Finding a “Left Governmentality”
Daniel Zamora
We live perhaps at the end of politics. Because, if it is true that politics is a field which has been opened by the existence of the revolution, and if the question of the revolution cannot arise in these terms anymore, then politics risk to disappear.1
—Michel Foucault, 1977
In his 1977 movie, A Grin Without a Cat, the famous French filmmaker Chris Marker gives his own account of the struggles that took place between 1967 and 1977 and, more generally, of the hopes of an entire generation in the aftermath of May 1968. Marker’s movie was an attempt to understand the birth of a French “new left” and how it reshaped conceptions of politics and contestation. Rather than reproducing the classic oppositions of postwar politics, Marker suggested that May 1968 transformed the terms through which one could think about politics. “A new kind of problematic emerged,” he wrote, delivering “staggering blows in every field of orthodoxy, right or left.” As the movie puts it: “There was the police blockade—this was an order—and there were unions’ security services—that was another order. In between there was a space to be taken. This meant a new kind of struggle.” The first order obviously represented the Gaullist power and its repressive state and culture. But another kind of order was also increasingly seen as an obstacle to real social transformation: the postwar left and its state-centered understanding of politics and social transformation. From this perspective, for many intellectuals after 1968, the communist opposition, the unions, and later, the union of the left (the coalition of the French Communist Party, the Radical Party, and the Socialist party under the “common program”) was no less problematic than the Gaullist power. To a certain extent, both were seen as functioning within the same logic and replacing certain masters with others (what do we win by replacing “the employers’ arbitrary will with a bureaucratic arbitrary will?”2 asked the famous Marxist and ecological thinker André Gorz). This centrality of the state in political parties of the left and right was what Pierre Rosanvallon and Patrick Viveret referred to as the dominant “political culture.” Such a culture—either “from the left or the right […] and for which the central element is the state, considered at the same time as the object of the struggle and the space of social transformation”3—had become, since the war, the underlying paradigm for all political discussion. For Rosanvallon and Viveret, May 1968 marked the birth of a “new political culture” that sought to transform not only the left, but also a general understanding of what politics could be about.
It was precisely this task—reshaping the understanding of politics and the left—that became central in Foucault’s last decade, a task he thought his generation had failed to achieve. As his friend Claude Mauriac explained in 1978, “Foucault condemned his generation who had proved unable to bring a new hope to humanity, after Marxism, either to continue or replace it.”4 And it is from this precise perspective that he will be interested in neoliberalism as a stimulating kind of governmentality that could offer alternatives to a socialist left, which he rejected for either its intellectual framework, or its strategy and program. To understand his last political decade, it is thus essential to inscribe his work both within a general opposition to the postwar left and within the promotion, in the intellectual and political field, of a “new political culture,” whose aim was to get rid of a certain conception of the left and of social transformation. For this new “culture,” neoliberalism was less an enemy than it was a true “utopian focus” that opened new perspectives for a left that should have been delivered from the socialist project, as it was formulated in the nineteenth century. These two evolutions, far from being foreign to Foucault, constitute one of its core elements after the mid-1970s. Neoliberalism offered him a means to rethink resistance, to imagine an intellectual framework that could create a space for minority practices, and to fulfill a key ambition of his last decade, finding a way to be “less governed.”
Foucault against the Postwar Left
Foucault’s last decade was marked by an increasing hostility to the postwar left and its ideas. Marxism, and what it represented in intellectual life (a strong state, universal social rights, control of the economy, the idea of revolution, etc.), became a target of Foucault and many other intellectuals. It is therefore not surprising that, in an unpublished interview in 1977 between Foucault and militants of the French Communist Revolutionary League (LCR), he had “no problem” with the idea that his thought could be described as a “war machine against Marxism.”5 In a 1978 interview for a Japanese journal entitled “How to Get Rid of Marxism,” he openly described Marxism as nothing more than “a modality of power in an elementary sense.” He then explained that “there is one clear determining factor: the fact that Marxism has contributed to and still contributes to the impoverishment of the political imaginary, this is our starting point.”6 In that prespective, Colin Gordon is right when he suggests that Foucault was obviously not a Marxist or a supporter of any existing model of revolutionary socialism.7 But it is important to acknowledge that Foucault was not only opposed to Marxism, but also to the “political imaginary” that could be derived from it. It was therefore not merely about Marxism as a political doctrine, but, more generally, as a symbol of the political project of the postwar left. What Foucault and many intellectuals at that time were struggling against was not only socialism abroad, but also a certain kind of socialism and its legacy in France. In this regard, Foucault’s politics in his last decade were particularly hostile to: (1) the socialist program of the union of the left; (2) an idea of politics as a way to conquer state power through parties, unions, and mass movements of class struggle; and (3) the idea of revolution itself.
Against the union of the left
The period in which Foucault’s attacks against Marxism were the most violent—between 1975 and 1978—was, in general, also a moment of increasing debate on totalitarianism and the French left. During this period, the possibility of a union of the left to win elections after its impressive results in 1974—and the possibility for communists to return to government for the first time since 1947—worried many post-1968 left intellectuals.
Founded in 1972, the “union of the left” united under the “common program” the PCF (French Communist Party), the PS (Socialist Party), and the MRG (movement of the radicals of the left). This ambitious program proposed the nationalization of the bank system, increases in wages, the reduction of work time, the expansion of social security, the “democratization” of the workplace, and even the dissolution of NATO and the Warsaw Pact. This alliance, as Marc Lazar writes, “marked . . . the victory of those who defended a strong interventionism of the state”8 on the left. The program, and the strategy to take state power, were therefore seen by the coalition as a first step toward socialism. At the same time, however, the alliance deepened tensions within the left. Indeed, since May 1968, an important wing of the union saw the state, as Pierre Grémion noted, “as an obstacle rather than a useful tool”9 for social transformation. This division was particularly strong within the Socialist Party, where the minority current, called the “second left,” led by Michel Rocard and figures such as Patrick Viveret or Pierre Rosanvallon, defended an anti-statist left that advocated for a project “of social transformation that does not carry the germ of totalitarianism.”10
From this perspective, these critics played an important role in crafting the more general argument that the triumph of the project of the common program could lead to a totalitarian “temptation”11 in France. This idea of a risk for liberty in the case of a socialist victory in France was also mentioned in an interview Foucault gave in 1976, where he discussed the problems of socialism and argued that it was necessary “to invent an exercise of power that is not scary.”12 What is interesting here is not only that he thought that the socialist project was potentially “scary,” but that what socialism needed was not “another freedom convention or another bill of rights: that is easy and so useless,” but a change in the conception of “power and its exercise.”13 The danger was not so much the supposedly “hidden totalitarian intentions” of the common program, but the socialist project. Socialism and revolution itself became a risk for liberty. This helps explain Foucault’s strong misgivings about the common program (what he called the “common imposture”14) and of the whole project of the left since the war: an interventionist state, social rights based on universal policies, public service, etc. This was the main reason why Foucault, as Claude Mauriac wrote, if he voted for Mitterrand in 1974, he did not wish the left to win in the elections of 1978,15 and, as his close friend and historian Paul Veyne recounts, he did not vote for Mitterrand in 1981.16 This strong refusal was therefore not only against the individual parties, but against institutional politics per se.
Against institutional politics
Foucault’s opposition to the union of the left was also, more generally, an opposition to a certain postwar understanding of politics. As mentioned, the idea of social transformation through state power seemed to him at the very least irrelevant and, at worse, dangerous. All his work in his last decade was therefore opposed to this tendency, which was shared by all “institutions, parties, and to a whole current of thought and revolutionary action that see power in the form of a state apparatus.”17 But his disregard for the statism of the left draws upon his larger historical views that it remained wedded to an understanding of political economy from the nineteenth century that he viewed as obsolete. Indeed, as he explained in many interviews and papers in the second half of the 1970s, political parties or unions were certainly adapted and useful for the issues of the industrial society but became for him an obstacle to the emergence of new problematizations. Questions of the “mad,” “delinquency,” medicine, or sexuality “could be heard only, and only if, they were conceptualized radically outside these organizations, and I would even say, against them.”18 Moreover, his opposition to the party-form remained strong. As he stated on many occasions, he did not think that parties had “produced, within the problematization of the social existence, anything interesting,” adding that “we might ask ourselves if political parties have not been the most sterilizing political invention since the nineteenth century.”19
This view fits perfectly with Foucault’s analysis of the origins of May 1968 and its aftermath. In the eyes of Foucault, it created “an outside to the major political parties, an outside to the normal or regular program,” which constituted a “certain form of political innovation.” This innovation, he added, would not transform institutions immediately, but rather our everyday life, “attitudes,” and “mentality.”20 Therefore, as he observed at the Forum “vivre à gauche” in 1977, organized by members of the second left like Pierre Rosanvallon, “innovation does not happen through parties, trade unions, bureaucracy and politics anymore. It emerges from an individual, moral concern. We no longer ask political theory to tell us what to do, we do not need tutors anymore. This change is ideological and profound.”21 As he argued, we know very well that all those political programs “even if they are inspired by the best of intentions, become a tool, an instrument of oppression.”22
Revolution as a totalitarian project
The strong opposition to both the union of the left, as well as a certain kind of institutional politics, should also be understood as part of a more general opposition to the idea of socialist revolution itself. These statements must be placed within the context of the huge campaign around Eastern European dissidents and against “totalitarianism” (amplified by the diffusion of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago under the aegis of the “new philosophers”) that took place between 1975 and 1978, which was not only about repression in communist countries but also the project of French socialism. In so doing, they openly associated their critique of totalitarianism with the entire project of the postwar left, suggesting that the “French Left’s roots in this revolutionary tradition (especially Jacobinism) made it particularly susceptible to totalitarianism.”23 As the historian Hervé Chauvin argues, within the anti-totalitarian left, “a certain amalgamation was cultivated between the situation in Eastern Europe and the potential risks related to the arrival of a socialist government in France.”24 The French writer Claude Mauriac, in an article in Le Monde, strongly criticized this new “antitotalitarian left” arguing that “this insidious, pernicious logic” will infer “abusively the Gulag to Marxism, Marxism to communism, communism to the common program and the common program to the Gulag.”25
Foucault’s views on this movement are well known and pretty clear in his writings of that period. Even if his own position was more careful, he still endorsed some of the most important interventions within that debate. There was, of course, his known admiration for the work of the French historian François Furet about the French Revolution (especially La revolution française and Penser la revolution française, published in 1965 and 1977),26 a book that, far from just revisiting the history of the French Revolution, also attacked the very relevance of the idea of revolutionary politics itself. The publication of Penser la revolution française in 1977 was therefore seen by many as a critique of the French left’s fascination for Jacobinism and revolutionary ideas. In that sense, as Christofferson has convincingly shown, Furet’s fears that the French “passion for equality” was a threat to liberty also participated in the debate among French intellectuals on the legitimacy of the union of the left.27
Beneath his endorsement of Furet’s work, Foucault supported such strong attacks on the ideas of revolution and egalitarianism. In a 1977 interview with the “new philosopher” and author of La barbarie à visage humain, Bernard-Henri Lévy, Foucault directly addressed the question of revolution. For him, “the return of the revolution, that’s our problem. . . . There is no doubt that, without it, the question of Stalinism would be no more than a textbook case—a simple problem of the organization of the societies, or of the validity of the Marxist theory. But, with Stalinism, it’s about something else. You know as well as I: it’s the desire for revolution itself that is a problem.”28 What is interesting about Foucault’s answer is not only that he notably dismisses the idea of revolution, but also that he makes a subtle reference to its “return” in the context of the union of the left and its expected victory in the legislative elections of 1978. Finally, in a 1977 interview (moderately) titled “Torture Is Reason,” Foucault was asked if he could think of an alternative to the “police state” that he associated with socialism. His answer was as clear as it was radical: “In one word this important tradition of socialism may be called fundamentally into question because everything this socialist tradition has produced historically may be condemned.”29 Considering that he made this statement in a context where almost half of the French population was ready to vote for a socialist candidate and project, Foucault’s radical critique of the socialist legacy may reasonably be interpreted as a strong dismissal of a socialist alternative. In the early 1980s it was not man, but Marxism and its political project that was to be erased, “like a face drawn in sand on the edge of the sea.”30
Neoliberalism beyond Left and Right
In this context of hostility against the postwar left, Foucault and many others set out in search of what could be called a “left governmentality.” As he consistently stated, in his view the French left did not have a “problematic of government” but only “a problematic of the State.”31 This idea was explicit in his lessons on The Birth of Biopolitics given at the Collège de France, where he famously argued that there was no “autonomous socialist governmentality”32 and that, therefore, “in actual fact, and history has shown this, socialism may only be implemented, connected up to diverse types of governmentality.”33 A socialist governmentality was thus, for Foucault, still left to “invent.”
In this context, Foucault—and some of his contemporaries—saw neoliberalism as an interesting framework to rethink the left rather than as a political program, as a “governmentality” rather than a “simple economic logic.”34 As has already been argued by the French sociologist Geoffroy de Lagasnerie, Foucault did not see it as “something that would function as a political alternative to which a well-defined program or plan could be attached.”35 In a sense, what was important here, was that Foucault did not really study neoliberalism as a problem of the “left” or “right.” Instead, he was interested in it as a form of governmentality or what we could call its political ontology, the framework under which it conceives politics and society. As he wrote in his biopolitics lectures:
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.36
This specific use of neoliberalism was also fueled by the French political context. The election of 1974 in France of Valéry Giscard D’Estaing against François Mitterrand in one of the tightest elections in French history (50.81—49.19 percent) played a key role here. His presidency, though often underestimated, marked an important transition in French society. Rather than pushing forward the Gaullist legacy, Giscard incarnated a more neoliberal right in French politics. His “liberal” program not only took into account the claims of May 1968 on “societal” issues, but also applied more neoliberal economic doctrines.37 In this perspective, the rising neoliberal governmentality within French politics and the transformations within French politics were essential for Foucault for at least two reasons: (1) a certain rejection of statism and (2) a framework for pluralism and tolerance for minority practices.
Anti-statism as desubjectification
Foucault’s thinking about anti-statism is complex. As noted by Mitchell Dean, we need to able to understand a perspective that mixes “a theoretical and analytical anti-statism with a critique of state phobia.”38 To grasp this ambivalent relationship, it is necessary to understand his relationship to the state within the more general evolution of his work and his rising interest in the techniques of subjection. Indeed, during the late 1970s, Foucault defined the idea of the critic as the “art of not being governed so much.”39 This art attempted to disarticulate the “bundle of relationships that ties . . . power, truth and the subject” and had as its essential function “the desubjectification of what one might call, the politics of truth.”40 This fundamental attitude against institutions of subjectification guided his understanding of politics in the last years of his life. His relation to anti-statism must therefore be understood through his work on subjectivity across the 1970s. The new framework Foucault built around the relations between “games of truth,” “systems of power,” and “techniques of the self” helped him to interpret the “new social movements” of the 1970s as movements against subjectification (assujetissement). In his words, struggles were no longer “attacks on a particular institution of power, or group, or class, or elite, but rather a particular technique, a form of power.”41 This form of power influenced everyday life, as it “classifies individuals into categories and defines their own individuality, attaches them to their identity.” It is not a power that represses or exploits, but rather that subjectifies. The problem of “exploitation and wealth would be replaced by one of excessive power,”42 of control of conduits and modern forms of pastoral power. He called this “specific frame of resistance to forms of power” “revolts of conduct.”43 Those revolts were erupting, in the eyes of Foucault, when the “proposed institutions are unsatisfactory” and “when we seek to organize, to construct, to define our relation to ourselves.”44
Such revolts obviously opposed a certain kind of state power, but not as it was conceived by many organizations on the left during that period. Foucault did not believe in seizing state power. The question was more about the state as “a matrix of individualization or a new form of pastoral power” and not only as an institution to control nor abolish. For Foucault, “the problem we are facing today, which is at once political, ethical, social and philosophical, is not to try to free the individual from the state and its institutions, but to free it from the State and the type of individualization associated with it.”45 In the same way that we should not seek to “liberate” our sexuality, the question is not about getting rid of the state (nor taking control of it), but of refusing the forms of normalization it imposes on our lives and the way it shapes our relation to truth and therefore to ourselves. The main task of the struggles of the 1970s and 1980s was therefore to “promote new forms of subjectivity by refusing the kind of individuality that has been imposed on us for several centuries.”46 His understanding of power and liberty therefore put the “invention of the self” at the center of his politics. The logic of resistance was profoundly changed under those terms. As Judith Revel has pointed out, Foucault’s critique “consisted of displacing the place of thought and politics”47 just like the Greek cynics who made of their own existence a public scandal. Foucault referred to it as “activism through life itself,” in which he saw the conditions of a “revolutionary life.”48
This critique of the state and of social institutions as techniques of subjectification deeply resonated with his understanding of neoliberalism and the evolution of French politics. It seems, therefore, interesting to note that for Foucault, parallels could be drawn between Greek antiquity, the rising neoliberal governmentality in France, and his understanding of what a critical attitude is. The 1970s in France seems, therefore, to manifest the slow disintegration of what happened under the Christianization of the culture of the self. Foucault appears then to establish a historical parallel between the transition from antiquity to Christianity and the transition from the old statist France to the rise of neoliberalism after 1968. Indeed it is important to understand that the autonomy he sees in the Greco-Roman culture is precisely what he tried to achieve through his critique as an intellectual. As he explained at UC Berkeley in 1983, what is “the most striking thing about Greco-Roman culture is the fact that people have what seems to be a real autonomous culture of the self.”49 This autonomy does not imply that one’s self is freed of any relation with power structures, but that the relationship to ourselves “was not at all a matter of authority-based obligation, they were not obliged to do so, but it was proposed to them as something important, something of great value, and something which could give them the ability to achieve a better life, a more beautiful life, a new type of existence, etc., etc. So you see that it was a matter of personal choice.”50 In this specific configuration, the techniques of the self were not integrated within institutions but rather diffused as books, treaties, or advice that Foucault studied in his History of Sexuality: “These practices of the self were independent of pedagogical, religious, social institutions. . . . This is what I meant by ‘autonomous.’”51
Christianity marked a transition from a “morality [that] was essentially looking for a personal ethics to morality as obedience to a system of rules.” More specifically, beginning in the fifteenth century, a “great process of governmentalization of society” occurred that made this “autonomous self-culture ‘disappear’ after the development of Christianity, because the formation of the self and the way in which people should take care of themselves was integrated into religious, social and educational institutions.”52 This institutionalization and integration of the culture of the self within pastoral power (through practices like confession or penitence that have the care of the soul as their object) obviously did not erase the culture of the self, but forced it to “lose much of its autonomy.”53 Today, he argued, this lack of autonomy persists and the practices of the self “have been integrated into structures of authority and discipline” or into the “penal system” that “responds, in a way, to the same objective. One of its aspects, of course, is to constitute a certain type of self, since, through the penal system, the criminal must recognize himself as a criminal.” But, with the 1970s and the rise of neoliberal governmentality, Foucault observed something that captivated him. The ethic, that was slowly incorporated into the “juridical organization,” which took the form of a “juridical structure” was now collapsing and opening a new path toward the creation of a more autonomous ethic:
[The] three great references of our ethics to religion, law and science are now, if I may say so, worn out. And we know very well that we need ethics, and that we cannot ask religion, law, or science to give us that ethic. We have the example of a Greco-Roman society, where an ethic, and an ethic of great importance, existed without these three references. [...] The problem is not at all to return to this Greco-Roman ethic, since part of ours is coming from it. But we know that it is possible to carry out an ethical research, to build a new ethic, to make room for what I should call the ethical imagination, without any reference to religion, law and science. And it is for this reason that, I believe, this analysis of Greco-Roman ethics may be of interest.54
We could therefore witness the fact that in the French society of the early 1970s “the idea of morality as obedience to a code of rules is now disappearing, has already disappeared.” This decline must be understood in relation to the rise of neoliberal policies in France after the election of Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, which led to an important transformation in the relation between the state and institutions. Giscard’s concern for increasing individual freedoms in the aftermath of May 1968 was accompanied by a warier relation to state power. In this context, Giscard defended the vision of a state that was neither “invasive nor arbitrary,”55 including the “suppression of phone listening, the refusal of any foreclosures of the press even in case of attacks against the president, reaffirmation of the right of asylum,”56 and the end of the censorship of cultural production (especially movies that had to be politically evaluated by the censorship commission until 1974). As noted by Mathias Bernard, “the crisis of May 1968 transformed [Giscard’s] conception of society—insofar as it appeared possible to respond to anti-authoritarian aspirations of the baby boom generation without jeopardizing an economic organization which, for him, carried the evidence of its effectiveness.”57 In an attempt to “modernize” French society and to attack “social prejudices,” he also created three new departments: one on the condition of prisoners, one for immigrant workers, and one concerning the condition of women. This led to such important reforms as the legalization of abortion, the liberalization of contraception, the decriminalization of adultery, the recognition of divorce by mutual consent, important measures to promote the integration of immigrant workers, and the improvement of conditions in prisons. He was also the first president to actually go into a prison to visit inmates58 and to invite immigrant garbage men to the Elysée presidential palace59 in 1974. He was also open to reducing the voting age to eighteen years old. In an interview, Foucault even joked about Giscard, saying that he would soon define his project as an “anti-repressive society.”60
The key point here is that he understood neoliberalism not as the retreat of the state but as the retreat of its techniques of subjugation and as a decline of the jurisdiction of the moral. From that standpoint, it is interesting to note that there was a deep connection between the rise of neoliberalism as a form of governmentality and Foucault’s plea for inventing new subjectivities. Indeed, rather than being an obstacle to these new forms of resistance, neoliberalism seemed to open new spaces for the experimentation of ways of life, to offer a framework more open to invent a more autonomous ethic. The effects of a certain configuration between state power and the forms of subjugation seem to be very different under neoliberalism than under the old Gaullist and statist France. It was a very seductive framework for rethinking the political struggles of the time. It opened a space of freedom within the enterprise of creating new “subjectivities” and spaces for experimentation.
Foucault was particularly struck by this evolution within the realm of sexuality. In a rare paper of 197861 discussed by Serge Audier, Foucault explored the reception of his proposition to depenalize sexual relations between adults and teenagers. In his view, France should move the legal age toward thirteen to fifteen years old. In the article, he explained how surprised he was that the reaction of the government (in 1977) was positive and the discussion interesting. The main reason he gave for this reaction was precisely the decline of a disciplinary/pastoral model of exercising power under neoliberalism. He then mobilized the analysis of Gary Becker on crime and interestingly noted that “in the development that we are seeing now, what we are now discovering, is the extraordinary cost of what represents the exercise of repressive power.”62 He continued: “Why alienate intellectuals? What is the benefit of a society that would hunt homosexuals? The birth rate? In the age of the contraceptive pill? The fight against syphilis?”63 In this age of neoliberalism, we understand that “whenever one commits an act that is exercising power, it costs, and not just economically.”64
A Framework for Pluralism
In terms of spaces for minority practices, the neoliberal government of Giscard could also be seen to be of significant interest for the post-1968 left. Foucault saw neoliberalism as an interesting framework for new forms of politics that were open to minority practices. As has been argued by Lagasnerie, Foucault “argued that the central concept of the neoliberal approach is not freedom, but plurality. [...] The specificity of this paradigm is to force us to ask ourselves what it means to live in a society made up of individuals or groups experiencing different modes of existence.”65 This framework was essential to Foucault precisely because his understanding of politics as a form of resistance to normalization and subjection implied a certain commitment to difference in terms of our relationship to ourselves. Foucault did not plea for identity, but rather for a certain form of pluralism in society and within ourselves. As he writes, “the relationships we have to have with ourselves are not ones of identity, rather, they must be relationships of differentiation, of creation, of innovation.”66 In this view, we do not need to “discover” our “true identity” (a form of essentialism Foucault always repudiated) but rather “refuse what we are”67 within a given configuration of power and knowledge (“la ‘vraie vie’ ne peut se manifester que comme ‘vie autre’”). In this regard, the struggles of the 1970s were fundamentally struggles for “a right to difference,” or to differ from oneself.
In an indirect critique to the situationists and Guy Debord, Foucault openly defined neoliberalism not as a society of consumption or as a force of uniformization, but rather as a “game of differentiations.”68 As he wrote in his lectures on biopolitics, neoliberalism, as it was conceived by the ordoliberals, “and which has now become the program of most governments in capitalist countries, absolutely does not seek the constitution of [a] standardizing market society” but, “on the contrary, obtaining a society that is not orientated towards the commodity and the uniformity of the commodity, but towards the multiplicity and differentiation of enterprises.”69 For him, the key aim of the neoliberal agenda was not “so much the exchange of commodities as the mechanisms of competition”70 and thus of “differenciation.” The logic of neoliberalism was therefore an interesting framework in the eyes of Foucault for creating a space to protect and even stimulate the proliferation of discourse and subjectivities. Indeed, as he argued in The Birth of Biopolitics, neoliberalism shaped the idea of a society “in which there is an optimization of systems of difference, in which the field is left open to fluctuating processes, in which minority individuals and practices are tolerated, in which action is brought to bear on the rules of the game rather than on the players, and finally in which there is an environmental type of intervention instead of the internal subjugation of individuals.”71
In Foucault’s view, this action of an “environmental” type was distinct from the former one. As he wrote, what “you can see appears on the horizon of this kind of analysis is not at all the idea of a project of an exhaustively disciplinary society in which the legal network hemming in individuals is taken over and extended internally by, let’s say, normative mechanisms. Nor is it a society in which the mechanisms of general normalization and the exclusion of those who cannot be normalized is needed.”72 Therefore, as argued by Mitchell Dean, Foucault draws an important contrast between “external” forms of subjugation and internal forms of subjugation “as the fabrication of subjectivity through relations of power and knowledge.”73 Neoliberalism is therefore a form of governmentality that breaks with past forms of regulation and power relying on the production of the subject through a set of techniques and laws. The rules of the game in opposition to the forms of disciplinary power “are not decisions which someone takes for others” but a general framework where neoliberalism does not tell you how to behave in your everyday life: “It is a rule of the economic game and not a purposeful economic-social control.”74 The rules are indeed imposed on players but the players “remain free in their game.”75 Thus, neoliberalism finally makes, as Luis Moreno notes, individuals that “are responsible for their lives without imposing a defined anthropological model. [...] Individuals must not submit to any rule concerning how to live, to love or to have fun; they simply have to ensure subjective and objective means to get there.”76 Indeed, as argued by Isabelle Garo:
Behind what may seem at first sight to be the most frightening commercial cynicism . . . lies a real critical power, which Foucault does not miss: criticism of any essentialization of feelings and behaviors, from the maternal nature to the Eternal feminine, critical of any eternity of norms at the same time. No other approach to human behavior offers such an a-moralistic, Nietzschean, or de-anthropologizing perspective of genuine explosive power.77
In the eyes of Foucault, neoliberalism proceeds to an “anthropologic erasing” (gommage anthropologique) in its understanding of human actions.78
From this perspective, it was quite clear to Foucault that neoliberalism was a new form of governmentality that, as Serge Audier points out, was certainly in many ways not better than the former but nonetheless, “offered margins of freedom, especially for minority practices—drugs, sex, refusal to work, etc.” Therefore, “this apparent ambiguity of Foucault’s relation to neoliberalism offers a landmark in the way he tried to reinvent subjectivity, sexuality and even welfare.”79
Foucault and the French “Second Left”
This important shift in the way Foucault conceived resistance outside the sphere of the state, and saw an interesting framework in neoliberalism, strongly echoed the transformations of the French intellectual field and, specifically that of the left. To understand how profound this transformation was, it is interesting to read how important French intellectuals at this time read Giscard’s reforms. Andre Gorz’s intervention is in this regard particularly interesting. An important Marxist thinker of ecology, but also an advocate of the end of postwar class politics80 (and close to the “second left”), Gorz also saw in the rise of French neoliberalism an occasion to rethink the left.
As he put it in a text of 1976, “it is clear: Giscard comes from the right. But it does not follow from that, that the liberalization of society is necessarily a right-wing project and that we should abandon that to the giscardians.”81 He then stated that “everywhere in Europe there is now, between neoliberals and neosocialists, exchanges and partial osmosis.”82 The core of these exchanges between this new left and this new right was not so much about increasing corporate power, but about struggling against a common enemy: the state. As Gorz argued, “if Giscard arrives at disengaging the central power and freeing new spaces where we can exercise collective initiative, why not profit from it?” The retreat of the state, provoked by neoliberal policies, would then become a good occasion for an anti-statist left to “occupy the field left vacant by power.”83 He then naturally concluded with a very straightforward question: “Does the left want a society where everyone relies on the state for everything: the pollution of our shores, food additives, architecture, abusive layoffs, work accidents, etc.? In that case we will only replace a private carelessness by an administrative carelessness, an employer’s arbitrary will with a bureaucratic arbitrary will.”84 As Serge Audier has pointed out, for Gorz, neoliberalism was obviously not a solution, but “it could offer significant opportunities for another economic, political and social agenda.”85
The relations between Foucault and neoliberalism may be understood from a similar perspective. He obviously never advocated for “any kind of wild liberalism,”86 but he did see neoliberalism as an interesting framework to create a “left governmentality” that could stand as an alternative to the old socialist left and a space for experimentation. This project was most clearly defended by the intellectuals around the French “second left” and the CFDT union. As Michel Chapuis, socialist minister under Michel Rocard and an important figure of the “second left,” wrote: “Facing the new liberal right incarnated by Giscard, it would have been important to give a chance to a new socialist left.”87 This Rocardian left, rather than being completely opposed to the Giscardian power, saw this transformation within the right as a model for its own ambitions on the left.
This French “second left” acquired its name from a famous speech of the socialist leader (and prime minister in 1988) Michel Rocard in the 1977 congress of the socialist party, where he made a distinction between two lefts: one “that was long-dominant, Jacobin, centralized, statist, nationalist and protectionist” and the other, the “second left,” which is “decentralized” and “refuses arbitrary domination, that of the bosses as well as of the state.” This left was to be “liberating for dependent majorities like women or badly integrated minorities in society: youth, immigrants, and the disabled.”88 In an obvious opposition to the program of the union of the left and to François Mitterrand, Rocard formulated the idea of a strong division between these two “cultures” within the left. In this struggle, it was clear for him that beyond their differences, both communists and the Mitterrandist majority within the party had in common the idea that “the essential element within their strategy of change is centered on the conquest of state.”89
The most clearly articulated theorization of these “two cultures” of the left could be found in a book by Patrick Viveret (who wrote Rocard’s 1977 speech) and Pierre Rosanvallon, which was published in 1977 under the title For a New Political Culture.90 Foucault was enthusiastic about this book, explaining that it gave “a remarkable understanding of our present” and “an accurate diagnosis,” and it was “a breakthrough.”91 Viveret and Rosanvallon defended the idea that, since the war, France had lived under a political culture where “the central element is the state, considered at the same time as the object of the struggle and the space of social transformation and the motor for the future transition to socialism.”92 The problem for them was not so much what you could do with the state as the state itself, which was the main tool for social transformation. As they argued, “the dominant political discourse, from the left or right, puts the difficulty of social transformation, not in its aim, but in the means.”93 From this perspective, the second left was a reaction against a certain conception of social transformation and a certain relation to the state that was, in their view, shared by both the left and the Gaullist right. Against these two figures of “statism,” the “second left” defended the virtues of “civil society,” of human rights, of minority rights, and rehabilitated within the left the idea of entrepreneurship. For them, as Jacques Julliard pointed out in an interview with Michel Rocard, “socialism is not the suppression of private entrepreneurship, but to the contrary, the possibility for each individual to recover a function of entrepreneur.”94 Thus, in their attempt to refuse a “statist society” and to “rehabilitate the concept of entrepreneurship,” neoliberalism could be seen as an interesting intellectual tool to invent a new left, a left that was no longer opposed to the market. This necessary evolution was for them a condition to be able to “elaborate a plan [that was] able to break with any economistic, bureaucratic or totalitarian temptation.”95
In this context, it comes as little surprise that Foucault shared their concerns and ambition to find an alternative to the postwar left. This is the reason Foucault was attracted by the “second left.”96 As noted by Isabelle Garo, “following the highly curved political trajectory of a part of his generation,” Foucault “intended to contribute in his own way to the liberalizing “modernization” of the institutional left, beginning with the Socialist Party.”97
Conclusion: What Does Left Mean?
In a conversation organized at the University of Chicago in 2013, Gary Becker asked if Foucault was a socialist. In his response, François Ewald made an interesting distinction: “Socialist, no! On the Left.” Troubled, Becker then asked, “But well, what does Left mean?”98 This question, regarding the definition of the left itself, would actually be the one that was at stake in the mid-1970s in France. What should the left be? What was at stake in the strong political debates of that period was not only the program of the left, but its definition. Though the so-called statist left won in the ballot boxes in 1981, it would not be an exaggeration to say that the “second left’s” ideas later had a central importance in the evolution of the socialist party.
It is essential to understand that Foucault and many other post-1968 intellectuals took part in the process of thinking about a left that was not socialist, a left that would wipe out the legacy of postwar socialism. Described as “crypto-totalitarian,” they finally abandoned the socialist project. Since the revolution was not desirable anymore, Foucault thought that we should invent a kind of politics that could open the path toward a left that would no longer reject the market and therefore create a space freed from the state and freed from the normativity of the “social-statist” governmentality (shared by both socialists and Gaullists). In this sense, as Michael Foessel argues:
In defending civil society, the second left took for inspiration the libertarian and social thought of 1968. From the thought of Michel Foucault to the activism of the CFDT there was an anti-statist consensus. Not “reform” instead of “revolution,” but “microresistances” and local experiences against the vertical exercise of power.99
By rejecting, as Paul Veyne notes, any “abstract” or “general” analysis in his political commitments, Foucault discovered an interesting idea in neoliberalism for his “militancy on the margins”100 and his “everyday” struggles for the excluded, prisoners, immigrants, or people with mental illness. From this perspective, neoliberalism provides an interesting framework for thinking about how, in accordance with Foucault’s understanding of social critique, “not to be governed too much.”101 This is precisely why the historian Julian Bourg saw in these evolutions a turn toward ethics among the French left, a turn that not only transformed the main subject of social change, but also “revolutionized what was the very notion of revolution itself.”102 In the long term, this change, to a certain extent, led to the substitution of “class struggle” with the “care of the self,” a struggle that was, in many ways, perfectly compatible with neoliberalism. Therefore, if Foucault was never a neoliberal in the strict sense of the term, his understanding of power and resistance in his last decade resonates profoundly with neoliberal political ontology and its transformation of politics into ethics.
NOTES
1. “Non au sexe roi” (Foucault interview with Bernard-Henri Lévy), Le nouvel observateur, no. 644 (March 1977): 92–130.
2. Michel Bosquet, “Occupons le terrain,” Le nouvel observateur, no. 116, (August 1976): 23.
3. Pierre Rosanvallon and Patrick Viveret, Pour une nouvelle culture politique (Paris: Seuil, 1977), ebook.
4. Claude Mauriac, Le Temps immobile VII. Signes, rencontres et rendez-vous (Paris: Grasset, 1983).
5. Unpublished interview of Michel Foucault and four militants of the LCR, July 1977, http://1libertaire.free.fr/MFoucault117.html.
6. Michel Foucault, “La méthodologie pour la connaissance du monde: comment se débarrasser du marxisme,” interview with R. Yoshimoto, April 25, 1978, 302–28, http://1libertaire.free.fr/MFoucault332.html.
7. Colin Gordon, “Foucault, neoliberalism, etc.,” Foucault News, 2015.
8. Marc Lazar, “La gauche et l’État:le ‘moment programme commun,’ 1974–1978,” in Danielle Tartakowsky and Alain Bergounioux, eds., L’union sans unité. Le programme commun de la gauche, 1963–1978 (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2012), 109.
9. Pierre Grémion, Modernisation et progressisme. Fin d’une époque 1968–1981 (Paris: Esprit, 2005), 8.
10. Rosanvallon and Viveret, Pour une nouvelle culture politique.
11. This theme was very popular at the time. See, especially, Claude Lefort, Un Homme en trop: Réflexions sur ‘L’Archipel du goulag’ (Paris: Le Seuil, 1975); Jean-François Revel, La Tentation totalitaire (Paris: Laffont, 1976); André Glucksmann, Les maitres penseurs (Paris: Grasset, 1977).
12. Michel Foucault, “Crimes et châtiments en U.R.S.S. et ailleurs.” (interview with K. S., Karol) Le nouvel observateur, no. 158 (1976): 34–37, http://1libertaire.free.fr/MFoucault438.html.
13. Ibid.
14. Quoted in Mauriac, Le Temps immobile VII.
15. Mauriac wrote: “Michel Foucault reconnaît ne même plus souhaiter pour la gauche une victoire dont elle ne saurait que faire dans ces conditions” (Mauriac, Le Temps immobile VII.).
16. Paul Veyne, Et dans l’éternité je ne m’ennuierai pas: Souvenirs (Paris: Albin Michel, 2014), 209.
17. Michel Foucault, “Non au sexe roi,” interview with B.- H. Lévy, Le nouvel observateur, no. 644 (March 1977), 92–130, Dits et écrits, vol. 3, no. 200.
18. Unpublished interview of Michel Foucault and four militants of the LCR, op.cit.
19. Michel Foucault, “Interview de Michel Foucault,” interview with C. Baker, avril 1984, Actes: cahiers d’action juridique, nos. 45–46: La Prison autrement? (June 1984), 3–6, in Dits et écrits, vol. 4, no. 353.
20. Ibid.
21. Michel Foucault, “Une mobilisation culturelle,” Le nouvel observateur, no. 670 (September 1977), 49. Online version: http://1libertaire.free.fr/MFoucault344.html.
22. Michel Foucault, “Truth, Power, Self,” in Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault, Hutton, Gutman, and Martin, eds. (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988), 9–15.
23. Michael Scott Christofferson, “An Antitotalitarian History of the French Revolution: Francois Furet’s Penser la revolution française in the Intellectual Politics of the Late 1970s,” French Historical Studies 22 (4).
24. Hervé Chauvin, “L’union de la gauche et la problématique des droits de l’homme en URSS,” in Tartakowsky and Bergounioux, L’union sans unité, 88.
25. Claude Mauriac, “Il ne faut pas tuer l’espérance,” Le Monde, July 7, 1977.
26. He notably praised Furet’s work in Michel Foucault, “The Great Rage of Facts,” in Daniel Zamora and Michael C. Behrent, Foucault and Neoliberalism (London: Polity Press, 2015), 171–75. He also characterized Interpreting the French Revolution as “a very clever book” in Michel Foucault, “L’esprit d’un monde sans esprit,” interview with P. Blanchet et C. Brière, online version: http://1libertaire.free.fr/MFoucault150.html.
27. Christofferson, “An Antitotalitarian History of the French Revolution.”
28. Foucault, “Non au sexe roi.”
29. Michel Foucault, “Die Folter, das ist die Vernunft” (“La torture, c’est la raison” interview with K. Boesers, J. Chavy, trans.), Literaturmagazin (8) (1977): 60–68, http://1libertaire.free.fr/MFoucault139.html.
30. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (New York: Pantheon, 1970), 387.
31. Daniel Defert, “Chronologie,” Dits et écrits, vol. 1, 87, cited in Serge Audier, Penser le “néolibéralisme,” 159.
32. Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 92.
33. Ibid.
34. Isabelle Garo, Foucault, Deleuze, Althusser et Marx (Paris: Démopolis, 2011), 150.
35. Geoffroy de Lagasnerie, La dernière leçon de Michel Foucault (Paris: Fayard, 2012).
36. Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 218–19.
37. On the economic policies, see Serge Berstein and Jean-François Sirinelli, Les années Giscard. La politique économique 1974–1981 (Paris: Armand Collin, 2009).
38. Mitchell Dean and Kaspar Villadsen, State Phobia and Civil Society (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2016), ebook.
39. Michel Foucault, Qu’est-ce que la critique?, Henri-Paul Fruchaud and Daniele Lorenzini, eds. (Paris: Vrin, 2015), 37.
40. Ibid., 39.
41. Michel Foucault, “The Subject and Power,” in Dreyfus and Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1982), 208–26.
42. Foucault, “La philosophie analytique de la politique,” 536.
43. Michel Foucault, Security, territory, population. Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977–1978, Graham Burchell, trans. (London: Palgrave, 2007), 264.
44. Foucault, Qu’est ce que la critique? 140.
45. Foucault, “The Subject and Power.”
46. Ibid.
47. Judith Revel, “‘N’oubliez pas d’inventer votre vie,’” in La Revue Internationale des Livres et des Idées, June 5, 2010, http://www.revuedeslivres.net/articles.php?idArt=348.
48. Ibid.
49. Michel Foucault, Qu’est ce que la critique?, 140.
50. Ibid.
51. Ibid.
52. Ibid., 141.
53. Ibid., 173.
54. Ibid., 143.
55. Mathias Bernard, “Le projet giscardien face aux contraintes du pouvoir,” in Berstein and Sirinelli, Les années Giscard. Les réformes de société, 18.
56. Ibid.
57. Mathias Bernard, Valéry Giscard D’Estaing. Les ambitions déçues (Paris: Armand Colin, 2014), ebook.
58. Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, Le pouvoir et la vie (Paris: Compagnie 12, 1988), 302–07.
59. Sylvain Laurens, “Les Maliens à l’Elysée,” Revue Agone (40) (2008).
60. Entretien avec la LCR….
61. Cited in Serge Audier, Penser le “néolibéralisme”; “Michel Foucault, July 1978,” in J. Le Bitoux, Entretiens sur la question gay (Bézier: H&O éditions, 2005), 70.
62. “Michel Foucault, July 1978,” 71.
63. Ibid.
64. Ibid.
65. de Lagasnerie, La dernière leçon de Michel Foucault.
66. Michel Foucault, “Michel Foucault, an interview: Sex, Power and the Politics of Identity.”
67. Foucault, “The Subject and Power.”
68. Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 142.
69. Ibid., 149.
70. Ibid., 147.
71. Ibid., 259–60.
72. Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 259.
73. Mitchell Dean, “Foucault, Ewald, Neoliberalism and the Left,” in Zamora and Behrent, Foucault and neoliberalism, 100.
74. Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 173.
75. Ibid., 175.
76. José Luis Moreno Pestaña, Foucault, la gauche et la politique (Paris: Textuel, 2011), 122.
77. Garo, Foucault, Deleuze, Althusser, and Marx, 175.
78. Foucault, Naissance de la Biopolitique, 264.
79. Serge Audier, “Quand Foucault découvre le néolibéralisme, Prophétie géniale ou symptôme d’une crise de la gauche?” in Daniel Zamora and Michael C. Behrent, Foucault et le néolibéralisme (Bruxelles: Aden, 2017 [forthcoming]).
80. Especially in André Gorz, Farewell to the Working Class (London: Pluto Press, 1982).
81. Bosquet, “Occupons le terrain,” 23.
82. Ibid., 213.
83. Ibid.
84. Ibid.
85. Ibid.
86. Michel Foucault, “Social Security,” in Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings, 1977–1984 (New York: Routledge, 1988), 175.
87. Michel Chapuis, Si Rocard avait su…Témoignage sur la deuxième gauche (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2007).
88. Michel Rocard, “Les deux cultures politiques, discours prononcé aux congrès de Nantes du Parti socialiste en avril 1977,” in Michel Rocard, Parler Vrai (Paris: Seuil, 1979), ebook.
89. Michel Rocard, “Un puissant parti socialiste, Intervention à la Convention nationale du parti socialiste le November 25, 1978,” in Michel Rocard, Parler Vrai.
90. Pierre Rosanvallon and Patrick Viveret, Pour une nouvelle culture politique (Paris: Seuil, 1977), ebook.
91. Letter from Michel Foucault to Pierre Rosanvallon of December 17, 1977, quoted in Michael Scott Christofferson, “Foucault and New Philosophy: Why Foucault Endorsed André Glucksmann’s The Master Thinkers,” in Zamora and Behrent, Foucault and Neoliberalism, 16–17.
92. Ibid.
93. Ibid.
94. Michel Rocard, “Entretien avec Jacques Julliard,” in Rocard, Parler Vrai, ebook.
95. Rosanvallon and Viveret, Pour une nouvelle culture politique.
96. Ibid.
97. Garo, Foucault, Deleuze, Althusser, and Marx, 161.
98. Becker, Ewald, and Harcourt, Becker and Foucault on Crime and Punishment, 19.
99. Michael Foessel, “De Rocard à Julliard, vie et mort de la deuxième gauche,” Libération, January 25, 2011.
100. Gil Delannoi, Les années utopiques, 1968–1978 (Paris: La découverte, 1990), 61.
101. Michel Foucault, “N’être pas tellement gouvernés,” Vacarme, no. 29, October 2, 2004.
102. Julian Bourg, From revolution to ethics: Mai 68 and contemporary French thought (Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2007), ebook.