A Deal with the Devil? Foucault, Neoliberalism, and the Politics of Truth

This paper argues that Foucault’s curiously ambivalent account of neoliberalism can be better understood by our exploring it through his interest in the “politics of truth,” instead of primarily as a power arrangement. If we conceptualize, with Foucault, the neoliberal market as a regime of truth, where knowledge is created and vetted, and neoliberalism as the endorsement of that regime, then we might better identify neoliberalism’s unique normative appeal, as well as its unique attending danger. Specifically, given that the neoliberal market reveals the “true” prices of things through the aggregated individual actions of the population, this has two effects. Firstly, this thoroughly undermines, on epistemic grounds, state or collective normalization efforts. Secondly, power, knowledge, and truth all uncomfortably converge, as once the market is perfected truth loses its ability to interrogate power – the market both coordinates outcomes and discovers the truth. Foucault’s idiosyncratic neoliberalism is thus a regime where almost all categories are reconciled, and all criteria for distinction are irrelevant other than individual estimations of cost and utility – a conceptual and normative concern that Foucault addresses in the very first 1980 lecture, where he abandons power-knowledge and neoliberalism while championing the anti-strategic effects of truth. Any shift to neoliberal rule thus seems normatively disastrous. This fear is slightly overemphasized, though, and there is thus good reason for Foucault’s ultimate ambivalence. To understand neoliberalism’s appeal for Foucault, we should draw a straight line from the 1976 to 1979 lectures. There, we see that the trajectory of Foucault’s governmental analysis followed his charting, and encouraging, the emergence of a multitude of local, subversive, knowledges that undermined sovereign authority, which were bound up in each individual’s drive to achieve their interests. There, Foucault took sides, as the political stakes were clear: local knowledges and a “perspectival” approach to the truth helped the oppressed properly assert themselves against sovereign powers which sought to conveniently cast power in the universalizing discourses of legitimacy and order. As these discourses of local knowledge and individual struggle evolved into the entrenchment of one, neoliberal, lens for understanding truth, the political stakes became unclear. That said, there remain significant reasons to see a Foucauldian upside to this story, as only (a perfected) neoliberalism offers a “massive withdrawal with regard to the normative-disciplinary system. ” Neoliberalism’s allure thus also reveals its curse: the same reduction of all phenomena to utility, which underwrites the possibility of our largely ending hierarchical normalization, also demands our subsequent inability to critique power from the perspectives of knowledge, truth, or the anti-strategic - a Faustian bargain that Foucault was evidently unwilling to make.

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