Liberalism as political rationality of government: too much state governing, not enough self-governing

A useful passage from Barry Hindess on Liberalism:

What particularly distinguishes liberalism, as Foucault describes it, from earlier versions of the art of government is not the view, which is also shared by the science of police, that nonstate agencies play an important part in the life of the population. Rather it is, first, the concern that the state may be "governing too much," that there may be cases in which "it is needless or harmful for [the state] to intervene." . . . Second . . . is liberalism's more restricted usage of the term government, which is now confined to the work of the state and certain of its agencies. This liberal usage involves a major redefinition of the term: where government was once seen as a ubiquitous work of regulation performed by a multiplicity of agencies throughout the population, it now comes to be identified more narrowly with the work of the state and its agencies. Government is no longer regarded as a field of activity that constitutes and maintains the social order from within, but rather as acting on this order from without. "The happiness of society" remains its fundamental concern, as it was in the era of police, but since government is now identified with the activities of state, it is no longer seen as something that is necessarily best served by the actions of government itself.

[“Politics as Government: Michel Foucault’s Analysis of Political Reason.” Alternatives 30 (2005): 389-413.394]

This is useful precisely because it unsettles the ideology of liberalism which counterposes a realm of individual and civic freedom (fundamentally modelled on and legitimated by market operations, like contract) to state regulation and authority. Foucualt's concepts of government and governmentality unearth the genealogy of this liberal critique of government - governing too much - and place it into the forcefield of debates about the government of the self and the state, and the roles and limits of 'police'. Thus one of Liberalism's key techniques is to conflate state and government and use this conflation to practice a form of distancing from this form of government as a practice of freedom from government as such. But such a distancing relies on other forms of regulation to do the work of governing; other forms of governmentality not necessarily emanating from the state. These other forms presume and work with dominations and disciplines, positive and negative, that community-governance, self-governance, household 'codes of conduct' seek to better manage. Management of the self, through what Foucault calls techniques of self, is thus a fundamental set of tasks and constant goal of governmentality: tasks and goals that are conducted through the formative techniques of the education system and other arms of the state and are daily mediated by work, media technology, narratives, religion, and so on. One domain of governmentality is that set of techniques whereby the self comes of age: how the self forms as responsible adult; the description of the tasks and practices that adult formation must accept as the work of a mature-ing self, and must accommodate as 'real'.

How these tasks and these paths of formation are narrativised in fictional and non-fictional print genres during the so-called modernisation of the Australian Economy in the 1980s-1990s is what my research investigates: a National coming-of-age in which maturity is tied in political and media narratives to financial deregulation, labour market reform, the installation of managerial regimes in public administration, and the privatisation of state-owned instruments and corporations. Concomitant with these 're-forms' was a pressure to reform the self: Australians needed to become more open, competitive, efficient, productive, flexible, 'creative'. Technologies of the self promoted through a pedagogic political discourse spoken most persausively by Treasurer then Prime Minister Paul Keating.

Now that Australia is headed toward a concerted policy response to Global Warming and an Emissions Trading System (ETS) is being debated, in spite of the neoliberal uses to which Keating put his substantial rhetorical skills, I'm nostalgic for the clarity and persuasiveness of his tongue: where in the current government is anybody capable of simplifying the rationale and prospects for an ETS? Which would be, paradoxically, a market-based system once the state sets up its first-period ground rules and prices. Is an ETS too much of a problem for the liberal critique of government and too much of a problem for the Keynesian-based notion of re-regulation that so often comes as its counter-critique? Do we need another Foucauldian notion of governmentality - the governing of the ecosphere perhaps - that can operate as a well-spring for positive techniques and practises which cut across selves, households, corporations, community group, local municipal councils, state and federal government?

Public sphere and publicity: a violently desirous speculation on bodies?

What role can 'culture' and its criticism play in terms of a Liberalism which has an ethos of separate realms for culture and the private sphere; realms which stand apart from the mass-market and the state? This question is one addressed by Jurgen Habermas in his study of the genesis of the modern political public sphere. For Habermas the critical-rational techniques that are publicly addressed to private people, firstly through criticism of epistolary novels like Richardson's Clarissa, model the means by which the police [in Foucault's terms - i.e. policies] of the state can be debated and decided. The autonomy of 'culture' thus serves as a 'space' into which such critical-rational debate can form spheres of public discourse. Something like this process can be currently seen in the multiple and overlapping debates, position-takings, affective testimonies and analyses surrounding photo-artist Bill Henson's work.

Henson's photo-models, in particular the becoming-adolescent female nudes, are both vulnerable, transforming individuals and mass-mediated images. The liberal rights of the models - to consent, to privacy, to restrict the uses of their image in the future - are in conflict with those of artistic autonomy: the rights of art to be free from state censorship and free to provide the impetus for rational-critical debate. Part of this debate is fuelled by anxieties about privacy and publicity in a time of accelerating mass-mediation with narrow-casting, networking and broad-casting image circulation coupled with increasing access to technologies for recording and disseminating 'private' information-image-text-sound globally.

For Habermas rational-critical debate in a public sphere that was no discriminator on grounds of differentials in class, status, race, gender, sexuality and education is an imaginary of the late c17th and c18 in Western Europe based on print-cultures. In his Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere it is print-culture (newspapers, journals, novels etc) that provides the means and forms for creating and circulating public-ness and public-ity. The transformation of this ideal open-ness comes, in part, from the infiltration of advertising publicity into this sphere of public-ness. Yet this narrative of decline - of the corruption by mass-culture and advertising of a once pure, neutral sphere of rational-critical debate which decided on the basis of the best arguments and evidence - was always predicated on its male, bourgeois, white, educated entry codes and conditions. That said the shifts from print- to image-based to multi-media cultures, from 'i-read therefore i am' to 'i-pod therefore i am', is not so much a decline in (print-)culture and its attendant rational-critical debate, as a transformation in forms and technologies that carry publicness. And thereby altering what we think and feel to be legitimate forms of privateness and the limits and objects of rational-critical debate.

Letter I.

Miss Anna Howe to Clarissa Harlowe
Jan. 10.

I am extremely concerned, my dearest friend, for the disturbances that have happened in your family. I know how it must have hurt you to become the subject of public talk: and yet upon an occasion so generally known, it is impossible but that whatever relates to a young lady whose distinguished merits have made her the public care, should engage every body's attention.
[Samuel Richardson Clarissa -1748. Opening lines - note the use of the two terms proceeding 'public': talk and care]

Is Liberalism then capable of adapting its critical-rational modes to our contemporary culture; a culture in which images and affect can circulate like forest fires or influenza through the social body? Is art capable of bringing moralities into question when it is itself, at moments in its social life, a commodity? Can art stand separate to modes of publicity which aim to sell? If controversy is an arm of modern PR, then to what extent is the choice of a controversial subject-form intended to generate publicity? Do we engage with these art-commodities as consumers or citizens?

These questions, I think, boil down to the criteria on which we try to separate public-ity from public-ness (open-ness). This brings us to Australian Cultural Studies academic John Frow's thoughts and his recent (1999)historicizing of Liberalism and what he, among others, sees as the transformation of classical Liberalism into a new form. Are we after Liberalism? Is neo-liberalism a form of classical liberalism or does the prefix 'neo' signify that the break with Locke's and Mills' (for example) liberalism is a ruptural and radical one?

In "Cultural Studies and the Neoliberal Imagination."
[The Yale Journal of Criticism 12.2 (1999): 424-30] Frow argues that American Liberalism "fails - constitutively, not accidently - to think three modes of historical transformation in the course of the twentieth century."

These three historically emergent blindspots of Liberalism are (concerning corporations, state, subject-citizen):

1. the transformation of corporations into forces radically transcendent of any one individual will. Liberalism simply has no good way of thinking about the overwhelming force of concentrated and deregulated capital other than as a system error or imbalance, and that means it has no good way of thinking about the complicities between its vision of cultural openness and the forces in the world that make for closure;



2. the transformation of the state into something more complex and differentiated than the site of sovereignty, such that it may under certain circumstances be available as a vehicle for the protection of individual freedoms, for the regulation of capital, and for the economic protection of those who lose out in the play of market forces - as well as continuing to be under other circumstances and perhaps also under the same circumstances a vehicle for oppression;
   



3. the transformation of the subject of citizenship into the mass-mediated and mass-interpellated subject of the culture industries and of the social-imaginary of consumption.

While Liberalism may have these three blindspots, neo-liberalism publicizes itself as "locating its vision of freedom in an expanded realm of economic transactions rather than in a separate realm of culture [and thereby it] has less of a problem in . . . coming to terms with a form of citizenship grounded in consumption rather than in the sphere of political judgement." [424-5] And rather than posit a separation between market and culture, between a domestic-intimate private-sphere and a commerical- corporate private-sphere, neoliberalism seeks to flatten this separation so that the idealised practice of rational choices exercised on the basis of entering freelyand equally into contracts of exchange in unfettered markets becomes the model for such events as marriage, going-to-war, visiting the dentist, buying a David Bowie Greatest Hits CD.

I take this to mean that in neoliberalism public-ness is the limited circulation of information that precedes contract-exchange in order to attract your attention and to provide the sorts of information that can enable a more rational choice when assessing a contract and its commodity. Publicity might be disseminated widely but it is aimed ultimately only at what will be consumers. Our interest in publicity is effectively our interest in consuming what is being publicised.

Can then public-ness be distinguished from public-ity in this time of neoliberal governmentality? For Frow, following Michael Warner, 'the public' in the term public-ness is predicated on an attitude of indifference to our own particularities and partialities: the public subject is a technology of the self which imagines through "a fiction of genericity, and is therefore a rhetorical fact" that the ordinary and public self are continuous [427].

For Warner the rhetorical fact of this public-ness is built on the classical rhetoric of disembodiment; a rhetoric which is challenged by mass consumption and its modes of publicity. Frow:

From this moment the political public sphere and mass consumption are at once alternatives and yet increasingly resemble and shape each other: publicness in the West henceforth has to do with iconicity, a rhetoric of embodiment, the display of bodies for the purposes of "admiration, identification, appropriation, scandal, etc; and public figures "increasingly take on the function of concretizing that fantasmatic body image, or in other words, of actualizing the otherwise indeterminate image of the people" (Warner, 385 &388) [428]

There is now a tension in the political realm between the generalized abstraction of the public subject in its classical form and "the always inadequate particularity of individual bodies," and it is this tension that generates the contemporary public sphere's dedication to "a violently desirous speculation on bodies" (Warner 397). [428]

I take Frow to be asking whether or not the public sphere can be said to exist if its founding rhetorical fact - print-culture based indifference to the self's particularities and partialities: disembodied self - is 'returned to' the representation of embodied identities. Frow questions whether Warner's argument for such an embodied public sphere is nostalgic, and whether or not it is "overdetermined by the sphere of commodity consumption and become the site of a fantasmatic identification." [428]

There are a few points here that Frow is seeking to make. I'll summarize these before attempting to apply some of them to the Henson art scandal.

Firstly, in terms of cultural studies Frow is seeking to defuse the project of subculture-liberation of minorities strand that comes out of parts of the Birmingham 'School'. For Frow these studies of subcultural formations are almost identical to the principles of neoliberalism, and any such studies need to attend to the rationalities and technologies of neoliberalism as a complementary study in order to discern whether or not a subculture's creative resistance is actual or based on the freedom-resistance nexus central to the imaginaries of neoliberalism.

Secondly, he aims to dissolve the barrier separating political and cultural fields through a consideration of liberalism and neoliberalism's blindspots and founding modes of subjectivity: the myth of equality and freedom in contract exchange.

Thirdly, the dream of a common public culture, which occurs in some forms of cultural studies that derive from Raymond Williams's writings, needs to take these developments in publicity's mass culture and mass consumption into account, and in particular the imbrication of the political and mass cultural fields. "When do we imagine that politics was ever a matter of dispassionate and rational judgement?" [429]

An yet Frow maintains the Habermasean imaginary of a rational-critical public sphere is still a viable and valuable one and that we shouldn't "give up on rational debate and on the critical analysis of social interests, or . . . reduce political action to the working-out of fantasmatic identifications." [429]. And its participants might register that "[t]his mass culture is no longer, for the main part, a print culture, and it is perhaps this shift that most distances us from the liberal vision of a common public culture." [429]

The Henson scandal is a dense web of desires, anxieties and rational-critical speech and text. I would like to just touch on those aspects of it that are highlighted by what I have taken from John Frow's essay; in particular the tension or contradiction between an embodied and disembodied identity that, in print-form, arguably founds the generic fiction of a public-ness that can function outside of public-ity.

The internet circulations of the photo that has generated the most attention are both public-ity for and instances of public-ness. Any framing of the photo, in itself, can't decide for us as citizen-subjects, between these two modes of the public. In other words whether or not the image is construed as publicity or as an artefact of public-culture is not finally immanent to the image nor able to be directed by the textual commentary or framing of its display. This indecidability is on the one hand an opening into our freedom to choose its meaning - this might be its libertarian and liberal dimensions and this might also be due to our capacity to disembody the subject of the photo. On the other hand this indecidability opens the photo to meanings and affects which are imputed to its embodiment of pubescent breasts framed by the body from thigh to crown of the head. This is construed as publicity: a display of an embodied privateness which must not be disembodied. It must not be disembodied because this will enable pedophilia, subsequent shame, the destruction of innocence.

That we are dealing here in photo-images circulating through the Web 2.0, through mobile phones, and able to be recorded points to how far from the print-culture roots of the classical public sphere we are. These technological-media conditions would be feeding into the moral panic that also traverses this debate. Yet to what extent is our imaginary of a rational-critical debate predicated on moralities and affects that are so normalised and naturalised as to count as the neutral ground upon which indifferent reason can do its work? If our idealised political public sphere was one created out of a conflation of two modes of private-ness (private commerical/property and private domestic-familial-intimate) then what affects or feelings are structured into this model of rational-critical debate in order that rationality can declare its forms and logics?

Is it more than a coincidence that Habermas's argument about the formative role of the epistolary novel in the creation of forms of publicness used by the political public sphere has as its central subject a young woman whose morality is at stake?

*Open letter of Support for Bill Henson here. *

Notes. Barry Hindess on Governmentalities

Some notes from
Barry Hindess. Discourses of power: from Hobbes to Foucault. Oxford: Blackwell, 1996.

Foucault maintains that . . . there is a certain continuity between the government of oneself, the government of a household [oeconomy] and the government of a state or community. Linked to this continuity, he argues, is the fact that the principles of political action and those of personal conduct can be seen as being intimately related. He suggests, for example, that successful government of others depends, in the first instance, on the capacity of those doing the governing to govern themselves. As for the governed, to the extent that it avoids the extremes of domination, their government must aim to affect their conduct - that is, it must operate through their capacity to regulate their own behaviour. In this respect too, successful government of others is often thought to depend on the ability of those others to govern themselves, and it must therefore aim to secure the conditions under which they are enabled to do so. [105]

[W]hat matters in the study of governmental power [from the perspective of government as the regulation of conduct] is not so much the state itself, considered as a more or less unified set of instrumentalities, but rather the broader strategies of government within which the instrumentalities of the state are incorporated and deployed. [109]

For Hindess there is also another more specific and precise form of Foucault's use of the term government: "'the particular form of governing which can be applied to the state as a whole.'" [Foucault cite. 109]

Government, in this specific sense, is not to be confused with the rule of the prince, feudal magnate or emperor, or even with the collective rule over themselves that is often said to have been excercised by citizens of the independent Greek communities and of the Roman republic. [109]

The government is based on intrinsic rational principles- reason of state - and has as its main object population. Population has 'its own regularities, its own rate of deaths and diseases, its cycles of scarcity, etc' [and it emerged due to an understanding of it] as characterized by its own aggregate phenomena, irreducible to those of the families contained within it. [Foucault cite. 111]

Population "comes to appear as above all else as the ultimate end of government. In constrast to sovereignty, government has as its purpose not the act of government itself, but the welfare of the population, the improvement of its condition, the increase of its wealth, longevity, health, etc.; and the means that the government uses to attain those ends are themselves all in some sense immanent to the population. [Foucault cite. 111-2]

3 'approaches to the general problem of government: discipline, pastoral power, liberalism.' [112]

3 rationalities of government.

1. Discipline
'A productive power par excellence: it aims not only to constrain those over whom it is exercised, but also to enhance and make use of their capacities.'
[113]

The idea that the conduct of others (and of oneself) can be subjected to instrumental control is clearly predicated on an orientation which Heidegger describes as 'the essence of technology'. This orientation treats the world as consisting essentially of forces that can be harnessed, at least in principle, to human purposes. Human individuals and human aggregates, too, will thus be seen, like all other phenomena, as if they were a standing reserve of energy to be put to use. But before this can happen, what it is that will be used in this way - what Heidegger refers to as 'a calculable coherence of forces' - must first be defined and identified. For this reason, Foucault insists that the expansion of discipline in this period goes hand-in-hand with the invention of the humanist subject; that is, of the conception of the human individual as endowned with a soul, consciousness, guilt, remorse, and other features of an interiority that can be worked on by other agents. This humanist subject came to be seen as the locus of usable energy and, therefore, as the focus of instrumental control: the focus, in other words, of discipline. [115]

Such discipline requires techniques of knowledge about and concerning the human subject. Thus discipline is knowledge/power. Techniques of disciplinary power include: surveillance, regimentation, classification. [118]

2. Pastoral Power (Shepherd-flock game): police, confession, guidance and self-examination

a more continuous and more intimate form of government than consensual ones: "to promote the well-being of its [a government's] subjects by means of detailed and comprehensive regulation of their behaviour. [. . . ] Pastoral power . . . is concerned more with the welfare of its subjects than with their liberty." [118]

Three facets of pastoral power: i. "Shepherd governs a flock and each of its member, rather than a territory and each of its inhabitants. [ . . . ii] the flock exists in and through the activity of the shepherd: remove the shepherd and the flock is likely to collapse into a mass of dispersed individuals. [ . . . iii] the shepherd cares for the flock both individually and collectively, attending to the needs of its members." [119]

Hindess summarizes Foucault's reach into older meanings of 'police': It referred both to an area of government administration - covering everything apart from justice, finance, the army and diplomacy - and to the objectives of that administration. In effect, police was responsible for the comprehensive regulation of social life in the interests and development of society and the improvement of individuals, and it was expected to pursue these objectives in the most rational fashion . . ."a good national 'police' was not to be achieved solely by politicians or by a professional corp of 'police', but by publicly concerned, philanthropically minded citizens." [Andrews cite. 120-121]

"The theory of police exemplifies the comprehensive responsibility for the welfare of the flock and each of its members that is central to Foucault's account of the 'pastoral' rationality of government." [121]

The early [Christian] church developed models of pastoral power which were later adapted by 17c 'Confessional' states in Europe.

"[T]he 'pastoral' ise of confession, self-examination and guidance continue to be found today, not only in Christian churches and sects, but also in the work of a variety of specialized state agencies and private charitable and philanthropic organizations, in may kinds of counselling, therapy and techniques of personality modification . . . In such cases, the training of individuals in the exercise of self-government serves as an instrument of the government of their conduct. . . . [T]he 'pastoral' use of confession, self-exmaination and guidance of conduct should be seen as instruments of government that work in part through the formation of individuals who can normally be relied upon to impose an appropriate rule on their own behaviour.[122-3]

3. Liberty and the Liberal Rationality of Government

From one, orthodox, perspective "[t]he fundamental problem of liberal government . . . is to build the appropriate restraints into a system of government that nevertheless remains sufficiently powerful to secure the liberty of its subjects." [124]

Foucault's very different perspective on Liberal rationality begins from his tenets that wherever power is freedom (to some extent) is always already there, and that governmental power works through the behaviour [conduct] of free persons. For Foucault the fundamental rationality of Liberal government is that it should promote the freedom of its subjects rather than see such freedoms as threats to its governing. Thus Liberal government seeks to secure what it considers as natural conditions for the generation of this freedom; security of markets-economy, population growth. At the heart of liberalism, in this view, is an interventionist state. [124-5]

Two Liberal critiques of police:
I. "the comprehensiveness of police attempts at regulation - the fact that they are aimed at the entire population - must be rejected on the grounds that the primary objective of the state should be the defence of individual liberty not the pursuit of happiness." [126]

II. Foucault's analysis of liberal critique of police focuses through something similar to Adam Smith's critique in which police=regulation=dependency=conditions for degeneration. cf "nanny state" critiques in which welfare is seen to blunt self-reliance, independence and moral improvement. Here the market comes shining through as that self-regulating and 'natural' realm, or sphere, in which these attributes can best be generated in a condition which is 'state-free'.

So, "[i]n Foucault's terms, then, the liberal rationality of government regards the liberty of its subjects as an indispensable element of government itself." [129]

Governing through a freedom that is regulated indirectly: through the formation of selves that is the aim of education. Or the formation of selves that occurs through enculturation, or what in German is called Bildung: often the first term in the literary genre class the Bildungsroman, or the formation or coming-of-age novel.

One research problem in my thesis is this: if neo-liberalism, a newer form of governmental rationality best summed up in the texts of the Chicago School political-economic intellectual Milton Friedman, becomes ascendant over the long Labor decade then how does its regulation through formation of selves appear in Australian literary fiction and in Australian Labor party discourse? In other words, is there an Australian inflection to the Bildungs of neoliberalism? Some previous thoughts here.