Foucault's Analytic Philosophy of Power (On Lorenzini, Neoliberalism and the politicization of analysis)
A 1978 lecture by Foucault, “The Analytic Philosophy of Politics” given in Tokyo (and published in a translation by Giovanni Mascaretti in (2018) Foucault Studies) plays a rather important role in Daniele Lorenzini’s (2023) The Force of Truth: Critique, Genealogy, and Truth-Telling (pp. 47-49). I have digressed on that book twice now (recall this post and this post). This is, thus, the third installment.
Foucault’s Tokyo lecture is mentioned in the editorial notes to The Birth of Biopolitics (note 15, p. 263). In the note the editors call attention to Foucault’s use of speech act theory later in the lecture. Here’s what the editors write in that note 15: “As the later allusion to the theory of speech acts (p. 254) suggests, it is doubtless the works of J.R. Searle, one of the American representatives of analytical philosophy, to which Foucault is implicitly referring here. See below, this lecture, note 29. The lecture given in Tokyo the previous year, “La philosophie analytique de la politique” Dits et Écrits, 3, pp. 534–551, is evidence of his interest in “Anglo-American analytical philosophy” during these years.”
When I first taught and blogged about Birth of Piopolitics, I agreed that the material on p. 254 was an allusion to Searle. But I didn’t think Foucault had Searle remotely in mind in his discussion on p. 247 that triggered note 15. This can be readily seen by the wider context around note 15 (recall this post):
So, it is criticism in the form of what could be called an “economic positivism”; a permanent criticism of governmental policy.
Seeing the deployment of this type of criticism one cannot help thinking of an analogy, which I will leave as such: the positivist critique of ordinary language. When you consider the way in which the Americans have employed logic, the logical positivism of the Vienna School, in order to apply it to scientific, philosophical, or everyday discourse, you see there too a kind of filtering of every statement whatsoever in terms of contradiction, lack of consistency, nonsense. [n. 15] To some extent we can say that the economic critique the neo-liberals try to apply to governmental policy is also a filtering of every action by the public authorities in terms of contradiction, lack of consistency, and nonsense. The general form of the market becomes an instrument, a tool of discrimination in the debate with the administration.—translated by Graham Burchell, Lecture 10, p. 247
I am not going to repeat my interpretation of this passage (if you are interested please re-read this post here). However, it is clear that Foucault is implicitly linking Milton Friedman (who wrote a famous essay and book on The methodology of positive economics), and his techniques of criticizing the New Deal, to an American uptake of Vienna methods to all kinds of discourses. I think this best describes Quine and Ernest Nagel and their students, not Searle (who we know Foucault knew), but I can’t prove it one way or another.
As an aside, Foucault’s attitude here toward “the Americans’' is not self-evident. It depends a lot on what you think his attitude is toward the other side of the analogy, “The economic critique [of] the neo-liberals.” This has famously become subject of very intense polemics within the reception of Foucault. (There is, thus, good strategic reason for Lorenzini to sidestep it, if he can.) However, what’s important here is that if the analogy is strict, there is a clear implication that the American philosophers are, when they are filtering various kinds of languages, also engaged with a certain kind of ‘critique.’ Keep that in mind.
However, I noticed that in Lorenzini’s argument in The Force of Truth that Searle barely figures. Now that may be due to Lorenzini’s general tendency to sideline The Birth of Biopolitics (which I have insinuated does not fit his overall argument so well—but about that soon more). Lorenzini, quite rightly picks up on the echoes of late Wittgenstein and J.L. Austin in Foucault’s thinking. Of course, early Searle is not far removed from Wittgenstein and J.L. Austin so that settles nothing (and it is a bit difficult to reconstruct how fine-grained Foucault’s knowledge of American philosophy was (he started visiting Berkeley in 1980, but he had visited America in the 1970s).
However, that Lorenzini sees links with Wittgenstein is best supported by that Tokyo lecture. An especially eye-opening moment in Lorenzini’s argument occurs on p. 48, where Lorenzini quotes Wittgenstein’s Logical Investigations alongside Foucault’s Tokyo lecture. Let me quote Lorenzini first (apologies for the weird formatting, but Substack is bad with indented block-quotes):
We have known for a long time that the role of philosophy is not to discover what is hidden, but rather to make visible what precisely is visible, which is to say, to make appear what is so close, so immediate, so intimately connected with ourselves that, as a consequence, we do not perceive it.79
Here, Foucault is quoting almost verbatim the Philosophical Investigations, where Wittgenstein famously argues that
philosophy just puts everything before us, and neither explains nor deduces anything. . . . The aspects of things that are most important for us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity. (One is unable to notice something— because it is always before one’s eyes.)80
Yet Foucault imbues this task with a critical, ethico-political value that we do not (explicitly) find in Wittgenstein, who writes that “philosophy must not interfere in any way with the actual use of language,” but must instead limit itself to describing it, and therefore “leaves everything as it is.”81
How neat! However, because, as remarked, Lorenzini sets aside the Birth of Biopolitics, he misses that a year after his Tokyo lecture, Foucault had implied that in the American context analytic philosophy does perform a sort of critique.
So, all of this made me check out the (1978) Tokyo lecture. This is very much worth reading because a sub-text is ‘why I am not a Marxist.’ The remarks that Lorenzini and I care about are inscribed in a number of broader frameworks (including a ‘Western’ vs Confucian set of implied contrasts). The one I want to highlight here is that Foucault diagnoses four kinds of roles philosophers have had in the West since Solon. These four roles all involve “to put a limit, to put a limit to this excess of power, to this overproduction of power every time and in each case it threatened to become alarming.” (p. 189) As an aside, that Foucault is thinking in terms of the production of power suggests to me that he has already assimilated the Chicago school framework on these matters ((recall this January post on Foucault’s account of the demand function for criminality), and also this (here) earlier post on Lorenzini on the production of truth.)
Be that as it may, of the four kinds of anti-tyranny roles that philosophy can play, three go back to ancient Greece: as legislators (Solon), teachers/advisors (Plato), and as laughers at/being independent of power (the Cynics). He goes on to suggest that the legislative role remains largely dormant until the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries when all kinds of regimes that have a major constitutive, philosophical inflection come about with mostly disastrous consequences. Along the way, Foucault makes a rather pregnant remark that
Foucault’s ‘perhaps’ is rather important. The Tokyo lecture is given just as he is immersing himself in liberalism and contemporary neo-liberalism, and it is quite clear that those streams understand themselves as moderation against power. (This would be a nice way of characterizing liberalism as such.)
As an aside, this is not the end of the matter. In his 1979 (Birth of Biopolitics) lecture-series Foucault realizes that the quasi set of oppositions he is drawing here (‘philosophy vs power’ and ‘philosophy grounding science’) is not quite right because (and this one of the great themes of Lorenzini’s book) the social force of scientific truth too often presupposes philosophy’s services to power by making (what Foucault calls) veridiction possible.
Okay, in reflecting on the disastrous consequences of philosophy’s legislative ambitions in the modern age (Stalinism and Fascism are both singled out by they are not the whole of it), Foucault introduces the fourth role of philosophy. This starts indeed with the Wittgensteinian echo noticed by Lorenzini (p. 48) discussed above.
One wonders, of course, how familiar Foucault was with Chomsky (‘deep structures of speech’) when he spoke this. (Obviously, the real contrast is with the French structuralism that was his own target already back in the 1960s.)
Let me wrap up. I don’t think Lorenzini is wrong to claim, when commenting on this material, “Thus, while drawing from ordinary language philosophy, Foucault explicitly politicizes its insights.” (p. 48 [emphasis in Lorenzini)) But the character of this politicization is at issue.
In the Tokyo lecture in the material on p. 192 (and subsequently on p. 193). Foucault is aware that what he offers may seem like a merely empirical project. And he explicitly rejects the idea that it is merely descriptive, his project is ‘critical.’ The task of making these relations of power visible and amenable to public discussion and more is not merely descriptive. (As Lorenzini notes Foucault is also excited about offering a new account of Kant’s ”What’s Enlightenment” in such terms.)
Part of Foucault’s insight here is that analysis is itself never merely descriptive. This is so even among fairly conservative analysists who present themselves as descriptive metaphysicians like Strawson (recall here) and hardnosed naturalists. For example, in Dennett analysis is not just an act of clarification, but we are also optimizing in some sense (see (recall) the new introduction to a recent edition of Elbow Room).
As I noted (recall) a few weeks ago, according to Lorenzini (pp. 104-5), Foucault’s project keeps its distance from one feature of normative theory, namely legislating content. This seems entirely right to me because the Tokyo lecture clearly implies Foucault thinks that was the source of modern political disasters. However, according to Lorenzini Foucault does point the way toward forms of conduct.
There is some evidence for this view in the Tokyo lecture when Foucault returns to the theme of an analytic philosophy of power:
It seems to me that the role of such an analytic philosophy of power should be to gauge the importance of these struggles and phenomena, which up to now have been granted just a marginal value. One should show how these processes, these unrests, these obscure, limited, and often modest struggles are different from the forms of struggle that have been so strongly valorised in the Western world under the mark of revolution. Whatever vocabulary one employs, whatever the theoretical references of those participating in these struggles are, it is absolutely clear that we have to do with a process which, albeit very important, is not at all a process characterized by a revolutionary form, a revolutionary morphology in the classical sense of the word “revolution”…—p. 196
Foucault’s use of ‘morphology’ is revealing because it’s a term that is associated with Eucken’s ordolibaral methods of analyzing the economy that he discusses at length in 1979 lectures, as Foucault knew from his study of F. Bilger’s La Pensée économique libérale, if not his reading of Eucken directly. (Lorenzini misses this.) Interestingly enough then, part of the particular point of this new analytic philosophy of power is to avoid the Marxist class analysis and obsession with revolution.
Lorenzini notes the distance from Marxism (p. 114). And then goes on to say Foucault’s genealogy “generates specific ethico-political commitments.” I think that’s right. Foucault clearly, thus, thinks the point of analytic philosophy of power is to valorize certain struggles in the margins (the prisoners, the inmates of asylums, every day life resistance, etc.).
I have gone on long enough, but let me just note what is at stake. Lorenzini claims (and I have suggested this is a kind of apologia for Foucault to the Left), in particular, that Foucault desires to instill “a sense of ethico-politico commitment” in a newly constituted ‘we.’ (p. 113-115). However sympathetic this goal may be, I doubt this can be right as a description of Foucault’s aims because such constitution is itself a form of legislative philosophy and “prophesy” (see p. 192 of the Tokyo lecture) that Foucault explicitly rejects. It is no surprise then that Lorenzini appeals to a different text by Foucault (“Polemics, Politics, and Problematizations”) to secure that claim.
To be continued.