Philippe Fournier (lecturer in political science at the Université de Montréal, postdoc in sociology
at the University of Québec at Montreal)
Presented at the Millennium Annual Conference (2012); Materialism and World Politics
Governmentality and Marxism; promises and difficulties.
Abstract: Over the last decade or so, governmentality has become an increasingly popular
analytical approach in International Relations. Recently, a few commentators have identified
fundamental problems with the scaling-up of governmentality, arguing that the conditions for it
to take hold are simply not present in many developing countries. In order to remedy this
difficulty, they propose to integrate governmentality to a Marxian framework, which would
account for the structural inequalities that explain the highly uneven governmentalisation of the
international sphere. The paper considers this suggestion in more depth and highlights the
promises, difficulties and wider implications of this combination for critical theories of
International Relations. First, I argue that the amalgamation of Foucault and Marx constitutes a
potentially effective political sociology that charters the social reproduction of capitalism in a
detailed and non-reductionist manner. In contrast with Foucault’s focus on disciplinary power,
governmentality extends the microphysics of power by representing the wider relations between
state, society and the constitution of subjectivity. It will be shown that these preoccupations are
shared by a variety of critical theorists who aim to represent the social and cultural reproduction
of capitalism. Second, I take stock of the complexities and tensions in the intellectual rapport
between Marxians and Foucaultians, with a particular focus on ontological and political
divergences. The final part of the paper insists on the opening of a sustained dialogue between
post-structuralism and broadly Marxian perspectives in International Relations. I suggest that
Hardt and Negri’s work, which, bar a few exceptions, has been inexplicably overlooked or
rapidly dismissed by International Relations scholars, can provide a good starting point for such a
theoretical dialogue and for a wider discussion of power and resistance in the global sphere.
Introduction
Over the last few years, the idea of bringing governmentality and Marxism together to analyse
International Relations has been gathering steam. One of the main motivations behind this
combination is, ironically, the implicitly Western and statist vantage point of foucaultian
governmentality. Indeed, governmentality’s very existence and effectiveness depends on a
variety of institutional, social and material conditions (see Selby, 2007 and Joseph, 2010) that are
not present everywhere. The extension of governmentality throughout the global sphere is thus
incomplete, and the crucial issue of material imbalances and of the corresponding issue of uneven
governmentalisation is best accounted for by historical materialism. Even if the dissemination of
ethical norms and performance standards through the ever more present and numerous agencies
of international development suggests that a transnational form of governmentality is beginning
to emerge, the effectiveness of advanced liberal norms depends on pre-existing dispositions to
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internalize the requirements set out by neoliberal behavioural and institutional models. It is often
the case that governmentality is best applied to very specific regulatory regimes and to countries
where the conditions are amenable to such an analysis. The other reason behind the inclusion of
Marxism as a complementary rejoinder is, in rather more basic terms, governmentality’s sheer
popularity as an approach and the inevitable critical discussion that this popularity entails. Yet,
there is a sense that Marxists and foucaultians have not really engaged on the core issues, and
have been hesitant to address more profound disagreements over the course of several decades.
There may be a variety of reason for this. Some may be content to be a part of the extended
family of critical International Relations and not be too concerned with epistemological
differences. Or it may be that this lack of engagement is borne out of the recognition that those
philosophical divergences are unbridgeable and that we best toil in our own respective fields. The
objective of the paper is to take a closer look at both the promises and difficulties involved in the
potential combination of Marxism and Governmentality. I make the case that the success and
effectiveness of this peculiar blend depends on a series of epistemological and political choices
and on the establishment of fairly specific conceptual grounds. I also claim that the re-emergence
of Marxism in its various guises speaks to our current historical, social and material predicament
and to the general need to develop adequate theoretical instruments to study emerging forms of
subjectivation and resistance. The combination of Marxism and Governmentality should
therefore respond to emerging practices of assent and resistance.
The paper proceeds in two steps. First, it looks at the relationship between Foucault and Marx
and at the relationship between Foucault and Marxism. Second, it attempts to set the conditions
for a reasonably harmonious and effective combination of both lines of thought. Third, it traces
the potential difficulties that such an encounter implies and suggests that the amalgamation of
Marxism and Governmentality is also an invitation to think about the current state of critical
theory. The paper closes with a preliminary extension of these questions to International
Relations.
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1_ Marx and Foucault
The most revealing insights about Foucault’s relationship with Marx are to be found in a variety
of interviews, as Foucault purposely avoided direct references to Marx in his own work. In 1960
and 1970’s France, the hegemony of Marxist thought in all its guises was at its peak. Foucault’s
entire corpus indicates an implicit desire with do away with the manifold power-effects of
Marxian theorising. It is worth noting that Foucault did not struggle with Marx as such but with
the presumably authoritative adaptations of his work (Foucault, 2008). The three aspects of
Marxian thought that Foucault regarded as particularly objectionable were its scientific pretence,
its prophetic nature and its incarnation as a philosophy of the state or class ideology.
To the first point, Marx’s intellectual production is intimately tied to a scientific discourse that
had great currency in the second half of the 19th century. The notion that science was an
embodiment of truth was reiterated in many varieties of Marxism in the twentieth century, not
least by one of Foucault’s old mentors, Louis Althusser. We can also gather that the teleological
inflections of several Marxian currents did not sit well with Foucault. Equally, he saw the
enthronisation of the communist project into the state structure as one more step in the
impoverishment of our political imagination (Foucault, 2008: 599). The uniformity and rigidity
of the French Communist Party was certainly a factor in the demise of its political project. The
idea that the party was the unique intellectual and cultural space through which classconsciousness could develop made it ill adapted to the expression of multiple wills and existential
forms (Foucault, 2008: 614-615) from the late 1960’s on. Foucault, who was briefly a member of
the Communist Party in the early 1950’s, quickly understood that this association was
unsustainable. As he says in an interview “to be a Nietzschean communist was intolerable and
even ridiculous, I knew that all too well” (Foucault, 2008: 869).
Having specified that he objected to the contemporary expressions of Marxism and not to Marx
as such, Foucault, rather playfully, situates his own work in the lineage of the Second Book of
Capital. He asserts that most of the Marxists of his age were primarily concerned with the first
Book of Capital and therefore with the technical modalities of the capitalist economy
(commodity, the market, theory of value, etc.) (Foucault, Gordon, Patton and Beaulieu, 2012:
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100-101). In contrast, he is more interested in the historical conditions of Capitalism’s
development. As is well know, Foucault’s interest lies less in the subjugation of the working class
in the economic structure than in the multiple institutional sites of control that shape the subject’s
behaviour in more specific as well as in more profound ways.
Foucault is undoubtedly influenced by Marx’s materialism but wants to apply it to ideas. In a
revealing interview conducted by Colin Gordon in 1978, he states that his overall intention is to
provide “a materialist history of idealities or of rationalities” (Foucault, Gordon, Patton and
Beaulieu, 2012: 106). Again, he claims that the link between materialities and idealities is to be
found in relations of power rather than in economic relations (Foucault, Gordon, Patton and
Beaulieu, 2012: 106). Whilst Foucault was no phenomenologist, he also sought to identify the
points at which subjectivity and materiality met in concrete historical settings (Foucault, Gordon,
Patton and Beaulieu, 2012: 110). After a philosophical investigation of the modalities of truth,
knowledge and meaning in the Order of Things and the Archeology of Knowledge, Foucault
turned his attention to the practical instantiations of power at the intersection of the body and the
norm, as well as that between psychological dispositions and rationalities of government. In this
context, subjectivity is produced through a variety of spatial, actuarial and administrative
techniques; freedom and volition can be nothing more than a perpetual and somewhat strained
encounter with the endless diversity of power.
Throughout most of his career, Foucault did not engage directly with the leading strands of
French Marxism and certainly had no interest in embarking upon a detailed commentary of
Marx’s own books, where many others set out to find new kernels of truth. Interestingly, he did
not come across the Frankfurt School until much later in his life, a delayed discovery that was
both, as he claimed, salutary for the development of his own thinking and a lost opportunity for a
productive intellectual engagement. In one of his last and most intriguing texts, What is
Enlightenment? (1984), Foucault associates more or less explicitly with the critical ethos of
Enlightenment though. In truth, as much as he was sympathetic to the philosophical concerns of
the Frankfurt School, Foucault could not have bought into the humanistic premises of their
intellectual project. Yet, one senses that he was less bothered by these predispositions than by the
doctrinal and economistic readings of Marx, which had great currency in his time.
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2_ Governmentality and Marxism; complementarity and critique
I argue that the combination of Marxism and governmentality must take place within a certain
mind-frame. At an elementary level, each perspective is presumably brought in mitigate the
other’s weaknesses or oversights. Second, their coming together needs to be considered in the
context of contemporary events and must be based on an acknowledgement that the gap between
living conditions and the soundness of the solutions that are being proposed to the impoverished
and the unemployed, is growing. In other words, it should have an avowedly critical aim that
foregoes functionalist applications of both modes of analysis and should recognise that the
current economic crisis restricts existential possibilities, an element that will presumably affect
the morphology of liberal-capitalism both as a socio-economic architecture and a rationality of
government.
Through his work on discipline and government, Foucault is more concerned with the
multifarious support systems of capitalism than in its intricate mechanisms. He concentrates on
the multiple practices that sustain the overall architecture of the socio-economic structure.
Government and discipline’s exclusions and selections certainly have economic and
organisational uses. As Bob Jessop points out, Foucault was generally interested in the ways in
which capitalism permeated daily life. Indeed, capitalism requires “diverse techniques of power
to enable capital to exploit people’s bodies and their time” (141: 2008). Of course, Foucault did
not see Capital as a pre-given social force that sets the totality of social relations.
Governmentality is particularly useful in understanding just how engrained the subjectifying
logics of a neoliberal way of doing things really are. It is rather more precise than Marxism in its
identification of the dispersed individual and social practices that converge towards collectivised
aims, which are primarily the happiness and productivity of the population. It allows us to
measure the nature and the extent of liberalism’s power effects and to identify the array of
behaviours that sustain the development and survival of the Capitalist system. It contributes to an
appreciation of the highly compelling or engrained character of a neoliberalism even in the face
of great adversity. It may also warn us about the enormity of the task of transforming it and about
the sheer quantity of practices and reflexes that we may need to unlearn. In all these respects, it
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goes one better than the existing analyses of ideology, Marxian or otherwise. The Marxian
tradition, with the notable exception of Gramsci, has struggled to represent both the appeal and
the durability of liberal capitalism. Marx thought it evident that Capitalism could not last very
long, at least in the form that it took in the 19th century. Many of the more creative or
philosophically inclined Marxians in the twentieth century were equally puzzled by this
resiliency and saw the reasonably widespread acceptance of capitalism as a case of outright
alienation or of methodical indoctrination.
On the other hand, Marxism is particularly effective at tracing the changing modalities of the
capitalist economy and at underlining the importance of their effects on the living conditions of
human beings. If one recognises the very real consequences of structural dysfunctions and crises
of capitalism on existential possibilities, then the diagnoses of the current financial and economic
crisis offered by prominent contemporary Marxian thinkers like David Harvey and Leo Panitch,
for example, are important. By focusing on the extraordinary expansion and complexification of
finance, Marxians have been able to account for and in some cases predict the unfolding crisis.
The analyses of the rise of finance are often supplemented with a portrayal of the transition from
an industrial base to the service-based economy, the weakening of trade Unions, the rolling-back
of the Welfare state, the steady decline in salaries and purchasing power, the expansion of credit
and the emergence of a global financier class from the 1970’s to the 2000’s.
The idea behind the combination or strategic alliance of Marxism and governmentality is to
respond to the need for mutual reinforcement in the task of detailing the cultural and social
reproduction of capitalist relations. However, the combination of Governmentality and Marxism
cannot only be based on the requirement to craft a more effective instrument for analysing state
power or International Relations. It must be cast as a self-consciously critical enterprise in
keeping with the radical tradition that takes as much inspiration from Marx as it does from
Nietzsche. This critical enterprise is of course full of tensions. It might seem self-defeating to
offer an inventory of the difficulties involved in the combination of Marxism and
governmentality but I think it may allow for a keener awareness of the multiple instantiation of
power and to get a sense of the current state of critical theory.
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3_ Tensions and difficulties
This part of the paper addresses the tensions between the normative underpinnings, the different
conceptions of power and the place of critique in both governmentality and Marxism. Looking at
the premises of both perspectives, the integration of governmentality and Marxism leads us to
consider two distinct critical endpoints. On the one hand we can hold on to the Young Marx’s
humanism and to the dual objective of critiquing Capitalism and working towards its demise
(something that seems unthinkable and impractical even in the current context). On the other, we
can side with Foucault’s rejection of humanism and acknowledge that critique and resistance are
fluctuating modes of being that move with the constant innovations of power. Suffice to say that
this is one of the more thorny points around the content and definition of critique, and that it is a
reflection the current fragmentation of critical theory.
The sources of this divergence are fairly recent. The post 1968 era gave way to the public and
eventually political expression of marginalised subjectivities, which incidentally opened the way
for a wider reception of Foucault’s work on the mad, the incarcerated, etc. The other condition of
possibility for this greater diffusion was the internal collapse of the French Communist Party and
the culmination of highly rigid and doctrinal currents of thought like Maoism, which made
Marxism and its contemporary political expressions much less palatable. Marx’s shadow was
then getting dimmer by the mid-1970’s and the sheer variety of forms of subjection in the
contemporary realm exploded in the light of day in myriad political struggles. In the last 30 years,
post-modernism and post-structuralism have become reasonably well-established perspectives
with their own reputable journals and with a growing number followers in a variety of
disciplines.
After all this time, we can rightfully ask if these currents have had any effect on Marxism.
Alternatively, we can ask if Marxism has liberated itself from its dependence upon state power
and dissociated itself from its authoritarian homogenisation of difference. It is hard to say for
sure, but even the more polemical critical cultural theorists recognize the influence of so-called
poststructuralists, or at least of the cultural expressions they are trying to conceptualise, on
Marxism’s own dialectical journey. A re-emergent Marxism must surely engage with these
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questions and apply perpetual vigilance with regards to its own ends and methods. Many
Marxists have been trying to accommodate the various expressions of identity within a historical
materialist framework. Many have also reconsidered the necessity to invest conventional political
structures to further their own agenda and have ceased to believe that repossessing the state is any
kind of solution.
a) Power, critique and borderline ideology
Aside from non-negligible differences in critical endpoints and normative underpinnings, there
remains, as is well know, a fundamental disagreement over the notion of power. To illustrate my
point, I briefly review Marxism and governmentality’s respective understandings of liberalism.
Governmentality sees liberalism in a peculiar light. Instead of being an elaborate institutional and
cultural structure of falsification, liberalism is more of a response to the specific needs that
emerge at a certain stage of historical development, which happens to coincide with the rise of
industrial capitalism. Governmentality is rather like an immaterial orchestrator of individual and
collective practices, which must be known and documented but also made to converge towards
keeping the population productive and happy. In this context, freedom is not so much an
illusionary endowment of abstract liberal philosophy, but is manipulated in relation to a given
ratio of happiness and productivity. Whereas Marxists would contend that liberal-capitalism
squeezes the life out of the population, Foucault claims that a liberal rationality uses and channels
the population’s life forces, whilst keeping an eye on the tolerability and effectiveness of its
administrative mechanisms.
Despite governmentality’s apparent self-consciousness and inherent adaptability, it does not place
one particular instance at the helm. Unlike Marxists, Foucault did not believe that the bourgeois
class had deliberately installed the welfare state in order to preserve itself. Many Marxists see the
rise of neoliberalism as a process of class re-composition and as resulting from a more or less
coordinated ideological offensive (Harvey, 2004). Although Frankfurt School theorists were
close to arguing that ideology had become reality, a faint glimmer of humanism and an even
fainter hope that the transformative potential of technique would be ceased by the dispossessed,
still remained. Foucault did not entertain such hopes and took for granted that ideology and
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reality had become indistinguishable. He admires neoliberalism precisely because of its life-like
character (2004b), and because it strips liberalism of its metaphysical shroud and abstract
moralizing. A neoliberal rationality of government both connects with and produces the
“naturalness” of human endeavours and energies. It is an integrally practical philosophy.
Neoliberalism is in other ways a replication of the laws of nature, and in particular of natural
selection. As a rationality, it is endlessly adaptative and follows in the midst of life’s
transformations. Whilst this particular take on liberalism and neoliberalism are both highly
original and perceptive, it is perhaps also where governmentality might be most vulnerable. In
their apparent closeness to “reality”, renderings of a neoliberal rationality of government risk
doing little more than reiterating it and turning into a sort of descriptive sociology.
There is something profoundly paradoxical about governmentality; first, as we have just pointed
out, it can come close to replicating and even fetishizing reality, second, if we go a little further in
Foucault’s work, practices of resistance and aestheticized modes of being may become co-opted
as soon as they emerge. As Hardt and Negri (2001) point out, within Empire, “difference” both
legitimates the cultural hold of capitalism and participates in its logic of profit. Whatever
imaginative practices we may come up with are bound to be subsumed in the endlessly flexible
web of liberal governmentality and of the world market. This somehow ties with Fisher’s
Capitalist realism and with Zizek’s ongoing complaint about the limits of contemporary political
imagination. For Foucault, the eventual integration of pre-political struggles is an inevitable byproduct of the work of power. These two tendencies inherent to governmentality give the
impression that liberalism, because of its uncanny ability to re-invent itself and to accommodate
every manner of cultural and aesthetic expression, extends onto an endless historical horizon. It is
practically impossible to conceive of a more effective, intelligent and durable form of
governmentality. All of these remarks about liberalism point to the issue of power, which is
undoubtedly one of the more intractable difficulties in the potential combination of Marxism and
Governmentality.
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Conclusions
To fashion a critical framework that takes into account the many facets of the socio-cultural
reproduction of capitalism is difficult and requires some important qualifications and an
acknowledgment of the tensions and limitations between two of the more compelling analytical
perspectives on neoliberalism that are currently available. The main question is, can we keep
governmentality’s undoubted analytical power and make it work within a renovated form of
Marxism for contemporary times? This leads to another question, namely has Marxism exorcized
what Foucault identified as the three demons of scientificity, teleology and state power?
Some adaptations of Marxism, perhaps those that are closer to critical theory and farther from
purely economistic readings, have certainly taken heed of the admittedly dispersed and vague
phenomenon that we tend to call post-modernism. However, the dialogue between two of the
more common critical currents of our day remains relatively timid and even more so in
International Relations. We can only guess what Foucault’s reaction to the material effects of
neoliberalism would have been, but he believed that an art of the self, or any wholesome
expression of subjectivity, required basic conditions of possibility, that is a certain freedom from
want. This should probably be the minimal threshold for a combination of Marxism and
governmentality.
Foucault said something quite interesting in one of his interviews, “it is clear, even if one admits
Marx will disappear for now, that he will reappear one day” (Foucault, 1999: 458). Perhaps the
time for Marx’s re-emergence has come. Marxism has certainly gained more visibility in the last
few years, but we would be hard pressed to say that this has been accompanied by a serious
consideration of an alternative political project. In any case, whether one decides to look at
important historical transformations in socio-economic arrangements from the perspective of
governmentality, ideology or Marxian political economy, there is invariably a reference to
widespread popular discontent and to ensuing political pressures. In this context,
governmentality, which I take to be a radical version of ideology as lived-practice, can be used
critically to determine the extent of our own subjection. The morphology of neoliberal
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government is bound to change through an internal displacement of its own constitutive practices
but also through a transformation of the population’s material conditions.
A renovated Marxism must dialogue and engage with an approach like governmentality, which
has become tremendously popular but is only just starting its own process of self-examination. It
will have to be determined if governmentality can be made to be a transformative force but on a
grander scale than the self. Marxism itself has gone through a long and strenuous internal
dialogue; it has receded and apologized for many years. Over the last few decades, it has become
increasingly clear is that it must include a feminist, anti-racist, polysexual, non-essentialist and
anti-authoritarian standpoint at the same time as it must expose the mechanisms of neoliberal
economics and class-formation.
If combined, Marxism and governmentality can provide very apt descriptions of the
simultaneously fine-grained, highly differentiated and generic practices that we like to group
under the heading of neoliberalism. However, I argue that this analytical precision or effective
political sociology must try and go beyond the detailed reconstitution of super-structures and
power-effects to include and conceptualise contemporary forms of resistance.
These are the preliminary questions and suggestions that I would like to discuss. These
interrogations are also applicable to International Relations and Hardt and Negri’s trilogy offers a
fertile of discussion that address or touch on many of the above points.
Bibliography :
Fisher, Mark (2009) Capitalist Realism : Is there no Alternative? London: Zero Books.
Foucault, Michel (1984) “What is Enlightenment?” in Rabinow, Paul (ed.), The Foucault Reader,
New York: Pantheon Books, pp. 32-50.
Foucault, Michel (1999) Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology (Essential Works of Foucault,
1954-1984, Vol. 2), New York: the New Press.
Foucault, Michel (2004a) Sécurité, territoire, population : cours au Collège de France (19771978), Paris : Gallimard.
Foucault, Michel (2004b) Naissance de la Biopolitique: cours au Collège de France (19781979), Paris: Gallimard.
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