CHAPTER THREE Foucault and Ancient
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SSStttooonnnyyy BBBrrrooooookkk UUUnnniiivvveeerrrsssiiitttyyy The official electronic file of this thesis or dissertation is maintained by the University Libraries on behalf of The Graduate School at Stony Brook University. ©©© AAAllllll RRRiiiggghhhtttsss RRReeessseeerrrvvveeeddd bbbyyy AAAuuuttthhhooorrr... The Policing of Self and Others: Foucault, Political Reason & a Critical Ontology of police A Dissertation Presented by Kevin Scott Jobe to The Graduate School in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Philosophy Stony Brook University December 2014 Stony Brook University The Graduate School Kevin S. Jobe We, the dissertation committee for the above candidate for the Doctor of Philosophy degree, hereby recommend acceptance of this dissertation. Eduardo Mendieta – Dissertation Advisor Professor, Philosophy Department Anne O’Byrne – Chairperson of Defense Associate Professor, Philosophy Department Amy Allen – External Reader Professor, Philosophy Department, Dartmouth College Linda Martín Alcoff – External Reader Professor, Philosophy Department, CUNY-Hunter College This dissertation is accepted by the Graduate School Charles Taber Dean of the Graduate School ii Abstract of the Dissertation The Policing of Self and Others: Foucault, Political Reason & a Critical Ontology of police by Kevin S. Jobe Doctor of Philosophy in Philosophy Stony Brook University 2014 Situating Foucault as a philosopher of actuality, I interpret and extend Foucault’s critique of police as part of a broader philosophical reflection on subjectivity, and the practices of freedom (parrhesia) and revolt that constitute our actuality as free beings. In the first chapter, I situate Foucault as a philosopher of actuality, understood as the thinking of the continuity of ourselves (“we”) as free beings involved in struggles against authority. In the second chapter, I draw out the fundamental antagonism in Foucault’s later work between pastoral modes of subjectivity and Cynic modes of subjectivity, setting up an oppositon in Foucault’s account between police and the practices of parrhesia. In the third chapter, tracing the critique of police power to Hegel’s analysis of polizei, I uncover the ancient roots of police in the notion of politeia. Through an analysis of politeia as origin of police, I uncover a military-pastoral technology of power, one which produces certain forms of authority and subjectivity. In the fourth chapter, I show how this political technology, developed most famously in ancient Sparta, can be traced to the formation of the American politeia in the early republic. By tracing this political technology to the early Republic, I seek to show how the warlike or military relations of a military-pastoral technologies are redeployed in the early American politeia. In the fifth chapter, I spell out how these various forms of police power converge in neoliberal governmentality in the context of policing the conduct of urban life. In conclusion, I argue that the apparatus of police in American government should be understood as a set of military-pastoral technologies that seek to establish hierarchical relations of authority-obedience. These military-pastoral technologies, I argue, should be understood in their current context as preserving the neoliberal “rule” of an American politeia. iii Frontispiece iv Table of Contents INTRODUCTION………………………………………………………………………......1 CHAPTER ONE: Foucault and the Philosophy of the Actual 13 I. Foucault, Badiou & the Philosophy of the Actual………………………………14 II. Philosophy & the Critique of Authority………………………………………...42 III. Genealogy to Ontology: the Parrhesiastic Standpoint.........................................54 CHAPTER TWO: Subjectivity, Power & the Critique of Authority 89 I. Parrhesia or, the ‘Counter-History of Governmentality’……………………….90 II. Subjectivity & Subordination in Butler, Allen, Arendt & Snyder……………...108 III. Ideology v. Critical Ontology: Althusser & Foucault on police……………......130 CHAPTER THREE: Foucault & Ancient Police 145 I. Foucault, Hegel and Polizei..................................................................................145 II. Politeia, epagoge and the Military-Pastorate…………………………………...168 III. Spartan Politeia, Ancient Police & Genealogy as Critique……………………..182 CHAPTER FOUR: Ben Franklin & the Economic Pastorate of police 194 I. Benjamin Franklin & the Military Constitution of a Nation……………………194 II. Political Economy & the Economic Pastorate of Police………………………..225 III. Auburn Prison Discipline, or, The Art of Conducting Men…………………….250 CHAPTER FIVE: Biopower, Law & War in a Neoliberal Era 273 I. From Prison to the City: The Birth of the Prison-in-Reverse…………………....274 II. The Neoliberal City & the Ecology of police……………………………………296 III. To Protect Life By Waging War: the new Military-Juridical Order……………..308 CONCLUSION……………………………………………………………………………...336 BIBLIOGRAPHY…………………………………………………………………………...339 v Acknowledgments I want to first acknowledge the guidance and inspiration of Professor Mendieta, without whom this project would have been inconceivable. Over the years, I have come to consider myself an extremely fortunate student of Dr. Mendieta’s, and I look forward to learning from and engaging with his work in my own philosophical projects. I am deeply indebted to both Amy Allen and Linda Alcoff, whose work serves as essential reference points for my own philosophical orientations. Finally, this work would have been impossible without the constant support and care of my family (Tom, Karen, Stacy, Dax and Duncan) and the loving companionship of Jennifer Ayres, who always deserves the highest koalifications, in my (note)book, and a small feline creature named Biscuit. vi INTRODUCTION In a lecture given at UC Berkeley in 1954 at the height of the Cold War, Hannah Arendt ends her lecture by lamenting the fact that the meaning of contemporary politics had been realized in the reversal of Clausewitz’s principle, namely that “…politics as nothing other than war continued by other means.”1 Exactly twenty years later, Michel Foucault, who visited UC Berkeley in the Spring of 1974, used precisely the same formulation in his College de France lectures to describe the internal politics of the modern biopolitical State, or what he would later call police, as “…the continuation of war by other means”.2 This observation becomes even more relevant in our current situation where, as one cultural theorist has recently said, even the quotidian of everyday urban life has become more and more perceived through the lens of war, so much so that an increasingly dominant paradigm of urban life understands life itself as war.3 Indeed, a fundamental question raised by contemporary political philosophers, cultural theorists and geographers is how exactly we arrived in a time and place such that everyday life itself can be perceived so easily and readily through the lens of war? For Hannah Arendt, the relation between life, war and politics in Ancient Greece was clearly demarcated. According to Arendt, life was exposed to war only to the extent that politics was excluded: this was the domain of foreign policy, the only moment when the polis acted “unpolitically”, conceiving of others not as free and equal political partners but as ‘bare life’ subject to the force of war.4 Thus for Arendt, there has in fact always been a close relation 1 Hannah Arendt. The Promise of Politics. (New York: Schocken Books, 2003) 199-200 2 Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended: lectures at the College de France, 1975-76 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003) 15, 48 3 Stephen Graham, Cities Under Siege: the New Military Urbanism (New York: Verso Books, 2011) 24, 348 4 Hannah Arendt. The Promise of Politics. (New York: Schocken Books, 2003) 166-67 1 between life and war, but only to the extent that this relation excludes politics as a realm of free and equal partners. For Arendt, the corruption of this view of politics would lead to a complete reorganization of the relations between life and war in modern life. For the Greeks, there was a separation between a realm of war and its subjects of bare life on the one hand, and the realm of politics and its subjects of freedom and equality on the other. With the corruption of politics in the modern nation-state into both a theory of political “rule” and a theory of economic household management, modern politics substitutes the “unpolitical” arts of war and administration of bare life for a properly “political” sphere of free and equal partners. Thus life and war, once considered linked as unpolitical, are today considered linked as inescapably political. Michel Foucault makes a very similar argument regarding the changing relation between life, politics and war. Foucault argues that until the eighteenth century, life and its processes remained what they were for Aristotle: bare life with the additional capacity for political existence.5 However in the eighteenth century, life soon became the object of political calculation, a long process by which life and its processes were reconceived as ‘natural elements’ of governmental reflection. For Foucault, this process began with the emergence of liberal government and the birth of political economy.6 In this way, according to Foucault, life and its processes become an intimate part of political reflection and calculation. Thus, for Foucault this process – what he termed biopolitics – was the necessary condition for the emergence of the modern State which would eventually take “population”