fame; but in the novel, everyone just treats it as uninflected second nature, a logical pedestrian response to a set of desires that would naturally arise in any social setting. People are “free” to use the apparat or not; people are free to alter their personal peccadilloes that factor into the statistical summaries; people are even free to dissimulate and misrepresent their “true” selves, whatever those might be. Politics has become so outré that the possible impending collapse of the government is itself reduced to a set of abstract statistics, which the individual feeds into his strategic risk calculations on the apparat. Revolution is just another occasion for disaster porn and reshuffling the portfolio, rather than a transformation of history. Shteyngart does mention a few characters who recoil from using the apparat, but they are portrayed as backward Russians whose quaint obsessions date from a bygone era of buggy whips and communism.
I can imagine my reader poised to retort, “That was precisely Foucault’s point!” Power is not simply exercised between the ruler and the ruled; it has been integrated directly into the makeup of modern agency, it fills up the pores of our most unremarkable day; it is the default option of our reflex assumptions about what others think and do. It gets under our skin; which is one way to try to understand what Foucault meant by his seductive term “biopolitics.”6 Yet, as I have already hinted, leaning on Foucault as a guide to everyday neoliberalism can be a treacherous proposition, at best.
First, let us accord him his due. Foucault read some of the most important members of the NTC, from the ordoliberals to Gary Becker, when it was highly unfashionable to do so. He did not simply recapitulate their writings, but rather drew out a range of stunning implications that ventured far beyond the exoteric knowledge then being broadcast by the collective. Accomplishing this back in 1979, he was the first to appreciate the vaunting ambition of neoliberals to recast not just markets and government, but the totality of human existence into a novel modality, to be disciplined and punished by structures of power/knowledge. He also insisted, contrary to their deceptive assertions, that it was no “return” to classical liberal principles: “Neoliberalism is not Adam Smith; neoliberalism is not market society.”7 He transcended the moralism of those who denounced the commodification of everyday life. The fact that he pursued these insights in lectures that were not further developed into full-blown texts before his death in 1984 accounts for the long delay in cognizance of that fact. (The current Foucault renaissance dates from posthumous publication of the Collège de France lecture transcripts over the past decade.) His perspicuity takes on greater significance in retrospect, since it is conventionally said that the political ascendancy of the neoliberals dates from the early 1980s. Figure 2.4 in chapter 2 also demonstrates that interest in the neoliberals (outside of the thought collective itself ) was not widely common prior to that date. Thus, Foucault was reconnoitering a development in its infancy, one that most people in his circles had up till then ignored, and which has since proven to be far more consequential than it was in his own lifetime.
Let us venture even further in giving him his due. Foucault appears to have been the trailblazer when it came to insisting that power operates on the microlevel through the production of subjectivity in the multitude. He highlighted a number of phenomena characteristic of the neoliberal project that have since been topics of frequent commentary, when not taken as obvious. A short list (with citations to his lectures) would include:
A) The fragmentation of identity is attendant upon
an entrepreneurial version of the self.
The individual’s life must be lodged, not within a framework of a big enterprise like the firm, or if it comes to it, the state, but within the framework of a multiplicity of diverse enterprises connected up to and entangled with each other . . . [It] must make him into a sort of permanent and multiple enterprise.8
B) An entrepreneurial regimen for the self will eventually extend
the purview of its calculus to every conceivable social activity,
and not just those narrowly oriented to pecuniary profit.
This happens because it renders persons more susceptible to control, and not simply due to the profit motive. As Foucault put it, one extends the “grid, the schema, and the model of Homo economicus to not only every economic actor, but to every social actor in general inasmuch as he or she gets married, for example, or commits a crime, or raises children, gives affection and spends time with the kids . . . Homo economicus is someone who is eminently governable.” Entrepreneurship was insensibly downgraded as a narrow societal function and redefined as a set of character traits.9
C) A stance of cold calculation of interest will eventually be reprocessed as a new, warm, soulful form of moral economy. 10
Quoting Margaret Thatcher: “Choice is the essence of ethics; good and evil only have meaning insofar as man is free to choose.” In the neoliberal imagination, “faith-based charities” “were crowded out by the rise of the welfare state and would grow again . . . if government were to reduce its profile or remove itself entirely.”11
D) “The malleability of the self presumed by the theory of human capital investment will extend down to the most basic corporeal level, which will eventually mean investment in genetic manipulation.” 12
Foucault was the first to insist that Becker’s “human capital” was a first move in the neoliberal disintegration of the self. This race to the empty bottom is the terminal meaning of “biocapital.”
E) “The Entrepreneurial self cannot be passive, but must move strategically in a world rife with risk. Hence, reward and punishment are accepted by the agent as the outcome of calculated risks, not as the dictates of ‘justice.’” 13
Casinos are not cynical scams taking advantage of the naïve and improvident; they are the practice tables for life. Risk is the oxygen for the entrepreneurial self, but also the means through which failure is leached of its political valence. The failed should accept the verdict of the market without complaint or pleas for help. Insecurity is the incubator for risk-loving behavior. The birth of actuarial tables is the death of tragedy.
F) Ignorance is the natural state of mankind, and the guarantor of neoliberal order. The neoliberal self is comfortable with this ignorance.
“Everyone must be uncertain with regard to the collective outcome if this positive collective outcome is really to be expected. Being in the dark and blindness of all the economic agents is absolutely necessary . . . Invisibility is absolutely indispensable. It is an invisibility which means that no economic agent should or can pursue the collective good. But we must no doubt go further than economic agents; not only no economic agent, but also no political agent . . . You cannot because you do not know, and you do not know because you cannot know.”14 Ignorance as the linchpin of the neoliberal project was already stressed in the previous chapter. These quotes reveal that Foucault got there first.
There are undoubtedly further observations on the neoliberal approach to everyday life salted throughout the lectures; but these will suffice to demonstrate that Foucault was poised to elucidate the microstructures of a new sort of power. He was fascinated with the prospect that the classical liberal notion of a governmentalized “population” in a designated “territory,” the very calling card of the prince, was being downsized and recast by neoliberalism through its transformation of the disciplined body into an autogoverned federation of temporary investments. However, in stark contrast to his previous writings, he was not teasing out the operation of power on the ground and under the skin, so to speak; instead, he was extrapolating certain trends from the theoretical writings of some of the most prominent members of the Neoliberal Thought Collective. These lectures did not resemble his prior texts, usually amply stocked with anthropological nuggets from archival sources. The shift in register was a little odd. It was as if he had taken in his waning years to writing the ethnography of the twenty-second century by reading H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine.15 Or, to clumsily switch metaphors in midstream, it was as if Foucault were thumbing through an IKEA catalog, trying to decide what sort of deck chairs to order, without paying any attention to whether the furniture