Way Too Cool

Selling Out Race and Ethics

Shannon Winnubst

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780231539883
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Ethics & Moral Philosophy

Life, liberty, and the pursuit of cool have informed the American ethos since at least the 1970s. Whether we strive for it in politics or fashion, cool is big business for those who can sell it across a range of markets and media. Yet the concept wasn't always a popular commodity. Cool began as a potent aesthetic of post-World War II black culture, embodying a very specific, highly charged method of resistance to white supremacy and the globalized exploitation of capital.

Way Too Cool follows the hollowing-out of "coolness" in modern American culture and its reflection of a larger evasion of race, racism, and ethics now common in neoliberal society. It revisits such watershed events as the 1960s Civil Rights Movement, second-wave feminism, the emergence of identity politics, 1980s multiculturalism, 1990s rhetorics of diversity and colorblindness, 9/11, and Hurricane Katrina, as well as the contemporaneous developments of rising mass incarceration and legalized same-sex marriage. It pairs the perversion of cool with the slow erasure of racial and ethical issues from our social consciousness, which effectively quashes our desire to act ethically and resist abuses of power. The cooler we become, the more indifferent we grow to the question of values, particularly inquiry that spurs protest and conflict. This book sounds an alarm for those who care about preserving our ties to an American tradition of resistance.

CHAPTER ONE

Excavating Categories

FOUCAULT’S BIRTH OF BIOPOLITICS

Of all the work on neoliberalism, I have chosen Foucault’s 1979 lectures, The Birth of Biopolitics, as the most valuable point of departure for two basic reasons. First and foremost, the analyses Foucault undertakes in these lectures reorient current approaches to neoliberalism historically and epistemologically. Historically, as I will elaborate, he begins not in the 1970s or even the 1920s, but in the eighteenth century. This longer historical arc brings his discussion of neoliberalism into the sociohistorical fugue that frames this book. Epistemologically, Foucault does not analyze sociological and historical effects of economic practices. Rather, he analyzes the transformations of the categories central to the reworking of the economic, political, and social worlds by neoliberal theorists. This excavation of the central, constitutive categories of neoliberalism, especially as produced through an intensification of the central, constitutive categories of classical liberalism, grounds my thinking about this current historical present. It initiates the Husserlian eidetic reduction that I described in the introduction.

Second, as is well known by now, Foucault argues in these lectures that neoliberalism expands its market rationality beyond the strictly economic domain to create a new social rationality with the causal power to produce new enterprising subjectivities—what he calls “subjects of interest.” This emergent account of subject formation in the early neoliberal theorists partially grounds Foucault’s insistence that neoliberalism does not function (solely) as an ideology. Calling it “one of the most important theoretical transformations in Western thought since the Middle Ages,” Foucault emphatically proclaims this new account of subject formation to be a profound alteration in the modern episteme.¹ In what I fear is but another mark of our neoliberal times, however, we seem to have reduced this radically new subject formation to a banal truism. The claim that neoliberalism turns us all into enterprising entrepreneurs seems to roll off our tongues without a single flinch. By turning to these lectures in great detail, I hope to reignite some of the awe in which Foucault held this transformation in subject formation (and, by extension, in social cathexes). I hope to begin mapping the full impact of this kind of profound transformation in subjectivity and subject formation.

While not wanting to add yet another exegesis of these lectures to the already robust body of such valuable scholarship,² I offer this close reading of them to excavate the exact categories that frame my larger project here. For readers already familiar with the lectures, parts of this reading may seem elementary or even pedantic; it may also read as an exegesis. (This is definitely the most uncool chapter of the book.) As with so much scholarship engaging Foucault, however, I argue that careful, detailed attention to the complexity of his analyses generates remarkably fruitful avenues of inquiry. Through a selective excavation of some of the dominant categories at work in Foucault’s 1979 lectures, I locate those sites where the emergence of neoliberalism intensifies categories of liberalism that subsequently do not track along the trajectories of (loosely Marxian) ideological analyses. This then sets the framework for my larger investigation into the transformation in the categories and processes of subject formation, social difference, and subsequently ethics.

“IT’S NOT AN IDEOLOGY!”

Despite the title of the lectures, The Birth of Biopolitics, Foucault never turns to biopolitics at all. Apparently caught in the complexity of its birthing, the entire course at the Collège de France is dedicated to a detailed account of neoliberalism, which he positions as the birth-site of contemporary biopolitics. Standing at an interesting juncture in his writing—between the analyses of power offered in Discipline and Punish and The History of Sexuality, volume 1, and the turn to the care of the self in volumes 2 and 3 of The History of Sexuality—these lectures on neoliberalism offer a fascinating lynchpin, of sorts, to the complex questions of the subjectivation of power as well as to the shift in Foucault’s thinking about subjectivity and ethics that we also see in this transitional period of his work. Over thirty years later, they feel remarkably timely, even urgent, for deciphering Foucault’s most persistent object of study—our historical present.

Unlike David Harvey’s self-avowed “brief” history of neoliberalism, Foucault situates his discussion in a much longer historical arc than the majority of scholars currently writing about this new form of economics. Rather than tracing the emergence of neoliberalism to the 1960s of the Chicago School or even to the mid-twentieth-century debates of Karl Polyani, Foucault begins with mid-eighteenth-century French and British economists. While still arguing that neoliberalism is a qualitatively new and different kind of social rationality that takes hold, with shades of different emphases, in Germany, France, and the United States in the early (not mid- or late) twentieth century, he nonetheless locates some of its roots in practices and values of liberalism in the mid-eighteenth century. This broader historical orientation, which Foucault explicitly marks as echoing his approaches to madness, criminality, and sexuality, sets his discussion of neoliberalism in a historical time frame that is incommensurate with the ideological framework that dominates so much of the scholarship critical of neoliberal policies and practices.

While neoliberalism undoubtedly functions very much like an ideology, particularly in areas of the world where it arrives in the explicitly marked western form of neocolonialism in economic policies, the conceptual framework of ideology limits our understanding of it and thereby dangerously narrows our vision of possible resistances to it. David Harvey’s account, along with the work of critics such as Henry Giroux, David Theo Goldberg, and Lisa Duggan, falls into this limited framework, arguing that neoliberalism is driven by a fairly conscious, intentional, and structural effort to restore class power to the elite wealthy, both nationally and globally. While that ideologically framed critique functions quite valuably as a mode of consciousness-raising regarding the pernicious effects of neoliberalism, such work is (as we also see in the history of feminist and antiracist praxis) intellectually, politically, and, most of all, psychologically necessary—but it is also insufficient. As Beatrice Han notes, “Foucault rejects the [Marxist] hypothesis that only an increase in awareness could liberate the oppressed class from ideological fictions.”³ As I will elaborate throughout this project, the mode of subjectivation at work in neoliberalism no longer succumbs to the principles of interpellation that undergird the hopes of these kind of consciousness-raising analyses. In a move that deepens and extends, without contesting or antagonizing, the political work of these ideological critiques of neoliberalism, I turn to Foucault’s lectures in an effort to develop a differently situated approach to these widespread phenomena that we are labeling “neoliberalism.” We need a more robust analysis of neoliberalism—one that includes attention to vectors such as ethics, affect, social difference, and subjectivity—to understand, not to mention to uproot or actively dislodge, this powerfully subtle episteme.

Consequently, as Thomas Lemke, Wendy Brown, and Jeffrey Nealon have all recognized, perhaps the most strident and provocative aspect of Foucault’s reading of neoliberalism is precisely his insistence that we not take it up as an ideology. This is also arguably the most difficult task presented to us, given my introductory discussion of the current discursive terrain and its valorization of the very categories of neoliberalism, such as the “free market,” as part of “the natural order.” But Foucault warns us in “Truth and Power” that ideological critique activates three epistemic habits that are, in turn, central to the biopolitics of normalization, namely, concepts of a truth, a subject, and an economic structure that all claim to transcend historico-political mutations.⁴ The transformation of each of these concepts becomes the foci of his account of neoliberalism in The Birth of Biopolitics. Attuning us to the fine contours of their historical mutations, he clearly wishes to disabuse us of these epistemological habits. But, as Foucault also well knows, they are not purely or exclusively epistemological habits. And so ridding ourselves of them is not purely an intellectual—or ideological—matter.

The lectures are sprinkled with explicit remarks about the confines of a Marxist analysis. Never framed as “wrong” or “false,” Marxist analyses are critiqued and avoided because the kinds of conceptual demarcations that they assume and enact no longer hold the same kind of traction in the neoliberal iteration of the modern episteme. So, for example, concepts such as the critique of capitalism as creating a “standardizing, mass society of consumption and spectacle” (BB, 149) or the abstraction of the infra-/superstructure apparatus that divides the economic from the juridical (BB, 163) or the analysis of labor via alienation (BB, 220–24) or, perhaps most damning, the insistence on a single “logic of capital and its accumulation” (BB, 165) no longer function in the same critical manner in the widespread, multiplying, diffuse practices of neoliberalism. These major conceptual breaks from Marx come as no surprise for readers of Foucault,⁵ but are particularly critical to his approach to neoliberalism and its considerable difference from contemporary scholarship.

We can begin by grouping these primary breaks in the schema suggested by his comments in “Truth and Power.” First, there is the concept of a transcendental truth, which takes on many of its possible guises in the lectures, including concepts of History as a Hegelian-Marxist unfolding of Capital (BB, 313), liberatory ideas of freedom as overcoming the alienation of labor (BB, 240–42), or even economic rationality itself à la Adam Smith (BB, 279–82); it also undergirds the infra-/superstructure division that relegates discourse to a secondary epiphenomenon.⁶ Second, there is the concept of a transcendental, nonhistorical, or prehistorical subject, which is taken up through the discussion of liberalism’s subject of rights in the lectures (BB, 40–43, 273–78) and which undergirds the assumptions of interpellation and consciousness-raising noted in Marxist analyses (Lisa Duggan’s analyses is exemplary here). And, third, there is a transcendental economic structure that directs economic practices from an abstracted ontological causal plane; this also feeds the infra-/superstructure apparatus, but even more so directs our critical attention away from the specificity of disciplinary mechanisms that are the lifeblood of neoliberalism (BB, 89–92, 222–24).

For readers of Foucault, from The History of Madness and The Archaeology of Knowledge (and its appendix, “The Discourse on Language”) to Discipline and Punish, all three volumes of The History of Sexuality, and various essays, especially “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” the breaks from these dominant epistemological habits are the hallmarks of Foucault’s thinking. But in the case of these lectures on neoliberalism, these serve as explicit arguments against a Marxist analysis that demarcates neoliberalism as just the latest, most clever, most widespread ideology of capitalism. The point is so important that Foucault, a quintessentially French thinker of nuance and innuendo, even goes so far as to state it explicitly, arguing that the historical framework within which German neo-liberalism (“Ordoliberalism”)⁷ takes place “is something other than a political calculation…. No more is it an ideology” (BB, 94, my emphasis). Operating in a qualitatively different register and thus requiring a different dimension of analysis, neoliberalism is not an ideology.

And so, what is it? What exactly does Foucault think neoliberalism is? Why are these three breaks from transcendental structures so important for the particularities of neoliberalism? What shifts in subjectivity and authority—the constitutive parts of any ethics—occur in this adamant argument that neoliberalism is not an ideology? What is at stake here, exactly?

LIBERALISM AND NEOLIBERALISM: FROM CONTRACTUAL RIGHTS TO MARKET INTERESTS

Foucault’s overarching argument is that, through processes of intensification, neoliberalism transforms the categories, practices, and values that it inherits from eighteenth-century liberalism into substantively new categories, practices, and values. In the language of the complex sociohistorical fugue that I am investigating, that is, neoliberalism repeats the themes of liberalism in a different voice.

When Foucault locates himself in the mid-eighteenth century to begin this genealogy, he immerses himself in a period in which three conceptual actors dominate the epistemological and cultural scene in Europe: the Church, the State, and the Economy. Classic Enlightenment narratives about the triumph of liberalism have locked most attention on the strife involved in separating the Church from the State, thereby fixating us on a conceptual framework that pits one sovereign actor (the Church) against another sovereign actor (the State). The upshot is a static concept of power as sovereign, paired interestingly with a narrow understanding of Protestantism that frames secularism as a primary barometer of modernity.⁸ In focusing his discussion of liberalism on the struggles and shifts between the State and the Economy, rather than the State and the Church, Foucault begins to reorient our conceptual framework of power toward his concepts of biopolitics. Following his arguments in part 5 of The History of Sexuality, volume 1, that biopower emerges alongside sovereign power, without displacing it, we can approach these lectures as analyzing precisely this shift.⁹

Beginning in liberalism, Foucault then turns to the transformations in governmental practices in the mid-eighteenth century to examine a new kind of politico-economic rationality that he calls “political economy” (BB, 13). Situated against the kind of political self-reflection at work in practices of government in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when the law emerged to limit the domain of the state, political economy does not exist in “the kind of external position occupied by juridical thought” (BB, 14). Lodging itself, rather, within governmental reason, political economy locates the principle of political self-limitation internally. And this alters all barometers of judgment, including the modes of self-reflection possible in such a rationality.

Rather than referring to an external “nature” or “law” to determine the legitimacy/illegitimacy of its actions, political economy analyzes governmental practices to determine whether the effects of its actions will be successful. It brings a utilitarian rationality to bear on all practices of the government and thereby transforms the very meaning of “nature.” Displacing the premodern metaphysics of a transcendental nature that, whether divine or human, hovers over and hems in the realm of politics, the mid-eighteenth-century emergence of political economy refers only to the specific logic internal to governmental practices for its evaluative barometers. Politics thus becomes the singular horizon of judgment and, within that singularity, the epistemological mechanisms of the economy become the practice of judgment: “success replaces legitimacy” (BB, 16) as the criteria for governmental action. All the questions formerly posed by and for the art of governing, especially those of its ethical contours and limitations, are transformed. For Foucault, this new form of governmental practice, which he locates in eighteenth-century liberalism, becomes the basis for grasping biopolitics.

Consequently, Foucault focuses on the mechanism that causes this crucial shift in the relations between politics and economics, namely, the market. In a further distancing from Marxist analysis, he does not frame this emergence of the market as the advent of capitalism. Approaching it as a new kind of rationality and resisting, as ever, the possibility of a singular cause of its emergence, Foucault suggests “a polygonal or polyhedral relationship” (BB, 33) between a number of economic, demographic, technical, theoretical, and governmental shifts to try to understand how this new market rationality emerges. He argues that, displacing the role of the law as a juridical structure to limit the power of the state, the market becomes a site of veridiction that, in turn, begins to saturate the field of the political writ large.

In the middle of the eighteenth century, Foucault argues, “the market no longer appeared as, or rather no longer had to be the site of jurisdiction” (BB, 31). Framed as following “natural” mechanisms, the market emerges—as both a concept and a practice¹⁰—as a site of “truth” that governmental practices need to leave alone. As Foucault explains, “Inasmuch as it enables production, need, supply, demand, value, and price, etcetera, to be linked together through exchange, the market constitutes a site of veridiction” (BB, 32). Laissez-nous faire becomes the logic of this market rationality that, in the mid-eighteenth century, emerges as a counterpoint to the juridical rationality of the government. But as the market saturates the political per se, the relation between economics and politics is subsequently flipped: no longer is it the government’s duty to rein in the market to ensure “fair” prices; rather, “to be good government, government has to function according to truth” (BB, 32), and it is the market that is the site of veridiction. “The market must tell the truth (dire le vrai)” (BB, 32), and thereby shape, enliven, and regulate exactly what it means to live dans le vrais, as we and Mendel all must do.¹¹

This results in a fundamental split in the modes of rationality dominant in practices of liberalism. While Foucault traces the changes as historical developments in the relations between politics and economics, it is important to read them also as transformations in the fields and modes of rationality itself, namely, the split between the juridical and the calculative modes. That is, while Foucault frames his discussion here as an analysis of “the birth of this dissymmetrical bipolarity of politics and the economy” (BB, 20)—a dissymmetry that neoliberalism virtually tosses overboard, as the economic becomes the singular mode of judgment—we must also realize that the transformations, occurring at the level of deciphering the true from the false, are transformations in the very mechanisms of judgment. Thus, while Foucault traces the historical emergence of “two absolutely heterogeneous conceptions of freedom, one based on the rights of man, and the other starting from the independence of the governed” (BB, 42), he is also beginning to turn to the fundamental changes in rationality itself that come to dominate the neoliberal iteration of the modern episteme. As we begin to see the erosion of juridi...

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents 
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: A Very Uncool Book
• 1. Excavating Categories: Foucault’s Birth of Biopolitics
• 2. Rethinking Difference: The Limits of Interpellation
• 3. From Instant Karma to Instant Wealth: The Fantasies and Cathexes of These Neoliberal Times
• 4. “How Cool Is That?”: Gender and the Neoliberal Imaginary
• 5. Reading Race as the Real: The Securities and Punishments of Neoliberal Cool
• 6. Stop Making Sense: The Aporia of Race and Ethics
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index