Foucault, Biopolitics, and Governmentality

JOHANNA OKSALA
Reagan and Thatcher placed themselves at the head of a class movement the
determined aim of which was to restore its power. By capturing the ideals of
individual freedom and turning them against the interventionist and
regulatory practices of the state, capitalist class interests were able to protect
and restore their position. It was the genius of neoliberal theory to provide a
benevolent mask full of wonderful-sounding words such as freedom,
liberty, choice and rights to hide the grim realities of this restoration of
naked class power, locally as well as transnationally. The IMF and the
World Bank functioned as conspiratorial centers for the propagation and
enforcement of “free market fundamentalism” and “neoliberal orthodoxy”—forms
of ideology with highly questionable scientific rigor. 7 For
Harvey, resistance to neoliberalism thus requires unmasking the truth: we
must expose it for what it truly is, namely a covert attempt to restore class
privilege. We also have to rejuvenate class politics: class is not a meaningless
or defunct category, but must remain the central conceptual weapon in the
struggle against neoliberal hegemony. 8
It is my contention that instead of treating neoliberalism as an
ideological mask for a hidden truth we should respond to it on the level of
the production of truth. Foucault was deeply suspicious of the notion of
ideology. For him, the key philosophical question did not consist in
drawing a line between what falls within the category of scientificity or truth
and what comes under the suspicious label of ideology. 9 His interest rather
lay in the production of truth in two distinct ways. He wanted to identify
the political effects of truth and how they were produced historically. On
the other hand, he also wanted to analyze the regimes of truth: the
conditions that made it possible to utter true statements about governance
or the economy, for example. Neoliberalism must be understood as a
distinct regime of truth in this sense: its political ontology forms the
conditions for making reasonable political judgments in today’s world.
Foucault’s lectures chart this historical development, the genealogy that has
there has been an enormous spiraling of the levels of wealth in the top income categories.
In the US, for example, the share of the national income taken by the top one
percent of income earners fell from a pre-war high of 16 to less than eight percent by the
end of the Second World War, and stayed close to that level for nearly three decades. The
wealth that is now concentrated in the upper echelons of society has returned to a level that
has not been seen since the 1920s. See Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism, 15.
7 Ibid, 21.
8 Ibid, 202-203.
9 See e.g. Foucault, “Truth and Power,” in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and
Other Writings 1972–1977 by Michel Foucault, ed. Colin Gordon, trans. Colin Gordon,
Leo Marshall, John Mepham, and Kate Soper (Brighton: The Harvester Press, 1980), 118.
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