoliberalism is precisely the demonstration that neoliberal society produces a new form of subjectivity, which might be denominated as entrepreneurial.

Working from the theories of Gary Becker, winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1992, Foucault presents the theory of human capital as the main axis of interpretation in this new subjectivity. For Becker, classical political economy indicated that the production of goods depended on three factors: land, capital and labor, but leaving labor as an unexplored dimension, confining it exclusively to a time factor and neutralizing it. The increment of production by the labor vector is uniquely constituted in a quantitative and temporal manner—in other words, increasing the number of workers in the market and the number of labor hours available to capital. The neoliberal theory promotes an epistemological change, taking on the task of analyzing human behavior and its internal rationality. From this perspective, the task of reintroducing labor into the domain of economic analysis entails displacing the point of view from those purchasing manpower to those selling it. How does the individual who works conduct him or herself? What calculations do they make? The worker comes to be seen as an active economic subject.

Why do people work? To receive a salary, or more accurately, a continual flow of salaries, seen as income, or in other words, the revenue of a capital, which is human capital, the capital possessed by the individual who works. Workers should know how to administer, promote and increment their own human capital if they want to improve their revenue. According to Becker, this capital is comprised of two kinds of elements: the innate and the acquired. Innate elements are hereditary traits implied by the classification of individuals based on risk factors, and, in this way, they may have impacts on policies related to healthcare, prevention and security, for instance. Meanwhile, acquired elements are those that promote an improvement in human capital over a person’s entire life, from early childhood like the affection time parents dedicate to a baby) to the investment in quality education and lifelong learning. It seems clear that, in a society constituted as such, all responsibility for a subject’s successes or failures become individualized; the unemployment or low “market value” of a worker direct results from the choices made throughout his or her life and investment in human capital.

As such, workers are entrepreneurs of the self, capitalists who administer their own capital and obtain revenues according to investments made. They position themselves in the market as unit-companies, in direct competition with other individual-businesses, constituting a purely entrepreneurial society in which everyone is seen as competitors disputing the best market positions, in direct competition with one another; there is no possible link of solidarity. Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval, French sociologists who analyze contemporary neoliberalism from a combination of Marxist and

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Foucauldian theory, define this new form of subjectivity thusly:

The new government of subjects in fact presupposes that the enterprise is not in the first instance a site of human flourishing, but an instrument and space of competition. Above all, it is ideally depicted as the site of all innovation, constant change, continual adaptation to variations in market demand, the search for excellence, and “zero defects.” The subject is therewith enjoined to conform internally to this image by constant self-work or self-improvement. He must constantly strive to be as efficient as possible, to appear to be totally involved in his work, to perfect himself by lifelong learning, and to accept the greater flexibility required [e.g., austerity measures] by the incessant changes dictated by markets. His or her own expert, own employer, own inventor, and own entrepreneur: neoliberal rationality encourages the ego to act to strengthen itself so as to survive competition. All its activities must be compared with a form of production, an investment, and a cost calculation (DARDOT; LAVAL, 2016, p. 330-31).

Outside of the neoliberal lurch, which becomes increasingly perverse with each cycle, with the loss of rights conquered decades earlier and dismantling of all the ties of solidarity, it is necessary to point out that the condition of possibility of these changes is in the neoliberal subjective development, rooted in competition, in human capital, in the entrepreneurship of the self; in short, in the supposition that the individual should be singularly held responsible for his or her losses and gains. Nonetheless, following Foucault’s thinking implies reactivating and renovating the critical attitude, undoing the knots that enable the emergence of a device that attaches the subject to the neoliberal narrative and seeking to affirm the birth of possible counter-conducts. In this way, recognizing the hegemony of neoliberalism in the contemporary world and focusing on its subjective dimension means imagining that counter-conducts entail the invention of a new ethical subject, which is not to be constituted as an entrepreneur of the self nor will it promote competitive sociability as the only form of coexistence, delegitimizing neoliberal competition and business-subjectivity.

Several initiatives have appeared in recent years in different places around the world—local initiatives that promote other forms of conduct of the self and in relation to others, counter-conducts that reject the corporate experience as a constituent part of all social domains. The occupy movements, the struggles of indigenous resistance, feminism,

black rights movements, LGBT and transgender resistances, among so many others, are examples of new inventive forms of counter-conducts that question the neoliberal hegemony and affirm ethical subjectivities not submitted to existing models.

Bibliographical references

Dardot, Pierre and Christian Laval. The New Way of the World: On Neoliberal Society. Translated by Gregory Eliot. London: Verso, 2013.

Foucault, Michel. "What is Critique?" Translated by Lysa Hochroth, in The Politics of Truth, edited by Sylvère Lotringer. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2007.

___ Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France (1977-1978). Translated by Graham Burchell. New York: Picador, 2009.

___ The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978-1979). Translated by Graham Burchell. New York: Picador, 2008.

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